Works of Robert W Chambers
Page 1090
XVIII.
And God alone knows the end, for the mists are crowding, brooding like angry-browed clouds, and I hear the whistle of unseen winds, and my life-flame wavers and sinks and flares, blown hither and thither, tossing, fading, leaping, but fading, always fading.
In a flash, like a printed picture on a screen, illuminated, keenly etched in the white glare, I see the bed, and the people around me, the black gowns, the pale eyes of the doctor, the sponge and basin, the rolls of lint.
Voices, minute but clean-cut and clear as picked harp-strings, tinkle in my ears; the voice of the doctor, other voices, but always the voice of the doctor— “The splinter of bone on the brain; the splinter pressing on the tissues; the depression.”
The doctor! That is the man! That is the man who comes to my side, who follows, follows where I go, who seeks me throughout the world! I saw him as I lay flung on the turf, limp, unconscious, below the cliffs on the Aspen hills; I felt his presence in the studio; I heard him creeping at my heels across the gorse thickets of St. Gildas. And now he has come to cut short the magic second, to turn back time — back, back, into the old worn channels, rock-ribbed and salt with tears.
As a leaf of written paper torn in two, so shall my life be torn in two; and the long tear shall mangle the chapter written in rose and gold.
Then, too, my shadow, already turned from white to gray, shall fall with a deeper stain wherever I pass; and I shall see the yellow gorse glimmer and turn to golden-rod, and the poplars turn to oaks; and the twin towers of Notre Dame, filmy, lace-carved, and gray with centuries, shall dwindle as I look — dwindle and sway and turn to pines, singing pines that murmur to the winds, blowing across the Aspen hills.
* * * *
All that is fair shall pass away; all that I love, all that I fear for — these shall the doctor take away, lifting them from my memory on the point of a steel blade. What has he to give in return? A hell of vapour, distorting sight; a hell of sound, drowning the soul.
* * * *
Gigantic apparitions arise across the world of water, wavering like shadows on the clouds. Steel-clad, clothed in skins, casqued in steel, their winged heads bend and nod and move against the clouds. And even they are changing as clouds change shape. I see steel limbs turn red and naked. I see winged casques trail to the earth, feathered, painted in colours of earth.
Ihó! Inâh! Etó! E-hó!
The bridge of stars spans the vast lake of air; the sun and the moon travel over it.
* * * *
My shadow is turning dark; I can scarcely see the doctor, but now — God have mercy! — I can touch him.
* * * *
All the high spectres are stooping from the clouds, bending above me to watch. I know them and their eyes of shadow I know them now; Hârpen that was to Chaské what Hárpstinâ shall be to Hapéda; and Harkâ shall come after all with the voice of winter winds:
“Aké u, aké u, aké u!”
But the magic second shall never return.
“Mâ cânté maséca!”
* * * *
Now they leave my bed, the people who crowded there under the shadowy forms of the spectres; now the doctor bends over; I see and feel him. His hands are tangled in the threads of time; he is cutting a thread; he ——
XIX.
When I spoke to him first I spoke in the French language. Before he answered, the scream of a blue jay in the elms outside set my nerves aquiver, and I called for Donald and Walter.
As I lay there I could see the Aspen hills from the window, heaps of crumpled gold bathed in sunshine. Over them sailed the froth from the silken milkweed; over them drifted the big brown-red butterflies, luminous as richest autumn leaves.
Some one closed the door softly. The doctor had gone.
The sunlight poured into the window, etching my shadow on the wall behind. Lying very still there I saw it motionless beside me. The shadow was black.
Somebody said in the next room, “Will he die?”
“Die?” I said aloud.
A bird twittered outside my window.
The door opened again, noiselessly.
“Sweetheart?” I whispered.
“Yes, Jack.”
After a moment I said, “When do you go back to school?”
“I? I finished school a year ago.”
“Come nearer.”
“I am here, Jack.”
“Time stopped a year ago.”
“A year ago to-day.”
The same gray eyes, the same face, paler, perhaps.
“We have journeyed far,” I sighed, “always together, but in those days our shadows were white as snow. Am I going to die? There are tears in your eyes.”
They fell on my cheek; her arms fell too, closer, closer, around my neck.
“Life has begun,” she said.
“Life? What was the year that ends to-day? The magic second of life?”
“A year of death, to me!”
Ah, but her soul knows of a life in death! And she shall know it, too, when her shadow turns whiter than snow. For the Temple of Idols has closed its doors at the sound of a voice, and an idol of gilt has turned to flesh and blood.
I-hó!
So shall she know of the life in death when her soul and her body are one.
O friends, I’ve served ye food and bed;
O friends, the mist is rising wet;
Then bide a moment, O my dead,
Where, lonely, I must linger yet!
PASSEUR.
Because man goeth to his long home,
And the mourners go about the streets.
WHEN he had finished his pipe he tapped the brier bowl against the chimney until the ashes powdered the charred log smouldering across the andirons. Then he sank back in his chair, absently touching the hot pipe-bowl with the tip of each finger until it grew cool enough to be dropped into his coat pocket.
