Short Stories 1895-1926 (36 page)

‘Shut in as I had been, until this moment it had been difficult to guess how far above me the actual plateau lay, or precisely how far below, the sea – though I had caught distant glimpses now and again of its spreading silver and the far horizon. Even at this point it would have been flattery to call the track a path. The steeper its incline, the more stony and precarious became one's footing. And then at last I rounded the first of a series of bluffs or headlands, commanding a spectacular view of the coast behind me, though nothing of what lay in front.

‘The tiny village had vanished. About a hundred and fifty feet beneath the steep on whose margin I was standing – with a flaming bush of gorse here and there, and an occasional dwarf oak as grey as silk in the evening light – the incoming tide gently mumbled its rocks, rocks of a peculiar patchy green and black.

‘I took another look at my map, enjoyed a prolonged “breather”, and went on. Steadily up and inward now and almost due north-west. And once more untended thickets rose dense on either side, and the air was oppressed with a fragrance sickly as chloroform. Some infernal winter tempest or equinoctial gale must have lately played havoc here. Again and again I had to clamber over the bole or through the head-twigs of monster trees felled by the wind, and still studded with a few sprouting
post-mortem
pale-green buds. It was like edging between this world and the next.

‘Apart, too, from the gulls with their saturnine gabbling, and flights of clanging oyster-catchers on the rocks below, what birds I saw were birds of prey: buzzards and kestrels chiefly, suspended as if by a thread from space, their small heads stooping between their quivering wings. And once I overheard what I took to be the cough of a raven to its mate. About twenty minutes afterwards, my second bluff hove into sight. And I paused for a while, staring at it.

‘For ordinary purposes I have a fairly good head. And yet I confess that before venturing further I took a prolonged look at this monster and at the faint patternings of the path that lay before me, curving first in, then out, along and across the face of the cliff, and just faintly etching its precipitous surface as it edged out of sight. It's a foolish thing perhaps to imagine oneself picked out clean against the sky on a precipitous slope – if, that is, you mean to put the fancy into action. You get a sort of double-barrelled view of your mortal body crouching there semi-erect, little better than a framework of bones.

‘Not that there was as yet any positive risk or danger. The adventure would have been child's play, no doubt, even for an amateur mountaineer. You had only to pick your way, keeping a sharp eye on the loose stones, and – to avoid megrims – skirting round the final curve without pausing to look up or to look down. A modest man might possibly try all fours. Still, after that, it did not surprise me to remember that visitors to these parts had usually preferred some other method of reaching the road and country up above. Pleasure may be a little
ov
er-
spiced with excitement.'

‘Steep, eh?' ejaculated the man in leggings.

‘Yes, steep,' replied the schoolmaster; ‘though taken as mere scenery,' he continued, ‘there was nothing to find fault with. Leagues and leagues of sea stretched out to the vague line of the horizon like an immense plate, mottled green and blue. A deep pinkish glow, too, had begun to spread over the eastern skies, mantling up into heights of space made the more abysmal in appearance by wisps of silver cirrus.

‘Now and again I lay back with my heels planted on what was left of the path, and rested a moment, staring up into that infinity. Now and again I all but decided to go back. But sheer curiosity to see the mysterious hermitage of which I had heard, and possibly the shame of proving myself yet another discredited visitor, lured me on. Solitude, too, is like deepening water to a swimmer: that also lures you on. Except for an occasional bloated, fork-tailed, shrimp-like insect that showed itself when a flake of dislodged stone went scuttering down into the abyss below, I was the only living creature abroad. Once more I pushed cautiously forward. But it was an evil-looking prospect, and the intense silence of the evening produced at last a peculiar sense of unreality and isolation. My universe seemed to have become a mere picture – and I out of place in it. It was as if I had been mislaid and forgotten.

