Philip Hands gazed carelessly upon the mountains that marched in a tremendous procession all round and below them.
“Yes, it is very high here,” he said soothingly. “It is much too high here. It is enough to turn anybody’s brain. Why did you come here? Let us go back.”
“I am never going back,” she answered. “I tell you I am gone mad. There must be madness in our family. It is a very old family. I could not stand the strain of waiting in that place. That is why I can never marry you. That is why I am here. That is why I will never go away from here.”
Philip Hands said:
“Oh, come!”
For the moment he could find nothing better to say. And then he pleaded the long agony of his ascent, all the terrible thoughts he had thought. He asked her to remember how faithfully he had followed her; he asked her to look how he had torn his clothes, and at the scratches on his hands.
Whilst he talked, his eyes wandered aimlessly down into one of the valleys, sheer down below their feet. It was a valley, but still it might have been the very top of a mountain—so high it was, like the crater of a very old, a very extinct, a hoary, a cold volcano. . . .
“And after I have followed you so faithfully,” he pleaded, desolately, “you are going to throw me over? You can’t mean to say you are going to throw me over?”
And then, suddenly, he exclaimed, “My God!” and with an irresistible action, impulsive of protection and of sudden flight, he clutched at her, and:
“The whole mountain’s moving!” he cried out.
She looked at him and caught the direction of his eyes. A sudden and incredulous joy appeared to fill her face.
“What do you see?” she called out. “What is it you see?”
“No, no,” he said. “Let us get away from here!”
She repeated imperiously, “Tell me what it is you see? Tell me, tell me!”
“What does it matter?” he said fiercely. “The mountain is moving. It looks like a man rolling over. An immense man! But it’s the mountain moving. We shall be killed.”
She caught him by the wrist and dragged him to the other side of the flat platform of their firm rock. A great screaming sound filled all the upper air, dissipating itself thinly in the immense reaches of space. She pointed.
“What is it you see?” she exclaimed imperiously. “What is it you see there?”
“It’s the same thing,” he said, “the mountain is moving. The whole mountain is moving under our feet. The rocks are flying about.”
And it appeared to him that an immense rock, as large as his father’s house, was thrown hurtling slowly into space far above them, to descend, passing right over their heads at a great height, crashing amongst the trees below.
“But what is it you see?” Annette insisted, until her tone had become an agony to his ears. “What is that thing there? What is it that moves?”
“Oh, it’s absurd,” he answered.
“In the name of God,” she cried out. “What is it? My whole life—my reason depends on this.”
He answered unwillingly and shamefaced.
“It’s all this fantastic mist. It’s a great, an immense man. It’s a mountain! It’s two mountains! One of them is throwing great rocks into the air. The other is scratching its side. That’s what makes the noise. Each time it scratches you hear that screaming. Do you see? There’s a deer running out of the wood; it looks smaller than an ant. Have we both gone mad?”
“No, no,” she answered. “We are neither of us mad. I see it. You see it. Oh, thank my God, I’m not mad. If I had seen it alone I should have been mad.”
And she threw her arms round him, and hid her face upon his shoulder that was wet with the mist.
“But the danger,” he said. “We’re in great danger. They’ve thrown another rock! Look!”
“Oh, what does it matter?” she answered passionately. “What does all the danger in the world matter? Don’t you understand? I saw this last night. I thought it was all nonsense about there being danger in this valley, and I was looking for the lost Grand Duke. I wanted to look for the Grand Duke and I saw all this! Don’t you understand? I thought I was mad!”
On the lower and easier slope, from the edge of the woods that curled up to the ridge, Philip perceived that there had slowly emerged the goat-like form of Dr. von Salzer. He was pushing before him the bath-chair, the ends of his immense beard brushing his laborious hands. Beside him walked Philip Hands’ mother, a little, odd figure, in black.
