The Stone hung on a jutting crag of Purple Hill. On one side of it, far
beneath, lay the village, huddled together as if, through being close
compacted, its handful of humanity should not be a mere dust in the
balance beside Nature’s portentousness. Yet if one stood beside The
Stone, and looked down, the flimsy wooden huts looked like a barrier at
the end of a great flume. For the hill hollowed and narrowed from
The Stone to the village, as if giants had made this concave path by
trundling boulders to that point like a funnel where the miners’ houses
now formed a cul-de-sac. On the other side of the crag was a valley
also; but it was lonely and untenanted; and at one flank of The Stone
were serried legions of trees.
The Stone was a mighty and wonderful thing. Looked at from the village
direct, it had nothing but the sky for a background. At times, also, it
appeared to rest on nothing; and many declared that they could see clean
between it and the oval floor of the crag on which it rested. That was
generally in the evening, when the sun was setting behind it. Then the
light coiled round its base, between it and its pedestal, thus making
it appear to hover above the hill-point, or, planet-like, to be just
settling on it. At other times, when the light was perfectly clear and
not too strong, and the village side of the crag was brighter than the
other, more accurate relations of The Stone to its pedestal could be
discovered. Then one would say that it balanced on a tiny base, a toe of
granite. But if one looked long, especially in the summer, when the air
throbbed, it evidently rocked upon that toe; if steadily, and very long,
he grew tremulous, perhaps afraid. Once, a woman who was about to become
a mother went mad, because she thought The Stone would hurtle down the
hill at her great moment and destroy her and her child. Indians would
not live either on the village side of The Stone or in the valley
beyond. They had a legend that, some day, one, whom they called The
Man Who Sleeps, would rise from his hidden couch in the mountains, and,
being angry that any dared to cumber his playground, would hurl The
Stone upon them that dwelt at Purple Hill. But white men pay little heed
to Indian legends. At one time or another every person who had come
to the village visited The Stone. Colossal as it was, the real base
on which its weight rested was actually very small: the view from the
village had not been all deceitful. It is possible, indeed, that at
one time it had really rocked, and that the rocking had worn for it a
shallow cup, or socket, in which it poised. The first man who came to
Purple Valley prospecting had often stopped his work and looked at The
Stone in a half-fear that it would spring upon him unawares. And yet he
had as often laughed at himself for doing so, since, as he said, it must
have been there hundreds of thousands of years. Strangers, when they
came to the village, went to sleep somewhat timidly the first night of
their stay, and not infrequently left their beds to go and look at The
Stone, as it hung there ominously in the light of the moon; or listened
towards it if it was dark. When the moon rose late, and The Stone
chanced to be directly in front of it, a black sphere seemed to be
rolling into the light to blot it out.
But none who lived in the village looked upon The Stone in quite the
same fashion as did that first man who had come to the valley. He had
seen it through three changing seasons, with no human being near him,
and only occasionally a shy, wandering elk, or a cloud of wild ducks
whirring down the pass, to share his companionship with it. Once he had
waked in the early morning, and, possessed of a strange feeling, had
gone out to look a The Stone. There, perched upon it, was an eagle; and
though he said to himself that an eagle’s weight was to The Stone as a
feather upon the world, he kept his face turned towards it all day;
for all day the eagle stayed. He was a man of great stature and immense
strength. The thews of his limbs stood out like soft unbreakable steel.
