“Well,” I said, “will you tell me the story?”
“I never considered it in the light of a story,” answered the Regius
Professor. “But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one
with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that
direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—” and he settled his
spectacles, and began:
“It was during the period of my first appointment as Science
Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little
pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulæ was instrumental in procuring
me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but
with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally
devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.
“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered
into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was
winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest.
The interesting conformations of the land—the bone-structure, as I
might say—were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking
a labour. One never recognizes under such conditions the extent of
one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of
surroundings to emphasize them, and one may be conscious of the strain
of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five
hundred.
“The scene was desolate to a degree; houseless, almost treeless—just
white wastes and leaden sky, and the eternal fusing of the two in an
indefinite horizon. I was wondering, without feeling actually
dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a
hill which had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon
a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages,
and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a
quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory.
“It was a stark little oasis, sure enough—the most grudging of moral
respites from depression. Only from one place, it seemed, broke a
green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a
window. Deathlily exclusive, the little stony buildings stood apart
from one another, incurious, sullen, and self-contained.
“There was, however, the green shoot; and the stock from which it
proceeded was the school building. That in itself was unlovely
enough—a bleak little stone box in an arid enclosure. It looked
hunched and grey with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of
its wall only underscored its frostiness. But as if that one green
shoot were the earnest of life lingering within, there suddenly broke
through its walls the voices of young children singing; and, in the
sound, the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted somewhat.
“Yes? What is it? Does anything amuse you? I am glad you are so far
recovered, at least. Well——
“I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time,
I am free to admit that those young voices, though they dismissed me
promptly on my way, dismissed me pleased, and to a certain degree, as
it were, reinvigorated. I passed through that little frigid camp of
outer silence, and swung down the road towards the factory. As I
advanced towards what I should have thought to be the one busy nucleus
of an isolated colony, the aspect of desolation intensified, to my
surprise, rather than diminished. But I soon saw the reason for this.
The great forge in the hills was nothing but a wrecked and abandoned
ruin, its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. Seeing which,
it only appeared to me a strange thing that any of the human part of
its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood; and stranger still
I thought it when I came to learn, as I did by and by, that its
devastation was at that date an ancient story.
“What a squalid carcass it did look, to be sure; gaunt, and unclean,
and ravaged by fire from crown to basement. The great flue of it stood
up alone, a blackened monument to its black memory.
“Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of
machinery, relics of its old vital organs, fallen, withered, from its
ribs. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled
masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places
under the merciless bombardment of the weather; and, here and there, a
scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the
draught like a ventilator. Bats of grimy cobweb hung from the beams;
and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with cold soot.
“It was all ugly and sordid enough, in truth, and I had no reason to
be exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I
was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black
opening of what looked like a shed or annex to the main factory.
Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim
obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither,
and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered.
I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom, and then I
discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little
dead-locked chamber, its details only partly decipherable in the
reflected light which came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk
in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose
scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke,
crossed the twilight at a height a little above my own; and I could
easily understand, by the apparent diameter of its barrel, that the
well was of a considerable depth.
“Now, as my eyes grew a little accustomed to the obscurity, I could
see how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness. For the rope,
which was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched to one side,
as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted
there. It was an insignificant fact in itself, but my chance
observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the
fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been
removed) hung down a yard or so below the big drum.
“You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational
creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb
with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity, to begin with, in
that vortex of gloom), I caught with my left hand (wisdom number two)
at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. On the instant
the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement,
however, had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and
shoulders, hanging over, and actually into, the well, pulled me,
without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a
convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to
the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the
violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last
desperate hold, and my legs came whipping helpless over the well-rim.
The weight of them in falling near jerked me from my clutch—a bad
shock, to begin with. But a worse was in store for me. For I
perceived, in the next instant, that the rusty, long-disused windlass
was beginning slowly to revolve, _and was letting me down into the
abyss_.
“I broke out in a sweat, I confess—a mere diaphoresis of nature; a
sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves. I don’t think
we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was
exalted, rather—promoted to the analysis of a very exquisite, scarce
mortal, problem. My will, as I hung by a hair over the abysm, was
called upon to vindicate itself under an utmost stress of
apprehension. I felt, ridiculous as it may appear, as if the
surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory, waiting,
curious, to test the value of my philosophy.
“Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The
windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved
persistently. If I would remain with my head above the
well-rim—which, I freely admit, I had an unphilosophic desire to
do—I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and
airy sort of treadmill. To climb, and climb, and always climb, paying
out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place! It was to
repudiate gravitation, which I spurned from beneath my feet into the
depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I ventured to pause, some
nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking which seized me, would
always send me struggling and wriggling, like a drowning body, up to
the surface again. Fortunately, I was slightly built and active; yet I
knew that wind and muscle were bound sometime to give out in this
swarming competition against death. I measured their chances against
the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound.
Moreover, in proportion as I grew the feebler, grew the need for my
greater activity. For there were already signs that the great groaning
windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn
quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck, paused one minute in its
eternal round, I might have set myself oscillating, gradually and
cautiously, until I was able to seize with one hand, then another,
upon the brick rim, which was otherwise beyond my reach. But now, did
I cease climbing for an instant and attempt a frantic clutch at it,
down I sank like a clock weight, my fingers trailed a yard in cold
slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more—the madder that I
must now make up for lost ground.
