Chapter IV (8)

“There is a man in the café. A man who saw the battle! Little Mother of God, a man who was there!”

He was in the hard-breathing front rank, pressed against the wall. The closed door of the café was in front of him. He could see a pale blot wavering like a moth within the glass,—the anxious face of Pedro. Then a darkness appeared in the blot, and two smaller blots appeared with cautious gestures. Fellowes worked forward till he leaned against the door. It opened suddenly. Fat hands dragged him within. And Pedro clapped to the door again in the excited faces of his friends.

“That was well done,” said Pedro, puffing heavily. “I saw the señor. I thought, he wishes to question me, to ask me the truth; I will admit him. And you are here, señor.”

Fellowes looked round. The thick-walled room was cool and dark, bitter with the smell of stale cheap wine, and as still as a chapel. The noise outside penetrated only as a murmur. “And the man?” he asked, with a breath of relief. “You have him here?”

“The man who was there?” said Pedro. “Yes, señor. You wish to ask him of the battle? Yes, señor. I will give light.”

He brought a little reeking lamp of the sort they light in shrines. Shapes dawned on them cloudily,—barrels, jars, an old door like a cave’s mouth, and a flight of steps. “He is . . .?” began Fellowes in some astonishment. And Pedro finished quickly, “In the cellar? Yes, señor. Why? Because he is afraid.”

The last word came back deep and hollow as Pedro led the way into the cellars. “Afraid . . .”

If the upper floor had been as still as a chapel, the cellar was as still as a tomb. The steps led straight down into a square room full of broad mud pillars; on three sides of this room smaller ones opened, bins and cupboards for storing the wine and the aguardiente. Each opening was hung with a rough door, and every door stood open, so that beyond the circling shadows of the pillars there seemed to wait a monstrous company of wings. Fellowes turned mechanically to close the door at the foot of the stairs. And a voice cried to him quickly, “Señor, señor, leave the door open, in the name of God.”

“Yes,” said the fat Pedro in a whisper, “that is the man. Leave the door open, señor. In the name of God.”

Fellowes looked. The soldier sat on a straw mattress with his back against the far wall, so that all the open doors were in view. His slender brown feet were wrapped in strips of native cloth that had once been white, but were now stained a thick dark brown. His knees were drawn up and his hands clasped them. He wore some sort of uniform-coat with gaudy yellow flannel facings, and a broad hat lay beside him, together with an untouched bottle of Pedro’s wine. His voice, singularly sharp and quick, was yet the voice of a sound man.

“Are you . . .” began Fellowes, and then stopped. The face touched with a strange reflection not of light, but of darkness, answered him. It was the only answer he had. For the soldier was counting the doors on his fingers,—“Four—seven—nine, and all open.”

Fellowes turned to Pedro. “Is this man—is he a little mad?”

“O no, señor. He is only afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of a closed door, señor. He is not mad. He was there, beyond Cienaga. Wait. I will speak for you.”

He leaned forward and spoke loudly, a fat hand on either knee. “This caballero wishes to ask if you were in the fight beyond Cienaga.”

The echoes of the deep voice rolled in little thunders; each echo died before the man answered in his sharp, breathless voice.

“Yes, I was there.”

“He wishes to hear about the battle. Will you tell him all you know?”

Another silence. Then,—“Yes, I will tell him all I know. But do not shut the doors.”

Fellowes took it up eagerly in his best Spanish. “Tell me all you know, my friend, and I’ll make it well worth your while.” He felt in his pocket for a pencil and a scrap of paper. “Go on. I’m ready.”

“There was a river,” said the soldier quickly, “and a house with a yellow roof in a clearing.”

“Yes. Go on, please.”

“A house with a yellow roof. I was in the house.”

“Yes, but before that?”

“Before that, the swamps, señor. Then the river, and the village, and the house with the yellow roof. I was in the house.”

“But—this is no use.” Fellowes turned to Pedro. “I want facts, all he knows—”

Pedro’s full-moon face was turned gravely on the soldier; his eyes, gentle as a girl’s, watched him only. “Señor,” he said, with an air slightly absent, “I think he will tell you all he knows. Listen. In the name of God.”

Pedro’s voice, the little shrine-lamp sending up a thin black finger to the roof, the shadows, the open doors,—all these chilled Fellowes a little. He glanced curiously from Pedro to the soldier. “Let him tell it in his own way, then.”

The soldier began again, as if he were speaking for the first time.

“There was the house with the yellow roof. But before that we crossed the swamps. It’s very bad in the swamps. We walked one behind the other on logs laid down in the mud; they were very old logs, very slippery. We walked for a long time, I don’t know how long. One man took the quick fever, and when the pain came, he cried and fell into the mud, in a deep place. He was gone before one could cry on the saints, and his gun too, which was a pity. This man was the first who died. I forget his name now, but he was very lucky at cockfighting.

“It was very dark in the swamps, too, dark almost like night. Sometimes the trees broke, and a line of light lay across the mud. As the long trail of men crawled along the logs, each as he passed under the light would go very slowly, and lift his face to it, until he was pushed on by the man behind who wanted to feel the sun on his eyes too. In this way two more men were drowned in the mud. But I was safe, and so was the man in front of me. I was glad of that, because he was my friend.”

“But can’t you remember how long you were in the swamps?” asked Fellowes, gently. “Who your captain was? Anything that happened?”

