The Soldanella Field

A Story

by OLIVE JOHNSON

ON the soldanella meadow — a scrap of land high above the distant valley — the little bell-like flowers shone warmly in the bland sunshine of an April afternoon. They hardly stirred in the still air, and to come upon them suddenly, round a bend in the path, was so unexpected that it had in it something of the miraculous, especially for Katherine, who had never before seen spring in the Austrian Alps. The field had a quality of translueency which was rather a symbolic than a physical expression of light, as some voices are translucent. It was such a small part of the whole scene — a patch of flower-laced turf under an immense clear sky, ringed with rough mountains, high above the lake; yet it seemed the center and source of all the world’s brightness. It gathered all the loveliness of its setting into itself, and from it went out, throbbing with renewed impulse of beauty, the essence of the cloudless afternoon.

Katherine had never seen soldanella before: she was dumb with astonishment, But Paul, for all his sixteen years, ran forward shouting with delight.

“Soldanella!” he cried. “Katherine, soldanella!” “How perfectly wonderful!” she managed to answer at last.

“Look at them! Hundreds of millions of them!” he laughed.

“Come down close to them!” he invited her.

She sat down near him. All round her the air was alive with sunlight. The lake shone deep blue in the hollow of the mountains. Up here, close-set, yet each as free as if it were the only one, were the minute mauve bells of the soldanella. She put her face down close to them, and felt too happy to speak.

The boy was sitting with his hands clasped round his knees, gazing at the flowers. Under the straight line of his dark hair, his eyes were serious and intent. Then he smiled to himself and, looking up, caught Katherine’s eye.

“They make me think of something,” he said.

“What?”

“ I don’t know. They make me feel the way something else made me feel. Only I can’t remember what it was.”

“Something pleasant?”

“I can’t explain. But it was something very — mysterious,” he finished with some hesitation.

They sat in silence.

“It was something connected with somebody else,” he said suddenly.

“Who?”

He turned to her with his puzzled smile. “I can’t remember that either,” he said.

“Was it a dream?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Z never saw or imagined anything at all like this,” said Katherine. “Never, in all my life.”

“I never remember seeing this meadow, either,” he said. “Soldanella are rather rare, you know. At least, they’re protected: we could only pick ten of them. But imagine,” he cried, his voice rising to laughter, “imagine picking ten from this field! Imagine picking a hundred! We could pick a thousand, and no one would notice the difference!”

“I don’t want to pick them,” said Katherine literally.

“Of course not; nor do I. But we could.”

“I shall never forget this,” said Katherine, “however long I live, and however far away I go from here.”

“Are you going far away?” he asked in a tone of friendly interest.

“I suppose so. I’m only here for a year, you know.”

“I know. And what then? Will they send you back to a finishing school for young ladies on the south coast of England?”

She burst out laughing at the tone of his voice.

“I hope not! I shall be nearly seventeen. I want to travel all over the world.”

He nodded absently, and they fell silent.

Then Katherine jumped up. Her long plaits hung over her shoulders, and her skin was golden brown from the sun. In her dirndl, she looked like a native. She was learning German so fast, too, that she would soon speak like a native; already she and Paul slid unconsciously into each other’s language in their conversations.

“We must go,” she said. “The sun will be down soon.”

2

HE got up and they crossed the field towards the wood below it. In silence they began the descent of the rocky path through the wood, and beyond that they came out again onto a meadow.

Up in the mountains, the air had yet the sharp taste of snow, and indeed the snow itself still lay in thick drifts in every sheltered hollow. Only on the gently sloping meadows, where the afternoon sun shone warmly, had the dull, rough grass appeared again. Yet the snow lingered, and was still icily thick, even when the uneven grass was dry and already decked with flowers. All the way down, from far above the soldanella meadow to far below it, faded Christmas roses bore witness to the triumph of life over death — even below the crusted snow they had borne their folded buds, which, uncovered by seekers’ fingers, had lain along their stems like the heads of sleeping children on a sheltering arm.

Paul suddenly broke the silence.

“I’m still trying to think what it was,” he said, pursuing the elusive memory.

“It was something to do with a mirror.”

“A mirror?”

“Yes. Now I know what it was. I was quite small, and one night my mother was carrying me up to bed. At the turn of the stairs there was an old-fashioned mirror, with a rather elaborately carved and gilded frame —I used to love to look up at it. And as my mother went past the mirror with me in her arms, I looked at it, and realized that I could see myself in it. But when I gazed into it, it wasn’t myself I saw there at all.”

