I stood staring at the black mouth which had engulfed the Regius Professor. I felt that a disaster was imminent; but to rush to warn him would be to embarrass the issues of his Providence – that only. For the instant a fierce resentment of his foolhardiness fired me – and was as immediately gone. I turned sick and half blind. I thought I saw the rock-face shrug and wrinkle; a blot of gall was expelled from it – and the blot was the Professor himself issued forth, and coming composedly towards me.
As he advanced, I turned my back on him. By the time he reached me I had made some small success of a struggle for self-mastery.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I left myself none too much of a margin, did I?’
With an effort I faced about again. The base of the cliff was yet scarred with holes, many and irregular; but now some of those which had stared at me like dilated eyes were, I could have sworn it, over-lidded – the eyes of drowsing reptiles. And the Professor’s particular cave was gone.
I gave quite an absurd little giggle. This man was soulless – a monstrosity.
‘Look here,’ he said, conning my face with a certain concern, ‘it’s no good tormenting yourself with what might have happened. Here I am, you know. Supposing we go and sit down yonder, against that drift, till you’re better.’
He led the way, and, dropping upon the sand, lolled easily, talking to himself, by way of me, for some minutes. It was the kindest thing he could have done. His confident voice made scorn of the never-ceasing rustling and falling sounds to our rear. The gulls skated before my eyes, drawing wide arcs and figures of freedom in the air. Presently I topped the crisis, and drew a deep breath.
‘Tell me,’ I said – ‘have you ever in all your life known fear?’
The Regius Professor sat to consider.
‘Well,’ he answered presently, rubbing his chin, ‘I was certainly once near losing hold of my will, if that’s what you mean. Of course, if I had let go—’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘No – luckily.’
‘You’re not taking credit for it?’
‘Credit!’ he exclaimed, surprised. ‘Why should I take credit for my freedom from a constitutional infirmity? In one way, indeed, I am only regretful that I am debarred that side of self-analysis.’
I could laugh lovelily, for the first time.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘will you tell me the story?’
‘I never considered it in the light of a story,’ answered the Regius Professor. ‘But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—’ and he settled his spectacles, and began:
‘It was during the period of my first appointment as Science Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulœ was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.
‘It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest. The interesting conformations of the land – the bone-structure, as I might say – were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking a labour. One never recognises under such conditions the extent of one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of surroundings to emphasise them, and one may be conscious of the strain of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five hundred.
‘The scene was desolate to a degree; houseless, almost treeless – just white wastes and leaden sky, and the eternal fusing of the two in an indefinite horizon. I was wondering, without feeling actually dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a hill which had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages, and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory.
‘It was a stark little oasis, sure enough – the most grudging of moral respites from depression. Only from one place, it seemed, broke a green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a window. Deathlily the little stony buildings stood apart from one another, incurious, sullen, and self-contained.
‘There was, however, the green shoot; and the stock from which it proceeded was the school building. That in itself was unlovely enough – a bleak little stone box in an arid enclosure. It looked hunched and grey with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of its wall only underscored its frostiness. But as if that one green shoot were the earnest of life lingering within, there suddenly broke through its walls the voices of young children singing; and, in the sound, the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted somewhat.
‘Yes? What is it? Does anything amuse you? I am glad you are so far recovered, at least. Well—
‘I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time, I am free to admit that those young voices, though they dismissed me promptly on my way, dismissed me pleased, and to a certain degree, as it were, reinvigorated. I passed through that little frigid camp of outer silence, and swung down the road towards the factory. As I advanced towards what I should have thought to be the one busy nucleus of an isolated colony, the aspect of desolation intensified to my surprise, rather than diminished. But I soon saw the reason for this. The great forge in the hills was nothing but a wrecked and abandoned ruin, its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. Seeing which, it only appeared to me a strange thing that any of the human part of its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood; and stranger still I thought it when I came to learn, as I did by-and-by, that its devastation was at that date an ancient story.
‘What a squalid carcass it did look, to be sure; gaunt, and unclean, and ravaged by fire from crown to basement. The great flue of it stood up alone, a blackened monument to its black memory.
‘Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of machinery, relics of its old vital organs, fallen, withered, from its ribs. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places under the merciless bombardment of the weather; and, here and there, a scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the draught like a ventilator. Bats of grimy cobweb hung from the beams; and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with cold soot.