Yet, as if to cast derision on his strength and great proportions, God
or Fate turned his bread to ashes, gave failure into his hands where he
hugely grasped at fortune, and hung him about with misery. He discovered
gold, but others gathered it. It was his daughter that went mad, and
gave birth to a dead child in fearsome thought of The Stone. Once,
when he had gone over the hills to another mining field, and had been
prevented from coming back by unexpected and heavy snows, his wife was
taken ill, and died alone of starvation, because none in the village
remembered of her and her needs. Again, one wild night, long after, his
only son was taken from his bed and lynched for a crime that was none
of his, as was discovered by his murderers next day. Then they killed
horribly the real criminal, and offered the father such satisfaction as
they could. They said that any one of them was ready there to be killed
by him; and they threw a weapon at his feet. At this he stood looking
upon them for a moment, his great breast heaving, and his eyes
glowering; but presently he reached out his arms, and taking two of
them by the throat, brought their heads together heavily, breaking their
skulls; and, with a cry in his throat like a wounded animal, left them,
and entered the village no more. But it became known that he had built
a rude but on Purple Hill, and that he had been seen standing beside The
Stone or sitting among the boulders below it, with his face bent upon
the village. Those who had come near to him said that he had greatly
changed; that his hair and beard had grown long and strong, and, in
effect, that he looked like some rugged fragment of an antique world.
The time came when they associated The Man with The Stone: they grew to
speak of him simply as The Man. There was something natural and apt in
the association. Then they avoided these two singular dwellers on the
height. What had happened to The Man when he lived in the village became
almost as great a legend as the Indian fable concerning The Stone. In
the minds of the people one seemed as old as the other. Women who knew
the awful disasters which had befallen The Man brooded at times most
timidly, regarding him as they did at first--and even still--The Stone.
Women who carried life unborn about with them had a strange dread of
both The Stone and The Man. Time passed on, and the feeling grew that
The Man’s grief must be a terrible thing, since he lived alone with
The Stone and God. But this did not prevent the men of the village from
digging gold, drinking liquor, and doing many kinds of evil. One
day, again, they did an unjust and cruel thing. They took Pierre, the
gambler, whom they had at first sought to vanquish at his own art, and,
possessed suddenly of the high duty of citizenship, carried him to the
edge of a hill and dropped him over, thinking thereby to give him a
quick death, while the vultures would provide him a tomb. But Pierre was
not killed, though to his grave--unprepared as yet--he would bear an
arm which should never be lifted higher than his shoulder. When he waked
from the crashing gloom which succeeded the fall, he was in the presence
of a being whose appearance was awesome and massive--an outlawed god:
whose hair and beard were white, whose eye was piercing, absorbing,
painful, in the long perspective of its woe. This being sat with his
great hand clasped to the side of his head. The beginning of his look
was the village, and--though the vision seemed infinite--the village was
the end of it too. Pierre, looking through the doorway beside which he
lay, drew in his breath sharply, for it seemed at first as if The Man
was an unnatural fancy, and not a thing. Behind The Man was The Stone,
which was not more motionless nor more full of age than this its
comrade. Indeed, The Stone seemed more a thing of life as it poised
above the hill: The Man was sculptured rock. His white hair was
chiselled on his broad brow, his face was a solemn pathos petrified, his
lips were curled with an iron contempt, an incalculable anger.
The sun went down, and darkness gathered about The Man. Pierre reached
out his hand, and drank the water and ate the coarse bread that had been
put near him. He guessed that trees or protruding ledges had broken his
fall, and that he had been rescued and brought here. As he lay thinking,
The Man entered the doorway, stooping much to do so. With flints
he lighted a wick which hung from a wooden bowl of bear’s oil; then
kneeling, held it above his head, and looked at Pierre. And Pierre, who
had never feared anyone, shrank from the look in The Man’s eyes. But
when the other saw that Pierre was awake, a distant kindness came upon
his face, and he nodded gravely; but he did not speak. Presently a great
tremor as of pain shook all his limbs, and he set the candle on the
ground, and with his stalwart hands arranged afresh the bandages about
Pierre’s injured arm and leg. Pierre spoke at last.
“You are The Man”? he said. The other bowed his head.
