I
Limasson was a religious man, though of what depth and quality
were unknown, since no trial of ultimate severity had yet tested
him. An adherent of no particular creed, he yet had his gods; and
his self-discipline was probably more rigorous than his friends
conjectured. He was so reserved. Few guessed, perhaps, the desires
conquered, the passions regulated, the inner tendencies trained
and schooled--not by denying their expression, but by transmuting
them alchemically into nobler channels. He had in him the makings
of an enthusiastic devotee, and might have become such but for two
limitations that prevented. He loved his wealth, labouring to increase
it to the neglect of other interests; and, secondly, instead of
following up one steady line of search, he scattered himself upon many
picturesque theories, like an actor who wants to play all parts rather
than concentrate on one. And the more picturesque the part, the more
he was attracted. Thus, though he did his duty unshrinkingly and with
a touch of love, he accused himself sometimes of merely gratifying a
sensuous taste in spiritual sensations. There was this unbalance in him
that argued want of depth.
As for his gods--in the end he discovered their reality by first
doubting, then denying their existence.
It was this denial and doubt that restored them to their thrones,
converting his dilettante skirmishes into genuine, deep belief; and the
proof came to him one summer in early June when he was making ready to
leave town for his annual month among the mountains.
With Limasson mountains, in some inexplicable sense, were a passion
almost, and climbing so deep a pleasure that the ordinary scrambler
hardly understood it. Grave as a kind of worship it was to him; the
preparations for an ascent, the ascent itself in particular, involved a
concentration that seemed symbolical as of a ritual. He not only loved
the heights, the massive grandeur, the splendour of vast proportions
blocked in space, but loved them with a respect that held a touch
of awe. The emotion mountains stirred in him, one might say, was of
that profound, incalculable kind that held kinship with his religious
feelings, half realised though these were. His gods had their invisible
thrones somewhere among the grim, forbidding heights. He prepared
himself for this annual mountaineering with the same earnestness that a
holy man might approach a solemn festival of his church.
And the impetus of his mind was running with big momentum in this
direction, when there fell upon him, almost on the eve of starting, a
swift series of disasters that shook his being to its last foundations,
and left him stunned among the ruins. To describe these is unnecessary.
People said, ‘One thing after another like that! What appalling luck!
Poor wretch!’ then wondered, with the curiosity of children, how in the
world he would take it. Due to no apparent fault of his own, these
disasters were so sudden that life seemed in a moment shattered, and
his interest in existence almost ceased. People shook their heads and
thought of the emergency exit. But Limasson was too vital a man to
dream of annihilation. Upon him it had a different effect--he turned
and questioned what he called his gods. They did not answer or explain.
For the first time in his life he doubted. A hair’s breadth beyond lay
definite denial.
The ruin in which he sat, however, was not material; no man of his
age, possessed of courage and a working scheme of life, would permit
disaster of a material order to overwhelm him. It was collapse of a
mental, spiritual kind, an assault upon the roots of character and
temperament. Moral duties laid suddenly upon him threatened to crush.
His _personal_ existence was assailed, and apparently must end. He must
spend the remainder of his life caring for others who were nothing to
him. No outlet showed, no way of escape, so diabolically complete was
the combination of events that rushed his inner trenches. His faith
was shaken. A man can but endure so much, and remain human. For him
the saturation point seemed reached. He experienced the spiritual
equivalent of that physical numbness which supervenes when pain has
touched the limit of endurance. He laughed, grew callous, then mocked
his silent gods.
It is said that upon this state of blank negation there follows
sometimes a condition of lucidity which mirrors with crystal
clearness the forces driving behind life at a given moment, a kind of
clairvoyance that brings explanation and therefore peace. Limasson
looked for this in vain. There was the doubt that questioned, there
was the sneer that mocked the silence into which his questions fell;
but there was neither answer nor explanation, and certainly not peace.
There was no relief. In this tumult of revolt he did none of the
things his friends suggested or expected; he merely followed the line
of least resistance. He yielded to the impetus that was upon him when
the catastrophe came. To their indignant amazement he went out to his
mountains.
All marvelled that at such a time he could adopt so trivial a line of
action, neglecting duties that seemed paramount; they disapproved. Yet
in reality he was taking no definite action at all, but merely drifting
with the momentum that had been acquired just before. He was bewildered
with so much pain, confused with suffering, stunned with the crash that
flung him helpless amid undeserved calamity. He turned to the mountains
as a child to its mother, instinctively. Mountains had never failed
to bring him consolation, comfort, peace. Their grandeur restored
proportion whenever disorder threatened life. No calculation, properly
speaking, was in his move at all; but a blind desire for a violent
physical reaction such as climbing brings. And the instinct was more
wholesome than he knew.
