What had taken Stephen Forrester to the Exhibition would be difficult to
say. He had told his friends that snow and ice and anything higher than
a first floor made him feel ill, and had then proceeded to lose himself
very pleasantly among the fleshpots. Well, he had earned his fleshpots.
Yet here he was, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, paying his
entrance fee like anybody else to the Association Rooms, to see Macrae’s
photographs.
“The large photographs of Mount Forrester are in Room C,” said the very
efficient young person with the bobbed hair who gave him his change.
“Kindly keep to the right.” He thanked her humbly and clicked through
the turnstile in the wake of a large woman in musquash and carnations,
who would probably have given much to know him. For Forrester was
something of a lion that winter.
He went into Room C, after a guilty glance about A and B. But no one was
there who knew him. No one said: “That’s Forrester! Yes, the fellow with
the limp. You’d never dream he was fond of that sort of thing, would
you?” His first thought was: “Mac did some good work!” Then, with an
involuntarily catching of the breath, he stopped short before the great
photograph that held the end wall alone.
And as he did so he knew with sure foreknowledge that any time in his
life he might be brought up with that little thrill, that while he
lived, a hundred chance scents or colours or silences would have power
to renew for him that air of ineffable space, those sheathed and virgin
rocks, those upper snows austere against the burning blue; that the
impersonal passion of the climber had been, was, and forever would be
the moving force of his soul.
“Mount Forrester from the South-east,” the catalogue had it. Just that!
He was the man who had conquered Mount Forrester; and he was the man who
knew how utterly the great height had conquered him.
He sat down on one of the leather divans placed at intervals down the
centre of the room, staring at the enlarged photograph with half-closed
eyes. The heated air grew cold in his throat; inside his irreproachable
gloves the scars of his old frost-bites burned and tingled; he tapped
one well-shod foot—the lame one—on the floor. There in the extreme
left-hand corner of the picture was the bit of ice that had slid and
crushed him. That had been on the return journey. They said he’d never
walk again. Macrae himself had been all in when he took that picture.
Why, they’d put him in the tent in the middle of a snow flurry; the
cloud had cleared and the light was right; they’d found Mac up to his
ears in snow half a mile away, clutching the camera—raving, but he’d
taken the picture.
“Excuse me, boss—you done any climbin’?”
Forrester came to earth with a start, and leaned round the curve of the
leather seat-back the better to see and answer the man who had so
suddenly spoken to him. But he was slow in answering as the details of
the questioner’s face presented themselves to him around the curve of
the fat green morocco. For what possible interest could such a one have
in climbing mountains? An elderly clerk out of work? Scarcely educated
enough, judged Forrester. A night watchman? More likely. Anyway, a
sub-under-assistant at whatever he set his hand to do. The stamp of the
man born to work under other men was on him, on his respectable
garments, on his vague face set in graying bristles; one could guess him
treading forever the same smoothed rut, running on the same rail, until
pushed off at last into a still deeper obscurity. And he was already
growing old. Forrester, clean from his heights, was quick to pity. “One
of the Great Unlucky,” he said to himself; and aloud: “Yes, I’ve climbed
a good bit. Are you—interested in it?”
The stranger smiled slowly. Then he drew out seven coppers and arranged
them along his dingy palm. There was a certain youthfulness, a hovering
and unexpected sweetness in his smile that attracted Forrester. “These
here,” he said, “are all I got left o’ what Maggie allows me fer baccy
this week, after payin’ me admission.” He returned the coins to his
pocket and resumed his slow contemplation of the picture.
For a moment Forrester was in doubt. But the shabby-respectable man was
oblivious of him, his whole attention absorbed in the picture. And it
was Forrester who renewed the conversation on some impulse of sympathy,
saying: “Where have you done your climbing?”
“Me? Oh, anywhere north o’ Thunder Valley, for the most part. You _got_
to climb there to get about. Don’t see no sense in doin’ it fer fun.” He
turned his eyes again to the photograph, and once more that shy,
half-boyish smile transfigured his commonplace face. “But you thinks
different when yer young eh, Mister? Where you done _your_ climbin’ if I
may arsk?”
