Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  There where they lay together side by side among Alpine roses in full bloom — there on the crag’s edge, watching the Swiss soldiery below combing the flanks of Mount Terrible for the perpetrators of that hellish murder at the shrine, these two people could see the Via Mala which had been the Via Crucis — the tragic Golgotha for that poor girl Helsa Kampf.

  They could almost see the gaunt, black cross itself from which the brutish Boches had kicked the carved and weather-beaten figure of Christ in order to nail to the massive cross the living hands and feet of that half-senseless girl whom they supposed had betrayed them.

  The man lying there on the edge of the chasm was Kay McKay; the girl stretched on her stomach beside him was Evelyn Erith.

  All that day they watched the Swiss soldiers searching Mount Terrible; saw a red fox steal from the lower thickets and bolt between the legs of the beaters who swung their rifle-butts at the streak of ruddy fur; saw little mountain birds scatter into flight, so closely and minutely the soldiers searched; saw even a big auerhahn burst into thunderous flight from the ferns to a pine and from the pine out across the terrific depths of space below the white shoulder of Thusis. At night the Swiss camp-fires glimmered on the rocks of Mount Terrible while, fireless, McKay and Miss Erith lay in their blankets under heaps of dead leaves on the knees of Thusis, cold as the moon that silvered their forest beds.

  But it was the last of the soldiery on Mount Terrible; for dawn revealed their dead fire and a summit untenanted save by the stark and phantom crucifix looming through rising mists.

  Evelyn Erith still slept; McKay fed the three carrier-pigeons, washed himself at the snow-rill in the woods, then went over to the crag’s gritty edge under which for three days now the ghoulish clamour of a lammergeier had seldom ceased. And now, as McKay peered down, two stein-adlers came flapping to the shelf on which hung something that seemed to flutter at times like a shred of cloth stirred by the abyss winds.

  The lammergeier, huge and horrible with scarlet eyes ablaze, came out on the shelf of rock and yelped at the great rock-eagles; but, if something indeed lay dead there, possibly it was enough for all — or perhaps the vulture-like bird was too heavily gorged to offer battle. McKay saw the rock-eagles alight heavily on the shelf, then, squealing defiance, hulk forward, undeterred by the hobgoblin tumult of the lammergeier.

  McKay leaned over the gulf as far as he dared. He could get down to the shelf; he was now convinced of that. Only fear of being seen by the soldiers on Mount Terrible had hitherto prevented him.

  Rope and steel-shod stick aided him. Sapling and shrub stood loyally as his allies. The rock-eagles heard him coming and launched themselves overboard into the depthless sea of air; the lammergeier, a huge, foul mass of distended feathers, glared at him out of blazing scarlet eyes; and all around was his vomit and casting in a mass of bloody human bones and shreds of clothing.

  And it was in that nauseating place of peril, confronting the grisly thing that might have hurled him outward into space with one wing-blow had it not been clogged with human flesh and incapable, that McKay reached for the remnants of the dead Hun’s clothing and, facing the feathered horror, searched for evidence and information.

  Never had he been so afraid; never had he so loathed a living creature as this unclean and spectral thing that sat gibbering and voiding filth at him — the ghastly symbol of the Hunnish empire itself befouling the clean-picked bones of the planet it was dismembering.

  He had his pistol but dared not fire, not knowing what ears across the gorge might hear the shot, not knowing either whether the death-agonies of the enormous thing might hurl him a thousand feet to annihilation.

  So he took what he found in the rags of clothing and climbed back as slowly and stealthily as he had come.

  And found Miss Erith cross-legged on the dead leaves braiding her yellow hair in the first sun-rays.

  Tethered by long cords attached to anklets over one leg the three pigeons walked busily around under the trees gorging themselves on last year’s mast.

  That afternoon they dared light a fire and made soup from the beef tablets in their packs — the first warm food they had tasted in a week.

