Heyl's place. Fanny stood before it, key in hand (she had found it
in the mail box, tied to a string), and she had a curious and restful
feeling, as if she had come home, after long wanderings. She smiled,
whimsically, and repeated her lesson to herself:
“The fire's laid in the fireplace with fat pine knots that will blaze
up at the touch of a match. My books are there, along the wall. The
bedding's in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tinned
stuff in the pantry. And the mountains are there, girl, to make you
clean and whole again....”
She stepped up to the little log-pillared porch and turned the key in
the lock. She opened the door wide, and walked in. And then she shut her
eyes for a moment. Because, if it shouldn't be true----
But there was a fire laid with fat pine knots. She walked straight over
to it, and took her box of matches from her bag, struck one, and held
it to the wood. They blazed like a torch. Books! Along the four walls,
books. Fat, comfortable, used-looking books. Hundreds of them. A lamp on
the table, and beside it a pipe, blackened from much use. Fanny picked
it up, smiling. She held it a moment in her hand, as though she expected
to find it still warm.
“It's like one of the fairy tales,” she thought, “the kind that repeats
and repeats. The kind that says, `and she went into the next room, and
it was as the good fairy had said.'”
There's tinned stuff in the pantry. She went into the tiny kitchen and
opened the pantry door cautiously, being wary of mice. But it met her
eye in spotless array. Orderly rows of tins. Orderly rows of bottles.
Coffee. Condensed milk. Beans. Spaghetti. Flour. Peaches. Pears.
Off the bedroom there was an absurdly adequate little bathroom, with a
zinc tub and an elaborate water-heating arrangement.
Fanny threw back her head and laughed as she hadn't laughed in months.
“Wild life in the Rockies,” she said aloud. She went back to the
book-lined living room. The fire was crackling gloriously. It was a
many-windowed room, and each window framed an enchanting glimpse of
mountain, flaming with aspens up to timber-line, and snow-capped at the
top. Fanny decided to wait until the fire had died down to a coal-bed.
Then she banked it carefully, put on a heavy sweater and a cap, and made
for the outdoors. She struck out briskly, tenderfoot that she was. In
five minutes she was panting. Her heart was hammering suffocatingly. Her
lungs ached. She stopped, trembling. Then she remembered. The altitude,
of course. Heyl had boasted that his cabin stood at an altitude of over
nine thousand feet. Well, she would have to get used to it. But she was
soon striding forward as briskly as before. She was a natural mountain
dweller. The air, the altitude, speeded up her heart, her lungs, sent
the blood dancing through her veins. Figuratively, she was on tip-toe.
They had warned her, at the Inn, to take it slowly for the first few
days. They had asked no questions. Fanny learned to heed their advice.
She learned many more things in the next few days. She learned how to
entice the chipmunks that crossed her path, streak o' sunshine, streak
o' shadow. She learned to broil bacon over a fire, with a forked stick.
She learned to ride trail ponies, and to bask in a sun-warmed spot on a
wind-swept hill, and to tell time by the sun, and to give thanks for the
beauty of the world about her, and to leave the wild flowers unpicked,
to put out her campfire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all rubbish
(your true woodsman and mountaineer is as painstakingly neat as a French
housewife).
She was out of doors all day. At night she read for a while before the
fire, but by nine her eyelids were heavy. She walked down to the Inn
sometimes, but not often. One memorable night she went, with half a
dozen others from the Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the
handy man about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's
far-famed phonograph concerts. Oscar's phonograph had cost twenty-five
dollars in Denver. It stood in one corner of his cabin, and its base was
a tree stump just five hundred years old, as you could tell for yourself
by counting its rings. His cabin walls were gorgeous with pictures of
Maxine Elliott in her palmy days, and blonde and sophisticated little
girls on vinegar calendars, posing bare-legged and self-conscious in
blue calico and sunbonnets. You sat in the warm yellow glow of Oscar's
lamp and were regaled with everything from the Swedish National
Anthem to Mischa Elman's tenderest crooning. And Oscar sat rapt, his
weather-beaten face a rich deep mahogany, his eyes bluer than any eyes
could ever be except in contrast with that ruddy countenance, his teeth
so white that you found yourself watching for his smile that was so
gently sweet and childlike. Oh, when Oscar put on his black pants and
issued invitations for a musical evening one was sure to find his cabin
packed. Eight did it, with squeezing.
