by John Buchan
They had emerged from the throat of the couloir, and were out on the fan of the lower and easier slopes when disaster overtook them. The Hare miscalculated a foot-hold at a place where there was glazed ice on the snow, and shot downward on his back. He, and the weight of the baggage, plucked Leithen from his stance, and the next second the whole outfit had started a mad glissade. The rope round Leithen’s middle choked the breath out of him. He cannoned into the baggage and ricochetted off; he cannoned into Big Klaus; his mouth and eyes were choked with snow; some rib of rock or ice caught his thigh and hurt him. . . . Once, climbing at Courmayeur alone, he had slipped on a snowfield and been whirled to what he believed to be his end in a bergschrund (which happened to be nearly full of snow into which he had dropped comfortably). Now once again, before his senses left him, he had the same certainty of death and the same apathy. . . .
17
He recovered consciousness to find the Hare attempting a kind of rough massage of his chest. For a minute or two he lay comatose, breathing heavily, but not suffering pain except for his bruised thigh. Slowly, with immense difficulty, he tested his body for damage. There seemed to be little — no concussion — the bruise — the breath knocked out of him but returning under the Hare’s ministrations. It was not until he tried to get to his feet that he realised how much the glissade had taken toll of his strength.
The valley bottom was like a new creation, for the whole flavour of the landscape was changed. It was no longer the roof of the world where the mind and eye were inured to far horizons, but a place enclosed, muffled, defended by great rock bastions from the bleak upper air. Against the eastern wall the snow lay piled in big drifts, but there was no snow on the western side and very little in the intervening meadows. In these same meadows there was what looked like frozen pools, but the rigour of the frost had not touched the whole river, for below one of the patches of forest there was a gleam of running water. There was not a breath of wind, the slanting sunlight gilded the russet grasses and snow patches, the air was unbelievably mild. Here in this fantastic sanctuary was nothing of North America. Apart from the sheer containing walls, the scene might have been a Northumbrian pasture in an English December.
But all the pith had gone out of him. It seemed as if the strain of the descent had damaged some nerve control, for his weakness was worse than pain. He struggled to his feet and clutched at the Hare to keep himself from falling. The latter had got the baggage straightened out and was restrapping the guns. He nodded down the valley —
“He has gone that way,” he said. But how he had guessed Lew’s route he did not tell, nor did the other inquire.
For to Leithen it looked as if in this strange place he had got very near his journey’s end. He toiled in the wake of the Hare for something less than a mile, counting each step, utterly oblivious of anything but the dun herbage under foot. He tried to step in the Indian’s prints, but found them too long for his enfeebled legs. He who had once had the stride of a mountaineer now teetered like an affected woman. He made little bets with himself — how many steps until he fell? — would Big Klaus turn back, see his distress, and stop of his own accord? . . . The latter guess was right. The Indian, turning, saw a face like death, and promptly flung down his pack and announced that he would make camp.
There was a patch of gravel where the stream made a sharp bend, and there, in the lee of a tall coppice, a fire was lit. The Hare had to loosen the light pack from Leithen’s shoulders, for he had lost all muscular power. His fingers seemed to bend back on him if he tried to lift a blanket. Also his breath was so troublesome that in that open place he panted like a man suffocating in a hole. The fit passed and by the time the tent was up and the beds laid his main trouble was his desperate weakness. Big Klaus fed him for supper with gruel and strong tea, but he was able to swallow little. His throat was as impotent as his hands and legs.
But his mind was no longer wholly apathetic, for he had stumbled on a queer corner of recollection. He had been conscious of the apathy of his memory, for, had he been able to choose, he would have been glad in those evil days to “count his mercies,” to remember with a wry satisfaction the many pleasant things in his life. No present misery could kill his gratitude for past joys. But the past had remained a closed book to him, and he had had no thoughts except for the moment.
