in my mind to God’s family pewter and silver stacked in useless and
aggravated confusion along the horizon. Brightly polished and metallic
they glistened in the sun, silver-plated with the crystallised snow and
hall-marked with ancient volcanic scars. I felt no doubt as to their
Maker. But my mood led me to view them relatively and from distances in
which they grew smaller. My imagination resolved them to the contours
of the Mountains in the Moon, which hung aloft that night like a steel
mirror parodying the Alps of earth. In that cosmic illumination which
we call moonlight I imagined the Alps as seen from Saturn or from the
sun, reducing them to mental and relative dust. What interested me
most, watching those mountains, was their human associations and the
dim thought that in crevasses hidden throughout those heights as remote
from man’s eye as the sepulchre of Moses lay the frost-eaten skeletons
of dead mountaineers, all the lonely legion who had gone up on the
hills and never returned. The great peaks seemed memorable, glamorous
and tragic. Without history until men travelled and travailed on them,
without dramatic power till men perished in their fastnesses and
fissures, dumb and inane the great hills encumbered the earth.
Switzerland is Switzerland, and three things in Switzerland do not
stop. Firstly, the wonderfully made clocks; secondly, the ever-tinkling
cattle bells, and, thirdly, the Tourists, who at certain and fortunate
periods take flight. I arrived in the lull between summer-climbing
and winter-sports while the voice of the tourist was low in the land.
Saltus met me at the station in the valley and conducted me to the
funicular railway leading to his chalet. We began to move slowly up the
heights. It was like tobogganing uphill in a kind of collapsed tramcar.
We passed through a mist of bell-music. Upon the cattle of a hundred
hills the little bells jangled and tinkled. If the bells were intended
to trace a lost cow I should imagine the expedient to be as practical
as tying a blue ribbon round every sheep on the English Downs. But I
dwell on a particular sound which, for me, is always associated with
Saltus.
At the top of the funicular we dismounted and began walking through
a forest of fir trees, which lost all charm for me when I read a
notice to say that it was reserved for hotel visitors! and in the
wild thickets Saltus pointed out one of those melancholy timberbuilt
depots for consumptives. Farther we met a fellow-countryman, who
turned and, looking at Saltus with staring hectic eyes, seemed to
fly horrorstruck, as far as I could judge. We were now passing on
footpaths through the forest proper, and in half an hour we reached
his chalet. It was a dark and dismal den though furnished with modern
comforts. A heavy overhanging drip-board shaded the dark-stained timber
stories from sun or snow. Piles of books filled the low-ceilinged room
amid much mountaineering gear and instruments that I connected with
astrology--star charts and astrolabes, crystal balls and the like.
This was a new side to Saltus’s character, and I decided that it
accounted for the dread which his neighbour had shown when we passed
in the forest, as well as for the awed demeanour of the two Swiss
servants, who worked in the chalet by day and withdrew to some Alpine
kraal by night. I found a clue to Saltus, at least to the extent of his
misanthropy. His chalet held no Visitors’ Book, and there appeared to
be no visitor’s room.
I presumed I was the first visitor to reach his abode, for a camp
bed and blankets were pitched for me in a corner of the dining-room.
I stayed a month with him without making any attempt to lift the
personal mystery. I discovered that he was wealthy, and a rich man
without friends is a curious phenomenon. He was also an epicure, for
the food and cooking were excellent. But there was no variety. Certain
vegetables and meats appeared but others never appeared in the round.
Yet Saltus surveyed the menu book every morning with an eagle eye.
However, I settled down to this solitary form of companionship. Lunn
had forgotten me and to Cook I must have been as one that had gone
down into the pit, though never had I dwelt at a higher elevation in my
life. Of his necromancy Saltus was very open and showed me many things
in old books, but I came to regard it as a hobby rather than a practice
on his part. I could not feel that his clever cynical mind would waste
or loose itself entirely on such barren investigations. His servants
thought he had attained some proficiency in the darker arts, for I
noticed that whenever he entered the room they crossed their thumbs in
his direction. I knew what this meant. They feared him for the evil
eye. Did the lady in the Aerated Bread Shop also fear the evil eye? I
wondered to myself. It was no business of mine whether the ban upon him
was social or supernatural. I would not ask and I could not blame. He
could make me his revelation when he wished.
