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Incredible Adventures

by Algernon Blackwood · English · Gutenberg #43816 · 619,127 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Incredible Adventures

Author: Algernon Blackwood


        
Release date: September 26, 2013 [eBook #43816]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES ***

INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES

  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
  DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
  TORONTO




  INCREDIBLE
  ADVENTURES

  BY
  ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

  AUTHOR OF ‘JIMBO,’ ‘JOHN SILENCE,’
  ‘THE CENTAUR,’ ‘A PRISONER IN FAIRYLAND,’ ETC.


  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
  1914


  COPYRIGHT




TO

M. S.-K.




CONTENTS


                                            PAGE

  THE REGENERATION OF LORD ERNIE               3

  THE SACRIFICE                               95

  THE DAMNED                                 131

  A DESCENT INTO EGYPT                       241

  WAYFARERS                                  339




THE REGENERATION OF LORD ERNIE


I

John Hendricks was bear-leading at the time. He had originally studied
for Holy Orders, but had abandoned the Church later for private reasons
connected with his faith, and had taken to teaching and tutoring
instead. He was an honest, upstanding fellow of five-and-thirty,
incorruptible, intelligent in a simple, straightforward way. He played
games with his head, more than most Englishmen do, but he went through
life without much calculation. He had qualities that made boys like
and respect him; he won their confidence. Poor, proud, ambitious,
he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of
State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils
for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an
educational trip that might make a man of him. For Lord Ernie was the
only son, and the Marquess’s influence was naturally great. To have
deposited a regenerated Lord Ernie at the castle gates might have
guaranteed Hendricks’ future. After leaving Eton prematurely the lad
had come under Hendricks’ charge for a time, and with such excellent
results--‘I’d simply swear by that chap, you know,’ the boy used
to say--that his father, considerably impressed, and rather as a
last resort, had made this proposition. And Hendricks, without much
calculation, had accepted it. He liked ‘Bindy’ for himself. It was
in his heart to ‘make a man of him,’ if possible. They had now been
round the world together and had come up from Brindisi to the Italian
Lakes, and so into Switzerland. It was middle October. With a week or
two to spare they were making leisurely for the ancestral halls in
Aberdeenshire.

The nine months’ travel, Hendricks realised with keen disappointment,
had accomplished, however, very little. The job had been exhausting,
and he had conscientiously done his best. Lord Ernie liked him
thoroughly, admiring his vigour with a smile of tolerant good-nature
through his ceaseless cigarette smoke. They were almost like two boys
together. ‘You _are_ a chap and a half, Mr. Hendricks. You really
ought to be in the Cabinet with my father.’ Hendricks would deliver
up his useless parcel at the castle gates, pocket the thanks and the
hard-earned fee, and go back to his arduous life of teaching and
writing in dingy lodgings. It was a pity, even on the lowest grounds.
The tutor, truth to tell, felt undeniably depressed. Hopeful by nature,
optimistic, too, as men of action usually are, he cast about him, even
at the last hour, for something that might stir the boy to life, wake
him up, put zest and energy into him. But there was only Paris now
between them and the end; and Paris certainly could not be relied upon
for help. Bindy’s desire for Paris even was not strong enough to count.
No desire in him was ever strong. There lay the crux of the problem in
a word--Lord Ernie was without desire which is life.

Tall, well-built, handsome, he was yet such a feeble creature, without
the energy to be either wild or vicious. Languid, yet certainly not
decadent, life ran slowly, flabbily in him. He took to nothing. The
first impression he made was fine--then nothing. His only tastes, if
tastes they could be called, were out-of-door tastes: he was vaguely
interested in flying, yet not enough to master the mechanism of it;
he liked motoring at high speed, being driven, not driving himself;
and he loved to wander about in woods, making fires like a Red Indian,
provided they lit easily, yet even this, not for the poetry of the
thing nor for any love of adventure, but just ‘because.’ ‘I like fire,
you know; like to watch it burn.’ Heat seemed to give him curious
satisfaction, perhaps because the heat of life, he realised, was
deficient in his six-foot body. It was significant, this love of fire
in him, though no one could discover why. As a child he had a dangerous
delight in fireworks--anything to do with fire. He would watch a candle
flame as though he were a fire-worshipper, but had never been known to
make a single remark of interest about it. In a wood, as mentioned, the
first thing he did was to gather sticks--though the resulting fire was
never part of any purpose. He had no purpose. There was no wind or fire
of life in the lad at all. The fine body was inert.

Hendricks did wrong, of course, in going where he did--to this little
desolate village in the Jura Mountains--though it was the first time
all these trying months he had allowed himself a personal desire. But
from Domo Dossola the Simplon Express would pass Lausanne, and from
Lausanne to the Jura was but a step--all on the way home, moreover.
And what prompted him was merely a sentimental desire to revisit the
place where ten years before he had fallen violently in love with the
pretty daughter of the Pasteur, M. Leysin, in whose house he lodged.
He had gone there to learn French. The very slight detour seemed
pardonable.

His spiritless charge was easily persuaded.

‘We might go home by Pontarlier instead of Bâle, and get a glimpse
of the Jura,’ he suggested. ‘The line slides along its frontiers
a bit, and then goes bang across it. We might even stop off a
night on the way--if you cared about it. I know a curious old
village--Villaret--where I went at your age to pick up French.’

‘Top-hole,’ replied Lord Ernie listlessly. ‘All on the way to Paris,
ain’t it?’

‘Of course. You see there’s a fortnight before we need get home.’

‘So there is, yes. Let’s go.’ He felt it was almost his own idea, and
that he decided it.

‘If you’d _really_ like it.’

‘Oh, yes. Why not? I’m sick of cities.’ He flicked some dust off his
coat sleeve with an immaculate silk handkerchief, then lit a cigarette.
‘Just as you like,’ he added with a drawl and a smile. ‘I’m ready for
anything.’ There was no keenness, no personal desire, no choice in
reality at all; flabby good-nature merely.

A suggestion was invariably enough, as though the boy had no will of
his own, his opposition rarely more than negative sulking that soon
flattened out because it was forgotten. Indeed, no sign of positive
life lay in him anywhere--no vitality, aggression, coherence of desire
and will; vacuous rather than imbecile; unable to go forward upon any
definite line of his own, as though all wheels had slipped their cogs;
a pasty soul that took good enough impressions, yet never mastered them
for permanent use. Nothing stuck. He would never make a politician,
much less a statesman. The family title would be borne by a nincompoop.
Yet all the machinery was there, one felt--if only it could be driven,
made to go. It was sad. Lord Ernie was heir to great estates, with a
name and position that might influence thousands.

And Hendricks had been a good selection, with his virility and gentle,
understanding firmness. He understood the problem. ‘You’ll do what no
one else could,’ the anxious father told him, ‘for he worships you,
and you can sting without hurting him. You’ll put life and interest
into him if anybody in this world can. I have great hopes of this
tour. I shall always be in your debt, Mr. Hendricks.’ And Hendricks
had accepted the onerous duty in his big, high-minded way. He was
conscientious to the backbone. This little side-trip was his sole
deflection, if such it can be called even. ‘Life, light and cheerful
influences,’ had been his instructions, ‘nothing dull or melancholy;
an occasional fling, if he wants it--I’d welcome a fling as a good
sign--and as much intercourse with decent people, and stimulating
sight-seeing as you can manage--or can stand,’ the Marquess added with
a smile. ‘Only you won’t overtax the lad, will you? Above all, let him
think _he_ chooses and decides, when possible.’

Villaret, however, hardly complied with these conditions; there was
melancholy in it; Hendricks’ mind--whose reflexes the spongy nature of
the empty lad absorbed too easily--would be in a minor key. Yet a night
could work no harm. Whence came, he wondered, the fleeting notion
that it might do good? Was it, perhaps, that Leysin, the vigorous old
Pasteur, might contribute something? Leysin had been a considerable
force in his own development, he remembered; they had corresponded a
little since; Leysin was out of the common, certainly, restless energy
in him as of the sea. Hendricks found difficulty in sorting out his
thoughts and motives, but Leysin was in them somewhere--this idea that
his energetic personality might help. His vitalising effect, at least,
would counteract the melancholy.

For Villaret lay huddled upon unstimulating slopes, the robe of gloomy
pine-woods sweeping down towards its poverty from bleak heights and
desolate gorges. The peasants were morose, ill-living folk. It was
a dark untaught corner in a range of otherwise fairy mountains, a
backwater the sun had neglected to clean out. Superstitions, Hendricks
remembered, of incredible kind still lingered there; a touch of the
sinister hovered about the composite mind of its inhabitants. The
Pasteur fought strenuously this blackness in their lives and thoughts;
in the village itself with more or less success--though even there
the drinking and habits of living were utterly unsweetened--but on
the heights, among the somewhat arid pastures, the mountain men
remained untamed, turbulent, even menacing. Hendricks knew this of
old, though he had never understood too well. But he remembered how
the English boys at _la cure_ were forbidden to climb in certain
directions, because the life in these scattered châlets was somehow
loose and violent. There was danger there, the danger, however, never
definitely stated. Those lonely ridges lay cursed beneath dark skies.
He remembered, too, the savage dogs, the difficulty of approach, the
aggressive attitude towards the plucky Pasteur’s visits to these remote
upland _pâturages_. They did not lie in his parish: Leysin made his
occasional visits as man and missionary; for extraordinary rumours,
Hendricks recalled, were rife, of some queer worship of their own these
lawless peasants kept alive in their distant, windy territory, planted
there first, the story had it, by some renegade priest whose name was
now forgotten.

Hendricks himself had no personal experiences. He had been too deeply
in love to trouble about outside things, however strange. But Marston’s
case had never quite left his memory--Marston, who climbed up by
unlawful ways, stayed away two whole days and nights, and came back
suddenly with his air of being broken, shattered, appallingly used up,
his face so lined and strained it seemed aged by twenty years, and yet
with a singular new life in him, so vehement, loud, and reckless, it
was like a kind of sober intoxication. He was packed off to England
before he could relate anything. But he had suffered shocks. His white,
passionate face, his boisterous new vigour, the way M. Leysin screened
his view of the heights as he put him personally into the Paris
train--almost as though he feared the boy would see the hills and make
another dash for them!--made up an unforgettable picture in the mind.

Moreover, between the sodden village and that string of evil
châlets that lay in their dark line upon the heights there had
been links. Exactly of what nature he never knew, for love made
all else uninteresting; only, he remembered swarthy, dark-faced
messengers descending into the sleepy hamlet from time to time, big,
mountain-limbed fellows with wind in their hair and fire in their eyes;
that their visits produced commotion and excitement of difficult kinds;
that wild orgies invariably followed in their wake; and that, when the
messengers went back, they did not go alone. There was life up there,
whereas the village was moribund. And none who went ever cared to
return. Cudrefin, the young giant _vigneron_, taken in this way, from
the very side of his sweetheart too, came back two years later as a
messenger himself. He did not even ask for the girl, who had meanwhile
married another. ‘There’s life up there with us,’ he told the drunken
loafers in the ‘Guillaume Tell,’ ‘wind and fire to make you spin to the
devil--or to heaven!’ He was enthusiasm personified. In the village
he had been merely drinking himself stupidly to death. Vaguely, too,
Hendricks remembered visits of police from the neighbouring town,
some of them on horseback, all armed, and that once even soldiers
accompanied them, and on another occasion a bishop, or whatever the
church dignitary was called, had arrived suddenly and promised radical
assistance of a spiritual kind that had never materialised--oh, and
many other details that now trooped back with suggestions time had
certainly not made smaller. For the love had passed along its way and
gone, and he was free now to the invasion of other memories, dwarfed at
the time by that dominating, sweet passion.

Yet all the tutor wanted now, this chance week in late October, was
to see again the corner of the mossy forest where he had known that
marvellous thing, first love; renew his link with Leysin who had taught
him much; and see if, perchance, this man’s stalwart, virile energy
might possibly overflow with benefit into his listless charge. The
expenses he meant to pay out of his own pocket. Those wild pagans on
the heights--even if they still existed--there was no need to mention.
Lord Ernie knew little French, and certainly no word of _patois_. For
one night, or even two, the risk was negligible.

Was there, indeed, risk at all of any sort? Was not this vague
uneasiness he felt merely conscience faintly pricking? He could not
feel that he was doing wrong. At worst, the youth might feel depression
for a few hours--speedily curable by taking the train.

Something, nevertheless, did gnaw at him in subconscious fashion,
producing a sense of apprehension; and he came to the conclusion that
this memory of the mountain tribe was the cause of it--a revival of
forgotten boyhood’s awe. He glanced across at the figure of Bindy
lounging upon the hotel lawn in an easy-chair, full in the sunshine,
a newspaper at his feet. Reclining there, he looked so big and
strong and handsome, yet in reality was but a painted lath without
resistance, much less attack, in all his many inches. And suddenly
the tutor recalled another thing, the link, however, undiscoverable,
and it was this: that the boy’s mother, a Canadian, had suffered once
severely from a winter in Quebec, where the Marquess had first made
her acquaintance. Frost had robbed her, if he remembered rightly, of
a foot--with the result, at any rate, that she had a wholesome terror
of the cold. She sought heat and sun instinctively--fire. Also, that
asthma had been her sore affliction--sheer inability to take a full,
deep breath. This deficiency of heat and air, therefore, were in her
mind. And he knew that Bindy’s birth had been an anxious time, the
anxiety justified, moreover, since she had yielded up her life for him.

And so the singular thought flashed through him suddenly as he watched
the reclining, languid boy, Cudrefin’s descriptive phrase oddly singing
in his head--

‘Heat and fire, fire and wind--why, it’s the very thing he lacks! And
he’s always after them. I wonder----!’


II

The lumbering yellow diligence brought them up from the Lake shore, a
long two hours, deposited them at the opening of the village street,
and went its grinding, toiling way towards the frontier. They arrived
in a blur of rain. It was evening. Lowering clouds drew night before
her time upon the world, obscuring the distant summits of the Oberland,
but lights twinkled here and there in the nearer landscape, mapping
the gloom with signals. The village was very still. Above and below
it, however, two big winds were at work, with curious results. For a
lower wind from the east in gusty draughts drove the body of the lake
into quick white horses which shone like wings against the deep _basses
Alpes_, while a westerly current swept the heights immediately above
the village. There was this odd division of two weathers, presaging a
change. A narrow line of clear bright sky showed up the Jura outline
finely towards the north, stars peeping sharply through the pale moist
spaces. Hurrying vapours, driven by the upper westerly wind, concealed
them thinly. They flashed and vanished. The entire ridge, five thousand
feet in the air, had an appearance of moving through the sky. Between
these opposing winds at different levels the village itself lay
motionless, while the world slid past, as it were, in two directions.

‘The earth seems turning round,’ remarked Lord Ernie. He had been
reading a novel all day in train and steamer, and smoking endless
cigarettes in the diligence, his companion and himself its only
occupants. He seemed suddenly to have waked up. ‘What is it?’ he asked
with interest.

Hendricks explained the queer effect of the two contrary winds. Columns
of peat smoke rose in thin straight lines from the blur of houses,
untouched by the careering currents above and below. The winds whirled
round them.

Lord Ernie listened attentively to the explanation.

‘I feel as if I were spinning with it--like a top,’ he observed,
putting his hand to his head a moment. ‘And what are those lights up
there?’

He pointed to the distant ridge, where fires were blazing as though
stars had fallen and set fire to the trees. Several were visible, at
regular intervals. The sharp summits of the limestone mountains cut
hard into the clear spaces of northern sky thousands of feet above.

‘Oh, the peasants burning wood and stuff, I suppose,’ the tutor told
him.

The youth turned an instant, standing still to examine them with a
shading hand.

‘People live up there?’ he asked. There was surprise in his voice, and
his body stiffened oddly as he spoke.

‘In mountain châlets, yes,’ replied the other a trifle impatiently,
noticing his attitude. ‘Come along now,’ he added, ‘let’s get to our
rooms in the carpenter’s house before the rain comes down. You can
see the windows twinkling over there,’ and he pointed to a building
near the church. ‘The storm will catch us.’ They moved quickly down
the deserted street together in the deepening gloom, passing little
gardens, doors of open barns, straggling manure heaps, and courtyards
of cobbled stones where the occasional figure of a man was seen. But
Lord Ernie lingered behind, half loitering. Once or twice, to the
other’s increasing annoyance, he paused, standing still to watch the
heights through openings between the tumble-down old houses. Half a
dozen big drops of rain splashed heavily on the road.

‘Hurry up!’ cried Hendricks, looking back, ‘or we shall be caught.
It’s the mountain wind--the _coup de joran_. You can hear it coming!’
For the lad was peering across a low wall in an attitude of fixed
attention. He made a gesture with one hand, as though he signalled
towards the ridges where the fires blazed. Hendricks called pretty
sharply to him then. It was possible, of course, that he misinterpreted
the movement; it _may_ merely have been that he passed his fingers
through his hair, across his eyes, or used the palm to focus sight, for
his hat was off and the light was quite uncertain. Only Hendricks did
not like the lingering or the gesture. He put authority into his tone
at once. ‘Come along, will you; come along, Bindy!’ he called.

The answer filled him with amazement.

‘All right, all right. I’ll follow in a moment. I like this.’

The tutor went back a few steps towards him. The tone startled him.

‘Like what?’ he asked.

And Lord Ernie turned towards him with another face. There was
fighting in it. There was resolution.

‘This, of course,’ the boy answered steadily, but with excitement shut
down behind, as he waved one arm towards the mountains. ‘I’ve dreamed
this sort of thing; I’ve known it somewhere. We’ve seen nothing like it
all our stupid trip.’ The flash in his brown eyes passed then, as he
added more quietly, but with firmness: ‘Don’t wait for me; I’ll follow.’

Hendricks stood still in his tracks. There was a decision in the voice
and manner that arrested him. The confidence, the positive statement,
the eager desire, the hint of energy--all this was new. He had never
encouraged the boy’s habit of vivid dreaming, deeming the narration
unwise. It flashed across him suddenly now that the ‘deficiency’ might
be only on the surface. Energy and life hid, perhaps, subconsciously in
him. Did the dreams betray an activity he knew not how to carry through
and correlate with his everyday, external world? And were these dreams
evidence of deep, hidden desire--a clue, possibly, to the energy he
sought and needed, the exact kind of energy that might set the inert
machinery in motion and drive it?

He hesitated an instant, waiting in the road. He was on the verge of
understanding something that yet just evaded him. Bindy’s childish,
instinctive love of fire, his passion for air, for rushing wind, for
oceans of limitless----

There came at that moment a deep roaring in the mountains. Far away,
but rapidly approaching, the ominous booming of it filled the air.
The westerly wind descended by the deep gorges, shaking the forests,
shouting as it came. Clouds of white dust spiralled into the sky off
the upper roads, spread into sheets like snow, and swept downwards
with incredible velocity. The air turned suddenly cooler. More big
drops of rain splashed and thudded on the roofs and road. There was a
feeling of something violent and instantaneous about to happen, a sense
almost of attack. The _joran_ tore headlong down into the valley.

‘Come on, man,’ he cried at the top of his voice. ‘That’s the _joran_!
I know it of old! It’s terrific. Run!’ And he caught the lad, still
lingering, by the arm.

But Lord Ernie shook himself free with an excitement almost violent.

‘I’ve been up there with those great fires,’ he shouted. ‘I know the
whole blessed thing. But where was it? Where?’ His face was white, eyes
shining, manner strangely agitated. ‘Big, naked fellows who dance like
wind, and rushing women of fire, and----’

Two things happened then, interrupting the boy’s wild language. The
_joran_ reached the village and struck it; the houses shook, the trees
bent double, and the cloud of limestone dust, painting the darkness
white, swept on between Hendricks and the boy with extraordinary force,
even separating them. There was a clatter of falling tiles, of banging
doors and windows, and then a burst of icy rain that fell like iron
shot on everything, raising actual spray. The air was in an instant
thick. Everything drove past, roared, trembled. And, secondly--just
in that brief instant when man and boy were separated--there shot
between them with shadowy swiftness the figure of a man, hatless,
with flying hair, who vanished with running strides into the darkness
of the village street beyond--all so rapidly that sight could focus
the manner neither of his coming nor of his going. Hendricks caught
a glimpse of a swarthy, elemental type of face, the swing of great
shoulders, the leap of big loose limbs--something rushing and elastic
in the whole appearance--but nothing he could claim for definite
detail. The figure swept through the dust and wind like an animal--and
was gone. It was, indeed, only the contrast of Lord Ernie’s whitened
skin, of his graceful, half-elegant outline, that enabled him to recall
the details that he did. The weather-beaten visage seemed to storm
away. Bindy’s delicate aristocratic face shone so pale and eager.
But that a real man had passed was indubitable, for the boy made a
flurried movement as though to follow. Hendricks caught his arm with a
determined grip and pulled him back.

‘Who was that? Who was it?’ Lord Ernie cried breathlessly, resisting
with all his strength, but vainly.