The soldier looked troubled. “No, I don’t remember. But I had a gun, and cartridges, and a bayoneta; and I was afraid of the insurgentes. I was afraid they would come up behind us. We didn’t know where they were. The man in front of me didn’t care. He was a young man and merry, with no hatred in him. He said, ‘If a Señor Insurgente gave me a good dinner, I’d build him a shrine.’ But I was afraid of the insurgentes. They were devils.

“When we came out of the swamps many of us had fever, and our feet were sore with leech-bites. There was a road, but it was very bad. Soon one part of our army was far ahead of the other. Those who went in front had shoes, those who went slowly, hadn’t any. I was afraid the insurgentes would catch us, but I couldn’t go fast. My friend had shoes, but he stayed with me. And one day he went off by himself, and came back laughing with a pair for me. ‘There’s a village yonder,’ he told me, ‘all shut up except the church. A poor place. Only the fleas are fat. I said a prayer in the church, amigo, and stole the jefe’s shoes for you.’

“Now that we both had shoes we left the rearguard behind us, the men who had none. I don’t remember where we went. We went on for a long time, and there was fighting in front of us. I think we fought too, because I remember hiding in some thick bushes covered with pink flowers. There was a dead man near us, and when I fired my gun, the pink flowers fell until he was almost buried,—only his feet out. There were lots of dead men, though, we didn’t mind them. But there were a few who were not dead. Those insurgentes are devils. I was not afraid of fighting—I was afraid of insurgentes. I would call to my friend in daylight, like a child at night. ‘Are they here, have they come, amigo?’ And he would say ‘No, we must still keep the dinner hot for them.’ He was a merry man even when he was hungry.

“I still had my gun, and some cartridges and my bayoneta; but we had no food. When we came to the river, and the village, and the house with the yellow roof, my friend went away to find food. I hid in the house with the yellow roof, waiting for him; I hid in a corner of the lower room behind the door, where there was a little window, high up. I had my gun, and my cartridges, and my bayoneta. I was going to fire on the rebels through the window if they came. But they didn’t come.

“It was very still in that house. The room was a very nice one, very clean. A water-pot hung under the eaves and dripped, and that was often the only sound I could hear. A child’s shoe lay in the middle of the floor; they must have been well-to-do folk if even the children had shoes. But I couldn’t find anything to eat, not so much as a mouldy plantain or a bit of bread. The door was open. I left it open and stood in the shadow behind it with my gun and my cartridges and my bayoneta, looking out of the little window and wondering where my friend was. There was a clearing outside, surrounded with tall trees. Sunlight hung like ropes made from gold between the trees. Birds talked; one flew in at the open door of the room where I hid. It was so quiet you woauld never have thought of fighting, of anger, of dead men. Except when the sunny wind blew off the woods.”

As if the remembered quietness locked his lips, the soldier was silent. The door at the foot of the stairs swung in a draught and he watched it anxiously with drawn-in lips until it was still. Then he went on breathlessly: “I will tell the gentleman all I can remember. It is not much. But there was fighting, but I don’t remember where or what it was all about. It is all gone. Only I was in the lower room of the house with the yellow roof, behind the door. And the door was open. I was waiting for my friend. I waited a long time, but he came at last.

“He broke through the trees on the far side of the clearing, running as if he were mad, and leaping from side to side. He had a dead fowl under each arm, and as he ran, their long necks jerked together. His tunic was all stuffed out with things, and his ragged trousers fluttered round his legs like flags round a flag-pole at a fiesta. He looked very funny. He was laughing as he ran. I laughed too, and I was just going to run and meet him, when I thought, is there a kettle here to cook the fowl in? I looked for the kettle, and looked back through the window. And I saw the little blue puff break from the trees . . .

“The crack followed, little and foolish in that big quietness as the crack of a twig. And three men ran out of the trees after my friend. They were insurgentes. I had never seen them so close before. I was afraid. But he wasn’t, I saw his white teeth flashing as he ran for the open door. He ran as fast as a dog, with the fowls’ heads jerking against his knees. And he laughed.

“I became very cold, there behind the door. Something jerked in my chest, and the gun jerked in my hand. I wondered what I should do. If I fired, I might have hit my friend. I didn’t fire. I watched the insurgentes coming nearer. I saw their faces, as they ran through the streaks of light and shadow in the clearing, now bright, now dark, and all with one thought in them . . . Then I was afraid. Afraid as I hadn’t been before. The light went out, my flesh trembled, my sinews shook against my bones. Mother of God, I died,—died many times.”

The soldier bent forward, panting. His eyes for the first time met Fellowes’.

“I was there. I will tell you all I know, señor. He was my friend. I was afraid.

“I shut the door.”

The cellar was very still. The lamp-fire trembled, and Pedro’s immense squat shadow surged like a cloud.

“I shut the door. The square of sunlight on the floor grew thin and went out. There was a place for a bolt, but no bolt. I drove in my bayoneta,—drove it in with the child’s shoe I picked up from the floor. I leaned against the door, staring at the floor where the sunlight had been. My hands were over my ears, but I could hear everything, rolling like stones in my heart, in my head . . .

