Pasteur Leysin Hendricks remembered very well. Even now in his old age
he was a vigorous personality, but in his youth he had been almost
revolutionary; wild enough, too, it was rumoured, until he had turned
to God of his own accord as offering a larger field for his strenuous
vitality. The little man was possessed of tireless life, a born leader
of forlorn hopes, attack his _métier_, and heavy odds the conditions
that he loved. Before settling down in this isolated spot--_pasteur de
l’église indépendente_ in a protestant Canton--he had been a missionary
in remote pagan lands. His horizon was a big one, he had seen strange
things. An uncouth being, with a large head upon a thin and wiry body
supported by steely bowed legs, he had that courage which makes itself
known in advance of any proof. Hendricks slipped over to _la cure_
about nine o’clock and found him in his study. Lord Ernie was asleep;
at least his light was out, no sound or movement audible from his room.
The _joran_ had swept the heavens of clouds. Stars shone brilliantly.
The fires still blazed faintly upon the heights.
The visit was not unexpected, for Hendricks had already sent a message
to announce himself, and the moment he sat down, met the Pasteur’s eye,
heard his voice, and observed his slight imperious gestures, he passed
under the influence of a personality stronger than his own. Something
in Leysin’s atmosphere stretched him, lifting his horizon. He had
come chiefly--he now realised it--to borrow help and explanation with
regard to Lord Ernie; the events of two hours before had impressed him
more than he quite cared to own, and he wished to talk about it. But,
somehow, he found it difficult to state his case; no opening presented
itself; or, rather, the Pasteur’s mind, intent upon something of his
own, was too preoccupied. In reply to a question presently, the tutor
gave a brief outline of his present duties, but omitted the scene of
excitement in the village street, for as he watched the furrowed face
in the light of the study lamp, he realised both anxiety and spiritual
high pressure at work below the surface there. He hesitated to intrude
his own affairs at first. They discussed, nevertheless, the psychology
of the boy, and the unfavourable chances of regeneration, while the old
man’s face lit up and flashed from time to time, until at length the
truth came out, and Hendricks understood his friend’s preoccupation.
‘What you’re attempting with an individual,’ Leysin exclaimed with
ardour, ‘is precisely what I’m attempting with a crowd. And it’s
difficult. For poor sinners make poor saints, and the lukewarm I will
spue out of my mouth.’ He made an abrupt, resentful gesture to signify
his disgust and weariness, perhaps his contempt as well. ‘Cut it down!
Why cumbereth it the ground?’
‘A hard, uncharitable doctrine,’ began the tutor, realising that
he must discuss the Parish before he could introduce Bindy’s case
effectively. ‘You mean, of course, that there’s no material to work on?’
‘No energy to direct,’ was the emphatic reply. ‘My sheep here are--real
sheep; mere negative, drink-sodden loafers without desire. Hospital
cases! I could work with tigers and wild beasts, but who ever trained a
slug?’
‘Your proper place is on the heights,’ suggested Hendricks,
interrupting at a venture. ‘There’s scope enough up there, or used to
be. Have they died out, those wild men of the mountains?’ And hit by
chance the target in the bull’s-eye.
The old man’s face turned younger as he answered quickly.
‘Men like that,’ he exclaimed, ‘do not die off. They breed and
multiply.’ He leaned forward across the table, his manner eager,
fervent, almost impetuous with suppressed desire for action. ‘There’s
evil thinking up there,’ he said suggestively, ‘but, by heaven, it’s
alive; it’s positive, ambitious, constructive. With violent feeling and
strong desire to work on, there’s hope of some result. Upon vehement
impulses like that, pagan or anything else, a man can work with a
will. Those are the tigers; down here I have the slugs!’
He shrugged his shoulders and leaned back into his chair. Hendricks
watched him, thinking of the stories told about his missionary days
among savage and barbarian tribes.
‘Born of the vital landscape, I suppose?’ he asked. ‘Wind and frost and
blazing sun. Their wild energy, I mean, is due to----’
A gesture from the old man stopped him. ‘You know who started them
upon their wild performances,’ he said gravely in a lower voice; ‘you
know how that ambitious renegade priest from the Valais chose them
for his nucleus, then died before he could lead them out, trained and
competent, upon his strange campaign? You heard the story when you were
with me as a boy----?’
‘I remember Marston,’ put in the other, uncommonly interested,
‘Marston--the boy who----’ He stopped because he hardly knew how
to continue. There was a minute’s silence. But it was not an empty
silence, though no word broke it. Leysin’s face was a study.
