I
John Hendricks was bear-leading at the time. He had originally studied
for Holy Orders, but had abandoned the Church later for private reasons
connected with his faith, and had taken to teaching and tutoring
instead. He was an honest, upstanding fellow of five-and-thirty,
incorruptible, intelligent in a simple, straightforward way. He played
games with his head, more than most Englishmen do, but he went through
life without much calculation. He had qualities that made boys like
and respect him; he won their confidence. Poor, proud, ambitious,
he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of
State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils
for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an
educational trip that might make a man of him. For Lord Ernie was the
only son, and the Marquess’s influence was naturally great. To have
deposited a regenerated Lord Ernie at the castle gates might have
guaranteed Hendricks’ future. After leaving Eton prematurely the lad
had come under Hendricks’ charge for a time, and with such excellent
results--‘I’d simply swear by that chap, you know,’ the boy used
to say--that his father, considerably impressed, and rather as a
last resort, had made this proposition. And Hendricks, without much
calculation, had accepted it. He liked ‘Bindy’ for himself. It was
in his heart to ‘make a man of him,’ if possible. They had now been
round the world together and had come up from Brindisi to the Italian
Lakes, and so into Switzerland. It was middle October. With a week or
two to spare they were making leisurely for the ancestral halls in
Aberdeenshire.
The nine months’ travel, Hendricks realised with keen disappointment,
had accomplished, however, very little. The job had been exhausting,
and he had conscientiously done his best. Lord Ernie liked him
thoroughly, admiring his vigour with a smile of tolerant good-nature
through his ceaseless cigarette smoke. They were almost like two boys
together. ‘You _are_ a chap and a half, Mr. Hendricks. You really
ought to be in the Cabinet with my father.’ Hendricks would deliver
up his useless parcel at the castle gates, pocket the thanks and the
hard-earned fee, and go back to his arduous life of teaching and
writing in dingy lodgings. It was a pity, even on the lowest grounds.
The tutor, truth to tell, felt undeniably depressed. Hopeful by nature,
optimistic, too, as men of action usually are, he cast about him, even
at the last hour, for something that might stir the boy to life, wake
him up, put zest and energy into him. But there was only Paris now
between them and the end; and Paris certainly could not be relied upon
for help. Bindy’s desire for Paris even was not strong enough to count.
No desire in him was ever strong. There lay the crux of the problem in
a word--Lord Ernie was without desire which is life.
Tall, well-built, handsome, he was yet such a feeble creature, without
the energy to be either wild or vicious. Languid, yet certainly not
decadent, life ran slowly, flabbily in him. He took to nothing. The
first impression he made was fine--then nothing. His only tastes, if
tastes they could be called, were out-of-door tastes: he was vaguely
interested in flying, yet not enough to master the mechanism of it;
he liked motoring at high speed, being driven, not driving himself;
and he loved to wander about in woods, making fires like a Red Indian,
provided they lit easily, yet even this, not for the poetry of the
thing nor for any love of adventure, but just ‘because.’ ‘I like fire,
you know; like to watch it burn.’ Heat seemed to give him curious
satisfaction, perhaps because the heat of life, he realised, was
deficient in his six-foot body. It was significant, this love of fire
in him, though no one could discover why. As a child he had a dangerous
delight in fireworks--anything to do with fire. He would watch a candle
flame as though he were a fire-worshipper, but had never been known to
make a single remark of interest about it. In a wood, as mentioned, the
first thing he did was to gather sticks--though the resulting fire was
never part of any purpose. He had no purpose. There was no wind or fire
of life in the lad at all. The fine body was inert.
Hendricks did wrong, of course, in going where he did--to this little
desolate village in the Jura Mountains--though it was the first time
all these trying months he had allowed himself a personal desire. But
from Domo Dossola the Simplon Express would pass Lausanne, and from
Lausanne to the Jura was but a step--all on the way home, moreover.
And what prompted him was merely a sentimental desire to revisit the
place where ten years before he had fallen violently in love with the
pretty daughter of the Pasteur, M. Leysin, in whose house he lodged.
He had gone there to learn French. The very slight detour seemed
pardonable.
His spiritless charge was easily persuaded.
‘We might go home by Pontarlier instead of Bâle, and get a glimpse
of the Jura,’ he suggested. ‘The line slides along its frontiers
a bit, and then goes bang across it. We might even stop off a
night on the way--if you cared about it. I know a curious old
village--Villaret--where I went at your age to pick up French.’