“I shut the door. It was fast when he flung himself against it, calling me to open in the name of God. I wanted to open it, then, señor, I wanted to open it. But I couldn’t move. I was afraid. And they killed him against it. They didn’t shoot. They killed him with their bayonets. The points came through to the other side and pricked me,—twice,—as I leaned against it. Then they took the fowls and went away. I don’t know how many there were or why they went away. Perhaps they didn’t see the door had been open.

“It was very quiet again. I crushed my ear against my side of the door, but there was no sound from his side. I put my lips to the wood and spoke to him in a whisper for fear the insurgentes should hear and come back. I couldn’t believe that _he_ didn’t hear. I thought he was listening in silence and laughing,—just to pay me out—but there was no sound but the drip from the water-jar. It was very loud, like a bell. A drop would flash in the shadow and fall, and then the sound would come in my head,—‘Boom.’ Soon I saw that there were two ‘Booms’ to every drip that fell. I couldn’t understand it at first. But the other drip, the other noise, were outside. I looked down at my feet. The jefe’s shoes he had stolen for me were very dark, very wet, with—with what had dripped and run under the closed door from his side to mine . . .

“I was afraid again. I kicked off the shoes and ran round and round the room. I couldn’t believe that he was dead. He was such a merry one. As I ran, I kept saying, ‘I’m afraid of the insurgentes, afraid of the insurgentes,’ and I called, ‘Are you here, amigo, have they come? But he didn’t answer ‘We must keep the soup hot.’ Then I knew I wasn’t afraid of the insurgentes, but of my amigo on the other side of the door.

“When it was dark, so dark I could see nothing, I went to the door. My hands were quite steady as I worked out the bayoneta. But I opened it the breadth of a hand. Señor, the door opened inwards. As it came, something came with it, heavy, dragging on the ground—pinned to it as a bat’s skin’s pinned on a board . . .

“I don’t remember much. I shut the door again. I was very cold. I took my gun and broke down the window and climbed out that way.

“The clearing was in very dark shadow, but the tops of the trees were white in the coming moonlight. I knew I must be away before the moonlight shone on the door. I dropped from the window and my foot struck something,—a loaf of bread. His tunic was all fat with things as he ran and laughed . . .

“I was very hungry. I caught it up and ran, wondering why the insurgentes had left it. I went on and on. The moon rose and the light came on my hands. They were dark, señor, the bread was dark. No wonder the insurgentes had left it. It was all spoiled . . .

“I don’t remember much more. I went on,—went on. Then it was day, and there was a town, one of our towns. When they saw my feet, they let me ride in the wagons. They offered me bread, but I couldn’t eat it. They thought I was wounded and starved. They thought I had fought the rebels. Perhaps I had. But I only remember that I was afraid. And so I shut the door.”

“But the fighting?” asked Fellowes under his breath. “Under whose command? Who cut off the insurgentes? Where will the troops retire? He must . . .”

“Hush, señor.” Pedro lifted his hand and turned on his heel. “Hush. He knows no more.”

“More?” The man in the yellow facings caught at the word. “Tell the gentleman that’s all. There was a house, and an open door, and I shut the door.”

“Come,” said Pedro again, “there is no more. He has told you all he knows.”

They went softly up the steps. And behind them the breathless voice called: “Señor, señor, for the pity of God, do not close the door!”

THE MEN WHO CLIMBED

What had taken Stephen Forrester to the Exhibition would be difficult to say. He had told his friends that snow and ice and anything higher than a first floor made him feel ill, and had then proceeded to lose himself very pleasantly among the fleshpots. Well, he had earned his fleshpots. Yet here he was, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, paying his entrance fee like anybody else to the Association Rooms, to see Macrae’s photographs.

“The large photographs of Mount Forrester are in Room C,” said the very efficient young person with the bobbed hair who gave him his change. “Kindly keep to the right.” He thanked her humbly and clicked through the turnstile in the wake of a large woman in musquash and carnations, who would probably have given much to know him. For Forrester was something of a lion that winter.

He went into Room C, after a guilty glance about A and B. But no one was there who knew him. No one said: “That’s Forrester! Yes, the fellow with the limp. You’d never dream he was fond of that sort of thing, would you?” His first thought was: “Mac did some good work!” Then, with an involuntarily catching of the breath, he stopped short before the great photograph that held the end wall alone.

And as he did so he knew with sure foreknowledge that any time in his life he might be brought up with that little thrill, that while he lived, a hundred chance scents or colours or silences would have power to renew for him that air of ineffable space, those sheathed and virgin rocks, those upper snows austere against the burning blue; that the impersonal passion of the climber had been, was, and forever would be the moving force of his soul.

“Mount Forrester from the South-east,” the catalogue had it. Just that! He was the man who had conquered Mount Forrester; and he was the man who knew how utterly the great height had conquered him.

He sat down on one of the leather divans placed at intervals down the centre of the room, staring at the enlarged photograph with half-closed eyes. The heated air grew cold in his throat; inside his irreproachable gloves the scars of his old frost-bites burned and tingled; he tapped one well-shod foot—the lame one—on the floor. There in the extreme left-hand corner of the picture was the bit of ice that had slid and crushed him. That had been on the return journey. They said he’d never walk again. Macrae himself had been all in when he took that picture. Why, they’d put him in the tent in the middle of a snow flurry; the cloud had cleared and the light was right; they’d found Mac up to his ears in snow half a mile away, clutching the camera—raving, but he’d taken the picture.