In the high upland valley among lonely peaks whither Limasson then
went, he found in some measure the proportion he had lost. He
studiously avoided thinking; he lived in his muscles recklessly. The
region with its little Inn was familiar to him; peak after peak he
attacked, sometimes with, but more often without a guide, until his
reputation as a sane climber, a laurelled member of all the foreign
Alpine Clubs, was seriously in danger. That he overdid it physically
is beyond question, but that the mountains breathed into him some
portion of their enormous calm and deep endurance is also true. His
gods, meanwhile, he neglected utterly for the first time in his life.
If he thought of them at all, it was as tinsel figures imagination had
created, figures upon a stage that merely decorated life for those
whom pretty pictures pleased. Only--he had left the theatre and their
make-believe no longer hypnotised his mind. He realised their impotence
and disowned them. This attitude, however, was subconscious; he lent to
it no substance, either of thought or speech. He ignored rather than
challenged their existence.
And it was somewhat in this frame of mind--thinking little, feeling
even less--that he came out into the hotel vestibule after dinner one
evening, and took mechanically the bundle of letters the porter handed
to him. They had no possible interest for him; in a corner where the
big steam-heater mitigated the chilliness of the hall, he idly sorted
them. The score or so of other guests, chiefly expert climbing men,
were trailing out in twos and threes from the dining-room; but he felt
as little interest in them as in his letters: no conversation could
alter facts, no written phrases change his circumstances. At random,
then, he opened a business letter with a typewritten address--it
would probably be impersonal, less of a mockery, therefore, than the
others with their tiresome sham condolences. And, in a sense, it was
impersonal; sympathy from a solicitor’s office is mere formula, a few
extra ticks upon the universal keyboard of a Remington. But as he
read it, Limasson made a discovery that startled him into acute and
bitter sensation. He had imagined the limit of bearable suffering and
disaster already reached. Now, in a few dozen words, his error was
proved convincingly. The fresh blow was dislocating.
This culminating news of additional catastrophe disclosed within him
entirely new reaches of pain, of biting, resentful fury. Limasson
experienced a momentary stopping of the heart as he took it in, a
dizziness, a violent sensation of revolt whose impotence induced almost
physical nausea. He felt like--death.
‘Must I suffer all things?’ flashed through his arrested intelligence
in letters of fire.
There was a sullen rage in him, a dazed bewilderment, but no positive
suffering as yet. His emotion was too sickening to include the smaller
pains of disappointment; it was primitive, blind anger that he knew.
He read the letter calmly, even to the neat paragraph of machine-made
sympathy at the last, then placed it in his inner pocket. No outward
sign of disturbance was upon him; his breath came slowly; he reached
over to the table for a match, holding it at arm’s length lest the
sulphur fumes should sting his nostrils.
And in that moment he made his second discovery. The fact that further
suffering was still possible included also the fact that some touch of
resignation had been left in him, and therefore some vestige of belief
as well. Now, as he felt the crackling sheet of stiff paper in his
pocket, watched the sulphur die, and saw the wood ignite, this remnant
faded utterly away. Like the blackened end of the match, it shrivelled
and dropped off. It vanished. Savagely, yet with an external calmness
that enabled him to light his pipe with untrembling hand, he addressed
his futile deities. And once more in fiery letters there flashed
across the darkness of his passionate thought:
‘Even this you demand of me--this cruel, ultimate sacrifice?’
And he rejected them, bag and baggage; for they were a mockery and a
lie. With contempt he repudiated them for ever. The stage of doubt
had passed. He denied his gods. Yet, with a smile upon his lips; for
what were they after all but the puppets his religious fancy had
imagined? They never had existed. Was it, then, merely the picturesque,
sensational aspect of his devotional temperament that had created them?
That side of his nature, in any case, was dead now, killed by a single
devastating blow. The gods went with it.
Surveying what remained of his life, it seemed to him like a city that
an earthquake has reduced to ruins. The inhabitants think no worse
thing could happen. Then comes the fire.
* * * * *
Two lines of thought, it seems, then developed parallel in him
and simultaneously, for while underneath he stormed against this
culminating blow, his upper mind dealt calmly with the project of a
great expedition he would make at dawn. He had engaged no guide. As
an experienced mountaineer, he knew the district well; his name was
tolerably familiar, and in half an hour he could have settled all
details, and retired to bed with instructions to be called at two. But,
instead, he sat there waiting, unable to stir, a human volcano that any
moment might break forth into violence. He smoked his pipe as quietly
as though nothing had happened, while through the blazing depths of him
ran ever this one self-repeating statement: ‘Even this you demand of
me, this cruel, ultimate sacrifice!...’ His self-control, dynamically
estimated, just then must have been very great and, thus repressed, the
store of potential energy accumulated enormously.