‘Ah, Marston, yes,’ he said slowly, without looking up; ‘you remember
him. But that is at my door, too, I suppose. His father was ignorant
and obstinate; I might have saved him otherwise.’ He seemed talking to
himself rather than to his listener. Pain showed in the lines about
the rugged mouth. ‘There was no one, you see, who knew how to direct
the great life that woke in the lad. He took it back with him, and
turned it loose into all manner of useless enterprises, and the doctors
mistook his abrupt and fierce ambitions for--for the hysteria which
they called the vestibule of lunacy.... Yet small characters may have
big ideas.... They didn’t understand, of course.... It was sad, sad,
sad.’ He hid his face in his hands a moment.
‘Marston went wrong, then, in the end?’ for the other’s manner
suggested disaster of some kind. Hendricks asked it in a whisper.
Leysin uncovered his face, looped his neck with one finger, and pointed
to the ceiling.
‘Hanged himself!’ murmured Hendricks, shocked.
The Pasteur nodded, but there was impatience, half anger in his tone.
‘They checked it, kept it in. Of course, it tore him!’
The two men looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and something
in the younger of them shrank. This was all beyond his ken a little. An
odd hint of bleak and cruel reality was in the air, making him shiver
along nerves that were normally inactive. The uneasiness he felt about
Lord Ernie became alarm. His conscience pricked him.
‘More than he could assimilate,’ continued Leysin. ‘It broke him. Yet,
had outlets been provided, had he been taught how to use it, this
elemental energy drawn direct from Nature----’ He broke off abruptly,
struck perhaps by the expression in his listener’s eyes. ‘It seems
incredible, doesn’t it, in the twentieth century? I know.’
‘Evil?’ asked Hendricks, stammering rather.
‘Why evil?’ was the impatient reply. ‘How can any force be evil? That’s
merely a question of direction.’
‘And the priest who discovered these forces and taught their use,
then----?’
‘Was genuinely spiritual and followed the truth in his own way. He
was not necessarily evil.’ The little Pasteur spoke with vehemence.
‘You talk like the religion-primers in the kindergarten,’ he went on.
‘Listen. This man, sick and weary of his lukewarm flock, sought vital,
stalwart systems who might be clean enough to use the elemental powers
he had discovered how to attract. Only the bias of the users could
make it “evil” by wrong use. His idea was big and even holy--to train
a corps that might regenerate the world. And he chose unreasoning,
unintellectual types with a purpose--primitive, giant men who could
assimilate the force without risk of being shattered. Under his
direction he intended they should prove as effective as the twelve
disciples of old who were fisher-folk. And, had he gone on----’
‘He, too, failed then?’ asked the other, whose tangled thoughts
struggled with incredulity and belief as he heard this strange new
thing. ‘He died, you mean?’
‘_Maison de santé_,’ was the laconic reply, ‘strait-waistcoats, padded
cells, and the rest; but still alive, I’m told. It was more than he
could manage.’
It was a startling story, even in this brief outline, deep suggestion
in it. The tutor’s sense of being out of his depth increased. After
nine months with a lifeless, devitalised human being, this was--well,
he seemed to have fallen in his sleep from a comfortable bed into a
raging mountain torrent. Strong currents rushed through and over him.
The lonely, peaceful village outside, sleeping beneath the stars,
heightened the contrast.
‘Suppressed or misdirected energy again, I suppose,’ he said in a low
tone, respecting his companion’s emotion. ‘And these mountain men,’ he
asked abruptly, ‘do they still keep up their--practices?’
‘Their ceremonies, yes,’ corrected the other, master of himself again.
‘Turbulent moments of nature, storms and the like, stir them to clumsy
rehearsals of once vital rituals--not entirely ineffective, even in
their incompleteness, but dangerous for that very reason. This _joran_,
for instance, invariably communicates something of its atmospherical
energy to themselves. They light their fires as of old. They blunder
through what they remember of _his_ ceremonies. With the glasses you
may see them in their dozens, men and women, leaping and dancing. It’s
an amazing sight, great beauty in it, impossible to witness even from a
distance without feeling the desire to take part in it. Even my people
feel it--the only time they ever get alive,’--he jerked his big head
contemptuously towards the street--‘or feel desire to act. And some one
from the heights--a messenger perhaps--will be down later, this very
evening probably, on the hunt----’
‘On the hunt?’ Hendricks asked it half below his breath. He felt a
touch of awe as he heard this experienced, genuinely religious man
speak with conviction of such curious things. ‘On the hunt?’ he
repeated more eagerly.