But it was a slight surprise to find that this velvet-dressed lounger
and affecter of the occult was a first-class mountaineer. I learnt
by observation that he was so keen that he never lost a chance to
go out on a search party. There were plenty of accidents in his
locality. In face of the chalet rose the colossal cloudpick known as
the Spindelhorn, and the ranges of the Schwindelhorn stretched at our
back. More than once I saw him go out at a night call with the guides
when some party had been reported lost. He seemed to have a passion
for danger and not for fame. Unrecorded were these heroic climbs,
except what he cared to tell me after he had rested. He told me one
day with visual effect how he had been forced to make a glissade down
a splitting snow-field. For a moment he had been suspended by the rope
over a crevasse, but he laughed as though life held far more terrible
situations. It was a ridiculising yet a haunted laugh. But it was a new
rôle for this misanthrope to adopt, that of a human St. Bernard, for he
never took out his gear except to find the lost. I never knew what to
make of it. His expeditions on the hills always left him in a strangely
exalted condition, and for a day the cynicism would fall from his real
nature like a bright barren husk. I even imagined him sentimental
within. The snows and storms of the Alps had no terrors for him; if
anything they were a refreshment to his silent, sullen soul.
He never left the chalet except to walk in the woods, and always
avoided seeing anybody except myself and the servants. Yet he had no
appearance of having shrunk into himself or of collapsing into ignoble
obscurity. He kept himself in the most magnificent strength and fettle,
and his agility in drawing himself over the rocks on the very mild
climbs we took together was little less than caprine. And all the while
his mystery seemed farther away than ever from solution. This was no
broken man, whose co-operation on a jaunt was half the battle. Why
did he behave as though his presence polluted the very whiteness of
Switzerland? Yet he used to stand for hours watching the Spindelhorn
as though he were sifting the snows in his inmost soul. I looked
carelessly into his eyes sometimes. They were the cold green colour
of the glaciers. They made me shiver and desire to ask questions less
than ever. They reminded me of the eyes of a man who had died long ago.
The chalet was comfortable enough to a bachelor, but it suffered from
what I can only describe as a great spiritual emptiness. Neither good
nor evil spirits could find lodging there. It was a sort of vacuum.
When I saw all his necromantic gear, I had a feeling that, as he had
found himself cut by the living, it was only natural that he should
wish to scrape up acquaintance with the dead. One day he told me that
he had never imagined once in his life that any survival of the human
personality was possible. I supposed his secret was that, though
endowed with fine faculties, mental and bodily, he had somehow become
dispossessed of his soul, if ever he had one! I felt as though I was
really the only human person walking about in that house. His body and
his mind were unconnected by the third quantity of soul, which makes a
person. He was a unique figure, a striking character in his way, almost
a personage; but he was not a real person. He was only a psychical
mannequin, after all! However, I was comfortable and I lived on with my
automaton friend as with a muscular phantom. I was fond of coining such
phrases, but none of them exactly caught John Saltus.
I felt that my patronising pity was inadequate to the power that
lay behind his detachment of purpose and life. He was something
more than an Alpine Diogenes in his tub. He had something of the
martyrised nobility of Prometheus chained to the rocks. But why
he lived on those heights, so lonely and so unsatisfied, a woman
visitor would have gone mad in a week trying to find out. He was not
consumptive. His mountaineering was occasional. His tastes lay with
civilisation, and eventually I realised that his astrology was all
a blind. The inspiration or fascination or redemption which he drew
from the everlasting hills eluded me. What possible sin or secret
demanded that he should live in his wooden eyrie, issuing forth on
rare and dangerous expeditions? What did he expect the snows of the
Schwindelhorn to wipe away from his past?
