after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. The village, a single
mass of shadow, was already asleep. Only in front of the little hotel
was there noise and light and bustle--for a moment. The horses, with
tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable
of their own accord, their harness trailing in the dust; and the
lumbering diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it--the
body of a great yellow-sided beetle with broken legs.
In spite of his physical weariness the schoolmaster, revelling in the
first hours of his ten-guinea holiday, felt exhilarated. For the high
Alpine valley was marvellously still; stars twinkled over the torn
ridges of the Dent du Midi where spectral snows gleamed against rocks
that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests,
dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. He took it all in with a
kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three
passengers gave directions about their luggage and went to their rooms.
Then he turned and walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the
hall, only just able to resist stopping to examine the big mountain map
that hung upon the wall by the door.
And, with a sudden disagreeable shock, he came down from the ideal to
the actual. For at the inn--the only inn--there was no vacant room.
Even the available sofas were occupied....
How stupid he had been not to write! Yet it had been impossible, he
remembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in
Geneva, enticed by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.
They talked endlessly, this gold-braided porter and the hard-faced old
woman--her face was hard, he noticed--gesticulating all the time, and
pointing all about the village with suggestions that he ill understood,
for his French was limited and their _patois_ was fearful.
"_There!_"--he might find a room, "or _there_! But we are, _hélas_
full--more full than we care about. To-morrow, perhaps--if So-and-So
give up their rooms----!" And then, with much shrugging of shoulders,
the hard-faced old woman stared at the gold-braided porter, and the
porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster.
At length, however, by some process of hope he did not himself
understand, and following directions given by the old woman that were
utterly unintelligible, he went out into the street and walked towards
a dark group of houses she had pointed out to him. He only knew that
he meant to thunder at a door and ask for a room. He was too weary to
think out details. The porter half made to go with him, but turned back
at the last moment to speak with the old woman. The houses sketched
themselves dimly in the general blackness. The air was cold. The whole
valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water. He was
thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be very far away, and that
he might even spend the night wandering in the woods, when there was
a sharp noise behind him and he turned to see a figure hurrying after
him. It was the porter--running.
And in the little hall of the inn there began again a confused
three-cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and
whispered asides in _patois_ between the woman and the porter--the net
result of which was that, "If Monsieur did not object--there _was_ a
room, after all, on the first floor--only it was in a sense 'engaged.'
That is to say----"
But the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely into
the puzzle that had somehow provided it so suddenly. The ethics of
hotel-keeping had nothing to do with him. If the woman offered him
quarters it was not for him to argue with her whether the said quarters
were legitimately hers to offer.
But the porter, evidently a little thrilled, accompanied the guest up
to the room and supplied in a mixture of French and English details
omitted by the landlady--and Minturn, the schoolmaster, soon shared
the thrill with him, and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible
tragedy.
All who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high mountain
valleys where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of the attractions,
will understand a certain faint element of high alarm that goes with
the picture. One looks up at the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks
involuntarily of the men who find their pleasure for days and nights
together scaling perilous summits among the clouds, and conquering
inch by inch the icy peaks that for ever shake their dark terror in
the sky. The atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror
of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative
contemplation of the scene; and the idea Minturn gleaned from the
half-frightened porter lost nothing by his ignorance of the language.
This Englishwoman, the real occupant of the room, had insisted on going
without a guide. She had left just before daybreak two days before--the
porter had seen her start--and ... she had not returned! The route was
difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for a skilled climber, even
a solitary one. And the Englishwoman was an experienced mountaineer.
Also, she was self-willed, careless of advice, bored by warnings,
self-confident to a degree. Queer, moreover; for she kept entirely
to herself, and sometimes remained in her room with locked doors,
admitting no one, for days together: a "crank," evidently, of the first
water.
This much Minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter's talk while
his luggage was brought in and the room set to rights; further, too,
that the search party had gone out and _might_, of course, return at
any moment. In which case---- Thus the room was empty, yet still hers.
"If Monsieur did not object--if the risk he ran of having to turn out
suddenly in the night----" It was the loquacious porter who furnished
the details that made the transaction questionable; and Minturn
dismissed the loquacious porter as soon as possible, and prepared to
get into the hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep he
could before he was turned out.
At first, it must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable--distinctly
uncomfortable. He was in some one else's room. He had really no right
to be there. It was in the nature of an unwarrantable intrusion; and
while he unpacked he kept looking over his shoulder as though some one
were watching him from the corners. Any moment, it seemed, he would
hear a step in the passage, a knock would come at the door, the door
would open, and there he would see this vigorous Englishwoman looking
him up and down with anger. Worse still--he would hear her voice asking
him what he was doing in her room--her bedroom. Of course, he had an
adequate explanation, but still----!