Forrester nodded toward the wall. “Thereabouts mostly,” he said
pleasantly. “My name’s Forrester—Stephen Forrester, at your service.”
The stranger turned completely around; his face rose over the back of
the divan like a queer mild moon. “You—Forrester?” he said with
interest. “Well, now! You the feller that climbed that mountain an’ had
it named fer him?”
“Yes,” smiled Forrester, conscious of an excusable glow.
“_My!_” said the unknown softly. “My! If that don’t beat all!” He looked
at Forrester carefully, as if making a friendly inventory of him. He
rubbed his hands gently together. “Maggie’ll be _that_ amused to hear
tell I seen you!” he said shyly.
Well—_amused_ was not just the word that Forrester had expected! But
the other man came sidling along the leather seat, all alight with
interest. He put out his hand, so palpably the hand of a failure, and
touched Forrester’s sleeve. “Mister,” he begged simply, “tell me all
about it, so’s I can tell Maggie!”
The appeal hit Forrester in his softest place. He was touched. Who was
Maggie? He visioned her as beautiful and dreaming of her native hills;
in a mental flash he saw himself telling a moving story to a dozen
well-appointed dinner-tables. He said kindly: “Tell me what you want to
know. But first—who’s Maggie? Where is she?”
“My old girl. Mister. She’s washin’ dishes at Henniker’s til I get a
job.” He went on with a touch of pride: “She don’t have to work when
_I’m_ doin’ anything, boss.”
Again Forrester was moved; he guessed that Maggie washed dishes a lot at
Henniker’s and did it cheerily. Maggie’s husband went on with a shy
eagerness, jerking his thumb at the wall: “Did you have to cross Somahl’
to the glacier, Mister?” “Yes.” Forrester was conscious of an increasing
astonishment, for the glacier was not shown on the photograph, and is
not named on any map. “We climbed that long ridge to the east—the
photograph does not show much of it—and worked along till we came to
the little plateau. And there we made our last camp. We went up next
day. We wanted to do it in a day, so as not to spend a night at that
altitude.”
“I know.” The face of Maggie’s husband showed keener, harder; he was
touched with some quiet amusement that puzzled Forrester. “You went up
roped, boss?”
“As far as that big fissure.” Forrester was kindling, as a lyric poet
might kindle at the talk of love. “We cast them off then. They were too
great a weight. We kept them as dry as we could, but there was a
continual _poudre_ and they were frozen as stiff as steel rods,
crackling as we moved. It sounded so loud, that crackle.”
“The papers say you was the only one that made the peak, Mister, the
only one that made good.”
“It wasn’t the other fellows’ fault,” said Forrester quickly. “They were
fine stuff—white men. I tell you they gave up their chances so I should
have mine. Yes. They helped me all through, spent their strength for
me—so that in the end they’d none left, and I went on alone—on their
strength. A man said to me last week: ‘You hired them, didn’t you?’
‘What difference does that make?’ I said, ‘when they gave me what money
couldn’t buy?’”
Forrester’s eyes went to the picture; he was abruptly silent. Then:
“They gave me _that_,” he breathed.
After a minute he went on quietly, talking more to himself than to the
man beside him:
“I left Mason and Pieters on the last tiny level with the tent over
them. Mason was finished. Pieters could have come with me, but daren’t
leave Mason, who was in a state of collapse, and blue. Pieters never
stopped rubbing him, he told me, for an hour. I went on alone, up a
slope of hard old snow, steep, but easy enough—that slope—and in five
minutes it was as if I’d been alone for centuries from the beginning of
the world! I drew myself up on a ledge and looked down. Mason and
Pieters were little black figures beneath. Pieters lifted a hand to me.
Then I went on over that hummock—there—and they were gone. It seemed
to be all right—all right, I mean, that I should be alone at the
end—alone with my mountain.