“Excuse me, boss—you done any climbin’?”

Forrester came to earth with a start, and leaned round the curve of the leather seat-back the better to see and answer the man who had so suddenly spoken to him. But he was slow in answering as the details of the questioner’s face presented themselves to him around the curve of the fat green morocco. For what possible interest could such a one have in climbing mountains? An elderly clerk out of work? Scarcely educated enough, judged Forrester. A night watchman? More likely. Anyway, a sub-under-assistant at whatever he set his hand to do. The stamp of the man born to work under other men was on him, on his respectable garments, on his vague face set in graying bristles; one could guess him treading forever the same smoothed rut, running on the same rail, until pushed off at last into a still deeper obscurity. And he was already growing old. Forrester, clean from his heights, was quick to pity. “One of the Great Unlucky,” he said to himself; and aloud: “Yes, I’ve climbed a good bit. Are you—interested in it?”

The stranger smiled slowly. Then he drew out seven coppers and arranged them along his dingy palm. There was a certain youthfulness, a hovering and unexpected sweetness in his smile that attracted Forrester. “These here,” he said, “are all I got left o’ what Maggie allows me fer baccy this week, after payin’ me admission.” He returned the coins to his pocket and resumed his slow contemplation of the picture.

For a moment Forrester was in doubt. But the shabby-respectable man was oblivious of him, his whole attention absorbed in the picture. And it was Forrester who renewed the conversation on some impulse of sympathy, saying: “Where have you done your climbing?”

“Me? Oh, anywhere north o’ Thunder Valley, for the most part. You _got_ to climb there to get about. Don’t see no sense in doin’ it fer fun.” He turned his eyes again to the photograph, and once more that shy, half-boyish smile transfigured his commonplace face. “But you thinks different when yer young eh, Mister? Where you done _your_ climbin’ if I may arsk?”

Forrester nodded toward the wall. “Thereabouts mostly,” he said pleasantly. “My name’s Forrester—Stephen Forrester, at your service.”

The stranger turned completely around; his face rose over the back of the divan like a queer mild moon. “You—Forrester?” he said with interest. “Well, now! You the feller that climbed that mountain an’ had it named fer him?”

“Yes,” smiled Forrester, conscious of an excusable glow.

“_My!_” said the unknown softly. “My! If that don’t beat all!” He looked at Forrester carefully, as if making a friendly inventory of him. He rubbed his hands gently together. “Maggie’ll be _that_ amused to hear tell I seen you!” he said shyly.

Well—_amused_ was not just the word that Forrester had expected! But the other man came sidling along the leather seat, all alight with interest. He put out his hand, so palpably the hand of a failure, and touched Forrester’s sleeve. “Mister,” he begged simply, “tell me all about it, so’s I can tell Maggie!”

The appeal hit Forrester in his softest place. He was touched. Who was Maggie? He visioned her as beautiful and dreaming of her native hills; in a mental flash he saw himself telling a moving story to a dozen well-appointed dinner-tables. He said kindly: “Tell me what you want to know. But first—who’s Maggie? Where is she?”

“My old girl. Mister. She’s washin’ dishes at Henniker’s til I get a job.” He went on with a touch of pride: “She don’t have to work when _I’m_ doin’ anything, boss.”

Again Forrester was moved; he guessed that Maggie washed dishes a lot at Henniker’s and did it cheerily. Maggie’s husband went on with a shy eagerness, jerking his thumb at the wall: “Did you have to cross Somahl’ to the glacier, Mister?” “Yes.” Forrester was conscious of an increasing astonishment, for the glacier was not shown on the photograph, and is not named on any map. “We climbed that long ridge to the east—the photograph does not show much of it—and worked along till we came to the little plateau. And there we made our last camp. We went up next day. We wanted to do it in a day, so as not to spend a night at that altitude.”

“I know.” The face of Maggie’s husband showed keener, harder; he was touched with some quiet amusement that puzzled Forrester. “You went up roped, boss?”

“As far as that big fissure.” Forrester was kindling, as a lyric poet might kindle at the talk of love. “We cast them off then. They were too great a weight. We kept them as dry as we could, but there was a continual _poudre_ and they were frozen as stiff as steel rods, crackling as we moved. It sounded so loud, that crackle.”

“The papers say you was the only one that made the peak, Mister, the only one that made good.”

“It wasn’t the other fellows’ fault,” said Forrester quickly. “They were fine stuff—white men. I tell you they gave up their chances so I should have mine. Yes. They helped me all through, spent their strength for me—so that in the end they’d none left, and I went on alone—on their strength. A man said to me last week: ‘You hired them, didn’t you?’ ‘What difference does that make?’ I said, ‘when they gave me what money couldn’t buy?’”

Forrester’s eyes went to the picture; he was abruptly silent. Then: “They gave me _that_,” he breathed.

After a minute he went on quietly, talking more to himself than to the man beside him:

“I left Mason and Pieters on the last tiny level with the tent over them. Mason was finished. Pieters could have come with me, but daren’t leave Mason, who was in a state of collapse, and blue. Pieters never stopped rubbing him, he told me, for an hour. I went on alone, up a slope of hard old snow, steep, but easy enough—that slope—and in five minutes it was as if I’d been alone for centuries from the beginning of the world! I drew myself up on a ledge and looked down. Mason and Pieters were little black figures beneath. Pieters lifted a hand to me. Then I went on over that hummock—there—and they were gone. It seemed to be all right—all right, I mean, that I should be alone at the end—alone with my mountain.