“At last, faint with fatigue, I was driven to face an alternative
resource, very disagreeable from the first in prospect. This was no
less than to resign temporarily my possession of the upper, and sink
to the under world; in other words, to let myself go with the rope,
and, when it was all reeled out, to climb it again. To this course
there were two objections: one, that I knew nothing of the depth of
the water beneath me, or of how soon I should come to it; the other,
that I was grown physically incapable of any further great effort in
the way of climbing. My reluctance to forgo the useless solace of the
upper twilight I dismiss as sentimental. But to drop into that sooty
pit, and then, perhaps, to find myself unable to reascend it! to feel
a gradual paralysis of heart and muscle committing me to a lingering
and quite unspeakable death—that was an unnerving thought indeed!
“Nevertheless, I had actually resolved upon the venture, and was on
the point of ceasing all effort, and permitting myself to sink,
when—I thought of the burnt place in the rope.
“Do you grasp what that sudden thought meant to me? Death, sir, in any
case; death, if, with benumbed and aching hands and blistered knees, I
continued to work my air-mill; death, no earlier and no later, no less
and no more certainly, if I ceased of the useless struggle and went
down into the depths. So soon as the strain of my hanging should tell
direct upon that scorched strand, that strand must part.
“Then, I think, I knew fear—fear as demoralizing, perhaps, as it may
be, short of the will-surrender. And, indeed, I’m not sure but that
the will which survives fear may not be a worse last condition than
fear itself, which, when exquisite, becomes oblivion. Consciousness
_in extremis_ has never seemed to me the desirable thing which some
hold it.
“Still, if I suffered for retaining my will power, there is no doubt
that its loss, on the flash of that deadly reflection, would have
meant an immediate syncope of nerve and an instant downfall;
whereas—well, anyhow, here I am.
“I was fast draining of all capacity for further effort. I climbed
painfully, spasmodically; but still I climbed, half hoping I should
die of the toil of it before I fell. Ever and again I would glance
faintly up at the snarling, slowly-revolving barrel above me, and mark
how death, as figured in that scorched strand, was approaching me
nearer at every turn. It was only a few coils away, when suddenly I
set to doing what, goodness knows, I should have done earlier. I
screamed—screamed until the dead marrow must have crawled in the very
bones of the place.
“Nothing human answered—not a voice, not the sound of a footfall.
Only the echoes laughed and chattered like monkeys up in the broken
roof of the factory. For the rest, my too-late outburst had but served
to sap what little energy yet remained to me.
“The end was come. Looking up, I saw the burnt strand reeling round, a
couple of turns away, to the test; and, with a final gulp of horror, I
threw up the sponge, and sank.
“I had not descended a yard or two, when my feet touched something.”
The Regius Professor paused dramatically.
“O, go on!” I snapped.
“That something,” he said, “yielded a little—settled—and there all
at once was I, standing as firmly as if I were in a pulpit.
“For the moment, I assure you, I was so benumbed, physically and
mentally, that I was conscious of nothing in myself but a small weak
impatience at finding the awful ecstasy of my descent checked. Then
reason returned, like blood to the veins of a person half drowned; and
I had never before realized that reason could make a man ache so.
“With the cessation of my strain upon it, the windlass had ceased to
revolve. Now, with a sudden desperation, I was tugging at the rope
once more—pulling it down hand over hand. At the fifth haul there
came a little quick report, and I staggered and near fell. The rope
had snapped; and the upper slack of it came whipping down upon my
shoulders.
“I rose, dimly aware of what had happened. I was standing on the
piled-up fathoms of rope which I had paid out beneath me. Above,
though still beyond my effective winning, glimmered the moon-like disk
of light which was the well mouth. I dared not, uncertain of the
nature of my tenure, risk a spring for it. But, very cautiously, I
found the end of the rope that had come away, made a bend in it well
clear of the injured part, and, after many vain attempts, slung it
clean over the yoke above, coaxed down the slack, spliced it to the
other, and so made myself a fixed ladder to climb by. Up this, after a
short interval for rest, I swarmed, set myself swinging, grasped the
brick rim, first with one hand, then with both, and in another instant
had flung myself upon the ground prostrate, and for the moment quite
prostrated. Then presently I got up, struck some matches, and
investigated.”
The Regius Professor stopped, laughing a little over the memory.
“_Do_ go on!” I said.
“Why,” he responded, chuckling, “generations of school children had
been pitching litter into that well, until it was filled up to within
a couple yards of the top—just that. The rope, heaping up under me,
did the rest. It was a testimony to the limited resources of the
valley. What the little natives of to-day do with their odd time,
goodness knows. But it was comical, wasn’t it?”
“O, most!” said I. “And particularly from the point of view of the
children’s return to you for your dislike of them.”
“Well, as to that,” said the Regius Professor, rather shamefacedly, “I
wasn’t beyond acknowledging a certain indebtedness.”
“Acknowledging? How?”
“Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on the
Reef-building Serpulæ; so I went back to the school, and gave it to
the mistress to include in her curriculum.”