roaring night descended against the windows with a thundering violence
that shook the walls and sucked the flame half-way up the wide stone
chimney. The oil lamp flickered and went out. Darkness invaded the
room for a second, and Delane sprang from his bench, thinking the wet
snow had loosened far above and was about to sweep the hut into the
depths. And he was still standing, trembling and uncertain, in the
middle of the room, when a deep and sighing hush followed sharp upon
the elemental outburst, and in the hush, like a whisper after thunder,
he heard a curious steady sound that, at first, he thought must be a
footstep by the door. It was then instantly repeated. But it was not
a step. It was some one knocking on the heavy oaken panels--a firm,
authoritative sound, as though the new arrival had the right to enter
and was already impatient at the delay.
The Englishman recovered himself instantly, realising with keen relief
the new arrival--at last.
"Another climber like myself, of course," he said, "or perhaps the man
who comes to prepare the hut for others. The season has begun." And he
went over quickly, without a further qualm, to unbolt the door.
"Forgive!" he exclaimed in German, as he threw it wide, "I was half
asleep before the fire. It is a terrible night. Come in to food and
shelter, for both are here, and you shall share such supper as I
possess."
And a tall, cloaked figure passed him swiftly with a gust of angry
wind from the impenetrable blackness of the world beyond. On the
threshold, for a second, his outline stood full in the blaze of
firelight with the sheet of darkness behind it, stately, erect,
commanding, his cloak torn fiercely by the wind, but the face hidden by
a low-brimmed hat; and an instant later the door shut with resounding
clamour upon the hurricane, and the two men turned to confront one
another in the little room.
Delane then realised two things sharply, both of them fleeting
impressions, but acutely vivid: First, that the outside darkness seemed
to have entered and established itself between him and the new arrival;
and, secondly, that the stranger's face was difficult to focus for
clear sight, although the covering hat was now removed. There was a
blur upon it somewhere. And this the Englishman ascribed partly to
the flickering effect of firelight, and partly to the lightning glare
of the man's masterful and terrific eyes, which made his own sight
waver in some curious fashion as he gazed upon him. These impressions,
however, were but momentary and passing, due doubtless to the condition
of his nerves and to the semi-shock of the dramatic, even theatrical
entrance. Delane's senses, in this wild setting, were guilty of
exaggeration. For now, while helping the man remove his cloak, speaking
naturally of shelter, food, and the savage weather, he lost this first
distortion and his mind recovered sane proportion. The stranger, after
all, though striking, was not of appearance so uncommon as to cause
alarm; the light and the low doorway had touched his stature with
illusion. He dwindled. And the great eyes, upon calmer subsequent
inspection, lost their original fierce lightning. The entering
darkness, moreover, was but an effect of the upheaving night behind him
as he strode across the threshold. The closed door proved it.
And yet, as Delane continued his quieter examination, there remained,
he saw, the startling quality which had caused that first magnifying in
his mind. His senses, while reporting accurately, insisted upon this
arresting and uncommon touch: there was, about this late wanderer of
the night, some evasive, lofty strangeness that set him utterly apart
from ordinary men.
The Englishman examined him searchingly, surreptitiously, but with a
touch of passionate curiosity he could not in the least account for
nor explain. There were contradictions of perplexing character about
him. For the first presentment had been of splendid youth, while on
the face, though vigorous and gloriously handsome, he now discerned
the stamp of tremendous age. It was worn and tired. While radiant
with strength and health and power, it wore as well this certain
signature of deep exhaustion that great experience rather than physical
experience brings. Moreover, he discovered in it, in some way he could
not hope to describe, man, woman, and child. There was a big, sad
earnestness about it, yet a touch of humour too; patience, tenderness,
and sweetness held the mouth; and behind the high pale forehead
intellect sat enthroned and watchful. In it were both love and hatred,
longing and despair; an expression of being ever on the defensive, yet
hugely mutinous; an air both hunted and beseeching; great knowledge and
great woe.