This, then, was the atmosphere in which Fanny Brandeis found herself.
As far from Haynes-Cooper as anything could be. At the end of the first
week she found herself able to think clearly and unemotionally about
Theodore, and about Fenger. She had even evolved a certain rather crude
philosophy out of the ruins that had tumbled about her ears. It was
so crude, so unformed in her mind that it can hardly be set down. To
justify one's own existence. That was all that life held or meant. But
that included all the lives that touched on yours. It had nothing to
do with success, as she had counted success heretofore. It was service,
really. It was living as--well, as Molly Brandeis had lived, helpfully,
self-effacingly, magnificently. Fanny gave up trying to form the thing
that was growing in her mind. Perhaps, after all, it was too soon to
expect a complete understanding of that which had worked this change in
her from that afternoon in Fenger's library.
After the first few days she found less and less difficulty in climbing.
Her astonished heart and lungs ceased to object so strenuously to the
unaccustomed work. The Cabin Rock trail, for example, whose summit found
her panting and exhausted at first, now seemed a mere stroll. She grew
more daring and ambitious. One day she climbed the Long's Peak trail to
timberline, and had tea at Timberline Cabin with Albert Edward Cobbins.
Albert Edward Cobbins, Englishman, erstwhile sailor, adventurer and
gentleman, was the keeper of Timberline Cabin, and the loneliest man in
the Rockies. It was his duty to house overnight climbers bound for the
Peak, sunrise parties and sunset parties, all too few now in the chill
October season-end. Fanny was his first visitor in three days. He was
pathetically glad to see her.
“I'll have tea for you,” he said, “in a jiffy. And I baked a pan of
French rolls ten minutes ago. I had a feeling.”
A magnificent specimen of a man, over six feet tall slim,
broad-shouldered, long-headed, and scrubbed-looking as only an
Englishman can be, there was something almost pathetic in the sight of
him bustling about the rickety little kitchen stove.
“To-morrow,” said Fanny, over her tea, “I'm going to get an early start,
reach here by noon, and go on to Boulder Field and maybe Keyhole.”
“Better not, Miss. Not in October, when there's likely to be a snowstorm
up there in a minute's notice.”
“You'd come and find me, wouldn't you? They always do, in the books.”
“Books are all very well, Miss. But I'm not a mountain man. The truth
is I don't know my way fifty feet from this cabin. I got the job because
I'm used to loneliness, and don't mind it, and because I can cook, d'you
see, having shipped as cook for years. But I'm a seafaring man, Miss. I
wouldn't advise it, Miss. Another cup of tea?”
But Long's Peak, king of the range, had fascinated her from the first.
She knew that the climb to the summit would be impossible for her now,
but she had an overwhelming desire to see the terrifying bulk of it from
a point midway of the range. It beckoned her and intrigued her, as the
difficult always did.
By noon of the following day she had left Albert Edward's cabin (he
stood looking after her in the doorway until she disappeared around the
bend) and was jauntily following the trail that led to Boulder Field,
that sea of jagged rock a mile across. Soon she had left the tortured,
wind-twisted timberline trees far behind. How pitiful Cabin Rock and
Twin Sisters looked compared to this. She climbed easily and steadily,
stopping for brief rests. Early in the week she had ridden down to the
village, where she had bought climbing breeches and stout leggings. She
laughed at Albert Edward and his fears. By one o'clock she had reached
Boulder Field. She found the rocks glazed with ice. Just over Keyhole,
that freakish vent in a wall of rock, the blue of the sky had changed
to the gray of snow-clouds. Tenderfoot though she was, she knew that the
climb over Boulder Field would be perilous, if not impossible. She went
on, from rock to rock, for half an hour, then decided to turn back. A
clap of thunder, that roared and crashed, and cracked up and down the
canyons and over the peaks, hastened her decision. She looked about her.
