At a Winter's Fire

by Bernard Edward Joseph Capes

  DINAH'S MAMMOTH

  On a day early in the summer of the present year Miss Dinah Groom wasfound lying dead off a field-path of the little obscure Wiltshire villagewhich she had named her "rest and be thankful." At the date of herdecease she was not an old woman, though any one marking her white hairand much-furrowed features might have supposed her one. The hair,however, was ample in quantity, the wrinkles rather so many under-scoresof energy than evidences of senility; and until the blinds were down overher soul, she had looked into and across the world with a pair of eyesthat seemed to reflect the very blue and white of a June sky. No doubtshe had thought to breast the hills and sail the seas again in somerenaissance of vigour. No doubt her "retreat," like a Roman Catholic's,was designed to be merely temporary. She aped the hermit for the sake ofa sojourn in the hermitage. She came to her island of Avalon to berestored of her weary limbs and her blistered feet, so to speak; andthere her heart, too weak for her spirit, failed her, and she fellamongst the young budding poppies, and died.

  I use the word "heart" literally, and in no sentimental sense. To talk ofassociations of sentiment in connection with this lady would bemisleading. She herself would not have repudiated any responsibility forthe term as applied to her; she would have simply failed to understandthe term itself. There was no least affectation in this. Throughout herlife of sixty years, as I gather, she acted never once upon principle.Impulse and inclination dominated her, and she would indulge manyprimitive instincts without a thought of conventions. Yet she was notselfish; or, at least, only in the self-contained and self-protectivemeaning of the word. She was a perfect animal, conscious of her supremebrute caste, shrewd, resourceful, and the plain embodiment of truth.

  Miss Groom had, I think, a boundless feeling of fellowship with beauty ofwhatever description; but no least touch of that sorrow of affectionwhich, in its very humanity, is divine. Her unswerving creed was thatwoman was the inheritrix of the earth, the reversion of which she hadwilfully mortgaged to an alien race, and that she had bartered hermaterial immortality for a sensation. For man she had no vulgar andjealous contempt; but she feared and shrank from him as something movedby scruples with which she had no sympathy. She understood the world ofNature, and could respond to its bloodless caresses and passions. Shecould _not_ understand the moodiness that dwells upon a grievance, orthat would sell its birthright of joy for a pitiful memory.

  Yet (and here I must speak with discretion, for I have no sufficient datato go upon) there was that of contradictoriness in her character that, Ihave reason to believe, she had borne children, and had even been rightand particular as to their temporal welfare until such time as, in thenature of things, they were of an age to make shift for themselves. This,virtually, I know to be the case; and that, once quit of the primitivematernal responsibility, she gave no more thought to them than a thrushgives to its fledglings when she has educated them to their firstflights, and to the useful knack of cracking a snail on a stone.

  My own feeling about Dinah Groom was that she had "thrown back" a longway over the heads of heredity, and that, in her fearlessness, in herundegenerate physique, in the animal regularity of her face and form, shepresented to modern days a startling aboriginal type.

  Beautiful--save in the sense of symmetry--she can never have been to theordinary man; inasmuch as she would subscribe to no arbitrary standard ofhis dictating. She had a high, rich colour; but her complexion mustalways have been rough, and a pronounced little moustache crossed herupper lip, like an accent to the speech that was too distinct anduncompromising to be melodious. Her every limb and feature, however, wasinstinct with capability, and, in her presence, one must always be movedto marvel over that indescribable worship of disproportion that has grownto be the religion of a shapely race.

  * * * * *

  How I first became acquainted with Miss Groom it is unnecessary toexplain. During the last three years of her life I was fortunate to beher guest in the Wiltshire retreat for an aggregate of many months. Shetook a fancy to me--to my solitariness and moroseness, perhaps--and shenot only liked to have me with her, but, after a time, she fell intosomething of a habit of recalling for my benefit certain passages andexperiences of her past life. In doing this, there was no suggestion ofconfidence; and I am breaking no faith in alluding to them. She was afine talker--rugged, unpicturesque, but with an instinctive capacity ofselection in words. If I quote her, as I wish to do, I cannot reproduceher style; and that, no doubt, would appear bald on paper. But, at least,the matter is all her own.

  Now, I must premise that I arrogate to myself no exhibitory rights inthis lady. She was familiar with and to many from the foremost ranks ofthose who "follow knowledge like a sinking star"; those great andrestless spirits to whom inaction reads stagnation. To such, in allprobability, I tell, in speaking of Dinah Groom, a twice-told tale; and,therefore--inasmuch as I make it my business only to print what ishitherto unrecorded--to them I give the assurance that I do not claim tohave "discovered" their friend.

