The Birds and Other Stories Read online

  The old man, anxious and distressed, looked from one to the other of them.

  "It is safe for you to climb Monte Verita, and to descend again," he repeated to Victor, "but not for your wife. They have great power, the sacerdotesse. Here in the village we are always in fear for our young girls, for our women."

  Victor said the whole thing sounded like an African travel tale, where a tribe of wild men pounced out of the jungle and carried off the female population into captivity.

  "I don't know what he's talking about," he said to Anna, "but I suppose they are riddled with some sort of superstition, which will appeal to you, with your Welsh blood."

  He laughed, he told me, making light of it, and then, being confoundedly sleepy, arranged their mattresses in front of the fire. Bidding the old man good evening, he and Anna settled themselves for the night.

  He slept soundly, in the profound sleep that comes after climbing, and woke suddenly, just before daybreak, to the sound of a cock crowing in the village outside.

  He turned over on his side to see if Anna was awake.

  The mattress was thrown back, and bare. Anna had gone...

  No one was yet astir in the house, Victor said, and the only sound was the cock crowing. He got up and put on his shoes and coat, went to the door and stepped outside.

  It was the cold, still moment that comes just before sunrise. The last few stars were paling in the sky. Clouds hid the valley, some thousands of feet below. Only here, near the summit of the mountain, was it clear.

  At first Victor felt no misgiving. He knew by this time that Anna was capable of looking after herself, and was as surefooted as he--more so, possibly. She would take no foolish risks, and anyway the old man had told them that the climb was not dangerous. He felt hurt, though, that she had not waited for him. It was breaking the promise that they should always climb together. And he had no idea how much of a start she had in front of him. The only thing he could do was to follow her as swiftly as he could.

  He went back into the room to collect their rations for the day--she had not thought of that. Their packs they could fetch later, for the descent, and they would probably have to accept hospitality here for another night.

  His movements must have roused his host, for suddenly the old man appeared from the inner room and stood beside him. His eyes fell on Anna's empty mattress, then he searched Victor's eyes, almost in accusation.

  "My wife has gone on ahead," Victor said. "I am going to follow her."

  The old man looked very grave. He went to the open door and stood there, staring away from the village, up the mountain.

  "It was wrong to let her go," he said, "you should not have permitted it." He appeared very distressed, Victor said, and shook his head to and fro, murmuring to himself.

  "It's all right," said Victor. "I shall soon catch her up, and we shall probably be back again, soon after midday."

  He put his hand on the old fellow's arm, to reassure him.

  "I fear very much that it will be too late," said the old man. "She will go to them, and once she is with them she will not come back."

  Once again he used the word sacerdotesse, the power of the sacerdotesse, and his manner, his state of apprehension, now communicated itself to Victor, so that he too felt a sense of urgency, and of fear.

  "Do you mean that there are living people at the top of Monte Verita?" he said. "People who may attack her, and harm her bodily?"

  The old man began to talk rapidly, and it was difficult to make any sense out of the torrent of words that now sprang from him. No, he said, the sacerdotesse would not hurt her, they hurt no one; it was that they would take her to become one of them. Anna would go to them, she could not help herself, the power was so strong. Twenty, thirty years ago, the old man said, his daughter had gone to them: he had never seen her again. Other young women from the village, and from down below, in the valley, were called by the sacerdotesse. Once they were called they had to go, no one could keep them back. No one saw them again. Never, never. It had been so for many years, in his father's time, his father's father's time, before that, even.

  It was not known now when the sacerdotesse first came to Monte Verita. No man living had set eyes upon them. They lived there, enclosed, behind their walls, but with power, he kept insisting, with magic. "Some say they have this from God, some from the Devil," he said, "but we do not know, we cannot tell. It is rumored that the sacerdotesse on Monte Verita never grow old, they stay forever young and beautiful, and that it is from the moon they draw their power. It is the moon they worship, and the sun."

  Victor gathered little from this wild talk. It must all be legend, superstition.

  The old man shook his head and looked towards the mountain track. "I saw it in her eyes last night," he said, "I was afraid of it. She had the eyes they have, when they are called. I have seen it before. With my own daughter, with others."

  By now the rest of the family had woken and had come by turn into the room. They seemed to sense what had happened. The younger man, and the woman, even the children, looked at Victor with anxiety and a strange sort of compassion. He said the atmosphere filled him not so much with alarm as with anger and irritation. It made him think of cats, and broomsticks, and sixteenth-century witchcraft.

  The mist was breaking slowly, down in the valley, and the clouds were going. The soft glow in the sky, beyond the range of mountains to the eastward, heralded the rising sun.

  The old man said something to the younger, and pointed with his stick.

  "My son will put you on the track," he said, "he will come part of the way only. Further he does not care to go."

  Victor said he set off with all their eyes upon him; and not only from this first hut, but from the other dwellings in the little village, he was aware of faces looking from drawn shutters, and faces peering from half-open doors. The whole village was astir now and intent upon watching him, held by a fearful fascination.

  His guide made no attempt to talk to him. He walked ahead, his shoulders bent, his eyes on the ground. Victor felt that he went only on command of the old man, his father.