He turned to Katherine with a puzzled expression in his eyes.

“It was not myself I saw,” he repeated slowly.

“How do you mean? You looked and saw someone else, who came between you and the mirror?”

“No. There wasn’t anyone else, except my mother, who was holding me, and whom I could see. I mean that as I looked at myself, I saw someone quite different.”

“Couldn’t you have imagined it?”

“I don’t think I was old enough to imagine anything like that.”

“How old were you?”

“It must have been in our old house in Vienna, and we left that before I was five.”

“Were you frightened?”

“No.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t at all frightened. I shouldn’t have forgotten it so completely if it had frightened me.”

“There must have been someone else there!”

“Oh no, there wasn’t. No, I really saw someone else’s face instead of my own.”

“Did you tell your mother?”

“No.”

“That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

“That I didn’t say anything? Oh, I don’t think so. Such odd things are always happening to children that they take it for granted that life is full of queer happenings.”

“What do you mean?”

He burst out laughing at her tone.

“Oh, they meet incomprehensible people, and they arc told they must do and say the most ridiculous things — don’t you think it must all seem very strange?”

Katherine looked at him: she had been sure lie had meant more than that; but he answered her look with candor and amusement.

“I suppose so,” she conceded. “But weren’t you at all surprised?”

“No, I don’t believe I was.”

“Well, would you be if it happened now?”

“I think I should. In spite of the fact that I know it has happened once, I should still be surprised if it happened to me again.”

“ But what has it to do with the soldanella field ? ”

“ I don’t know.” He frowned under his straight black hair.

Their nailed boots slithered on the loose rocky surface of the path. The sun was going down and the air was suddenly very cool. They came out of the last bit of forest on the road down to the valley, and now the way lay over the lush spring meadows. Marsh marigolds stood motionless in the long grass, curled into compact golden globes. In the distance they could hear the voices of peasant girls singing, and from time to time a lad, going home from his work in the forest, passed them with a greeting.

They were both tired, and were silent all the rest of the way home.

When they came indoors, it seemed dark in the house; it was a mild, blue spring twilight, and there were no lamps lit.

The house was at the edge of the lake, and as they came in at the front door they could see, clear through the living room, the wide view of the mountains and the water. It was the most magic moment, of the day, more full of meaning and loveliness even than mornings in summer, when the roses burned crimson against the dim green of the mountains, or in winter, when the snow lay vast and unbroken, shadowed blue with the early sun. Voices, in this twilight, seemed rich with hidden significance, and faces and hands were strange and lovely.

Nothing stirred. The house was quite silent. They went through the living room to the balcony, where Paul’s mother was sitting to watch the last daylight over the mountains. They sat on the rush-bottomed bench and talked to her about the day’s outing. Katherine poured out the tale of their wonderful soldanella field, and Paid listened in silence. Listening, he felt with increased intensity the importance of the face he had seen in the mirror, which had seemed somehow to be linked to the sight of the soldanella. He turned and watched Katherine as she recounted their wonder and delight at the discovery. It occurred to him suddenly that she might have been the link between the two experiences. Suppose it had been her face he had seen? The contours of the phantom face had completely escaped him: he could not sincerely say whether it had been hers or someone else’s. He looked at her intently, as if some trace of the other experience might yet come back to him.

But nothing in her clear and enthusiastic young face gave him any clue.

“Supper’s all ready,” said his mother, cutting across his secret train of thought. “We’re only waiting till Maria gets back — she went across to the Grill farm for cream. You’d better both go and get ready.”

3

ATiiEniisE went upstairs, ami Paul sat dowrn on the bottom step to take off his boots. When he got up, with his boots in his hand, he crossed the floor noiselessly in his stockinged feet, and as he passed the mirror by the door, he glanced up at himself in it. For a moment he paused, and watched the faint image which came back to him. In the dim light, he saw his own pale oval face, with the fringe of black hair straight across his forehead: his own grave eyes looked back and answered his scrutiny. lie remembered the moment, in another dusk, when his mother had carried him past the mirror on the stairs in the house in Vienna. He remembered the satisfaction of realizing that now he would be able to see himself in the admired glass, and the moment when, in their passage past it, he had looked up to fulfill the desire and had seen that other face look back at him. But what other face? He was almost sure, now, that it had been a woman’s face. He stared at his own reflection, trying to conjure up the image he had seen before. But nothing changed in the dim and shadowy glass, not a line wavered or blurred. His eyes were steady and constant in his serious face. lie smiled, almost wondering if he had ever really seen the phantom; yet below the doubt was a certainty that he had seen it.