‘Some mountain fellow, of course. Nothing to do with us.’ And he
dragged the boy after him down the road. For a second both seemed to
have lost their heads. Hendricks certainly felt a gust of something
strike him into momentary consternation that was half alarm.

‘From up there, where the fires are?’ asked the boy, shouting above the
wind and rain.

‘Yes, yes, I suppose so. Come along. We shall be soused. Are you mad?’
For Bindy still held back with all his weight, trying to turn round and
see. Hendricks used more force. There was almost a scuffle in the road.

‘All right, I’m coming. I only wanted to look a second. You needn’t
drag my arm out.’ He ceased resistance, and they lurched forward
together. ‘But what a chap he was! He went like the wind. Did you see
the light streaming out of him--like fire?’

‘Like what?’ shouted Hendricks, as they dashed now through the driving
tempest.

‘Fire!’ bawled the boy. ‘It lit me up as he passed--fire that lights
but does not burn, and wind that blows the world along----’

‘Button your coat and run!’ interrupted the other, hurrying his pace,
and pulling the lad forcibly after him.

‘Don’t twist! You’re hurting! I can run as well as you!’ came back,
with an energy Bindy had never shown before in his life. He was
breathless, panting, charged with excitement still. ‘It touched me as
he passed--fire that lights but doesn’t burn, and wind that blows the
heart to flame--let me go, will you? Let go my hand.’

He dashed free and away. The torrential rain came down in sheets now
from a windless sky, for the _joran_ was already miles beyond them,
tearing across the angry lake. They reached the carpenter’s house,
where their lodging was, soaked to the skin. They dried themselves, and
ate the light supper of soup and omelette prepared for them--ate it in
their dressing-gowns. Lord Ernie went to bed with a hot-water bottle
of rough stone. He declared with decision that he felt no chill. His
excitement had somewhat passed.

‘But, I say, Mr. Hendricks,’ he remarked, as he settled down with his
novel and a cigarette, calmed and normal again, ‘this _is_ a place and
a half, isn’t it? It stirs me all up. I suppose it’s the storm. What do
_you_ think?’

‘Electrical state of the air, yes,’ replied the tutor briefly.

Soon afterwards he closed the shutters on the weather side, said
good-night, and went into his own room to unpack. The singular phrase
Bindy had used kept singing through his head: ‘Fire that lights but
doesn’t burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame’--the first
time he had said ‘blows the world along.’ Where on earth had the boy
got hold of such queer words? He still saw the figure of that wild
mountain fellow who had passed between them with the dust and wind
and rain. There was confusion in the picture, or rather in his memory
of it, perhaps. But it seemed to him, looking back now, that the man
in passing had paused a second--the briefest second merely--and had
spoken, or, at any rate, had stared closely a moment into Bindy’s face,
and that some communication had been between them in that moment of
elemental violence.


III

Pasteur Leysin Hendricks remembered very well. Even now in his old age
he was a vigorous personality, but in his youth he had been almost
revolutionary; wild enough, too, it was rumoured, until he had turned
to God of his own accord as offering a larger field for his strenuous
vitality. The little man was possessed of tireless life, a born leader
of forlorn hopes, attack his _métier_, and heavy odds the conditions
that he loved. Before settling down in this isolated spot--_pasteur de
l’église indépendente_ in a protestant Canton--he had been a missionary
in remote pagan lands. His horizon was a big one, he had seen strange
things. An uncouth being, with a large head upon a thin and wiry body
supported by steely bowed legs, he had that courage which makes itself
known in advance of any proof. Hendricks slipped over to _la cure_
about nine o’clock and found him in his study. Lord Ernie was asleep;
at least his light was out, no sound or movement audible from his room.
The _joran_ had swept the heavens of clouds. Stars shone brilliantly.
The fires still blazed faintly upon the heights.

The visit was not unexpected, for Hendricks had already sent a message
to announce himself, and the moment he sat down, met the Pasteur’s eye,
heard his voice, and observed his slight imperious gestures, he passed
under the influence of a personality stronger than his own. Something
in Leysin’s atmosphere stretched him, lifting his horizon. He had
come chiefly--he now realised it--to borrow help and explanation with
regard to Lord Ernie; the events of two hours before had impressed him
more than he quite cared to own, and he wished to talk about it. But,
somehow, he found it difficult to state his case; no opening presented
itself; or, rather, the Pasteur’s mind, intent upon something of his
own, was too preoccupied. In reply to a question presently, the tutor
gave a brief outline of his present duties, but omitted the scene of
excitement in the village street, for as he watched the furrowed face
in the light of the study lamp, he realised both anxiety and spiritual
high pressure at work below the surface there. He hesitated to intrude
his own affairs at first. They discussed, nevertheless, the psychology
of the boy, and the unfavourable chances of regeneration, while the old
man’s face lit up and flashed from time to time, until at length the
truth came out, and Hendricks understood his friend’s preoccupation.

‘What you’re attempting with an individual,’ Leysin exclaimed with
ardour, ‘is precisely what I’m attempting with a crowd. And it’s
difficult. For poor sinners make poor saints, and the lukewarm I will
spue out of my mouth.’ He made an abrupt, resentful gesture to signify
his disgust and weariness, perhaps his contempt as well. ‘Cut it down!
Why cumbereth it the ground?’

‘A hard, uncharitable doctrine,’ began the tutor, realising that
he must discuss the Parish before he could introduce Bindy’s case
effectively. ‘You mean, of course, that there’s no material to work on?’

‘No energy to direct,’ was the emphatic reply. ‘My sheep here are--real
sheep; mere negative, drink-sodden loafers without desire. Hospital
cases! I could work with tigers and wild beasts, but who ever trained a
slug?’

‘Your proper place is on the heights,’ suggested Hendricks,
interrupting at a venture. ‘There’s scope enough up there, or used to
be. Have they died out, those wild men of the mountains?’ And hit by
chance the target in the bull’s-eye.

The old man’s face turned younger as he answered quickly.

‘Men like that,’ he exclaimed, ‘do not die off. They breed and
multiply.’ He leaned forward across the table, his manner eager,
fervent, almost impetuous with suppressed desire for action. ‘There’s
evil thinking up there,’ he said suggestively, ‘but, by heaven, it’s
alive; it’s positive, ambitious, constructive. With violent feeling and
strong desire to work on, there’s hope of some result. Upon vehement
impulses like that, pagan or anything else, a man can work with a
will. Those are the tigers; down here I have the slugs!’

He shrugged his shoulders and leaned back into his chair. Hendricks
watched him, thinking of the stories told about his missionary days
among savage and barbarian tribes.

‘Born of the vital landscape, I suppose?’ he asked. ‘Wind and frost and
blazing sun. Their wild energy, I mean, is due to----’

A gesture from the old man stopped him. ‘You know who started them
upon their wild performances,’ he said gravely in a lower voice; ‘you
know how that ambitious renegade priest from the Valais chose them
for his nucleus, then died before he could lead them out, trained and
competent, upon his strange campaign? You heard the story when you were
with me as a boy----?’

‘I remember Marston,’ put in the other, uncommonly interested,
‘Marston--the boy who----’ He stopped because he hardly knew how
to continue. There was a minute’s silence. But it was not an empty
silence, though no word broke it. Leysin’s face was a study.

‘Ah, Marston, yes,’ he said slowly, without looking up; ‘you remember
him. But that is at my door, too, I suppose. His father was ignorant
and obstinate; I might have saved him otherwise.’ He seemed talking to
himself rather than to his listener. Pain showed in the lines about
the rugged mouth. ‘There was no one, you see, who knew how to direct
the great life that woke in the lad. He took it back with him, and
turned it loose into all manner of useless enterprises, and the doctors
mistook his abrupt and fierce ambitions for--for the hysteria which
they called the vestibule of lunacy.... Yet small characters may have
big ideas.... They didn’t understand, of course.... It was sad, sad,
sad.’ He hid his face in his hands a moment.

‘Marston went wrong, then, in the end?’ for the other’s manner
suggested disaster of some kind. Hendricks asked it in a whisper.
Leysin uncovered his face, looped his neck with one finger, and pointed
to the ceiling.

‘Hanged himself!’ murmured Hendricks, shocked.

The Pasteur nodded, but there was impatience, half anger in his tone.

‘They checked it, kept it in. Of course, it tore him!’

The two men looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and something
in the younger of them shrank. This was all beyond his ken a little. An
odd hint of bleak and cruel reality was in the air, making him shiver
along nerves that were normally inactive. The uneasiness he felt about
Lord Ernie became alarm. His conscience pricked him.

‘More than he could assimilate,’ continued Leysin. ‘It broke him. Yet,
had outlets been provided, had he been taught how to use it, this
elemental energy drawn direct from Nature----’ He broke off abruptly,
struck perhaps by the expression in his listener’s eyes. ‘It seems
incredible, doesn’t it, in the twentieth century? I know.’

‘Evil?’ asked Hendricks, stammering rather.

‘Why evil?’ was the impatient reply. ‘How can any force be evil? That’s
merely a question of direction.’

‘And the priest who discovered these forces and taught their use,
then----?’

‘Was genuinely spiritual and followed the truth in his own way. He
was not necessarily evil.’ The little Pasteur spoke with vehemence.
‘You talk like the religion-primers in the kindergarten,’ he went on.
‘Listen. This man, sick and weary of his lukewarm flock, sought vital,
stalwart systems who might be clean enough to use the elemental powers
he had discovered how to attract. Only the bias of the users could
make it “evil” by wrong use. His idea was big and even holy--to train
a corps that might regenerate the world. And he chose unreasoning,
unintellectual types with a purpose--primitive, giant men who could
assimilate the force without risk of being shattered. Under his
direction he intended they should prove as effective as the twelve
disciples of old who were fisher-folk. And, had he gone on----’

‘He, too, failed then?’ asked the other, whose tangled thoughts
struggled with incredulity and belief as he heard this strange new
thing. ‘He died, you mean?’

‘_Maison de santé_,’ was the laconic reply, ‘strait-waistcoats, padded
cells, and the rest; but still alive, I’m told. It was more than he
could manage.’

It was a startling story, even in this brief outline, deep suggestion
in it. The tutor’s sense of being out of his depth increased. After
nine months with a lifeless, devitalised human being, this was--well,
he seemed to have fallen in his sleep from a comfortable bed into a
raging mountain torrent. Strong currents rushed through and over him.
The lonely, peaceful village outside, sleeping beneath the stars,
heightened the contrast.

‘Suppressed or misdirected energy again, I suppose,’ he said in a low
tone, respecting his companion’s emotion. ‘And these mountain men,’ he
asked abruptly, ‘do they still keep up their--practices?’

‘Their ceremonies, yes,’ corrected the other, master of himself again.
‘Turbulent moments of nature, storms and the like, stir them to clumsy
rehearsals of once vital rituals--not entirely ineffective, even in
their incompleteness, but dangerous for that very reason. This _joran_,
for instance, invariably communicates something of its atmospherical
energy to themselves. They light their fires as of old. They blunder
through what they remember of _his_ ceremonies. With the glasses you
may see them in their dozens, men and women, leaping and dancing. It’s
an amazing sight, great beauty in it, impossible to witness even from a
distance without feeling the desire to take part in it. Even my people
feel it--the only time they ever get alive,’--he jerked his big head
contemptuously towards the street--‘or feel desire to act. And some one
from the heights--a messenger perhaps--will be down later, this very
evening probably, on the hunt----’

‘On the hunt?’ Hendricks asked it half below his breath. He felt a
touch of awe as he heard this experienced, genuinely religious man
speak with conviction of such curious things. ‘On the hunt?’ he
repeated more eagerly.

‘Messengers do come down,’ was the reply. ‘A living belief always
seeks to increase, to grow, to add to itself. Where there’s conviction
there’s always propaganda.’

‘Ah, converts----?’

Leysin shrugged his big black shoulders. ‘Desire to add to their
number--desire to _save_,’ he said. ‘The energy they absorb overflows,
that’s all.’

The Englishman debated several questions vaguely in his mind; only
his mind, being disturbed, could not hold the balance exactly true.
Leysin’s influence, as of old, was upon him. A possibility, remote,
seductive, dangerous, began to beckon to him, but from somewhere just
outside his reasoning mind.

‘And they always know when one of their kind is near,’ the voice
slipped in between his tumbling thoughts, ‘as though they get it
instinctively from these universal elements they worship. They select
their recruits with marvellous judgment and precision. No messenger
ever goes back alone; nor has a recruit ever been known to return to
the lazy squalor of the conditions whence he escaped.’

The younger man sat upright in his chair, suddenly alert, and the
gesture that he made unconsciously might have been read by a keen
psychiatrist as evidence of mental self-defence. He felt the forbidden
impulse in him gathering force, and tried to call a halt. At any rate,
he called upon the other man to be explicit. He enquired point-blank
what this religion of the heights might be. What were these elements
these people worshipped? In what did their wild ceremonies consist?

And Leysin, breaking bounds, let his speech burst forth in a stream of
explanation, learned of actual knowledge, as he claimed, and uttered
with a vehement conviction that produced an undeniable effect upon his
astonished listener. Told by no dreamer, but by a righteous man who
lived, not merely preached his certain faith, Hendricks, before the
half was heard, forgot what age and land he dwelt in. Whole blocks
of conventional belief crumbled and fell away. Brick walls erected
by routine to mark narrow paths of proper conduct--safe, moral,
advisable conduct--thawed and vanished. Through the ruins, scrambling
at him from huge horizons never recognised before, came all manner
of marvellous possibilities. The little confinement of modern thought
appalled him suddenly. Leysin spoke slowly, said little, was not even
speculative. It was no mere magic of words that made the dim-lit study
swim these deep waters beyond the ripple of pert creeds, but rather the
overwhelming sense of sure conviction driving behind the statements.
The little man had witnessed curious things, yes, in his missionary
days, and that he had found truth in them in place of ignorant nonsense
was remarkable enough. That silly superstitions prevalent among older
nations could be signs really of their former greatness, linked
mightily close to natural forces, was a startling notion, but it paved
the way in Hendricks’ receptive mind just then for the belief that
certain so-called elements might be worshipped--known intimately, that
is--to the uplifting advantage of the worshippers. And what elements
more suitable for adoring imitation than wind and fire? For in a
human body the first signs of what men term life are heat which is
combustion, and breath which is a measure of wind. Life means fire,
drawn first from the sun, and breathing, borrowed from the omnipresent
air; there might credibly be ways of assaulting these elements and
taking heaven by storm; of seizing from their inexhaustible stores an
abnormal measure, of straining this huge raw supply into effective
energy for human use--vitality. Living with fire and wind in their most
active moments; closely imitating their movements, following in their
footsteps, understanding their ‘laws of being,’ going _identically_
with them--there lay a hint of the method. It was once, when men were
primitively close to Nature, instinctual knowledge. The ceremony was
the teaching. The Powers of fire, the Principalities of air, existed;
and humanity _could_ know their qualities by the ritual of imitation,
could actually absorb the fierce enthusiasm of flame and the tireless
energy of wind. Such transference was conceivable.

Leysin, at any rate, somehow made it so. His description of what
he had personally witnessed, both in wilder lands and here in this
little mountain range of middle Europe, had a reality in it that was
upsetting to the last degree. ‘There is nothing more difficult to
believe,’ he said, ‘yet more certainly true, than the effect of these
singular elemental rites.’ He laughed a short dry laugh. ‘The mediaeval
superstition that a witch could raise a storm is but a remnant of
a once completely efficacious system,’ he concluded, ‘though how
that strange being, the Valais priest, rediscovered the process and
introduced it here, I have never been able to ascertain. That he did
so results have proved. At any rate, it lets in life, life moreover in
astonishing abundance; though, whether for destruction or regeneration,
depends, obviously, upon the use the recipient puts it to. That’s where
direction comes in.’

The beckoning impulse in the tutor’s bewildered thoughts drew closer.
The moment for communicating it had come at last. Without more ado he
took the opening. He told his companion the incident in the village
street, the boy’s abrupt excitement, his new-found energy, the curious
words he used, the independence and vitality of his attitude. He told
also of his parentage, of his mother’s disabilities, his craving for
rushing air in abundance, his love of fire for its own sake, of his
magnificent physical machinery, yet of his uselessness.

And Leysin, as he listened, seemed built on wires. Searching questions
shot forth like blows into the other’s mind. The Pasteur’s sudden
increase of enthusiasm was infectious. He leaped intuitively to the
thing in Hendricks’ thought. He understood the beckoning.

The tutor answered the questions as best he could, aware of the end
in view with trepidation and a kind of mental breathlessness. Yes,
unquestionably, Bindy _had_ exchanged communication of some sort with
the man, though his excitement had been evident even sooner.

‘And you saw this man yourself?’ Leysin pressed him.

‘Indubitably--a tall and hurrying figure in the dusk.’

‘He brought energy with him? The boy felt it and responded?’

Hendricks nodded. ‘Became quite unmanageable for some minutes,’ he
replied.

‘He assimilated it though? There was no distress exactly?’ Leysin asked
sharply.

‘None--that I could see. Pleasurable excitement, something aggressive,
a rather wild enthusiasm. His will began to act. He used that curious
phrase about wind and fire. He turned alive. He wanted to follow the
man----’

‘And the face--how would you describe it? Did it bring terror, I mean,
or confidence?’

‘Dark and splendid,’ answered the other as truthfully as he could. ‘In
a certain sense, rushing, tempestuous, yet stern rather.’

‘A face like the heights,’ suggested Leysin impatiently, ‘a windy,
fiery aspect in it, eh?’

‘The man swept past like the spirit of a storm in imaginative
poetry----’ began the tutor, hunting through his thoughts for adequate
description, then stopped as he saw that his companion had risen from
his chair and begun to pace the floor.

The Pasteur paused a moment beside him, hands thrust deep into his
pockets, head bent down, and shoulders forward. For twenty seconds he
stared into his visitor’s face intently, as though he would force into
him the thought in his own mind. His features seemed working visibly,
yet behind a mask of strong control.

‘Don’t you see what it is? Don’t you see?’ he said in a lower, deeper
tone. ‘_They knew._ Even from a distance they were aware of his coming.
He is one of themselves.’ And he straightened up again. ‘He belongs to
them.’

‘One of them? One of the wind-and-fire lot?’ the tutor stammered.

The restless little man returned to his chair opposite, full of
suppressed and vigorous movement, as though he were strung on springs.

‘He’s _of_ them,’ he continued, ‘but in a peculiar and particular
sense. More than merely a possible recruit, his empty organism would
provide the very link they need, the perfect conduit.’ He watched his
companion’s face with careful keenness. ‘In the country where I first
experienced this marvellous thing,’ he added significantly, ‘he would
have been set apart as the offering, the sacrifice, as they call it
there. The tribe would have chosen him with honour. He would have been
the special bait to attract.’

‘Death?’ whispered the other.

But Leysin shook his head. ‘In the end, perhaps,’ he replied darkly,
‘for the vessel might be torn and shattered. But at first charged to
the brim and crammed with energy--with transformed vitality they could
draw into themselves through him. A monster, if you will, but to them a
deity; and superhuman, in our little sense, most certainly.’

Then Hendricks faltered inwardly and turned away. No words came to him
at the moment. In silence the minds of the two men, one a religious,
the other a secular teacher, and each with a burden of responsibility
to the race, kept pace together without speech. The religious,
however, outstripped the pedagogue. What he next said seemed a little
disconnected with what had preceded it, although Hendricks caught the
drift easily enough--and shuddered.

‘An organism needing heat,’ observed Leysin calmly, ‘can absorb without
danger what would destroy a normal person. Alcohol, again, neither
injures nor intoxicates--up to a given point--the system that really
requires it.’

The tutor, perplexed and sorely tempted, felt that he drifted with a
tide he found it difficult to stem.

‘Up to a point,’ he repeated. ‘That’s true, of course.’

‘Up to a given point,’ echoed the other, with significance that made
his voice sound solemn. ‘Then rescue--in the nick of time.’

He waited two full minutes and more for an answer; then, as none was
audible, he said another thing. His eyes were so intent upon the
tutor’s that the latter raised his own unwillingly, and understood thus
all that lay behind the pregnant little sentence.

‘With a number it would not be possible, but with an individual it
could be done. Brim the empty vessel first. Then rescue--in the nick
of time! Regeneration!’


IV

In the Englishman’s mind there came a crash, as though something
fell. There was dust, confusion, noise. Moral platitudes shouted
at conventional admonitions. Warnings laughed and copy-book maxims
shrivelled up. Above the lot, rising with a touch of grandeur, stood
the pulpit figure of the little Pasteur, his big face shining clear
through all the turmoil, strength and vision in the flaming eyes--a
commanding outline with spiritual audacity in his heart. And Hendricks
saw then that the man himself was standing erect in the centre of
the room, one finger raised to command attention--listening. Some
considerable interval must have passed while he struggled with his
inner confusion.

Leysin stood, intently listening, his big head throwing a grotesque
shadow on wall and ceiling.

‘Hark!’ he exclaimed, half whispering. ‘Do you hear that? Listen.’