Now suddenly, with blinding clearness, he saw a picture. Outside his bedroom door in a passage on the upper floor of the old Scots country house of his boyhood, there had hung a print. It was a Munich photogravure called Die Toten-Insel, and showed an island of tall cliffs, and within their angle a grove of cypresses, while a barge full of bent and shrouded figures approached this home of the dead. The place was Sick Heart Valley — the same sheer cliffs, the same dark, evergreen trees; the Hare and he, bowed and muffled figures, were approaching the graveyard. . . . As a boy he had been puzzled by the thing, but had rather liked it. As he dashed out on a spring morning its sombreness had pleased him by its contrast with his own sunlit world. . . . Now, though he saw the picture of those April days, he could not recapture the faintest flavour of that spring rapture. He saw only the dark photogravure on the distempered passage wall, and his interest was faintly touched by its likeness to his present environment. . . . Surely he was already dead, for he had ceased to react to life!
Through the open tent door he could see the northern heavens ablaze with the aurora. The frost was closing down again, for the Dancers seemed to give out a crackling sound as if the sky were the back-cloth of a stage with the painted canvas strained to cracking-point. The spectacle did not stir his apathy. This blanched world was rioting in colour, but it was still blanched and bleached, the enemy of all life.
As he lay wakeful, scarcely conscious of the dull pain in his chest or of the spasms in his breathing, but desperately aware of his weakness, he felt the shadow of eternity deepening over him. Like Job, the last calamities had come on him. Thank Heaven he was free from loquacious friends. Like Job he bowed his head and had no impulse to rebel. The majesty of God filled his universe. He was coming face to face with his religion.
He had always been in his own way a religious man. Brought up under the Calvinistic shadow, he had accepted a simple evangel which, as he grew older, had mellowed and broadened. At Oxford he had rationalised it in his philosophical studies, but he had never troubled to make it a self-sufficing logical creed. Certain facts were the buttresses of his faith, and the chief of them was the omnipotence and omnipresence of God. He had always detested the glib little humanism of most of his contemporaries.
But his creed had remained something aloof from his life. He had no communion with the omnipotent God and no craving for it. It rarely impinged on his daily experience. When things went well he felt a dim gratitude to Omnipotence; when badly, it was a comfort to tell himself that it was God’s will and to take misfortune cheerfully. In the War it had been different. Then he felt a relation so close as to be almost communion — that he was not only under God’s ultimate command, but under His direct care. That was why his nerves had been so steady. It was foolish to worry about what was preordained.
Then had come long years of spiritual sloth. The world had been too much with him. But certain habits had continued. Still in his heart he had praised God for the pleasures of life, and had taken disappointments with meekness, as part of a divine plan. Always, when he reflected, he had been conscious of being a puppet in Almighty hands. So he had never been much cast down or much puffed up. He had passed as a modest man — a pose, some said; a congenital habit, said others. His friends had told him that if he had only pushed himself he might have been Prime Minister. Foolish! These things were ordained.
Now his castles had been tumbled down. Pleasant things they had been, even if made of paste-board; in his heart he had always known that they were pasteboard. Here was no continuing city. God had seen fit to change the sunlight for a very dark shadow. Well, under the shadow he must not quail but keep his head high, not in re
volt or in defiance, but because He, who had made him in His image, expected such courage. “Though Thou slay me, yet will I trust in Thee.”
There was no shade of grievance in Leithen’s mind, still less self-pity. There was almost a grim kind of gratitude. He was now alone with God. In these bleak immensities the world of man had fallen away to an infinite distance, and the chill of eternity was already on him. He had no views about an after-life. That was for God’s providence to decree. He was an atom in infinite space, the humblest of slaves waiting on the command of an august master.
He remembered a phrase of Cromwell’s about putting his mouth in the dust. That was his mood now, for he felt above everything his abjectness. In his old bustling world there were the works of man’s hands all around to give a false impression of man’s power. But here the hand of God had blotted out life for millions of miles and made a great tract of the inconsiderable ball which was the earth, like the infinite interstellar spaces which had never heard of man.
