On a hill in the midst of a great Austrian plain, around which high Alps
wait watching through the ages, stands a venerable fortress, almost more
beautiful than anything one has ever seen. Perhaps, if it were not for
the great plain flowering broadly about it with its wide-spread beauties
of meadow-land, and wood, and dim toned buildings gathered about farms,
and its dream of a small ancient city at its feet, it might--though it
is to be doubted--seem something less a marvel of medieval
picturesqueness. But out of the plain rises the low hill, and
surrounding it at a stately distance stands guard the giant majesty of
Alps, with shoulders in the clouds and god-like heads above them,
looking on--always looking on--sometimes themselves ethereal clouds of
snow-whiteness, some times monster bare crags which pierce the blue, and
whose unchanging silence seems to know the secret of the everlasting.
And on the hill which this august circle holds in its embrace, as though
it enclosed a treasure, stands the old, old, towered fortress built as a
citadel for the Prince Archbishops, who were kings in their domain in
the long past centuries when the splendor and power of ecclesiastical
princes was among the greatest upon earth.
And as you approach the town--and as you leave it--and as you walk
through its streets, the broad calm empty-looking ones, or the narrow
thoroughfares whose houses seem so near to each other, whether you climb
or descend--or cross bridges, or gaze at churches, or step out on your
balcony at night to look at the mountains and the moon--always it seems
that from some point you can see it gazing down at you--the citadel of
Hohen-Salzburg.
It was to Salzburg they went next, because at Salzburg was to be found
the man who looked like a hair-dresser and who worked in a barber's
shop. Strange as it might seem, to him also must be carried the Sign.
"There may be people who come to him to be shaved--soldiers, or men who
know things," The Rat worked it out, "and he can speak to them when he
is standing close to them. It will be easy to get near him. You can go
and have your hair cut."
The journey from Munich was not a long one, and during the latter part
of it they had the wooden-seated third-class carriage to themselves.
Even the drowsy old peasant who nodded and slept in one corner got out
with his bundles at last. To Marco the mountains were long-known wonders
which could never grow old. They had always and always been so old!
Surely they had been the first of the world! Surely they had been
standing there waiting when it was said "Let there be Light." The Light
had known it would find them there. They were so silent, and yet it
seemed as if they said some amazing thing--something which would take
your breath from you if you could hear it. And they never changed. The
clouds changed, they wreathed them, and hid them, and trailed down them,
and poured out storm torrents on them, and thundered against them, and
darted forked lightnings round them. But the mountains stood there
afterwards as if such things had not been and were not in the world.
Winds roared and tore at them, centuries passed over them--centuries of
millions of lives, of changing of kingdoms and empires, of battles and
world-wide fame which grew and died and passed away; and temples
crumbled, and kings' tombs were forgotten, and cities were buried and
others built over them after hundreds of years--and perhaps a few stones
fell from a mountain side, or a fissure was worn, which the people below
could not even see. And that was all. There they stood, and perhaps
their secret was that they had been there for ever and ever. That was
what the mountains said to Marco, which was why he did not want to talk
much, but sat and gazed out of the carriage window.
The Rat had been very silent all the morning. He had been silent when
they got up, and he had scarcely spoken when they made their way to the
station at Munich and sat waiting for their train. It seemed to Marco
that he was thinking so hard that he was like a person who was far away
from the place he stood in. His brows were drawn together and his eyes
did not seem to see the people who passed by. Usually he saw everything
and made shrewd remarks on almost all he saw. But to-day he was somehow
otherwise absorbed. He sat in the train with his forehead against the
window and stared out. He moved and gasped when he found himself staring
at the Alps, but afterwards he was even strangely still. It was not
until after the sleepy old peasant had gathered his bundles and got out
at a station that he spoke, and he did it without turning his head.
"You only told me one of the two laws," he said. "What was the other
one?"
Marco brought himself back from his dream of reaching the highest
mountain-top and seeing clouds float beneath his feet in the sun. He had
to come back a long way.
"Are you thinking of that? I wondered what you had been thinking of all
the morning," he said.
"I couldn't stop thinking of it. What was the second one?" said The Rat,
but he did not turn his head.