‘Messengers do come down,’ was the reply. ‘A living belief always
seeks to increase, to grow, to add to itself. Where there’s conviction
there’s always propaganda.’
‘Ah, converts----?’
Leysin shrugged his big black shoulders. ‘Desire to add to their
number--desire to _save_,’ he said. ‘The energy they absorb overflows,
that’s all.’
The Englishman debated several questions vaguely in his mind; only
his mind, being disturbed, could not hold the balance exactly true.
Leysin’s influence, as of old, was upon him. A possibility, remote,
seductive, dangerous, began to beckon to him, but from somewhere just
outside his reasoning mind.
‘And they always know when one of their kind is near,’ the voice
slipped in between his tumbling thoughts, ‘as though they get it
instinctively from these universal elements they worship. They select
their recruits with marvellous judgment and precision. No messenger
ever goes back alone; nor has a recruit ever been known to return to
the lazy squalor of the conditions whence he escaped.’
The younger man sat upright in his chair, suddenly alert, and the
gesture that he made unconsciously might have been read by a keen
psychiatrist as evidence of mental self-defence. He felt the forbidden
impulse in him gathering force, and tried to call a halt. At any rate,
he called upon the other man to be explicit. He enquired point-blank
what this religion of the heights might be. What were these elements
these people worshipped? In what did their wild ceremonies consist?
And Leysin, breaking bounds, let his speech burst forth in a stream of
explanation, learned of actual knowledge, as he claimed, and uttered
with a vehement conviction that produced an undeniable effect upon his
astonished listener. Told by no dreamer, but by a righteous man who
lived, not merely preached his certain faith, Hendricks, before the
half was heard, forgot what age and land he dwelt in. Whole blocks
of conventional belief crumbled and fell away. Brick walls erected
by routine to mark narrow paths of proper conduct--safe, moral,
advisable conduct--thawed and vanished. Through the ruins, scrambling
at him from huge horizons never recognised before, came all manner
of marvellous possibilities. The little confinement of modern thought
appalled him suddenly. Leysin spoke slowly, said little, was not even
speculative. It was no mere magic of words that made the dim-lit study
swim these deep waters beyond the ripple of pert creeds, but rather the
overwhelming sense of sure conviction driving behind the statements.
The little man had witnessed curious things, yes, in his missionary
days, and that he had found truth in them in place of ignorant nonsense
was remarkable enough. That silly superstitions prevalent among older
nations could be signs really of their former greatness, linked
mightily close to natural forces, was a startling notion, but it paved
the way in Hendricks’ receptive mind just then for the belief that
certain so-called elements might be worshipped--known intimately, that
is--to the uplifting advantage of the worshippers. And what elements
more suitable for adoring imitation than wind and fire? For in a
human body the first signs of what men term life are heat which is
combustion, and breath which is a measure of wind. Life means fire,
drawn first from the sun, and breathing, borrowed from the omnipresent
air; there might credibly be ways of assaulting these elements and
taking heaven by storm; of seizing from their inexhaustible stores an
abnormal measure, of straining this huge raw supply into effective
energy for human use--vitality. Living with fire and wind in their most
active moments; closely imitating their movements, following in their
footsteps, understanding their ‘laws of being,’ going _identically_
with them--there lay a hint of the method. It was once, when men were
primitively close to Nature, instinctual knowledge. The ceremony was
the teaching. The Powers of fire, the Principalities of air, existed;
and humanity _could_ know their qualities by the ritual of imitation,
could actually absorb the fierce enthusiasm of flame and the tireless
energy of wind. Such transference was conceivable.
Leysin, at any rate, somehow made it so. His description of what
he had personally witnessed, both in wilder lands and here in this
little mountain range of middle Europe, had a reality in it that was
upsetting to the last degree. ‘There is nothing more difficult to
believe,’ he said, ‘yet more certainly true, than the effect of these
singular elemental rites.’ He laughed a short dry laugh. ‘The mediaeval
superstition that a witch could raise a storm is but a remnant of
a once completely efficacious system,’ he concluded, ‘though how
that strange being, the Valais priest, rediscovered the process and
introduced it here, I have never been able to ascertain. That he did
so results have proved. At any rate, it lets in life, life moreover in
astonishing abundance; though, whether for destruction or regeneration,
depends, obviously, upon the use the recipient puts it to. That’s where
direction comes in.’
The beckoning impulse in the tutor’s bewildered thoughts drew closer.
