Wilfrid Cumbermede

I only half understood him. I am afraid I never did understand him more than half. Later I came to the conclusion that this was not the fit place for him, and that if his father had understood him, he would never have sent him there.

It was some time before Mr Forest would take us any mountain ramble. He said we must first get accustomed to the air of the place, else the precipices would turn our brains. He allowed us, however, to range within certain bounds.

One day soon after our arrival, we accompanied one of our schoolfellows down to the valley of the Grindelwald, specially to see the head of the snake-glacier, which having crept thither can creep no further. Somebody had even then hollowed out a cave in it. We crossed a little brook which issued from it constantly, and entered. Charley uttered a cry of dismay, but I was too much delighted at the moment to heed him. For the whole of the white cavern was filled with blue air, so blue that I saw the air which filled it. Perfectly transparent, it had no substance, only blueness, which deepened and deepened as I went further in. All down the smooth white walls evermore was stealing a thin veil of dissolution; while here and there little runnels of the purest water were tumbling in tiny cataracts from top to bottom. It was one of the thousand birthplaces of streams, ever creeping into the day of vision from the unlike and the unknown, unrolling themselves like the fronds of a fern out of the infinite of God. Ice was all around, hard and cold and dead and white; but out of it and away went the water babbling and singing in the sunlight.

‘Oh, Charley!’ I exclaimed, looking round in my transport for sympathy. It was now my turn to cry out, for Charley’s face was that of a corpse. The brilliant blue of the cave made us look to each other most ghastly and fearful.

‘Do come out, Wilfrid,’ he said; ‘I cannot bear it.’

I put my arm in his, and we walked into the sunlight. He drew a deep breath of relief, and turned to me with an attempt at a smile, but his lip quivered.

‘It’s an awful place, Wilfrid. I don’t like it. Don’t go in again. I should stand waiting to see you come out in a winding-sheet. I think there’s something wrong with my brain. That blue seems to have got into it. I see everything horribly dead.’

On the way back he started several times, and looked, round as if with involuntary apprehension, but mastered himself with an effort, and joined again in the conversation. Before we reached home he was much fatigued, and complaining of head-ache, went to bed immediately on our arrival.

We slept in the same room. When I went up at the usual hour, he was awake.

‘Can’t you sleep, Charley?’ I said.

‘I’ve been asleep several times,’ he answered, ‘but I’ve had such a horrible dream every time! We were all corpses that couldn’t get to sleep, and went about pawing the slimy walls of our marble sepulchre—so cold and wet! It was that horrible ice-cave, I suppose. But then you know that’s just what it is, Wilfrid.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, instinctively turning from the subject, for the glitter of his blue eyes looked bodeful. I did not know then how like he and I were, or how like my fate might have been to his, if, instead of finding at once a fit food for my fancy, and a safety-valve for its excess, in those old romances, I had had my regards turned inwards upon myself, before I could understand the phenomena there exhibited. Certainly I too should have been thus rendered miserable, and body and soul would have mutually preyed on each other.

I sought to change the subject. I could never talk to him about his father, but he had always been ready to speak of his mother and his sister. Now, however, I could not rouse him. ‘Poor mamma!’ was all the response he made to some admiring remark; and when I mentioned his sister Mary, he only said, ‘She’s a good girl, our Mary,’ and turned uneasily towards the wall. I went to bed. He lay quiet, and I fell asleep.

When I woke in the morning, I found him very unwell. I suppose the illness had been coming on for some time. He was in a low fever. As the doctor declared it not infectious, I was allowed to nurse him. He was often delirious, and spoke the wildest things. Especially, he would converse with the Saviour after the strangest fashion.

He lay ill for some weeks. Mr Forest would not allow me to sit up with him at night, but I was always by his bedside early in the morning, and did what I could to amuse and comfort him through the day. When at length he began to grow better, he was more cheerful than I had known him hitherto; but he remained very weak for some time. He had grown a good deal during his illness, and indeed never looked a boy again.

CHAPTER XVII. AMONG THE MOUNTAINS

One summer morning we all got up very early, except Charley, who was unfit for the exertion, to have a ramble in the mountains, and see the sun rise. The fresh friendly air, full of promise, greeting us the moment we crossed the threshold; the calm light which, without visible source, lay dream-like on the hills; the brighter space in the sky whence ere long the spring of glory would burst forth triumphant; the dull white of the snow-peaks, dwelling so awful and lonely in the mid heavens, as if nothing should ever comfort them or make them acknowledge the valleys below; the sense of adventure with which we climbed the nearer heights as familiar to our feet on ordinary days as the stairs to our bedrooms; the gradual disappearance of the known regions behind us, and the dawning sense of the illimitable and awful, folding in its bosom the homely and familiar—combined to produce an impression which has never faded. The sun rose in splendour, as if nothing more should hide in the darkness for ever; and yet with the light came a fresh sense of mystery, for now that which had appeared smooth was all broken and mottled with shadows innumerable. Again and again I found myself standing still to gaze in a rapture of delight which I can only recall, not express; again and again was I roused by the voice of the master in front, shouting to me to come on, and warning me of the danger of losing sight of the rest of the company; and again and again I obeyed, but without any perception of the peril.