18
He woke to a cold which seemed to sear that part of his face which the blanket left exposed. There was a great rosy light all about the tent which the frost particles turned into a sparkling mist.
The Hare stood above him.
“There is a man,” he said, “beyond the river under the rocks. I have seen a smoke.”
The news gave Leithen the extra incentive that made it possible for him to rise. He hung on to the Hare’s shoulder, and it was in that posture that he drank some strong tea and swallowed a mouthful of biscuit. The smoke, he was told, was perhaps a mile distant in a nook of the cliffs. The long pool of the river was frozen hard, and beyond it was open ground.
Leithen’s strength seemed suddenly to wax. A fever had taken him, a fever to be up and doing, to finish off his business once for all. His weakness was almost a physical anguish, and there was a horrid background of nausea. . . . But what did it all matter? He was very near his journey’s end. One way or another in a few hours he would be quit of his misery.
The Hare guided him — indeed, half carried him — over the frozen hummocks of the pool. Beyond was a slight rise, and from that a thin spire of smoke could be seen in an angle of the cliffs. In the shelter of the rise Leithen halted.
“You must stay here,” he told the Indian, “and see what happens to me. If I am killed you will go back to where we came from and tell my friend what has happened. He may want to come here, and in that case you will show him the road. If I do not die now you will make camp for yourself a little way off and at dawn tomorrow you will come where the smoke is. If I am alive you may help me. If I am dead you must return to my friend. Do you understand?”
The Hare shook his head. The orders seemed to be unacceptable, and Leithen had to repeat them again before he nodded in acquiescence.
“Good-bye,” he said. “God bless you for an honest man.”
The turf was frozen hard, but it was as level as a croquet lawn and made easy walking. All Leithen’s attention was concentrated on his crazy legs. They wobbled and shambled and sprawled, and each step was a separate movement which had to be artfully engineered. He took to counting them — ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred. He seemed to have made no progress. Two hundred, three hundred — here he had to scramble in and out of a small watercourse — four hundred, five hundred.
A cry made him lift his eyes, and he saw a man perhaps two hundred yards distant.
The man was shouting, but he could not hear what he said. A horrid nausea was beginning to afflict him — the overpowering sickness which comes to men who reach the extreme limits of their strength. Then there was a sound which was not the human voice, and something sang not far from his left shoulder. He had taken perhaps six further steps when the same something passed somewhere on his right.
His dulled brain told him the meaning of it. “He must be bracketing,” he said to himself. “The third shot will get me in the heart or the head, and then all will be over.” He found himself longing for it as a sick man longs for the morning. But it did not come. Instead came the nausea and the extremity of weakness. The world swam in a black mist, and strength fled from his limbs, like air from a slit bladder.
19
When Leithen’s weakness overpowered him he might lose consciousness, but when he regained it there was no half-way house of dim perception to return to. He alternated between a prospect of acid clarity and no prospect at all. . . . Now he took in every detail of the scene, though he was puzzled at first to interpret them.
At first he thought that it was night and that he was lying out of doors, for he seemed to be looking up to a dark sky. Then a splash of light on his left side caught his attention, and he saw that it outlined some kind of ceiling. But it was a ceiling which lacked at least one supporting wall, for there was a great blue vagueness pricked out with points of light, and ruddy in the centre with what looked like flames. It took him some time to piece together the puzzle. . . . He was in a cave, and towards the left he was looking to the open where a big fire was burning.
There was another light, another fire it seemed. This was directly in front of him, but he could not see the flames, only the glow on floor and roof, so that it must be burning beyond a projecting rib of rock. There must be a natural flue there, he thought, an opening in the roof, for there was no smoke to make his eyes smart.
He was lying on a pile of spruce boughs covered with a Hudson’s Bay blanket. There was a bitter taste on his lips as he passed his tongue over them — brandy or whisky it seemed; anyhow some kind of spirit. Somebody, too, had been attending to him, for the collar of his dicky had been loosened, and he was wearing an extra sweater which was not his own. Also his moccasins had been removed and his feet rolled snugly in a fold of the blanket. . . .