Delane gave up the search, aware that something unalterably splendid
stood before him. Solemnity and beauty swept him too. His was never
the grotesque assumption that man must be the highest being in the
universe, nor that a thing is a miracle merely because it has never
happened before. He groped, while explanation and analysis both halted.
"A great teacher," thought fluttered through him, "or a mighty rebel!
A distinguished personality beyond all question! Who can he be?" There
was something regal that put respect upon his imagination instantly.
And he remembered the legend of the country-side that Ludwig of Bavaria
was said to be about when nights were very wild. He wondered. Into
his speech and manner crept unawares an attitude of deference that
was almost reverence, and with it--whence came this other quality?--a
searching pity.
"You must be wearied out," he said respectfully, busying himself about
the room, "as well as cold and wet. This fire will dry you, sir, and
meanwhile I will prepare quickly such food as there is, if you will
eat it." For the other carried no knapsack, nor was he clothed for the
severity of mountain travel.
"I have already eaten," said the stranger courteously, "and, with my
thanks to you, I am neither wet nor tired. The afflictions that I bear
are of another kind, though ones that you shall more easily, I am sure,
relieve."
He spoke as a man whose words set troops in action, and Delane glanced
at him, deeply moved by the surprising phrase, yet hardly marvelling
that it should be so. He found no ready answer. But there was evidently
question in his look, for the other continued, and this time with a
smile that betrayed sheer winning beauty as of a tender woman:
"I saw the light and came to it. It is unusual--at this time."
His voice was resonant, yet not deep. There was a ringing quality about
it that the bare room emphasised. It charmed the young Englishman
inexplicably. Also, it woke in him a sense of infinite pathos.
"You are a climber, sir, like myself," Delane resumed, lifting his eyes
a moment uneasily from the coffee he brewed over a corner of the fire.
"You know this neighbourhood, perhaps? Better, at any rate, than I can
know it?" His German halted rather. He chose his words with difficulty.
There was uncommon trouble in his mind.
"I know all wild and desolate places," replied the other, in perfect
English, but with a wintry mournfulness in his voice and eyes, "for I
feel at home in them, and their stern companionship my nature craves as
solace. But, unlike yourself, I am no climber."
"The heights have no attraction for you?" asked Delane, as he mingled
steaming milk and coffee in the wooden bowl, marvelling what brought
him then so high above the valleys. "It is their difficulty and
danger that fascinate me always. I find the loneliness of the summits
intoxicating in a sense."
And, regardless of refusal, he set the bread and meat before him, the
apple and the tiny packet of salt, then turned away to place the coffee
pot beside the fire again. But as he did so a singular gesture of the
other caught his eyes. Before touching bowl or plate, the stranger took
the fruit and brushed his lips with it. He kissed it, then set it on
the ground and crushed it into pulp beneath his heel. And, seeing this,
the young Englishman knew something dreadfully arrested in his mind,
for, as he looked away, pretending the act was unobserved, a thing
of ice and darkness moved past him through the room, so that the pot
trembled in his hand, rattling sharply against the hearthstone where he
stooped. He could only interpret it as an act of madness, and the myth
of the sad, drowned monarch wandering through this enchanted region,
pressed into him again unsought and urgent. It was a full minute before
he had control of his heart and hand again.
The bowl was half emptied, and the man was smiling--this time the smile
of a child who implores the comfort of enveloping and understanding
arms.
"I am a wanderer rather than a climber," he was saying, as though there
had been no interval, "for, though the lonely summits suit me well,
I now find in them only--terror. My feet lose their sureness, and my
head its steady balance. I prefer the hidden gorges of these mountains,
and the shadows of the covering forests. My days"--his voice drew the
loneliness of uttermost space into its piteous accents--"are passed in
darkness. I can never climb again."
He spoke this time, indeed, as a man whose nerve was gone for ever. It
was pitiable almost to tears. And Delane, unable to explain the amazing
contradictions, felt recklessly, furiously drawn to this trapped
wanderer with the mien of a king yet the air and speech sometimes of a
woman and sometimes of an outcast child.