Then, reflecting that he was already half undressed, the humour of it
flashed for a second across his mind, and he laughed--_quietly_. And at
once, after that laughter, under his breath, came the sudden sense of
tragedy he had felt before. Perhaps, even while he smiled, her body lay
broken and cold upon those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over
her hair, her glazed eyes staring sightless up to the stars.... It
made him shudder. The sense of this woman whom he had never seen, whose
name even he did not know, became extraordinarily real. Almost he could
imagine that she was somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing
all he did.
He opened the door softly to put his boots outside, and when he closed
it again he turned the key. Then he finished unpacking and distributed
his few things about the room. It was soon done; for, in the first
place, he had only a small Gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly, the
only place where he could spread his clothes was the sofa. There was no
chest of drawers, and the cupboard, an unusually large and solid one,
was locked. The Englishwoman's things had evidently been hastily put
away in it. The only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of faded
_Alpenrosen_ standing in a glass jar upon the washhand stand. This, and
a certain faint perfume, were all that remained. In spite, however, of
these very slight evidences, the whole room was pervaded with a curious
sense of occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. One moment
the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a "just left" feeling; the
next it was a queer awareness of "still here" that made him turn cold
and look hurriedly behind him.
Altogether, the room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the
strength of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing the
faded flowers out of the window, and then hanging his mackintosh upon
the cupboard door in such a way as to screen it as much as possible
from view. For the sight of that big, ugly cupboard, filled with the
clothing of a woman who might then be beyond any further need of
covering--thus his imagination insisted on picturing it--touched in him
a startled sense of the Incongruous that did not stop there, but crept
through his mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of a
rather grotesque horror. At any rate, the sight of that cupboard was
offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively. Then, turning out
the electric light, he got into bed.
But the instant the room was dark he realised that it was more than he
could stand; for, with the blackness, there came a sudden rush of cold
that he found it hard to explain. And the odd thing was that, when he
lit the candle beside his bed, he noticed that his hand trembled.
This, of course, was too much. His imagination was taking liberties
and must be called to heel. Yet the way he called it to order was
significant, and its very deliberateness betrayed a mind that has
already admitted fear. And fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge.
He lay there upon his elbow in bed and carefully took note of all the
objects in the room--with the intention, as it were, of taking an
inventory of everything his senses perceived, then drawing a line,
adding them up finally, and saying with decision, "That's all the room
contains! I've counted every single thing. There is nothing more.
_Now_--I may sleep in peace!"
And it was during this absurd process of enumerating the furniture of
the room that the dreadful sense of distressing lassitude came over him
that made it difficult even to finish counting. It came swiftly, yet
with an amazing kind of violence that overwhelmed him softly and easily
with a sensation of enervating weariness hard to describe. And its
first effect was to banish fear. He no longer possessed enough energy
to feel really afraid or nervous. The cold remained, but the alarm
vanished. And into every corner of his usually vigorous personality
crept the insidious poison of a _muscular_ fatigue--at first--that in a
few seconds, it seemed, translated itself into _spiritual_ inertia. A
sudden consciousness of the foolishness, the crass futility, of life,
of effort, of fighting--of all that makes life worth living, shot into
every fibre of his being, and left him utterly weak. A spirit of black
pessimism that was not even vigorous enough to assert itself, invaded
the secret chambers of his heart....
Every picture that presented itself to his mind came dressed in
grey shadows: those bored and sweating horses toiling up the ascent
to--nothing! that hard-faced landlady taking so much trouble to let her
desire for gain conquer her sense of morality--for a few francs! That
gold-braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic, and so anxious
to tell all he knew! What was the use of them all? And for himself,
what in the world was the good of all the labour and drudgery he went
through in that preparatory school where he was junior master? What
could it lead to? Wherein lay the value of so much uncertain toil, when
the ultimate secrets of life were hidden and no one knew the final
goal? How foolish was effort, discipline, work! How vain was pleasure!
How trivial the noblest life!...
With a fearful jump that nearly upset the candle Minturn pulled himself
together. Such vicious thoughts were usually so remote from his normal
character that the sudden vile invasion produced a swift reaction. Yet,
only for a moment. Instantly, again, the black depression descended
upon him like a wave. His work--it could lead to nothing but the
dreary labour of a small headmastership after all--seemed as vain
and foolish as his holiday in the Alps. What an idiot he had been,
to be sure, to come out with a knapsack merely to work himself into
a state of exhaustion climbing over toilsome mountains that led to
nowhere--resulted in nothing. A dreariness of the grave possessed him.