Peak on peak. Purple and black and yellow masses, fantastic in their
hugeness. Chasms. Canyons. Pyramids and minarets. And so near. So grim.
So ghastly desolate. And yet so threatening. And then Fanny Brandeis was
seized with mountain terror. It is a disease recognized by mountain men
everywhere, and it is panic, pure and simple. It is fear brought on by
the immensity and the silence of the mountains. A great horror of the
vastness and ruggedness came upon her. It was colossal, it was crushing,
it was nauseating.
She began to run. A mistake, that, when one is following a mountain
trail, at best an elusive thing. In five minutes she had lost the trail.
She stopped, and scolded herself sternly, and looked about her. She saw
the faint trail line again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it,
and found it to be no trail at all. She knew that she must be not more
than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward, and
his biscuits and tea. Why be frightened? It was absurd. But she was
frightened, horribly, harrowingly. The great, grim rock masses seemed
to be shaking with silent laughter. She began to run again. She was very
cold, and a piercing wind had sprung up. She kept on walking, doggedly,
reasoning with herself quite calmly, and proud of her calmness. Which
proves how terrified she really was. Then the snow came, not slowly,
not gradually, but a blanket of it, as it does come in the mountains,
shutting off everything. And suddenly Fanny's terror vanished. She felt
quite free from weariness. She was alive and tingling to her fingertips.
The psychology of fear is a fascinating thing. Fanny had reached
the second stage. She was quite taken out of herself. She forgot her
stone-bruised feet. She was no longer conscious of cold. She ran now,
fleetly, lightly, the ground seeming to spur her on. She had given up
the trail completely now. She told herself that if she ran on, down,
down, down, she must come to the valley sometime. Unless she was turned
about, and headed in the direction of one of those hideous chasms. She
stopped a moment, peering through the snow curtain, but she could see
nothing. She ran on lightly, laughing a little. Then her feet met a
projection, she stumbled, and fell flat over a slab of wood that jutted
out of the ground. She lay there a moment, dazed. Then she sat up, and
bent down to look at this thing that had tripped her. Probably a tree
trunk. Then she must be near timberline. She bent closer. It was a rough
wooden slab. Closer still. There were words carved on it. She lay flat
and managed to make them out painfully.
“Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest, and died alone, April 26, 1893.”
Fanny had heard the story of Sarah Cannon, a stern spinster who had
achieved the climb to the Peak, and who had met with mishap on the down
trail. Her guide had left her to go for help. When the relief party
returned, hours later, they had found her dead.
Fanny sprang up, filled with a furious energy. She felt strangely light
and clear-headed. She ran on, stopped, ran again. Now she was
making little short runs here and there. It was snowing furiously,
vindictively. It seemed to her that she had been running for hours. It
probably was minutes. Suddenly she sank down, got to her feet again,
stumbled on perhaps a dozen paces, and sank down again. It was as though
her knees had turned liquid. She lay there, with her eyes shut.
“I'm just resting,” she told herself. “In a minute I'll go on. In a
minute. After I've rested.”
“Hallo-o-o-o!” from somewhere on the other side of the snow blanket.
“Hallo-o-o-o!” Fanny sat up, helloing shrilly, hysterically. She got to
her feet, staggeringly. And Clarence Heyl walked toward her.
“You ought to be spanked for this,” he said.
Fanny began to cry weakly. She felt no curiosity as to his being there.
She wasn't at all sure that he actually was there, for that matter.
At that thought she dug a frantic hand into his arm. He seemed to
understand, for he said, “It's all right. I'm real enough. Can you
walk?”
“Yes.” But she tried it and found she could not. She decided she was too
tired to care. “I stumbled over a thing--a horrible thing--a gravestone.