As he was turning away, and in a fragment of time, he saw again, and with perfect clarity, the other face look back at him.

It was a face he recognized, without knowing whose it was — it was a face which he seemed to have seen in a hundred forgotten dreams, to have met in another world, where no sign or word of recognition was needed between them. It belonged to another part of himself, a part below the everyday surface, but not less real than the part he habitually knew. Sometimes in a dream, we find ourselves in a house, or a street, where we have never consciously been; but in the dream it is as familiar as the streets we walk every day. As long as the dream lasts, we are at home there, and only when we wake do we know that we have surprised, with our remembrance of the dream, a secret territory of our hidden selves.

Entranced, he tried to hold on to the moment, to will the vision to remain. It was a lovely face which answered his gaze, and he had no idea how long it was that he saw it there. It was not that time stood still; it no longer existed, for he and the face were outside time. With a mingling of joy and sadness, it smiled at him ever so slightly, and then at once it vanished.

Hardly daring to move, hoping it might come back, he remained staring at himself in the twilight. Overhead, he heard Katherine singing to herself, and in the distance were sounds of music from beyond the waiter, Somewhere a board creaked; on the lake was a faint splash of oars. In the dusk of the familiar house he stood intent on the rapidly fading patch of light from the mirror.

Suddenly the spell that had held him was broken. Astonishment overwhelmed him. A moment ago, he had been staring into the glass at a strange face that had been hauntingly familiar; for the moment he had been so completely bewitched by it that its familiarity had seemed natural. Now, as if he had abruptly waked from sleep, he looked back with mounting wonder across the gulf that separates dream and reality.

But this had been no dream.

Slowly he turned and went upstairs.

It was not Katherine he had seen. There was something in the face which set it apart from every other face he had ever known.

“It was the face of a ghost,” he said to himself out loud, as he came to the top of the stairs.

But if it had been the face of a ghost, where had it come from — why had it come? IIow did it happen that he had seen it a second time? He had no doubt now that this was the face he had seen before. There had been, he was sure, an immediate, tacit recognition, an acknowledgment of a common ground, that had been mutual.

His thoughts were confused as he considered the vision. Only when he refused to think, accepting it as an experience which had really happened, but could not be explained, could he recall the face at all. But he could not stop thinking about it.

4

HE washed his face and hands and came down to supper with his eyelashes and the fringe across his forehead in damp points where he had not bothered to dry them properly. Looking at him, Katherine was a ware of something warm and tender in her feeling for him, an affection which was yet not love. He was scarcely younger than she wras, and seemed in so many ways the elder. But now she felt protective towards him, as if she had discovered a new and disarming vulnerability in him. He did not take much notice of any of them, but went on with his supper in silence. Maria, the cook who had been in the family since before Paul was born, was telling a long story about the peasants she had been to see that evening,

He wished very much to know who it was he had seen, but he was afraid there would be no way of ever discovering. Perhaps, though, he would find her human counterpart one day, coming upon her suddenly, with a shock of surprise and delight, with that wordless recognition that had passed between them tonight. If he found her, the vision in the glass would be explained; and if he never found her, what then?

Maria’s voice broke in upon his thoughts.

“They actually believe they have seen the ghosts of their grandparents up in the cemetery!” she said. “As if there were such things!”

Paul smiled across the table at her.

“Ghosts?” he said. “Of course there are ghosts! Didn’t you ever see one, Maria?”

“No, that I did not, nor did you. And you wouldn’t say such things, either, if you weren’t half a peasant yourself, living here so long!”

They all laughed at her indignation, and in the end she joined in the laughter. Katherine was watching Paid with wide eyes. Even after living in the same house with him all the winter, and spending so much time with him, she never fell she quite understood him — there was always something just out of reach.

He was wondering if the mirror itself had any special virtue, and if the face would appear to anyone who looked into it with sufficient concentration. He was very reluctant to believe this. He remembered with relief that he had first seen her in a different mirror. To still a lingering doubt, he turned to his mother.

“Do you remember the old mirror you had on the stairs in the house in Vienna?” he asked.

