Part 20

“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.

THE WORKER IN SANDAL-WOOD

I like to think of this as a true story, but you who read may please yourselves, siding either with the curé, who says Hyacinthe dreamed it all, and did the carving himself in his sleep, or with Madame. I am sure that Hyacinthe thinks it true, and so does Madame, but then she has the cabinet, with the little birds and the lilies carved at the corners. Monsieur le curé shrugs his patient shoulders; but then he is tainted with the infidelities of cities, good man, having been three times to Montreal, and once, in an electric car, to Sainte Anne. He and Madame still talk it over whenever they meet, though it happened so many years ago, and each leaves the other forever unconvinced. Meanwhile the dust gathers in the infinite fine lines of the little birds’ feathers, and softens the lily stamens where Madame’s duster may not go; and the wood, ageing, takes on a golden gleam as of immemorial sunsets: that pale red wood, heavy with the scent of the ancient East; the wood that Hyacinthe loved.

It was the only wood of that kind which had ever been seen in Terminaison. Pierre L’Oreillard brought it into the workshop one morning; a small heavy bundle wrapped in sacking, and then in burlap, and then in fine soft cloths. He laid it on a pile of shavings, and unwrapped it carefully and a dim sweetness filled the dark shed and hung heavily in the thin winter sunbeams.

Pierre L’Oreillard rubbed the wood respectfully with his knobby fingers. “It is sandal-wood,” he explained to Hyacinthe, pride of knowledge making him expansive; “a most precious wood that grows in warm countries, thou great goblin. Smell it, _imbécile_. It is sweeter than cedar. It is to make a cabinet for the old Madame at the big house. Thy great hands shall smooth the wood, _nigaud_, and I,—I, Pierre the cabinet-maker, shall render it beautiful.” Then he went out, locking the door behind him.

When he was gone Hyacinthe laid down his plane, blew on his stiff fingers, and shambled slowly over to the wood. He was a great clumsy boy of fourteen, dark-faced, very slow of speech, dull-eyed and uncared for. He was clumsy because it is impossible to move gracefully when you are growing very big and fast on quite insufficient food. He was dull-eyed because all eyes met his unlovingly; uncared for, because none knew the beauty of his soul. But his heavy young hands could carve simple things, like flowers and birds and beasts, to perfection, as the curé pointed out. Simon has a tobacco-jar, carved with pine-cones and squirrels, and the curé has a pipe whose bowl is the bloom of a moccasin-flower, that I have seen. But it is all very long ago. And facts, in those lonely villages, easily become transfigured, touched upon their gray with a golden gleam.

“Thy hands shall smooth the wood, _nigaud_, and I shall render it beautiful,” said Pierre L’Oreillard, and went off to drink brandy at the Cinq Châteaux.

Hyacinthe knew that the making of the cabinet would fall to him, as most of the other work did. He also touched the strange sweet wood, and at last laid his cheek against it, while the fragrance caught his breath. “How it is beautiful,” said Hyacinthe, and for a moment his eyes glowed and he was happy. Then the light passed, and with bent head he shuffled back to his bench through a foam of white shavings curling almost to his knees.

“Madame perhaps will want the cabinet next week, for that is Christmas,” said Hyacinthe, and fell to work harder than ever, though it was so cold in the shed that his breath hung like a little silver cloud and the steel stung his hands. There was a tiny window to his right, through which, when it was clear of frost, one looked on Terminaison, and that was cheerful and made one whistle. But to the left, through the chink of the ill-fitting door, there was nothing but the forest and the road dying away in it, and the trees moving heavily under the snow. Yet, from there came all Hyacinthe’s dumb dreams and slow reluctant fancies, which he sometimes found himself able to tell,—in wood, not in words.

Brandy was good at the Cinq Châteaux, and Pierre L’Oreillard gave Hyacinthe plenty of directions, but no further help with the cabinet.

“That is to be finished for Madame on the festival, _gros escargot_!” said he, cuffing Hyacinthe’s ears furiously, “finished, and with a prettiness about the corners, hearest thou, _ourson_? I suffer from a delicacy of the constitution and a little feebleness in the legs on these days, so that I cannot handle the tools. I must leave this work to thee, _gâcheur_. See it is done properly, and stand up and touch a hand to thy cap when I address thee, _orvet_, great slow-worm.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said Hyacinthe, wearily.

It is hard, when you do all the work, to be cuffed into the bargain, and fourteen is not very old. He went to work on the cabinet with slow, exquisite skill, but on the eve of Noel, he was still at work, and the cabinet unfinished. It meant a thrashing from Pierre if the morrow came and found it still unfinished, and Pierre’s thrashings were cruel. But it was growing into a thing of perfection under his slow hands, and Hyacinthe would not hurry over it.