  A declining sun painted the crags in raw splendour; valleys were already dusky; a vast stretch of misty glory beyond the world of mountains to the north was Alsace; southward there was no end to the myriad snowy summits, cloud-like, piled along the horizon. The brief meal ended.

  McKay set a pannikin of water to boil and returned to his yellow-haired comrade. Like some slim Swiss youth — some boy mountaineer — and clothed like one, Miss Erith sat at the foot of a tree in the ruddy sunlight studying once more the papers which McKay had discovered that morning among the bloody debris on the shelf of rock.

  As he came up he knew he had never seen anything as pretty in his life, but he did not say so. Any hint of sentiment that might have budded had been left behind when they crossed the Swiss wire beyond Delle. An enforced intimacy such as theirs tended to sober them both; and if at times it preoccupied them, that was an added reason not only to ignore it but also to conceal any effort it might entail to take amiably but indifferently a situation foreseen, deliberately embraced, yet scarcely entirely discounted.

  The girl was so pretty in her youth’s clothing; her delicate ankles and white knees bare between the conventional thigh-length of green embossed leather breeches, rough green stockings, and fleece-lined hob-nailed shoes. And over the boy’s shirt the mountaineer’s frieze jacket! — with staghorn buttons. And the rough wool cuff fell on the hands of a duchess! — pistols at either hip, and a murderous Bavarian knife in front.

  Glancing up at him where he stood under the red pine beside her:

  “I’ll do the dishes presently,” she said.

  “I’ll do them,” he remarked, his eyes involuntarily seeking her hands.

  A pink flush grew on her weather-tanned face — or perhaps it was the reddening sunlight stealing through some velvet piny space in the forest barrier. If it was a slight blush in recognition of his admiration she wondered at her capacity for blushing. However, Marie Antoinette coloured from temple to throat on the scaffold. But the girl knew that the poor Queen’s fate was an enviable one compared to what awaited her if she fell into the hands of the Hun.

  McKay seated himself near her. The sunny silence of the mountains was intense. Over a mass of alpine wild flowers hanging heavy and fragrant between rocky clefts two very large and intensely white butterflies fought a fairy battle for the favours of a third — a dainty, bewildering creature, clinging to an unopened bud, its snowy wings a-quiver.

  The girl’s golden eyes noted the pretty courtship, and her side glance rested on the little bride to be with an odd, indefinite curiosity, partly interrogative, partly disdainful.

  It seemed odd to the girl that in this Alpine solitude life should be encountered at all. And as for life’s emotions, the frail, frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight, embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled peaks and the terrific twilight of the world’s depths below.

  McKay, studying the papers, glanced up at Miss Erith. A bar of rosy sunset light slanted almost level between them.

  “There seems to be,” he said slowly, “only one explanation for what you and I read here. The Boche has had his filthy fist on the throat of Switzerland for fifty years.”

  “And what is ‘Les Errues’ to which these documents continually refer?” asked the girl.

  “Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton of Switzerland. It is the strip of forest and crag which includes all the northeastern region below Mount Terrible. It is a canton, a secret canton unrepresented in the Federal Assembly — a region without human population — a secret slice of Swiss wilderness OWNED BY GERMANY!”

  “Kay, do you believe that?”

  “I am sure of it now. It is that wilderness into which I stumbled. It overlooks the t
errain in Alsace where for fifty years the Hun has been busy day and night with his sinister, occult operations. Its entrance, if there be any save by the way of avalanches — the way I entered — must be guarded by the Huns; its only exit into Hunland. That is Les Errues. That is the region which masks the Great Secret of the Hun.”

  He dropped the papers and, clasping his knees in his arms, sat staring out into the infernal blaze of sunset.

  “The world,” he said slowly, “pays little attention to that agglomeration of cantons called Switzerland. The few among us who know anything about its government might recollect that there are twenty-six cantons — the list begins, Aargau, Appenzell, Ausser-Rhoden, Inner-Rhoden — you may remember — and ends with Valais, Vaud, Zug, and Zurich. And Les Errues is the twenty-seventh canton!”

