The Birds and Other Stories Page 9

  "She may have found it on the mountain side," he said.

  "We do not work thus," answered the old man, "nor the people in the valley, nor even in the cities of this country, where I have been. The child was given the circlet, as she has told us, by those who inhabit Monte Verita."

  Victor knew then that further argument was useless. Their obstinacy was too strong, and their superstition proof against all worldly sense. He asked if he might remain in the house another day and night.

  "You are welcome to stay," said the old man, "until you know the truth."

  One by one the neighbors dispersed, the routine of the quiet day was resumed. It was as though nothing had happened. Victor went out again, this time towards the northern shoulder of the mountain. He had not gone far before he realized that this ridge was unclimbable, at any rate without skilled help and equipment. If Anna had gone that way she had found certain death.

  He came back to the village, which, situated as it was on the eastern slopes, had already lost the sun. He went into the living room, and saw that there was a meal there prepared for him, and his mattress lay on the floor before the hearth.

  He was too exhausted to eat. He flung himself down on the mattress and slept. Next morning he rose early, and climbed once more to Monte Verita, and sat there all the day. He waited, watching the slit windows, while the hot sun scorched the rock face through the long hours and then sank down into the western sky; and nothing stirred, and no one came.

  He thought of that other man from the village who some years ago had waited there three months, day after day, night after night; and Victor wondered what limitation time would put to his endurance, and whether he would equal the other in fortitude.

  On the third day, at that moment of midday when the sun was strongest, he could bear the heat no longer and went to lie in the gully-way, in the shadow and blessed coolness of the projecting rock. Worn with the strain of watching, and with the despair that now filled his entire being, Victor slept.

  He awoke with a start. The hands of his watch pointed to five o'clock, and it was already cold inside the gully. He climbed out and looked towards the rock face, golden now in the setting sun. Then he saw her. She was standing beneath the wall, but on a ledge only a few feet in circumference, and below her the rock face fell away sheer, a thousand feet or more.

  She waited there, looking towards him, and he ran towards her shouting "Anna... Anna..." And he said that he heard himself sobbing, and he thought his heart would burst.

  When he drew closer he saw that he could not reach her. The great drop to the depths below divided them. She was a bare twelve feet away from him, and he could not touch her.

  "I stood where I was, staring at her," said Victor. "I did not speak. Something seemed to choke my voice. I felt the tears running down my face. I was crying. I had made up my mind that she was dead, you see, that she had fallen. And she was there, she was alive. Ordinary words wouldn't come. I tried to say "What has happened? Where have you been?"--but it wasn't any use. Because as I looked at her I knew in one moment, with terrible blinding certainty, that it was all true, what the old man had said, and the child; it wasn't imagination, it wasn't superstition. Though I saw no one but Anna, the whole place suddenly became alive. From behind those window slits above me there were God knows how many eyes, watching, looking down on me. I could feel the nearness of them, beyond those walls. And it was uncanny, and horrible, and real."

  Now the strain had come back into Victor's voice, now his hands trembled once again. He reached out for a glass of water and drank thirstily.

  "She was not wearing her own clothes," he said. "She had a kind of shirt, like a tunic, to her knees, and round her waist a circlet of stones, like the one the child had shown me. Nothing on her feet, and her arms bare. What frightened me most was that her hair was cut quite short, as short as yours or mine. It altered her strangely, made her look younger, but in some way terribly austere. Then she spoke to me. She said quite naturally, as if nothing had happened, 'I want you to go back home, Victor darling. You mustn't worry about me anymore.' "

  Victor told me he could hardly credit it, at first, that she could stand there and say this to him. It reminded him of those so-called psychic messages that mediums give out to relatives at a spiritualistic seance. He could hardly trust himself to answer. He thought that perhaps she had been hypnotized and was speaking under suggestion.

  "Why do you want me to go home?" he said, very gently, not wanting to damage her mind, which these people might have destroyed.

  "It's the only thing to do," she answered. And then, Victor said, she smiled, normally, happily, as if they were at home discussing plans. "I'm all right, darling," she said. "This isn't madness, or hypnotism, or any of the things you imagine it to be. They have frightened you in the village, and it's understandable. This thing is so much stronger than most people. But I must have always known it existed, somewhere; and I've been waiting all these years. When men go into monasteries, and women shut themselves up in convents, their relatives suffer very much, I know, but in time they come to bear it. I want you to do the same, Victor, please. I want you, if you can, to understand."

  She stood there, quite calm, quite peaceful, smiling down at him.

  "You mean," he said, "you want to stay in this place always?"

  "Yes," she said, "there can be no other life for me, anymore, ever. You must believe this. I want you to go home, and live as you have always done, and look after the house and the estate, and if you fall in love with anyone to marry and be happy. Bless you for your love and kindness and devotion, darling, which I shall never forget. If I were dead, you would want to think of me at peace, in paradise. This place, to me, is paradise. And I would rather jump now, to those rocks hundreds of feet below me, than go back to the world from Monte Verita."

  Victor said he went on staring at her as she spoke, and he said there was a radiance about her there had never been before, even in their most contented days.