Twice he raised his eyes to the little American clock ticking upon the mantel. He had half an hour to wait.
The three candles that lighted the room might be trimmed to advantage; this would give him something to do. A pair of scissors lay open upon the bureau, and he rose and picked them up. For a while he stood dreamily shutting and opening the scissors, his eyes roaming about the room. There was an easel in the corner, and a pile of dusty canvases behind it; behind the canvases there was a shadow — that gray, menacing shadow that never moved.
When he had trimmed each candle he wiped the smoky scissors on a paint rag and flung them on the bureau again. The clock pointed to ten; he had been occupied exactly three minutes.
The bureau was littered with neckties, pipes, combs and brushes, matches, reels and fly-books, collars, shirt studs, a new pair of Scotch shooting stockings, and a woman’s workbasket. He picked out all the neckties, folded them once, and hung them over a bit of twine that stretched across the looking-glass; the shirt studs he shovelled into the top drawer along with brushes, combs, and stockings; the reels and fly-books he dusted with his handkerchief and placed methodically along the mantel shelf. Twice he stretched out his hand toward the woman’s workbasket, but his hand fell to his side again, and he turned away into the room staring at the dying fire.
Outside the snow-sealed window a shutter broke loose and banged monotonously, until he flung open the panes and fastened it. The soft, wet snow, that had choked the window-panes all day, was frozen hard now, and he had to break the polished crust before he could find the rusty shutter hinge.
He leaned out for a moment, his numbed hands resting on the snow, the roar of a rising snow-squall in his ears; and out across the desolate garden and stark hedgerow he saw the flat black river spreading through the gloom.
A candle sputtered and snapped behind him; a sheet of drawing-paper fluttered across the floor, and he closed the panes and turned back into the room, both hands in his worn pockets.
The little American clock on the mantel ticked and ticked, but the hands lagged, for he had not been occupied five minutes i
n all. He went up to the mantel and watched the hands of the clock. A minute — longer than a year to him — crept by.
Around the room the furniture stood ranged — a chair or two of yellow pine, a table, the easel, and in one corner the broad curtained bed; and behind each lay shadows, menacing shadows that never moved.
A little pale flame started up from the smoking log on the andirons; the room sang with the sudden hiss of escaping wood gases. After a little the back of the log caught fire; jets of blue flared up here and there with mellow sounds like the lighting of gas-burners in a row, and in a moment a thin sheet of yellow flame wrapped the whole charred log.
Then the shadows moved; not the shadows behind the furniture — they never moved — but other shadows, thin, gray, confusing, that came and spread their slim patterns all around him, and trembled and trembled.
He dared not step or tread upon them, they were too real; they meshed the floor around his feet, they ensnared his knees, they fell across his breast like ropes. Some night, in the silence of the moors, when wind and river were still, he feared these strands of shadow might tighten — creep higher around his throat and tighten. But even then he knew that those other shadows would never move, those gray shapes that knelt crouching in every corner.
When he looked up at the clock again ten minutes had straggled past. Time was disturbed in the room; the strands of shadow seemed entangled among the hands of the clock, dragging them back from their rotation. He wondered if the shadows would strangle Time, some still night when the wind and the flat river were silent.
There grew a sudden chill across the floor; the cracks of the boards let it in. He leaned down and drew his sabots toward him from their place near the andirons, and slipped them over his chaussons; and as he straightened up, his eyes mechanically sought the mantel above, where in the dusk another pair of sabots stood, little, slender, delicate sabots, carved from red beach. A year’s dust grayed their surface; a year’s rust dulled the silver band across the in-step. He said this to himself aloud, knowing that it was within a few minutes of the year.
His own sabots came from Mort-Dieu; they were shaved square and banded with steel. But in days past he had thought that no sabot in Mort-Dieu was delicate enough to touch the instep of the Mort-Dieu passeur. So he sent to the shore lighthouse, and they sent to Lorient, where the women are coquettish and show their hair under the coiffe, and wear dainty sabots; and in this town, where vanity corrupts and their is much lace on coiffe and collarette, a pair of delicate sabots was found, banded with silver and chiselled in red beach. The sabots stood on the mantel above the fire now, dusty and tarnished.
There was a sound from the window, the soft murmur of snow blotting glass panes. The wind, too, muttered under the roof eaves. Presently it would begin to whisper to him from the chimney — he knew it — and he held his hands over his ears and stared at the clock.
In the hamlet of Mort-Dieu the pines sing all day of the sea secrets, but in the night the ghosts of little gray birds fill the branches, singing of the sunshine of past years. He heard the song as he sat, and he crushed his hands over his ears; but the gray birds joined with the wind in the chimney, and he heard all that he dared not hear, and he thought all that he dared not hope or think, and the swift tears scalded his eyes.
In Mort-Dieu the nights are longer than anywhere on earth; he knew it — why should he not know? This had been so for a year; it was different before. There were so many things different before; days and nights vanished like minutes then; the pines told no secrets of the sea, and the gray birds had not yet come to Mort-Dieu. Also, there was Jeanne, passeur at the Carmes.
