IN THE MIST
I slipped off in grayness the next morning. There was a water fog that
hugged me clammily, and sounds echoed in it as in a metal canopy. I
could not have found my way in open water, but here I could crowd tight
to the shore and keep my bearings. I took a keg of pitch with me, for
when I saw the weather I knew that I would give the canoe many a scrape
on rocks and snags.
It was tedious traveling, and it seemed a long time before I made my
worming way around every inequality in the shore and reached the inlet
where we had eaten lunch. Here I lifted the canoe, turned it bottom
side up in the meadow, and covered it with a sailcloth. I wanted it to
dry, and the air was still dripping moisture. I had expected the fog
to lift before this, but it seemed to be growing heavier.
I tried to light my pipe, but the tobacco was damp and would not burn.
Slow drops dribbled from the trees and the meadow was soggy. Where
should I go? I could hear nothing, and as for seeing anything I could
have passed my own camp a rod away. It began to seem a fool's errand.
I thought of returning.
Perhaps it was a boyish feeling that took me to the sycamore. I looked
about. The ashes of our little fire still lay in a rounded pile, and
at the edge of the pile, printed deep in the yielding surface, was a
moccasin print. It was not the woman's moccasin, nor my own boot. One
look showed me that.
And then I went over the surrounding ground. I learned nothing, for
pebbles and short grass are as non-committal as a Paris pavement. The
print had been made before the mist fell, for the dew was unbrushed. I
looked at the encircling forest, and its dripping uniformity gave no
clue. I knocked the charred tobacco from my pipe, pulled my hat down
on my ears, and plunged straight ahead.
It was a fool's way of going at the matter, but a fool has as good a
chance as a philosopher in such a case. I clove my way through the
mist as blind and breathless as a swimmer in a breaker. The forest was
thickly grown and the trees stood about me as alike as water-reeds.
Whenever I touched one it pelted me with drops, and I was numbed with
cold. My feet slipped, for the ground was slimy with wet. But I was
not thinking of comfort, nor of speed. I was listening.
For the strange, gray air was trembling with echoes. Every snapped
twig, every bird murmur, every brush of a padded foot on leaf mould was
multiplied many-fold. The fog was a sounding-board. All the spectral
space around me, above me, below me was quivering and talking. My very
breath was peopled with murmurs. I have been in many fogs, but none
like this one. If the spirits of the dead should revisit us, they
would whisper, I think, as the air whispered around me then.
How long I groped, learning nothing, I do not know, for when the mind
forgets the body minutes may be long or short, and no count is taken of
them. But at last among the noises that knocked at my ear came a new
note. I heard a human voice.
And then, indeed, I pressed all my faculties into service. I put my
ear to the wet ground and strained it against tree trunks, trying to
weed out the myriad tiny whisperings that assailed me and grasp that
one sound that I wanted and hold it clear. And at last I heard it
unmistakably; there were voices, more than one it seemed.
My ears buzzed with my effort to listen. I heard the sound, lost it,
then heard it again. It was like a child's game. I heard it,
blundered after it, then it disappeared. I turned to go back, and it
came behind and mocked me. It was everywhere and nowhere. It came
near, then faded into silence. The fog suffocated me; I found myself
pressing at it with my hands.
Yet on the whole I made progress. In time the voices grew clearer.
There were several of them, perhaps many. I heard shouting,--orders,
presumably,--and once a clink of metal,--an iron kettle it might have
been. But the sound was back of me, in front of me, at the sides of
me, above me. I could not hold it. It reverberated like the drumming
of a woodcock that comes to the ear from four quarters at once. And
all the time the fog pressed on my eyelids like a hand.
I had left my musket hidden under the canoe, for I could not have used
it in the dampness, so I had only my knife for guard. I carried it
open, and made an occasional notch upon a tree. Once I came to a
notched tree a second time. The old woodland madness was on me, and I
was stepping in circles. Yet the sounds were growing clearer. They
were approaching, though I could not tell from what quarter. I stood
still.
What followed was like a dream; like the dream that I had had the night
after the storm when I woke with sweat cold on me. The fog pinioned me
like a clammy winding-sheet; I could see nothing; I was too chilled to
feel; I was as alone and powerless as a lost canoe in the ocean; but
somewhere on earth or in air I heard a company of men pass me by. The
sounds were unmistakable. I heard the swish of wet leaves, the pad of
feet, and even the creak of the damp leather of the carrying-straps.
Something cracked, pricking in my ears in a blur of sound, and I knew
that the men had brushed a branch with the canoe that they were
carrying on their heads. They were near me; at any moment they might
come within touch of my hand. But where were they? Whoever they were,
whatever they were, the wish to see them became an obsession. I knew
no feeling but my tingling to get at them. I pushed to right and left.