  "You and I," he said to me, "have both read of transfiguration in the Bible. That is the only word I can use to describe her face. It was not hysteria, it was not emotion; it was just that. Something--out of this world of ours--had put its hand upon her. To plead with her was useless, to attempt force impossible. Anna, rather than go back to the world, would throw herself off the rock face. I should achieve nothing."

  He said the feeling of utter helplessness was overwhelming, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do. It was as if he and she were standing on a dockway, and she was about to set foot in a ship, bound to an unknown destination, and the last few minutes were passing by before the ship's siren blew, warning him the gangways would be withdrawn and she must go.

  He asked her if she had all she needed, if she would be given sufficient food, enough covering, and whether there were any facilities should she fall ill. He wanted to know if there was anything she wanted that he could send to her. And she smiled back at him, saying she had everything, within those walls, that she would ever need.

  He said to her, "I shall return every year, at this time, to ask you to come back. I shall never forget."

  She said, "It will be harder for you if you do that. Like putting flowers on a grave. I would rather you stayed away."

  "I can't stay away," he said, "with the knowledge you are here, behind these walls."

  "I won't be able to come to you again," she said, "this is the last time you will see me. Remember, though, that I shall go on looking like this, always. That is part of the belief. Carry me with you."

  Then, Victor said, she asked him to go. She could not return inside the walls until he had gone. The sun was low in the sky and already the rock face was in shadow.

  Victor looked at Anna a long time; then he turned his back on her, standing by the ledge, and walked away from the wall towards the gully, without looking over his shoulder. When he came to the gully he waited there a few minutes, then looked out again towards the rock face. Anna was no long
er standing on the ledge. There was nothing there but the wall and the slit windows, and above, not yet in shadow, the twin peaks of Monte Verita.

  I managed to spare half an hour or so, every day, to go and visit Victor in the nursing home. Each day he appeared stronger, more himself. I spoke to the doctor attending him, to the matron and the nurses. They told me there was no question of a deranged mind; he came to them suffering from severe shock and nervous collapse. It had already done him immense good to see me and to talk to me. In a fortnight he was well enough to leave the nursing home, and he came to stay with me in Westminster.

  During those autumn evenings we went over all that had happened again and again. I questioned him more closely than I had done before. He denied that there had ever been anything abnormal about Anna. Theirs had been a normal, happy marriage. Her dislike of possessions, her spartan way of living, was, he agreed, unusual; but it had not struck him as peculiar--it was Anna. I told him of the night I had seen her standing with bare feet in the garden, on the frosted lawn. Yes, he said, that was the sort of thing she did. But she had a fastidiousness, a certain personal reticence, that he respected. He never intruded upon it.

  I asked him how much he knew of her life before he married her. He told me there was very little to know. Her parents had died when she was young, and she had been brought up in Wales by an aunt. There was no peculiar background, no skeletons in the cupboard. Her upbringing had been entirely ordinary in every way.

  "It's no use," said Victor, "you can't explain Anna. She is just herself, unique. You can't explain her any more than you can explain the sudden phenomenon of a musician, born to ordinary parents, or a poet, or a saint. There is no accounting for them. They just appear. It was my great fortune, praise God, to find her, just as it is my own personal hell, now, to have lost her. Somehow I shall continue living, as she expected me to do. And once a year I shall go back to Monte Verita."

  His acquiescence to the total breakup of his life astounded me. I felt that I could not have overcome my own despair, had the tragedy been mine. It seemed to me monstrous that an unknown sect, on a mountainside, could, in the space of a few days, have such power over a woman, a woman of intelligence and personality. It was understandable that ignorant peasant girls could be emotionally misled and their relatives, blinded by superstition, do nothing about it. I told Victor this. I told him that it should be possible, through the ordinary channels of our embassy, to approach the government of that country, to have a nationwide inquiry, to get the Press onto it, the backing of our own government. I told him I was prepared, myself, to set all this in motion. We were living in the twentieth century, not in the Middle Ages. A place like Monte Verita should not be permitted to exist. I would arouse the whole country with the story, create an international situation.

  "But why," said Victor quietly, "to what end?"

  "To get Anna back," I said, "and to free the rest. To prevent the breakup of other people's lives."

  "We don't," said Victor, "go about destroying monasteries or convents. There are hundreds of them, all over the world."

  "That is different," I argued. "They are organized bodies of religious people. They have existed for centuries."

  "I think, very probably, Monte Verita has too."

  "How do they live, how do they eat, what happens when they fall ill, when they die?"

  "I don't know. I try not to think about it. All I cling to is that Anna said she had found what she was searching for, that she was happy. I'm not going to destroy that happiness."

  Then he looked at me, in a way half puzzled, half wise, and said, "It's odd, your talking in this way. Because by rights you should understand Anna's feelings more than I do. You were always the one with mountain fever. You were the one, in old climbing days, to have your head in the clouds and quote to me--

  "The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

  I remember getting up and going over to the window and looking out over the foggy street, down to the embankment. I said nothing. His words had moved me very much. I could not answer them. And I knew, in the depths of my heart, why I hated the story of Monte Verita and wanted the place to be destroyed. It was because Anna had found her Truth, and I had not...