The Sanitätsrath came along very slowly. He was in his shirt sleeves and with his white arms he pointed energetically first down one slope of the ridge, then down the other, and, with his beard flowing out across his chest, he appeared to address long speeches to Mrs. Hands. Once, when a great rock was passing through the sky he began to run, dragging Mrs. Hands behind him and glancing apprehensively upwards. His motion reminded Philip Hands exactly of the attitudes of people as they ran to take shelter from bomb-fire, he had seen in sieges during the South African war. But the rock, thrown very high, fell far beyond the ridge.
“My God!” Philip Hands exclaimed, “it’s hit the other chap on the crown.”
The Sanitätsrath and Mrs. Hands were approaching them very slowly so that:
“Gracious lady,” his voice came up to them, “if these visions appear as real or seem as unreal as the other visions that you see and if one illusion appears no greater than the other, surely your cure should be completed. For all life is real; or all life is illusions. And who are we to say which are illusions or which are real? When we have such a little bit of life given to us surely it is unworthy of a man or of a woman to trouble about his, or about her illusions! If you hear voices, hear them and there is an end; if you see devils, see them and there is an end of it. Just as if you see and hear these danger zones of mine there is an end of it too. And this is an end of my cure. It is all I can do for you.”
He stopped and bowed to the old lady. They were at the very foot of the pinnacle upon which stood Philip Hands and Annette von Droste. And Mrs. Hands walking slowly forward, disappeared right under their feet.
“A bomb-proof shelter,” Philip Hands exclaimed, for he recognized that beneath their feet the pinnacle must be hollow towards the west. “A bomb-proof shelter, that’s exactly what this place appears to be.”
The Sanitätsrath had pushed the bath-chair away in front of him. He stood surveying Philip and Annette looking upwards with an attentive and a bland glance.
“Your two Excellencies,” he said mildly, “had better descend. That is not the safest place in the world for tragic explanations.”
They found von Salzer and Mrs. Hands in a little alcove that had been carved out of the pinnacle. It was exactly like the summer-houses you find at the top of every German hill. There were wooden seats fitted into the semi-circular wall. In the centre of the horse-shoe was a wooden table painted rusty red, and upon trestles at one side there stood a cask, and on the red table were four glass beer mugs.
The Sanitätsrath was wiping his perspiring brow with his white shirt sleeve and Mrs. Hands was fanning herself slowly with a very white handkerchief.
“Yes, that is all there is to it,” the Sanitätsrath lisped amiably. He combed his beard with three fingers. He peeped at them all with a queer smile and, bending down, he picked up from the bath-chair his black alpaca jacket which he slowly put on, and his brown straw hat which he crushed down over his eyes.
“So!” he ejaculated comfortably.
Annette had sunk down upon a seat, her head leaning back against the stone wall and her eyes closed. Mrs. Hands was leaning forward towards the table upon which her fingers drummed slowly. And Philip Hands, lost in an Anglo-Saxon amazement at the inappropriateness of the doctor’s actions, asked with a slight touch of irritation, “What the deuce is the meaning of it all?”
The doctor glanced at him quickly and negligently across his shoulder. He reached out and took a large beer mug from the table. He put it benea
th the tap of the barrel and when it was filled he held it to his lips and drank with deep satisfaction.
“So!” he exclaimed once more. Then he sat down beside Mrs. Hands and slowly extended his spidery fingers to her wrist.
“It is a very good pulse,” he said. He remained for some time gazing at the ground, then he looked at Annette von Droste.
“So, Excellency,” he said, with an air of tender malice, “last night we were mad, and to-day we are sane again?”
Annette slowly opened her eyes.
“Oh, we are all quite sane again,” the Sanitätsrath said. He pointed a thin, white and curved forefinger exactly at her nose.
“Listen, you,” he said. “I will tell you how it was. You were about to promise to marry his young Excellency the Second Secretary of Embassy. You say to yourself: Now you will have your last moment of freedom! You will come and seek for the lost Grand Duke. For when you are married to this gentleman you will lose your liberty and never will he agree to permit you such a breach of the laws. So you creep up through the woods and you are frightened and alarmed, and after a long climb you come last night upon my two large ones. Last night my large ogres were very merry and noisy. I heard them far down below and you saw them, and you thought you have become mad because of your ancestors, and all such nonsense as I am for ever contesting. So you run back and tell our young friend that you are unfit to marry him. And then again once more this morning in your agony of mind you run here again to see if still the shapes of your madness existed. . . . Yes, is that not all true?”