“You saved me from those devils in the valley?” A look of impregnable
hardness came into The Man’s face, but he pressed Pierre’s hand for
answer; and though the pressure was meant to be gentle, Pierre winced
painfully. The candle spluttered, and the hut filled with a sickly
smoke. The Man brought some bear skins and covered the sufferer, for,
the season being autumn, the night was cold. Pierre, who had thus spent
his first sane and conscious hour in many days, fell asleep. What time
it was when he waked he was not sure, but it was to hear a metallic
click-click come to him through the clear air of night. It was
a pleasant noise as of steel and rock: the work of some lonely
stone-cutter of the hills. The sound reached him with strange,
increasing distinctness. Was this Titan that had saved him sculpturing
some figure from the metal hill? Click-click! it vibrated as regularly
as the keen pulse of a watch. He lay and wondered for a long time, but
fell asleep again; and the steely iteration went on in his dreams.
In the morning The Man came to him, and cared for his hurts, and gave
him food; but still would speak no word. He was gone nearly all day in
the hills; yet when evening came he sought the place where Pierre had
seen him the night before, and the same weird scene was re-enacted. And
again in the night the clicking sound went on; and every night it was
renewed. Pierre grew stronger, and could, with difficulty, stand upon
his feet. One night he crept out, and made his way softly, slowly
towards the sound. He saw The Man kneeling beside The Stone, he saw a
hammer rise and fall upon a chisel; and the chisel was at the base of
The Stone. The hammer rose and fell with perfect but dreadful precision.
Pierre turned and looked towards the village below, whose lights were
burning like a bunch of fire-flies in the gloom. Again he looked at The
Stone and The Man.
Then the thing came to him sharply. The Man was chiselling away the
socket of The Stone, bringing it to that point of balance where the
touch of a finger, the wing of a bird, or the whistle of a north-west
wind, would send it down upon the offending and unsuspecting village.
The thought held him paralysed. The Man had nursed his revenge long past
the thought of its probability by the people beneath. He had at first
sat and watched the village, hated, and mused dreadfully upon the thing
he had determined to do. Then he had worked a little, afterwards more,
and now, lastly, since he had seen what they had done to Pierre, with
the hot but firm eagerness of an avenging giant. Pierre had done some
sad deeds in his time, and had tasted some sweet revenges, but nothing
like to this had ever entered his brain. In that village were men
who--as they thought--had cast him to a death fit only for a coward or
a cur. Well, here was the most exquisite retaliation. Though his hand
should not be in the thing, he could still be the cynical and approving
spectator.
But yet: had all those people hovering about those lights below done
harm to him? He thought there were a few--and they were women--who would
not have followed his tumbril to his death with cries of execration.
The rest would have done so,--most of them did so, not because he was a
criminal, but because he was a victim, and because human nature as it is
thirsts inordinately at times for blood and sacrifice--a living strain
of the old barbaric instinct. He remembered that most of these people
were concerned in having injured The Man. The few good women there had
vile husbands; the few pardonable men had hateful wives: the village of
Purple Hill was an ill affair.
He thought: now doubtfully, now savagely, now with irony.
The hammer and steel clicked on.
He looked at the lights of the village again. Suddenly there came to
his mind the words of a great man who sought to save a city manifold
centuries ago. He was not sure that he wished to save this village; but
there was a grim, almost grotesque, fitness in the thing that he now
intended. He spoke out clearly through the night:
“‘Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once:
Peradventure ten righteous shall be found there.’”
The hammer stopped. There was a silence, in which the pines sighed
lightly. Then, as if speaking was a labour, The Man replied in a deep,
harsh voice:
“I will not spare it for ten’s sake.”
Again there was a silence, in which Pierre felt his maimed body bend
beneath him; but presently the voice said,--“Now!”
At this the moon swung from behind a cloud. The Man stood behind The
Stone. His arm was raised to it. There was a moment’s pause--it seemed
like years to Pierre; a wind came softly crying out of the west, the
moon hurried into the dark, and then a monster sprang from its pedestal
upon Purple Hill, and, with a sound of thunder and an awful speed, raced
upon the village below. The boulders of the hillside crumbled after it.
And Pierre saw the lights go out.
The moon shone out again for an instant, and Pierre saw that The Man
stood where The Stone had been; but when he reached the place The Man
was gone. Forever!