I knocked against trees. The sounds were here, then there. I could
not reach them. They taunted me as lost spirits tantalize a soul in
purgatory. Whichever way I turned they were just out of my grasp. I
clenched my hands and swore that I would not be beaten.
But my pitiful little oath was all bluster and impotent defiance. I
was as helpless as a squirming puppy held by the neck. I ran like a
madman, but I ran the wrong way. The invisible crew passed me, and
their voices faded. I heard them melt, melt into nothing. A sound, an
impression,--that had been all. Not even a gray shadow on the fog to
show that I had not been dreaming. I looked at my skinned knuckles and
disordered clothes, and a strange feeling shook me. A certain rashness
of temperament had all my life made me contemptuous of fear. But this
was different. I tried to laugh at myself, but could not.
It was a simple matter to retrace my route, for I had left a trail like
a behemoth's. And one thought I chewed all the way back to the meadow.
If I could have done it over again I should have called, and so have
drawn whatever thing it was toward me. That would have been dangerous,
and I might have paid the forfeit of a head that was not my own to part
with, but at least I should have seen what thing it was that passed me
in the fog. There began to be something that was not wholly sound and
sane in the depth of my feeling that I ought, at whatever cost, to have
confronted that noise and forced it to declare itself.
When I came to the meadow it was wet and spectral. The fog had lifted
somewhat and now the air was curiously luminous. It appeared
transparent, as if the vision could pierce far-stretching reaches, but
when I tried to peer ahead I found my glance baffled a few feet away.
It was as if the world ended suddenly, exhaled in grayness, just beyond
the reach of my hand. It made objects remote and unreal and singularly
shining. I looked toward the sycamore, and my heart beat fast for a
moment, for I thought that a pool of fresh blood lay in the grass where
the woman and I had sat the day before. But I looked again and saw
that it was only the bunch of red lilies that she had plucked and worn
and thrown away. I had told her that their red was the color of war,
and she had let them drop to the ground. I went to them and picked
them up, and they left heavy, scarlet stains upon my fingers.
When I went to the canoe I found it still damp, but I uncovered it and
went to work to do what I could with the frayed seams. An unreasoning
haste had possession of me, and I worked fumblingly and badly, like a
man with fear behind him. Yet I was not afraid. I was consumed by the
feeling that I must get back to camp and to the woman without delay.
Kneeling to my work with my back to the forest, strange noises came
behind and begged attention. But I would not look up. I had had
enough of visions and whisperings and a haunted wood. I wanted my
canoe and my paddle and a chance to shoot straight and to get home.
For already I thought of the camp as home, and of this meadow as a
place where I had been held for a long time. It was a strange morning.
And so it was that even when I heard the thud, thud of a man's step
behind me I did not turn. A man's step is unlike an animal's, and I
had no doubt in my heart that a man was coming. But let him come to
me. My immediate and pressing concern was to repair my canoe that I
might get to camp, and I would squander neither movement nor eyesight
till that was done. A few moments before it had seemed a vital matter
to find what creatures they were that whispered and rustled past me in
the grayness. Now my anxiety was transferred.
The echoing fog played witchcraft with the step as it had done with the
other noises. The sound came, came, came,--a steady, moderate note; no
haste, no dallying, no indecision. Quiet, purposeful, controlled, it
sounded; that pace, pace, that came through the twig-carpeted timber.
The Greek Fates were pictured as moving with just that even
relentlessness of stride. Yet in life, so far as I have seen it,
tragedies commonly pounce upon us, like a wolfish cat upon her prey,
and we find ourselves stunned and mangled before we gather dignity to
meet the blow. I thought of this, in an incoherent, muddy way, as the
step came nearer. And I worked with hurrying hands at the canoe.
Then came a voice. No whispering, no rustling, nothing vague and
formless and haunting, but a low, commanding call:--
"Bonjour, mon ami."
I did not start. If I turned slowly it was because I knew what was
waiting me, and was adjusting several possibilities to meet it. It was
a man's voice that called, yet its every inflection was familiar,
familiar as the beating of my heart. For madame, my wife, had called
to me more or less often in the twin of that voice with its slurring
deliberateness and its insolent disregard of the pitfall accents of a
foreign tongue. And now I turned to meet her cousin, the man whom she
had promised to marry; the man who had deserted her to the knives of
savages; the man whom she despised and yet feared, and who now called
to me in a voice that was hers and yet was not; that haunted and
repelled, all in one. I did not think out any of this by rule and
line. I only knew that I dreaded meeting this man who was stepping,
stepping into my life through the fog, and that I turned to meet him
with my heart like ice but my brain on fire.
I had ado to keep my tongue from exclaiming when I turned. I do not
know why I expected the man to be small, except that I myself am overly
large, and that I was looking for him to be my antithesis in every way.