"Ah, then you have known accidents," Delane replied with outer
calmness, as he lit his pipe, trying in vain to keep his hand as steady
as his voice. "You have been in one perhaps. The effect, I have been
told, is----"
The power and sweetness in that resonant voice took his breath away as
he heard it break in upon his own uncertain accents:
"I have--fallen," the stranger replied impressively, as the rain and
wind wailed past the building mournfully, "yet a fall that was no part
of any accident. For it was no common fall," the man added with a
magnificent gesture of disdain, "while yet it broke my heart in two."
He stooped a little as he uttered the next words with a crying pathos
that an outcast woman might have used. "I am," he said, "engulfed in
intolerable loneliness. I can never climb again."
With a shiver impossible to control, half of terror, half of pity,
Delane moved a step nearer to the marvellous stranger. The spirit of
Ludwig, exiled and distraught, had gripped his soul with a weakening
terror; but now sheer beauty lifted him above all personal shrinking.
There seemed some echo of lost divinity, worn, wild yet grandiose,
through which this significant language strained towards a personal
message--for himself.
"In loneliness?" he faltered, sympathy rising in a flood.
"For my Kingdom that is lost to me for ever," met him in deep,
throbbing tones that set the air on fire. "For my imperial ancient
heights that jealousy took from me----"
The stranger paused, with an indescribable air of broken dignity and
pain.
Outside the tempest paused a moment before the awful elemental crash
that followed. A bellowing of many winds descended like artillery
upon the world. A burst of smoke rushed from the fireplace about them
both, shrouding the stranger momentarily in a flying veil. And Delane
stood up, uncomfortable in his very bones. "What can it be?" he asked
himself sharply. "Who is this being that he should use such language?"
He watched alarm chase pity, aware that the conversation held something
beyond experience. But the pity returned in greater and ever greater
flood. And love surged through him too. It was significant, he
remembered afterwards, that he felt it incumbent upon himself to stand.
Curious, too, how the thought of that mad, drowned monarch haunted
memory with such persistence. Some vast emotion that he could not name
drove out his subsequent words. The smoke had cleared, and a strange,
high stillness held the world. The rain streamed down in torrents,
isolating these two somehow from the haunts of men. And the Englishman
stared then into a countenance grown mighty with woe and loneliness.
There stood darkly in it this incommunicable magnificence of pain that
mingled awe with the pity he had felt. The kingly eyes looked clear
into his own, completing his subjugation out of time. "I would follow
you," ran his thought upon its knees, "follow you with obedience for
ever and ever, even into a last damnation. For you are sublime. You
shall come again into your Kingdom, if my own small worship----"
Then blackness sponged the reckless thought away. He spoke in its place
a more guarded, careful thing:
"I am aware," he faltered, yet conscious that he bowed, "of standing
before a Great One of some world unknown to me. Who he may be I have
but the privilege of wondering. He has spoken darkly of a Kingdom that
is lost. Yet he is still, I see, a Monarch." And he lowered his head
and shoulders involuntarily.
For an instant, then, as he said it, the eyes before him flashed their
original terrific lightnings. The darkness of the common world faded
before the entrance of an Outer Darkness. From gulfs of terror at his
feet rose shadows out of the night of time, and a passionate anguish as
of sudden madness seized his heart and shook it.
He listened breathlessly for the words that followed. It seemed some
wind of unutterable despair passed in the breath from those non-human
lips:
"I am still a Monarch, yes; but my Kingdom is taken from me, for I
have no single subject. Lost in a loneliness that lies out of space
and time, I am become a throneless Ruler, and my hopelessness is more
than I can bear." The beseeching pathos of the voice tore him in two.
The Deity himself, it seemed, stood there accused of jealousy, of sin
and cruelty. The stranger rose. The power about him brought the picture
of a planet, throned in mid-heaven and poised beyond assault. "Not
otherwise," boomed the startling words as though an avalanche found
syllables, "could I now show myself to--you."
Delane was trembling horribly. He felt the next words slip off his
tongue unconsciously. The shattering truth had dawned upon his soul at
last.
"Then the light you saw, and came to----?" he whispered.