A deep sound, confused and roaring, passed across the night, far away,
and slightly booming. It entered the little room so that the air seemed
to tremble a moment. To Hendricks it held something ominous.

‘The wind,’ he whispered, as the noise died off into the distance; ‘yet
a moment ago the night was still enough. The stars were shining.’ There
was tense excitement in the room just then. It showed in Leysin’s face,
which had gone white as a cloth. Hendricks himself felt extraordinarily
stirred.

‘Not wind, but human voices,’ the older man said quickly. ‘It’s
shouting. Listen!’ and his eyes ran round the room, coming to rest
finally in a corner where his hat and cloak hung from a nail. A gesture
accompanied the look. He wanted to be out. The tutor half rose to take
his leave. ‘You have duties to-night elsewhere,’ he stammered. ‘I’m
forgetting.’ His own instinct was to get away himself with Bindy by the
first early diligence. He was afraid of yielding.

‘Hush!’ whispered Leysin peremptorily. ‘Listen!’

He opened the window at the top, and through the crack, where the stars
peeped brightly, there came, louder than before, the uproar of human
voices floating through the night from far away. The air of the great
pine forests came in with it. Hendricks listened intently a moment. He
positively jumped to feel a hand upon his arm. Leysin’s big head was
thrust close up into his face.

‘That’s the commotion in the village,’ he whispered. ‘A messenger has
come and gone; some one has gone back with him. To-night I shall be
needed--down here, but to-morrow night when the great ritual takes
place--up there----!’

Hendricks tried to push him away so as not to hear the words; but the
little man seemed immovable as a rock. The impulse remained probably
in the mind without making the muscles work. For the tutor, sorely
tempted, longed to dare, yet faltered in his will.

‘----if you felt like taking the risk,’ the words continued
seductively, ‘we might place the empty vessel near enough to let it
fill, then rescue it, charged with energy, in the nick of time.’ And
the Pasteur’s eyes were aglow with enthusiasm, his voice even trembling
at the thought of high adventure to save another’s soul.

‘Watch merely?’ Hendricks heard his own voice whisper, hardly aware
that he was saying it, ‘without taking part?’ He said it thickly,
stupidly, a man wavering and unsure of himself. ‘It would be an
experience,’ he stammered. ‘I’ve never----’

‘Merely watch, yes; look on; let him see,’ interrupted the other with
eagerness. ‘We must be very careful. It’s worth trying--a last resort.’

They still stood close together. Hendricks felt the little man’s breath
on his face as he peered up at him.

‘I admit the chance,’ he began weakly.

‘There is no chance,’ was the vigorous reply, ‘there is only
Providence. You have been guided.’

‘But as to risk and failure, what of them? What’s involved?’ he asked,
recklessness increasing in him.

‘New wine in old bottles,’ was the answer. ‘But here, you tell me, the
vessel is not damaged, but merely empty. The machinery is all right. If
he merely watches, as from a little distance----’

‘Yes, yes, the machinery _is_ there, I agree. The boy has breeding,
health, and all the physical qualities--good blood and nerves and
muscles. It’s only that life refuses to stay and drive them.’ His heart
beat with violence even as he said it; he felt the energy and zeal from
the older man pour into him. He was realising in himself on a smaller
scale what might take place with the boy in large. But still he shrank.
Leysin for the moment said no more. His spiritual discernment was equal
to his boldness. Having planted the seed, he left it to grow or die.
The decision was not for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the light of the single lamp the two men sat facing each other,
listening, waiting, while Leysin talked occasionally, but in the
main kept silence. Some time passed, though how long the tutor could
not say. In his mind was wild confusion. How could he justify such
a mad proposal? Yet how could he refuse the opening, preposterous
though it seemed? The enticement was very great; temptation rushed
upon him. Striving to recall his normal world, he found it difficult.
The face of the old Marquess seemed a mere lifeless picture on a
wall--it watched but could not interfere. Here was an opportunity to
take or leave. He fought the battle in terms of naked souls, while
the ordinary four-cornered morality hid its face awhile. He heard
himself explaining, delaying, hedging, half-toying with the problem.
But the redemption of a soul was at stake, and he tried to forget the
environment and conditions of modern thought and belief. Sentences
flashed at him out of the battle: ‘I must take him back worse than
when I started, or--what? A violent being like Marston, or a redeemed,
converted system with new energy? It’s a chance, and my last.’
Moreover, odd, half-comic detail--there was the support of the Church,
of a protestant clergyman whose fundamental beliefs were similar to the
evangelical persuasions of the boy’s family. Conversion, as demoniacal
possession, were both traditions of the blood. After all, the old
Marquess might understand and approve. ‘You took the opening God set in
your way in His wisdom. You showed faith and courage. Far be it from me
to condemn you.’ The picture on the wall looked down at him and spoke
the words.

The wild hypothesis of the intrepid little missionary-pasteur swept him
with an effect like hypnotism. Then, suddenly, something in him seemed
to decide finally for itself. He flung himself, morality and all, upon
this vigorous other personality. He leaned across the table, his face
close to the lamp. His voice shook as he spoke.

‘Would _you_?’ he asked--then knew the question foolish, and that such
a man would shrink from nothing where the redemption of a soul was at
stake; knew also that the question was proof that his own decision was
already made.

There was something grotesque almost in the torrent of colloquial
French Leysin proceeded to pour forth, while the other sat listening in
amazement, half ashamed and half exhilarated. He looked at the stalwart
figure, the wiry bowed legs as he paced the floor, the shortness of the
coat-sleeves and the absence of shirt-cuffs round the powerful lean
wrists. It was a great fighting man he watched, a man afraid of nothing
in heaven or earth, prepared to lead a forlorn hope into a hostile
unknown land. And the sight, combined with what he heard, set the seal
upon his half-hearted decision. He would take the risk and go.

‘Pfui!’ exclaimed the little Pasteur as though it might have been an
oath, his loud whisper breaking through into a guttural sound, ‘pfui!
Bah! Would that _my_ people had machinery like that so that I could use
it! I’ve no material to work on, no force to direct, nothing but heavy,
sodden clay. Jelly!’ he cried, ‘negative, useless, lukewarm stuff at
best.’ He lowered his voice suddenly, so as to listen at the same time.
‘I might as well be a baker kneading dough,’ he continued. ‘They drink
and yield and drink again; they never attack and drive; they’re not
worth labouring to save.’ He struck the wooden table with his fist,
making the lamp rattle, while his listener started and drew back. ‘What
good can weak souls, though spotless, be to God? The best have long
ago gone up to them,’ and he jerked his leonine old head towards the
mountains. ‘Where there’s _life_ there’s hope,’ he stamped his foot as
he said it, ‘but the lukewarm--pfui!--I will spue them out of my mouth!’

He paused by the window a moment, listened attentively, then resumed
his pacing to and fro. Clearly, he longed for action. Indifference,
half-heartedness had no place in his composition. And Hendricks felt
his own slower blood take fire as he listened.

‘Ah!’ cried Leysin louder, ‘what a battle I could fight up there for
God, could I but live among them, stem the flow of their dark strong
vitality, then twist it round and up, up, up!’ And he jerked his finger
skywards. ‘It’s the great sinners we want, not the meek-faced saints.
There’s energy enough among those devils to bring a whole Canton to the
great Footstool, could I but direct it.’ He paused a moment, standing
over his astonished visitor. ‘Bring the boy up with you, and let him
drink his fill. And pray, pray, I say, that he become a violent sinner
first in order that later there shall be something worth offering to
God. Over one _sinner_ that repenteth----’

A rapid, nervous knocking interrupted the flow of words, and the figure
of a woman stood upon the threshold. With the opening of the door came
also again the roaring from the night outside. Hendricks saw the tall,
somewhat dishevelled outline of the wife--he remembered her vaguely,
though she could hardly see him now in his darker corner--and recalled
the fact that she had been sent out to Leysin in his missionary days,
a worthy, illiterate, but adoring woman. She wore a shawl, her hair was
untidy, her eyes fixed and staring. Her husband’s sturdy little figure,
as he rose, stood level with her chin.

‘You hear it, Jules?’ she whispered thickly. ‘The _joran_ has brought
them down. You’ll be needed in the village.’ She said it anxiously,
though Hendricks understood the _patois_ with difficulty. They talked
excitedly together a moment in the doorway, their outlines blocked
against the corridor where a single oil lamp flickered. She warned,
urging something; he expostulated. Fragments reached Hendricks in his
corner. Clearly the woman worshipped her husband like a king, yet
feared for his safety. He, for his part, comforted her, scolded a
little, argued, told her to ‘believe in God and go back to bed.’

‘They’ll take you too, and you’ll never return. It’s not your parish
anyhow ...’ a touch of anguish in her tone.

But Leysin was impatient to be off. He led her down the passage. ‘My
parish is wherever I can help. I belong to God. Nothing can harm me but
to leave undone the work He gives me.’ The steps went farther away as
he guided her to the stairs. Outside the roar of voices rose and fell.
Wind brought the drifting sound, wind carried it away. It was like the
thunder of the sea.

And the Englishman, using the little scene as a flashlight upon his own
attitude, saw it for an instant as God might have seen it. Leysin’s
point of view was high, scanning a very wide horizon. His eye being
single, the whole body was full of light. The risk, it suddenly seemed,
was--nothing; to shirk it, indeed, the merest cowardice.

He went up and seized the Pasteur’s hand.

‘To-morrow,’ he said, a trifle shakily perhaps, yet looking straight
into his eyes. ‘If we stay over--I’ll bring the lad with me--provided
he comes willingly.’

‘You will stay over,’ interrupted the other with decision. ‘Come to
supper at seven. Come in mountain boots. Use persuasion, but not force.
He shall see it from a distance--without taking part.’

‘From a distance--yes,’ the tutor repeated, ‘but without taking part.’

‘I know the signs,’ the Pasteur broke in significantly. ‘We can rescue
him in the nick of time--charged with energy and life, yet before the
danger gets----’

A sudden clangour of bells drowned the whispering voice, cutting the
sentence in the middle. It was like an alarm of fire. Leysin sprang
sharply round.

‘The signal!’ he cried; ‘the signal from the church. Some one’s been
taken. I must go at once--I shall be needed.’ He had his hat and cloak
on in a moment, was through the passage and into the street, Hendricks
following at his heels. The whole place seemed alive. Yet the roadway
was deserted, and no lights showed at the windows of the houses. Only
from the farther end of the village, where stood the cabaret, came a
roar of voices, shouting, crying, singing. The impression was that the
population was centred there. Far in the starry sky a line of fires
blazed upon the heights, throwing a lurid reflection above the deep
black valley. Excitement filled the night.

‘But how extraordinary!’ exclaimed Hendricks, hurrying to overtake his
alert companion; ‘what life there is about! Everything’s on the rush.’
They went faster, almost running. ‘I feel the waves of it beating even
here.’ He followed breathlessly.

‘A messenger has come--and gone,’ replied Leysin in a sharp, decided
voice. ‘What you feel here is but the overflow. This is the aftermath.
I must work down here with my people----’

‘I’ll work with you,’ began the other. But Leysin stopped him.

‘Keep yourself for to-morrow night--up there,’ he said with grave
authority, pointing to the fiery line upon the heights, and at the same
time quickening his pace along the street. ‘At the moment,’ he cried,
looking back, ‘your place is yonder.’ He jerked his head towards the
carpenter’s house among the vineyards. The next minute he was gone.


V

And Hendricks, accredited tutor to a sprig of nobility in the twentieth
century, asked himself suddenly how such things could possibly be. The
adventure took on abruptly a touch of nightmare. Only the light in
the sky above the cabaret windows, and the roar of voices where men
drank and sang, brought home the reality of it all. With a shudder of
apprehension he glanced at the lurid glare upon the mountains. He was
committed now; not because he had merely promised, but because he had
definitely made up his mind.

Lighting a match, he saw by his watch that the visit had lasted over
two hours. It was after eleven. He hurried, letting himself in with
the big house-key, and going on tiptoe up the granite stairs. In his
mind rose a picture of the boy as he had known him all these weary,
sight-seeing months--the mild brown eyes, the facile indolence, the
pliant, watery emotions of the listless creature, but behind him now,
like storm clouds, the hopes, desires, fears the Pasteur’s talk had
conjured up. The yearning to save stirred strongly in his heart, and
more and more of the little man’s reckless spiritual audacity came
with it. His own affection for the lad was genuine, but impatience
and adventure pushed eagerly through the tenderness. If only, oh, if
only he could put life into that great six-foot, big-boned frame!
Some energy as of fire and wind into that inert machinery of mind and
body! The idea was utterly incredible, but surely no harm could come
of trying the experiment. There _were_ the huge and elemental forces,
of course, in Nature, and if ... A sound in the bedroom, as he crept
softly past the door, caught his attention, and he paused a moment to
listen. Lord Ernie was not asleep, then, after all. He wondered why the
sound got somehow at his heart. There was shuffling behind the door;
there was a voice, too--or was it voices? He knocked.

‘Who is it?’ came at once, in a tone he hardly recognised. And, as he
answered, ‘It’s I, Mr. Hendricks; let me in,’ there followed a renewal
of the shuffling, but without the sound of voices, and the door flew
open--it was not even locked. Lord Ernie stood before him, dressed to
go out. In the faint starlight the tall ungainly figure filled the
doorway, erect and huge, the shoulders squared, the trunk no longer
drooping. The listlessness was gone. He stood upright, limbs straight
and alert; the sagging limp had vanished from the knees. He looked, in
this semi-darkness, like another person, almost monstrous. And the
tutor drew back instinctively, catching an instant at his breath.

‘But, my dear boy! why aren’t you asleep?’ he stammered. He glanced
half nervously about him. ‘I heard you talking, surely?’ He fumbled for
a match; but, before he found it, the other had turned on the electric
switch. The light flared out. There was no one else in the room. ‘Is
anything wrong with you? What’s the matter?’

But the boy answered quietly, though in a deeper voice than Hendricks
had ever known in him before:

‘I’m all right; only I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been watching those fires
on the mountains. I--I wanted to go out and see.’

He still held the field-glasses in his hand, swinging them vigorously
by the strap. The room was littered with clothes, just unpacked,
the heavy shooting boots in the middle of the floor; and Hendricks,
noticing these signs, felt a wave of excitement sweep through him,
caught somehow from the presence of the boy. There was a sense of
vitality in the room--as though a rush of active movement had just
passed through it. Both windows stood wide open, and the roar of voices
was clearly audible. Lord Ernie turned his head to listen.

‘That’s only the village people drinking and shouting,’ said Hendricks,
closely watching each movement that he made. ‘It’s perfectly natural,
Bindy, that you feel too excited to sleep. We’re in the mountains.
The air stimulates tremendously--it makes the heart beat faster.’ He
decided not to press the lad with questions.

‘But I never felt like this in the Rockies or the Himalayas,’ came the
swift rejoinder, as he moved to the window and looked out. ‘There was
nothing in India or Japan like _that_!’ He swept his hand towards
the wooded heights that towered above the village so close. He talked
volubly. ‘All those things we saw out there were sham--done on purpose
for tourists. Up there it’s real. I’ve been watching through the
glasses till--I felt I simply must go out and join it. You can see men
dancing round the fires, and big, rushing women. Oh, Mr. Hendricks,
isn’t it all glorious--all too glorious and ripping for words!’ And his
brown eyes shone like lamps.

‘You mean that it’s spontaneous, natural?’ the other guided him,
welcoming the new enthusiasm, yet still bewildered by the startling
change. It was not mere nerves he saw. There was nothing morbid in it.

‘They’re doing it, I mean, because they have to,’ came the decided
answer, ‘and because they feel it. They’re not just copying the world.’
He put his hand upon the other’s arm. There was dry heat in it that
Hendricks felt even through his clothes. ‘And that’s what _I_ want,’
the boy went on, raising his voice; ‘what I’ve always wanted without
knowing it--real things that can make me alive. I’ve often had it in my
dreams, you know, but now I’ve found it.’

‘But I didn’t know. You never told me of those dreams.’

The boy’s cheeks flushed, so that the colour and the fire in his eyes
made him positively splendid. He answered slowly, as out of some part
he had hitherto kept deliberately concealed.

‘Because I never could get hold of it in words. It sounded so silly
even to myself, and I thought Father would train it all away and
laugh at it. It’s awfully far down in me, but it’s so real I knew
it must come out one day, and that I should find it. Oh, I say,
Mr. Hendricks,’ and he lowered his voice, leaning out across the
window-sill suddenly, ‘_that_ fills me up and feeds me’--he pointed
to the heights--‘and gives me life. The life I’ve seen till now was
only a kind of show. It starved me. I want to go up there and feel it
pouring through my blood.’ He filled his lungs with the strong mountain
air, and paused while he exhaled it slowly, as though tasting it with
delight and understanding. Then he burst out again, ‘I vote we go. Will
you come with me? What d’you say. Eh?’

They stared at each other hard a moment. Something as primitive and
irresistible as love passed through the air between them. With a great
effort the older man kept the balance true.

‘Not to-night, not now,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s too late. To-morrow, if
you like--with pleasure.’

‘But to-morrow _night_,’ cried the boy with a rush, ‘when the fires are
blazing and the wind is loose. Not in the stupid daylight.’

‘All right. To-morrow night. And my old friend, Monsieur Leysin, shall
be our guide. He knows the way, and he knows the people too.’

Lord Ernie seized his hands with enthusiasm. His vigour was so
disconcerting that it seemed to affect his physical appearance. The
body grew almost visibly; his very clothes hung on him differently;
he was no longer a nonentity yawning beneath an ancient pedigree and
title; he was an aggressive personality. The boy in him rushed into
manhood, as it were, while still retaining boyish speech and gesture.
It was uncanny. ‘We’ll go more than once, I vote; go again and again.
This _is_ a place and a half. It’s _my_ place with a vengeance----!’

‘Not exactly the kind of place your father would wish you to linger
in,’ his tutor interrupted. ‘But we might stay a day or two--especially
as you like it so.’

‘It’s far better than the towns and the rotten embassies; better
than fifty Simlas and Bombays and filthy Cairos,’ cried the other
eagerly. ‘It’s just the thing I need, and when I get home I’ll show ’em
something. I’ll prove it. Why, they simply won’t know me!’ He laughed,
and his face shone with a kind of vivid radiance in the glare of the
electric light. The transformation was more than curious. Waiting a
moment to see if more would follow, Hendricks moved slowly then towards
the door, with the remark that it was advisable now to go to bed since
they would be up late the following night--when he noticed for the
first time that the pillow and sheets were crumpled and that the bed
had already been lain in. The first suspicion flashed back upon him
with new certainty.

Lord Ernie was already taking off his heavy coat, preparatory to
undressing. He looked up quickly at the altered tone of voice.

‘Bindy,’ the tutor said with a touch of gravity, ‘you _were_ alone just
now--weren’t you--of course?’

The other sat up from stooping over his boots. With his hands resting
on the bed behind him, he looked straight into his companion’s eyes.
Lying was not among his faults. He answered slowly after a decided
interval.

‘I--I was asleep,’ he whispered, evidently trying to be accurate,
yet hesitating how to describe the thing he had to say, ‘and had a
dream--one of my real, vivid dreams when something happens. Only, this
time, it was more real than ever before. It was’--he paused, searching
for words, then added--‘sweet and awful.’

And Hendricks repeated the surprising sentence. ‘Sweet and awful,
Bindy! What in the world do you mean, boy?’

Lord Ernie seemed puzzled himself by the choice of words he used.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ he went on honestly, ‘only I mean that it was
awfully real and splendid, a bit of my own life somewhere--somewhere
else--where it lies hidden away behind a lot of days and months that
choke it up. I can never get at it except in woods and places, quite
alone, hearing the wind or making fires, or--in sleep.’ He hid his face
in his hands a moment, then looked up with a hint of censure in his
eyes. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that such things _were_ done? You never
told me,’ he repeated.

‘I didn’t know it myself until this evening. Leysin----’

‘I thought you knew everything,’ Lord Ernie broke in in that same
half-chiding tone.

‘Monsieur Leysin told me to-night for the first time,’ said Hendricks
firmly, ‘that such people and such practices existed. Till now I had
never dreamed that such superstitions survived anywhere in the world
at all.’ He resented the reproach. But he was also aware that the boy
resented his authority. For the first time his ascendency seemed in
question; his voice, his eye, his manner did not quell as formerly.
‘So you mean, when you say “sweet and awful,” that it was very real to
you?’ he asked. He insisted now with purpose. ‘Is that it, Bindy?’

The other replied eagerly enough. ‘Yes, that’s it, I think--partly.
This time it was more than dreaming. It was real. I got there. I
remembered. That’s what I meant. And after I woke up the thing still
went on. The man seemed still in the room beside the bed, calling me to
get up and go with him----’

‘Man! What man?’ The tutor leant upon the back of a chair to steady
himself. The wind just then went past the open windows with a singing
rush.

‘The dark man who passed us in the village, and who pointed to the
fires on the heights. He came with the wind, you remember. He pulled my
coat.’