I used to feel that he was a ghostless body, that he was ever watching
those heights for the return of his soul. They were not unpopulated,
those uncanny crevasses and glaciers. Human beings had been lured and
trapped into their embrace. I could conceive ghosts among those emerald
cracks in the sides of the lacquered mountain. There, as in a vision,
the dead climbers eternally negotiate the trackless passes, while the
noiseless flick of their shadowy axes moves upon the face of the ice,
and phantom pulls phantom along the endless rope.
* * * * *
One day the end came with such an unexpected explanation. We were
watching the fronting heights, the trillion tonnage of micaed granite,
that rises in sheeted cliffs and light-green landing stages, where
alpine men actually live, and the higher barren ledges and ragged
belts of hirsute fir-trees growing on the gigantic rock jowls and only
waiting for a drift of snowlike soap and the razorlike effect of an
avalanche to give the illusion of a grandiose operation in Titanic
shaving. And over all rose the snowy peaks, worn fine by the workings
of sun and rain, or tangled and wounded by the primeval chaos.
Leaving him, I had turned back to the chalet when I suddenly heard him
cry to himself: “Onions and veal, onions and veal, there is no peace!”
Ridiculous words they sounded, but from Saltus they came with all the
force and enunciation of Greek tragedy. And he sighed the words again
and again: “No peace, no peace!” While his green eyes still ranged
the panorama of the Alps. I knew not what to think. Had he sent his
soul out into the waste and had it returned empty to him again? He
rejoined me at lunch and showed himself almost human--not that he was
not always courteous and hospitable and (when he wished) the fount of
good conversation. Whatever his tragedy was, he had seemingly merged it
into nature. Whatever had been the primitive shades and sensitiveness
of his character, he had reduced himself to the slow patience of the
unemotional. He was the triumph of undecontrollable control. In a month
of close company those were the only revealing words he had let slip.
And they were the most anguished I had ever heard drop from a human
creature in my life. Otherwise I could not recollect once seeing him
hurried or angry or grieved. I could not conceive him passing in or out
of love. Swearing or praying, those two easily reversible processes
of approach to the Creator, were not for him. Fortunately I still
remained, on the whole, neither curious nor critical.
When he joined me, he told me he had seen an avalanche on the sides
of the Schwindelhorn. Emotion in his face took the form of chalky
solemnity. “I never watch an avalanche without wishing I were under
it”; and again he said with unusual feeling, “I believe I could bring
myself to pray to be buried under those moving snows if my prayer could
be heard.” I said I hoped that the avalanche had brought no accident
in its train, and that if he liked I would go down the funicular to
the Club that evening to find out if it were so. He nodded grateful
agreement. “Yes, do find out. If there has been trouble, I should like
to be out on the Alps to-morrow.”
I crawled down by the funicular that evening and found my way to the
English Club. The avalanche had caused some stirring among guides and
visitors. At least one party was known to have been making in the
direction taken by the avalanche. Alpenstocks were clashing and heavy
boots beating upon the boarding. Anglo-Saxon superiority upon the
mountains was being demonstrated. Casual English voices could be heard
with their peculiarly unhumorous drawl. I made bold to inquire if this
activity had been caused by rumour of accident. A quiet man looked up
and nodded. Then he said: “You come from Saltus, don’t you? I have
noticed you with him several times.” I assented. “You live with him?”
I nodded. “You eat with him?” I nodded. “Then I bet you haven’t smelt
an onion for a twelvemonth,” and he laughed coarsely. “I am afraid I
don’t understand you, sir,” I said. “Then wait till this search party
gets clear. I dare say they will send for Saltus, if they don’t strike
the party which was due to return last night.” And I waited, curious
perhaps for the first time in my life. The word “onion” rang like an
echo of fatality in my ears.