When he first saw her she was poling the square, flat-bottomed ferry skiff from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu, a red handkerchief bound across her silky black hair, a red skirt fluttering just below her knees. The next time he saw her he had to call to her across the placid river, “Ohé! Ohé, passeur!” She came, poling the flat skiff, her deep blue eyes fixed pensively on him, the scarlet skirt and kerchief idly flapping in the April wind. Then day followed day when the far call “Passeur!” grew clearer and more joyous, and the faint answering cry, “I come!” rippled across the water like music tinged with laughter. Then spring came, and with spring came love love, carried free across the ferry from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu.
The flame above the charred log whistled, flickered, and went out in a jet of wood vapour, only to play like lightning above the gas and relight again. The clock ticked more loudly, and the song from the pines filled the room. But in his straining eyes a summer landscape was reflected, where white clouds sailed and white foam curled under the square bow of a little skiff. And he pressed his numbed hands tighter to his ears to drown the cry, “Passeur! Passeur!”
And now for a moment the clock ceased ticking. It was time to go — who but he should know it, he who went out into the night swinging his lantern? And he went. He had gone each night from the first — from that first strange winter evening when a strange voice had answered him across the river, the voice of the new passeur. He had never heard her voice again.
So he passed down the windy wooden stairs, lantern hanging lighted in his hand, and stepped out into the storm. Through sheets of drifting snow, over heaps of frozen seaweed and icy drift he moved, shifting his lantern right and left, until its glimmer on the water warned him. Then he called out into the night, “Passeur!” The frozen spray spattered his face and crusted the lantern; he heard the distant boom of breakers beyond the bar, and the noise of mighty winds among the seaward cliffs.
“Passeur!”
Across the broad flat river, black as a sea of pitch, a tiny light sparkled a moment. Again he cried, “Passeur!”
“I come!”
He turned ghastly white, for it was her voice — or was he crazy? — and he sprang waist deep into the icy current and cried out again, but his voice ended in a sob.
Slowly through the snow the flat skiff took shape, creeping nearer and nearer. But she was not at the pole — he saw that; there was only a tall, thin man, shrouded to the eyes in oilskin; and he leaped into the boat and bade the ferryman hasten.
Halfway across he rose in the skiff, and called, “Jeanne!” But the roar of the storm and the thrashing of icy waves drowned his voice. Yet he heard her again, and she called to him by name.
When at last the boat grated upon the in visible shore, he lifted his lantern, trembling, stumbling among the rocks, and calling to her, as though his voice could silence the voice that had spoken a year ago that night. And it could not. He sank shivering upon his knees, and looked out into the darkness, where an ocean rolled across a world. Then his stiff lips moved, and he repeated her name; but the hand of the ferryman fell gently upon his head.
And when he raised his eyes he saw that the ferryman was Death.
The moving finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
FITZGERALD.
THE KEY TO GRIEF.
The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky
The deer to the wholesome wold,
And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
As it was in the days of old.
KIPLING.
I.
THEY were doing their work very badly. They got the rope around his neck, and tied his wrists with moose-bush withes, but again he fell, sprawling, turning, twisting over the leaves, tearing up everything around him like a trapped panther.
He got the rope away from them; he clung to it with bleeding fists; he set his white teeth in it, until the jute strands relaxed, unravelled, and snapped, gnawed through by his white teeth.
Twice Tully struck him with a gum hook. The dull blows fell on flesh rigid as stone.
Panting, foul with forest mould and rotten leaves, hands and face smeared with blood, he sat up on the ground, glaring at the circle of men around him.
“Git back!” whispered Bates, but his voice and hand trembled. “Kent,” he stammered, “won’t ye hang?”
The man on the ground glared.
“Ye’ve got to die, Kent,” he urged; “they all say so. Ask Lefty Sawyer; ask Dyce; ask Carrots. — He’s got to swing fur it — ain’t he, Tully? — Kent, fur God’s sake, swing fur these here gents!”
The man on the ground panted; his bright eyes never moved.
After a moment Tully sprang on him again. There was a flurry of leaves, a crackle, a gasp and a grunt, then the thumping and thrashing of two bodies writhing in the brush. Dyce and Carrots jumped on the prostrate men. Lefty Sawyer caught the rope again, but the jute strands gave way and he stumbled. Tully began to scream, “He’s chokin me!” Dyce staggered out into the open, moaning over a broken wrist.
“Shoot!” shouted Lefty Sawyer, and dragged Tully aside. “Shoot, Jim Bates! Shoot straight, b’God!”
“Git back!” gasped Bates, rising from the fallen log.
The crowd parted right and left; a quick report rang out — another — another. Then from the whirl of smoke a tall form staggered, dealing blows — blows that sounded sharp as the crack of a whip.
“He’s off! Shoot straight!” they cried.
There was a gallop of heavy boots in the woods. Bates, faint and dazed, turned his head.
“Shoot!” shrieked Tully.
But Bates was sick; his smoking revolver fell to the ground; his white face and pale eyes contracted. It lasted only a moment; he started after the others, plunging, wallowing through thickets of osier and hemlock underbrush.