  The track was rough and stony, broken in many places, and was, Victor judged, part of an old watercourse that would be impassable when the rains came. Now, in full summer, it was easy enough to climb. Verdure, thorn, and scrub they left behind them, after climbing steadily for an hour, and the summit of the mountain pierced the sky directly above their heads, split into two like a divided hand. From the depths of the valley, and from the village even, this division could not be seen; the two peaks seemed as one.

  The sun had risen with them as they climbed, and now shone in full upon the southeastern face, turning it to coral. Great banks of clouds, soft and rolling, hid the world below. Victor's guide stopped suddenly and pointed ahead, where a jutting lip of rock wound in a razor's edge and curved southward out of sight.

  "Monte Verita," he said, and then repeated it again, "Monte Verita."

  Then he turned swiftly and began scrambling back along the way that they had come.

  Victor called to him, but the man did not answer; he did not even bother to turn his head. In a moment he was out of sight. There was nothing for it but to go on alone, round the lip of the escarpment, Victor said, and trust that he found Anna waiting for him on the further side.

  It took him another half hour to encircle the projecting shoulder of the mountain, and with every step he took his anxiety deepened, because now, on the southward side, there was no gradual incline--the mountain face was sheer. Soon further progress would be impossible.

  "Then," Victor said, "I came out through a sort of gully-way, over a ridge about three hundred feet only from the summit; and I saw it, the monastery, built out of the rock between the two peaks, absolutely bare and naked; a steep rock wall enclosing it, a drop of a thousand feet beneath the wall to the next ridge, and above, nothing but the sky and the twin peaks of Monte Verita."

  It was true, then. Victor had not lost his mind.
The place existed. There had been no accident. He sat there, in his chair by the gas fire, in the nursing home; and this had happened, it was not fantasy, born out of tragedy.

  He seemed calm, now that he had told me so much. A great part of the strain had gone, his hands no longer trembled. He looked more like the old Victor, and his voice was steady.

  "It must have been centuries old," he said, after a moment or two. "God knows how long it must have taken to build, hewn out of the rock face like that. I have never seen anything more stark and savage, nor, in a strange way, more beautiful. It seemed to hang there, suspended, between the mountain and the sky. There were many long narrow slits, for light and air. No real windows, in the sense we know them. There was a tower, looking west, with a sheer drop below. The great wall encircled the whole place, making it impregnable, like a fortress. I could see no way of entrance. There was no sign of life. No sign of anyone. I stood there staring at the place, and the narrow window slits stared back at me. There was nothing I could do but wait there until Anna showed herself. Because now, you see, I was convinced the old man had been right, and I knew what must have happened. The inhabitants had seen Anna, from behind those slit windows, and had called to her. She was with them now, inside. She must see me, standing outside the wall, and presently would come out to me. So I waited there, all day..."

  His words were simple. Just a plain statement of fact. Any husband might have waited thus for a wife who had, during their holiday, ventured forth one morning to call upon friends. He sat down, and later ate his lunch, and watched the rolling banks of cloud that hid the world below move, and disperse, and form again; and the sun, in all its summer strength, beat down upon the unprotected face of Monte Verita, on the tower and the narrow window slits, and the great encircling wall, from whence came no movement and no sound.

  "I sat there all the day," said Victor, "but she did not come. The force of the sun was blinding, scorching, and I had to go back to the gully-way for shelter. There, lying under the shadow of a projecting rock, I could still watch that tower and those window slits. You and I in the past have known silence on the mountains, but nothing like the silence beneath those twin peaks of Monte Verita.

  "The hours dragged by and I went on waiting. Gradually it grew cooler, and then, as my anxiety increased, time raced instead. The sun went too fast into the west. The color of the rock face was changing. There was no longer any glare. I began to panic then. I went to the wall and shouted. I felt along the wall with my hands, but there was no entrance, there was nothing. My voice echoed back to me, again and again. I looked up, and all I could see were those blind slits of windows. I began to doubt everything, the old man's story, all that he had said. This place was uninhabited, no one had lived there for a thousand years. It was something built long ago in time, and now deserted. And Anna had never come to it at all. She had fallen, on that narrow lip-way where the track ended and the man had left me. She must have fallen into the sheer depths where the southern shoulder of the mountain ridge began. And this is what had happened to the other women who had come this way, the old man's daughter, the girls from the valleys; they had all fallen, none of them had ever reached the ultimate rock face, here between the peaks."

  The suspense would have been easier to bear if the first strain and sign of breakdown had come back into Victor's voice. As it was, sitting there in the London nursing home, the room impersonal and plain, the routine bottles of medicines and pills on the table by his side, and the sound of traffic coming from Wigmore Street, his voice took on a steady monotonous quality, like a clock ticking; it would have been more natural had he turned suddenly, and screamed.

  "Yet I dared not go back," he said, "unless she came. I was compelled to go on waiting there, beneath the wall. The clouds banked up towards me and turned gray. All the warning evening shadows that I knew too well crept into the sky. One moment the rock face, and the wall, and the slit windows were golden; then, suddenly, the sun was gone. There was no dusk at all. It was cold, and it was night."