  That conversation between Victor and myself made, if not a division in our friendship, at least a turning point. We had reached a halfway mark in both our lives. He went back to his home in Shropshire, and later wrote to me that he intended making over the property to a young nephew, still at school, and during the next few years intended having the lad to stay with him in the holidays, to get him acquainted with the place. After that, he did not know. He would not commit himself to plans. My own future, at this time, was full with change. My work necessitated living in America for a period of two years.

  Then, as it turned out, the whole tenor of the world became disrupted. The following year was 1914.

  Victor was one of the first to join up. Perhaps he thought this would be his answer. Perhaps he thought he might be killed. I did not follow his example until my period in America was over. It was certainly not my answer, and I disliked every moment of my army years. I saw nothing of Victor during the whole of the war; we fought on different fronts, and did not even meet on leave. I did hear from him, once. And this is what he said:

  In spite of everything, I have managed to get to Monte Verita each year, as I promised to do. I stayed a night with the old man in the village, and climbed onto the mountaintop the following day. It looked exactly the same. Quite dead, and silent. I left a letter for Anna beneath the wall and sat there, all the day, looking at the place, feeling her near. I knew she would not come to me. The next day I went again, and was overjoyed to find a letter from her in return. If you can call it a letter. It was cut on flat stone, and I suppose this is the only method they have of communication. She said she was well, and strong, and very happy. She gave me her blessing, and you also. She told me never to be anxious for her. That was all. It was, as I told you at the nursing home, like a spirit message from the dead. With this I have to be content, and am. If I survive this war, I shall probably go out and live somewhere in that country, so that I can be near her, even if I never see her again, or hear nothing of her but a few words scrawled on a stone once a year.

  Good luck to yourself, old fellow. I wonder where you are.

  Victor

  When the armistice came, and I got myself demobilized and set about the restoration of my normal life, one of the first things I did was to inquire for Victor. I wrote to him, in Shropshire. I had a courteous reply from the nephew. He had taken over the house and the estate. Victor had been wounded, but not badly. He had now left England and was somewhere abroad, either in Italy or Spain, the nephew was not sure which. But he believed his uncle had decided to live out there for good. If he had news of him, he would let me know. No further news came. As to myself, I decided I disliked postwar London and the people who lived there. I cut myself loose from home ties too, and went to America.

  I did not see Victor again for nearly twenty years.

  It was not chance that brought us together again. I am sure of that. These things are predestined. I have a theory that each man's life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on. What combination of events brought me to Europe again at the age of fifty-five, two or three years before the Second World War, does not matter to this story. It so happened that I came.

  I was flying from one capital city to another--the names of both are immaterial--and the airplane in which I traveled made a forced landing, luckily without loss of life, in desolate mountainous country. For two days the crew and passengers, myself among them, held no contact with the outer world. We camped in the partially wrecked machine and waited for rescue. This adventure made headlines in the world Press at the time, even ta
king precedence, for a few days, over the simmering European situation.

  Hardship, for those forty-eight hours, was not acute. Luckily there were no women or children passengers traveling, so we men put the best face on it we could, and waited for rescue. We were confident that help would reach us before long. Our wireless had functioned until the moment of the forced landing, and the operator had given our position. It was all a matter of patience, and of keeping warm.

  For my part, with my mission in Europe accomplished and no ties strong enough back in the States to believe myself anxiously awaited, this sudden plunging into the sort of country that years ago I had most passionately loved was a strange experience. I had become so much a man of cities, and a creature of comfort. The high pulse of American living, the pace, the vitality, the whole breathless energy of the New World, had combined to make me forget the ties that still bound me to the Old.

  Now, looking about me in the desolation and the splendor, I knew what I had lacked all these years. I forgot my fellow travelers, forgot the gray fuselage of the crippled plane--an anachronism, surely, amid the wilderness of centuries--and forgot too my gray hair, my heavy frame, and all the burden of my five-and-fifty years. I was a boy again, hopeful, eager, seeking an answer to eternity. Surely it was there, waiting, beyond the further peaks. I stood there, incongruous in my city clothes, and the mountain fever raced back into my blood.

  I wanted to get away from the wrecked plane and the pinched faces of my companions; I wanted to forget the waste of the years between. What I would have given to be young again, a boy, and, reckless of the consequences, set forth towards those peaks and climb to glory. I knew how it would feel, up there on the higher mountains. The air keener and still more cold, the silence deeper. The strange burning quality of ice, the penetrating strength of the sun, and that moment when the heart misses a beat as the foot, momentarily slipping on the narrow ledge, seeks safety; the hand's clutch to the rope.

  I gazed up at them, the mountains that I loved, and felt a traitor. I had betrayed them for baser things, for comfort, ease, security. When rescue came to me and to my fellow travelers, I would make amends for the time that had been lost. There was no pressing hurry to return to the States. I would take a vacation, here in Europe, and go climbing once again. I would buy proper clothes, equipment, set myself to it. This decision taken, I felt lighthearted, irresponsible. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I returned to my little party, sheltering beside the plane, and laughed and joked through the remaining hours.