13 Dec 1921

13 December 1921

Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland

    But its all the musical people who make St Johns Wood so delightful - those grunting cellos, those flying fiddles and the wakeful pianos. Its like a certain part of Brussels. And then the house at 5 Acacia Road. It has memories - but its not only precious because of them. It was a charming house.
   Oh, this cold! I feel like an explorer sending you these last lines before the snow kills him. Its fearful! One cant work; ones brain is frozen hard & I cant breathe better than a fish in an empty tank. There is no air, its a kind of ice. I would leave here tomorrow but where can one go? One begins the wandering of a consumptive - fatal! Everybody does it and dies. However I have decided to leave this particular house in June for another, more remote. I passed it one day lately when I was out driving. Its in the most superb spot. The forests are on both sides but in front there are huge meadows with clumps of fir trees dotted over them - a kind of 18th century landscape. Beyond the meadows tower the gaunt snow mountains, and behind there is a big lake. It is to let in June. We shall take it for a year. My chief reason is for the hay making. One will be in the very midst of it all through August. To watch - to hear - mowing, to see the carts, to take part in the harvest is to share the summer in a way I love. You will really swoon at the view - or at least I shall expect you to!!! And we shall eat out of doors - eat the hay with trimmings, and get a little boat & float on the lake and put up hammocks & swing on the pines, and paddle in the little stream. Dont you love to paddle?
[To Dorothy Brett, 13 December 1921.]

Dear Koteliansky -
   All I meant by a ‘mystery' was that one so good and so precious as you should have sorrows . . . I have written a second time to Paris. If I do not hear from this letter I will try the secretary of the institut. There is nothing else to be done.
                Katherine. [To S. S. Koteliansky, 13 December 1921.]