THE ICE-CAVE.
During our journey, Mr Osborne had seldom talked to us, and far more
seldom in speech sympathetic. If by chance I came out with anything I
thought or felt, even if he did not disapprove altogether, he would yet
first lay hold of something to which he could object, coming round only
by degrees, and with differences, to express consent. Evidently with
him objection was the first step in instruction. It was better in his
eyes to say you were wrong than to say you were right, even if you
should be much more right than wrong. He had not the smallest idea of
siding with the truth in you, of digging about it and watering it until
it grew a great tree in which all your thought-birds might nestle and
sing their songs; but he must be ever against the error--forgetting
that the only antagonist of the false is the true. ‘What,’ I used to
think in after-years, ‘is the use of battering the walls to get at the
error, when the kindly truth is holding the postern open for you to
enter, and pitch it out of window.’
The evening before we parted, he gave us a solemn admonishment on the
danger of being led astray by what men called the beauties of
Nature--for the heart was so desperately wicked that, even of the
things God had made _to show his power_, it would make snares for our
destruction. I will not go on with his homily, out of respect for the
man; for there was much earnestness in him, and it would utterly shame
me if I were supposed to hold that up to the contempt which the forms
it took must bring upon it. Besides, he made such a free use of the
most sacred of names, that I shrink from representing his utterance. A
good man I do not doubt he was; but he did the hard parts of his duty
to the neglect of the genial parts, and therefore was not a man to help
others to be good. His own son revived the moment he took his leave of
us--began to open up as the little red flower called the Shepherd’s
Hour-Glass opens when the cloud withdraws. It is a terrible thing when
the father is the cloud, and not the sun, of his child’s life. If
Charley had been like the greater number of boys I have known, all this
would only have hardened his mental and moral skin by the natural
process of accommodation. But his skin would not harden, and the evil
wrought the deeper. From his father he had inherited a conscience of
abnormal sensibility; but he could not inherit the religious dogmas by
means of which his father had partly deadened, partly distorted his;
and constant pressure and irritation had already generated a great
soreness of surface.
When he began to open up, it was after a sad fashion at first. To
resume my simile of the pimpernel--it was to disclose a heart in which
the glowing purple was blanched to a sickly violet. What happiness he
had, came in fits and bursts, and passed as quickly, leaving him
depressed and miserable. He was always either wishing to be happy, or
trying to be sure of the grounds of the brief happiness he had. He
allowed the natural blessedness of his years hardly a chance: the
moment its lobes appeared above ground, he was handling them, examining
them, and trying to pull them open. No wonder they crept underground
again! It may seem hardly credible that such should be the case with a
boy of fifteen, but I am not mistaken in my diagnosis. I will go a
little further. Gifted with the keenest perceptions, and a nature
unusually responsive to the feelings of others, he was born to be an
artist. But he was content neither with his own suggestions, nor with
understanding those of another; he must, by the force of his own will,
generate his friend’s feeling in himself, not perceiving the thing
impossible. This was one point at which we touched, and which went far
to enable me to understand him. The original in him was thus constantly
repressed, and he suffered from the natural consequences of repression.
He suffered also on the physical side from a tendency to disease of the
lungs inherited from his mother.
Mr Forest’s house stood high on the Grindelwald side of the Wengern
Alp, under a bare grassy height full of pasture both Summer and Winter.
In front was a great space, half meadow, half common, rather poorly
covered with hill-grasses. The rock was near the surface, and in places
came through, when the grass was changed for lichens and mosses.
Through this rocky meadow now roamed, now rushed, now tumbled one of
those Alpine streams the very thought of whose ice-born plenitude makes
me happy yet. Its banks were not abrupt, but rounded gently in, and
grassy down to the water’s brink. The larger torrents of Winter wore
the channel wide, and the sinking of the water in Summer let the grass
grow within it. But peaceful as the place was, and merry with the
constant rush of this busy stream, it had, even in the hottest Summer
day, a memory of the Winter about it, a look of suppressed desolation;
for the only trees upon it were a score of straggling pines--all dead,
as if blasted by lightning, or smothered by snow. Perhaps they were the
last of the forest in that part, and their roots had reached a stratum
where they could not live. All I know is that there they stood, blasted
and dead every one of them.
Charley could never bear them, and even disliked the place because of
them. His father was one whom a mote in his brother’s eye repelled. The
son suffered for this in twenty ways--one of which was that a single
spot in the landscape was to him enough to destroy the loveliness of
exquisite surroundings.
