The Silent Barrier

“Do you mean that Mr. Spencer wanted to stake a thousand pounds on a single game at cards?”

“Evidently he did not want to do it, but he talked about it.”

“Yet he impressed me as being a very clear-headed and sensible young man,” said Helen decisively.

“Here, young lady, I must call you to account! In what category do you place me, then?”

“Oh, you are different. I disapprove of anyone playing for such high stakes; but I suppose you are used to it and can afford it, whereas a man who has his way to make in the world would be exceedingly foolish to do such a thing.”

“Pray, how did you come to measure the extent of Spencer’s finances?”

“Dear me! Did I say that?”

“I am sorry. Of course, I had no wish to speak offensively. What I mean is that he may be quite as well able to run a big bank at baccarat as I am.”

“He was telling me yesterday of his early struggles to gain a footing in some mining community in Colorado, and the impression his words left on me was that he is still far from wealthy; that is, as one understands the term. Here we are at the footpath. Shall we follow it and scramble up out of the ravine, or do you prefer the carriage road?”

“The footpath, please. But before we drop the subject of cards, which is unquestionably out of place on a morning like this, let me say that perhaps I have done the American an injustice. Dunston is given to exaggeration. He has so little control over his face that it is rank robbery to bet with him. Such a man is apt to run to extremes. It may be that Spencer was only talking through his hat, as they say in New York.”

Helen had the best of reasons for rejecting this version of the story. Her perceptive faculties, always well developed, were strung to high tension in Maloja. The social pinpricks inflicted there had rendered her more alert, more cautious, than was her wont. She was quite sure, for instance, judging from a number of slight indications, that Spencer was deliberately avoiding any opportunity of making Bower’s acquaintance. More than once, when an introduction seemed to be imminent, the American effaced himself. Other men in the hotel were not like that – they rather sought the great man’s company. She wondered if Bower had noticed it. Despite his candid, almost generous, disclaimer of motive, there was an undercurrent of hostility in his words that suggested a feeling of pique. She climbed the rocky path in silence until Bower spoke again.

“How do the boots go?” he asked.

“Splendidly, thanks. It was exceedingly kind of you to take such trouble about them. I had no idea one had to wear such heavy nails, and that tip of yours about the extra stockings is excellent.”

“You will acknowledge the benefit most during the descent. I have known people become absolutely lame on the home journey through wearing boots only just large enough for ordinary walking. As for the clamping of the nails over the edges of the soles, the sharp stones render that imperative. When you have crossed a moraine or two, and a peculiarly nasty geröll that exists beyond the hut, if we have time to make an easy ascent, you will understand the need of extra strong footwear.”

Helen favored him with a shy smile. “Long hours of reading have revealed the nature of a moraine,” she said; “but, please, what is a geröll?”

“A slope of loose stones. Let me see, what do they call it in Scotland and Cumberland? Ah, yes, a scree. On the French side of the Alps the same thing is known as a casse.”

“How well you know this country and its ways! Have you climbed many of the well known peaks?”

“Some years ago I scored my century beyond twelve thousand feet. That is pretty fair for an amateur.”

“Have you done the Matterhorn?”

“Yes, four times. Once I followed Tyndall’s example, and converted the summit into a pass between Switzerland and Italy.”

“How delightful! I suppose you have met many of the famous guides?”

He laughed pleasantly. “One does not attempt the Cervin or the Jungfrau without the best men, and in my time there were not twenty, all told. I had a long talk with our present guide last night, and found I had used many a track he had only seen from the valley.”

“Then – ”

A loud toot on a cowhorn close at hand interrupted her. The artist was a small boy. He appeared to be waiting expectantly on a hillock for someone who came not.

“Is that a signal?” she asked.

“Yes. He is a gaumer, or cowherd, – another word for your Alpine vocabulary, – the burgher whose cattle he will drive to the pasture has probably arranged to meet him here.”

Bower was always an interesting and well informed companion. Launched now into a congenial topic, he gave Helen a thoroughly entertaining lecture on the customs of a Swiss commune. He pointed out the successive tiers of pastures, told her their names and seasons of use, and even hummed some verses of the cow songs, or Kuh-reihen, which the men sing to the cattle, addressing each animal by name.

An hour passed pleasantly in this manner. Their guide, a man named Josef Barth, and the porter, who answered to “Karl,” awaited them at the milk chalet by the side of Lake Cavloccio. Bower, evidently accustomed to the leadership of expeditions of this sort, tested their ice axes and examined the ropes slung to Barth’s rucksack.

“The Forno is a glacier de luxe,” he explained to Helen; “but it is always advisable to make sure that your appliances are in good order. That pickel you are carrying was made by the best blacksmith in Grindelwald, and you can depend on its soundness; but these men are so familiar with their surroundings that they often provide themselves with frayed ropes and damaged axes.”

“In addition to my boots, therefore, I am indebted to you for a special brand of ice ax,” she cried.