‘I hung by now, I suppose, about two or three hundred feet above the sea; and maybe a hundred or so beneath the summit of the wall which brushed my left elbow. Wind-worn boulders, gently whispered over by saplings of ash or birch, jutted shallowly here and there above and below me. Marine plants lifted their wind-bitten flowers from inch-wide ledges on which their seeds had somehow found a lodging. The colours mirrored in sky and water increased in brilliance and variety as the sunset advanced, though here was only its reflection; and the flat ocean beneath lapped soundlessly on; its cream-like surf fringing here and there the very base of the cliff, beneath which, like antediluvian monsters, vast rocks lay drowsing. I refrained from examining them too closely.

‘But even if – minute intrusive mote that I was, creeping across that steep of wall – even if I had been so inclined, there was little opportunity. Though for centuries wind, frost and rain had been gnawing and fretting at the face of the cliff, sure foothold and finger-hold became ever more precarious. An occasional ringing reverberation from far below suggested, too, that even the massive bulk of rock itself might be honeycombed to its foundations. What once had been a path was now the negation of one. And the third prodigious bluff towards which I presently found myself slowly, almost mechanically, advancing, projected into space at a knife-like angle; cut sharp in gigantic silhouette against the skies.

‘I made a bewildering attempt to pretend to be casual and cheerful – even to whistle. But my lips were dry, and breath or courage failed me. None the less I had contrived to approach within twenty yards or so of that last appalling precipice, when, as if a warning voice had whispered the news in my ear, I suddenly realized the predicament I was in. To turn back now was impossible. Nor had I a notion of what lay on the further side of the headland. For a few instants my bones and sinews rebelled against me, refusing to commit themselves to the least movement. I could do no more than cling spasmodically with my face to the rock.

‘But to hang there on and on and wither like an autumnal fly was out of the question. One single hour of darkness, one spinning puff of wind, would inevitably dislodge me. But darkness was some hours distant; the evening was of a dead calm; and I thanked my stars there was no sun to roast and confuse me with his blaze and heat. I thanked my stars – but where would my carcase be when those stars began to show themselves in the coming night? All this swept through my mind in an instant. Complete self-possession was the one thing needful. I realized that too. And then a frightful cold came over me; sweat began to pour off my body; the very soul within me became sick with fear.

‘I use the word soul because this renewed nausea was something worse than physical. I was a younger man then, and could still in the long run rely on nerve and muscle, but fear turns one's blood to water – that terror of the spirit, and not merely of the mind or instinct. It bides its moment until the natural edges off into – into the unknown.

‘Not that Nature, as we call her, even in the most congenial surroundings, is the sort of old family nurse that makes one's bed every morning, and tucks one up with a “God bless you” overnight. Like the ants and the aphides and the elvers and the tadpoles, she produces us humans in millions; leaving us otherwise to our own devices. We can't even guess what little stratagems for the future she may be hiding up her sleeve. We can't even guess. But that's a mere commonplace. After all, so far as we can prove, she deserves only a small “n” to her name.

‘What I'm suggesting is merely that though she appeared to have decoyed me into this rat-trap with all her usual artlessness, she remained a
passive
enemy, and what now swathed me in like a breath of poison – as, with face, palms, knees and belly pressed close against the rock, I began once more working softly on from inch-wide ledge and inch-deep weed, my tongue like tinder, my eyes seeming to magnify every glittering atom they tried to focus – was the consciousness of some power or influence beyond Nature's. It was not so much of death – and I actually with my own eyes
saw
my body inertly hurtling to its doom beneath – that I was afraid. What terrified me beyond words to express was some positive presence here in a more desperate condition even than I. I was being waylaid.

‘When you come to such a pass as this, you lose count of time. I had become an automaton – little better than a beetle obeying the secret dictates of what I believe they call the Life-Urge; and how precisely I contrived to face and to circumnavigate that last bit of precipice, I cannot recall. But this once done, in a few minutes I was in comparative safety. I found myself sluggishly creeping again along a path which had presently widened enough to allow me to turn my face outwards from the rock, and even to rest. And even though the precipice beneath me was hardly less abrupt and enormous, and the cliff-face above actually overhung my niche, for the time being I was out of physical danger. I was, as they say, my own man again; had come back.

‘It was high time. My skull seemed to have turned to ice; I was wet through; my finger-nails were split; my hands covered with blood; and my clothes would have disgraced a tramp.