  “Yes,” said the girl in a low voice, “the evidence lies at your feet.”

  “Surely, surely,” he muttered, his fixed gaze lost on the crimson celestial conflagration. She said, thinking aloud, and her clear eyes on him:

  “Then, of the Great Secret, we have learned this much anyway — that there exists in Switzerland a secret canton called Les Errues; that it is practically Hun territory; that it masks what they call their Great Secret; that their ownership or domination of Les Errues is probably a price paid secretly by the Swiss government for its national freedom and that this arrangement is absolutely unknown to anybody in the world outside of the Imperial Hun government and the few Swiss who have inherited, politically, a terrible knowledge of this bargain dating back, probably, from 1870.”

  “That is the situation we are confronting,” admitted McKay calmly.

  She said with perfect simplicity: “Of course we must go into Les

  Errues.”

  “Of course, comrade. How?”

  He had no plan — could have none. She knew it. Her question was merely meant to convey to him a subtle confirmation of her loyalty and courage. She scarcely expected to escape a dreadful fate on this quest — did not quite see how either of them could really hope to come out alive. But that they could discover the Great Secret of the Hun, and convey to the world by means of their pigeons some details of the discovery, she felt reasonably certain. She had much faith in the arrangements they had made to do this.

  “One thing worries me a lot,” remarked McKay pleasantly.

  “Food supply?”

  He nodded.

  She said: “Now that the Boche have left Mount Terrible — except that wretched creature whose bones lie on the shelf below — we might venture to kill whatever game we can find.”

  “I’m going to,” he said. “The Swiss troops have cleared out. I’ve got to risk it. Of course, down there in Les Errues, some Hun guarding some secret chamois trail into the forbidden wilderness may hear our shots.”

  “We shall have to take that chance,” she remarked.

  He said in the low, quiet voice which always thrilled her a little:

  “You poor child — you are hungry.”

  “So are you, Kay.”

  “Hungry? These rations act like cocktails: I could barbecue a roebuck and finish him with you at one sitting!”

  “Monsieur et Madame Gargantua,” she mocked him with her enchanting laughter. Then, wistful: “Kay, did you see that very fat and saucy auerhahn which the Swiss soldiers scared out of the pines down there?”

  “I did,” said McKay. “My mouth watered.”

  “He was quite as big as a wild turkey,” sighed the girl.

  “They’re devils to get,” said McKay, “and with only a pistol — well, anyway we’ll try to-night. Did you mark that bird?”

  “Mark him?”

  “Yes; mark him down?”

  She shook her pretty head.

  “Well, I did,” grinned McKay. “It’s habit with a man who shoots. Besides, seeing him was like a bit of Scotland — their auerhahn is kin to the black-cock and capercailzie. So I marked him to the skirt of Thusis, yonder — in line with that needle across the gulf and, through it, to that bunch of pinkish-stemmed pines — there where the brook falls into silver dust above that gorge. He’ll lie there. Just before daybreak he’ll mount to the top of one of those pines. We’ll hear his yelping. That’s our only chance at him.”

  “Could you ever hit him in the dark of dawn, Kay?”

  “With a pistol? And him atop a pine? No, not under ordinary conditions. But I’m hungry, dear Yellow-hair, and that is not all: you are hungry—” He looked at her so intently that the colour tinted her face and the faint little thrill again possessed her.

  Her glance stole involuntarily toward the white butterflies. One had disappeared. The two others, drunk with their courtship, clung to a scented blossom.

  Gravely Miss Erith lifted her young eyes to the eternal peaks — to Thusis, icy, immaculate, chastely veiled before the stealthy advent of the night.

  Oddly, yet without fear, death seemed to her very near. And love, also — both in the air, both abroad and stirring, yet neither now of vital consequence. Only service meant anything now to this young man so near her — to herself. And after that — after accomplishment — love? — death? — either might come to them then. And find them ready, perhaps.