“Your gratitude now is as nothing to the ecstasy you will display when Karl unpacks his load,” he answered lightly. “Now, Miss Wynton, en route! You know the path to the glacier already, don’t you?”

“I have been to its foot twice.”

“Then you go in front. There is no room to walk two abreast. Before we tackle the ice we will call a halt for refreshments.”

From that point till the glacier was reached the climb was laboriously simple. There was no difficulty and not the slightest risk, even for a child; but the heavy gradient and the rarefied air made it almost impossible to sustain a conversation unless the speakers dawdled. Helen often found herself many yards in advance of the others. She simply could not help breasting the steeper portions of the track. She was drawn forward by an intense eagerness to begin the real business of the day. Bower did not seek to restrain her. He thought her high spirits admirable, and his gaze dwelt appreciatively on her graceful poise as she stopped on the crest of some small ravine and looked back at the plodders beneath. Attractive at all times, she was bewitching that morning to a man who prided himself on his athletic tastes. She wore a white knitted jersey and a short skirt, a costume seemingly devised to reveal the lines of a slender waist and supple limbs. A white Tam o’ Shanter was tied firmly over her glossy brown hair with a silk motor veil, and the stout boots which she had surveyed so ruefully when Bower brought them to her on the previous evening after interviewing the village shoemaker, were by no means so cumbrous in use as her unaccustomed eyes had deemed them. Even the phlegmatic guide was stirred to gruff appreciation when he saw her vault on to a large flat boulder in order to examine an iron cross that surmounted it.

“Ach, Gott!” he grunted, “that Englishwoman is as surefooted as a chamois.”

But Helen had found a name and a date on a triangular strip of metal attached to the cross. “Why has this memorial been placed here?” she asked. Bower appealed to Barth; but he shook his head. Karl gave details.

“A man fell on the Cima del Largo. They carried him here, and he died on that rock.”

“Poor fellow!” Some of the joyous light left Helen’s face. She had passed the cross before, and had regarded it as one of the votive offerings so common by the wayside in Catholic countries, knowing that in this part of Switzerland the Italian element predominated among the peasants.

“We get a fine view of the Cima del Largo from the cabane,” said Bower unconcernedly.

Helen picked a little blue flower that nestled at the base of the rock. She pinned it to her jersey without comment. Sometimes the callousness of a man was helpful, and the shadow of a bygone tragedy was out of keeping with the glow of this delightful valley.

The curving mass of the glacier was now clearly visible. It looked like some marble staircase meant to be trodden only by immortals. Ever broadening and ascending until it filled the whole width of the rift between the hills, it seemed to mount upward to infinity. The sidelong rays of the sun, peeping over the shoulders of Forno and Roseg, tinted the great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand, where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the accumulation of winter débris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress. But that unpleasing glimpse of disruption was quickly dispelled by the magnificent volume and virgin purity of the glacier as a whole. Helen tried to imagine herself two miles distant, a tiny speck on the great floor of the pass. That was the only way to grasp its stupendous size, though she knew that it mounted through five miles of rock strewn ravine before it touched the precipitous saddle along which runs the border line between Italy and Switzerland.

Karl’s sigh of relief as he deposited his heavy load on a tablelike boulder brought Helen back from the land of dreams. To this sturdy peasant the wondrous Forno merely represented a day’s hard work, at an agreed sum of ten francs for carrying nearly half a hundredweight, and a liberal pour-boire if the voyageurs were satisfied.

Sandwiches and a glass of wine, diluted with water brought by the guide from a neighboring rill, – glacier water being used only as a last resource, – were delectable after a steady two hours’ walk. The early morning meal of coffee and a roll had lost some of its flavor when consumed apparently in the middle of the night, and Helen was ready now for her breakfast. While they were eating, Bower and Josef Barth cast glances at some wisps of cloud drifting slowly over the crests of the southern hills. Nothing was said. The guide read his patron’s wishes correctly. Unless some cause far more imperative than a slight mist intervened, the day’s programme must not be abandoned. So there was no loitering. The sun was almost in the valley, and the glacier must be crossed before the work of the night’s frost was undone.

When they stepped from the moraine on to the ice Barth led, Helen followed, Bower came next, with Karl in the rear.

If it had not been for the crisp crunching sound of the hobnails amid the loose fragments on the surface, and the ring of the pickel’s steel-shod butt on the solid mass beneath, Helen might have fancied that she was walking up an easy rock-covered slope. Any delusion on that point, however, was promptly dispelled by a glimpse of a narrow crevasse that split the foot of the glacier lengthwise.

She peered into its sea-green depths awesomely. It resembled a toothless mouth gaping slowly open, ready enough to swallow her, but too inert to put forth the necessary effort. And the thought reminded her of something. She halted and turned to Bower.

“Ought we not to be roped?” she asked.

He laughed, with the quiet confidence of the expert mountaineer. “Why?” he cried. “The way is clear. One does not walk into a crevasse with one’s eyes open.”

“But Stampa told me that I should refuse to advance a yard on ice or difficult rock without being roped.”

“Stampa, your cab driver?”