‘Top-hole,’ replied Lord Ernie listlessly. ‘All on the way to Paris,
ain’t it?’
‘Of course. You see there’s a fortnight before we need get home.’
‘So there is, yes. Let’s go.’ He felt it was almost his own idea, and
that he decided it.
‘If you’d _really_ like it.’
‘Oh, yes. Why not? I’m sick of cities.’ He flicked some dust off his
coat sleeve with an immaculate silk handkerchief, then lit a cigarette.
‘Just as you like,’ he added with a drawl and a smile. ‘I’m ready for
anything.’ There was no keenness, no personal desire, no choice in
reality at all; flabby good-nature merely.
A suggestion was invariably enough, as though the boy had no will of
his own, his opposition rarely more than negative sulking that soon
flattened out because it was forgotten. Indeed, no sign of positive
life lay in him anywhere--no vitality, aggression, coherence of desire
and will; vacuous rather than imbecile; unable to go forward upon any
definite line of his own, as though all wheels had slipped their cogs;
a pasty soul that took good enough impressions, yet never mastered them
for permanent use. Nothing stuck. He would never make a politician,
much less a statesman. The family title would be borne by a nincompoop.
Yet all the machinery was there, one felt--if only it could be driven,
made to go. It was sad. Lord Ernie was heir to great estates, with a
name and position that might influence thousands.
And Hendricks had been a good selection, with his virility and gentle,
understanding firmness. He understood the problem. ‘You’ll do what no
one else could,’ the anxious father told him, ‘for he worships you,
and you can sting without hurting him. You’ll put life and interest
into him if anybody in this world can. I have great hopes of this
tour. I shall always be in your debt, Mr. Hendricks.’ And Hendricks
had accepted the onerous duty in his big, high-minded way. He was
conscientious to the backbone. This little side-trip was his sole
deflection, if such it can be called even. ‘Life, light and cheerful
influences,’ had been his instructions, ‘nothing dull or melancholy;
an occasional fling, if he wants it--I’d welcome a fling as a good
sign--and as much intercourse with decent people, and stimulating
sight-seeing as you can manage--or can stand,’ the Marquess added with
a smile. ‘Only you won’t overtax the lad, will you? Above all, let him
think _he_ chooses and decides, when possible.’
Villaret, however, hardly complied with these conditions; there was
melancholy in it; Hendricks’ mind--whose reflexes the spongy nature of
the empty lad absorbed too easily--would be in a minor key. Yet a night
could work no harm. Whence came, he wondered, the fleeting notion
that it might do good? Was it, perhaps, that Leysin, the vigorous old
Pasteur, might contribute something? Leysin had been a considerable
force in his own development, he remembered; they had corresponded a
little since; Leysin was out of the common, certainly, restless energy
in him as of the sea. Hendricks found difficulty in sorting out his
thoughts and motives, but Leysin was in them somewhere--this idea that
his energetic personality might help. His vitalising effect, at least,
would counteract the melancholy.
For Villaret lay huddled upon unstimulating slopes, the robe of gloomy
pine-woods sweeping down towards its poverty from bleak heights and
desolate gorges. The peasants were morose, ill-living folk. It was
a dark untaught corner in a range of otherwise fairy mountains, a
backwater the sun had neglected to clean out. Superstitions, Hendricks
remembered, of incredible kind still lingered there; a touch of the
sinister hovered about the composite mind of its inhabitants. The
Pasteur fought strenuously this blackness in their lives and thoughts;
in the village itself with more or less success--though even there
the drinking and habits of living were utterly unsweetened--but on
the heights, among the somewhat arid pastures, the mountain men
remained untamed, turbulent, even menacing. Hendricks knew this of
old, though he had never understood too well. But he remembered how
the English boys at _la cure_ were forbidden to climb in certain
directions, because the life in these scattered châlets was somehow
loose and violent. There was danger there, the danger, however, never
definitely stated. Those lonely ridges lay cursed beneath dark skies.
He remembered, too, the savage dogs, the difficulty of approach, the
aggressive attitude towards the plucky Pasteur’s visits to these remote
upland _pâturages_. They did not lie in his parish: Leysin made his
occasional visits as man and missionary; for extraordinary rumours,
Hendricks recalled, were rife, of some queer worship of their own these
lawless peasants kept alive in their distant, windy territory, planted
there first, the story had it, by some renegade priest whose name was
now forgotten.