  * * * * *

  On a wall of the little embowered sitting-room hung a queer picture, byErnest Griset, of the "Overwhelming of the Mammoths in the Ice." From thefirst this odd conception had engaged my curiosity,--purely for itsfanciful side,--and one evening, in alluding to it, I made the not veryprofound remark that Imagination had no anatomy.

  "They are true beasts," said Dinah.

  "They are the mastodons of Cuvier, no doubt; but, then, Cuvier never sawa mastodon, you know."

  "But I have; and I tell you Griset and Cuvier are very nearly right."

  I expressed no surprise.

  "In what were they astray?" I asked.

  "The mammoth, as I saw it, had a huge hump--like the steam-chest of anenormous engine--over its shoulders."

  "And where did you see it, and when?"

  "You are curious to know?"

  "Yes, I think I am; and there is a quiet of expectancy abroad. I hear theghost of my dead brother walking in the corridor, Dinah; and we are allwaiting for you to speak."

  She smiled, and said, "Push me over the cigarettes."

  She struck a match, kindled the little crackling tube, and threw thelight out into the shrubbery. It traced a tiny arc of flame and vanished.The sky was full of the mewing of lost kittens, it seemed. The sound camefrom innumerable peewits, that fled and circled above the slopes of thedarkening meadows below.

  "What an uncomfortable seer you are!" she said, "to people this dearhuman night with your fancies. No doubt, now, you will read betweenthe lines of that bird speech down there?" (She looked at me curiously,but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul strugglingagainst the dimness of its own vision.) "To me it is articulatehappiness--nothing more abstruse. Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I wasas glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missinglink in a chain of evidence. From the moment, I knew myself quite clearlyto be the recovered heir to this abused planet."

  She paused a moment, and contracted her brows, as if regretfully and inanger. "If I had only seen it sooner!" she cried, low; "before I had, inmy pride of strength, tested the poison that has bewildered the brains ofmy sisters!"

  Her general reserve was her self-armour against the bolts of thePhilistines. What worldling would not have read mania in much that wasspoken by this sane woman? Yet, indeed, if we were all to find the powerto give expression to our inmost thoughts, madness and sanity would haveto change places in the order of affairs.

  "Once," said Dinah--"and it was when I was a young woman--a man in whom Iwas interested shipped as passenger on a whaling vessel. This friend waswhat is called a degenerate. Physically and morally he had yielded hisclaim to any share in that province of the sun, that his race hadconquered and annexed only to find it antipathetic to its needs.Combative effort was grown impossible to him, as in time it will grow toyou all. You drop from the world like dead flies from a wall. He couldnot physic his soul with woods, and groves, a
nd waters. To hisperceptions, life was become an abnormality--a disease of which hesickened, as you all must when the last of the fever of aggression hasbeen diluted out of your veins. You die of your triumph, as the bee diesof his own weapon of offence; and you can find no antidote to the poisonin the nature you have inoculated with your own virus.

  "This man contemplated self-destruction as the only escape. He had soughtdistraction of his moral torments in travel long and varied. Many of themost beautiful, of the historically interesting places of the world, hehad visited and sojourned in--without avail. His haunting feeling, hesaid, was that he did not belong to himself. Pursued by this Nemesis, hecame home to end it all. He still proclaimed his spiritual independence;but it was immeshed, and he must tear the strands. This was wonderfullyperplexing to me, and, out of my curiosity, I must persuade him to makeone more attempt. His late efforts, I assured him, were nothing but anendeavour to cure nausea with sweet syrups. He would not get his changeout of nature by such pitiful wooing. Let him, rather, emulate, if hecould not feel, the spirit of his remote forbears, and rally his nervesto an expedition into the harsh and awful places of the earth. I wouldaccompany him, and watch with and for him, and supply that of the fibrehe lacked.

  "He consented, and, after some difficulty (for there is an economy ofroom in whalers), we obtained passage in a vessel and sailed into theunknown. Our life and our food were simple and rugged; but the keen air,the relief from luxury, the novelty and the wonder, wrought upon mycompanion and renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note in himsigns of a moral preening--some smug resumption of that arrogant air ofsuperiority that is a tradition with your race."

  Miss Groom here puckered her lips, and breathed a little destructivelaugh upon her cigarette ash.