‘It was all ugly and sordid enough, in truth, and I had no reason to be exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black opening of what looked like a shed or annex to the main factory. Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither, and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered. I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom, and then I discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little deadlocked chamber, its details only partly decipherable in the reflected light which came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke, crossed the twilight at a height a little above my own: and I could easily understand, by the apparent diameter of its barrel, that the well was of a considerable depth.
‘Now, as my eyes grew a little accustomed to the obscurity, I could see how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness. For the rope, which was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched to one side, as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted there. It was an insignificant fact in itself, but my chance observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been rem
oved), hung down a yard or so below the big drum.
‘You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity, to begin with, in that vortex of gloom), I caught with my left hand (wisdom number two) at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. On the instant the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement, however, had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and shoulders, hanging over, and actually into, the well, pulled me, without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last desperate hold, and my legs came whipping helpless over the well-rim. The weight of them in falling near jerked me from my clutch – a bad shock, to begin with. But a worse was in store for me. For I perceived, in the next instant, that the rusty, long-disused windlass was beginning slowly to revolve, and was letting me down into the abyss.
‘I broke out in a sweat, I confess – a mere diaphoresis of nature; a sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves. I don’t think we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was exalted, rather – promoted to the analysis of a very exquisite, scarce mortal, problem. My will, as I hung by a hair over the abysm, was called upon to vindicate itself under an utmost stress of apprehension. I felt, ridiculous as it may appear, as if the surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory, waiting, curious, to test the value of my philosophy.
‘Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved persistently. If I would remain with my head above the well-rim – which, I freely admit, I had an unphilosophic desire to do – I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and airy sort of treadmill. To climb, and climb, and always climb, paying out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place! It was to repudiate gravitation, which I spurned from beneath my feet into the depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I ventured to pause, some nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking which seized me, would always send me struggling and wriggling, like a drowning body, up to the surface again. Fortunately, I was slightly built and active; yet I knew that wind and muscle were bound sometime to give out in this swarming competition against death. I measured their chances against the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound. Moreover, in proportion as I grew the feebler, grew the need for my greater activity. For there were already signs that the great groaning windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck, paused one minute in its eternal round, I might have set myself oscillating, gradually and cautiously, until I was able to seize with one hand, then another, upon the brick rim, which was otherwise beyond my reach. But now, did I cease climbing for an instant and attempt a frantic clutch at it, down I sank like a clock weight, my fingers trailed a yard in cold slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more – the madder that I must now make up for lost ground.
‘At last, faint with fatigue, I was driven to face an alternative resource, very disagreeable from the first in prospect. This was no less than to resign temporarily my possession of the upper, and sink to the under world; in other words, to let myself go with the rope, and, when it was all reeled out, to climb it again. To this course there were two objections: one, that I knew nothing of the depth of the water beneath me, or of how soon I should come to it; the other, that I was grown physically incapable of any further great effort in the way of climbing. My reluctance to forgo the useless solace of the upper twilight I dismiss as sentimental. But to drop into that sooty pit, and then, perhaps, to find myself unable to reascend it! to feel a gradual paralysis of heart and muscle committing me to a lingering and quite unspeakable death – that was an unnerving thought indeed!
‘Nevertheless, I had actually resolved upon the venture, and was on the point of ceasing all effort, and permitting myself to sink, when – I thought of the burnt place in the rope.
‘Do you grasp what that sudden thought meant to me? Death, sir, in any case; death, if, with benumbed and aching hands and blistered knees, I continued to work my air-mill; death, no earlier and no later, no less and no more certainly, if I ceased of the useless struggle and went down into the depths. So soon as the strain of my hanging should tell direct upon that scorched strand, that strand must part.
‘Then, I think, I knew fear – fear as demoralising, perhaps, as it may be, short of the will-surrender. And, indeed, I’m not sure but that the will which survives fear may not be a worse last condition than fear itself, which, when exquisite, becomes oblivion. Consciousness in extremis has never seemed to me the desirable thing which some hold it.