"It was called the Law of Earthly Living. It was for every day," said
Marco. "It was for the ordering of common things--the small things we
think don't matter, as well as the big ones. I always remember that one
without any trouble. This was it:
"_'Let pass through thy mind, my son, only the image thou wouldst desire
to see become a truth. Meditate only upon the wish of thy heart--seeing
first that it is such as can wrong no man and is not ignoble. Then will
it take earthly form and draw near to thee._
"_'This is the Law of That which Creates.'_"
Then The Rat turned round. He had a shrewdly reasoning mind.
"That sounds as if you could get anything you wanted, if you think about
it long enough and in the right way," he said. "But perhaps it only
means that, if you do it, you'll be happy after you're dead. My father
used to shout with laughing when he was drunk and talked about things
like that and looked at his rags."
He hugged his knees for a few minutes. He was remembering the rags, and
the fog-darkened room in the slums, and the loud, hideous laughter.
"What if you want something that will harm somebody else?" he said next.
"What if you hate some one and wish you could kill him?"
"That was one of the questions my father asked that night on the ledge.
The holy man said people always asked it," Marco answered. "This was the
answer:
"_'Let him who stretcheth forth his hand to draw the lightning to his
brother recall that through his own soul and body will pass the bolt.'_"
"Wonder if there's anything in it?" The Rat pondered. "It'd make a chap
careful if he believed it! Revenging yourself on a man would be like
holding him against a live wire to kill him and getting all the volts
through yourself."
A sudden anxiety revealed itself in his face.
"Does your father believe it?" he asked. "Does he?"
"He knows it is true," Marco said.
"I'll own up," The Rat decided after further reflection--"I'll own up
I'm glad that there isn't any one left that I've a grudge against. There
isn't any one--now."
Then he fell again into silence and did not speak until their journey
was at an end. As they arrived early in the day, they had plenty of time
to wander about the marvelous little old city. But through the wide
streets and through the narrow ones, under the archways into the market
gardens, across the bridge and into the square where the "glockenspiel"
played its old tinkling tune, everywhere the Citadel looked down and
always The Rat walked on in his dream.
They found the hair-dresser's shop in one of the narrow streets. There
were no grand shops there, and this particular shop was a modest one.
They walked past it once, and then went back. It was a shop so humble
that there was nothing remarkable in two common boys going into it to
have their hair cut. An old man came forward to receive them. He was
evidently glad of their modest patronage. He undertook to attend to The
Rat himself, but, having arranged him in a chair, he turned about and
called to some one in the back room.
"Heinrich," he said.
In the slit in Marco's sleeve was the sketch of the man with smooth
curled hair, who looked like a hair-dresser. They had found a corner in
which to take their final look at it before they turned back to come in.
Heinrich, who came forth from the small back room, had smooth curled
hair. He looked extremely like a hair-dresser. He had features like
those in the sketch--his nose and mouth and chin and figure were like
what Marco had drawn and committed to memory. But--
He gave Marco a chair and tied the professional white covering around
his neck. Marco leaned back and closed his eyes a moment.
"That is _not_ the man!" he was saying to himself. "He is _not_ the man."
How he knew he was not, he could not have explained, but he felt sure.
It was a strong conviction. But for the sudden feeling, nothing would
have been easier than to give the Sign. And if he could not give it now,
where was the one to whom it must be spoken, and what would be the
result if that one could not be found? And if there were two who were so
much alike, how could he be sure?
Each owner of each of the pictured faces was a link in a powerful secret
chain; and if a link were missed, the chain would be broken. Each time
Heinrich came within the line of his vision, he recorded every feature
afresh and compared it with the remembered sketch. Each time the
resemblance became more close, but each time some persistent inner
conviction repeated, "No; the Sign is not for him!"
It was disturbing, also, to find that The Rat was all at once as
restless as he had previously been silent and preoccupied. He moved in
his chair, to the great discomfort of the old hair-dresser. He kept
turning his head to talk. He asked Marco to translate divers questions
he wished him to ask the two men. They were questions about the
Citadel--about the Monchsberg--the Residenz--the Glockenspiel--the
mountains. He added one query to another and could not sit still.