“The hardest part of the climbing was over. There remained only that
great soaring wedge of immortal snow, that heaved above me into the
blue. I had only to climb, to keep on working upward as long as my
strength held. I knew it would not fail. My arms, outstretched against
the face of the steep, and looking as weak as a fly’s legs, were yet
long enough and strong enough to clasp the whole of that magnificent
summit, and leave their mark upon it, and conquer it. What a thing
humanity is! Oh, I’m talking nonsense, if you like, but I was a little
mad at the time. If you’ve climbed, you know how it is!”
But Forrester saw at the same moment that his listener didn’t know how
it was, for all he was smiling indulgently. “I been mad in my time,
boss,” he said almost with a wink. “I ain’t the head for such things
now.”
Forrester laughed a little. “It took some head,” he confessed, nodding
at the photograph. “After I worked round that curve there, I had nothing
under me but a drop—a drop clear to timber-line. I’d loose a handful of
snow from somewhere, and it’d go glittering off into the emptiness
behind me like frozen smoke, and I’d stick close for a minute to see if
any more was coming. Then I’d watch those bits of snow-dust fall and
fall and fall—miles and miles they seemed to fall, right to the black
furriness that was the forest of the lower slopes. They came near to
shaking me. And now and then I seemed to have nothing at all under hands
or feet—-to be just afloat in dizzy space. Then I’d look up, and the
whole weight of the summit’d rush back at me—hang over me until I
seemed to be underneath it and crushed flat. And then I’d kind of come
back to myself, and know what I was doing. And I tell you I wouldn’t
have swapped places with a millionaire! It’s at times like that a man
feels his soul alive in him and knows he can’t fail, whatever seems to
happen. They say that morally we only use about one-tenth of our power
of living. It takes the divine moment to teach us what we are when we
use ten-tenths—what we are!”
Forrester was frankly smiling now, frankly talking to himself. Maggie’s
husband was listening in respectful bewilderment, yet with something
held in reserve; he sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands
dangling forward. Forrester wished he wouldn’t; somehow, those hands
looked so inept, so apologetic. He went on abruptly:
“I was corkscrewing upwards, if you see what I mean. I calculated to
reach the top on the side opposite to where I’d left my two men, for
we’d seen that the overhang was less there. But on that side the wind
was worse. It was not strong—just a steady swim of cold air fit to
freeze the breath inside you.
“I was working up very safely and steadily, finding everything much
easier than I had expected, which is often the way. I was cutting steps
in solid snow. Nothing could happen to me as long as I kept on cutting
steps. I was as safe as a house, for all the next stopping place was two
thousand feet under. And I was just thinking so when the thong with
which my ice-axe was looped round my wrist caught against a snag that
thrust through the snow-crust, and snapped. I shifted my grip on the
shaft for greater security; and the next instant the thing was out of my
hand and glissading down the slope.
“Well, it was awkward enough, but not fatal. I went on without it,
though slower; making detours round hummocks I’d have cut into, and
scooping holds with the big knife I had on a lanyard round my neck. I
went on so for maybe another hour, not thinking of the top, pinning my
mind to every inch of the ascent.
“And then—all in a moment, as it seemed—I looked up. And there was the
summit not two hundred feet above me, and easy all the way.
“Well, I hung on with toes and fingers and tried to cheer, but I
couldn’t get it out. Change places with a millionaire! I wouldn’t have
changed places with the kings of the earth! And then I looked more
closely at what lay in front of me. And—the cheer went out of me like
the flame out of a candle.
“Immediately over me, and for as far round as I could see the
mountain-top was girdled with a band of rock, a sheer face, too sheer to
hold the snow. It was all veined with ice, pitted and porous with the
weather since the world began—soft stuff, crumbling under frost and
sun. Yes, there was just about twenty feet of it. After that a smooth
mound of snow to the very crest. And I lay with my chin in a drift at
the foot of it, and cried like a baby. For I knew that no power on earth
could get me up that little twenty-foot wall of rock without an axe to
chip holds with.