  "It did not last long," she said. "We encountered very bad weather, andhis nerves again went by the board. That was in the 60th longitude, Ithink (where whales were still to be found in those years), and sevenhundred miles or so to the east of Spitzbergen. On the day--it was inAugust--that the storm first overtook us, the boats were out in pursuitof a 'right' whale, as, I believe, the men called it--a great bullcreature, and piebald like a horse; and I saw the spouting of his breathas if a water main had burst in a London fog. The wind came in a suddencharge from the northwest, and the whale dived with a harpoon in itsback; and in the confusion a reel fouled, and one of the boats was whiptunder in a moment--half a mile down, perhaps--and its crew drawn withit, and their lungs, full of air, burst like bubbles. We had no time tothink of them. We got the other boat-load on board, and then the galesent us crashing down the slopes of the sea. I have no knowledge of howlong we were curst of the tempest and the sport of its ravings. I onlyknow that when it released us at last, we had been hurled a thousandmiles eastwards. The long interval was all a hellish jangle in which timeseemed obliterated. Sometimes we saw the sun--a furious red globe; and weseemed to stand still while it raced down the sky and ricocheted over thefurthermost waves like a red-hot cannon ball. Sometimes in pitch darknessthe wild sense of flight and expectation was an ecstasy. But through allmy friend lay in a half-delirious stupor.

  "At length a morning broke, full of icy scud, but the sea panting andexhausted of its rage. As a child catches its breath after a storm oftears, so it would heave up suddenly, and vibrate, and sink; and werocked upon it, a ruined hulk. We were off a flat, vacant shore--if shoreyou could call it--whose margin, for miles inland, it seemed, undulatedwith the lifting of the swell. It was treeless desolation manifest; andon our sea side, as far as the eye could reach, the water bobbed andwinked with countless spars of ice.

  "I will tell you at once, my friend,--we were brought to opposite aninhuman swamp on the coast of Siberia, fifty miles or more to the westof North-east Cape; and there what remained of the crew made shift tocast anchor; and for a day and night the ragged ship curtsied to theland, like a blind beggar to an empty street, and we only dozed in ourcorners and wondered at the silence.

  "By-and-by the men made a raft, and that took us all ashore. There wassomething like a definite coast-line, then; but for long before wetouched it the undersides of the planks were scraping and hissing overvegetation. This was the winter fur of the land--thick, coarse tundramoss; and on that we pitched a camp, and on that we remained for longweeks while the ship was mending. It was a weird, lonely time. Onceor twice strange, wandering creatures came our way--little, belted men,with hairless faces, who rode up on strong horses, and liked to exhibittheir skilful management of them. They talked to us in their chirpyjargon (Toongus, I think it was called); but jargon it must needs remainto us.

  "Well, we made a patch of the hulk, and we shipped in her again. We werefortunate to be able to do that, for, with every stiffish wind blowinginshore, we had feared she would drag her moorings and ground immovablyon the swamps. The land, indeed, was so flat and low that, whenever thesea rose at all, it threshed the very plains and crackled in the moss;and we were glad, despite the risk, to leave so lifeless a place."

  Dinah paused to light another cigarette, and to inhale the ecstasy of thefirst puff or so before she continued. Up through the still evening, froma curve of the main road that crooked an elbow to her front garden, camewhat sounded like the purring of a great cat--the wind in the telegraphwires.

  "And I am now to tell you," she said, "about the mastodon?"

  "As you please," I answered.

  "I do please; for why should I keep it to myself? It makes no difference;only I warn you, if you quote me, you will be writ down a fool or amaniac. This relation lacks witnesses, for the whaler--that Isubsequently quitted for another homing vessel--was never heard of inport any more."

  She looked at me with some serious scrutiny before she went on.

  "For these regions, it had been an extraordinarily hotsummer--phenomenally hot, I understand; and to this--to the melting andbreaking away of the ice from hitherto century-locked fastnesses, thecaptain attributed the wonderful experience that befell us. The sea wasstrewn with blocks and bergs, all hurrying onwards in the strongcurrents, as if in haste to escape the pursuing demon of frost thatshould re-fetter them; and their multitude kept the steersman's armsspinning till the man would fall half-fainting over the spoke-handles.

  "Now, one morning early in September, a dense bright fog dropped suddenlyupon the waters. We were making what sail we could--with our crippledspars and stunted trees of masts--and this it were useless to shorten,and so invite a rearward bombardment from the chasing hummocks. So wekept our course by the compass, and trailed on through a blind mist whilefear drummed in our throats. The demoralization of my friend was by thistime complete. For myself, I seldom had a thought but that Nature wouldsheathe her claws when she played with me.