"Was the light in your heart that guided me," came the answer, sweet,
beguiling as the music in a woman's tones, "the light of your instant,
brief desire that held love in it." He made an opening movement with
his arms as he continued, smiling like stars in summer. "For you
summoned me; summoned me by your dear and precious belief: how dear,
how precious, none can know but I who stand before you."
His figure drew up with an imperial air of proud dominion. His feet
were set among the constellations. The opening movement of his arms
continued slowly. And the music in his tones seemed merged in distant
thunder.
"For your single, brief belief," he smiled with the grandeur of a
condescending Emperor, "shall give my vanished Kingdom back to me."
And with an air of native majesty he held his hand out--to be kissed.
The black hurricane of night, the terror of frozen peaks, the yawning
horror of the great abyss outside--all three crowded into the
Englishman's mind with a slashing impact that blocked delivery of
any word or action. It was not that he refused, it was not that he
withdrew, but that Life stood paralysed and rigid. The flow stopped
dead for the first time since he had left his mother's womb. The God
in him was turned to stone and rendered ineffective. For an appalling
instant God was _not_.
He realised the stupendous moment. Before him, drinking his little soul
out merely by his Presence, stood one whose habit of mind, not alone
his external accidents, was imperial with black prerogative before the
first man drew the breath of life. August procedure was native to his
inner process of existence. The stars and confines of the universe
owned his sway before he fell, to trifle away the dreary little
centuries by haunting the minds of feeble men and women, by hiding
himself in nursery cupboards, and by grinning with stained gargoyles
from the roofs of city churches....
And the lad's life stammered, flickered, threatened to go out before
the enveloping terror of the revelation.
"I called to you ... but called to you in play," thought whispered
somewhere deep below the level of any speech, yet not so low that the
audacious sound of it did not crash above the elements outside; "for
... till now ... you have been to me but a ... coated bogy ... that my
brain disowned with laughter ... and my heart thought picturesque. If
you are here ... _alive_! May God forgive me for my ..."
It seemed as though tears--the tears of love and profound
commiseration--drowned the very seed of thought itself.
A sound stopped him that was like a collapse in heaven. Some crashing,
as of a ruined world, passed splintering through his little timid
heart. He did not yield, but he understood--with an understanding which
seemed the delicate first sign of yielding--the seductiveness of evil,
the sweet delight of surrendering the Will with utter recklessness
to those swelling forces which disintegrate the heroic soul in man.
He remembered. It was true. In the reaction from excess he _had_
definitely called upon his childhood's teaching with a passing moment
of genuine belief. And now that yearning of a fraction of a second bore
its awful fruit. The luscious Capitals where he had rioted passed in
a coloured stream before his eyes; the Wine, the Woman, and the Song
stood there before him, clothed in that Power which lies insinuatingly
disguised behind their little passing show of innocence. Their glamour
donned this domino of regal and virile grandeur. He felt entangled
beyond recovery. The idea of God seemed sterile and without reality.
The one real thing, the one desirable thing, the one possible, strong
and beautiful thing--was to bend his head and kiss those imperial
fingers. He moved noiselessly towards the Hand. He raised his own to
take it and lift it towards his mouth----
When there rose in his mind with startling vividness a small, soft
picture of a child's nursery, a picture of a little boy, kneeling in
scanty night-gown with pink upturned soles, and asking ridiculous,
audacious things of a shining Figure seated on a summer cloud above the
kitchen-garden walnut tree.
The tiny symbol flashed and went its way, yet not before it had lit
the entire world with glory. For there came an absolutely routing
power with it. In that half-forgotten instant's craving for the simple
teaching of his childhood days, Belief had conjured with two immense
traditions. This was the second of them. The appearance of the one had
inevitably produced the passage of its opposite....
And the Hand that floated in the air before him to be kissed sank
slowly down below the possible level of his lips. He shrank away.
Though laughter tempted something in his brain, there still clung
about his heart the first aching, pitying terror. But size retreated,
dwindling somehow as it went. The wind and rain obliterated every other
sound; yet in that bare, unfurnished room of a climber's mountain hut,
there was a silence, above the roar, that drank in everything and broke
the back of speech. In opposition to this masquerading splendour Delane
had set up a personal, paternal Deity.
