At a Winter's Fire Part 4

"And I, Camille?"

He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasing the dying words of certain n.o.ble lips,--

"Be good, Monsieur; be good."

JACK AND JILL

My friend, Monsieur ----, absolutely declines to append his name to these pages, of which he is the virtual author. Nevertheless, he permits me to publish them anonymously, being, indeed, a little curious to ascertain what would have been the public verdict as to his sanity, had he given his personal imprimatur to a narrative on the face of it so incredible.

"How!" he says. "Should I have believed it of another, when I have such astonis.h.i.+ng difficulty at this date in realizing that it was I--yes, I, my friend--this same little callow _poupon_--that was an actual hero of the adventure? Fidele" (by which term we cover the ident.i.ty of his wife)--"Fidele will laugh in my face sometimes, crying, 'Not thou, little cabbage, nor yet thy faithful, was it that dived through half the world and came up breathless! No, no--I cannot believe it. We folk, so matter-of-fact and so comical. It was of Hansel and Gretel we had been reading hand-in-hand, till we fell asleep in the twilight and fancied this thing.' And then she will trill like a bird at the thought of how solemn Herr Grabenstock, of the Hotel du Mont Blanc, would have stared and edged apart, had we truly recounted to him that which had befallen us between the rising and the setting of a sun. We go forth; it rains--my faith! as it will in the Chamounix valley--and we return in the evening sopped. Very natural. But, for a first cause of our wetting. Ah! there we must be fastidious of an explanation, or we shall find ourselves in peril of restraint.

"Now, write this for me, and believe it if you can. We are not in a conspiracy of imagination--I and the dear courageous."

Therefore I _do_ write it, speaking in the person of Monsieur ----, and largely from his dictation; and my friend shall amuse himself over the nature of its reception.

"One morning (it was in late May)," says Monsieur ----, "my Fidele and I left the Hotel du Mont Blanc for a ramble amongst the hills. We were a little adventurous, because we were innocent. We took no guide but our commonsense; and that served us very ill--or very well, according to the point of view. Ours was that of the birds, singing to the sky and careless of the snake in the gra.s.s so long as they can pipe their tune.

Of a surety that is the only course. If one would make provision against every chance of accident, one must dematerialize. To die is the only way to secure oneself from fatality.

"Still, it is a wise precaution, I will admit, not to eat of all hedge fruit because blackberries are sweet. Some day, after the fiftieth stomach-ache, we shall learn wisdom, my Fidele and I.

"'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.' That, I know, comes into the English gospel.

"Well, I will tell you, I am content to be considered of the first; and my Fidele is a.s.suredly of the second. Yet did she fear, or I rush in? On the contrary, I have a little laughing thought that it was the angel inveighed against the dulness of caution when the fool would have hesitated.

"Now, it was before the season of the Alps; and the mountain aubergistes were, for the most part, not arrived at their desolate hill-taverns. Nor were guides at all in evidence, being yet engaged, the st.u.r.dy souls, over their winter occupations. One, no doubt, we could have procured, had we wished it; but we did not. We would explore under the aegis of no cicerone but our curiosity. That was native to us, if the district was strange.

"Following, at first, the instructions of Herr Baedeker, we travelled and climbed, chattering and singing as we went, in the direction of the Montenvert, whence we were to descend upon the Mer de Glace, and enjoy the spectacle of a stupendous glacier.

"'And that, I am convinced,' said Fidele, 'is nothing more nor less than one of those many windows that give light to the monsters of the under-earth.'

"'Little imbecile! In some places this window is six hundred feet thick.'

"'So?' she said. 'That is because their dim eyes could not endure the full light of the sun.'

"We had brought a tin box of sandwiches with us; and this, with my large pewter flask full of wine, was slung upon my back. For we had been told the Hotel du Montenvert was yet closed; and, sure enough when we reached it, the building stood black in a pool of snow, its shuttered windows forlorn, and long icicles hung from the eaves.

"The depression induced by this sight was momentary. We turned from it to the panorama of majestic loveliness that stretched below and around us.

The glacier--that rolling sea of gla.s.s--descended from the enormous gates of the hills. Its source was the white furnace of the skies; its substance the crystal refuse of the stars; and from its margins the splintered peaks stood up in a thousand forms of beauty. Right and left, in the hollows of the mountains, the mist lay like ponds, opal and translucent; and the shafts of the pine trees standing in it looked like the reflections of themselves.