And I must have hurt my leg. I didn't know----”
She leaned against him, a dead weight. “Tell you what,” said Heyl,
cheerfully. “You wait here. I'll go on down to Timberline Cabin for
help, and come back.”
“You couldn't manage it--alone? If I tried? If I tried to walk?”
“Oh, impossible.” His tone was brisk. “Now you sit right down here.”
She sank down obediently. She felt a little sorry for herself, and glad,
too, and queer, and not at all cold. She looked up at him dumbly. He was
smiling. “All right?”
She nodded. He turned abruptly. The snow hid him from sight at once.
“Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest and died alone, April 26, 1893.”
She sank down, and pillowed her head on her arms. She knew that this was
the end. She was very drowsy, and not at all sad. Happy, if anything.
“You didn't really think I'd leave you, did you, Fan?”
She opened her eyes. Heyl was there. He reached down, and lifted her
lightly to her feet. “Timberline Cabin's not a hundred yards away. I
just did it to try you.”
She had spirit enough left to say, “Beast.”
Then he swung her up, and carried her down the trail. He carried her,
not in his arms, as they do it in books and in the movies. He could not
have gone a hundred feet that way. He carried her over his shoulder,
like a sack of meal, by one arm and one leg, I regret to say. Any boy
scout knows that trick, and will tell you what I mean. It is the most
effectual carrying method known, though unromantic.
And so they came to Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward Cobbins was in
the doorway. Heyl put her down gently on the bench that ran alongside
the table. The hospitable table that bore two smoking cups of tea.
Fanny's lips were cracked, and the skin was peeled from her nose, and
her hair was straggling and her eyes red-rimmed. She drank the tea in
great gulps. And then she went into the tiny bunkroom, and tumbled into
one of the shelf-bunks, and slept.
When she awoke she sat up in terror, and bumped her head against the
bunk above, and called, “Clancy!”
“Yep!” from the next room. He came to the door. The acrid smell of their
pipes was incense in her nostrils. “Rested?”
“What time is it?”
“Seven o'clock. Dinner time. Ham and eggs.”
She got up stiffly, and bathed her roughened face, and produced a powder
pad (they carry them in the face of danger, death, and dissolution) and
dusted it over her scaly nose. She did her hair--her vigorous, abundant
hair that shone in the lamplight, pulled down her blouse, surveyed
her torn shoes ruefully, donned the khaki skirt that Albert Edward had
magically produced from somewhere to take the place of her breeches.
She dusted her shoes with a bit of rag, regarded herself steadily in the
wavering mirror, and went in.
The two men were talking quietly. Albert Edward was moving deftly from
stove to table. They both looked up as she came in, and she looked at
Heyl. Their eyes held.
Albert Edward was as sporting a gentleman as the late dear king whose
name he bore. He went out to tend Heyl's horse, he said. It was little
he knew of horses, and he rather feared them, as does a sailing man. But
he went, nevertheless.
Heyl still looked at Fanny, and Fanny at him.
“It's absurd,” said Fanny. “It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen.”
“It's simple enough, really,” he answered. “I saw Ella Monahan in
Chicago, and she told me all she knew, and something of what she had
guessed. I waited a few days and came back. I had to.” He smiled. “A
pretty job you've made of trying to be selfish.”
At that she smiled, too, pitifully enough, for her lower lip trembled.
She caught it between her teeth in a last sharp effort at self-control.
“Don't!” she quavered. And then, in a panic, her two hands came up in a
vain effort to hide the tears. She sank down on the rough bench by the
table, and the proud head came down on her arms so that there was a
little clatter and tinkle among the supper things spread on the table.
Then quiet.
Clarence Heyl stared. He stared, helplessly, as does a man who has
never, in all his life, been called upon to comfort a woman in tears.