Annette von Droste gazed with all her large eyes at the Sanitätsrath.
“And I was not mad,” she whispered.
The Sanitätsrath slowly crossed his arms in their alpaca sleeves. “Then there is an end of it,” he said, “and it all ends very well.”
“But it isn’t an end of it at all,” Philip Hands exclaimed. “I must have some explanation of all this foolery!”
The Sanitätsrath looked at him penetratingly for a long time. Suddenly he rose and catching Hands by the wrist in his firm doctor’s grasp, he led him swiftly out on to the ridge. He pointed straight down into each of the rocky cups decorated with the torn pines that were below them, one on each hand.
“What do you see?” he said.
Philip answered, “Oh, I know all that.”
“They are quite still now,” the professor said. “Both large ones. They are asleep. But I will give you a thousand pounds to go down into either of those valleys. I will give two thousand. I will give you ten thousand. I will give you all my fortune if you will bring me the thigh bone of the skeleton that is near the shoulder of the Large One on our left.”
“Damn you!” Philip exclaimed. “Don’t you know I am just engaged to be married?”
“I do not need the thigh bone,” the professor lisped gently. “It is nothing to me. Yet I offer you a quarter of a million marks if you will fetch it for me. And you will not do it. . . Then you may tell Her Excellency Annette that you are paying a quarter of a million marks in order to prove her sanity. For if you believed my large ones mere illusions, you would go down and fetch me that thigh bone. Yet now! There! You shudder all over your body and start back when I draw your wrist one-fifth of an inch downwards as if I were about to force you towards the slope.”
Philip swore beneath his breath. The Sanitätsrath led him back towards the little alcove.
“So then,” he said, “there is an end of it.”
Annette leant suddenly forward.
“Excellent Wirkicher Geheim Sanitätsrath,” she pleaded, “would it not help in the cure both of myself and Mrs. Hands if you would explain a little more?”
Von Salzer caught all the ends of his beard into his right hand.
“It is all explained that I can explain,” he said. “I am a child in these matters. . . . Oh, oh!” he checked the expostulations that were rising to her lips. “If you could ask the Hofrath von Kellermann—a biologist now! But a mere nerve-doctor like myself! How can I explain these things? There they are, my two large ogres. They help me to cure my patients of a certain class. My business is to cure patients of a certain class, and that is the end of it, for me.”
“But the Hofrath von Kellermann was buried this morning,” Philip Hands exclaimed.
“No, no,” the doctor answered amiably, “his body was taken to the train. He is to be buried in Berlin in the Hedwigs Kirche in four days’ time. There will a great ceremony and many speeches. He was a biologist of world-wide fame.”
Over his folded arms the doctor looked reminiscently at the ground.
“For three years,” he said, “on and off for every day the Hofrath has sat here observing my Large Ones. He had a little donkey cart. It brought up this barrel of good beer that he will never drink again. He has surveyed them with field glasses; he has measured them with geometric projections, he has watched them in their sleep. For hours and hours he has sat here alone, he has sat here with me and never have I known a man of such unflagging industry and of such enormous skill. I wish I could show you the model of the skeleton of one of my Large Ones that he has made by conjecture. They differ, he says, as much from man as from the larger apes, only in the disproportionately enormous length of the spine from the lower ribs downwards.”
“But where is the romance in all this?” Annette von Droste said. “Where is all the wonder?”
The doctor smiled at her—a sunny and friendly smile.