Life was a ghastly fraud! Religion childish humbug! Everything was
merely a trap--a trap of death; a coloured toy that Nature used as
a decoy! But a decoy for what? For nothing! There was no meaning in
anything. The only _real_ thing was--DEATH. And the happiest people
were those who found it soonest.
_Then why wait for it to come?_
He sprang out of bed, thoroughly frightened. This was horrible. Surely
mere physical fatigue could not produce a world so black, an outlook so
dismal, a cowardice that struck with such sudden hopelessness at the
very roots of life? For, normally, he was cheerful and strong, full
of the tides of healthy living; and this appalling lassitude swept
the very basis of his personality into Nothingness and the desire for
death. It was like the development of a Secondary Personality. He had
read, of course, how certain persons who suffered shocks developed
thereafter entirely different characteristics, memory, tastes, and
so forth. It had all rather frightened him. Though scientific men
vouched for it, it was hardly to be believed. Yet here was a similar
thing taking place in his own consciousness. He was, beyond question,
experiencing all the mental variations of--_some one else_! It was
un-moral. It was awful. It was--well, after all, at the same time, it
was uncommonly interesting.
And this interest he began to feel was the first sign of his returning
normal Self. For to feel interest is to live, and to love life.
He sprang into the middle of the room--then switched on the electric
light. And the first thing that struck his eye was--the big cupboard.
"Hallo! There's that--beastly cupboard!" he exclaimed to himself,
involuntarily, yet aloud. It held all the clothes, the swinging
skirts and coats and summer blouses of the dead woman. For he knew
now--somehow or other--that she _was_ dead....
At that moment, through the open windows, rushed the sound of falling
water, bringing with it a vivid realisation of the desolate, snow-swept
heights. He saw her--positively _saw_ her!--lying where she had fallen,
the frost upon her cheeks, the snow-dust eddying about her hair and
eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the lumps of ice. For a moment
the sense of spiritual lassitude--of the emptiness of life--vanished
before this picture of broken effort--of a small human force battling
pluckily, yet in vain, against the impersonal and pitiless Potencies of
Inanimate Nature--and he found himself again, his normal self. Then,
instantly, returned again that terrible sense of cold, nothingness,
emptiness....
And he found himself standing opposite the big cupboard where her
clothes were. He wanted to see those clothes--things she had used and
worn. Quite close he stood, almost touching it. The next second he had
touched it. His knuckles struck upon the wood.
Why he knocked is hard to say. It was an instinctive movement probably.
Something in his deepest self dictated it--ordered it. He knocked at
the door. And the dull sound upon the wood into the stillness of that
room brought--horror. Why it should have done so he found it as hard
to explain to himself as why he should have felt impelled to knock.
The fact remains that when he heard the faint reverberation inside the
cupboard, it brought with it so vivid a realisation of the woman's
presence that he stood there shivering upon the floor with a dreadful
sense of anticipation: he almost expected to hear an answering knock
from within--the rustling of the hanging skirts perhaps--or, worse
still, to see the locked door slowly open towards him.
And from that moment, he declares that in some way or other he must
have partially lost control of himself, or at least of his better
judgment; for he became possessed by such an overmastering desire
to tear open that cupboard door and see the clothes within, that he
tried every key in the room in the vain effort to unlock it, and then,
finally, before he quite realised what he was doing--rang the bell!
But, having rung the bell for no obvious or intelligent reason at
two o'clock in the morning, he then stood waiting in the middle of
the floor for the servant to come, conscious for the first time that
something outside his ordinary self had pushed him towards the act. It
was almost like an internal voice that directed him ... and thus, when
at last steps came down the passage and he faced the cross and sleepy
chambermaid, amazed at being summoned at such an hour, he found no
difficulty in the matter of what he should say. For the same power that
insisted he should open the cupboard door also impelled him to utter
words over which he apparently had no control.
"It's not _you_ I rang for!" he said with decision and impatience, "I
want a man. Wake the porter and send him up to me at once--hurry! I
tell you, hurry----!"
And when the girl had gone, frightened at his earnestness, Minturn
realised that the words surprised himself as much as they surprised
her. Until they were out of his mouth he had not known what exactly
he was saying. But now he understood that some force foreign to his
own personality was using his mind and organs. The black depression
that had possessed him a few moments before was also part of it. The
powerful mood of this vanished woman had somehow momentarily taken
possession of him--communicated, possibly, by the atmosphere of things
in the room still belonging to her. But even now, when the porter,
without coat or collar, stood beside him in the room, he did not
understand _why_ he insisted, with a positive fury admitting no denial,
that the key of that cupboard must be found and the door instantly
opened.