But the figure that loomed toward me out of the luminous mist dwarfed
my own stature. Never had my eyes seen so powerful a man. Long and
swinging as an elk, he had the immense, humped shoulders of a buffalo
and the length of arm of a baboon. His head would have sat well on
some rough bronze coin of an early day. Semitic in type he looked,
with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of
his eyes was English. They were intelligent eyes.
He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative. I
remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my
contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows
_coureur de bois_. He would not know me for the man he was seeking. I
waited for him to ask my name, and selected one to give him that was my
own and yet was not M. de Montlivet. Since names cannot be sold nor
squandered, my father had bequeathed me a plethora of them.
But I credited the Englishman with too little acuteness. He stepped
forward. "This is Monsieur de Montlivet?"
I could do no less than bow, but I kept my hand by my side. "And you,
monsieur?"
He smiled as at one indulging a childish skirmish of wits; but
controlled as his face was, I could see the relief that overspread it
at my admission. "My name is Starling. I have a packet for you,
monsieur," and he handed me Cadillac's letter.
I hated the farce of the whole affair, and when I ran my eye over
Cadillac's message, which I could forecast word for word, I felt like a
play-acting fool. But I read it and put it in my pocket.
"You have had a long trip, Lord Starling," I said, with some show of
courtesy. "It is new to see a man of your nation in this land!"
He waved me and my words into limbo.
"Where is the Englishman,--the prisoner?"
A folded blanket lay beside the canoe, and I shook it out and spread it
on the dew-drenched grass. "Will you sit, Lord Starling? Forgive me
if I smoke. It is unusual grace to meet a man of my own station, and I
would enjoy it in my own way. Will you do the same? I see you have
your pipe."
He swung his great arm like a war club. "Where is the prisoner?"
I sat on the red blanket and filled my pipe. "I know of no prisoner."
I thought he would have broken into oaths, but instead he shrugged his
shoulders. He walked to the other side of the blanket, and I saw that
he limped painfully. Then he sat down opposite me, his great turtle
neck standing up between his humping shoulders. With all his size and
ugliness he was curiously well finished,--a personality. He was a man
to sway men and women. I felt it as I felt his likeness to his cousin,
a likeness that I could not put my finger on but that I knew was there.
Small wonder that she dreaded him. He was a replica in heavy lines of
the sterner traits in her own nature. He had something of her
curiously winning quality, too. Did she feel that? She had promised
to marry him. I lit my pipe and smoked, and waited for him to declare
himself.
He did it with his glance hard on me. "You are playing for time. Is
that worthy your very evident intelligence, monsieur, since you can
protract the game only the matter of a few hours at most? I have
Cadillac's warrant for the prisoner."
I smoked. I felt no haste for speech. What I had to say would make a
brutal, tearing wound, and I hugged my sense of power and gloated over
it like an Iroquois. A woman was between us, and I knew no mercy.
My silence appeared to amuse him. He studied me and looked unhurried
and reflective. He stretched out a long, yellow arm in simulation of
contented weariness. "I wonder why you wish to keep the prisoner with
you longer," he marveled.
And then I laughed. I looked him full in the face and laughed again.
"But I have no prisoner. Unless, indeed, matrimony be a sort of
bondage. I travel with my wife, with Madame de Montlivet, née
Starling, monsieur."
I knew that I had cut him in a vital part, but he held himself well.
An oath burst from him, but it did not move his great, immobile face
into betraying lines. Yet when he tried to speak his voice trailed off
in an unmeaning rattle. He tried twice, and his hands were
sweat-beaded. Then he heaved his great bulk upward and stood over me,
his baboon arms reaching for my throat.
"The marriage was honest? Speak."
I could respect that feeling. "Father Nouvel married us," I replied.
"We found him at the Pottawatamie Islands. I marvel that you did not
hear news of us from there, monsieur."
He sank back on the blanket. "I did not go there. I sprained my
ankle." He talked still with that curious rattling in his voice. "I
lost time and the damned Indians left me. When did you discover"----
"I married madame as soon as I discovered. Monsieur, you are of her
family. I can assure you that I have shown your cousin all the respect
and consideration in my power."
He looked at me as if I were some smirking carpet knight who prated of
conventions when a man was dying.
"Where is she?"
"In my camp, monsieur."
"Take me to her."
"Monsieur, I must refuse."
He opened his mouth with a look that cursed me, but before the words
came he thought twice and changed his front. He spoke calmly. "I am
her guardian and her cousin. I was her intended husband. You are a
gentleman. I ask you to bring me to my cousin, monsieur."
His tone of calm possession fired me, I remembered what he was, and I
enumerated his titles in order.
"Yes. You are the guardian who would have married her for her estates;
you are the cousin who played the poltroon and outraged her pride of
family; you are the lover who abandoned her,--abandoned her to torture
and the tomahawk. Is it strange that it is her wish never to see you?