  Victor told me that he stayed there against the wall until daybreak. He did not sleep. He paced up and down to keep warm. When dawn came he was chilled and numb, faint, too, from want of food. He had brought with him only the rations for their midday meal.

  Sense told him that to wait now, through another day, was madness. He must return to the village for food and drink, and if possible enlist the help of the men there to form a search party. Reluctantly, when the sun rose, he left the rock face. Silence enwrapped it still. He was certain now there was no life behind the walls.

  He went back, round the shoulder of the mountain, to the track; and so down into the morning mist, and to the village.

  Victor said they were waiting there for him. It was as though he was expected. The old man was standing at the entrance of his home, and gathered about him were neighbors, mostly men and children.

  Victor's first question was, "Has my wife returned?" Somehow, descending from the summit, hope had come to him again--that she had never climbed the mountain track, that she had walked another way, and had come back to the village by a different path. When he saw their faces his hope went.

  "She will not come back," said the old man, "we told you she would not come back. She has gone to them, on Monte Verita."

  Victor had wisdom enough to ask for food and drink before entering into argument. They gave him this. They stood beside him, watching him with compassion. Victor said the greatest agony was the sight of Anna's pack, her mattress, her drinking bottle, her knife; the little personal possessions she had not taken with her.

  When he had eaten they continued to stand there, waiting for him to speak. He told the old man everything. How he had waited all day, and through the night. How there was never a sound, or a sign of life, from those slit windows on the rock face on Monte Verita. Now and again the old man translated what Victor said to the neighbors.

  When Victor had finished the old man spoke.

  "It is as I said. Your wife is there. She is with them."

  Victor, his nerves to pieces, shouted aloud.

  "How can she be there? There is no one alive in that place. It's dead, it's empty. It's been dead for centuries."

  The old man leaned forward and put his hand on Victor's shoulder. "It is not dead. That is what many have said before. They went and waited, as you waited. Twenty-five years ago I did the same. This man here, my neighbor, waited three months, day after day, night after night, many years ago, when his wife was called. She never came back. No one who is called to Monte Verita returns."

  She had fallen, then. She had died. It was that after all. Victor told them this, he insisted upon it, he begged that they would go now, with him, and search the mountain for her body.

  Gently, compassionately, the old man shook his head. "In the past we did that too," he said. "There are those among us who climb with great skill, who know the mountain, every inch of it, and who have descended the southern side even, to the edge of the great glacier, beyond which no one can live. There are no bodies. Our women never fell. They were not there. They are in Monte Verita, with the sacerdotesse."

  It was hopeless, Victor said. It was no use to try argument. He knew that he must go down to the valley, and if he could not get help there go further yet, back to some part of the country that was familiar to him, where he could find guides who would be willing to return with him.

  "My wife's body is somewhere on this mountain," he said. "I must find it. If your people won't help me, I will get others."

  The old man looked over his shoulder and spoke a name. From the little crowd of silent spectators came a child, a small girl of about nine years old. He laid his hand upon her head.

  "This child," he said to Victor, "has seen and spoken with the sacerdotesse. Other children, in the past, have seen them too. Only to children, and then rarely, do they show themselves. She will tell you what she saw."

  The child began her recitation, in a high singsong voice, her eyes
fixed upon Victor; and he could tell, he said, that it was a tale she had repeated so many times, to the same listeners, that it was now a chant, a lesson learned by heart. And it was all in patois. Not one word could Victor understand.

  When she had finished the old man acted as interpreter; and from force of habit he too declaimed as the child had done, his tone taking that same singsong quality.

  "I was with my companions on Monte Verita. A storm came, and my companions ran away. I walked, and lost myself, and came to the place where the wall is, and the windows. I cried; I was afraid. She came out of the wall, the tall and splendid one, and another with her, also young and beautiful. They comforted me and I wanted to go inside the walls with them, when I heard the singing from the tower, but they told me it was forbidden. When I was thirteen years old I could return to live with them. They wore white raiment to the knees, their arms and legs were bare, the hair close to the head. They were more beautiful than the people of this world. They led me back from Monte Verita, down the track where I could find my way. Then they went from me. I have told all I know."

  The old man watched Victor's face when he had finished his recital. Victor said the faith that must have been put in the child's statement astounded him. It was obvious, he thought, that the child had fallen asleep, and dreamed, and translated her dream into reality.

  "I am sorry," he told his interpreter, "but I can't believe the child's tale. It is imagination."

  Once again the child was called and spoken to, and she at once ran out of the house and disappeared.

  "They gave her a circlet of stones on Monte Verita," said the old man. "Her parents keep it locked up, in case of evil. She has gone to ask for it, to show you."

  In a few moments the child returned, and she put into Victor's hand a girdle, small enough to encompass a narrow waist, or else to hang about the neck. The stones, which looked like quartz, were cut and shaped by hand, fitting into one another in hollowed grooves. The craftsmanship was fine, even exquisitely done. It was not the rude handiwork of peasants, done of a winter's evening, to pass the time. In silence Victor handed the circlet back to the child.