‘But all trace of fear had left me, and what now swept my very wits away in this almost unendurable reaction was the sheer beauty of the scene that hung before my eyes. Half reclining, not daring yet to stir, my outstretched hands clasping two knobs of rocks, my eyeballs gently moving to and fro, I sat there and feasted on the amazing panorama spread out before me; realizing none the less that I was in the presence of something – how can I express it? – of something a little different from, stranger and less human than – well, our old friend Nature.

‘The whole face of this precipice was alight with colour – dazzling green and orange, drifts of snow and purple – campion, sea-pink, may-weed, samphire, camomile, lichen, stonecrop, with fleshy and aromatic plants that I knew not even the names of, sweeping down drift beyond drift into a narrow rock-bound tranquil bay of the darkest emerald and azure, and then sweeping up once more drift beyond drift into the vault of the sky, its blue fretted over as if by some master architect with silvery interlacings, a scattered feather-like fleece of vapour.

‘The steady cry too, possibly amplified by echo, of the incoming tide reached me here once more; a whisper and yet not toneless. And on and on into the distance swept the gigantic coast line, crowned summit to base with its emerald springtide woods.

‘Still slightly intoxicated as I was by the terror and danger in which I had been, and which were now for the moment past and gone, I gave myself ample opportunity to rest and to drink in this prodigious spectacle. And yet, as I lay there, still at a dizzy altitude, midway between sea and sky but in perfect safety, the odd conviction persisted, that though safe, I was not yet secure. It was as if I were still facing some peril of the mind, and absurd and irrational though it may sound there was a vague disquieting hint within me of disappointment – as if I had lost without realizing it a unique opportunity. And yet, all this medley of hints and intuitions was wholly subsidiary to the conviction that from some one point in all this vacancy around me a steady devouring gaze was fixed on me – that I was being watched.'

Once more our hard-headed friend fidgeted uneasily on his stool.

‘It sounds absurd, I agree,' the schoolmaster caught him up. ‘Simply because, apart from the seabirds and the clouds, I had been and was still the only moving object within view. The sudden apparition of me crawling around that huge nose of rock must have been as conspicuous as it was absurd. Besides, myriads of concealed eyes in the dense forest towering conically up on the other side of the narrow bay beneath me, and looming ever more mistily from headland to headland towards the north and west, could have watched my every movement. A thousand arrows from unseen archers concealed on the opposing heights might at any instant have transfixed me where I lay. One becomes conscious, too, of the sort of empty settled stare which fixes an intruder into such solitudes. It is at the same time vacant, enormous and hostile.

‘But I don't mean that. I still mean something far more definite – and more dangerous, too, than that; and I keep to it even if this precise memory may have been affected by what came after. For I was soon to learn that in actual fact I
was
being watched; and by as acute and unhuman a pair of eyes as I have ever seen in mortal head.

‘With infinite caution I rose to my feet again at last, and continued my journey. The path grew steadily easier; soil succeeded to bare rock, and this must not very long before, I discovered, have been trodden by other human feet than mine. There were marks of hobnails between its tussocks of grass and moss and thrift.

‘It presently descended a little, and then in a while, from out of the glare of the evening, I found myself entering a broader and heavily-shaded track leading straight onwards and tunnelling inland into the woods. It was, to my amazement, close on eight o'clock, and too late to dream of turning back, even if I could have persuaded myself to face again the experience of the last half-hour. Yet whatever curiosity might say for itself, I felt a peculiar disinclination to forge ahead. The bait had ceased to be enticing.

‘I paused once more under the dismal funnel of greenery in which I found myself staring at the face of my watch, and then had another look at the map. A minute or two's scrutiny assured me that straight ahead was my only possible course. And why not? There was company ahead. In this damp soil the impressions of the hob-nailed shoes showed more clearly. Quite recently those shoes must have come and gone along this path on three separate occasions at least. Mine had been a rather acutely solitary excursion, and yet for the life of me I had not the smallest desire to meet the maker of those footprints.