‘Still, if I suffered for retaining my will power, there is no doubt that its loss, on the flash of that deadly reflection, would have meant an immediate syncope of nerve and an instant downfall; whereas – well, anyhow, here I am.
‘I was fast draining of all capacity for further effort. I climbed painfully, spasmodically; but still I climbed, half hoping I should die of the toll of it before I fell. Ever and again I would glance faintly up at the snarling, slowly-revolving barrel above me, and mark how death, as figured in that scorched strand, was approaching me nearer at every turn. It was only a few coils away, when suddenly I set to doing what, goodness knows, I should have done earlier. I screamed – screamed until the dead marrow must have crawled in the very bones of the place.
‘Nothing human answered – not a voice, not the sound of a footfall. Only the echoes laughed and chattered like monkeys up in the broken roof of the factory. For the rest, my too-late outburst had but served to sap what little energy yet remained to me.
‘The end was come. Looking up, I saw the burnt strand reeling round, a couple of turns away, to the test; and, with a final gulp of horror, I threw up the sponge, and sank.
‘I had not descended a yard or two, when my feet touched something.’
The Regius Professor paused dramatically.
‘Oh, go on!’ I snapped.
‘That something,’ he said, ‘yielded a little – settled – and there all at once was I, standing as firmly as if I were in a pulpit.
‘For the moment, I assure you, I was so benumbed, physically and mentally, that I was conscious of nothing in myself but a small weak impatience at finding the awful ecstasy of my descent checked. Then reason returned, like blood to the veins of a person half drowned; and I had never before realised that reason could make a man ache so.
‘With the cessation of my strain upon it, the windlass had ceased to revolve. Now, with a sudden desperation, I was tugging at the rope once more – pulling it down hand over hand. At the fifth haul there came a little quick report, and I staggered and near fell. The rope had snapped; and the upper slack of it came whipping down upon my shoulders.
‘I rose, dimly aware of what had happened. I was standing on the piled-up fathoms of rope which I had paid out beneath me. Above, though still beyond my effective winning, glimmered the moonlike disc of light which was the well mouth. I dared not, uncertain of the nature of my tenure, risk a spring for it. But, very cautiously, I found the end of the rope that had come away, made a bend in it well clear of the injured part, and, after many vain attempts, slung it clean over the yoke above, coaxed down the slack, spliced it to the other, and so made myself a fixed ladder to climb by. Up this, after a short interval for rest, I swarmed, set myself swinging, grasped the brick rim, first with one hand, then with both, and in another instant had flung myself upon the ground prostrate, and for the moment quite prostrated. Then presently I got up, struck some matches, and investigated.’
The Regius Professor stopped, laughing a little over the memory.
‘Do go on!’ I said.
‘Why,’ he responded, chuckling, ‘generations of school chil
dren had been pitching litter into that well, until it was filled up to within a couple yards of the top – just that. The rope, heaping up under me, did the rest. It was a testimony to the limited resources of the valley. What the little natives of today do with their odd time, goodness knows. But it was comical, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, most!’ said I. ‘And particularly from the point of view of the children’s return to you for your dislike of them.’
‘Well, as to that,’ said the Regius Professor, rather shamefacedly, ‘I wasn’t beyond acknowledging a certain indebtedness.’
‘Acknowledging? How?’
‘Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on the Reef-building Serpulœ; so I went back to the school, and gave it to the mistress to include in her curriculum.’
THE WHITE HARE
You know the Mendips or you don’t know them – their beauty, their savagery, their wide-flung loneliness sweeping miles down into the haunted valley called the moors, where, in the moonlit nights, strange craft come floating from Glastonbury on mystic waters long since sunk and lost. There may be trippers in this place and that to vulgarise the brooding hours, and if you see with their eyes you see nothing; but they are local, after all – mere profaners of places already profaned to show. One may leave them behind, to resettle like flies disturbed from carrion, and, entering into the fastnesses of the hills, forget them in a moment.
The place belongs to legend and the past; it murmurs with inarticulate voices, drums and rustles under visionary footfalls. Once, long ago there stood a little ruined church, difficult to strangers to find, among the high, far thickets, and there the dead lay tumbled and neglected, because the building had been desecrated of old, and never since reconsecrated; so that it was avoided by the people, and the fence surrounding the graveyard rotted piecemeal and grew choked with fungus and brier.
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