The moment for communicating it had come at last. Without more ado he
took the opening. He told his companion the incident in the village
street, the boy’s abrupt excitement, his new-found energy, the curious
words he used, the independence and vitality of his attitude. He told
also of his parentage, of his mother’s disabilities, his craving for
rushing air in abundance, his love of fire for its own sake, of his
magnificent physical machinery, yet of his uselessness.
And Leysin, as he listened, seemed built on wires. Searching questions
shot forth like blows into the other’s mind. The Pasteur’s sudden
increase of enthusiasm was infectious. He leaped intuitively to the
thing in Hendricks’ thought. He understood the beckoning.
The tutor answered the questions as best he could, aware of the end
in view with trepidation and a kind of mental breathlessness. Yes,
unquestionably, Bindy _had_ exchanged communication of some sort with
the man, though his excitement had been evident even sooner.
‘And you saw this man yourself?’ Leysin pressed him.
‘Indubitably--a tall and hurrying figure in the dusk.’
‘He brought energy with him? The boy felt it and responded?’
Hendricks nodded. ‘Became quite unmanageable for some minutes,’ he
replied.
‘He assimilated it though? There was no distress exactly?’ Leysin asked
sharply.
‘None--that I could see. Pleasurable excitement, something aggressive,
a rather wild enthusiasm. His will began to act. He used that curious
phrase about wind and fire. He turned alive. He wanted to follow the
man----’
‘And the face--how would you describe it? Did it bring terror, I mean,
or confidence?’
‘Dark and splendid,’ answered the other as truthfully as he could. ‘In
a certain sense, rushing, tempestuous, yet stern rather.’
‘A face like the heights,’ suggested Leysin impatiently, ‘a windy,
fiery aspect in it, eh?’
‘The man swept past like the spirit of a storm in imaginative
poetry----’ began the tutor, hunting through his thoughts for adequate
description, then stopped as he saw that his companion had risen from
his chair and begun to pace the floor.
The Pasteur paused a moment beside him, hands thrust deep into his
pockets, head bent down, and shoulders forward. For twenty seconds he
stared into his visitor’s face intently, as though he would force into
him the thought in his own mind. His features seemed working visibly,
yet behind a mask of strong control.
‘Don’t you see what it is? Don’t you see?’ he said in a lower, deeper
tone. ‘_They knew._ Even from a distance they were aware of his coming.
He is one of themselves.’ And he straightened up again. ‘He belongs to
them.’
‘One of them? One of the wind-and-fire lot?’ the tutor stammered.
The restless little man returned to his chair opposite, full of
suppressed and vigorous movement, as though he were strung on springs.
‘He’s _of_ them,’ he continued, ‘but in a peculiar and particular
sense. More than merely a possible recruit, his empty organism would
provide the very link they need, the perfect conduit.’ He watched his
companion’s face with careful keenness. ‘In the country where I first
experienced this marvellous thing,’ he added significantly, ‘he would
have been set apart as the offering, the sacrifice, as they call it
there. The tribe would have chosen him with honour. He would have been
the special bait to attract.’
‘Death?’ whispered the other.
But Leysin shook his head. ‘In the end, perhaps,’ he replied darkly,
‘for the vessel might be torn and shattered. But at first charged to
the brim and crammed with energy--with transformed vitality they could
draw into themselves through him. A monster, if you will, but to them a
deity; and superhuman, in our little sense, most certainly.’
Then Hendricks faltered inwardly and turned away. No words came to him
at the moment. In silence the minds of the two men, one a religious,
the other a secular teacher, and each with a burden of responsibility
to the race, kept pace together without speech. The religious,
however, outstripped the pedagogue. What he next said seemed a little
disconnected with what had preceded it, although Hendricks caught the
drift easily enough--and shuddered.
‘An organism needing heat,’ observed Leysin calmly, ‘can absorb without
danger what would destroy a normal person. Alcohol, again, neither
injures nor intoxicates--up to a given point--the system that really
requires it.’
The tutor, perplexed and sorely tempted, felt that he drifted with a
tide he found it difficult to stem.
‘Up to a point,’ he repeated. ‘That’s true, of course.’
‘Up to a given point,’ echoed the other, with significance that made
his voice sound solemn. ‘Then rescue--in the nick of time.’
He waited two full minutes and more for an answer; then, as none was
audible, he said another thing. His eyes were so intent upon the
tutor’s that the latter raised his own unwillingly, and understood thus
all that lay behind the pregnant little sentence.
‘With a number it would not be possible, but with an individual it
could be done. Brim the empty vessel first. Then rescue--in the nick
of time! Regeneration!’