The intention was to cross the hills into the valley of the Lauterbrunnen, not, however, by the path now so well known, but by another way, hardly a path, with which the master and some of the boys were familiar enough. It was my first experience of anything like real climbing. As we passed rapidly over a moorland space, broken with huge knolls and solitary rocks, something hurt my foot, and taking off my shoe, I found that a small chiropodical operation was necessary, which involved the use of my knife. It slipped, and cut my foot, and I bound the wound with a strip from my pocket-handkerchief. When I got up, I found that my companions had disappeared. This gave me little trouble at the moment, for I had no doubt of speedily overtaking them; and I set out briskly in the direction, as I supposed, in which we had been going. But I presume that, instead of following them, I began at once to increase the distance between us. At all events, I had not got far before a pang of fear shot through me—the first awaking doubt. I called—louder—and louder yet; but there was no response, and I knew I was alone.

Invaded by sudden despair, I sat down, and for a moment did not even think. All at once I became aware of the abysses which surrounded the throne of my isolation. Behind me the broken ground rose to an unseen height, and before me it sloped gently downwards, without a break to the eye, yet I felt as if, should I make one wavering movement, I must fall down one of the frightful precipices which Mr Forest had told me as a warning lay all about us. I actually clung to the stone upon which I sat, although I could not have been in more absolute safety for the moment had I been dreaming in bed. The old fear had returned upon me with a tenfold feeling of reality behind it. I presume it is so all through life: it is not what is, but what may be, that oftenest blanches the cheek and paralyzes the limbs; and oftenest gives rise to that sense of the need of a God which we are told nowadays is a superstition, and which he whom we call the Saviour acknowledged and justified in telling us to take no thought for the morrow, inasmuch as God took thought for it. I strove to master my dismay, and forced myself to get up and run about; and in a few minutes the fear had withdrawn into the background, and I felt no longer an unseen force dragging me towards a frightful gulf. But it was replaced by a more spiritual horror. The sense of loneliness seized upon me, and the first sense of absolute loneliness is awful. Independent as a man may fancy himself in the heart of a world of men, he is only to be convinced that there is neither voice nor hearing, to know that the face from which he most recoils is of a kind essential to his very soul. Space is not room; and when we complain of the over-crowding of our fellows, we are thankless for that which comforts us the most, and desire its absence in ignorance of our deepest nature.

Not even a bird broke the silence. It lay upon my soul as the sky and the sea lay upon the weary eye of the ancient mariner. It is useless to attempt to convey the impression of my misery. It was not yet the fear of death, or of hunger or thirst, for I had as yet no adequate idea of the vast lonelinesses that lie in a mountain land: it was simply the being alone, with no ear to hear and no voice to answer me—a torture to which the soul is liable in virtue of the fact that it was not made to be alone, yea, I think, I hope, never can be alone; for that which could be fact could not be such horror. Essential horror springs from an idea repugnant to the nature of the thinker, and which therefore in reality could not be.

My agony rose and rose with every moment of silence. But when it reached its height, and when, to save myself from bursting into tears, I threw myself on the ground, and began gnawing at the plants about me—then first came help: I had a certain experience, as the Puritans might have called it. I fear to build any definite conclusions upon it, from the dread of fanaticism and the danger of attributing a merely physical effect to a spiritual cause. But are matter and spirit so far asunder? It is my will moves my arm, whatever first moves my will. Besides, I do not understand how, unless another influence came into operation, the extreme of misery and depression should work round into such a change as I have to record.

But I do not know how to describe the change. The silence was crushing or rather sucking my life out of me—up into its own empty gulfs. The horror of the great stillness was growing deathly, when all at once I rose to my feet, with a sense of power and confidence I had never had before. It was as if something divine within me awoke to outface the desolation. I felt that it was time to act, and that I could act. There is no cure for terror like action: in a few moments I could have approached the verge of any precipice—at least without abject fear. The silence—no longer a horrible vacancy—appeared to tremble with unuttered thinkings. The manhood within me was alive and awake. I could not recognize a single landmark, or discover the least vestige of a path. I knew upon which hand the sun was when we started; and took my way with the sun on the other side. But a cloud had already come over him.

