Children, indifferently watched by parents, ran up and down the veranda. A burst of laughter came from one corner: four fat women, all wearing tight pants in pastel shades, were playing cards at a wicker table. Judith passed through the side door into the lounge, where people were walking in every direction. She remembered that tea was served in the dining room at four; perhaps it was not too late, though it was getting on toward half-past. But on the way she decided that she didn’t want tea. It wasn’t the Isle of Wight, for God’s sake. She went up to her room to work until dinner.
Judith felt better for the little work she had done, and on her way down to the dining hall she permitted the charm of the place to cast its spell again. She loved the wide window recesses with their cushioned window seats and the bookshelves on both sides, and she loved the dark, paneled walls hung with glass-covered photographs of the Mountain Lodge at the turn of the century, glass-covered photographs of bearded men in tweed caps and tweed knickerbockers, and glass-covered drawings of herbs and ferns carefully labeled in Latin and English. She loved the broad, thick-carpeted stairway with its sturdy and shiny old banister, whose thick balusters were shaped like bowling pins. She had showered and changed into a rose-colored blouse, beige slacks, and beige sandals, and as she entered the filled and festive dining hall, with its soaring paneled walls and the orange sunset through the tall windows, she felt not merely pleasure but gratitude. The diners, unlike the day crowd, were all here for at least the weekend, sharing the same gentle adventure. The Mountain Lodge was a great ship sailing into the hills, and they were all passengers. She recognized many faces: the tall, very thin man with the hearty laugh, two of the teenagers who had lain on the grass before the tower, the elderly couple who had spoken to her in the morning. They greeted her as she passed; Judith smiled at the woman and, turning to the man, touched the tips of her fingers to her temple. The table beside hers was empty, as were several others here and there in the hall, and when, halfway through dinner, Judith looked up to see the dark woman in her chair, it struck her as being so natural, so entirely without menace or meaning of any kind, that she could have laughed aloud to think of the absurd pains she had taken to evade this harmless creature with the slumped shoulders and melancholy eyes, who had been placed beside her by wildest chance and whom she was not called upon to elude or know. For each to the other was entirely a stranger.
And it was splendid after dinner to sit on the darkening veranda among quiet voices and the sound of creaking wicker. She looked at the sky above hills slowly draining of color. The darkening blue of the east turned to pale, pale blue above, to a blue that was almost white but gave off no light, like a darkness. It was growing cool. “Cheesecloth,” a man’s voice said decisively, and she tried to hear the next sentence, but his words were interwoven with sounds of footsteps, creaking furniture, a pipe knocking against a glass ashtray. “It’s getting a little chilly,” a woman said to her husband. A few older men lit up cigars. “I think I’ll go in and get my sweater,” someone said. “It’s this mountain air,” someone else said. And all at once, for no reason, the missing letters came to her: arête. The side door opened and closed, someone yawned loudly, people walked on the gravel paths lit by carriage lamps. The veranda smelled of lake water, cigar smoke, and damp wood. It was growing dark.
Someone cried out, then there were gasps and shouts: and the moon, large and fiery orange, rose slowly from the black hills. It was nearly round, except that one side was slightly blurred, as if someone had started to erase it before giving up.
Judith could almost hear the machinery hidden behind the hills, creakily hoisting the cumbrous old moon, which in a moment would probably tumble back down with a crash. But it detached itself from the hill and sat there, looking pleased with itself.
She decided to take a little walk in the lamplit dark before going inside. On the gravel paths by the side of the lake, couples strolled slowly, stopping now and then to look at the water. Judith walked along a path to the other side of the lake and began climbing the dark hill. She had hoped to sit in one of the gazebos on the cliffs along the way, but in each one she passed there sat a couple looking out across the lake. On a stretch of bare flat moon-brightened cliffs, a little distance from the paths, lovers sat and lay as if they were on a beach. Some had brought blankets and lay on their backs, staring up at the night sky. And an irritation came over Judith, at this invasion, this conspiracy of lovers to occupy the best places. The moon had climbed and was pale yellow now. Judith continued up the steep trail, hoping to exhaust the lovers. When she came to the next gazebo she saw a heavy man smoking a pipe, alone. She turned back down the path.
In the warm, lamplit lounge, in an armchair beside one of the big empty fireplaces, Judith sat reading a book about Victorian architecture in New England, which she had found in the small library off the Winter Lounge. In winter there would be fires blazing in all the fireplaces, and suddenly she longed for it to be winter, with logs snapping in the fireplace beside her and, through the bay windows, fields of smooth snow glistening under the moon.
“Hello there.” The voice startled her, and she looked up to see the elderly man who had saluted her on the path. His wife, who had spoken, stood beside him.
“Oh, hello,” Judith said.
“We saw you sitting here all by your lonesome, and we thought, now why don’t we just go over and say hello.”
“We saw you reading a book by yourself here. I told Bea, we shouldn’t disturb her, if she’s reading.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’m just sitting here, really. Soaking up the atmosphere.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said the woman. “It’s a fine evening. We saw you sitting alone, dear, and we just wanted to come over and say hello. We’ll be right across the room there, if you’d care for comp’ny.”
The woman pointed across the room. The man bent his head slightly, touched two fingers to his temple, and lifted them. Taking his wife by the arm, he turned and walked with her slowly back across the room.
A warm, tender feeling rose in Judith, as if the word “dear” had been a hand laid on her cheek. A desire came over her to follow the kindly couple across the room, to pull up an armchair beside them and recount the little adventures of her day: the fourteen wildflowers, the climb to the top of the tower, the red bench in the sun, her unedited manuscript, the three ducks in a triangle scattering the yellow windows, the wooden bridge over the stream. Perhaps she could even tell them about the dark woman, and about the beauty and grace of the boy as he bent over the girl. Then they would explain to her what everything meant. And the man would touch his fingers to his temple, and the woman would say: “That’s all right, dear. That’s as it should be, dear.”
Judith looked up, and saw a plump, bald man with the face of a child, who sat with his knees apart, his plump hands resting on his thighs, and his pants cuffs raised to show red-and-blue argyle socks. She saw a woman with blue-gray hair who sat stiffly upright in her armchair, raising her thin arm to pat gently at her hair while her ivory bracelet slipped slowly from her wrist to her forearm. In an armchair a girl of twenty in tight faded jeans and a burnt-orange sweater sat hugging her raised knees and staring over the tops of them as, flexing and unflexing her bare toes, she listened intensely to a young man with a short blond beard, black-rimmed eyeglasses, and bright blue eyes. Judith felt that she wanted to tell these people something important, something about how strange it was to be sitting in chairs in a lounge in the middle of the hills, how everything was startling and utterly unknown, how each of them was as wondrous as a giraffe or a rhinoceros, but her thoughts grew confused, the expansive, mysterious feeling passed away, and she saw before her a roomful of dull people, sitting around with nothing to do.