“The hardest part of the climbing was over. There remained only that great soaring wedge of immortal snow, that heaved above me into the blue. I had only to climb, to keep on working upward as long as my strength held. I knew it would not fail. My arms, outstretched against the face of the steep, and looking as weak as a fly’s legs, were yet long enough and strong enough to clasp the whole of that magnificent summit, and leave their mark upon it, and conquer it. What a thing humanity is! Oh, I’m talking nonsense, if you like, but I was a little mad at the time. If you’ve climbed, you know how it is!”

But Forrester saw at the same moment that his listener didn’t know how it was, for all he was smiling indulgently. “I been mad in my time, boss,” he said almost with a wink. “I ain’t the head for such things now.”

Forrester laughed a little. “It took some head,” he confessed, nodding at the photograph. “After I worked round that curve there, I had nothing under me but a drop—a drop clear to timber-line. I’d loose a handful of snow from somewhere, and it’d go glittering off into the emptiness behind me like frozen smoke, and I’d stick close for a minute to see if any more was coming. Then I’d watch those bits of snow-dust fall and fall and fall—miles and miles they seemed to fall, right to the black furriness that was the forest of the lower slopes. They came near to shaking me. And now and then I seemed to have nothing at all under hands or feet—-to be just afloat in dizzy space. Then I’d look up, and the whole weight of the summit’d rush back at me—hang over me until I seemed to be underneath it and crushed flat. And then I’d kind of come back to myself, and know what I was doing. And I tell you I wouldn’t have swapped places with a millionaire! It’s at times like that a man feels his soul alive in him and knows he can’t fail, whatever seems to happen. They say that morally we only use about one-tenth of our power of living. It takes the divine moment to teach us what we are when we use ten-tenths—what we are!”

Forrester was frankly smiling now, frankly talking to himself. Maggie’s husband was listening in respectful bewilderment, yet with something held in reserve; he sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling forward. Forrester wished he wouldn’t; somehow, those hands looked so inept, so apologetic. He went on abruptly:

“I was corkscrewing upwards, if you see what I mean. I calculated to reach the top on the side opposite to where I’d left my two men, for we’d seen that the overhang was less there. But on that side the wind was worse. It was not strong—just a steady swim of cold air fit to freeze the breath inside you.

“I was working up very safely and steadily, finding everything much easier than I had expected, which is often the way. I was cutting steps in solid snow. Nothing could happen to me as long as I kept on cutting steps. I was as safe as a house, for all the next stopping place was two thousand feet under. And I was just thinking so when the thong with which my ice-axe was looped round my wrist caught against a snag that thrust through the snow-crust, and snapped. I shifted my grip on the shaft for greater security; and the next instant the thing was out of my hand and glissading down the slope.

“Well, it was awkward enough, but not fatal. I went on without it, though slower; making detours round hummocks I’d have cut into, and scooping holds with the big knife I had on a lanyard round my neck. I went on so for maybe another hour, not thinking of the top, pinning my mind to every inch of the ascent.

“And then—all in a moment, as it seemed—I looked up. And there was the summit not two hundred feet above me, and easy all the way.

“Well, I hung on with toes and fingers and tried to cheer, but I couldn’t get it out. Change places with a millionaire! I wouldn’t have changed places with the kings of the earth! And then I looked more closely at what lay in front of me. And—the cheer went out of me like the flame out of a candle.

“Immediately over me, and for as far round as I could see the mountain-top was girdled with a band of rock, a sheer face, too sheer to hold the snow. It was all veined with ice, pitted and porous with the weather since the world began—soft stuff, crumbling under frost and sun. Yes, there was just about twenty feet of it. After that a smooth mound of snow to the very crest. And I lay with my chin in a drift at the foot of it, and cried like a baby. For I knew that no power on earth could get me up that little twenty-foot wall of rock without an axe to chip holds with.

“I worked up to it and stood against it. There was a ledge that held me comfortably. I stood on it and drove in the knife as far as I could reach above my head, tossed my line round it and pulled. It came away in a tinkle of tiny ice-chips and rotten rock. I stared below me. I wondered how long it would take me to get down—without having reached the top. I looked to my right, just to make certain of what I was deadly sure of already—that there wasn’t any possible way up for a single climber farther along the ledge. And there, as sure as I’m a living man, were little steps cut roughly in the rock—choked with ice, but recognizable, serviceable.

“When I told our president that,” said Forrester after a silence, “he told _me_ I’d gone light-headed from exposure.”

Forrester gazed at the picture a moment, a smile on his fine vivid face. His eyes looked into a great distance; and the eyes of the man beside him rested on him—kindly, uncomprehendingly, a little wistfully, as if he were trying to follow Forrester into that shining distance.

“I knew.” Forrester was speaking to his own soul. “Oh, I knew,” he repeated, softly. “I met him there. I felt him there—my nameless forerunner! There was a high spirit near me in the very wind. I touched hands with an unknown comrade, a friend who’d climbed higher, leaving his glory to me like a coat for which he’d no more use. How high he must have climbed! To the very stars!