  "'This cannot last long!' said the captain.

  "The words were on his lips when we struck with a noise like thesplintering of glass. We were all thrown down, and my companion screamedlike a mad thing. The captain rose and ran to the bows; and in a momenthe came back and his beard was shaking.

  "'God save us!' he cried, 'and fetch aft the rum!'

  "There you have man in his invincible moods. They drank till they were ina condition to face death; and then they found that our situation wasrather improved than otherwise by the collision. For--so it appeared--wehad run full tilt for a perpendicular fissure in a huge block, andinto that our bows were firmly wedged, the nature of the impactdistributing the shock, and the berg itself carrying us along with it andprotecting us.

  "Now the dipping motion of the vessel was exchanged for a heavy regularwash along its stern quarters; for the bows were so much raised as that Ifelt a little strain on my knees as I went forward to satisfy mycuriosity with a view of the icy mass into which we were penetrated. Iwaited, indeed, until the crew were come aft again from looking, and myfriend crept timidly at my shoulder; but when we reached the stem, therewas one of the hands, a little soberer than his fellows, sprawled overthe bulwarks, and staring with all his eyes into the green lift of thewall
against him.

  "'Is it a mermaid you see, Killigrew?' I asked.

  "The man shifted his gaze to me slowly and solemnly.

  "'Nowt, nowt,' said he; 'but a turble monster, like a pram stuck injelly.'

  "I laughed, and went to his side. The fog, as I have said, was dense andbright, and one could see into it a little way, as into a milky whiteagate. But now and again a film of it would pull thin, and then sunlightcame through and made a dim radiance of the ice.

  "'I can make out nothing,' I said.

  "He cocked an eye and leered up at me. 'Look steady and sober,' he said,'and you'll make en owut like as in a glass darkly.'

  "I gave a little gasp and my friend a cry before the words were issuedfrom the man's mouth. Drawn by some current of air, the fog at themoment blew out of the cleft, like smoke from a chimney; and there,before our gaze, was a great curved tusk coming up through the ice andinside it.

  "Now I clapped my hands in an agony, lest the fog should close in again,and the vision fade before my eyes; for, following the sweep of the tusk,I was aware of the phantom presentment of some monster creature lyingimbedded within the ice, its mighty carcase prostrate as it had fallen;the conformation of its enormous forehead presented directly to ourgaze. Its little toffee-ball eyes--little proportionately, that is tosay--squinted at us, it seemed, through half-closed lids, and a huge,hairy trunk lay curled, like the proboscis of a dead moth, between itstree-like fore-legs. Away beyond, the great red-brown drum of its hidebellied upward on ribs as thick as a Dutch galliot's, and sprouting fromits shoulders was the hump I have mentioned, but here, from its position,sprawled abroad and lying over in a shapeless mass.

  "There was something else--horribly nauseating but for its strangeness.The brute had been partly disembowelled, as there was ample evidence toshow, for the ice had preserved all.

  "Suddenly my companion gave a high nervous shriek.

  "'Look!' he cried--'the hand! the hand sticking out of the side!'

  "I saw in a moment; turned, and called excitedly to the captain. He--allthe crew--came tumbling forward up the slippery deck. I seized him by theshoulder.

  "'Do you see?' I screamed--'the human hand beckoning to us from thatgreat body!'

  "He gazed stupidly, swaying where he stood.

  "'One o' them bloomin' pre-hadymite cows!' he muttered; 'caught in thecold nip, by thunder! and some unfortnit crept into her for warmth.'

  "I believed the creature's rude intuition had flown true.

  "'Cannot you get at it?' I gasped.

  "He stared at me. All in an instant a little paltry demon of avariceblinked out of his eye-holes.

  "'Why,' he said slowly, 'who knows but it mayn't be a gal a-jingling fromtop to toe with gold curtain rings!'

  "He was a furious dare-devil immediately, and quick, and savage, andperemptory. His spirit entered into his men. They went over the sidewith pikes and axes, and, scrambling for any foothold, set to work on theice like maniacs. In the lust of cupidity they did not even think howthey wrought against their own safety and that of the ship.

  "The point of the uppermost tusk came to within a foot of theice-surface. This they soon reached, and, prising frantically withcrowbars, flaked off and rolled away half-ton blocks of thesuperincumbent mass. I need not detail the fierce process. In half anhour they had laid bare a great segment of that part of the trunk whencethe hand protruded, and then they paused, and at a word flung down theirtools.