The boy stood up as he said it. He came across the naked boarding, his
step light and dancing. ‘Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind
that blows the heart alight, or something--I forget now exactly. _You_
heard it too.’ He whispered the words with excitement, raising his arms
and knees as in the opening movements of a dance.

Hendricks kept his own excitement down, but with a distinctly conscious
effort.

‘I heard nothing of the kind,’ he said calmly. ‘I was only thinking of
getting home dry. You say,’ he asked with decision, ‘that you _heard_
those words?’

Lord Ernie stood back a little. It was not that he wished to conceal,
but that he felt uncertain how to express himself. ‘In the street,’ he
said, ‘I heard nothing; the words rose up in my own head, as it were.
But in the dream, and afterwards too, when I was wide awake, I heard
them out loud, clearly: Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind
that blows the heart to flame--that’s how it was.’

‘In French, Bindy? You heard it in French?’

‘Oh, it was no language at all. The eyes said it--both times.’ He
spoke as naturally as though it was the Durbah he described again.
Only this new aggressive certainty was in his voice and manner.
‘Mr. Hendricks,’ he went on eagerly, ‘_you_ understand what I mean,
don’t you? When certain people look at one, words start up in the
mind as though one heard them spoken. I heard the words in my head,
I suppose; only they seemed so familiar, as though I’d known them
before--always----’

‘Of course, Bindy, I understand. But this man--tell me--did he stay on
after you woke up? And how did he go?’ He looked round at the barely
furnished room for hiding-places. ‘It was really the dream you carried
on after waking, wasn’t it?’

Then Bindy laughed, but inwardly, as to himself. There was the faintest
possible hint of derision in his voice. ‘No doubt,’ he said; ‘only it
was one of my big, real dreams. And how he went I can’t explain at
all, for I didn’t see. You knocked at the door; I turned, and found
myself standing in the room, dressed to go out. There was a rush of
wind outside the window--and when I looked he was no longer there.
The same minute you came in. It was all as quick as that. I suppose I
dressed--in my sleep.’

They stood for several minutes, staring at each other without speaking.
The tutor hesitated between several courses of action, unable, for the
life of him, to decide upon any particular one. His instinct on the
whole was to stop nothing, but to encourage all possible expression,
while keeping rigorous watch and guard. Repression, it seemed to him
just then, was the least desirable line to take. Somewhere there was
truth in the affair. He felt out of his depth, his authority impaired,
and under these temporary disadvantages he might so easily make a
grave mistake, injuring instead of helping. While Lord Ernie finished
his undressing he leaned out of the window, taking great draughts of
the keen night air, watching the blazing fires and listening to the
roar of voices, now dying down into the distance.

And the voice of his thinking whispered to him, ‘Let it all come out.
Repress nothing. Let him have the entire adventure. If it’s nonsense
it can’t injure, and if it’s true it’s inevitable.’ He drew his head
in and moved towards the door. ‘Then it’s settled,’ he said quietly,
as though nothing unusual had happened; ‘we’ll go up there to-morrow
night--with Monsieur Leysin to show us the way. And you’ll go to sleep
now, won’t you? For to-morrow we may be up very late. Promise me,
Bindy.’

‘I’m dead tired,’ came the answer from the sheets. ‘I certainly shan’t
dream any more, if that’s what you mean. I promise.’

Hendricks turned the light out and went softly from the room. He could
always trust the boy.

‘Good-night, Bindy,’ he said.

‘Good-night,’ came the drowsy reply.

Upstairs he lingered a long time over his own undressing, listening,
waiting, watching for the least sound below. But nothing happened.
Once, for his own peace of mind, he stole stealthily downstairs to the
boy’s door; then, reassured by the heavy breathing that was distinctly
audible, he went up finally and got into bed himself. The night was
very still now. It was cool, and the stars were brilliant over lake and
forest and mountain. No voices broke the silence. He only heard the
tinkle of the little streams beyond the vineyards. And by midnight he
was sound asleep.


VI

And next day broke as soft and brilliant as though October had stolen
it from June; the Alps gleamed through an almost summery haze across
the lake; the air held no hint of coming winter; and the Jura mountains
wore the true blue of memory in Hendricks’ mind. Patches of red and
yellow splashed the great pine-woods here and there where beech and ash
put autumn in the vast dark carpet.

The tutor woke clear-headed and refreshed. All that had happened the
night before seemed out of proportion and unreasonable. There had
been exaggerated emotion in it: in himself, because he returned to a
place still charged with potent memories of youth; and in Lord Ernie,
because the lad was overwrought by the electrical disturbance of the
atmosphere. The nearness of the ancestral halls, which they both
disliked, had emphasised it; the ominous, wild weather had favoured
it; and the coincidence of these pagan rites of superstitious peasants
had focused it all into a melodramatic form with an added touch of the
supernatural that was highly picturesque and--dangerously suggestive.
Hendricks recovered his common sense; judgment asserted itself again.

Yet, for all that, certain things remained authentic. The effect
upon the boy was not illusion, nor his words about fire and wind
mere meaningless invention. There hid some undivined and significant
correspondence between the gaps in his deficient nature and these two
turbulent elements. The talk with Leysin, as the conduct of his wife,
remained authentic; those facts were too steady to be dismissed, the
Pasteur too genuinely in earnest to be catalogued in dream. Neither
daylight nor common sense could dissipate their actuality. Truth lay
somewhere in it all.

Thus the day, for the tutor, was a battle that shifted with varying
fortune between doubt and certainty. In the morning his mind was
decided: the wild experiment was unjustifiable; in the afternoon,
as the sunshine grew faint and melancholy, it became ‘interesting,
for what harm could come of it?’ but towards evening, when shadows
lengthened across the purple forests and the trees stood motionless in
the calm and windless air, the adventure seemed, as it had seemed the
night before, not only justifiable, but right and necessary. It only
became inevitable, however, when, after tea together on the balcony,
Lord Ernie, mentioning the subject for the first time that day, asked
pointedly what time the Pasteur expected them to supper; then, noticing
the flash of hesitancy in his companion’s eyes, added in his strange
deep voice, ‘You promised we should go.’ Withdrawal after that was out
of the question. To retract would have meant, for one thing, final loss
of the boy’s confidence--a possibility not to be contemplated for a
moment.

Until this moment no word of the preceding night had passed the lips
of either. Lord Ernie had been quiet and preoccupied, silent rather,
but never listless. He was peaceful, perhaps subdued a little, yet with
a suppressed energy in his bearing that Hendricks watched with secret
satisfaction. The tutor, closely observant, detected nothing out of
gear; life stirred strongly in him; there was purpose, interest, will;
there was desire; but there was nothing to cause alarm.

Availing himself then of the lad’s absorption in his own affairs, he
wandered forth alone upon his sentimental tour of inspection. No ghost
of emotion rose to stalk beside him. That early tragedy, he now saw
clearly, had been no more than youthful explosion of mere physical
passion, wholesome and natural, but due chiefly to propinquity. His
thoughts ran idly on; and he was even congratulating himself upon
escape and freedom when, abruptly, he remembered a phrase Bindy had
used the night before, and stumbled suddenly upon a clue when least
expecting it.

He came to a sudden halt. The significance of it crashed through his
mind and startled him. ‘There are big rushing women ...’ It was the
first reference to the other sex, as evidence of their attraction
for him, Hendricks had ever known to pass his lips. Hitherto, though
twenty years of age, the lad had never spoken of women as though he was
aware of their terrible magic. He had not discovered them as females,
necessary to every healthy male. It was not purity, of course, but
ignorance: he had felt nothing. Something had now awakened sex in him,
so that he knew himself a man, and naked. And it had revolutionised the
world for him. This new life came from the roots, transforming listless
indifference into positive desire; the will woke out of sleep, and
all the currents of his system took aggressive form. For all energy,
intellectual, emotional, or spiritual, is fundamentally one: it is
primarily sexual.

Hendricks paused in his sentimental walk, marvelling that he had not
realised sooner this simple truth. It brought a certain logical meaning
even into the pagan rites upon the mountains, these ancient rites
which symbolised the marriage of the two tremendous elements of wind
and fire, heat and air. And the lad’s quiet, busy mood that morning
confirmed his simple discovery. It involved restraint and purpose. Lord
Ernie was alive. Hendricks would take home with him to those ancestral
halls a vessel bursting with energy--creative energy. It was admirable
that he should witness--from a safe distance--this primitive ceremony
of crude pagan origin. It was the very thing. And the tutor hurried
back to the house among the vineyards, aware that his responsibility
had increased, but persuaded more than ever that his course was
justified.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sky held calm and cloudless through the day, the forests brooding
beneath the hazy autumn sunshine. Indications that the second hurricane
lay brewing among the heights were not wanting, however, to experienced
eyes. Almost a preternatural silence reigned; there was a warm
heaviness in the placid atmosphere; the surface of the lake was patched
and streaky; the extreme clarity of the air an ominous omen. Distant
objects were too close. Towards sunset, moreover, the streaks and
patches vanished as though sucked below, while thin strips of tenuous
cloud appeared from nowhere above the northern cliffs. They moved with
great rapidity at an enormous height, touched with a lurid brilliance
as the sun sank out of sight; and when Hendricks strolled over with
Lord Ernie to _la cure_ for supper there came a sudden rush of heated
wind that set the branches sharply rattling, then died away as abruptly
as it rose.

They seemed reflected, too, these disturbances, in the human
atmospheres about the supper table--there was suppression of various
emotions, emotions presaging violence. Lord Ernie was exhilarated,
Hendricks uneasy and preoccupied, the Pasteur grave and thoughtful. In
Hendricks was another feeling as well--that he had lightly summoned
a storm which might carry him off his feet. The boy’s excitement
increased it, as wind-puffs fan a starting fire. His own judgment
had somewhere played him false, betraying him into this incredible
adventure. And yet he could not stop it. The Pasteur’s influence was
over him perhaps. He was ashamed to turn back. He was committed. The
unusual circumstances found the weakness in his character.

For somewhere in the preposterous superstition there lay a big
forgotten truth. He could not believe it, and yet he did believe it.
The world had forgotten how to live truly close to Nature.

A desultory conversation was carried on, chiefly between the two men,
while the boy ate hungrily, and Mme. Leysin watched her husband with
anxiety as she served the simple meal.

‘So you are coming with us, and you like to come?’ the Pasteur observed
quietly, Hendricks translating.

Lord Ernie replied with a gesture of unmistakable enthusiasm.

‘A wild lot of men and women,’ Leysin went on, keeping his eye hard
upon him, ‘with an interesting worship of their own copied from very
ancient times. They live on the heights, and mix little with us valley
folk. You shall see their ceremonies to-night.’

‘They get the wind and fire into themselves, don’t they?’ asked the boy
keenly, and somewhat to the distress of the translator who rendered it,
‘They get into wind and fire.’

‘They worship wind and fire,’ Leysin replied, ‘and they do it by means
of a wonderful dance that somehow imitates the leap of flame and the
headlong rush of wind. If you copy the movements and gestures of a
person you discover the emotion that causes them. You share it. Their
idea is, apparently, that by imitating the movements they invite or
attract the force--draw these elemental powers into their systems, so
that in the end----’

He stopped suddenly, catching the tutor’s eye. Lord Ernie seemed
to understand without translation; he had laid down his knife and
fork, and was leaning forward across the table, listening with deep
absorption. His expression was alert with a new intelligence that was
almost cunning. An acute sensibility seemed to have awakened in him.

‘As with laughing, I suppose?’ he said in an undertone to Hendricks
quickly. ‘If you imitate a laugher, you laugh yourself in the end and
feel all the jolly excitement of laughter. Is that what he means?’

The tutor nodded with assumed indifference. ‘Imitation is always
infectious,’ he said lightly; ‘but, of course, you will not imitate
these wild people yourself, Bindy. We’ll just look on from a distance.’

‘From a distance!’ repeated the boy, obviously disappointed. ‘What’s
the good of that?’ A look of obstinacy passed across his altered face.

Hendricks met his eyes squarely. ‘At a circus,’ he said firmly, ‘you
just watch. You don’t imitate the clown, do you?’

‘If you look on long enough, you do,’ was the rather dogged reply.

‘Well, take the Russian dancers we saw in Moscow,’ the other insisted
patiently; ‘you felt the power and beauty without jumping up and
whirling in your stall?’

Bindy half glared at him. There was almost contempt in his quiet
answer: ‘But your mind whirled with them. And later your body would
too; otherwise it’s given you nothing.’ He paused a second. ‘I can
only get the fun of riding by being on a horse’s back and doing his
movements exactly with him--not by watching him.’

Hendricks smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He did not wish to
discourage the enthusiasm lying behind this analysis. The uneasiness in
him grew apace. He said something rapidly in French, using an undertone
and laughter to confuse the actual words.

‘Of course we must not interfere with their ceremonies,’ put in the
Pasteur with decision. ‘It’s sacred to them. We can hide among the
trees and watch. You would not leave your seat in church to imitate the
priest, would you?’ He glanced smilingly at the eager youth before him.

‘If he did something real, I would.’ It was said with a bright flash in
the eyes. ‘Anything real I’d copy like a shot. Only, I never find it.’

The reply was disconcerting rather: and Hendricks, as he hurriedly
translated, made a clatter with his knife and fork, for something in
him rose to meet the truth behind the curious words. From that moment,
as though catching a little of the boy’s exhilaration, he passed under
a kind of spell perhaps. It was, in spite of the exaggeration, oddly
stimulating. This dull little meal at the village _cure_ masked an
accumulating vehemence, eager to break loose. He heard the old father’s
voice: ‘Well done, Hendricks! You have accomplished wonders!’ He would
take back the boy--alive....

Yet all the time there were streaks and patches on his soul as upon
the surface of the lake that afternoon. There were signs of terror. He
felt himself letting go, an increasing recklessness, a yielding up more
and more of his own authority to that of this triumphant boy. Bindy
understood the meaning of it all and felt secure; Hendricks faltered,
hesitated, stood on the defensive. Yet, ever less and less. Already he
accepted the other’s guidance. Already Lord Ernie’s leadership was in
the ascendant. Conviction invariably holds dominion over doubt.

They ate little. It was near the end of the meal when the wind, falling
from a clear and starlit sky, struck its first violent blow, dropping
with the force of an explosion that shook the wooden house, and passing
with a roar towards the distant lake. The oil lamp, suspended from the
ceiling, trembled; the Pasteur looked apprehensively at the shuttered
windows; and Lord Ernie, with startling abruptness, stood up. His eyes
were shining. His voice was brisk, alert, and deep.

‘The wind, the wind!’ he cried. ‘Think what it’ll be up there! We
shall feel it on our bodies!’ His enthusiasm was like a rush of air
across the table. ‘And the fire!’ he went on. ‘The flames will lick all
over, and tear about the sky. I feel wild and full of them already!
How splendid!’ And the flame of the little lamp leaped higher in the
chimney as he said it.

‘The violence of the _coup de joran_ is extraordinary,’ explained
Leysin as he got up to turn down the wick, ‘and the second
outburst----’ The rest of his sentence was drowned by the noise of
Hendricks’ voice telling the boy to sit down and finish his supper.
And at the same moment the Pasteur’s wife came in as though a stroke
of wind drove behind her down the passage. The door slammed in the
draught. There was a momentary confusion in the room above which her
voice rose shrill and frightened.

‘The fires are alight, Jules,’ she whispered in her half-intelligible
_patois_, ‘the forest is burning all along the upper ridge.’ Her face
was pale and her speech came stumbling. She lowered her lips to her
husband’s ear. ‘They’ll be looking out for recruits to-night. Is it
necessary, is it right for you to go?’ She glanced uneasily at the
English visitors. ‘You know the danger----’

He stopped her with a gesture. ‘Those who look on at life accomplish
nothing,’ he answered impatiently. ‘One must act, always act. Chances
are sent to be taken, not stared at.’ He rose, pushing past her into
the passage, and as he did so she gave him one swift comprehensive
look of tenderness and admiration, then hurried after him to find his
hat and cloak. Willingly she would have kept him at home that night,
yet gladly, in another sense, she saw him go. She fumbled in her
movements, ready to laugh or cry or pray. Hendricks saw her pain and
understood. It was singular how the woman’s attitude intensified his
own misgivings; her behaviour, the mere expression of her face alone,
made the adventure so absolutely real.

Three minutes later they were in the village street. Hendricks and Lord
Ernie, the latter impatient in the road beyond, saw her tall figure
stoop to embrace him. ‘I shall pray all night: I shall watch from my
window for your return. God, who speaks from the whirlwind, and whose
pathway is the fire, will go with you. Remember the younger men; it is
ever the younger men that they seek to take...!’ Her words were half
hysterical. The kiss was given and taken; the open doorway framed her
outline a moment; then the buttress of the church blotted her out, and
they were off.


VII

And at once the curious confusion of strong wind was upon them. Gusts
howled about the corners of the shuttered houses and tore noisily
across the open yards. Dust whirled with the rapidity as of some
spectral white machinery. A tile came clattering down about their feet,
while overhead the roofs had an air of shifting, toppling, bending.
The entire village seemed scooped up and shaken, then dropped upon the
earth again in tottering fashion.

‘This way,’ gasped the little Pasteur, blown sideways like a sail;
‘follow me closely.’ Almost arm-in-arm at first they hurried down the
deserted street, past lampless windows and tight-fastened doors, and
soon were beyond the cabaret in that open stretch between the village
and the forest where the wind had unobstructed way. Far above them ran
the fiery mountain ridge. They saw the glare reflected in the sky as
the tempest first swept them all three together, then separated them in
the same moment. They seemed to spin or whirl. ‘It’s far worse than I
expected,’ shouted their guide; ‘here! Give me your hand!’ then found,
once disentangled from his flapping cloak, that no one stood beside
him. For each of them it was a single fight to reach the shelter of the
woods, where the actual ascent began. An instant the Pasteur seemed to
hesitate. He glanced back at the lighted window of _la cure_ across the
fields, at the line of fire in the sky, at the figure disappearing in
the blackness immediately ahead. ‘Where’s the boy?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t
let him get too far in front. Keep close. Wait till I come!’ They
staggered back against each other. ‘Look how easily he’s slipped ahead
already!’

‘This howling wind----’ Hendricks shouted, as they advanced side by
side, pushing their shoulders against the storm.

The rest of the sentence vanished into space. Leysin shoved him
forward, pointing to where, some twenty yards in front, the figure of
Lord Ernie, head down, was battling eagerly with the hurricane. Already
he stood near to the shelter of the trees waving his arms with energy
towards the summits where the fire blazed. He was calling something at
the top of his voice, urging them to hurry. His voice rushed down upon
them with a pelt of wind.

‘Don’t let him get away from us,’ bawled Leysin, holding his hands
cup-wise to his mouth. ‘Keep him in reach. He may see, but must not
take part....’ A blow full in the face that smote him like the flat
of a great sword clapped the sentence short. ‘That’s _your_ part. He
won’t obey me!’ Hendricks heard it as they plunged across the windswept
reach, panting, struggling, forcing their bodies sideways like
two-legged crabs against the terrific force of the descending _joran_.
They reached the protection of the forest wall without further attempt
at speech. Here there was sudden peace and silence, for the tall, dense
trees received the tempest’s impact like a cushion, stopping it. They
paused a moment to recover breath.

But although the first exhaustion speedily passed, that original
confusion of strong wind remained--in Hendricks’ mind at least,--for
wind violent enough to be battled with has a scattering effect on
thought and blows the very blood about. Something in him snapped its
cables and blew out to sea. His breath drew in an impetuous quality
from the tempest each time he filled his lungs. There was agitation in
him that caused an odd exaggeration of the emotions. The boy, as they
came up, leaped down from a boulder he had climbed. He opened his arms,
making of his cloak a kind of sail that filled and flapped.

‘At last!’ he cried, impatient, almost vexed. ‘I thought you were never
coming. The wind blew me along. We shall be late----’

The tutor caught his arm with vigour. ‘You keep by us, Ernest; d’you
hear now? No rushing ahead like that. Leysin’s the guide, not you.’ He
even shook him. But as he did so he was aware that he himself resisted
something that he did not really want to resist, something that urged
him forcibly; a little more and he would yield to it with pleasure,
with abandon, finally with recklessness. A reaction of panic fear ran
over him.

‘It was the wind, I tell you,’ cried the boy, flinging himself free
with a hint of insolence in his voice, ‘for it’s alive. I mean to see
everything. The wind’s our leader and the fire’s our guide.’ He made a
movement to start on again.

‘You’ll obey me,’ thundered Hendricks, ‘or else you’ll go home. D’you
understand?’

With exasperation, yet with uneasy delight, he noted the words Bindy
made use of. It was in him that he might almost have uttered them
himself. He stepped already into an entirely new world. Exhilaration
caught him even now. Putting the brake on was mere pretence. He seized
the lad by both shoulders and pushed him to the rear, then placed
himself next, so that Leysin moved in front and led the way. The
procession started, diving into the comparative shelter of the forest.
‘Don’t let him pass you,’ he heard in rapid French; ‘guide him, that’s
all. The power’s already in his blood. Keep yourself in hand as well,
and follow me closely.’ The roar of the storm above them carried the
words clean off the world.