“I worked up to it and stood against it. There was a ledge that held me
comfortably. I stood on it and drove in the knife as far as I could
reach above my head, tossed my line round it and pulled. It came away in
a tinkle of tiny ice-chips and rotten rock. I stared below me. I
wondered how long it would take me to get down—without having reached
the top. I looked to my right, just to make certain of what I was deadly
sure of already—that there wasn’t any possible way up for a single
climber farther along the ledge. And there, as sure as I’m a living man,
were little steps cut roughly in the rock—choked with ice, but
recognizable, serviceable.
“When I told our president that,” said Forrester after a silence, “he
told _me_ I’d gone light-headed from exposure.”
Forrester gazed at the picture a moment, a smile on his fine vivid face.
His eyes looked into a great distance; and the eyes of the man beside
him rested on him—kindly, uncomprehendingly, a little wistfully, as if
he were trying to follow Forrester into that shining distance.
“I knew.” Forrester was speaking to his own soul. “Oh, I knew,” he
repeated, softly. “I met him there. I felt him there—my nameless
forerunner! There was a high spirit near me in the very wind. I touched
hands with an unknown comrade, a friend who’d climbed higher, leaving
his glory to me like a coat for which he’d no more use. How high he must
have climbed! To the very stars!
“The steps were very much weathered. They looked very old. They were
filled, as I said, with old ice, which I chipped out with the hook of my
knife. I went up hand over hand.
“The rest was easy. I won’t trouble you with it. I stood on the summit
at last, and left the tiny flag there that I’d carried up. He—my
forerunner—seemed to be waiting for me there; I fancied that he gave me
a generous smile. I knew he didn’t grudge me anything. It sounds rubbish
_here_, eh? but _there_ I smiled back at him—the man in whose steps I’d
climbed to the best thing life’s given me yet; and I drank his health in
the last of my brandy. Then I—came down.”
The pleasant, vigorous voice died to silence. Both men, so contrasted,
sat silent for a while, looking at the picture, which even in the
electric light seemed to glow and recede into some splendid atmosphere
of its own.
At last Forrester turned, a little shamefaced; he felt that in talking
so to a man who couldn’t possibly understand, he’d gone very near to
making a fool of himself and his mountain. There was honest pity in his
heart for any man who knew nothing of such austere triumphs as he
enjoyed; perhaps there was a shade of contempt, too, as he said hastily:
“See here, I’ve made you listen to a lot of stuff, eh? But you must let
me pay for this, you know. Just the price of admission—between two men
who have something in common.”
He broke off. For he was not heard. The shabby man was gazing at the
photograph. And as he gazed he chuckled quietly and rubbed his faded
knees. “If you’d looked, Mister,” he said, “if you’d looked, maybe you’d
have found the bits of an ol’ lantern, up there where you left the
flag!”
Perfectly motionless, Forrester waited.
The shabby man turned to him genially. “Such fools as we are when we’re
young!” he said. “How it all comes back!” He smiled upon the younger man
again with that bright, gentle look which gave him momentarily the
aspect of youth; it was like a light reflected from some mountain-peak
of the soul. He went on: “Maggie’ll be _that_ interested when she hears
some one has set right alongside me, talkin’—excuse me, boss—like man
to man, some one that’s been up that there mountain!”
Still Forrester waited, dry-mouthed.
“You see, Mister, me and Maggie, we always counted that there old
mountain as ours like, seein’ as I was the only feller’d ever been up it
in them days. And a fine fool I was. Many’s the time Maggie’s said to
me: ‘I wonder I took you, Si,’ she’s said, ‘seein’ you showed me what
kind of a fool you was when you was courtin’.’ Maggie’s a great one for
a joke. ‘Or maybe,’ she says, ‘I took you just because you was such a
fool that Christmas. There’s no accountin’ for a woman’s taste,’ she
says.”
That reflection of a far light rosed his colourless face as he turned
again to Forrester; it lighted a pleasant blue star in his homely eyes;
he laughed consciously, and glanced down at his patched shoes.