"The young gentleman will get an ear snipped," said the old man to
Marco. "And it will not be my fault."
"What shall I do?" Marco was thinking. "He is not the man."
He did not give the Sign. He must go away and think it out, though where
his thoughts would lead him he did not know. This was a more difficult
problem than he had ever dreamed of facing. There was no one to ask
advice of. Only himself and The Rat, who was nervously wriggling and
twisting in his chair.
"You must sit still," he said to him. "The hair-dresser is afraid you
will make him cut you by accident."
"But I want to know who lives at the Residenz?" said The Rat. "These men
can tell us things if you ask them."
"It is done now," said the old hair-dresser with a relieved air.
"Perhaps the cutting of his hair makes the young gentleman nervous. It
is sometimes so."
The Rat stood close to Marco's chair and asked questions until Heinrich
also had done his work. Marco could not understand his companion's
change of mood. He realized that, if he had wished to give the Sign, he
had been allowed no opportunity. He could not have given it. The
restless questioning had so directed the older man's attention to his
son and Marco that nothing could have been said to Heinrich without his
observing it.
"I could not have spoken if he had been the man," Marco said to himself.
Their very exit from the shop seemed a little hurried. When they were
fairly in the street, The Rat made a clutch at Marco's arm.
"You didn't give it?" he whispered breathlessly. "I kept talking and
talking to prevent you."
Marco tried not to feel breathless, and he tried to speak in a low and
level voice with no hint of exclamation in it.
"Why did you say that?" he asked.
The Rat drew closer to him.
"That was not the man!" he whispered. "It doesn't matter how much he
looks like him, he isn't the right one."
He was pale and swinging along swiftly as if he were in a hurry.
"Let's get into a quiet place," he said. "Those queer things you've been
telling me have got hold of me. How did I know? How could I know--unless
it's because I've been trying to work that second law? I've been saying
to myself that we should be told the right things to do--for the Game
and for your father--and so that I could be the right sort of
aide-de-camp. I've been working at it, and, when he came out, I knew he
was not the man in spite of his looks. And I couldn't be sure you knew,
and I thought, if I kept on talking and interrupting you with silly
questions, you could be prevented from speaking."
"There's a place not far away where we can get a look at the mountains.
Let's go there and sit down," said Marco. "I knew it was not the right
one, too. It's the Help over again."
"Yes, it's the Help--it's the Help--it must be," muttered The Rat,
walking fast and with a pale, set face. "It could not be anything else."
They got away from the streets and the people and reached the quiet
place where they could see the mountains. There they sat down by the
wayside. The Rat took off his cap and wiped his forehead, but it was not
only the quick walking which had made it damp.
"The queerness of it gave me a kind of fright," he said. "When he came
out and he was near enough for me to see him, a sudden strong feeling
came over me. It seemed as if I knew he wasn't the man. Then I said to
myself--'but he looks like him'--and I began to get nervous. And then I
was sure again--and then I wanted to try to stop you from giving him the
Sign. And then it all seemed foolishness--and the next second all the
things you had told me rushed back to me at once--and I remembered what
I had been thinking ever since--and I said--'Perhaps it's the Law
beginning to work,' and the palms of my hands got moist."
Marco was very quiet. He was looking at the farthest and highest peaks
and wondering about many things.
"It was the expression of his face that was different," he said. "And
his eyes. They are rather smaller than the right man's are. The light in
the shop was poor, and it was not until the last time he bent over me
that I found out what I had not seen before. His eyes are gray--the
other ones are brown."
"Did you see that!" The Rat exclaimed. "Then we're sure! We're safe!"
"We're not safe till we've found the right man," Marco said. "Where is
he? Where is he? Where is he?"
He said the words dreamily and quietly, as if he were lost in
thought--but also rather as if he expected an answer. And he still
looked at the far-off peaks. The Rat, after watching him a moment or so,
began to look at them also. They were like a loadstone to him too. There
was something stilling about them, and when your eyes had rested upon
them a few moments they did not want to move away.
"There must be a ledge up there somewhere," he said at last.