“The steps were very much weathered. They looked very old. They were filled, as I said, with old ice, which I chipped out with the hook of my knife. I went up hand over hand.

“The rest was easy. I won’t trouble you with it. I stood on the summit at last, and left the tiny flag there that I’d carried up. He—my forerunner—seemed to be waiting for me there; I fancied that he gave me a generous smile. I knew he didn’t grudge me anything. It sounds rubbish _here_, eh? but _there_ I smiled back at him—the man in whose steps I’d climbed to the best thing life’s given me yet; and I drank his health in the last of my brandy. Then I—came down.”

The pleasant, vigorous voice died to silence. Both men, so contrasted, sat silent for a while, looking at the picture, which even in the electric light seemed to glow and recede into some splendid atmosphere of its own.

At last Forrester turned, a little shamefaced; he felt that in talking so to a man who couldn’t possibly understand, he’d gone very near to making a fool of himself and his mountain. There was honest pity in his heart for any man who knew nothing of such austere triumphs as he enjoyed; perhaps there was a shade of contempt, too, as he said hastily: “See here, I’ve made you listen to a lot of stuff, eh? But you must let me pay for this, you know. Just the price of admission—between two men who have something in common.”

He broke off. For he was not heard. The shabby man was gazing at the photograph. And as he gazed he chuckled quietly and rubbed his faded knees. “If you’d looked, Mister,” he said, “if you’d looked, maybe you’d have found the bits of an ol’ lantern, up there where you left the flag!”

Perfectly motionless, Forrester waited.

The shabby man turned to him genially. “Such fools as we are when we’re young!” he said. “How it all comes back!” He smiled upon the younger man again with that bright, gentle look which gave him momentarily the aspect of youth; it was like a light reflected from some mountain-peak of the soul. He went on: “Maggie’ll be _that_ interested when she hears some one has set right alongside me, talkin’—excuse me, boss—like man to man, some one that’s been up that there mountain!”

Still Forrester waited, dry-mouthed.

“You see, Mister, me and Maggie, we always counted that there old mountain as ours like, seein’ as I was the only feller’d ever been up it in them days. And a fine fool I was. Many’s the time Maggie’s said to me: ‘I wonder I took you, Si,’ she’s said, ‘seein’ you showed me what kind of a fool you was when you was courtin’.’ Maggie’s a great one for a joke. ‘Or maybe,’ she says, ‘I took you just because you was such a fool that Christmas. There’s no accountin’ for a woman’s taste,’ she says.”

That reflection of a far light rosed his colourless face as he turned again to Forrester; it lighted a pleasant blue star in his homely eyes; he laughed consciously, and glanced down at his patched shoes.

“We wasn’t married then,” he explained confidentially. “It’s a long time ago. Seems queer that there ever _was_ a time when Maggie and me wasn’t married; but there was.” He wrinkled his brow with a ruminative air. “But there wasn’t never at no time, any other girl than Maggie Delane for me.” He looked gently at Forrester. “You should ’a’ seen her then,” he said; “she was the purtiest girl in Cascapedia, my Maggie was.

“There was a lot of fellers after her. She could ’a’ done lots better, but—she stuck to me. Seems like I didn’t have much luck, even then. I dunno why—I was always willin’ to work. It just happened that way, Mister. Times I said to her: ‘You’d best quit me, honey, and take up with a luckier man.’ I said that not knowin’ just what I’d do if she done it. But she—she just put her hands on my shoulders,”—he glanced wonderingly at his shabby coat,—“she put her hands there, an’ she says: ‘Good luck or bad, I’ll never go back on you, Si.’” His slow eyes went back to Forrester’s face. “You know how it is with them, with the good ones, boss, when they’re—fond of a feller.”

“No,” said Forrester, after a short silence, and very humbly, “no, I don’t know—yet. Go on, please. Tell me the rest.”

“We was to have been married that Christmas. But I didn’t have no luck. I didn’t have enough saved. It near broke my heart. I hadn’t got so kinder used to waitin’ on things then, and I was just set on goin’ to Cascapedia and claimin’ my girl that Christmas. She was workin’ in a store there, and I was on a lumberin’ job back on the Oucouagan. ’Twasn’t so far asunders, but the hills riz up to heaven in betwixt us. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, Mister. And when the time come on, an’ I’d no luck an’ had been sick, an’ dassent to quit my job, I tramped them hills all one night, boss, tryin’ to find the nerve to write Maggie and say: ‘We can’t be married this Christmas after all, honey; we’ll have to wait for the spring.’”

He bent down and picked a thread carefully from his frayed trousers. Raising his head, he stared again at the picture. “I wrote it at last,” he went on in his heavy way, “an’ I sent it to her. I was down an’ out. I—kinder lost me self-respeck, boss, havin’ to write that way to Maggie when she could ’a’ done so much better. . . Yes sir. An’ then her answer came. She wasn’t a very good writer. She just said I wasn’t to worry; she guessed she could get along without me till the spring—always one for a joke, was Maggie!—but I was to think of her on Christmas.”

The shabby man’s voice trailed off into silence. After a moment he said, thoughtfully: “Queer how they—the good ones—can break a feller all up an’ put him on his feet at the same time, aint it, boss?”

“I—don’t know,” said Forrester, softly. “Go on please.”