“We wasn’t married then,” he explained confidentially. “It’s a long time
ago. Seems queer that there ever _was_ a time when Maggie and me wasn’t
married; but there was.” He wrinkled his brow with a ruminative air.
“But there wasn’t never at no time, any other girl than Maggie Delane
for me.” He looked gently at Forrester. “You should ’a’ seen her then,”
he said; “she was the purtiest girl in Cascapedia, my Maggie was.
“There was a lot of fellers after her. She could ’a’ done lots better,
but—she stuck to me. Seems like I didn’t have much luck, even then. I
dunno why—I was always willin’ to work. It just happened that way,
Mister. Times I said to her: ‘You’d best quit me, honey, and take up
with a luckier man.’ I said that not knowin’ just what I’d do if she
done it. But she—she just put her hands on my shoulders,”—he glanced
wonderingly at his shabby coat,—“she put her hands there, an’ she says:
‘Good luck or bad, I’ll never go back on you, Si.’” His slow eyes went
back to Forrester’s face. “You know how it is with them, with the good
ones, boss, when they’re—fond of a feller.”
“No,” said Forrester, after a short silence, and very humbly, “no, I
don’t know—yet. Go on, please. Tell me the rest.”
“We was to have been married that Christmas. But I didn’t have no luck.
I didn’t have enough saved. It near broke my heart. I hadn’t got so
kinder used to waitin’ on things then, and I was just set on goin’ to
Cascapedia and claimin’ my girl that Christmas. She was workin’ in a
store there, and I was on a lumberin’ job back on the Oucouagan.
’Twasn’t so far asunders, but the hills riz up to heaven in betwixt us.
I hadn’t seen her in a long while, Mister. And when the time come on,
an’ I’d no luck an’ had been sick, an’ dassent to quit my job, I tramped
them hills all one night, boss, tryin’ to find the nerve to write Maggie
and say: ‘We can’t be married this Christmas after all, honey; we’ll
have to wait for the spring.’”
He bent down and picked a thread carefully from his frayed trousers.
Raising his head, he stared again at the picture. “I wrote it at last,”
he went on in his heavy way, “an’ I sent it to her. I was down an’ out.
I—kinder lost me self-respeck, boss, havin’ to write that way to Maggie
when she could ’a’ done so much better. . . Yes sir. An’ then her answer
came. She wasn’t a very good writer. She just said I wasn’t to worry;
she guessed she could get along without me till the spring—always one
for a joke, was Maggie!—but I was to think of her on Christmas.”
The shabby man’s voice trailed off into silence. After a moment he said,
thoughtfully: “Queer how they—the good ones—can break a feller all up
an’ put him on his feet at the same time, aint it, boss?”
“I—don’t know,” said Forrester, softly. “Go on please.”
“She said I was to think of her on Christmas. Somethin’ you said awhile
back put me in mind of how I felt then. Think of her! Why, I—I felt as
though I could chop the mountains down same as if they was trees to get
her! I felt there was nothin’—just nothin’—I couldn’t do, or bear, or
get, so as Maggie didn’t quit me. I felt I’d get her them great shiny
stars fer buttons to her Sunday dress if she was wantin’ them. Made me
feel twelve foot high and drunk, she did, just with three lines o’ bad
spellin’ and a joke! I’d five dollars in me pocket, an’ I went an’
looked up a Siwash, one o’ them mountain Injuns that looks like a
Chinaman and moves up or down like a goat; I’d done him a kindness a
little while back, an’ he was grateful, which is more’n white fellers
always is. I said, would he take a letter to my _klootch_ in Cascapedia,
for five dollars, she to get it on Christmas? Yes, he said, he would. I
gave him the letter an’ the bill, an’ off he went—not that she was
rightly my _klootch_ then, o’ course, an’ she’d ’a’ been terrible vexed
if she’d known I called her so; but it was near enough fer _him_.
“We wasn’t so far apart, as I says—not so many miles on the level, only
not a yard of it _was_ level; the hills was like a wall between us; but
there was one thing we could both see, one thing that was in sight from
Cascapedia an’ from the Oucouagan on the other side. An’ that was that
mountain there.”