"Let's go up and look for it and sit there and think and think--about
finding the right man."
There seemed nothing fantastic in this to Marco. To go into some quiet
place and sit and think about the thing he wanted to remember or to find
out was an old way of his. To be quiet was always the best thing, his
father had taught him. It was like listening to something which could
speak without words.
"There is a little train which goes up the Gaisberg," he said. "When you
are at the top, a world of mountains spreads around you. Lazarus went
once and told me. And we can lie out on the grass all night. Let us go,
Aide-de-camp."
So they went, each one thinking the same thought, and each boy-mind
holding its own vision. Marco was the calmer of the two, because his
belief that there was always help to be found was an accustomed one and
had ceased to seem to partake of the supernatural. He believed quite
simply that it was the working of a law, not the breaking of one, which
gave answer and led him in his quests. The Rat, who had known nothing of
laws other than those administered by police-courts, was at once awed
and fascinated by the suggestion of crossing some borderland of the
Unknown. The law of the One had baffled and overthrown him, with its
sweeping away of the enmities of passions which created wars and called
for armies. But the Law of Earthly Living seemed to offer practical
benefits if you could hold on to yourself enough to work it.
"You wouldn't get everything for nothing, as far as I can make out," he
had said to Marco. "You'd have to sweep all the rubbish out of your
mind--sweep it as if you did it with a broom--and then keep on thinking
straight and believing you were going to get things--and working for
them--and they'd come."
Then he had laughed a short ugly laugh because he recalled something.
"There was something in the Bible that my father used to jeer
about--something about a man getting what he prayed for if he believed
it," he said.
"Oh, yes, it's there," said Marco. "That if a man pray believing he
shall receive what he asks it shall be given him. All the books say
something like it. It's been said so often it makes you believe it."
"He didn't believe it, and I didn't," said The Rat.
"Nobody does--really," answered Marco, as he had done once before. "It's
because we don't know."
They went up the Gaisberg in the little train, which pushed and dragged
and panted slowly upward with them. It took them with it stubbornly and
gradually higher and higher until it had left Salzburg and the Citadel
below and had reached the world of mountains which rose and spread and
lifted great heads behind each other and beside each other and beyond
each other until there seemed no other land on earth but that on
mountain sides and backs and shoulders and crowns. And also one felt the
absurdity of living upon flat ground, where life must be an
insignificant thing.
There were only a few sight-seers in the small carriages, and they were
going to look at the view from the summit. They were not in search of a
ledge.
The Rat and Marco were. When the little train stopped at the top, they
got out with the rest. They wandered about with them over the short
grass on the treeless summit and looked out from this viewpoint and the
other. The Rat grew more and more silent, and his silence was not merely
a matter of speechlessness but of expression. He _looked_ silent and as if
he were no longer aware of the earth. They left the sight-seers at last
and wandered away by themselves. They found a ledge where they could sit
or lie and where even the world of mountains seemed below them. They had
brought some simple food with them, and they laid it behind a jutting
bit of rock. When the sight-seers boarded the laboring little train
again and were dragged back down the mountain, their night of vigil
would begin.
That was what it was to be. A night of stillness on the heights, where
they could wait and watch and hold themselves ready to hear any thought
which spoke to them.
The Rat was so thrilled that he would not have been surprised if he had
heard a voice from the place of the stars. But Marco only believed that
in this great stillness and beauty, if he held his boy-soul quiet
enough, he should find himself at last thinking of something that would
lead him to the place which held what it was best that he should find.
The people returned to the train and it set out upon its way down the
steepness.
They heard it laboring on its way, as though it was forced to make as
much effort to hold itself back as it had made to drag itself upward.
Then they were alone, and it was a loneness such as an eagle might feel
when it held itself poised high in the curve of blue. And they sat and
watched. They saw the sun go down and, shade by shade, deepen and make
radiant and then draw away with it the last touches of color--rose-gold,
rose-purple, and rose-gray.
One mountain-top after another held its blush a few moments and lost it.
It took long to gather them all but at length they were gone and the
marvel of night fell.