“She said I was to think of her on Christmas. Somethin’ you said awhile back put me in mind of how I felt then. Think of her! Why, I—I felt as though I could chop the mountains down same as if they was trees to get her! I felt there was nothin’—just nothin’—I couldn’t do, or bear, or get, so as Maggie didn’t quit me. I felt I’d get her them great shiny stars fer buttons to her Sunday dress if she was wantin’ them. Made me feel twelve foot high and drunk, she did, just with three lines o’ bad spellin’ and a joke! I’d five dollars in me pocket, an’ I went an’ looked up a Siwash, one o’ them mountain Injuns that looks like a Chinaman and moves up or down like a goat; I’d done him a kindness a little while back, an’ he was grateful, which is more’n white fellers always is. I said, would he take a letter to my _klootch_ in Cascapedia, for five dollars, she to get it on Christmas? Yes, he said, he would. I gave him the letter an’ the bill, an’ off he went—not that she was rightly my _klootch_ then, o’ course, an’ she’d ’a’ been terrible vexed if she’d known I called her so; but it was near enough fer _him_.

“We wasn’t so far apart, as I says—not so many miles on the level, only not a yard of it _was_ level; the hills was like a wall between us; but there was one thing we could both see, one thing that was in sight from Cascapedia an’ from the Oucouagan on the other side. An’ that was that mountain there.”

He looked at the picture with lingering surprise. “My!” he said, “You wouldn’t never think I’d been up there, would you? You’d think I was too old and had too much sense. But I was young then; and some way Maggie’d made me clean crazy.”

He flushed and gave Forrester a shy, friendly smile. “Two nights,” he said, laughing a little, “two nights I sat up, fixin’ a lantern to suit me—fixin’ it so’s no draft could get in, puttin’ in extry wicks an’ more oil an’ the dear knows what-all! I’d said to Maggie in my letter I’d sent, ‘You borrer a pair of glasses if it ain’t clear,’ I says, ‘an’ you look at the top o’ the biggest mountain you see in betwixt us,’ I says ‘on Christmas night, an’ you’ll see if I’m thinkin’ of you or not, Maggie Delane.’ That’s what I says.

“When the lantern was fixed, I packed it on me back keerful, an’ I borrerred an ice-ax, an’ a pair o’ creepers, an’ I climbed that there mountain an’ left the lighted lantern on the top.”

Forrester stared at him. Did he know what he was saying, what, in that brief day of glory given him by a girl’s trust, he had done? No, he had no inkling of it; no shadow of a suspicion crossed his simple mind that he had achieved a feat that no man had been able to repeat for thirty years. He was smiling pleasantly, indulgently, at the folly of his youth. And Forrester said, not knowing he spoke aloud: “It’s better it should be like that. It’s more beautiful so.”

“Did you speak, Mister?”

“No—nothing. Please go on.”

But the charm was broken; the reflection of that far light was fading from the ageing face as Forrester had seen the reflected glory of his peak fading from the lowlands. The shabby man’s shyness was increasing; he looked at Forrester uneasily. “I dunno what made me talk so much,” he mumbled apologetically. “Seein’ that picture an’ all, I guess. I aint generally one to talk much.”

“Good heavens, man,” cried Forrester, “don’t you know you’ve just been telling me the most beautiful thing I ever heard?” He checked himself abruptly at the look in his companion’s face. “Tell me how you got up,” he went on more quietly.

But the present had again usurped the splendid past. “I don’t rightly remember now,” said the shabby man uncertainly. “My mind was that full of Maggie, anyways. . . . I crossed the glacier below where you did, an’ then I—I guess, I just went up, boss.”

“Yes,” agreed Forrester, “you just went up. . . And the lantern wasn’t hurt, and Maggie saw the light from Cascapedia?”

“She saw it boss. It burned till the oil give out. ’Twasn’t hurt a mite.”

Forrester looked again at the photograph. He visioned his great peak, a shadow against the winter stars, crowned with a tiniest point of light—a weak star that invaded those awful solitudes, those dominions of wind and cloud, dawn and darkness, to tell a girl in a store that her man hadn’t forgotten her! He roused from his vision to see Maggie’s husband on his feet, to hear him mumbling good-bye.

“. . . . be terribly amused to hear I seen you,” he heard. “Take it as a favour, boss, if you’d not mention it to no one. . . . do a steady man no good. They’d think I was drunk.”

Forrester got up and shook hands, which seemed to abash the man very much.

“It’s better that way too,” he said abruptly, “though you won’t have the least idea what I mean. If I can ever have the honour of doing anything for you or Maggie, let me know.”

The shabby man was gone. An official in blue and silver buttons was staring suspiciously at Forrester. He scowled at the official, and went and stood in front of the great photograph. He stood there so long that the official gave up watching him and moved away. The room was empty. Forrester glanced around; then he took out his fountain pen.

He looked again at the picture of the peak. “Not mine,” he said under his breath, and humbly, “not mine!” There was a large ticket attached to the frame, bearing the legend: “Mount Forrester from the South-east.” He crossed out the word “Forrester,” and above the erasure, in neat black letters, he wrote the words: “Maggie Delane.” Then he too, went away.

