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 in 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 beech. A year's dust grayed their surface; a
year's rust dulled the silver band across the instep. 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 there is much lace
on coiffe and collarette, a pair of delicate sabots was found, banded
with silver and chiselled in red beech. 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 invisible 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.