Here in the forest they moved, it seemed, along the floor of an
ocean whose surface raged with dreadful violence; any moment one or
other of them might be caught up to that surface and whirled off to
destruction. For the procession was not one with itself. The darkness,
the difficulty of hearing what each said, the feeling, too, that each
climbed for himself, made everything seem at sixes and sevens. And the
tutor, this secret exultation growing in his heart, denied the anxiety
that kept it pace, and battled with his turbulent emotions, a divided
personality. His power over the boy, he realised, had gravely weakened.
A little time ago they had seemed somehow equal. Now, however, a
complete reversal of their relative positions had taken place. The boy
was sure of himself. While Leysin led at a steady mountaineer’s pace
on his wiry, short, bowed legs, Hendricks, a yard or two behind him,
stumbled a good deal in the darkness, Lord Ernie forever on his heels,
eager to push past. But Bindy never stumbled. There was no flagging
in his muscles. He moved so lightly and with so sure a tread that he
almost seemed to dance, and often he stopped aside to leap a boulder or
to run along a fallen trunk. Path there was none. Occasional gusts of
wind rushed gustily down into these depths of forest where they moved,
and now, from time to time, as they rose nearer to the line of fire on
the ridge, an increasing glare lit up the knuckled roots or glimmered
on the bramble thickets and heavy beds of moss. It was astonishing
how the little Pasteur never missed his way. Periods of thick silence
alternated with moments when the storm swept down through gullies among
the trees, reverberating like thunder in the hollows.

Slowly they advanced, buffeted, driven, pushed, the wildness of some
Walpurgis night growing upon all three. In the tutor’s mind was this
strange lift of increasing recklessness, the old proportion gone, the
spiritual aspect of it troubling him to the point of sheer distress. He
followed Leysin as blindly with his body as he followed this new Bindy
eagerly with his mind. For this languid boy, now dancing to the tune
of flooding life at his very heels, seemed magical in the true sense:
energy created as by a wizard out of nothing. From lips that ordinarily
sighed in listless boredom poured now a ceaseless stream of questions
and ejaculations, ringing with enthusiasm. How long would it take to
reach the fiery ridge? Why did they go so slowly? Would they arrive
too late? Would their intrusion be welcomed or understood? Already one
great change was effected--accepted by Hendricks, too--that the rôle
of mere spectator was impossible. The answers Hendricks gave, indeed,
grew more and more encouraging and sympathetic. He, too, was impatient
with their leader’s crawling pace. Some elemental spell of wind and
fire urged him towards the open ridge. The pull became irresistible.
He despised the Pasteur’s caution, denied his wisdom, wholly rejected
now the spirit of compromise and prudence. And once, as the hurricane
brought down a flying burst of voices, he caught himself leaping upon a
big grey boulder in their path. He leaped at the very moment that the
boy behind him leaped, yet hardly realised that he did so; his feet
danced without a conscious order from his brain. They met together on
the rounded top, stumbled, clutched one another frantically, then slid
with waving arms and flying cloaks down the slippery surface of damp
moss--laughing wildly.

‘Fool!’ cried Hendricks, saving himself. ‘What in the world----?’

‘_You_ called,’ laughed Bindy, picking himself up and dropping back to
his place in the rear again. ‘It’s the wind, not me; it’s in our feet.
Half the time you’re shouting and jumping yourself!’

And it was a few minutes after this that Lord Ernie suddenly forged
ahead. He slipped in front as silently as a shadow before a moving
candle in a room. Passing the tutor at a moment when his feet were
entangled among roots and stones, he easily overtook the Pasteur and
found himself in the lead. He never stumbled; there seemed steel
springs in his legs.

From Leysin, too breathless to interfere, came a cry of warning. ‘Stop
him! Take his hand!’ his tired voice instantly smothered by the roaring
skies. He turned to catch Hendricks by the cloak. ‘You see _that_!’ he
shouted in alarm. ‘For the love of God, don’t lose sight of him! He
must see, but not take part--remember----!’

And Hendricks yelled after the vanishing figure, ‘Bindy, go slow, go
slow! Keep in touch with us.’ But he quickened his pace instantly, as
though to overtake the boy. He passed his companion the same minute,
and was out of sight. ‘I’ll wait for you,’ came back the boy’s shrill
answer through the thinning trees. And a flare of light fell with it
from the sky, for the final climb of a steep five hundred feet had now
begun, and overhead the naked ridge ran east and west with its line of
blazing fires. Boulders and rocky ground replaced the pines and spruces.

‘But you’ll never find the way,’ shouted Leysin, while a deep
trumpeting roar of the storm beyond muffled the remainder of the
sentence.

Hendricks heard the next words close beside him from a clump of
shadows. He was in touching distance of the excited boy.

‘The fires and the singing guide me. Only a fool could miss the way.’

‘But you _are_ a----’

He swallowed the unuttered word. A new, extraordinary respect was
suddenly in him. That tall, virile figure, instinct with life,
springing so cleverly through the choking darkness, guiding with
decision and intelligence, almost infallible--it was no fool that led
them thus. He hurried after till his very sinews ached. His eyes,
troubled and confused, strained through the trees to find him. But
these same trees now fled past him in a torrent.

‘Bindy, Bindy!’ he cried, at the top of his voice, yet not with
the imperious tone the situation called for. The sentence dropped
into a lull of wind. Instead of command there was entreaty, almost
supplication, in it. ‘Wait for me, I’m coming. We’ll see the glorious
thing together!’

And then suddenly the forest lay behind him, with a belt of open
pasture-land in front below the actual ridge. He felt the first great
draught of heat, as a line of furnaces burst their doors with a mighty
roar and turned the sky into a blaze of golden daylight. There was a
crackling as of musketry. The flare shot up and burned the air about
him, and the voices of a multitude, as yet invisible, drove through it
like projectiles on the wind. This was the first impression, wholesale
and terrific, that met him as he paused an instant on the edge of the
sheltering forest and looked forward. Leysin and Lord Ernie seemed
to leave his mind, forgotten in this first attack of splendour, but
forgotten, as it were, the first with contempt, the latter with an
overwhelming regret. For the Pasteur’s mistake in that instant seemed
obvious. In half measures lay the fatal error, and in compromise the
danger. Bindy all along had known the better way and followed it. The
lukewarm was the worthless.

‘Bindy, boy, where are you? I’m coming ...’ and stepping on to the
grassy strip of ground, soft to his feet, he met a wind that fell upon
his body with a shower of blows from all directions at once and beat
him to his knees. He dropped, it seemed, into the cover of a sheltering
rock, for there followed then a moment of sudden and delicious
stillness in which the weary muscles recovered themselves and thought
grew slightly steadier. Crouched thus close to the earth he no longer
offered a target to the hurricane’s attack. He peered upwards, making a
screen of his hands.

The ridge, some fifty feet above him, he saw, ran in a generous
platform along the mountain crest; it was wide and flat; between the
enormous fires of piled-up wood that stretched for half a mile coiled a
medley of dense smoke and tearing sparks. No human beings were visible,
and yet he was aware of crowding life quite near. On hands and knees,
crawling painfully, he then slowly retreated again into the shelter of
the forest he had sought to leave. He stood up. The awful blaze was
veiled by the roof of branches once more. But, as he rose, seizing a
sapling to steady himself by, two hands caught him with violence from
behind, and a familiar voice came shouting against his ear. Leysin,
panting, dishevelled and half broken with the speed, stood beside him.

‘The boy! Where is he? We’re just in time!’ He roared the words to
make them carry above the din. ‘Hurry, hurry! I’ll follow.... My older
legs.... See, for the love of God, that he is not taken.... I warned
you!’

And for a second, as he heard, Hendricks caught at the vanished sense
of responsibility again. He saw the face of the old Marquess watching
him among the tree trunks. He heard his voice, amazed, reproachful,
furious: ‘It was criminal of you, criminal----!’

‘Where is the boy--_your_ boy?’ again broke in the shout of the Pasteur
with a slap of hurricane, as he staggered against the tutor, half
collapsing, and trying to point the direction. ‘Watch him, find him for
the love of heaven before it is too late--before they see him...!’

The tutor’s normal and responsible self dived out of sight again as he
heard the cry of weakness and alarm. It seemed the wind got under him,
lifting him bodily from his feet. He did not pause to think. Like a man
midway in a whirling prize-fight, he felt dazed but confident, only
conscious of one thing--that he must hold out to the end, take part in
all the splendid fighting--_win_. The lust of the arena, the pride of
youth and battle, the impetuous recklessness of the charge in primitive
war caught at his heart, brimming it with headlong courage. To play
the game for all it might be worth seemed shouted everywhere about
him, as the abandon of wind and fire rushed through him like a storm.
He felt lifted above all possibility of little failure. The Marquess
with his conventional traditions, the Pasteur with his considerations
of half-way safety, both vanished utterly; safety, indeed, both for
himself and for the boy in his charge lay in unconditional surrender.
This was no time for little thought-out actions. It was all or nothing!

‘God bless the whirlwind and the fire!’ he shouted, opening wide his
arms.

But his voice was inaudible amid the uproar, and the forward movement
of his body remained at first only in the brain. He turned to push the
old man aside, even to strike him down if necessary. ‘Lukewarm yourself
and a coward!’ rose in his throat, yet found no utterance, for in that
moment a tall, slim figure, swift as a shadow, steady as a hawk, shot
hard across the open space between the forest and the ridge. In the
direction of the blazing platform it disappeared against a curtain of
thick smoke, emerged for one second in a storm of light, then vanished
finally behind a ruin of loose rocks. And Hendricks, his eyes wounded
by heat and wind, his muscles paralysed, understood that the boy
deliberately invited capture. The multitude that hid behind the smoke
and fire, feeding the blazing heaps with eager hands, had become aware
of him, and presently would appear to claim him. They would take him
to themselves. Already answering flares ran east and west along the
desolate ridge.

‘I’ll join you! I’m coming! Wait for me!’ he tried to cry. The uproar
smothered it.


VIII

And this uproar, he now perceived, was composed entirely of wind and
fire. Here, on the roof of the hills beneath a starry sky, these two
great elements expressed their nature with unhampered freedom, for
there was neither rain to modify the one, nor solid obstacle to check
the other. Their voices merged in a single sound--the hollow boom of
wind and the deep, resounding clap of flame. The splitting crackle
of burning branches imitated the high, shrill whistle of the tearing
gusts that, javelin-like, flew to and fro in darts of swifter sound.
But one shout rose from the summit, no human cry distinguishable in it,
nor amid the thousand lines of skeleton wood that pierced the golden
background was any human outline visible. Fire and wind encouraged one
another to madness, manifesting in prodigious splendour by themselves.

Then, suddenly, before a gigantic canter of the wind, the driving smoke
rolled upwards like a curtain, and the flames, ceasing their wild
flapping, soared steadily in gothic windows of living gold towards the
stars. In towering rows between columns of black night they transformed
the empty space between them into a colossal temple aisle. They
tapered aloft symmetrically into vanishing crests. And Hendricks stood
upright. Rising so that his shoulders topped the edge of the boulder,
and utterly contemptuous of Leysin’s hand that sought with violence to
drag him into shelter, he gazed as one who sees a vision. For at first
he could only stand and stare, aware of sensation but not of thought.
An enormous, overpowering conviction blew his whole being to white
heat. Here was a supply of elemental power that human beings--empty,
needy, starved, deficient human beings--could use. His love for the boy
leaped headlong at the skirts of this terrific salvation. A majestic
possibility stormed through him.

Yet it was no nightmare wonder that met his staring and half-shielded
eyes, although some touch of awful dream seemed in it, set, moreover,
to a scale that scantier minds might deem distortion. The heat from
some thirty fires, placed at regular intervals, made midnight quiver
with immense vibrations. Of varying, yet calculated size, these
towering heaps emitted notes of measured and alternating depth, until
the roar along the entire line produced a definite scale almost of
melody, the near ones shrilly singing, those more distant booming with
mountainous pedal notes. The consonance was monstrous, yet conformed to
some magnificent diapason. This chord of fire-music paced the starlit
sky, directed, but never overmastered, by the wind that measured it
somehow into meaning. Repeated in quick succession, the notes now
crashing in a mass, now singing alone in solitary beauty, the effect
suggested an idea of ordered sequence, of gigantic rhythm. It seemed,
indeed, as though some controlling agency, mastering excess, coerced
both raging elements to express through this stupendous dance some
definite idea. Here, as it were, was the alphabet of some natural,
undifferentiated language, a language of sight and sound, predating
speech, symbolical in the ultimate, deific sense. Some Lord of Fire
and some Lord of Air were in command. Harnessed and regulated, these
formless cohorts of energy that men call stupidly mere flame and wind,
obeyed a higher power that had invoked them, yet a power that, by
understanding their laws of being, held them most admirably in control.

This, at least, seems a hint of the explanation that flashed into
Hendricks as he stared in amazed bewilderment from the shelter of the
nearest boulder. He read a sentence in some natural, forgotten script.
He watched a primitive ritual that once invoked the gods. He was aware
of rhythm, and he was aware of system, though as yet he did not see the
hand that wrote this marvellous sentence on the night. For still the
human element remained invisible. He only realised--in dim, blundering
fashion--that he witnessed a revelation of those two powers which, in
large, lie at the foundations of the Universe, and, in little, are the
basic essentials of human existence--the powers behind heat and air.
Fragments of that talk with Leysin stammered back across his mind, like
letters in some stupendous word he dared not reconstruct entire. He
shuddered and grew wise. Realms of forgotten being opened their doors
before his dazzled sight. Vision fluttered into far, piercing vistas
of ancient wonder, haunting and half-remembered, then lost its way
in blindness that was pain. For a moment, it seemed, he was aware of
majestic Presences behind the turmoil, shadowy but mighty, charged with
a vague potentiality as of immense algebraical formulae, symbolical
and beyond full comprehension, yet willing and able to be used for
practical results. He _felt_ the elements as nerves of a living
Universe.... Yet thinking was not really in him anywhere; feeling was
all he knew. The world he moved in, as the script he read, belonged
to conditions too utterly remote for reason to recover a single clue
to their intelligible reconstruction. Glory, clean and strong as of
primitive star-worship, passed between what he saw and all that he
had ever known before. The curtain of conventional belief was rent in
twain. The terrific thing was true....

For an unmeasured interval the tutor, oblivious of time and actual
place, stood on the brink of this majestic pageant, staring with
breathless awe, while the swaying of the entire scenery increased, like
the sway of an ocean lifted to the sky by many winds. Then, suddenly,
in one of those temporary lulls that passed between the beat of the
great notes, his searching eyes discovered a new thing. The focus
of his sight was altered, and he realised at last the source of the
directing and the controlling power. Behind the fires and beyond the
smoke he recognised the disc-like, shining ovals that upon this little
earth stand in the image of the one, eternal Likeness. He saw the human
faces, symbols of spiritual dominion over all lesser orders, each one
possessed of belief, intelligence and will. Singly so feeble, together
so invincible, this assemblage, unscorched by the fire and by the wind
unmoved, seemed to him impressive beyond all possible words. And a
further inkling of the truth flashed on him as he stared: that a group
of humans, a crowd, combining upon a given object with concentrated
purpose, possessed of that terrific power, certain faith, may know
in themselves the energy to move great mountains, and therefore that
lesser energy to guide the fluid forces of the elements. And a sense
of cosmic exultation leaped into his being. For a moment he knew a
touch of almost frenzy. Proud joy rose in him like a splendour of
omnipotence. Humanity, it seemed to him, here came into a grand but
long neglected corner of its kingdom as originally planned by Heaven.
Into the hands of a weakling and deficient boy the guidance had been
given.

Motionless beneath the stars, lit by the glare till they shone
like idols of yellow stone, and magnified by the sheets of flying,
intolerable light the wind chased to and fro, these rows of faces
appeared at first as a single line of undifferentiated fire against the
background of the night. The eyes were all cast down in prayer, each
mind focused steadily upon one clear idea--the control and assimilation
of two elemental powers. The crowd was one; feeling was one; desire,
command and certain faith were one. The controlling power that resulted
was irresistible.

Then came a remarkable, concerted movement. With one accord the eyes
all opened, blazing with reflected fire. A hundred human countenances
rose in a single shining line. The men stood upright. Swarthy faces,
tanned by sun and wind, heads uncovered, hair and beards tossing in
the air, turned all one way. Mouths opened too. There came a roar that
even the hurricane could not drown--a word of command, it seemed,
that sprang into the pulses of the dancing elements and reduced their
turmoil to a wave of steadier movement. And at the same moment a
hundred bodies, naked above the waist, arms outstretched and hands with
the palms held upwards, swayed forwards through the smoke and fire.
They came towards the spot where, half concealed from view, the tutor
crouched and watched.

And Hendricks, thinking himself discovered, first quailed, then rose
to meet them. No power to resist was in him. It was, rather, willing
response that he experienced. He stepped out from the shelter of the
boulder and entered the brilliant glare. Hatless himself, shoulders
squared, cloak, flying in the wind, he took three strides towards the
advancing battalion--then, undecided, paused. For the line, he saw,
disregarded him as though he were not there at all. It was not _him_
the worshippers sought. The entire troop swept past to a point some
fifty feet below where the end of the ridge broke out of the thinning
trees. Beautiful as a curving wave of flame, the figures streamed
across the narrow, open space with a drilled precision as of some
battle line, and Hendricks, with a sense of wild, secret triumph, saw
them pause at the brink of the platformed ridge, form up their serried
ranks yet closer, then open two hundred arms to welcome some one whom
the darkness should immediately deliver. Simultaneously, from the
covering trees, the tall, slim shadow of Lord Ernie darted out into the
light.

‘Magnificent!’ cried Hendricks, but his voice was smothered instantly
in a mightier sound, and his movement forward seemed ineffective
stumbling. The hundred voices thundered out a single note. Like a
deer the boy leaped; like a tongue of flame he flew to join his own;
and instantly was surrounded, borne shoulder-high upon those upturned
palms, swept back in triumph towards the procession of enormous fires.
Wrapped by smoke and sparks, lifted by wind, he became part of the
monstrous rhythm that turned that mountain ridge alive. He stood
upright upon the platform of interlacing arms; he swayed with their
movements as a thing of wind and fire that flew. The shining faces
vanished then, turned all towards the blazing piles so that the boy had
the appearance of standing on a wall of living black. His outline was
visible a moment against the sky, firelight between his wide-stretched
legs, streaming from his hair and horizontal arms, issuing almost, as
it seemed, from his very body. The next second he leaped to the ground,
ran forward--appallingly close--between two heaped-up fires, flung both
hands heavenwards, and--knelt.

And Hendricks, sympathetically following the boy’s performance as
though his own mind and body took part in it, experienced then a
singular result: it seemed the heart in him began to roar. This
was no rustle of excited blood that the little cavern of his skull
increased, but a deeper sound that proclaimed the kinship of his
entire being with the ritual. His own nature had begun to answer. From
that moment he perceived the spectacle, not with the senses of sight
and hearing, separately, but with his entire body--synthetically. He
became a part of this assembly that was itself one single instrument:
a cosmic sounding-board for the rhythmical expression of impersonal
Nature Powers. Leysin, he dimly realised, fixed in his churchy tenets,
remained outside, apart, and compromising; Hendricks accepted and went
with. All little customary feelings dipped utterly away, lost, false,
denied, even as a unit in a crowd loses its normal characteristics
in the greater mood that sways the whole. The fire no longer burned
him, for he was the fire; nor did he stagger against the furious wind,
because the wind was in his heart. He moved all over, alive in every
point and corner. With his skin he breathed, his bones and tissue ran
with glorious heat. He cried aloud. He praised. ‘I am the whirlwind and
I am the fire! Fire that lights but does not burn, and wind that blows
the heart to flame!’ His body sang it, or rather the elements sang it
through his body; for the sound of his voice was not audible, and it
was wind and fire that thundered forth his feeling in their crashing
rhythm.


IX

And so it was that he no longer saw this thing pictorially, nor in the
little detached reports the individual senses brought, but knew it in
himself complete, as a man knows love and passion. Memory afterwards
translated these vast central feelings into pictures, but the pictures
touched reality without containing it. Like a vision it happened all
at once, as a room or landscape happens, and what happens all at once,
coming through a synthesis of the senses, is not properly describable
later. To instantaneous knowledge mere sequence is a falsehood. The
sequence first comes in with the telling afterwards. That kneeling
form, he understood, was the empty vessel to which conventional life
had hitherto denied the heat and air it craved. The breath of life
now poured at full tide into it, the fire of deity lit its heart of
touchwood, wind blew into desire; and later flame would burst forth in
action, consuming opposition. He must let it fill to the brim. It was
not salvation, but creation. Then thought went out, extinguished by a
puff of something greater....