Then instinct came to his rescue. He made her side of the table in two
strides (your favorite film star couldn't have done it better), put his
two hands on her shoulders and neatly shifted the bowed head from the
cold, hard surface of the table top to the warm, rough, tobacco-scented
comfort of his coat. It rested there quite naturally. Just as naturally
Fanny's arm crept up, and about his neck. So they remained for a moment,
until he bent so that his lips touched her hair. Her head came up at
that, sharply, so that it bumped his chin. They both laughed, looking
into each other's eyes, but at what they saw there they stopped laughing
and were serious.
“Dear,” said Heyl. “Dearest.” The lids drooped over Fanny's eyes. “Look
at me,” said Heyl. So she tried to lift them again, bravely, and could
not. At that he bent his head and kissed Fanny Brandeis in the way a
woman wants to be kissed for the first time by the man she loves. It
hurt her lips, that kiss, and her teeth, and the back of her neck, and
it left her breathless, and set things whirling. When she opened her
eyes (they shut them at such times) he kissed her again, very tenderly,
this time, and lightly, and reassuringly. She returned that kiss, and,
strangely enough, it was the one that stayed in her memory long, long
after the other had faded.
“Oh, Clancy, I've made such a mess of it all. Such a miserable mess.
The little girl in the red tam was worth ten of me. I don't see how you
can--care for me.”
“You're the most wonderful woman in the world,” said Heyl, “and the most
beautiful and splendid.”
He must have meant it, for he was looking down at her as he said it, and
we know that the skin had been peeled off her nose by the mountain winds
and sun, that her lips were cracked and her cheeks rough, and that she
was red-eyed and worn-looking. And she must have believed him, for she
brought his cheek down to hers with such a sigh of content, though she
said, “But are we at all suited to each other?”
“Probably not,” Heyl answered, briskly. “That's why we're going to be
so terrifically happy. Some day I'll be passing the Singer building, and
I'll glance up at it and think how pitiful it would look next to Long's
Peak. And then I'll be off, probably, to these mountains.”
“Or some day,” Fanny returned, “we'll be up here, and I'll remember,
suddenly, how Fifth Avenue looks on a bright afternoon between four and
five. And I'll be off, probably, to the Grand Central station.”
And then began one of those beautiful and foolish conversations which
all lovers have whose love has been a sure and steady growth. Thus:
“When did you first begin to care,” etc. And, “That day we spent at the
dunes, and you said so and so, did you mean this and that?”
Albert Edward Cobbins announced his approach by terrific stampings and
scufflings, ostensibly for the purpose of ridding his boots of snow. He
entered looking casual, and very nipped.
“You're here for the night,” he said. “A regular blizzard. The greatest
piece of luck I've had in a month.” He busied himself with the ham and
eggs and the teapot. “Hungry?”
“Not a bit,” said Fanny and Heyl, together.
“H'm,” said Albert Edward, and broke six eggs into the frying pan just
the same.
After supper they aided Albert Edward in the process of washing up. When
everything was tidy he lighted his most malignant pipe and told them
seafaring yarns not necessarily true. Then he knocked the ashes out
of his pipe and fell asleep there by the fire, effacing himself as
effectually as one of three people can in a single room. They talked;
low-toned murmurings that they seemed to find exquisitely meaningful
or witty, by turn. Fanny, rubbing a forefinger (his) along her
weather-roughened nose, would say, “At least you've seen me at my
worst.”
Or he, mock serious: “I think I ought to tell you that I'm the kind of
man who throws wet towels into the laundry hamper.”
But there was no mirth in Fanny's voice when she said, “Dear, do you
think Lasker will give me that job? You know he said, `When you want a
job, come back.' Do you think he meant it?”
“Lasker always means it.”
“But,” fearfully, and shyly, too, “you don't think I may have lost my
drawing hand and my seeing eye, do you? As punishment?”
“I do not. I think you've just found them, for keeps. There wasn't a
woman cartoonist in the country--or man, either, for that matter--could
touch you two years ago. In two more I'll be just Fanny Brandeis'
husband, that's all.”
They laughed together at that, so that Albert Edward Cobbins awoke with
a start and tried to look as if he had not been asleep, and failing,
smiled benignly and drowsily upon them.