"It made the eyes ache--this silence of greatness; and it became a relief to s.h.i.+ft one's gaze to the reality of one's near neighbourhood--the gra.s.s, and the rhododendron bushes, and even the dull walls of the deserted auberge.

"A narrow path dipped over the hill-side and fled into the very jaws of the moraine. Down the first of this path we raced, hand in hand; but soon, finding the impetus overmastering us, we pulled up with difficulty, and descended the rest of the way circ.u.mspectly.

"At the foot of the steep slope we came upon the little wooden hutch where, ordinarily, one may procure a guide (also rough socks to stretch over one's boots) for the pa.s.sage of the glacier. Now, however, the shed was closed and tenantless; and we must e'en dispense with a conductor, should we adventure further.

"Herr Baedeker says, 'Guide unnecessary for the experienced.'

"'Fidele, are we experienced?'

"'We shall be, _mon ami_, when we have crossed. A guide could not alter that.'

"'But it is true, _ma pet.i.te_. Come, then!'

"We clambered down amongst huge stones. Fidele's little feet went in and out of the crannies like sand-martins. Suddenly, before we realized it, we were on the glacier.

"Fidele exclaimed.

"'_Mon Dieu_! Is this ice--these blocks of dirty alabaster?'

"Alas! she was justified. This torrent of majestic crystal--seen from above so smooth and bountiful--a flood of the milk of Nature dispensed from the white bosom of the hills! Now, near at hand, what do we find it?

A medley of opaque blocks, smeared with grit and rubbish; a vast ruin of avalanches hurled together and consolidated, and of the colour of rock salt.

"'_Peste!_' I cried. 'We must get to the opposite bank, for all that.

"_Mignonne, allons voir si la rose, Qui ce matin avoit desclose_....'"

"We clasped hands and set forth on our little traversee, our landmark an odd-shaped needle of spar on the further side. My faith! it was simple.

The _paveurs_ of Nature had left the road a trifle rough, that was all.

Suddenly we came upon a wide fissure stretched obliquely like the mouth of a sole. Going glibly, we learnt a small lesson of caution therefrom.

Six paces, and we should have tumbled in.

"We looked over fearfully. Here, in truth, was real ice at last--green as bottle-gla.s.s at the edges, and melting into unfathomable deeps of glowing blue.

"In a moment, with a shriek like that of escaping steam, a windy demon leapt at us from the underneath. It was all of winter in a breath. It seemed to shrivel the skin from our faces--the flesh from our bones. We staggered backwards.

"'_Mon ami! mon ami_!' cried Fidele, 'my heart is a stone; my eyes are two blisters of water!'

"We danced as the blood returned unwilling to our veins. It was minutes before we could proceed.

"Afterwards I learned that these h.e.l.lish eruptions of air betoken a change of temperature. It was coming then shortly in a dense rainfall.

"When we were recovered, we sought about for a way to circ.u.mambulate the creva.s.se. Then we remarked that up a huge boulder of ice that had seemed to block our path recent steps, or toe-holes, had been cut. In a twinkling we were over. Fidele--no, a woman never falls.

"'For all this,' she says, shaking her head, 'I maintain that a guide here is a sinecurist.'

"Well, we made the pa.s.sage safely, and toiled up the steep, loose moraine beyond--to find the track over which was harder than crossing the glacier. But we did it, and struck the path along the hillside, which leads by the _Mauvais Pas_ (the _mauvais quart d'heure_) to the little cabaret called the _Chapeau_. This tavern, too, was shut and dismal.

It did not matter. We sat like sparrows on a railing, and munched our egg-sandwiches and drank our wine in a sort of glorious stupefaction. For right opposite us was the vast glacier-fall, whose cras.h.i.+ng foam was towers and parapets of ice, that went over and rolled into the valley below, a ruin of thunder.

"Far beyond, where the mouth of the gorge spread out littered with monstrous destruction, we saw the hundred threads of the glacier streams collect into a single rope of silver, that went drawn between the hills, a highway of water. It was all a majestic panorama of grey and pearly white--the sky, the torrents, the mountains; but the blue and rusty green of the stone pines, flung abroad in hanging woods and coppices, broke up and distributed the infinite serenity of the snow fields.

"Presently, having drunk deep of rich content, we rose to retrace our steps. For, spurred by vanity, we must be returning the way we had come, to show our confident experience of glaciers.

"All went well. Actually we had pa.s.sed over near two-thirds of the ice-bed, when a touch on my arm stayed me, and _ma mie_ looked into my eyes, very comical and insolent.