I had not gone far before I saw in front of me, on the other side of a little hillock, something like the pale blue grey fog that broods over a mountain lake. I ascended the hillock, and started back with a cry of dismay: I was on the very verge of an awful gulf. When I think of it, I marvel yet that I did not lose my self-possession altogether. I only turned and strode in the other direction—the faster for the fear. But I dared not run, for I was haunted by precipices. Over every height, every mound, one might be lying—a trap for my destruction. I no longer looked out in the hope of recognizing some feature of the country; I could only regard the ground before me, lest at any step I might come upon an abyss.

I had not walked far before the air began to grow dark. I glanced again at the sun. The clouds had gathered thick about him. Suddenly a mountain wind blew cold in my face. I never yet can read that sonnet of Shakspere’s,

Full many a glorious morning I have seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with his disgrace,—

without recalling the gladness when I started from home and the misery that so soon followed. But my new spirits did not yet give way. I trudged on. The wind increased, and in it came by-and-by the trailing skirts of a cloud. In a few moments more I was wrapped in mist. It was as if the gulf from which I had just escaped had sent up its indwelling demon of fog to follow and overtake me. I dared hardly go on even with the greatest circumspection. As I grew colder, my courage declined. The mist wetted my face and sank through my clothes, and I began to feel very wretched, I sat down, not merely from dread of the precipices, but to reserve my walking powers when the mist should withdraw. I began to shiver, and was getting utterly hopeless and miserable when the fog lifted a little, and I saw what seemed a great rock near me. I crept towards it. Almost suddenly it dwindled, and I found but a stone, yet one large enough to afford me some shelter. I went to the leeward side of it, and nestled at its foot. The mist again sank, and the wind blew stronger, but I was in comparative comfort, partly because my imagination was wearied. I fell fast asleep.

I awoke stiff with cold. Rain was falling in torrents, and I was wet to the skin; but the mist was much thinner, and I could see a good way. For awhile I was very heartless, what with the stiffness, and the fear of having to spend the night on the mountains. I was hungry too, not with the appetite of desire but of need. The worst was that I had no idea in what direction I ought to go. Downwards lay precipices—upwards lay the surer loneliness. I knelt, and prayed the God who dwelt in the silence to help me; then strode away I knew not whither—up the hill in the faint hope of discovering some sign to direct me. As I climbed the hill rose. When I surmounted what had seemed the highest point, away beyond rose another. But the slopes were not over-steep, and I was able to get on pretty fast. The wind being behind me, I hoped for some shelter over the highest brow, but that, for anything I knew, might be miles away in the regions of ice and snow.

I had been walking I should think about an hour, when the mist broke away from around me, and the sun, in the midst of clouds of dull orange and gold, shone out upon the wet hill. It was like a promise of safety, and woke in me courage to climb the steep and crumbling slope which now lay before me. But the fear returned. People had died in the mountains of hunger, and I began to make up my mind to meet the worst. I had not learned that the approach of any fate is just the preparation for that fate. I troubled myself with the care of that which was not impending over me. I tried to contemplate the death-struggle with equanimity, but could not. Had I been wearier and fainter, it would have appeared less dreadful. Then, in the horror of the slow death of hunger, strange as it may appear, that which had been the special horror of my childish dreams returned upon me changed into a thought of comfort: I could, ere my strength failed me utterly, seek the verge of a precipice, lie down there, and when the suffering grew strong enough to give me courage, roll myself over the edge, and cut short the agony.

At length I gained the brow of the height, and at last the ground sank beyond. There was no precipice to terrify, only a somewhat steep descent into a valley large and wide. But what a vision arose on the opposite side of that valley!—an upright wilderness of rocks, slopes, precipices, snow, glaciers, avalanches! Weary and faint as I was, I was filled with a glorious awe, the terror of which was the opposite of fear, for it lifted instead of debasing the soul. Not a pine-tree softened the haggard waste; not a single stray sheep of the wind’s flock drew one trail of its thin-drawn wool behind it; all was hard and bare. The glaciers lay like the skins of cruel beasts, with the green veins yet visible, nailed to the rocks to harden in the sun; and the little streams which ran down from their claws looked like the knife-blades they are, keen and hard and shining, sawing away at the bones of the old mountain. But although the mountain looked so silent, there came from it every now and then a thunderous sound. At first I could not think what it was, but gazing at its surface more steadily, upon the face of a slope I caught sight of what seemed a larger stream than any of the rest; but it soon ceased to flow, and after came the thunder of its fall: it was a stream, but a solid one—an avalanche. Away up in the air the huge snow-summit glittered in the light of the Afternoon sun. I was gazing on the Maiden in one of her most savage moods—or to speak prose—I was regarding one of the wildest aspects of the many-sided Jungfrau.