The scene was a curious one. After some perplexed whispering with
the chambermaid at the end of the passage, the porter managed to find
and produce the key in question. Neither he nor the girl knew clearly
what this excited Englishman was up to, or why he was so passionately
intent upon opening the cupboard at two o'clock in the morning. They
watched him with an air of wondering what was going to happen next.
But something of his curious earnestness, even of his late fear,
communicated itself to them, and the sound of the key grating in the
lock made them both jump.
They held their breath as the creaking door swung slowly open. All
heard the clatter of that other key as it fell against the wooden
floor--within. The cupboard had been locked _from the inside_. But it
was the scared housemaid, from her position in the corridor, who first
saw--and with a wild scream fell crashing against the bannisters.
The porter made no attempt to save her. The schoolmaster and himself
made a simultaneous rush towards the door, now wide open. They, too,
had seen.
There were no clothes, skirts or blouses on the pegs, but, all by
itself, from an iron hook in the centre, they saw the body of the
Englishwoman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards, the
tongue protruding. Jarred by the movement of unlocking, the body swung
slowly round to face them.... Pinned upon the inside of the door was a
hotel envelope with the following words pencilled in straggling writing:
"Tired--unhappy--hopelessly depressed.... I cannot face life any
longer.... All is black. I must put an end to it.... I meant to do it
on the mountains, but was afraid. I slipped back to my room unobserved.
This way is easiest and best...."
VIII
CAIN'S ATONEMENT
So many thousands to-day have deliberately put Self aside, and are
ready to yield their lives for an ideal, that it is not surprising a
few of them should have registered experiences of a novel order. For
to step aside from Self is to enter a larger world, to be open to new
impressions. If Powers of Good exist in the universe at all, they can
hardly be inactive at the present time....
The case of two men, who may be called Jones and Smith, occurs to the
mind in this connection. Whether a veil actually was lifted for a
moment, or whether the tension of long and terrible months resulted in
an exaltation of emotion, the experience claims significance. Smith,
to whom the experience came, holds the firm belief that it was real.
Jones, though it involved him too, remained unaware.
It is a somewhat personal story, their peculiar relationship dating
from early youth: a kind of unwilling antipathy was born between them,
yet an antipathy that had no touch of hate or even of dislike. It was
rather in the nature of an instinctive rivalry. Some tie operated that
flung them ever into the same arena with strange persistence, and ever
as opponents. An inevitable fate delighted to throw them together in a
sense that made them rivals; small as well as large affairs betrayed
this malicious tendency of the gods. It showed itself in earliest
days, at school, at Cambridge, in travel, even in house-parties
and the lighter social intercourse. Though distant cousins, their
families were not intimate, and there was no obvious reason why their
paths should fall so persistently together. Yet their paths did so,
crossing and recrossing in the way described. Sooner or later, in
all his undertakings, Smith would note the shadow of Jones darkening
the ground in front of him; and later, when called to the Bar in his
chosen profession, he found most frequently that the learned counsel
in opposition to him was the owner of this shadow, Jones. In another
matter, too, they became rivals, for the same girl, oddly enough,
attracted both, and though she accepted neither offer of marriage
(during Smith's lifetime!), the attitude between them was that of
unwilling rivals. For they were friends as well.
Jones, it appears, was hardly aware that any rivalry existed; he did
not think of Smith as an opponent, and as an adversary, never. He did
notice, however, the constantly recurring meetings, for more than once
he commented on them with good-humoured amusement. Smith, on the other
hand, was conscious of a depth and strength in the tie that certainly
intrigued him; being of a thoughtful, introspective nature, he was
keenly sensible of the strange competition in their lives, and sought
in various ways for its explanation, though without success. The desire
to find out was very strong in him. And this was natural enough, owing
to the singular fact that in all their battles he was the one to lose.
Invariably Jones got the best of every conflict. Smith always paid;
sometimes he paid with interest.
Occasionally, too, he seemed forced to injure himself while
contributing to his cousin's success. It was very curious. He reflected
much upon it; he wondered what the origin of their tie and rivalry
might be, but especially why it was that he invariably lost, and why
he was so often obliged to help his rival to the point even of his own
detriment. Tempted to bitterness sometimes, he did not yield to it,
however; the relationship remained frank and pleasant; if anything, it
deepened.
He remembered once, for instance, giving his cousin a chance
introduction which yet led, a little later, to the third party offering
certain evidence which lost him an important case--Jones, of course,
winning it. The third party, too, angry at being dragged into the case,
turned hostile to him, thwarting various subsequent projects. In no
other way could Jones have procured this particular evidence; he did
not know of its existence even. That chance introduction did it all.
There was nothing the least dishonourable on the part of Jones--it
was just the chance of the dice. The dice were always loaded against
Smith--and there were other instances of similar kind.