He looked at the picture with lingering surprise. “My!” he said, “You
wouldn’t never think I’d been up there, would you? You’d think I was too
old and had too much sense. But I was young then; and some way Maggie’d
made me clean crazy.”
He flushed and gave Forrester a shy, friendly smile. “Two nights,” he
said, laughing a little, “two nights I sat up, fixin’ a lantern to suit
me—fixin’ it so’s no draft could get in, puttin’ in extry wicks an’
more oil an’ the dear knows what-all! I’d said to Maggie in my letter
I’d sent, ‘You borrer a pair of glasses if it ain’t clear,’ I says, ‘an’
you look at the top o’ the biggest mountain you see in betwixt us,’ I
says ‘on Christmas night, an’ you’ll see if I’m thinkin’ of you or not,
Maggie Delane.’ That’s what I says.
“When the lantern was fixed, I packed it on me back keerful, an’ I
borrerred an ice-ax, an’ a pair o’ creepers, an’ I climbed that there
mountain an’ left the lighted lantern on the top.”
Forrester stared at him. Did he know what he was saying, what, in that
brief day of glory given him by a girl’s trust, he had done? No, he had
no inkling of it; no shadow of a suspicion crossed his simple mind that
he had achieved a feat that no man had been able to repeat for thirty
years. He was smiling pleasantly, indulgently, at the folly of his
youth. And Forrester said, not knowing he spoke aloud: “It’s better it
should be like that. It’s more beautiful so.”
“Did you speak, Mister?”
“No—nothing. Please go on.”
But the charm was broken; the reflection of that far light was fading
from the ageing face as Forrester had seen the reflected glory of his
peak fading from the lowlands. The shabby man’s shyness was increasing;
he looked at Forrester uneasily. “I dunno what made me talk so much,” he
mumbled apologetically. “Seein’ that picture an’ all, I guess. I aint
generally one to talk much.”
“Good heavens, man,” cried Forrester, “don’t you know you’ve just been
telling me the most beautiful thing I ever heard?” He checked himself
abruptly at the look in his companion’s face. “Tell me how you got up,”
he went on more quietly.
But the present had again usurped the splendid past. “I don’t rightly
remember now,” said the shabby man uncertainly. “My mind was that full
of Maggie, anyways. . . . I crossed the glacier below where you did, an’
then I—I guess, I just went up, boss.”
“Yes,” agreed Forrester, “you just went up. . . And the lantern wasn’t
hurt, and Maggie saw the light from Cascapedia?”
“She saw it boss. It burned till the oil give out. ’Twasn’t hurt a
mite.”
Forrester looked again at the photograph. He visioned his great peak, a
shadow against the winter stars, crowned with a tiniest point of
light—a weak star that invaded those awful solitudes, those dominions
of wind and cloud, dawn and darkness, to tell a girl in a store that her
man hadn’t forgotten her! He roused from his vision to see Maggie’s
husband on his feet, to hear him mumbling good-bye.
“. . . . be terribly amused to hear I seen you,” he heard. “Take it as a
favour, boss, if you’d not mention it to no one. . . . do a steady man
no good. They’d think I was drunk.”
Forrester got up and shook hands, which seemed to abash the man very
much.
“It’s better that way too,” he said abruptly, “though you won’t have the
least idea what I mean. If I can ever have the honour of doing anything
for you or Maggie, let me know.”
The shabby man was gone. An official in blue and silver buttons was
staring suspiciously at Forrester. He scowled at the official, and went
and stood in front of the great photograph. He stood there so long that
the official gave up watching him and moved away. The room was empty.
Forrester glanced around; then he took out his fountain pen.
He looked again at the picture of the peak. “Not mine,” he said under
his breath, and humbly, “not mine!” There was a large ticket attached to
the frame, bearing the legend: “Mount Forrester from the South-east.” He
crossed out the word “Forrester,” and above the erasure, in neat black
letters, he wrote the words: “Maggie Delane.” Then he too, went away.