Half way down the hill, almost right under my feet, rose a slender column of smoke, I could not see whence. I hastened towards it, feeling as strong as when I started in the morning. I zig-zagged down the slope, for it was steep and slippery with grass, and arrived at length at a good-sized cottage, which faced the Jungfrau. It was built of great logs laid horizontally one above the other, all with notches half through near the end, by which notches, lying into each other, the sides of the house were held together at the corners. I soon saw it must be a sort of roadside inn. There was no one about the place, but passing through a dark vestibule, in which were stores of fodder and various utensils, I came to a room in which sat a mother and her daughter, the former spinning, the latter making lace on a pillow. In at the windows looked the great Jungfrau. The room was lined with planks; the floor was boarded; the ceiling, too, was of boards—pine-wood all around.

The women rose when I entered. I knew enough of German to make them understand my story, and had learned enough of their patois to understand them a little in return. They looked concerned, and the older woman passing her hands over my jacket, turned to her daughter and commenced a talk much too rapid and no doubt idiomatic for me to follow. It was in the end mingled with much laughter, evidently at some proposal of the mother. Then the daughter left the room, and the mother began to heap wood on the fire. In a few minutes the daughter returned, still laughing, with some garments, which the mother took from her. I was watching everything from a corner of the hearth, where I had seated myself wearily. The mother came up to me, and, without speaking, put something over my head, which I found to be a short petticoat such as the women wore; then told me I must take off my clothes, and have them dried at the fire. She laid other garments on a chair beside me.

‘I don’t know how to put them on,’ I objected.

‘Put on as many as you can,’ she said laughing, ‘and I will help you with the rest.’

I looked about. There was a great press in the room. I went behind it and pulled off my clothes; and having managed to put on some of the girl’s garments, issued from my concealment. The kindly laughter was renewed, and mother and daughter busied themselves in arranging my apparel, evidently seeking to make the best of me as a girl, an attempt favoured by my pale face. When I seemed to myself completely arrayed, the girl said to her mother what I took to mean, ‘Let us finish what we have begun;’ and leaving the room, returned presently with the velvet collar embroidered with silver and the pendent chains which the women of most of the cantons wear, and put it on me, hooking the chains and leaving them festooned under my arms. The mother was spreading out my clothes before the fire to dry.

Neither was pretty, but both looked womanly and good. The daughter had the attraction of youth and bright eyes; the mother of goodwill and experience; but both were sallow, and the mother very wrinkled for what seemed her years.

‘Now,’ I said, summoning my German, ‘you’ve almost finished your work. Make my short hair as like your long hair as you can, and then I shall be a Swiss girl.’

I was but a boy, and had no scruple concerning a bit of fun of which I might have been ashamed a few years later. The girl took a comb from her own hair and arranged mine. When she had finished, ‘One girl may kiss another,’ I said; and doubtless she understood me, for she returned my kiss with a fresh laugh. I sat down by the fire, and as its warmth crept into my limbs, I rejoiced over comforts which yesterday had been a matter of course.

Meantime they were busy getting me something to eat. Just as they were setting it on the table, however, a loud call outside took them both away. In a few moments two other guests entered, and then first I found myself ashamed of my costume. With them the mother re-entered, calling behind her, ‘There’s nobody at home; you must put the horses up yourself, Annel.’ Then she moved the little table towards me, and proceeded to set out the meal.

‘Ah! I see you have got something to eat,’ said one of the strangers, in a voice I fancied I had heard before.

‘Will you please to share it?’ returned the woman, moving the table again towards the middle of the room.

I thought with myself that, if I kept silent, no one could tell I was not a girl; and, the table being finally adjusted, I moved my seat towards it. Meantime the man was helping his companion to take off her outer garments, and put them before the fire. I saw the face of neither until they approached the table and sat down. Great was my surprise to discover that the man was the same I had met in the wood on my way to Moldwarp Hall, and that the girl was Clara—a good deal grown—in fact, looking almost a woman. From after facts, the meeting became less marvellous in my eyes than it then appeared.

I felt myself in an awkward position—indeed, I felt almost guilty, although any notion of having the advantage of them never entered my head. I was more than half inclined to run out and help Annel with the horses, but I was very hungry, and not at all willing to postpone my meal, simple as it was—bread and butter, eggs, cheese, milk, and a bottle of the stronger wine of the country, tasting like a coarse sherry. The two—father and daughter evidently—talked about their journey, and hoped they should reach the Grindelwald without more rain.

‘By the way,’ said the gentleman, ‘it’s somewhere not far from here young Cumbermede is at school. I know Mr Forest well enough—used to know him, at least. We may as well call upon him.’

‘Cumbermede,’ said Clara; ‘who is he?’

‘A nephew of Mrs Wilson’s—no, not nephew—second or third cousin—or something of the sort, I believe.—Didn’t somebody tell me you met him at the Hall one day?’

‘Oh, that boy—Wilfrid. Yes; I told you myself. Don’t you remember what a bit of fun we had the night of the ball? We were shut out on the leads, you know.’

‘Yes, to be sure, you did tell me. What sort of a boy is he?’