For beyond the smoke and sparks, beyond the space the men had occupied,
a new and gentler movement, lyrical with bird-like beauty, ran suddenly
along the ridge. What Hendricks had taken for branches heaped in rows
for the burning, stirred marvellously throughout their whole collective
mass, stirred sweetly, too, and with an exquisite loveliness. The
entire line rose gracefully into the air with a whirr as of sweeping
birds. There was a soft and undulating motion as though a draught of
flowing wind turned faintly visible, yet with an increasing brilliance,
like shining lilies of flame that now flocked forward in a troop,
bending deliciously all one way. And in the same second these tall
lilies of fire revealed themselves as figures, naked above the waist,
hair streaming on the wind, eyes alight and bare arms waving. Above the
men’s deep pedal bass their voices rose with clear, shrill sweetness on
the storm. The band swept forwards swift as wind towards the kneeling
boy. The long line curved about him foldingly. The women took him as
the south wind takes a bird.

There may have been--indeed, there was--an interval, for Hendricks
caught, again and again repeated, the boy’s great cry of passionate
delight above the tumult. Ringing and virile it rose to heaven, clear
as a fine-wrought bell. And instantaneously the knitted figures of
flame disentangled themselves again, the mass unfolded like an opening
flower, and, as by a military word of command, dissolved itself once
more into a long thin line of running fire. The women advanced, and the
waiting men flowed forward in a stream to meet them. This interweaving
of the figures was as easily accomplished as the mingling of light
and heavy threads upon some living loom. Hands joining hands, all
singing, these naked worshippers of fire and wind passed in and out
among the blazing piles with a headlong precision that was torrential
and yet orderly. The speed increased; the faces flashed and vanished,
then flashed and passed again; each woman between two men, each man
between two women, and Lord Ernie, radiantly alive, between two girls
of rich, o’erflowing beauty. Their movements were undulating, like
the undulations of fire, yet with sudden, unexpected upward leaps as
when fire is partnered abruptly by a cantering wind. For the women were
fire, and the men were wind. The imitative dance was in full swing. The
marvellous wind and fire ritual unrolled its old-world magic.

It was awe-inspiring certainly, but for Hendricks, as he watched, the
terror of big conflagrations was wholly absent: rather, he felt the
sense of deep security that rhythmic movement causes. Bathed in a sea
of elemental power, he burned to share the pagan splendour and the
rush of primitive delight. It seemed he had a cosmic body in which
new centres stirred to life, linking him on to this source of natural
forces. Through these centres he drew the chaotic energy into nerves
and blood and muscle, into the very substance of his thought, indeed,
transmuting them into the magic of the will. Abundant and inexhaustible
vigour filled the air, pouring freely into whatever empty receptacle
lay at hand. Sheets of flame, whole separate fragments of it, torn at
the edges, raced, loudly, hungrily flapping on vehement gusts of wind;
curved as they flew; leaped, twisted, flashed and vanished. And the
figures closely copied them. The women tossed their bodies aloft, then
dipped suddenly to the earth, invisible, till the rushing men urged
them into view again with wild impetuous swing, so that the entire line
stretched and contracted like an immense elastic band of life, now
knotted, now dissolved.

Yet, while of raging and terrific beauty, there was never that mad
abandon which is disorder; but rather a kind of sacred natural revel
that prohibited mere licence. There was even a singular austerity in
it that betrayed a definite ritual and not mere reckless pageantry.
No walls could possibly have contained it. In cathedral, temple, or
measured space, however grand, it could only have seemed exaggerated
and apostate; here, beneath the open sky, it was beautiful and true.
For overhead the stars burned clear and steady, the constellations
watching it from their immovable towers--a representation of their own
leisured and hierarchic dance in swifter miniature. And indeed this
relationship it bore to a universal rhythm was the key, it seemed, to
its deep significance; for the close imitation of natural movements
seduced the colossal powers of fire and wind to swell human emotions
till they became mould and vessel for this elemental manifestation
in men and women. Golden yellow in the blaze, the limbs of the women
flashed and passed; their hair flew dark a moment across gleaming
breasts; and their waving arms tossed in ever-shifting patterns through
the driving smoke. The fires boiled and roared, scattering torrents of
showering sparks like stars; and amid it all the slim, white shoulders
of the boy, his clothes torn from him, his eyes ablaze, and his lips
opened to the singing as though he had known it always, drove to and
fro on the crest of the ritual like some flying figure of wind and fire
incarnate.

All of which, instantaneously yet in sequence, Hendricks witnessed,
painted upon the wild night sky. A volcanic energy poured through
him too. He knew a golden enthusiasm of immeasurable strength, of
unconquerable hope, of irresistible delight. Wind set his feet to
dancing, and fire swept across his face without a trace of burning.

Nature was part of him. He had stepped inside. No obstacle existed that
could withstand for a single second the torrential energy that fired
his heart and blood. There was lightning in his veins. He could sweep
aside life’s difficult barriers with the ease of a tornado, and shake
the rubbish of doubt and care from the years with earthquake shocks.
Empires he could mould, and play with nations, drive men and women
before him like a flock of sheep, shatter convention, and dislocate the
machinery time has foisted upon natural energies. He knew in himself
the omnipotence of the lesser elemental deities. Yet, as sympathetic
observer, he can but have felt a tithe of what Lord Ernie felt.

‘We are the whirlwind and we are the fire!’ he cried aloud with the
rushing worshippers. ‘We are unconquerable and immense! We destroy the
lukewarm and absorb the weak! For we can make evil into good by bending
it all one way!...’

The roar swept thunderingly past him, catching at his voice and body.
He felt himself snatched forward by the wind. The fire licked sweetly
at him. It was the final abandonment. He plunged recklessly towards the
surge of dancers....


X

What stopped him he did not know. Some hard and steely thing pricked
sharply into him. An opposing power, fierce as a sword, stabbed at his
heart--and he heard a little sound quite close beside him, a sound that
pierced the babel, reaching his consciousness as from far away.

‘Keep still! Cling tight to this old rock! Hold yourself in, or else
they’ll have you too!’

It was as if some insect scratched within his ear. His arm, that same
instant, was violently seized. He came down with a crash. He had been
half in the air. He had been dancing.

‘Turn your eyes away, away! Take hold of this big tree!’ The voice
cried furiously, but with a petty human passion in it that marred the
world. There was an intolerable revulsion in him as he heard it. He
felt himself dragged forcibly backwards. He lost his balance, stumbling
among loose stones.

‘Loose me! Let me go!’ he shouted, struggling like a wild animal, yet
vainly, against the inflexible grip that held him. ‘I am one with the
fire that lights but does not burn. I am the wind that blows the worlds
along! Damnation take you.... Let me free!...’

Confusion caught him, smothering speech and blinding sight. He fell
backwards, away from the heat and wind. He was furious, but furious
with he knew not whom or what. The interference had destroyed the
rhythm, broken it into fragments. Violent impulses clashed through
him without the will to choose or guide them. For power had deserted
him and flowed elsewhere. He stood no longer in the stream of energy.
He was emptied. And at first he could not tell whether his instinct
was to return himself, to rescue his precious boy, or--to crush the
interfering object out of existence with what was left to him of raging
anger. He turned, stood up, and flung the Pasteur aside with violence.
He raised his feet to stamp and kill ... when a phrase with meaning
darted suddenly across his wild confusion and recalled him to some
fragment of truer responsibility and life.

‘... There’ll be only violence in him--reckless violence instead of
strength--destructive. Save him before it is too late!’

‘It _is_ too late,’ he roared in answer. ‘What devil hinders me?’

But his roar was feeble, and his ironed boots refused the stamping.
Power slipped wholly out of him. The rhythm poured past, instead of
through him. Interference had destroyed the circuit. More glimmerings
of responsibility came back. He stooped like a drunken man and helped
the other to his feet. The rapidity of the change was curious, proving
that the spell had been put upon him from without. It was not, as with
the boy, mere development of pre-existing tendencies.

‘Help me,’ he implored suddenly instead, ‘help me! There has been
madness in me. For God’s sake, help me to get him out!’ It seemed the
face of the old Marquess, stern and terrible, broke an instant through
the smoky air, black with reproach and anger. And, with a violent
effort of the will, Hendricks turned round to face the elemental orgy,
bent on rescue. But this time the heat was intolerable and drove him
back. The hair, hitherto untouched, now singed upon his head. Fire
licked his very breath away. He bent double, covering his face with
arms and cloak.

‘Pray!’ shouted Leysin, dropping to his knees. ‘It is the only way. My
God is higher than this. Pray, pray!’

And, automatically, Hendricks fell upon his knees beside him, though
to pray he knew not how. For no real faith was in him as in the other,
and his eye was far from single. The fast fading grandeur of what he
had experienced still left its pagan tumult in his blood. The pretence
of prayer could only have been blasphemy. He watched instead, letting
the other invoke his mighty Deity alone, that Deity he had served
unflinchingly all his life with faith and fasting, and with belief
beyond assault.

It was an impressive picture, fraught with passionate drama. On his
knees behind a sheltering boulder, a blackened pine-tree tossing
scorched branches above his head, this righteous man prayed to his God,
sure of his triumphant answer. Hendricks watched with an admiration
that made him realise his own insignificance. The eyes were closed,
the leonine big head set firm upon the diminutive body, the face now
lit by flame, now veiled by smoke, the strong hands clasped together
and upraised. He envied him. He recognised, too, that the elements
themselves, with all their chaos of might and terror, were after all
but servants of the Vastness which dips the butterflies in colour
and puts down upon the breasts of little robins. And, because the
Pasteur’s life had been always prayer in action, his little human will
invoked the Will of Greatness, merged with it, used it, and directed
it steadily against the commotion of these unleashed elements. Certain
of himself and of his God, the Pasteur never doubted. His prayer set
instantly in action those forces which balance suns and keep the stars
afloat.

Thus, trembling with terror that made him wholly ineffective, Hendricks
watched, and, as he watched, became aware of the amazing change. For
it seemed as if a stream of power, steady and in opposition to the
tumult, now poured audaciously against the elemental rhythm, altering
its direction, modifying gradually its stupendous impetus. There were
pauses in the huge vibrations: they wavered, broke, and fled. They knew
confusion, as when the prow of a steel-nosed vessel drives against
the tide. The tide is vaster, but the steel is--different. The whole
sky shivered, as this new entering force, so small, so soft, yet of
such incalculable energy, began at once its overmastering effect.
Signs of violence or rout, or of anything disordered, had no part in
it; excess before it slipped into willing harness; there was light
that sponged away all glare, as when morning sunshine cleans a forest
of its shadows. Some little whispering power sang marvellously as of
old across the desolate big mountains, ‘Peace! Be still!’ turning
the monstrous turbulence into obedient sweetness. And upon his face
and hands Hendricks felt faint, delicate touches of some refreshing
softness that he could not understand.

Yet not instantly was this harmony restored; at first there was the
stress of vehement opposition. The night of wind and fire drove roaring
through the sky. There were bursts of triumphant tumult, but convulsion
in them and no true steadiness as before. The human figures hitherto
had danced with that fluid appearance which belongs to fire, and with
that instantaneous rush which is of wind, the men increasing the women,
and the women answering with joy; limbs and faces had melted into each
other till the circular ritual looked like a glowing wheel of flame
rotating audibly. But slowly now the speed of the wheel decreased;
the single utterance was marred by the crying of many voices, all at
different pitch, discordant, inharmonious, dismayed. The fires somehow
dwindled; there came pauses in the wind; and Hendricks became aware of
a curious hissing noise, as more and more of these odd soft touches
found his face and hands. Here and there, he saw, a figure stumbled,
fell, then gathered itself clumsily together again with a frightened
shout, breaking violently out of the circle. More and more these
figures blundered and dropped out; and although they returned again,
so that the dance apparently increased, these were but moments in the
final violence of the dispersing hurricane. The rejected ones dashed
back wildly into the wrong places; men and women no longer stood
alternate, but in groups together, falsely related. The entire movement
was dislocated; the ceremony grew rapidly incoherent; meaning forsook
it. The composite instrument that had transmuted the elemental forces
into human, emotional storage was imperfect, broken, out of tune. The
disarray turned rout.

And then it was, while Leysin continued without ceasing his burning and
successful prayer, that his companion, conscious of returning harmony,
rose to his feet, aware suddenly that he could also help. A portion of
the powers he had absorbed still worked in him, but in a new direction.
He felt confident and unafraid. He did not stumble. With unerring tread
he advanced towards the lessening fires, feeling as he did so the cold
soft touches multiply with a rush upon his skin. From all sides they
came by hundreds, like messengers of help.

‘Ernest!’ he cried aloud, and his voice, though little raised, carried
resonantly above the dying turmoil; ‘Ernest! Come back to us. Your
father calls you!’

And from threescore faces hurrying in confusion through the smoke,
one paused and turned. It stood apart, hovering as though in air,
while the mob of disordered figures rushed in a body along the ridge.
Plunging like frightened cattle below the farther edge, then vanishing
into thick darkness, they left behind them this one solitary face. A
final dying flame licked out at it; a rush of smoke drove past to hide
it; there was a high, wild scream--and the figure shot forward with a
headlong leap and fell with a crash at Hendricks’ feet. Lord Ernie,
blackened by smoke and scorched by fire, lay safe outside the danger
zone.

And Hendricks knelt beside him. Remorse and shame made him powerless
to do more as he pulled the torn clothing over the neck and chest
and heard his own heart begging for forgiveness. He realised his own
weakness and faithlessness. A great temptation had found him wanting....

It was owing to Leysin that the rescue was complete. The Pasteur was
instantly by his side.

‘Saved as by water,’ he cried, as he folded his cloak about the
prostrate body, and then raised the head and shoulders; ‘saved by His
ministers of rain. For His miracles are love, and work through natural
laws.’

He made a sign to Hendricks. Carrying the boy between them, they
scrambled down the slope into the shelter of the trees below. The cold,
soft touches were then explained. The _joran_ had dropped as suddenly
as it rose, and the torrential rain that invariably follows now poured
in rivers from the sky. Water, drenching the fires and padding the
savage wind, had stopped the dancers midway in their frenzied ritual.
It was the element they dreaded, for it was hostile. Rain soused the
mountain ridge, extinguishing the last embers of the numerous fires.
It rushed in rivulets between their feet. The heated earth gave out a
hissing steam, and the only sound in the spaces where wind and fire had
boomed and thundered a little while before was now the splash of water
and the drip of quenching drops.

In the cover of the sheltering trees the body stirred, lifted its head,
and sat up slowly. The eyes opened.

‘I’m cold. I’m frightened,’ whispered a shivering voice. ‘Where am I?’

Only the pelt and thud of the rain sounded behind the quavering words.

‘Where are the others? Have I been away? Hendricks--Mr. Hendricks--is
that you----?’

He stared about him, his face now a mere luminous disc in the thick
darkness. No breath of wind was loose. They spoke to him till he
answered with assurance, groping to find their hands with his own, his
words confused and strange with hidden meaning for a time. ‘I’m all
right now,’ he kept repeating. ‘I know exactly. It was one of my big
dreams ... I suppose I fell asleep ... and the rain woke me. Great
heavens! What a night to be out.’ And then he clambered vigorously to
his feet with a sudden movement of great energy again, saying that
hunger was in him and he must eat. There was no complaint of heat or
cold, of burning or of bruises. The boy recovered marvellously. In ten
minutes, breaking away from all support, he led, as they descended
through the dripping forest in the gloom and chill of very early
morning. It was the others who called to him for guidance in the
tangled woods. Lord Ernie was in the lead. Throughout the difficult
woods he was ever in front, and singing:

‘Fire that lights but does not burn! And wind that blows the heart to
flame! They both are in me now for ever and ever! Oh, praise the Lord
of Fire and the Lord of Wind...!’

And this voice, now near, now distant, sounding through the dripping
forest on their homeward journey, was an experience weird and
unforgettable for those other two. Leysin, it seemed, had one sentence
only which he kept repeating to himself--‘Heaven grant he may direct it
all for good. For they have filled him to the brim, and he is become an
instrument of power.’

But Hendricks, though he understood the risk, felt only confidence.
Lord Ernie’s regeneration had begun.

Soaked and bedraggled, all three, they reached the village about two
o’clock. The boy, utterly unmanageable, said an emphatic No to spirits,
soup, or medical appliances. His skin, indeed, showed no signs of
burning, nor was there the smallest symptom of cold or fever in him.
‘I’m a perfect furnace,’ he laughed; ‘I feel health and strength
personified.’ And the brightness of his eyes, his radiant colour, the
vigour of his voice and manner--both in some way astonishing--made all
pretence of assistance unnecessary and absurd. ‘It’s like a new birth,’
he cried to Hendricks, as he almost cantered beside him down the road
to their house, ‘and, by Jove, I’ll wake ’em up at home and make the
world go round. I know a hundred schemes. I tell you, sir, I’m simply
bursting! For the first time I’m alive!’

And an hour later, when the tutor peeped in upon him, the boy was
calmly sleeping. The candle-light, shaded carefully with one hand, fell
upon the face. There were new lines and a new expression in it. Will
and purpose showed in the stern set of the lips and jaw. It was the
face of a man, and of a man one would not lightly trifle with. Purpose,
will, and power were established on their thrones. To such a man the
entire world might one day bow the head.

‘If only it will last,’ thought Hendricks, as, shaken, bewildered, and
more than a little awed, he tiptoed out of the room again and went
to bed. But through his dreams, sheeted in flame and veiled in angry
smoke, the face of the old Marquess glowered upon him from a heavy sky
above ancestral towers.


XI

From the obituary notices of the 9th Marquess of Oakham the following
selections have their interest: He succeeded to his father, then in
the Cabinet as Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the age of twenty-one.
His career was brief but singular, the early magnificence of the
younger Pitt offering a standard of comparison, though by no means a
parallel, to his short record of astonishing achievement. His effect
upon the world, first as Chief of the Government Labour Department and
subsequently as Home Secretary, and Minister of War, is described as
shattering, even cataclysmic. His public life lasted five years. He
died at the age of twenty-nine. His personality was revolutionary and
overwhelming.

For, judging by these extracts, he was a ‘Napoleonic figure whose
personal influence combined the impetus of Mirabeau and the dominance
of Alexander. His authority held an incalculable element, precisely
described as uncanny. His spirit was puissant, elemental, his activity
irresistible.’ Yet, according to another journal, ‘he was, properly
speaking, neither intellectual, astute, nor diplomatic, and possessed
as little subtlety as might be expected of a miner whose psychology was
called upon to explain the Trinity. In no sense was he Statesman, and
even less strategist, yet his name swept Europe, changed the map of
the Nearer East, its mere whisper among the Chancelleries convulsing
men’s counsels with an influence almost menacing.’

His enthusiasm appears to have been amazing. ‘Some stupendous and
untiring energy drove through him, paralysing attack, and rendering the
bitterest and most skilful opposition nugatory. His hand was imperious,
upsetting with a touch the chessboards set by the most able statecraft,
and his voice was heard with a kind of reverence in every capital.’

The brevity of his astonishing career called for universal comment, as
did the hypnotising effect of his singular ascendency. ‘In five short
years of power he achieved his sway. He rushed upon the world, he shook
it, he retired,’ as one journal picturesquely phrased it. ‘The manner
of his ending, moreover--a stroke of lightning,--seemed in keeping
with his life. There was neither lingering, delay, nor warning. Of
distinguished stock, noble, yet ordinary enough in all but name, his
power is unexplained by heredity; his family furnished no approach to
greatness, as history supplied no parallel to his dynamic intensity.
Nor, we are informed, among his near of kin, does any inherit his
volcanic energy.’

The world, however, was apparently well relieved of his tumultuous
presence, for his influence was generally surveyed as ‘destructive
rather than constructive.’ He was unmarried, and the title went to a
nephew.

The cheaper journals abounded, of course, in details of his personal
and private life that were freely copied into the foreign press, and
supply curious material for the student of human nature and the
psychologist. The amazing revelations no doubt were picturesquely
exaggerated, yet the sub-stratum of truth in them all was generally
admitted. No contradictions, at any rate, appeared. They read
like the story of some primitive, wild giant let loose upon the
world--primitive, because his specific brain power was admittedly of
no high order; wild, because he was in favour of fierce, spontaneous
action, and his mere presence, on occasions, could stir a nation,
not alone a crowd, to vehement, terrific methods. His energy seemed
inexhaustible, his fire inextinguishable.

Legends were rife, even before he died, among the peasantry of his
Scotch estates, that he was in league with the devil. His habit of
keeping enormous fires in his private rooms, fires that burned day and
night from January to December, and in open hearths widened to thrice
their natural size, stimulated the growth of this particular myth among
those of his personal environment. All manner of stories raged. But
it was his strange custom out-of-doors that provided the diabolical
suggestion. For, ‘behind a specially walled-in space on an open ridge,
denuded of pines, in a distant part of the estate, a series of gigantic
heaps of wood, all ready to ignite, were--it was said--kept in a state
of constant preparedness. And on stormy nights, especially when winds
were high, and invariably at the period of the equinoctial tempests,
his lordship would himself light these tremendous bonfires, and spend
the nocturnal hours in their blazing presence, communing, the stories
variously relate, with the witches at their Sabbath, or with hordes
of fire-spirits, who emerged from the Bottomless Pit in order to feed
his soul with their unquenchable supplies. From these nightly orgies,
it seems clear, at any rate, he returned at dawn with a splendour of
energy that no one could resist, and with a mien whose grandeur invited
worship rather than inspired alarm.’