THE WORKER IN SANDAL-WOOD

I like to think of this as a true story, but you who read may please yourselves, siding either with the curé, who says Hyacinthe dreamed it all, and did the carving himself in his sleep, or with Madame. I am sure that Hyacinthe thinks it true, and so does Madame, but then she has the cabinet, with the little birds and the lilies carved at the corners. Monsieur le curé shrugs his patient shoulders; but then he is tainted with the infidelities of cities, good man, having been three times to Montreal, and once, in an electric car, to Sainte Anne. He and Madame still talk it over whenever they meet, though it happened so many years ago, and each leaves the other forever unconvinced. Meanwhile the dust gathers in the infinite fine lines of the little birds’ feathers, and softens the lily stamens where Madame’s duster may not go; and the wood, ageing, takes on a golden gleam as of immemorial sunsets: that pale red wood, heavy with the scent of the ancient East; the wood that Hyacinthe loved.

It was the only wood of that kind which had ever been seen in Terminaison. Pierre L’Oreillard brought it into the workshop one morning; a small heavy bundle wrapped in sacking, and then in burlap, and then in fine soft cloths. He laid it on a pile of shavings, and unwrapped it carefully and a dim sweetness filled the dark shed and hung heavily in the thin winter sunbeams.

Pierre L’Oreillard rubbed the wood respectfully with his knobby fingers. “It is sandal-wood,” he explained to Hyacinthe, pride of knowledge making him expansive; “a most precious wood that grows in warm countries, thou great goblin. Smell it, _imbécile_. It is sweeter than cedar. It is to make a cabinet for the old Madame at the big house. Thy great hands shall smooth the wood, _nigaud_, and I,—I, Pierre the cabinet-maker, shall render it beautiful.” Then he went out, locking the door behind him.

When he was gone Hyacinthe laid down his plane, blew on his stiff fingers, and shambled slowly over to the wood. He was a great clumsy boy of fourteen, dark-faced, very slow of speech, dull-eyed and uncared for. He was clumsy because it is impossible to move gracefully when you are growing very big and fast on quite insufficient food. He was dull-eyed because all eyes met his unlovingly; uncared for, because none knew the beauty of his soul. But his heavy young hands could carve simple things, like flowers and birds and beasts, to perfection, as the curé pointed out. Simon has a tobacco-jar, carved with pine-cones and squirrels, and the curé has a pipe whose bowl is the bloom of a moccasin-flower, that I have seen. But it is all very long ago. And facts, in those lonely villages, easily become transfigured, touched upon their gray with a golden gleam.

“Thy hands shall smooth the wood, _nigaud_, and I shall render it beautiful,” said Pierre L’Oreillard, and went off to drink brandy at the Cinq Châteaux.

Hyacinthe knew that the making of the cabinet would fall to him, as most of the other work did. He also touched the strange sweet wood, and at last laid his cheek against it, while the fragrance caught his breath. “How it is beautiful,” said Hyacinthe, and for a moment his eyes glowed and he was happy. Then the light passed, and with bent head he shuffled back to his bench through a foam of white shavings curling almost to his knees.

“Madame perhaps will want the cabinet next week, for that is Christmas,” said Hyacinthe, and fell to work harder than ever, though it was so cold in the shed that his breath hung like a little silver cloud and the steel stung his hands. There was a tiny window to his right, through which, when it was clear of frost, one looked on Terminaison, and that was cheerful and made one whistle. But to the left, through the chink of the ill-fitting door, there was nothing but the forest and the road dying away in it, and the trees moving heavily under the snow. Yet, from there came all Hyacinthe’s dumb dreams and slow reluctant fancies, which he sometimes found himself able to tell,—in wood, not in words.

Brandy was good at the Cinq Châteaux, and Pierre L’Oreillard gave Hyacinthe plenty of directions, but no further help with the cabinet.

“That is to be finished for Madame on the festival, _gros escargot_!” said he, cuffing Hyacinthe’s ears furiously, “finished, and with a prettiness about the corners, hearest thou, _ourson_? I suffer from a delicacy of the constitution and a little feebleness in the legs on these days, so that I cannot handle the tools. I must leave this work to thee, _gâcheur_. See it is done properly, and stand up and touch a hand to thy cap when I address thee, _orvet_, great slow-worm.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said Hyacinthe, wearily.

It is hard, when you do all the work, to be cuffed into the bargain, and fourteen is not very old. He went to work on the cabinet with slow, exquisite skill, but on the eve of Noel, he was still at work, and the cabinet unfinished. It meant a thrashing from Pierre if the morrow came and found it still unfinished, and Pierre’s thrashings were cruel. But it was growing into a thing of perfection under his slow hands, and Hyacinthe would not hurry over it.

“Then work on it all night, and show it to me all completed in the morning, or thy bones shall mourn thine idleness,” said Pierre with a flicker of his little eyes. And he shut Hyacinthe into the workshop with a smoky lamp, his tools and the sandal-wood cabinet.

It was nothing unusual. The boy had often been left before to finish a piece of work overnight while Pierre went off to his brandies. But this was Christmas Eve, and he was very tired. The cold crept into the shed until the scent of the sandal-wood could not make him dream himself warm, and the roof cracked sullenly in the frost. There came upon Hyacinthe one of those awful, hopeless despairs that children know. It seemed to be a living presence that caught up his soul and crushed it in black hands. “In all the world, nothing!” said he, staring at the dull flame; “no place, no heart, no love! O kind God, is there a place, a love for me in another world?”