A good way below lay the valley of the Grindelwald. The Eiger and the
Matterhorn were both within sight. If a man has any sense of the
infinite, he cannot fail to be rendered capable of higher things by
such embodiments of the high. Otherwise, they are heaps of dirt, to be
scrambled up and conquered, for scrambling and conquering’s sake. They
are but warts, Pelion and Ossa and all of them. They seemed to oppress
Charley at first.
‘Oh, Willie,’ he said to me one day, ‘if I could but believe in those
mountains, how happy I should be! But I doubt, I doubt they are but
rocks and snow.’
I only half understood him. I am afraid I never did understand him more
than half. Later I came to the conclusion that this was not the fit
place for him, and that if his father had understood him, he would
never have sent him there.
It was some time before Mr Forest would take us any mountain ramble. He
said we must first get accustomed to the air of the place, else the
precipices would turn our brains. He allowed us, however, to range
within certain bounds.
One day soon after our arrival, we accompanied one of our schoolfellows
down to the valley of the Grindelwald, specially to see the head of the
snake-glacier, which having crept thither can creep no further.
Somebody had even then hollowed out a cave in it. We crossed a little
brook which issued from it constantly, and entered. Charley uttered a
cry of dismay, but I was too much delighted at the moment to heed him.
For the whole of the white cavern was filled with blue air, so blue
that I saw the air which filled it. Perfectly transparent, it had no
substance, only blueness, which deepened and deepened as I went further
in. All down the smooth white walls evermore was stealing a thin veil
of dissolution; while here and there little runnels of the purest water
were tumbling in tiny cataracts from top to bottom. It was one of the
thousand birthplaces of streams, ever creeping into the day of vision
from the unlike and the unknown, unrolling themselves like the fronds
of a fern out of the infinite of God. Ice was all around, hard and cold
and dead and white; but out of it and away went the water babbling and
singing in the sunlight.
‘Oh, Charley!’ I exclaimed, looking round in my transport for sympathy.
It was now my turn to cry out, for Charley’s face was that of a corpse.
The brilliant blue of the cave made us look to each other most ghastly
and fearful.
‘Do come out, Wilfrid,’ he said; ‘I cannot bear it.’
I put my arm in his, and we walked into the sunlight. He drew a deep
breath of relief, and turned to me with an attempt at a smile, but his
lip quivered.
‘It’s an awful place, Wilfrid. I don’t like it. Don’t go in again. I
should stand waiting to see you come out in a winding-sheet. I think
there’s something wrong with my brain. That blue seems to have got into
it. I see everything horribly dead.’
On the way back he started several times, and looked, round as if with
involuntary apprehension, but mastered himself with an effort, and
joined again in the conversation. Before we reached home he was much
fatigued, and complaining of head-ache, went to bed immediately on our
arrival.
We slept in the same room. When I went up at the usual hour, he was
awake.
‘Can’t you sleep, Charley?’ I said.
‘I’ve been asleep several times,’ he answered, ‘but I’ve had such a
horrible dream every time! We were all corpses that couldn’t get to
sleep, and went about pawing the slimy walls of our marble
sepulchre--so cold and wet! It was that horrible ice-cave, I suppose.
But then you know that’s just what it is, Wilfrid.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, instinctively turning from the
subject, for the glitter of his blue eyes looked bodeful. I did not
know then how like he and I were, or how like my fate might have been
to his, if, instead of finding at once a fit food for my fancy, and a
safety-valve for its excess, in those old romances, I had had my
regards turned inwards upon myself, before I could understand the
phenomena there exhibited. Certainly I too should have been thus
rendered miserable, and body and soul would have mutually preyed on
each other.
I sought to change the subject. I could never talk to him about his
father, but he had always been ready to speak of his mother and his
sister. Now, however, I could not rouse him. ‘Poor mamma!’ was all the
response he made to some admiring remark; and when I mentioned his
sister Mary, he only said, ‘She’s a good girl, our Mary,’ and turned
uneasily towards the wall. I went to bed. He lay quiet, and I fell
asleep.
When I woke in the morning, I found him very unwell. I suppose the
illness had been coming on for some time. He was in a low fever. As the
doctor declared it not infectious, I was allowed to nurse him. He was
often delirious, and spoke the wildest things. Especially, he would
converse with the Saviour after the strangest fashion.
He lay ill for some weeks. Mr Forest would not allow me to sit up with
him at night, but I was always by his bedside early in the morning, and
did what I could to amuse and comfort him through the day. When at
length he began to grow better, he was more cheerful than I had known
him hitherto; but he remained very weak for some time. He had grown a
good deal during his illness, and indeed never looked a boy again.