His biography, it was further stated, would be written by Sir John
Hendricks, Bt., who began life as Private Secretary to his father, the
8th Marquess, but whose rapid rise to position was due to his intimate
association as trusted friend and adviser to the subject of these
obituary notices. The biography, however, had not appeared, within five
years of Lord Oakham’s sudden death, and curiosity is only further
stimulated by the suggestive whisper that it never will, and never can
appear.




THE SACRIFICE


I

Limasson was a religious man, though of what depth and quality
were unknown, since no trial of ultimate severity had yet tested
him. An adherent of no particular creed, he yet had his gods; and
his self-discipline was probably more rigorous than his friends
conjectured. He was so reserved. Few guessed, perhaps, the desires
conquered, the passions regulated, the inner tendencies trained
and schooled--not by denying their expression, but by transmuting
them alchemically into nobler channels. He had in him the makings
of an enthusiastic devotee, and might have become such but for two
limitations that prevented. He loved his wealth, labouring to increase
it to the neglect of other interests; and, secondly, instead of
following up one steady line of search, he scattered himself upon many
picturesque theories, like an actor who wants to play all parts rather
than concentrate on one. And the more picturesque the part, the more
he was attracted. Thus, though he did his duty unshrinkingly and with
a touch of love, he accused himself sometimes of merely gratifying a
sensuous taste in spiritual sensations. There was this unbalance in him
that argued want of depth.

As for his gods--in the end he discovered their reality by first
doubting, then denying their existence.

It was this denial and doubt that restored them to their thrones,
converting his dilettante skirmishes into genuine, deep belief; and the
proof came to him one summer in early June when he was making ready to
leave town for his annual month among the mountains.

With Limasson mountains, in some inexplicable sense, were a passion
almost, and climbing so deep a pleasure that the ordinary scrambler
hardly understood it. Grave as a kind of worship it was to him; the
preparations for an ascent, the ascent itself in particular, involved a
concentration that seemed symbolical as of a ritual. He not only loved
the heights, the massive grandeur, the splendour of vast proportions
blocked in space, but loved them with a respect that held a touch
of awe. The emotion mountains stirred in him, one might say, was of
that profound, incalculable kind that held kinship with his religious
feelings, half realised though these were. His gods had their invisible
thrones somewhere among the grim, forbidding heights. He prepared
himself for this annual mountaineering with the same earnestness that a
holy man might approach a solemn festival of his church.

And the impetus of his mind was running with big momentum in this
direction, when there fell upon him, almost on the eve of starting, a
swift series of disasters that shook his being to its last foundations,
and left him stunned among the ruins. To describe these is unnecessary.
People said, ‘One thing after another like that! What appalling luck!
Poor wretch!’ then wondered, with the curiosity of children, how in the
world he would take it. Due to no apparent fault of his own, these
disasters were so sudden that life seemed in a moment shattered, and
his interest in existence almost ceased. People shook their heads and
thought of the emergency exit. But Limasson was too vital a man to
dream of annihilation. Upon him it had a different effect--he turned
and questioned what he called his gods. They did not answer or explain.
For the first time in his life he doubted. A hair’s breadth beyond lay
definite denial.

The ruin in which he sat, however, was not material; no man of his
age, possessed of courage and a working scheme of life, would permit
disaster of a material order to overwhelm him. It was collapse of a
mental, spiritual kind, an assault upon the roots of character and
temperament. Moral duties laid suddenly upon him threatened to crush.
His _personal_ existence was assailed, and apparently must end. He must
spend the remainder of his life caring for others who were nothing to
him. No outlet showed, no way of escape, so diabolically complete was
the combination of events that rushed his inner trenches. His faith
was shaken. A man can but endure so much, and remain human. For him
the saturation point seemed reached. He experienced the spiritual
equivalent of that physical numbness which supervenes when pain has
touched the limit of endurance. He laughed, grew callous, then mocked
his silent gods.

It is said that upon this state of blank negation there follows
sometimes a condition of lucidity which mirrors with crystal
clearness the forces driving behind life at a given moment, a kind of
clairvoyance that brings explanation and therefore peace. Limasson
looked for this in vain. There was the doubt that questioned, there
was the sneer that mocked the silence into which his questions fell;
but there was neither answer nor explanation, and certainly not peace.
There was no relief. In this tumult of revolt he did none of the
things his friends suggested or expected; he merely followed the line
of least resistance. He yielded to the impetus that was upon him when
the catastrophe came. To their indignant amazement he went out to his
mountains.

All marvelled that at such a time he could adopt so trivial a line of
action, neglecting duties that seemed paramount; they disapproved. Yet
in reality he was taking no definite action at all, but merely drifting
with the momentum that had been acquired just before. He was bewildered
with so much pain, confused with suffering, stunned with the crash that
flung him helpless amid undeserved calamity. He turned to the mountains
as a child to its mother, instinctively. Mountains had never failed
to bring him consolation, comfort, peace. Their grandeur restored
proportion whenever disorder threatened life. No calculation, properly
speaking, was in his move at all; but a blind desire for a violent
physical reaction such as climbing brings. And the instinct was more
wholesome than he knew.

In the high upland valley among lonely peaks whither Limasson then
went, he found in some measure the proportion he had lost. He
studiously avoided thinking; he lived in his muscles recklessly. The
region with its little Inn was familiar to him; peak after peak he
attacked, sometimes with, but more often without a guide, until his
reputation as a sane climber, a laurelled member of all the foreign
Alpine Clubs, was seriously in danger. That he overdid it physically
is beyond question, but that the mountains breathed into him some
portion of their enormous calm and deep endurance is also true. His
gods, meanwhile, he neglected utterly for the first time in his life.
If he thought of them at all, it was as tinsel figures imagination had
created, figures upon a stage that merely decorated life for those
whom pretty pictures pleased. Only--he had left the theatre and their
make-believe no longer hypnotised his mind. He realised their impotence
and disowned them. This attitude, however, was subconscious; he lent to
it no substance, either of thought or speech. He ignored rather than
challenged their existence.

And it was somewhat in this frame of mind--thinking little, feeling
even less--that he came out into the hotel vestibule after dinner one
evening, and took mechanically the bundle of letters the porter handed
to him. They had no possible interest for him; in a corner where the
big steam-heater mitigated the chilliness of the hall, he idly sorted
them. The score or so of other guests, chiefly expert climbing men,
were trailing out in twos and threes from the dining-room; but he felt
as little interest in them as in his letters: no conversation could
alter facts, no written phrases change his circumstances. At random,
then, he opened a business letter with a typewritten address--it
would probably be impersonal, less of a mockery, therefore, than the
others with their tiresome sham condolences. And, in a sense, it was
impersonal; sympathy from a solicitor’s office is mere formula, a few
extra ticks upon the universal keyboard of a Remington. But as he
read it, Limasson made a discovery that startled him into acute and
bitter sensation. He had imagined the limit of bearable suffering and
disaster already reached. Now, in a few dozen words, his error was
proved convincingly. The fresh blow was dislocating.

This culminating news of additional catastrophe disclosed within him
entirely new reaches of pain, of biting, resentful fury. Limasson
experienced a momentary stopping of the heart as he took it in, a
dizziness, a violent sensation of revolt whose impotence induced almost
physical nausea. He felt like--death.

‘Must I suffer all things?’ flashed through his arrested intelligence
in letters of fire.

There was a sullen rage in him, a dazed bewilderment, but no positive
suffering as yet. His emotion was too sickening to include the smaller
pains of disappointment; it was primitive, blind anger that he knew.
He read the letter calmly, even to the neat paragraph of machine-made
sympathy at the last, then placed it in his inner pocket. No outward
sign of disturbance was upon him; his breath came slowly; he reached
over to the table for a match, holding it at arm’s length lest the
sulphur fumes should sting his nostrils.

And in that moment he made his second discovery. The fact that further
suffering was still possible included also the fact that some touch of
resignation had been left in him, and therefore some vestige of belief
as well. Now, as he felt the crackling sheet of stiff paper in his
pocket, watched the sulphur die, and saw the wood ignite, this remnant
faded utterly away. Like the blackened end of the match, it shrivelled
and dropped off. It vanished. Savagely, yet with an external calmness
that enabled him to light his pipe with untrembling hand, he addressed
his futile deities. And once more in fiery letters there flashed
across the darkness of his passionate thought:

‘Even this you demand of me--this cruel, ultimate sacrifice?’

And he rejected them, bag and baggage; for they were a mockery and a
lie. With contempt he repudiated them for ever. The stage of doubt
had passed. He denied his gods. Yet, with a smile upon his lips; for
what were they after all but the puppets his religious fancy had
imagined? They never had existed. Was it, then, merely the picturesque,
sensational aspect of his devotional temperament that had created them?
That side of his nature, in any case, was dead now, killed by a single
devastating blow. The gods went with it.

Surveying what remained of his life, it seemed to him like a city that
an earthquake has reduced to ruins. The inhabitants think no worse
thing could happen. Then comes the fire.

       *       *       *       *       *

Two lines of thought, it seems, then developed parallel in him
and simultaneously, for while underneath he stormed against this
culminating blow, his upper mind dealt calmly with the project of a
great expedition he would make at dawn. He had engaged no guide. As
an experienced mountaineer, he knew the district well; his name was
tolerably familiar, and in half an hour he could have settled all
details, and retired to bed with instructions to be called at two. But,
instead, he sat there waiting, unable to stir, a human volcano that any
moment might break forth into violence. He smoked his pipe as quietly
as though nothing had happened, while through the blazing depths of him
ran ever this one self-repeating statement: ‘Even this you demand of
me, this cruel, ultimate sacrifice!...’ His self-control, dynamically
estimated, just then must have been very great and, thus repressed, the
store of potential energy accumulated enormously.

With thought concentrated largely upon this final blow, Limasson had
not noticed the people who streamed out of the _salle à manger_ and
scattered themselves in groups about the hall. Some individual, now and
again, approached his chair with the idea of conversation, then, seeing
his absorption, turned away. Even when a climber whom he slightly knew
reached across him with a word of apology for the matches, Limasson
made no response, for he did not see him. He noticed nothing. In
particular he did not notice two men who, from an opposite corner, had
for some time been observing him. He now looked up--by chance?--and was
vaguely aware that they were discussing him. He met their eyes across
the hall, and started.

For at first he thought he knew them. Possibly he had seen them about
in the hotel--they seemed familiar--yet he certainly had never spoken
with them. Aware of his mistake, he turned his glance elsewhere,
though still vividly conscious of their attention. One was a clergyman
or a priest; his face wore an air of gravity touched by sadness, a
sternness about the lips counteracted by a kindling beauty in the
eyes that betrayed enthusiasm nobly regulated. There was a suggestion
of stateliness in the man that made the impression very sharp. His
clothing emphasised it. He wore a dark tweed suit that was strict in
its simplicity. There was austerity in him somewhere.

His companion, perhaps by contrast, seemed inconsiderable in his
conventional evening dress. A good deal younger than his friend,
his hair, always a tell-tale detail, was a trifle long; the thin
fingers that flourished a cigarette wore rings; the face, though
picturesque, was flippant, and his entire attitude conveyed a
certain insignificance. Gesture, that faultless language which
challenges counterfeit, betrayed unbalance somewhere. The impression
he produced, however, was shadowy compared to the sharpness of the
other. ‘Theatrical’ was the word in Limasson’s mind, as he turned his
glance elsewhere. But as he looked away he fidgeted. The interior
darkness caused by the dreadful letter rose about him. It engulfed him.
Dizziness came with it....

Far away the blackness was fringed with light, and through this light,
stepping with speed and carelessness as from gigantic distance, the two
men, suddenly grown large, came at him. Limasson, in self-protection,
turned to meet them. Conversation he did not desire. Somehow he had
expected this attack.

Yet the instant they began to speak--it was the priest who opened
fire--it was all so natural and easy that he almost welcomed the
diversion. A phrase by way of introduction--and he was speaking of
the summits. Something in Limasson’s mind turned over. The man was a
serious climber, one of his own species. The sufferer felt a certain
relief as he heard the invitation, and realised, though dully, the
compliment involved.

‘If you felt inclined to join us--if you would honour us with your
company,’ the man was saying quietly, adding something then about ‘your
great experience’ and ‘invaluable advice and judgment.’

Limasson looked up, trying hard to concentrate and understand.

‘The Tour du Néant?’ he repeated, mentioning the peak proposed. Rarely
attempted, never conquered, and with an ominous record of disaster, it
happened to be the very summit he had meant to attack himself next day.

‘You have engaged guides?’ He knew the question foolish.

‘No guide will try it,’ the priest answered, smiling, while his
companion added with a flourish, ‘but we--we need no guide--if _you_
will come.’

‘You are unattached, I believe? You are alone?’ the priest enquired,
moving a little in front of his friend, as though to keep him in the
background.

‘Yes,’ replied Limasson. ‘I am quite alone.’

He was listening attentively, but with only part of his mind. He
realised the flattery of the invitation. Yet it was like flattery
addressed to some one else. He felt himself so indifferent, so--dead.
These men wanted his skilful body, his experienced mind; and it was his
body and mind that talked with them, and finally agreed to go. Many a
time expeditions had been planned in just this way, but to-night he
felt there was a difference. Mind and body signed the agreement, but
his soul, listening elsewhere and looking on, was silent. With his
rejected gods it had left him, though hovering close still. It did not
interfere; it did not warn; it even approved; it sang to him from great
distance that this expedition cloaked another. He was bewildered by the
clashing of his higher and his lower mind.

‘At one in the morning, then, if that will suit you ...’ the older man
concluded.

‘I’ll see to the provisions,’ exclaimed the younger enthusiastically,
‘and I shall take my telephoto for the summit. The porters can come as
far as the Great Tower. We’re over six thousand feet here already, you
see, so ...’ and his voice died away in the distance as his companion
led him off.

Limasson saw him go with relief. But for the other man he would have
declined the invitation. At heart he was indifferent enough. What
decided him really was the coincidence that the Tour du Néant was the
very peak he had intended to attack himself _alone_, and the curious
feeling that this expedition cloaked another somehow--almost that these
men had a hidden motive. But he dismissed the idea--it was not worth
thinking about. A moment later he followed them to bed. So careless
was he of the affairs of the world, so dead to mundane interests, that
he tore up his other letters and tossed them into a corner of the
room--unread.


II

Once in his chilly bedroom he realised that his upper mind had
permitted him to do a foolish thing; he had drifted like a schoolboy
into an unwise situation. He had pledged himself to an expedition with
two strangers, an expedition for which normally he would have chosen
his companions with the utmost caution. Moreover, he was guide; they
looked to him for safety, while yet it was they who had arranged and
planned it. But who were these men with whom he proposed to run grave
bodily risks? He knew them as little as they knew him. Whence came,
he wondered, the curious idea that this climb was really planned by
another who was no one of them?

The thought slipped idly across his mind; going out by one door, it
came back, however, quickly by another. He did not think about it more
than to note its passage through the disorder that passed with him just
then for thinking. Indeed, there was nothing in the whole world for
which he cared a single brass farthing. As he undressed for bed, he
said to himself: ‘I shall be called at one ... but why am I going with
these two on this wild plan?... And who made the plan?’...

It seemed to have settled itself. It came about so naturally and
easily, so quickly. He probed no deeper. He didn’t care. And for the
first time he omitted the little ritual, half prayer, half adoration,
it had always been his custom to offer to his deities upon retiring to
rest. He no longer recognised them.

How utterly broken his life was! How blank and terrible and lonely! He
felt cold, and piled his overcoats upon the bed, as though his mental
isolation involved a physical effect as well. Switching off the light
by the door, he was in the act of crossing the floor in the darkness
when a sound beneath the window caught his ear. Outside there were
voices talking. The roar of falling water made them indistinct, yet he
was sure they were voices, and that one of them he knew. He stopped
still to listen. He heard his own name uttered--‘John Limasson.’ They
ceased. He stood a moment shivering on the boards, then crawled into
bed beneath the heavy clothing. But in the act of settling down, they
began again. He raised himself again hurriedly to listen. What little
wind there was passed in that moment down the valley, carrying off the
roar of falling water; and into the moment’s space of silence dropped
fragments of definite sentences:

‘They are close, you say--close down upon the world?’ It was the voice
of the priest surely.

‘For days they have been passing,’ was the answer--a rough, deep tone
that might have been a peasant’s, and a kind of fear in it, ‘for all my
flocks are scattered.’

‘The signs are sure? You know them?’

‘Tumult,’ was the answer in much lower tones. ‘There has been tumult in
the mountains....’

There was a break then as though the voices sank too low to be heard.
Two broken fragments came next, end of a question--beginning of an
answer.

‘... the opportunity of a lifetime?’

‘... if he goes of his own free will, success is sure. For acceptance
is ...’

And the wind, returning, bore back the sound of the falling water, so
that Limasson heard no more....

An indefinable emotion stirred in him as he turned over to sleep. He
stuffed his ears lest he should hear more. He was aware of a sinking of
the heart that was inexplicable. What in the world were they talking
about, these two? What was the meaning of these disjointed phrases?
There lay behind them a grave significance almost solemn. That ‘tumult
in the mountains’ was somehow ominous, its suggestion terrible and
mighty. He felt disturbed, uncomfortable, the first emotion that
had stirred in him for days. The numbness melted before its faint
awakening. Conscience was in it--he felt vague prickings--but it was
deeper far than conscience. Somewhere out of sight, in a region life
had as yet not plumbed, the words sank down and vibrated like pedal
notes. They rumbled away into the night of undecipherable things. And,
though explanation failed him, he felt they had reference somehow
to the morrow’s expedition: how, what, wherefore, he knew not; his
name had been spoken--then these curious sentences; that was all. Yet
to-morrow’s expedition, what was it but an expedition of impersonal
kind, not even planned by himself? Merely his own plan taken and
altered by others--made over? His personal business, his personal life,
were not really in it at all.

The thought startled him a moment. He had no personal life...!

Struggling with sleep, his brain played the endless game of
disentanglement without winning a single point, while the under-mind in
him looked on and smiled--because it _knew_. Then, suddenly, a great
peace fell over him. Exhaustion brought it perhaps. He fell asleep; and
next moment, it seemed, he was aware of a thundering at the door and an
unwelcome growling voice, ‘_’s ist bald ein Uhr, Herr! Aufstehen!_’

Rising at such an hour, unless the heart be in it, is a sordid and
depressing business; Limasson dressed without enthusiasm, conscious
that thought and feeling were exactly where he had left them on going
to sleep. The same confusion and bewilderment were in him; also the
same deep solemn emotion stirred by the whispering voices. Only long
habit enabled him to attend to detail, and ensured that nothing was
forgotten. He felt heavy and oppressed, a kind of anxiety about him;
the routine of preparation he followed gravely, utterly untouched
by the customary joy; it was mechanical. Yet through it ran the old
familiar sense of ritual, due to the practice of so many years,
that cleansing of mind and body for a big Ascent--like initiatory
rites that once had been as important to him as those of some priest
who approached the worship of his deity in the temples of ancient
time. He performed the ceremony with the same care as though no
ghost of vanished faith still watched him, beckoning from the air as
formerly.... His knapsack carefully packed, he took his ice-axe from
beside the bed, turned out the light, and went down the creaking wooden
stairs in stockinged feet, lest his heavy boots should waken the other
sleepers. And in his head still rang the phrase he had fallen asleep
on--as though just uttered:

‘The signs are sure; for days they have been passing--close down upon
the world. The flocks are scattered. There has been tumult--tumult in
the mountains.’ The other fragments he had forgotten. But who were
‘they’? And why did the word bring a chill of awe into his blood?

And as the words rolled through him Limasson felt tumult in his
thoughts and feelings too. There had been tumult in his life, and
all his joys were scattered--joys that hitherto had fed his days.
The signs were sure. Something was close down upon his little
world--passing--sweeping. He felt a touch of terror.

Outside in the fresh darkness of very early morning the strangers stood
waiting for him. Rather, they seemed to arrive in the same instant as
himself, equally punctual. The clock in the church tower sounded one.
They exchanged low greetings, remarked that the weather promised to
hold good, and started off in single file over soaking meadows towards
the first belt of forest. The porter--mere peasant, unfamiliar of
face and not connected with the hotel--led the way with a hurricane
lantern. The air was marvellously sweet and fragrant. In the sky
overhead the stars shone in their thousands. Only the noise of falling
water from the heights, and the regular thud of their heavy boots broke
the stillness. And, black against the sky, towered the enormous pyramid
of the Tour du Néant they meant to conquer.

Perhaps the most delightful portion of a big ascent is the beginning in
the scented darkness while the thrill of possible conquest lies still
far off. The hours stretch themselves queerly; last night’s sunset
might be days ago; sunrise and the brilliance coming seem in another
week, part of dim futurity like children’s holidays. It is difficult to
realise that this biting cold before the dawn, and the blazing heat to
come, both belong to the same to-day.

