At a Winter's Fire Part 5

"'Little cabbage,' she said; 'will you not put your new knowledge to account?'

"'But how, my soul?'

"She laughed and pressed my arm to her side. Her heart fluttered like a nestling after its first flight.

"'To rest on the little prowess of a small adventure! No, no! Shall he who has learnt to swim be always content to bathe in shallow water?'

"I was speechless as I gazed on her.

"'Behold, then!' she cried. 'We have opposed ourselves to this problem of the ice, and we have mastered it. See how it rears itself to the inaccessible peaks, the which to reach the poor innocents expend themselves over rocks and drifts. But why should one not climb the mountain by way of the glacier?'

"'Fidele!' I gasped.

"'Ah!' she exclaimed, nodding her head; 'but poor men! They are mules.

They spill their blood on the scaling ladders when the town gate is open.'

"Again I cried 'Fidele!'

"'But, yes,' she said, 'it needs a woman to see. It is but two o'clock.

Let us ascend the glacier, like a staircase; and presently we shall stand upon the summit of the mountain. Those last little peaks above the ice can be of no importance.'

"I was touched, astounded by the sublimity of her idea. Had no one, then, ever thought of this before?

"We began the ascent.

"I swear we must have toiled upwards half a mile, when the catastrophe took place.

"It was raining then--a dense small mist; and the ice was as if it had been greased. We were proceeding with infinite care, arm in arm, tucked close together. A little doubt, I think, was beginning to oppress us. We could move only with much caution and difficulty; and there were noises--sounds like the clapping of great hands in those rocky attics above us. Then there would come a slamming report, as if the window of the unknown had been burst open by demons; and the moans of the lost would issue, surging down upon the world.

"These thunders, as we were afterwards told, are caused by the splitting of the ice when there comes a fall in the barometer. Then the glacier will yawn like a sliced junket.

"My faith! what a simile! But again the point of view, my friend.

"All in a moment I heard a little cluck. I looked down. Alas! the fine spirit was obscured. Fidele was weeping.

"'_Chut! chut!_' I exclaimed in consternation. 'We will go back at once.'

"She struggled to smile, the poor _mignonne_.

"'It is only that my knees are sick,' she said piteously.

"I took her in my strong arms tenderly.

"We had paused on a ridge of hard snow.

"There came a tearing clang--an enormous sucking sound, as of wet lips opening. The snow sank under our feet.

"'My G.o.d!' shrieked Fidele.

"I held her convulsively. It happened in an instant, before one could leap aside. The bed of snow on which we were standing broke down into the creva.s.se it had bridged, and let us through to the depths.

"Will you believe what follows? Pinch your nose and open your mouth. You shall take the whole draught at a breath. _The ice at the point where we entered was five hundred feet thick; and we fell to the very bottom of it._

"Ha! ha! Is it difficult to swallow? But it is true--it is quite true.

Here I sit, sound and safe, and eminently sane, and that after a fall of five hundred feet.

"Now, listen.

"We went down, welded together, with a rush and a buzz like a cannon-ball. Thoughts? Ah! my friend, I had none. Who can think even in a high wind? And here the wind of our going would have brained an ox.

Only one desperate instinct I had, one little forlorn remnant of humanity--to s.h.i.+eld the love of my heart. So my arms never left her; and we fell together. I dreaded nothing, feared nothing, foresaw no terror in the inevitable mangling crash of the end. For time, that is necessary to emotion, was annihilated. We had outstripped it, and left sense and reason sluggishly following in our wake.

"Sense, yes; but not altogether sensation. Flas.h.i.+ngly I was conscious here of incredibly swift transitions, from cold to deeper wells of frost; thence down through a stratum of death and negation, between mere blind walls of frigid inhumanity, to have been stayed a moment by which would have pointed all our limbs as stiff as icicles, as stiff as those of frogs plunged into boiling water. But we pa.s.sed and fell, still cras.h.i.+ng upon no obstruction; and thought pursued us, tailing further behind.

"It was the pa.s.sage of the eternal night--frozen, self-contained; awful as any fancied darkness that is without one tradition of a star. Yet, struggling hereafter to, in some shadowy sense, renew my feelings of the moment, it seemed to me that I had not fallen through darkness at all; but rather that the friction of descent had kindled an inner radiance in me that was independent of the vision of the eyes, and full of promise of a sudden illumination of the soul.

"Now, after falling what depths G.o.d knows, I become numbly aware of a little griding sensation at my back, that communicated a whistling small vibration to my whole frame. This intensified, became more p.r.o.nounced.

Perceptibly, in that magnificent refinement of speed, our enormous pace I felt to decrease ever so little. Still we had so far outstripped intelligence as that I was incapable of considering the cause of the change.

"Suddenly, for the first time, pain made itself known; and immediately reason, plunging from above, overtook me, and I could think.

"Then it was I became conscious that, instead of falling, we were rising, rising with immense swiftness, but at a pace that momently slackened--rising, slipping over ice and in contact with it,

"The muscles of my arms, clasped still about Fidele, involuntarily swelled to her. My G.o.d! there was a tiny answering pressure. I could have screamed with joy; but physical anguish overmastered me. My back seemed bursting into flame.

"The suffering was intolerable. When, at last, I thought I should go mad, in a moment we took a surging swoop, shot down an easy incline, and _stopped_.

"There had been noise in our descent, as only now I knew by its cessation--a hissing sound as of wire whirring from a draw-plate. In the profound enormous silence that, at last, enwrapped us, the bliss of freedom from that metallic accompaniment fell on me like a balm. My eyelids closed. Possibly I fainted.

"All in a moment I came to myself, to an undefinable sense of the tremendous pressure of nothingness. Darkness! it was not that; yet it was as little light. It was as if we lay in a dim, luminous chaos, ourselves an integral part of its self-containment. I did not stir; but I spoke: and my strange voice broke the enchantment. Surely never before or since was speech exchanged under such conditions.

"'Fidele!'

"'I can speak, but I cannot look. If I hide so for ever I can die bravely.'

"'_Ma pet.i.te!_ oh, my little one! Are you hurt?'

"'I don't know. I think not.'

"Her voice, her dear voice was so odd; but, _Mon Dieu_! how wonderful in its courage! That, Heaven be praised! is no monopoly of intellect.

Indeed, it is imagination that makes men cowards; and to the lack of this possibly we owed our salvation.

"Now, calm and freed of that haunting jar of descent, I became conscious that a sound, that I had at first taken for the rush of my own arteries, had an origin apart from us. It was like the wash and thunder of waters in a deep sewer.

"'Fidele!' I said again.

"'I am listening.'

"'Hear, then! Canst thou free my right arm, that I may feel for the lucifers in my pocket?'