The breath of the forests below was sweet about them, and soundlessness
enclosed them which was of unearthly peace. The stars began to show
themselves, and presently the two who waited found their faces turned
upward to the sky and they both were speaking in whispers.
"The stars look large here," The Rat said.
"Yes," answered Marco. "We are not as high as the Buddhist was, but it
seems like the top of the world."
"There is a light on the side of the mountain yonder which is not a
star," The Rat whispered.
"It is a light in a hut where the guides take the climbers to rest and
to spend the night," answered Marco.
"It is so still," The Rat whispered again after a silence, and Marco
whispered back:
"It is so still."
They had eaten their meal of black bread and cheese after the setting of
the sun, and now they lay down on their backs and looked up until the
first few stars had multiplied themselves into myriads. They began a
little low talk, but the soundlessness was stronger than themselves.
"How am I going to hold on to that second law?" The Rat said restlessly.
"'Let pass through thy mind only the image thou wouldst see become a
truth.' The things that are passing through my mind are not the things I
want to come true. What if we don't find him--don't find the right one,
I mean!"
"Lie still--still--and look up at the stars," whispered Marco. "They
give you a _sure_ feeling."
There was something in the curious serenity of him which calmed even his
aide-de-camp. The Rat lay still and looked--and looked--and thought. And
what he thought of was the desire of his heart. The soundlessness
enwrapped him and there was no world left. That there was a spark of
light in the mountain-climbers' rest-hut was a thing forgotten.
They were only two boys, and they had begun their journey on the
earliest train and had been walking about all day and thinking of great
and anxious things.
"It is so still," The Rat whispered again at last.
"It is so still," whispered Marco.
And the mountains rising behind each other and beside each other and
beyond each other in the night, and also the myriads of stars which had
so multiplied themselves, looking down knew that they were asleep--as
sleep the human things which do not watch forever.
* * * * *
"Some one is smoking," Marco found himself saying in a dream. After
which he awakened and found that the smoke was not part of a dream at
all. It came from the pipe of a young man who had an alpenstock and who
looked as if he had climbed to see the sun rise. He wore the clothes of
a climber and a green hat with a tuft at the back. He looked down at the
two boys, surprised.
"Good day," he said. "Did you sleep here so that you could see the sun
get up?"
"Yes," answered Marco.
"Were you cold?"
"We slept too soundly to know. And we brought our thick coats."
"I slept half-way down the mountains," said the smoker. "I am a guide
in these days, but I have not been one long enough to miss a sunrise it
is no work to reach. My father and brother think I am mad about such
things. They would rather stay in their beds. Oh! he is awake, is he?"
turning toward The Rat, who had risen on one elbow and was staring at
him. "What is the matter? You look as if you were afraid of me."
Marco did not wait for The Rat to recover his breath and speak.
"I know why he looks at you so," he answered for him. "He is startled.
Yesterday we went to a hair-dresser's shop down below there, and we saw
a man who was almost exactly like you--only--" he added, looking up,
"his eyes were gray and yours are brown."
"He was my twin brother," said the guide, puffing at his pipe
cheerfully. "My father thought he could make hair-dressers of us both,
and I tried it for four years. But I always wanted to be climbing the
mountains and there were not holidays enough. So I cut my hair, and
washed the pomade out of it, and broke away. I don't look like a
hair-dresser now, do I?"
He did not. Not at all. But Marco knew him. He was the man. There was no
one on the mountain-top but themselves, and the sun was just showing a
rim of gold above the farthest and highest giant's shoulders. One need
not be afraid to do anything, since there was no one to see or hear.
Marco slipped the sketch out of the slit in his sleeve. He looked at it
and he looked at the guide, and then he showed it to him.
"That is not your brother. It is you!" he said.
The man's face changed a little--more than any other face had changed
when its owner had been spoken to. On a mountain-top as the sun rises
one is not afraid.
"The Lamp is lighted," said Marco. "The Lamp is lighted."
"God be thanked!" burst forth the man. And he took off his hat and bared
his head. Then the rim behind the mountain's shoulder leaped forth into
a golden torrent of splendor.
And The Rat stood up, resting his weight on his crutches in utter
silence, and stared and stared.
"That is three!" said Marco.