An hour later we were alone in the club-room, and the other began his
yarn. Mercifully it was quickly told. “So you eat with John Saltus day
after day and your flesh never creeps?” I sat, nodding and nodding, in
a waking trance, but I could not fall asleep. Like the Ancient Mariner,
the other told me his ghastly tale as follows:
“I knew John Saltus in Paris when we were both students. We lived in
the same rooms for a time. But for a year we always fed at a crowded
little restaurant in the Latin Quarter. It was very cheap and very
good. The restaurant was kept by an old artist, fallen on evil days,
and his handsome wife. We all admired and feebly affected Madame.
Saltus had a friend who went further and made love to her. They used
to eat together. One day I saw the old man serving them both with a
livid face. It really seemed a little hard that they should eat his own
food under his nose and make him wait on them both. Two days later I
arrived late for the evening meal. To my surprise only Saltus and his
friend were sitting there. I joined them, and Saltus explained: ‘The
old man has been feeling ill. He refused us admission, but we insisted
and tried to put it right. Anyhow, he has closed his windows and let in
no one but us. Madame has not appeared yet. She must be doing penance
in the kitchen. However, you have missed nothing. The cooking has been
execrable. We have had horrible horsemeat with onions. Can’t you catch
the smell? You had better go on to another restaurant. They are too
much upset here. Our friend has disorganised the establishment by his
love-making. The wonder is that he has been served at all. And now
Monsieur has not returned from the kitchen. We had better pay the bill
and go. I will go in and spare him the trouble of looking upon his
rival again.’ All these words and sentences have remained indelible
upon my mind,” continued my informant.
“When Saltus came back from the kitchen he was a changed man. He could
not speak, but motioned us all to follow him. Madame lay dead on the
table, her breasts terribly mangled and her whole body dissected. Her
husband had fled and was picked out of the Seine the next day. The
stove was burning hard and a saucepan of onions was frizzling to a
stinking cinder. No need to discuss or analyse the menu. Saltus has
been that way ever since. He thinks he has committed some unforgivable
sin or incurred some uncleansable degradation in the sight of men.”
I ran out into the moonlit night. It was late, and I walked about,
unable to sleep, and watched the sunrise redden the snowy veins of
the Schwindelhorn like a pink unguent applied by Dawn to heal the
black bruise of night. I can never forget the first delicate pink that
sprayed or rather perfumed the mountain until the sun brought a ruddier
rush of light over the mountain-head, and Day succeeded with all her
diamond whiteness. And the stark beauty of the Spindelhorn and the
Spittlehorn rose up behind me with a whiteness as of fuller’s earth.
Then I could understand Saltus longing for the untarnished hills. It
was not curious that he should have drawn himself into the heights that
his flesh might be cleansed by the snow and his bones one day made one
with the unpolluted Alps. But I never returned to his chalet.
LOADED DICE
I was recently passing a few days at Monte Carlo, tempted more by
the weather than the spirit of gambling. I was mooning about in the
sunshine, if I may so describe a very pleasant though unproductive
manner of spending the time. The hot-house plants and tropical trees
which grow out-of-doors in the Riviera are alone worth the pleasure of
the trip. The principality of Monaco needs no foreign loans to run its
government, for the tax paid by the Casino is sufficient to balance its
expenses. The flowers benefit by the local affluence, for their beds
are as carefully made as though they were occupying a royal suite, and
they themselves receive as much toilet as ladies of fashion. Palms,
prickly-pear cactus, and all kinds of thick, watery-fleshed plants
thrive in the dry terraces between the mountains and the Mediterranean
Sea. The top-heavy, gouty, black-fibred palm-trees give a ludicrous
impression of old elephants’ legs suffering, if such a medical horror
is possible, from the disease called elephantiasis! The fruit of the
prickly-pear looks like lumps of coloured putty temporarily stuck upon
the gawky leathery leaves. Another amusing plant with stiff spiked
leaves a yard long looks, when it begins to wither, like strips of
zebra hide cut into ribbons. Sun and dew work hand in hand all winter
to make the vegetation as delightful to passing visitors to Monte
Carlo as it must be consoling to constant losers!
