_Century Magazine, November, 1883._
The great Pasterzen glacier rises in Western Austria, and flows into
Carinthia, and is fourteen or seventeen miles long, as you measure it
from its birth in the snow-field, or from where it begins to move from
the higher snows and its active course is marked by the first wrinkle.
It flows in a straight, steady sweep, a grand avenue, guarded by giant
mountains, steep and wide; a prototype, huge and undesigned, of the
giants' stairway in the Venice palace. No known force can block its
path; it would need a cataclysm to reverse its progress. What falls
upon it moves with it, what lies beneath it moves with it--down to the
polished surface of the earth's frame, laid bare; no blade of grass
grows so slowly as it moves, no meteor of the air is so irresistible.
Its substant ice curls freely, moulds, and breaks itself like
water,--breaks in waves, plastic like honey, crested lightly with a
frozen spray; it winds tenderly about the rocky shore, and the
granite, disintegrated into crumbs, flows on with it. All this so
quietly that busy, officious little Man lived a score of thousand
years before he noticed even that the glacier moved.
Now, however, men have learned to congregate upon its shores, and
admire. Scientists stick staves in the ground (not too near, lest the
earth should move with it), and appraise the majesty of its motion;
ladies, politely mystified, give little screams of pleased surprise;
young men, secretly exultant, pace the yard or two between the sticks,
a distance that takes the frozen stream a year to compass, and look
out upon it half contemptuously. Then they cross it--carefully, they
have enough respect left for that--with their cunningly nailed shoes
and a rope; an hour or two they dally with it, till at last, being
hungry and cold, they walk to the inn for supper. At supper they tell
stories of their prowess, pay money to the guides who have protected
them, and fall asleep after tea with weariness. Meantime, the darkness
falls outside; but the white presence of the glacier breaks the night,
and strange shapes unseen of men dance in its ashen hollows. It is
so old that the realms of death and life conflict; change is on the
surface, but immortality broods in the deeper places. The moon rises
and sinks; the glacier moves silently, like a timepiece marking the
centuries, grooving the record of its being on the world itself,--a
feature to be read and studied by far-off generations of some other
world. The glacier has a light of its own, and gleams to stars above,
and the great Glockner mountain flings his shadow of the planets in
its face.
Mrs. Knollys was a young English bride, sunny-haired, hopeful-eyed,
with lips that parted to make you love them,--parted before they
smiled, and all the soft regions of her face broke into attendant
dimples. And then, lest you should think it meant for you, she looked
quickly up to "Charles," as she would then call him even to strangers,
and Charles looked down to her. Charles was a short foot taller, with
much the same hair and eyes, thick flossy whiskers, broad shoulders,
and a bass voice. This was in the days before political economy cut
Hymen's wings. Charles, like Mary, had little money, but great hopes;
and he was clerk in a government office, with a friendly impression of
everybody and much trust in himself. And old Harry Colquhoun, his
chief, had given them six weeks to go to Switzerland and be happy in,
all in celebration of Charles Knollys's majority and marriage to his
young wife. So they had both forgotten heaven for the nonce, having a
passable substitute; but the powers divine overlooked them pleasantly
and forgave it. And even the phlegmatic driver of their _Einspaenner_
looked back from the corner of his eye at the _schoene Englaenderin_,
and compared her mentally with the far-famed beauty of the Koenigssee.
So they rattled on in their curious conveyance, with the pole in the
middle and the one horse out on one side, and still found more beauty
in each other's eyes than in the world about them. Although Charles
was only one and twenty, Mary Knollys was barely eighteen, and to her
he seemed godlike in his age, as in all other things. Her life had
been as simple as it had been short. She remembered being a little
girl, and then the next thing that occurred was Charles Knollys, and
positively the next thing she remembered of importance was being Mrs.
Charles Knollys; so that old Mrs. Knollys, her guardian aunt and his,
had first called her a love of a baby, and then but a baby in love.
All this, of course, was five and forty years ago, for you know how
old she was when she went again to Switzerland last summer--three and
sixty.
They first saw the great mountains from the summit of the Schafberg.
This is a little height, three-cornered, between three lakes; a
natural Belvedere for Central Europe. Mr. and Mrs. Knollys were seated
on a couch of Alpine roses behind a rhododendron bush watching the
sunset; but as Charles was desirous of kissing Mrs. Knollys, and the
rhododendron bush was not thick enough, they were waiting for the sun
to go down. He was very slow in doing this, and by way of consolation
Knollys was keeping his wife's hand hidden in the folds of her dress.
Undoubtedly a modern lady would have been talking of the scenery,
giving word-color pictures of the view; but I am afraid Mrs. Knollys
had been looking at her husband, and talking with him of the cottage
they had bought in a Surrey village, not far from Box Hill, and
thinking how the little carvings and embroideries would look there
which they had bought abroad. And, indeed, Mrs. Charles secretly
thought Box Hill an eminence far preferable to the Venediger, and
Charles's face an infinitely more interesting sight than any lake,
however expressive. But the sun, looking askance at them through the
lower mist, was not jealous; all the same he spread his glory lavishly
for them, and the bright little mirror of a lake twinkled cannily
upward from below. Finally it grew dark; then there was less talking.
It was full night when they went in, she leaning on his arm and
looking up; and the moonbeam on the snowy shoulder of the Glockner,
twenty leagues away, came over, straight-way, from the mountain to her
face. Three days later, Charles Knollys, crossing with her the lower
portion of the Pasterzen glacier, slipped into a crevasse, and
vanished utterly from the earth.