“Child,” he said, “you have heard of Woden and Thor. Well, the Hofrath in consultation with Professor Dr. von Gobel the historian of the University of Isclimgen arrived at the conclusion that my Large Ones gave rise to the legend of Woden and Thor, the deities of the high and wonderful past of us Teutons. I know nothing of these things, for I am neither a historian nor a biologist. But this opinion is by no means a new one in the Christian world since the convent of Drieselheim, as you will find in any guide book, was built in the year 969 just after the date of the conversion of this part of Germany to Christianity. In order to enclose for ever within these valleys, two immense devils—duo imtnanes diaboli. And from that date until the convent was shelled during the war between Prussia and Austria and the nuns dispersed—from that date until the year 1866 the convent was never without these brave and courageous sisters who were of the opinion that by their prayers alone they kept back from our beloved nation the horrors of pagan worship.”
“But hang it all!” Philip Hands said. “You don’t mean to say that these things were really pagan gods, or that the prayers of nuns kept them shut up in a valley?”
“I don’t mean to tell you anything, my friend,” the doctor said. “These are things for specialists. Specialists in the history of religion will tell you one thing; specialists in biology another; historians another; I, I am a humble nerve doctor. And if I report to you the conclusions of the Hofrath von Kellermann and his scientific colleagues which will be published in a lucid and compendious volume, I don’t do any more than give you the faintest shadows of their splendid arguments which, according to my humble lights, I have mastered in order to be of service to my patients. For my business is to assure people who are in doubt as to their sanity that they are sane.”
“But the Hofrath von Kellermann—” Philip Hands began.
“The Hofrath von Kellermann,” the doctor continued, “died here yesterday on his four hundred and twenty-first visit to my Large Ones. How he died is not known. He was found crushed to pieces at the bottom of the mountain. But whether he was killed by a rock falling upon him or whether he himself was taken up and thrown down to this great distance, it is very difficult to say. For my Large Ones are of a placid and amiable disposition. They do not eat nor do they, as a rule, touch any living animal, though, at intervals of about a month, the Hofrath observed that one or the other of them would take a pine tree and grind it between his teeth. But the Hofrath was of opinion that this was not done for the sake of nourishment but more probably in order to while away t
he time as you might chew the stump of an unlit cigar.”
“But—” Mr. Hands began again.
“Excellent Mr. Second Secretary of Embassy,” the Sanitätsrath said, “in order to save you the trouble of incessant questions I will try to sum up for you the conclusions arrived at by these eminent professors.”
Philip Hands couldn’t restrain himself from remarking, “I don’t see why you haven’t got some American agent to boom these—these giants? It would have been the sensation of the world.”
And at the same moment Mrs. Hands exclaimed:
“Don’t continue to exhibit yourself as an indomitable ass, Philip!” The Fraulein von Droste, intent upon her more romantic train of mind, asked:
“And the lost Grand Duke?”
The doctor glanced at her quietly and amiably.
“Ah, my never to be sufficiently lamented and glorious lord!” he said. “It was his case that set me on to preach the crusade that I am never tired of preaching—the crusade that there is no such thing as madness. They said he was mad but he was a man of grandiloquent schemes and magnificent achievements. It was simply that he was outside the plan of his circumstances. He desired to be greater than Tiberias so he built splendid palaces that his subjects couldn’t pay for. He desired to be greater than Alexander so he was perpetually raising forces to prepare for a struggle against Prussia. He desired to emulate Hercules and so he came here to fight with the Large Ones, the secret of whose existence was the heritage of his illustrious position. He came here, you understand, alone, the sisters of the convent and the officials of his court begging him to desist from the dangerous adventure. And that is all that is known of him! There was never another trace. Where do his bones lie rotting? Who knows? As a young man, being his body physician, I searched every nook of the valley, I climbed in between the legs of the Large Ones as they slept.”
“You!” Mr. Philip Hands exclaimed.
“Excellent Mr. Second Secretary,” the doctor said ironically, “if you will climb down and examine these beings who appear to be now once more asleep, you will discover that their forms are covered with a grey-black hair, so coarse that it resembles the plants known as mares’-tails, and the grain of their flesh is so huge that with its indentations and the dirt that is upon it, it resembles a rough and uncultivated field, whilst the warmth that they give out is so considerable that each of these little valleys like cups appears like a greenhouse for heat and the stench is intolerable. If you will only climb you will observe all these things.”
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