Hendricks himself had no personal experiences. He had been too deeply
in love to trouble about outside things, however strange. But Marston’s
case had never quite left his memory--Marston, who climbed up by
unlawful ways, stayed away two whole days and nights, and came back
suddenly with his air of being broken, shattered, appallingly used up,
his face so lined and strained it seemed aged by twenty years, and yet
with a singular new life in him, so vehement, loud, and reckless, it
was like a kind of sober intoxication. He was packed off to England
before he could relate anything. But he had suffered shocks. His white,
passionate face, his boisterous new vigour, the way M. Leysin screened
his view of the heights as he put him personally into the Paris
train--almost as though he feared the boy would see the hills and make
another dash for them!--made up an unforgettable picture in the mind.
Moreover, between the sodden village and that string of evil
châlets that lay in their dark line upon the heights there had
been links. Exactly of what nature he never knew, for love made
all else uninteresting; only, he remembered swarthy, dark-faced
messengers descending into the sleepy hamlet from time to time, big,
mountain-limbed fellows with wind in their hair and fire in their eyes;
that their visits produced commotion and excitement of difficult kinds;
that wild orgies invariably followed in their wake; and that, when the
messengers went back, they did not go alone. There was life up there,
whereas the village was moribund. And none who went ever cared to
return. Cudrefin, the young giant _vigneron_, taken in this way, from
the very side of his sweetheart too, came back two years later as a
messenger himself. He did not even ask for the girl, who had meanwhile
married another. ‘There’s life up there with us,’ he told the drunken
loafers in the ‘Guillaume Tell,’ ‘wind and fire to make you spin to the
devil--or to heaven!’ He was enthusiasm personified. In the village
he had been merely drinking himself stupidly to death. Vaguely, too,
Hendricks remembered visits of police from the neighbouring town,
some of them on horseback, all armed, and that once even soldiers
accompanied them, and on another occasion a bishop, or whatever the
church dignitary was called, had arrived suddenly and promised radical
assistance of a spiritual kind that had never materialised--oh, and
many other details that now trooped back with suggestions time had
certainly not made smaller. For the love had passed along its way and
gone, and he was free now to the invasion of other memories, dwarfed at
the time by that dominating, sweet passion.
Yet all the tutor wanted now, this chance week in late October, was
to see again the corner of the mossy forest where he had known that
marvellous thing, first love; renew his link with Leysin who had taught
him much; and see if, perchance, this man’s stalwart, virile energy
might possibly overflow with benefit into his listless charge. The
expenses he meant to pay out of his own pocket. Those wild pagans on
the heights--even if they still existed--there was no need to mention.
Lord Ernie knew little French, and certainly no word of _patois_. For
one night, or even two, the risk was negligible.
Was there, indeed, risk at all of any sort? Was not this vague
uneasiness he felt merely conscience faintly pricking? He could not
feel that he was doing wrong. At worst, the youth might feel depression
for a few hours--speedily curable by taking the train.
Something, nevertheless, did gnaw at him in subconscious fashion,
producing a sense of apprehension; and he came to the conclusion that
this memory of the mountain tribe was the cause of it--a revival of
forgotten boyhood’s awe. He glanced across at the figure of Bindy
lounging upon the hotel lawn in an easy-chair, full in the sunshine,
a newspaper at his feet. Reclining there, he looked so big and
strong and handsome, yet in reality was but a painted lath without
resistance, much less attack, in all his many inches. And suddenly
the tutor recalled another thing, the link, however, undiscoverable,
and it was this: that the boy’s mother, a Canadian, had suffered once
severely from a winter in Quebec, where the Marquess had first made
her acquaintance. Frost had robbed her, if he remembered rightly, of
a foot--with the result, at any rate, that she had a wholesome terror
of the cold. She sought heat and sun instinctively--fire. Also, that
asthma had been her sore affliction--sheer inability to take a full,
deep breath. This deficiency of heat and air, therefore, were in her
mind. And he knew that Bindy’s birth had been an anxious time, the
anxiety justified, moreover, since she had yielded up her life for him.
And so the singular thought flashed through him suddenly as he watched
the reclining, languid boy, Cudrefin’s descriptive phrase oddly singing
in his head--
‘Heat and fire, fire and wind--why, it’s the very thing he lacks! And
he’s always after them. I wonder----!’