He felt rather than saw that Katherine was at once alert.

“Of course. You mean the one with the carved frame? ”

He nodded. “That’s the one. What happened to it?”

“Fancy your remembering it! You were quite a baby when we left that house.”

“Yes,” he said patiently. “But what did happen to it?”

“Oh, the wood was all rotten inside the gilding: those old things are so lovely, and so terribly fragile! The carving got broken when we moved; I hated to part with it, but it was quite hopeless to think of trying to get it repaired — so I put it away in the attic for years. Then one day I went up there and saw it, and felt sorry that I’d never had anything done to it. So I got it down and had it put into another frame.”

Suddenly he thought he could not bear to hear any more. He guessed the end of the story.

“And where is it now?” he said breathlessly.

“Out there in the hall — didn’t you know it was that one?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I always remembered it with the golden frame.”

He felt empty and disappointed. He could no longer be sure that the face belonged to him, not to the mirror.

“Where did it come from originally? Has it a history?” asked Katherine.

“In a way it has. It’s very old, the oldest thing I have which has been in the family for years. It belonged to a distant ancestress, who is said to have been a great beauty, and who died young.”

“My ancestress?” said Paul.

“Not directly; she was a cousin by marriage of your great-great-grandmother.”

“Are there any pictures of her?”

“I don’t think so. At least, we haven’t any. I believe there was a miniature of her, but it went to another branch of the family, and I’ve never even seen it.”

“You never told me about her,” said Paul.

“I never thought of it,” replied his mother.

“But,” he said, smiling at her, “it’s very important! A beauty in the family!”

Now he felt sure that he had seen the face of that distant relative. But he could find no explanation of his having seen her. Why, especially, had the soldanella field brought back to him the memory of the first sight of her? Had she, too, by chance, seen the same field? That alone, he was sure, would not be a strong enough bond to bring her back from her shadowy world to greet him. Was there some other bond between them?

“Do you know any more about her?” he demanded abruptly. He had been so absorbed in his secret speculations that he had not been listening to the rest of the conversation.

“Only what I was just saying, that there was some story of her being secretly in love with a young man at the court; her father was opposed to the match, and she pined away and died. There are always such stories about beauties, specially those who die young and unmarried!”

He nodded absently. A preposterous idea had occurred to him. Supposing he had been that young man at the court? It was quite fantastic, and yet somehow it seemed to explain everything. He toyed delightedly with the idea of her waiting in the mirror to look out at him when the moment came. But her face had been so known to him that he thought they had probably found other ways of meeting. How did he know what happened to his spirit when he was asleep? Conjectures moved excitingly in his brain. If he had indeed brought the unremembered knowledge of her into the world with him, it was no longer so inexplicable that the loveliness of the soldanella field had awakened it in his conscious mind. Once, every beauty and every perfection in the world must have seemed to him to be part of her beauty.

“Look!” cried Katherine, who was sitting facing the windows.

They looked, and over the mountain they saw the soft brilliance of the rising moon. They left the supper table, and went and stood out on the balcony to watch. Gradually the brilliance grew brighter, and a rim of yellow, clear and definite as metal, came up over the edge of the mountain. As they watched, it became momently bigger, enormous as a portent in the smooth and softly shining blue of the sky. They were waiting breathless for the moment when it would clear the line of the mountain. It was a suspense so unbearable that they felt as if their nerves were being finely drawn to an infinitesimal point. Then, all at once, there lay the perfect globe, round and smooth and shining with a deep intense warmth, on the very top of the long slope of the mountain, as if it were the princess’s golden ball, about to roll down and lie hidden in the grasses of the valley below.

Already there appeared a thin space of shining blue between the moon and the mountain: the danger of its rolling down was over. It cleared the peak and rose serene into the vast metallic cupola of the night. Over the lake stretched a band of hardly rippled light.

Katherine sighed. “How lovely!” she said.

“Let’s get the boat out, and row into the middle of the lake!” cried Paul. “Come on, let’s leave the supper things, and we’ll all go!”

He did not wait for an answer, but jumped down the steps and raced through the garden to the boathouse. He was filled with extravagant happiness, and as he ran, it was as if a small cool hand slipped itself into his, as if his footsteps were accompanied by the faint sound of little feet that ran beside him on the soft wet grass.

He sat down on the short grass and bent to touch the flowers with his cheek.