With thought concentrated largely upon this final blow, Limasson had
not noticed the people who streamed out of the _salle à manger_ and
scattered themselves in groups about the hall. Some individual, now and
again, approached his chair with the idea of conversation, then, seeing
his absorption, turned away. Even when a climber whom he slightly knew
reached across him with a word of apology for the matches, Limasson
made no response, for he did not see him. He noticed nothing. In
particular he did not notice two men who, from an opposite corner, had
for some time been observing him. He now looked up--by chance?--and was
vaguely aware that they were discussing him. He met their eyes across
the hall, and started.
For at first he thought he knew them. Possibly he had seen them about
in the hotel--they seemed familiar--yet he certainly had never spoken
with them. Aware of his mistake, he turned his glance elsewhere,
though still vividly conscious of their attention. One was a clergyman
or a priest; his face wore an air of gravity touched by sadness, a
sternness about the lips counteracted by a kindling beauty in the
eyes that betrayed enthusiasm nobly regulated. There was a suggestion
of stateliness in the man that made the impression very sharp. His
clothing emphasised it. He wore a dark tweed suit that was strict in
its simplicity. There was austerity in him somewhere.
His companion, perhaps by contrast, seemed inconsiderable in his
conventional evening dress. A good deal younger than his friend,
his hair, always a tell-tale detail, was a trifle long; the thin
fingers that flourished a cigarette wore rings; the face, though
picturesque, was flippant, and his entire attitude conveyed a
certain insignificance. Gesture, that faultless language which
challenges counterfeit, betrayed unbalance somewhere. The impression
he produced, however, was shadowy compared to the sharpness of the
other. ‘Theatrical’ was the word in Limasson’s mind, as he turned his
glance elsewhere. But as he looked away he fidgeted. The interior
darkness caused by the dreadful letter rose about him. It engulfed him.
Dizziness came with it....
Far away the blackness was fringed with light, and through this light,
stepping with speed and carelessness as from gigantic distance, the two
men, suddenly grown large, came at him. Limasson, in self-protection,
turned to meet them. Conversation he did not desire. Somehow he had
expected this attack.
Yet the instant they began to speak--it was the priest who opened
fire--it was all so natural and easy that he almost welcomed the
diversion. A phrase by way of introduction--and he was speaking of
the summits. Something in Limasson’s mind turned over. The man was a
serious climber, one of his own species. The sufferer felt a certain
relief as he heard the invitation, and realised, though dully, the
compliment involved.
‘If you felt inclined to join us--if you would honour us with your
company,’ the man was saying quietly, adding something then about ‘your
great experience’ and ‘invaluable advice and judgment.’
Limasson looked up, trying hard to concentrate and understand.
‘The Tour du Néant?’ he repeated, mentioning the peak proposed. Rarely
attempted, never conquered, and with an ominous record of disaster, it
happened to be the very summit he had meant to attack himself next day.
‘You have engaged guides?’ He knew the question foolish.
‘No guide will try it,’ the priest answered, smiling, while his
companion added with a flourish, ‘but we--we need no guide--if _you_
will come.’
‘You are unattached, I believe? You are alone?’ the priest enquired,
moving a little in front of his friend, as though to keep him in the
background.
‘Yes,’ replied Limasson. ‘I am quite alone.’
He was listening attentively, but with only part of his mind. He
realised the flattery of the invitation. Yet it was like flattery
addressed to some one else. He felt himself so indifferent, so--dead.
These men wanted his skilful body, his experienced mind; and it was his
body and mind that talked with them, and finally agreed to go. Many a
time expeditions had been planned in just this way, but to-night he
felt there was a difference. Mind and body signed the agreement, but
his soul, listening elsewhere and looking on, was silent. With his
rejected gods it had left him, though hovering close still. It did not
interfere; it did not warn; it even approved; it sang to him from great
distance that this expedition cloaked another. He was bewildered by the
clashing of his higher and his lower mind.
‘At one in the morning, then, if that will suit you ...’ the older man
concluded.
‘I’ll see to the provisions,’ exclaimed the younger enthusiastically,
‘and I shall take my telephoto for the summit. The porters can come as
far as the Great Tower. We’re over six thousand feet here already, you
see, so ...’ and his voice died away in the distance as his companion
led him off.
Limasson saw him go with relief. But for the other man he would have
declined the invitation. At heart he was indifferent enough. What
decided him really was the coincidence that the Tour du Néant was the
very peak he had intended to attack himself _alone_, and the curious
feeling that this expedition cloaked another somehow--almost that these
men had a hidden motive. But he dismissed the idea--it was not worth
thinking about. A moment later he followed them to bed. So careless
was he of the affairs of the world, so dead to mundane interests, that
he tore up his other letters and tossed them into a corner of the
room--unread.