Whether one hazards a stake or not, it is always interesting to sit
outside the Casino and watch the different types who frequent that
most levelling of institutions. Fortune is the most democratic of
divinities, and often tosses into the lap of the humble what she
has filched from the purse-proud. Great or small, adventurer or
artistocrat, sharp or flat, she has a levelling effect on them all
in time. They are all at the mercy of her infinite and ironical
whimsicality.
Monte Carlo has this in common with certain other places in the world,
like Charing Cross Station, the Piazza of St. Peter’s, and Niagara
Falls, that the world, with or without his wife, passes there sooner
or later. If you wait, you will soon run into an acquaintance, and
already you have a curious feeling that half the people you have ever
known have passed that way. For once I sat waiting an hour without
recognising a face. It was like a long run of the _rouge_ at the table.
The _noir_ seemed more and more certain to come. The next to pass
must be a friend. So it was, for I recognised the worn, old-fashioned
features before me. But where had I met them previously? The name came
back to me with an effort. I remembered now. It was an old friend of my
father’s, and we had met in Hyde Park twenty years before, when I was a
boy at Eton. I never forgot the gold sovereign he gave me to take back
to school. I remembered, too, my father having pointed him out to me as
the greatest gambler of his generation. I vaguely knew that his whole
fortune had disappeared at the tables.
I was feeling lonely, so I followed him into the gambling-rooms and
claimed acquaintance, which he was polite enough not to refuse. He
was not gambling himself, so he had time to take me round the tables
and explain to me in theory one or two unfailing systems for breaking
the bank. In practice I afterwards found out, and even suspected at
the moment, they had as often bankrupted the would-be ruptors of the
bank, but he only remembered the one or two brilliant moments in his
career when he had cleared out a table and left it closed for the
day. I found it more interesting listening to this old-time player
than watching the motley crowd who clutched the gold-spangled skirts
of Fortune as she slipped by, in silences only broken by the mocking
formulas of the croupiers and the whirring of the fatal ball. At the
tables were sitting girls who had better been playing draughts in
their schoolrooms, and hawk-eyed beldames who seemed ready to stake
the price of their coffins on the winning number. Only when they won
did a muscle relax in their tired faces. The presiding croupiers were
a perpetual lesson in the art of concealing emotions. But as they were
never allowed to join in a stake, they shovelled the money like so
many beans. What perfect flunkeys they would have made for the Sphinx!
“_Messieurs, faites vos jeux_,” sang the croupiers, and a minute later
came the warning signal, “_rien ne va plus!_” followed in a few long
seconds by the announcement of the winning number, red or black, odd
or even, and the swift scraping in of the lost stakes. And so it would
be all afternoon and into the night and the next day again and the
day after ... crack! a sudden shot broke through the great room and
everybody who was not watching a stake rushed into a corner, where some
unknown plunger had just taken the last plunge into eternity by blowing
out his brains. The attendants collected from every corner and formed
a hedge round the dead man. Quickly and soundlessly they began moving
him out by a side-door, while gamblers picking up their stakes ran to
dip a finger in his blood for luck. In five minutes he had disappeared
as though he had fallen off a liner into a boiling sea. Monte Carlo
cannot afford to have scandals on the premises any more than any
well-established and well-connected institution, and is generally
more successful than others in concealing them. Blood is soon mopped
up, especially if the passers believe that it is a charmed fluid. The
roulette ball was soon spinning round again, and the only trace of the
tragedy was the struggle of a dozen gamblers to sit where the suicide
had been sitting all the afternoon. It is a superstition that the dead
gambler’s spirit does not leave the rooms immediately with death, but
remains to avenge his ill luck on the bank; and against the unknown
forces of the underworld even the bank cannot win.
I had had enough of it, and we strolled out on the terrace, my
companion becoming amused to talk to such a novice in gambling matters
as I then was. From the altitude of twenty years’ experience he began
to give me his views on Luck, which some call Providence and some
the Deuce. “Gambling,” he said, “is worth while to me whether I win
or lose. When I win I cannot spend my money more pleasurably than by
playing it again till I lose in the end. The bank must win. Let it!”