  "I was leaning over the bulwarks watching them. I could contain myexcitement no longer.

  "'Come,' I said to my friend, 'help me down, for I must go.'

  "He climbed over, trembling, and assisted me to a standing on the ice. Wescrambled along the track of _debris_ left by the crew. At the momenthalf a dozen of the latter were rolling back a broad flap of the hide, inwhich they had found a long L-shaped rent revealed. Then a hoarse crybroke from them, and I stumbled forward and looked down, and saw.

  "They lay beneath the mighty ribs as in a cage, of which the intercostalspaces were a foot in width, and the bars of a strength to maintain theenormous pressure of that which had surrounded and entombed them; theylay in one close group, their naked limbs smeared with the stain of theirprison--a man, a woman, and a tiny child. From their faces, and theirunfallen flesh, they might have been sleeping; but they were not; theywere come down to us, a transfixture of death--prehistoric people in aprehistoric brute, and their eyes--their eyes!"

  Dinah's voice trailed off into silence. Some expression that I could notinterpret was on her face. There was regret in it, but nothing of pathosor mysticism. Suddenly she breathed out a great sigh and resumed hernarrative.

  "You will want to know how they looked, these lifeless survivors of aremote race from a remote time? I will try to tell you. The men hackedaway the ribs with their axes, and laid bare the group lying in thehollow scooped out of the fallen beast. They were little people, and theman, according to your modern canons of taste, was by far the mostbeautiful of the three. He sat erect, with one uplifted arm projectedthrough the ribs; as if, surprised by the frost-stroke, he had started toescape, and had been petrified in the act. His face, wondering anddelicate as a baby's, was hairless; and his head only a pretty infantiledown covered--a curling floss as radiant as spun glass. His wide-openeyes glinted yet with a hyacinth blue, and it was difficult to realizethat they were dead and vacant.

  "The woman was of coarser mould, ruddy, vigorous, brown-haired and eyed.She looked the very hamadryad of some blossoming tree, a sweet capriciousdaughter of the blameless earth. Everything luxuriated in her--colour,hair, and lusty flesh; and the child she held to her bosom with a mannerthat indescribably commingled contempt, and resentment, and a passion ofproprietorship.

  "This baby--joining the prominent characteristics of the two--was theoddest little mortal I have ever seen. What did its expression convey tome? 'I am fairly caught, and must brazen out the situation!' There! thatwas what it was; I cannot put it more lucidly. Only the thing's wee facewas animal conscious for the first time of itself, and inclined torejoice in that primitive energy of knowledge.

  "Now, my friend, I must tell you how the sight operated upon me and uponmy companion. For myself, I can only say that, looking upon that fine,independent fore-mother of my race, I felt the sun in my veins and thewiny fragrance of antique woods and pastures. I laughed; I clapped myhands; I danced on the ice-rubbish, so that they thought me mad. But, forthe other--the man--he was in a different plight. He was transfigured;his nervousness was gone in a flash. He cast himself down upon his knees,and gazed and gazed, his hands clasped, upon that sleek, mild progenitorof his, that pure image of gentle self-containment, whose very meeknesssuggested an indomitable will.

  "Suddenly he, my friend, cried out: 'This is one caught in the process ofmaterialization! It is not flesh; my God, no!'

  "It seemed, indeed, as if it were as he said. I stopped in my caperingand looked down. The tarry hinds standing by grinned and jeered.

  "On the instant there came a splintering snap, and the floe rocked andcurtsied.

  "'Back!' yelled the captain. 'She's breaking through by the head!'

  "He shrieked of the ship. She was clearing herself, had already shakenher prow free of the ice.

  "There was a wild scamper for safety. I was carried with the throng. Itwas not until I was hauled on board once more that I thought of myfriend. He still knelt where we had fled from him, a wrapt, strangeexpression on his face.

  "'Come back!' I screamed. 'You will be lost!'

  "Now at that he turned his head and looked at me; but he never moved, andhis voice came to me quiet and exultant.

  "'Lost!' he said, 'ay, for forty-three years: and here, here I findmyself!'

  "We dipped, and the wash of the water came about our bows. The block ofice swerved, made a sluggish half-pirouette and dropped astern.

  "'Come!' I shrieked again faintly.

  "With the echo of my cry he was a phantom, a blot, had vanished in therearward fog;
and thereout a little joyous laugh came to me.

  "And that was a queer good-bye for ever, wasn't it?"