"I thought of you, perhaps," cried the voice of self-defence, "but I
did not call to you with real belief. And, by the name of God, I did
not summon you. For your sweetness, as your power, sickens me; and your
hand is black with the curses of all the mothers in the world, whose
prayers and tears----"
He stopped dead, overwhelmed by the cruelty of his reckless utterance.
And the Other moved towards him slowly. It was like the summit of some
peaked and terrible height that moved. He spoke. He changed appallingly.
"But _I_ claim," he roared, "your heart. I claim you by that instant of
belief you felt. For by that alone you shall restore to me my vanished
Kingdom. You shall worship me."
In the countenance was a sudden awful power; but behind the stupefying
roar there was weakness in the voice as of an imploring and beseeching
child. Again, deep love and searching pity seared the Englishman's
heart as he replied in the gentlest accents he could find to master:
"And I claim _you_," he said, "by my understanding sympathy, and by my
sorrow for your God-forsaken loneliness, and by my love. For no Kingdom
built on hate can stand against the love you would deny----"
Words failed him then, as he saw the majesty fade slowly from the
face, grown small and shadowy. One last expression of desperate energy
in the eyes struck lightnings from the smoky air, as with an abandoned
movement of the entire figure, he drew back, it seemed, towards the
door behind him.
Delane moved slowly after him, opening his arms. Tenderness and big
compassion flung wide the gates of love within him. He found strange
language, too, although actual, spoken words did not produce them
further than his entrails where they had their birth.
"Toys in the world are plentiful, Sire, and you may have them for your
masterpiece of play. But you must seek them where they still survive;
in the churches, and in isolated lands where thought lies unawakened.
For they are the children's blocks of make-believe whose palaces, like
your once tremendous kingdom, have no true existence for the thinking
mind."
And he stretched his hands towards him with the gesture of one who
sought to help and save, then paused as he realised that his arms
enclosed sheer blackness, with the emptiness of wind and driving rain.
For the door of the hut stood open, and Delane balanced on the
threshold, facing the sheet of night above the abyss. He heard the
waterfalls in the valley far below. The forest flapped and tossed
its myriad branches. Cold draughts swept down from spectral fields
of melting snow above; and the blackness turned momentarily into
the semblance of towers and bastions of thick beaten gloom. Above
one soaring turret, then, a space of sky appeared, swept naked by a
violent, lost wind--an opening of purple into limitless distance. For
one second, amid the vapours, it was visible, empty and untenanted.
The next, there sailed across its small diameter a falling Star. With
an air of slow and endless leisure, yet at the same time with terrific
speed, it dived behind the ragged curtain of the clouds, and the space
closed up again. Blackness returned upon the heavens.
And through this blackness, plunging into that abyss of woe whence
he had momentarily risen, the figure of the marvellous stranger
melted utterly away. Delane, for a fleeting second, was aware of the
earnestness in the sad, imploring countenance; of its sweetness and
its power so strangely mingled; of it mysterious grandeur; and of its
pathetic childishness. But, already, it was sunk into interminable
distance. A star that would be baleful, yet was merely glorious, passed
on its endless wandering among the teeming systems of the universe.
Behind the fixed and steady stars, secure in their appointed places, it
set. It vanished into the pit of unknown emptiness. It was gone.
"God help you!" sighed across the sea of wailing branches, echoing down
the dark abyss below. "God give you rest at last!"
For he saw a princely, nay, an imperial Being, homeless for ever,
and for ever wandering, hunted as by keen remorseless winds about a
universe that held no corner for his feet, his majesty unworshipped,
his reign a mockery, his Court unfurnished, and his courtiers mere
shadows of deep space....
And a thin, grey dawn, stealing up behind clearing summits in the
east, crept then against the windows of the mountain hut. It brought
with it a treacherous, sharp air that made the sleeper draw another
blanket near to shelter him from the sudden cold. For the fire had died
out, and an icy draught sucked steadily beneath the doorway.
XII
A BIT OF WOOD