You will spare your pride some hurts if you avoid her in the future,
monsieur."
The great face turned yellow to the eyes. "She told you this?"
"I am no mind reader, monsieur."
And then he turned away. I took one glimpse of his face and knew it
was not decent to look a second time. He had done a hideous thing, but
he was having a hideous punishment. Nature had formed him for a proud
man, and he had lived arrogantly, secure of homage. I wondered now
that he could live at all.
And so I went to work at the canoe, and waited till he should turn to
me. When he did it was with a child's plea for pity, and the
abjectness of his tone was horrible, coming from a man of his girth and
power.
"You might have done the same thing yourself, monsieur."
I bowed. I could not but toss him that bone of comfort, for it was the
truth. Sometimes a spring snaps suddenly in a man, and he becomes a
brute. How could I boast that I would be immune?
"But I would have shot myself the moment after," I said.
He had regained his level. "Then you would have been a double coward.
I shall do better."
"You think to reinstate yourself?"
"I know that I shall reinstate myself. Monsieur, I throw myself upon
your courtesy. I ask to be taken to my cousin."
"No, monsieur. I follow my wife's wishes."
"I loved her, monsieur."
My pity of the moment before was gone like vapor. I looked up from my
canoe, and took the man's measure. "I think not. You loved something,
I grant. Her wit, perhaps, her money, the pleasure she gave your
epicure's taste. But you did not love her, the woman. My God, if you
loved her how could you endure to scatter her likeness broadcast among
the savages as you did? To make that profile, that mouth, that chin,
the jest and property of a greasy Indian! No, you shall not see my
wife, monsieur."
He changed no line at my outburst. "Then I shall follow by force. I
shall sit here till you move, monsieur."
I shrugged. "A rash promise. Are your provisions close at hand?"
He looked at me steadfastly. "Then you absolutely refuse to take me to
her?"
"I refuse."
"Yet I shall reach her."
I took moss from my pocket and calked a seam with some precision. I
did not speak.
"You think that I cannot reach her?"
I smiled. There was a womanish vein in the man that he should press me
in this fashion for a useless answer. I began to see his weakness as
well as his obvious strength. I waited till he asked yet again.
"You think that I shall not be able to reach your wife, monsieur?"
And then I shrugged and examined him over my pipe-bowl. "Yes, you will
reach her, I think. You have a certain persistence that often wins
small issues,--seldom large ones. But I shall not help you."
"I shall stay here till you go."
"Then we shall be companions for some time. May I offer you tobacco,
monsieur?"
He smiled, though wryly and against his will. It was plain that we
were taking a certain saturnine enjoyment out of the situation. We
could hate each other well, and we were doing it, but we were both
starved for men's talk,--the talk of equals.
"It seems a pity to detain you," he mused. "You are obviously on
business. When I came up behind you I thought that I had never seen a
man work in such a frenzy of haste. There was sweat on your forehead."
I waved my pipe at him. I had the upper hand, and I felt cruelly
jovial. "It was haste to meet you," I assured him. "I missed you in
the fog, and feared you would reach camp before me."
"You feared me, monsieur?"
I felt an unreasoning impulse to be candid with him. The strange,
choking terror had swept back at that instant, and again it had me by
the throat. Yet here sat the cause of my terror before me, and he was
in my power.
"I feared your Indians." I spoke gravely. "Handle those Hurons
carefully, monsieur. It is a tricky breed."
"But I have no"---- He stopped, and looked at me strangely. "What
made you think that I was near?"
"For one thing I heard your axe yesterday."
"But yesterday I was five leagues from here."
I whistled through my teeth. I hate a useless lie. "I heard your
axe," I reiterated. "This morning you and your men passed me in the
fog."
He stared at me, then at the forest. "Monsieur, I have no men!"
"What?"
"I came alone."
"Monsieur, you are lying."
"It is you who are mad. Take your hands away!"
"I will let you go when you tell me the truth. Remember, your men
passed me this morning."
"I tell you, I came alone."
"Where are your Indians that Cadillac sent with you?"
"I sprained my ankle and they left me."
"Where did they go?"
"How should I know? I tell you they left me."
"Was Pemaou, the Huron, one of them?"
"He was guide. Monsieur, what do you mean?"
I could not answer. My throat was dry as if I breathed a furnace
blast. I looked at the canoe under my hands. It was not seaworthy.
"Will your canoe carry two?" I cried.
He nodded. His great rough face was sickly with suspense. "Monsieur,
what does this mean?"
I swore at him and at the hour he had made me lose. "Men passed me in
a fog. They have been hiding here for a day at least. Show me your
canoe. We must get to camp. Yes, come with me. Come, show me your
canoe."