There were no sounds as they toiled slowly up the zigzag path through
the first fifteen hundred feet of pine-woods; no one spoke; the clink
of nails and ice-axe points against the stones was all they heard. For
the roar of water was felt rather than heard; it beat against the ears
and the skin of the whole body at once. The deeper notes were below
them now in the sleeping valley; the shriller ones sounded far above,
where streams just born out of ponderous snow-beds tinkled sharply....

The change came delicately. The stars turned a shade less brilliant,
a softness in them as of human eyes that say farewell. Between the
highest branches the sky grew visible. A sighing air smoothed all their
crests one way; moss, earth, and open spaces brought keen perfumes; and
the little human procession, leaving the forest, stepped out into the
vastness of the world above the tree-line. They paused while the porter
stooped to put his lantern out. In the eastern sky was colour. The
peaks and crags rushed closer.

Was it the Dawn? Limasson turned his eyes from the height of sky
where the summits pierced a path for the coming day, to the faces of
his companions, pale and wan in the early twilight. How small, how
insignificant they seemed amid this hungry emptiness of desolation. The
stupendous cliffs fled past them, led by headstrong peaks crowned with
eternal snows. Thin lines of cloud, trailing half way up precipice and
ridge, seemed like the swish of movement--as though he caught the earth
turning as she raced through space. The four of them, timid riders on
the gigantic saddle, clung for their lives against her titan ribs,
while currents of some majestic life swept up at them from every side.
He drew deep draughts of the rarefied air into his lungs. It was very
cold. Avoiding the pallid, insignificant faces of his companions, he
pretended interest in the porter’s operations; he stared fixedly on the
ground. It seemed twenty minutes before the flame was extinguished, and
the lantern fastened to the pack behind. This Dawn was unlike any he
had seen before.

For, in reality, all the while, Limasson was trying to bring order
out of the extraordinary thoughts and feelings that had possessed him
during the slow forest ascent, and the task was not crowned with much
success. The Plan, made by others, had taken charge of him, he felt;
and he had thrown the reins of personal will and interest loosely upon
its steady gait. He had abandoned himself carelessly to what might
come. Knowing that he was leader of the expedition, he yet had suffered
the porter to go first, taking his own place as it was appointed to
him, behind the younger man, but before the priest. In this order, they
had plodded, as only experienced climbers plod, for hours without a
rest, until half way up a change had taken place. He had wished it,
and instantly it was effected. The priest moved past him, while his
companion dropped to the rear--the companion who forever stumbled
in his speed, whereas the older man climbed surely, confidently.
And thereafter Limasson walked more easily--as though the relative
positions of the three were of importance somehow. The steep ascent of
smothering darkness through the woods became less arduous. He was glad
to have the younger man behind him.

For the impression had strengthened as they climbed in silence that
this ascent pertained to some significant Ceremony, and the idea had
grown insistently, almost stealthily, upon him. The movements of
himself and his companions, especially the positions each occupied
relatively to the other, established some kind of intimacy that
resembled speech, suggesting even question and answer. And the entire
performance, while occupying hours by his watch, it seemed to him more
than once, had been in reality briefer than the flash of a passing
thought, so that he saw it within himself--pictorially. He thought of a
picture worked in colours upon a strip of elastic. Some one pulled the
strip, and the picture stretched. Or some one released it again, and
the picture flew back, reduced to a mere stationary speck. All happened
in a single speck of time.

And the little change of position, apparently so trivial, gave point to
this singular notion working in his under-mind--that this ascent was a
ritual and a ceremony as in older days, its significance approaching
revelation, however, for the first time--now. Without language, this
stole over him; no words could quite describe it. For it came to him
that these three formed a unit, himself being in some fashion yet the
acknowledged principal, the leader. The labouring porter had no place
in it, for this first toiling through the darkness was a preparation,
and when the actual climb began, he would disappear, while Limasson
himself went first. This idea that they took part together in a
Ceremony established itself firmly in him, with the added wonder that,
though so often done, he performed it now for the first time with full
comprehension, knowledge, truth. Empty of personal desire, indifferent
to an ascent that formerly would have thrilled his heart with ambition
and delight, he understood that climbing had ever been a ritual for
his soul and of his soul, and that power must result from its sincere
accomplishment. It was a symbolical ascent.

In words this did not come to him. He felt it, never criticising. That
is, he neither rejected nor accepted. It stole most sweetly, grandly,
over him. It floated into him while he climbed, yet so convincingly
that he had felt his relative position must be changed. The younger
man held too prominent a post, or at least a wrong one--in advance.
Then, after the change, effected mysteriously as though all recognised
it, this line of certainty increased, and there came upon him the big,
strange knowledge that all of life is a Ceremony on a giant scale, and
that by performing the movements accurately, with sincere fidelity,
there may come--knowledge. There was gravity in him from that moment.

This ran in his mind with certainty. Though his thought assumed no form
of little phrases, his brain yet furnished detailed statements that
clinched the marvellous thing with simile and incident which daily
life might apprehend: That knowledge arises from action; that to do
the thing invites the teaching and explains it. Action, moreover, is
symbolical; a group of men, a family, an entire nation, engaged in
those daily movements which are the working out of their destiny,
perform a Ceremony which is in direct relation somewhere to the
pattern of greater happenings which are the teachings of the Gods. Let
the body imitate, reproduce--in a bedroom, in a wood--anywhere--the
movements of the stars, and the meaning of those stars shall sink
down into the heart. The movements constitute a script, a language.
To mimic the gestures of a stranger is to understand his mood, his
point of view--to establish a grave and solemn intimacy. Temples are
everywhere, for the entire earth is a temple, and the body, House of
Royalty, is the biggest temple of them all. To ascertain the pattern
its movements trace in daily life, _could_ be to determine the relation
of that particular ceremony to the Cosmos, and so learn power. The
entire system of Pythagoras, he realised, could be taught without a
single word--by movements; and in everyday life even the commonest
act and vulgarest movement are part of some big Ceremony--a message
from the Gods. Ceremony, in a word, is three-dimensional language, and
action, therefore, is the language of the Gods. The Gods he had denied
were speaking to him ... passing with tumult close across his broken
life.... Their passage it was, indeed, that had caused the breaking!

In this cryptic, condensed fashion the great fact came over him--that
he and these other two, here and now, took part in some great Ceremony
of whose ultimate object as yet he was in ignorance. The impact with
which it dropped upon his mind was tremendous. He realised it most
fully when he stepped from the darkness of the forest and entered the
expanse of glimmering, early light; up till this moment his mind was
being prepared only, whereas now he knew. The innate desire to worship
which all along had been his, the momentum his religious temperament
had acquired during forty years, the yearning to have proof, in a word,
that the Gods he once acknowledged were really true, swept back upon
him with that violent reaction which denial had aroused.

He wavered where he stood....

Looking about him, then, while the others rearranged burdens the
returning porter now discarded, he perceived the astonishing beauty
of the time and place, feeling it soak into him as by the very
pores of his skin. From all sides this beauty rushed upon him. Some
radiant, wingéd sense of wonder sped past him through the silent
air. A thrill of ecstasy ran down every nerve. The hair of his head
stood up. It was far from unfamiliar to him, this sight of the upper
mountain world awakening from its sleep of the summer night, but never
before had he stood shuddering thus at its exquisite cold glory,
nor felt its significance as now, so mysteriously _within himself_.
Some transcendent power that held sublimity was passing across this
huge desolate plateau, far more majestic than the mere sunrise among
mountains he had so often witnessed. There was Movement. He understood
why he had seen his companions insignificant. Again he shivered and
looked about him, touched by a solemnity that held deep awe.

Personal life, indeed, was wrecked, destroyed, but something greater
was on the way. His fragile alliance with a spiritual world was
strengthened. He realised his own past insolence. He became afraid.


III

The treeless plateau, littered with enormous boulders, stretched for
miles to right and left, grey in the dusk of very early morning. Behind
him dropped thick guardian pine-woods into the sleeping valley that
still detained the darkness of the night. Here and there lay patches
of deep snow, gleaming faintly through thin rising mist; singing
streams of icy water spread everywhere among the stones, soaking the
coarse rough grass that was the only sign of vegetation. No life was
visible; nothing stirred; nor anywhere was movement, but of the quiet
trailing mist and of his own breath that drifted past his face like
smoke. Yet through the splendid stillness there _was_ movement; that
sense of absolute movement which results in stillness--it was owing
to the stillness that he became aware of it--so vast, indeed, that
only immobility could express it. Thus, on the calmest day in summer,
may the headlong rushing of the earth through space seem more real
than when the tempest shakes the trees and water on its surface; or
great machinery turn with such vertiginous velocity that it appears
steady to the deceived function of the eye. For it was not through the
eye that this solemn Movement made itself known, but rather through
a massive sensation that owned his entire body as its organ. Within
the league-long amphitheatre of enormous peaks and precipices that
enclosed the plateau, piling themselves upon the horizon, Limasson felt
the outline of a Ceremony extended. The pulses of its grandeur poured
into him where he stood. Its vast design was knowable because they
themselves had traced--were even then tracing--its earthly counterpart
in little. And the awe in him increased.

‘This light is false. We have an hour yet before the true dawn,’ he
heard the younger man say lightly. ‘The summits still are ghostly. Let
us enjoy the sensation, and see what we can make of it.’

And Limasson, looking up startled from his reverie, saw that the
far-away heights and towers indeed were heavy with shadow, faint still
with the light of stars. It seemed to him they bowed their awful heads
and that their stupendous shoulders lowered. They drew together,
shutting out the world.

‘True,’ said his companion, ‘and the upper snows still wear the
spectral shine of night. But let us now move faster, for we travel very
light. The sensations you propose will but delay and weaken us.’

He handed a share of the burdens to his companion and to Limasson.
Slowly they all moved forward, and the mountains shut them in.

And two things Limasson noted then, as he shouldered his heavier pack
and led the way: first, that he suddenly knew their destination though
its purpose still lay hidden; and, secondly, that the porter’s leaving
before the ascent proper began signified finally that ordinary climbing
was not their real objective. Also--the dawn was a lifting of inner
veils from off his mind, rather than a brightening of the visible earth
due to the nearing sun. Thick darkness, indeed, draped this enormous,
lonely amphitheatre where they moved.

‘You lead us well,’ said the priest a few feet behind him, as he
picked his way unfalteringly among the boulders and the streams.

‘Strange that I do so,’ replied Limasson in a low tone, ‘for the way is
new to me, and the darkness grows instead of lessening.’ The language
seemed hardly of his choosing. He spoke and walked as in a dream.

Far in the rear the voice of the younger man called plaintively after
them:

‘You go so fast, I can’t keep up with you,’ and again he stumbled and
dropped his ice-axe among the rocks. He seemed for ever stooping to
drink the icy water, or clambering off the trail to test the patches of
snow as to quality and depth. ‘You’re missing all the excitement,’ he
cried repeatedly. ‘There are a hundred pleasures and sensations by the
way.’

They paused a moment for him to overtake them; he came up panting and
exhausted, making remarks about the fading stars, the wind upon the
heights, new routes he longed to try up dangerous couloirs, about
everything, it seemed, except the work in hand. There was eagerness in
him, the kind of excitement that saps energy and wastes the nervous
force, threatening a probable collapse before the arduous object is
attained.

‘Keep to the thing in hand,’ replied the priest sternly. ‘We are not
really going fast; it is you who are scattering yourself to no purpose.
It wears us all. We must husband our resources,’ and he pointed
significantly to the pyramid of the Tour du Néant that gleamed above
them at an incredible altitude.

‘We are here to amuse ourselves; life is a pleasure, a sensation, or it
is nothing,’ grumbled his companion; but there was a gravity in the
tone of the older man that discouraged argument and made resistance
difficult. The other arranged his pack for the tenth time, twisting
his axe through an ingenious scheme of straps and string, and fell
silently into line behind his leaders. Limasson moved on again ... and
the darkness at length began to lift. Far overhead, at first, the snowy
summits shone with a hue less spectral; a delicate pink spread softly
from the east; there was a freshening of the chilly wind; then suddenly
the highest peak that topped the others by a thousand feet of soaring
rock, stepped sharply into sight, half golden and half rose. At the
same instant, the vast Movement of the entire scene slowed down; there
came one or two terrific gusts of wind in quick succession; a roar like
an avalanche of falling stones boomed distantly--and Limasson stopped
dead and held his breath.

For something blocked the way before him, something he knew he could
not pass. Gigantic and unformed, it seemed part of the architecture
of the desolate waste about him, while yet it bulked there, enormous
in the trembling dawn, as belonging neither to plain nor mountain.
Suddenly it was there, where a moment before had been mere emptiness of
air. Its massive outline shifted into visibility as though it had risen
from the ground. He stood stock still. A cold that was not of this
world turned him rigid in his tracks. A few yards behind him the priest
had halted too. Farther in the rear they heard the stumbling tread of
the younger man, and the faint calling of his voice--a feeble broken
sound as of a man whom sudden fear distressed to helplessness.

‘We’re off the track, and I’ve lost my way,’ the words came on the
still air. ‘My axe is gone ... let us put on the rope!... Hark! Do you
hear that roar?’ And then a sound as though he came slowly groping on
his hands and knees.

‘You have exhausted yourself too soon,’ the priest answered sternly.
‘Stay where you are and rest, for we go no farther. This is the place
we sought.’

There was in his tone a kind of ultimate solemnity that for a moment
turned Limasson’s attention from the great obstacle that blocked his
farther way. The darkness lifted veil by veil, not gradually, but by a
series of leaps as when some one inexpertly turns a wick. He perceived
then that not a single Grandeur loomed in front, but that others of
similar kind, some huger than the first, stood all about him, forming
an enclosing circle that hemmed him in.

Then, with a start, he recovered himself. Equilibrium and common sense
returned. The trick that sight had played upon him, assisted by the
rarefied atmosphere of the heights and by the witchery of dawn, was no
uncommon one, after all. The long straining of the eyes to pick the way
in an uncertain light so easily deceives perspective. Delusion ever
follows abrupt change of focus. These shadowy encircling forms were but
the rampart of still distant precipices whose giant walls framed the
tremendous amphitheatre to the sky.

Their closeness was a mere gesture of the dusk and distance.

The shock of the discovery produced an instant’s unsteadiness in him
that brought bewilderment. He straightened up, raised his head, and
looked about him. The cliffs, it seemed to him, shifted back instantly
to their accustomed places; as though after all they _had_ been close;
there was a reeling among the topmost crags; they balanced fearfully,
then stood still against a sky already faintly crimson. The roar he
heard, that might well have seemed the tumult of their hurrying speed,
was in reality but the wind of dawn that rushed against their ribs,
beating the echoes out with angry wings. And the lines of trailing
mist, streaking the air like proofs of rapid motion, merely coiled and
floated in the empty spaces.

He turned to the priest, who had moved up beside him.

‘How strange,’ he said, ‘is this beginning of new light. My sight went
all astray for a passing moment. I thought the mountains stood right
across my path. And when I looked up just now it seemed they all ran
back.’ His voice was small and lost in the great listening air.

The man looked fixedly at him. He had removed his slouch hat, hot
with the long ascent, and as he answered, a long thin shadow flitted
across his features. A breadth of darkness dropped about them. It
was as though a mask were forming. The face that now was covered had
been--naked. He was so long in answering that Limasson heard his mind
sharpening the sentence like a pencil.

He spoke very slowly. ‘_They_ move perhaps even as Their powers move,
and Their minutes are our years. Their passage ever is in tumult. There
is disorder then among the affairs of men; there is confusion in their
minds. There may be ruin and disaster, but out of the wreckage shall
issue strong, fresh growth. For like a sea, They pass.’

There was in his mien a grandeur that seemed borrowed marvellously
from the mountains. His voice was grave and deep; he made no sign
or gesture; and in his manner was a curious steadiness that breathed
through the language a kind of sacred prophecy.

Long, thundering gusts of wind passed distantly across the precipices
as he spoke. The same moment, expecting apparently no rejoinder to his
strange utterance, he stooped and began to unpack his knapsack. The
change from the sacerdotal language to this commonplace and practical
detail was singularly bewildering.

‘It is the time to rest,’ he added, ‘and the time to eat. Let us
prepare.’ And he drew out several small packets and laid them in a
row upon the ground. Awe deepened over Limasson as he watched, and
with it a great wonder too. For the words seemed ominous, as though
this man, upon the floor of some vast Temple, said: ‘Let us prepare a
sacrifice...!’ There flashed into him, out of depths that had hitherto
concealed it, a lightning clue that hinted at explanation of the entire
strange proceeding--of the abrupt meeting with the strangers, the
impulsive acceptance of their project for the great ascent, their grave
behaviour as though it were a Ceremonial of immense design, his change
of position, the bewildering tricks of sight, and the solemn language,
finally, of the older man that corroborated what he himself had deemed
at first illusion. In a flying second of time this all swept through
him--and with it the sharp desire to turn aside, retreat, to run away.

Noting the movement, or perhaps divining the emotion prompting it, the
priest looked up quickly. In his tone was a coldness that seemed as
though this scene of wintry desolation uttered words:

‘You have come too far to think of turning back. It is not possible.
You stand now at the gates of birth--and death. All that might hinder,
you have so bravely cast aside. Be brave now to the end.’

And, as Limasson heard the words, there dropped suddenly into him a new
and awful insight into humanity, a power that unerringly discovered
the spiritual necessities of others, and therefore of himself. With
a shock he realised that the younger man who had accompanied them
with increasing difficulty as they climbed higher and higher--was
but a shadow of reality. Like the porter, he was but an encumbrance
who impeded progress. And he turned his eyes to search the desolate
landscape.

‘You will not find him,’ said his companion, ‘for he is gone. Never,
unless you weakly call, shall you see him again, nor desire to hear his
voice.’ And Limasson realised that in his heart he had all the while
disapproved of the man, disliked him for his theatrical fondness of
sensation and effect, more, that he had even hated and despised him.
Starvation might crawl upon him where he had fallen and eat his life
away before he would stir a finger to save him. It was with the older
man he now had dreadful business in hand.

‘I am glad,’ he answered, ‘for in the end he must have proved my
death--our death!’

And they drew closer round the little circle of food the priest had
laid upon the rocky ground, an intimate understanding linking them
together in a sympathy that completed Limasson’s bewilderment. There
was bread, he saw, and there was salt; there was also a little flask
of deep red wine. In the centre of the circle was a miniature fire of
sticks the priest had collected from the bushes of wild rhododendron.
The smoke rose upwards in a thin blue line. It did not even quiver, so
profound was the surrounding stillness of the mountain air, but far
away among the precipices ran the boom of falling water, and behind it
again, the muffled roar as of peaks and snow-fields that swept with a
rolling thunder through the heavens.

‘They are passing,’ the priest said in a low voice, ‘and They know
that you are here. You have now the opportunity of a lifetime; for, if
you yield acceptance of your own free will, success is sure. You stand
before the gates of birth and death. They offer you life.’

‘Yet ... I denied Them!’ He murmured it below his breath.

‘Denial is evocation. You called to them, and They have come. The
sacrifice of your little personal life is all They ask. Be brave--and
yield it.’

He took the bread as he spoke, and, breaking it in three pieces, he
placed one before Limasson, one before himself, and the third he laid
upon the flame which first blackened and then consumed it.

‘Eat it and understand,’ he said, ‘for it is the nourishment that shall
revive your fading life.’

Next, with the salt, he did the same. Then, raising the flask of wine,
he put it to his lips, offering it afterwards to his companion. When
both had drunk there still remained the greater part of the contents.
He lifted the vessel with both hands reverently towards the sky. He
stood upright.

‘The blood of your personal life I offer to Them in your name. By
the renunciation which seems to you as death shall you pass through
the gates of birth to the life of freedom beyond. For the ultimate
sacrifice that They ask of you is--this.’

And bending low before the distant heights, he poured the wine upon the
rocky ground.

For a period of time Limasson found no means of measuring, so terrible
were the emotions in his heart, the priest remained in this attitude of
worship and obeisance. The tumult in the mountains ceased. An absolute
hush dropped down upon the world. There seemed a pause in the inner
history of the universe itself. All waited--till he rose again. And,
when he did so, the mask that had for hours now been spreading across
his features, was accomplished. The eyes gazed sternly down into his
own. Limasson looked--and recognised. He stood face to face with the
man whom he knew best of all others in the world ... himself.

There had been death. There had also been that recovery of splendour
which is birth and resurrection.

And the sun that moment, with the sudden surprise that mountains only
know, rushed clear above the heights, bathing the landscape and the
standing figure with a stainless glory. Into the vast Temple where he
knelt, as into that greater inner Temple which is mankind’s true House
of Royalty, there poured the completing Presence which is--Light.

‘For in this way, and in this way only, shall you pass from death to
life,’ sang a chanting voice he recognised also now for the first time
as indubitably his own.

It was marvellous. But the birth of light is ever marvellous. It
was anguis

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