At a Winter's Fire Part 6

"She moved at once, never raising her face from my breast. I groped for the box, found it; and manipulating with one hand, succeeded in striking a match. It flamed up--a long wax vesta.

"A glory of sleek fires sprang on the instant into life. We lay imprisoned in a house of gla.s.s at the foot of a smooth incline rising behind us to unknown heights. A wall of porous and opaque ice-rubbish, into which our feet had plunged deep, had stayed our progress.

"I placed the box by my side ready for use. Our last moments should be lavish of splendour. Stooping for another match, to kindle from the flame of the near-expired one, a thought struck me. Why had we not been at once frozen to death? Yet we lay where we had brought up, as snug and glowing as if we were wrapped in bedclothes.

"The answer came to me in a flash. We had fallen sheer to the glacier bed, which, warmed by subterraneous heat, was ever in process of melting.

Possibly, but a comparatively thin curtain of perforated ice separated us from the under torrent.

"The enforced conclusion was astounding; but as yet it inspired no hope.

We were none the less doomed and buried.

"I lit a second match, turned about, and gave a start of terror. There, imbedded in the transparent wall at my very shoulder, was something--the body of a man.

"A horrible sight--a horrible, horrible sight--crushed, flattened--a caricature; the very gouts of blood that had burst from him held poised in the ma.s.sed congelations of water.

"For how long ages had he been travelling to the valley, and from what heights? He was of a bygone generation, by his huge coat cuffs, his metal b.u.t.tons, by his shoe buckles and the white stockings on his legs, which were pressed thin and sharp, as if cut out of paper. Had he been a climber, an explorer--a contemporary, perhaps, of Saussure and a rival?

And what had been his unrecorded fate? To slip into a creva.s.se, and so for the parted ice to snap upon him again, like a hideous jaw? Its work done, it might at least have opened and dropped him through--not held him intact to jog us, out of all that world of despair, with his battered elbow!

"Perhaps to witness in others the fate he had himself suffered!

"I dropped the match I was holding. I tightened my clasp convulsively about Fidele. Thank G.o.d she, at any rate, was blind to this horror within a horror!

"All at once--was it the start I had given, or the natural process of dissolution beneath our feet?--we were moving again. Swift--swifter!

Fidele uttered a little moaning cry. The rubbish of ice crashed below us, and we sank through.

"I knew nothing, then, but that we were in water--that we had fallen from a little height, and were being hurried along. The torrent, now deep, now so shallow that my feet sc.r.a.ped its bed, gushed in my ears and blinded my eyes.

"Still I hugged Fidele, and I could feel by her returning grasp that she lived. The water was not unbearably cold as yet. The air that came through cracks and creva.s.ses had not force to overcome the under warmth.

"I felt something slide against me--clutched and held on. It was a brave pine log. Could I recover it at this date I would convert it into a flagstaff for the tricolour. It was our raft, our refuge; and it carried us to safety.

"I cannot give the extravagant processes of that long journey. It was all a rus.h.i.+ng, swirling dream--a mad race of mystery and sublimity, to which the only conscious periods were wild, flitting glimpses of wonderful ice arabesques, caught momentarily as we pa.s.sed under fissures that let the light of day through dimly.

"Gradually a ghostly radiance grew to encompa.s.s us; and by a like gradation the water waxed intensely cold. Hope then was blazing in our hearts; but this new deathliness went nigh to quench it altogether. Yet, had we guessed the reason, we could have foregone the despair. For, in truth, we were approaching that shallower terrace of the glacier beyond the fall, through which the light could force some weak pa.s.sage, and the air make itself felt, blowing upon the beds of ice.

"Well, we survived; and still we survive. My faith, what a couple!

Sublimity would have none of us. The glacier rejected souls so commonplace as not to be properly impressed by its inexorability.

"This, then, was the end. We swept into a huge cavern of ice--through it--beyond it, into the green valley and the world that we love. And there, where the torrent splits up into a score of insignificant streams, we grounded and crawled to dry land and sat down and laughed.

"Yes, we could do it--we could laugh. Is that not bathos? But Fidele and I have a theory that laughter is the chief earnest of immortality.

"To _dry_ land I have said. _Mon Dieu!_ the torrent was no wetter. It rains in the Chamounix valley. We looked to see whence we had fallen, and not even the _Chapeau_ was visible through the mist.

"But, as I turned, Fidele uttered a little cry.

"'The flask, and the sandwich-box, and your poor coat!'

"'_Comment?_' I said; and in a moment was in my s.h.i.+rt-sleeves.

"I stared, and I wondered, and I clucked in my throat.

"Holy saints! I was adorned with a breastplate on my back. The friction of descent, first welding together these, the good ministers to our appet.i.te, had worn the metal down in the end to a mere skin or badge, the heat generated from which had scorched and frizzled the cloth beneath it.

"I needed not to seek further explanation of the pain I had suffered--was suffering then, indeed, as I had reason to know when ecstasy permitted a return of sensation. My back bears the scars at this moment.

"'It shall remain there for ever!' I cried, 'like the badge of a _cocher de fiacre_, who has made the fastest journey on record. 'Coachman! from the glacier to the valley.' '_Mais oui, monsieur_. Down this creva.s.se, if you please.'

"And that is the history of our adventure.

"Why we were not dashed to pieces? But that, as I accept it, is easy of elucidation. Imagine a vast crescent moon, with a downward nick from the end of the tail. This form the fissure took, in one enormous sweep and drop towards the mouth of the valley. Now, as we rushed headlong, the gentle curve received us from s.p.a.ce to substance quite gradually, until we were whirring forward wholly on the latter, my luggage suffering the brunt of the friction. The upward sweep of the crescent diminished our progress--more and yet more--until we switched over the lower point and shot quietly down the incline beyond. And all this in ample room, and without meeting with a single unfriendly obstacle.

"'_Voila, mes chers amis, ce qui me met en peine_.'

"Fidele laughs, the rogue!

"'Ta, ta, ta!' she says. 'But they will not believe a word of it all.'"

THE VANIs.h.i.+NG HOUSE

"My grandfather," said the banjo, "drank 'dog's-nose,' my father drank 'dog's-nose,' and I drink 'dog's-nose.' If that ain't heredity, there's no virtue in the board schools."

"Ah!" said the piccolo, "you're always a-boasting of your science. And so, I suppose, your son'll drink 'dog's-nose,' too?"

"No," retorted the banjo, with a rumbling laugh, like wind in the bung-hole of an empty cask; "for I ain't got none. The family ends with me; which is a pity, for I'm a full-stop to be proud on."

He was an enormous, tun-bellied person--a mere mound of expressionless flesh, whose size alone was an investment that paid a perpetual dividend of laughter. When, as with the rest of his company, his face was blackened, it looked like a specimen coal on a pedestal in a museum.

There was Christmas company in the Good Intent, and the sanded tap-room, with its trestle tables and sprigs of holly stuck under sooty beams reeked with smoke and the steam of hot gin and water.

"How much could you put down of a night, Jack?" said a little grinning man by the door.

"Why," said the banjo, "enough to lay the dustiest ghost as ever walked."

"Could you, now?" said the little man.

"Ah!" said the banjo, chuckling. "There's nothing like settin' one sperit to lay another; and there I could give you proof number two of heredity."

"What! Don't you go for to say you ever see'd a ghost!"

"Haven't I? What are you whisperin' about, you blushful chap there by the winder?"

"I was only remarking sir, 'twere snawin' like the devil."