Ten days later the porter Joseph Zimmer of Arosa, clad in the tough and shapeless trousers of his class, but sporting an old velveteen shooting-coat bequeathed to him by a former German master — speaking the guttural tongue of the Grisons, and with all his belongings¹ in one massive rucksack, came out of the little station of St Anton and blinked in the frosty sunshine. He looked down upon the little old village beside its icebound lake, but his business was with the new village of hotels and villas⁴ which had sprung up in the last ten years south of the station. He made some halting inquiries⁵ of the station people, and a cab-driver outside finally directed him to the place he sought — the cottage of the Widow Summermatter, where resided an English intern⁶, one Peter Pienaar.

The porter Joseph Zimmer had had a long and roundabout journey. A fortnight before he had worn the uniform of a British major-general. As such he had been the inmate⁷ of an expensive Paris hotel, till one morning, in grey tweed clothes and with a limp, he had taken the Paris–Mediterranean Express with a ticket for an officers’ convalescent home at Cannes. Thereafter he had declined in the social scale. At Dijon he had been still an Englishman, but at Pontarlier he had become an American bagman of Swiss parentage, returning to wind up his father’s estate. At Berne he limped excessively, and at Zurich, at a little back-street hotel, he became frankly⁹ the peasant. For he met a friend there from whom he acquired clothes with that odd rank smell, far stronger than Harris tweed, which marks the raiment of most Swiss guides and all Swiss porters. He also acquired a new name and an old aunt, who a little later received him with open arms and explained to her friends that he was her brother’s son from Arosa who three winters ago had hurt his leg wood-cutting and had been discharged from the levy¹⁰.

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