Presently a man came into the light of the inner fire. The sight of him awoke Leithen to memory of the past days. This could only be Lew Frizel, whom he had come to find — a man who had gone mad, according to his brother’s view, for he had left Galliard to perish; one who a few hours back had beyond doubt shot at himself. Then he had marched forward without a tremor, expecting a third bullet to find his heart, for it would have been a joyful release. Now, freed from the extreme misery of weakness, he found himself nervous about this brother of Johnny’s — why, he did not know, for his own fate was beyond caring about. Lew’s madness, whatever it was, could not be wholly malevolent, for he had taken some pains to make comfortable the man he had shot at. Besides, he was the key to Galliard’s sanity, and Galliard was the purpose of his quest.
He was a far bigger man than Johnny, not less, it appeared, than six feet two; a lean man, and made leaner by his dress, which was deerskin breeches, a tanned caribou shirt worn above a jersey, and a lumberman’s laced boots. His hair, as flaxen as a girl’s, had been self-cut into a bunch and left a ridiculous fringe on his forehead. It was only the figure he saw, a figure apparently of immense power and activity, for every movement was like the releasing of a spring.
The man glanced towards him and saw that he was awake. He lit a lantern with a splinter from the fire, and came forward so that Leithen could see his face. Plainly he was Johnny’s brother, for there was the same shape of head and the same bat’s ears. But his eyes were a world apart. Johnny’s were honest, featureless pools of that indistinct colour which is commonly called blue or grey, but Lew’s were as brilliant as jewels, pale, but with the pallor of intense delicate colour, the hue of a turquoise, but clear as a sapphire, and with an adamantine brilliance. They were masterful, compelling eyes, wild, but to Leithen not mad — at least it was the madness of a poet and not of a maniac.
He bent his big shoulders and peered into Leithen’s face. There was nothing of the Indian in him, except the round head and the bat’s ears. The man was more Viking, with his great high-bridged nose, his straight, bushy eyebrows, his long upper lip, and his iron chin. He was clean-shaven, too, unlike his brother, who was as shaggy as a bear. The eyes devoured Leithen, puzzled, in a way contemp
tuous, but not hostile.
“Who are you? Where do you come from?”
The voice was the next surprise. It was of exceptional beauty, soft, rich, and musical, and the accent was not Johnny’s lingua franca of all North America. It was a gentle, soothing Scots, like the speech of a Border shepherd.
“I came with Johnny — your brother. He’s in camp three days’ journey back. We’ve found Galliard, the man who was with you. He was pretty sick and wanted nursing.”
“Galliard!” The man rubbed his eyes. “I lost him — he lost himself. Come to think of it, he wasn’t much of a pal. Too darned slow. I had to hurry on.”
He lowered his blazing splinter and scanned Leithen’s thin face and hollow eyes and temples. He looked at the almost transparent wrist. He lifted the blanket and put his head close to his chest so that he could hear his breathing.
“What brought you here?” he asked fiercely. “You haven’t got no right here.”
“I came to find you. Galliard needs you. And Johnny.”
“You took a big risk.”
“I’m a dying man, so risk doesn’t matter.”
“You’re over Jordan now. The Sick Heart is where you come to when you’re at the end of your road. . . . I had a notion it was the River of the Water of Life, same as in Revelation.”
The man’s eyes seemed to have lost their glitter and become pools of melancholy.
“Well, it ain’t. It’s the River of the Water of Death. The Indians know that and they only come here to die. Some, at least; but it isn’t many that gets here, it being a damn rough road.”
He took Leithen’s hand in his gigantic paw.
“You’re sick. Terrible sick. You’ve got what the Hares call tfitsiki and white folk T.B. We don’t suffer from it anything to signify, but it’s terrible bad among the Indians. It’s poor feeding with them; but that’s not what’s hunting you. Where d’you come from? Edmonton way, or New York like the man Galliard?”