  The awful, witch-like screaming of the lammergeier saluted the falling darkness where he squatted, a huge huddle of unclean plumage amid the debris of decay and death.

  “I don’t believe I could have faced that,” murmured the girl. “You have more courage than I have, Kay.”

  “No! I was scared stiff. A bird like that could break a man’s arm with a wing-blow…. That — that thing he’d been feeding on — it must have been a Boche of high military rank to carry these papers.”

  “You could not find out?”

  “There were only the rags of his mufti there and these papers inside them. Nothing to identify him personally — not a tag, not a shred of anything. Unless the geier bolted it—”

  She turned aside in disgust at the thought.

  “When do you suppose he happened to fall to his death there, Kay?”

  “In the darkness when the Huns scattered after the crucifixion. Perhaps the horror of it came suddenly upon him — God knows what happened when he stepped outward into depthless space and went crashing down to hell.”

  They had stayed their hunger on the rations. It was bitter cold in the leafy lap of Thusis, but they feared to light a fire that night.

  McKay fed and covered the pigeons in their light wicker box which was carried strapped to his mountain pack.

  Evelyn Erith fell asleep in her blanket under the dead leaves piled over her by McKay. After awhile he slept too; but before dawn he awoke, took a flash-light and his pistol and started down the slope for the wood’s edge.

  Her sweet, sleepy voice halted him: “Kay dear?”

  “Yes, Yellow-hair.”

  “May I go?”

  “Don’t you want to sleep?”

  “No.”

  She sat up under a tumbling shower of silvery dead leaves, shook out her hair, gathered it and twisted it around her brow like a turban.

  Then, flashing her own torch, she sprang to her feet and ran lightly down to where the snow brook whirled in mossy pools below.

  When she came back he took her cold smooth little hand fresh from icy ablutions: “We must beat it,” he said; “that auerhahn won’t stay long in his pine-tree after dawn. Extinguish your torch.”

  She obeyed and her warning fingers clasped his more closely as together they descended the path of light traced out before them by his electric torch.

  Down, down, down they went under hard-wood and evergreen, across little fissures full of fern, skirting great slabs of rock, making detours where tangles checked progress.

  Through tree-tops the sky glittered — one vast sheet of stars; and in the forest was a pale lustre born of this celestial splendour — a pallid dimness like that unreal day which reigns in the regions of the dead.

  “We might meet the shade of Helen here,” said
the girl, “or of Eurydice. This is a realm of spirits. … We may be one with them very soon — you and I. Do you suppose we shall wander here among these trees as long as time lasts?”

  “It’s all right if we’re together, Yellow-hair.”

  There was no accent from his fingers clasped in hers; none in hers either.

  “I hope we’ll be together, then,” she said.

  “Will you search for me, Yellow-hair?”

  “Yes. Will you, Kay?”

  “Always.”

  “And I — always — until I find you or you find me.” … Presently she laughed gaily under her breath: “A solemn bargain, isn’t it?”

  “More solemn than marriage.”

  “Yes,” said the girl faintly.

  Something went crashing off into the woods as they reached the hogback which linked them with the group of pines whither the big game-bird had pitched into cover. Perhaps it was a roe deer; McKay flashed the direction in vain.

  “If it were a Boche?” she whispered.

  “No; it sounded like a four-legged beast. There are chamois and roe deer and big mountain hares along these heights.”

  They went on until the hog-back of sheer rock loomed straight ahead, and beyond, against a paling sky, the clump of high pines toward which they were bound.

  McKay extinguished his torch and pocketed it.

  “The sun will lead us back, Yellow-hair,” he whispered. “Now hold very tightly to my hand, for it’s a slippery and narrow way we tread together.”

  The rocks were glassy. But there were bushes and mosses; and presently wild grass and soil on the other side.

  All around them, now, the tall pines loomed, faintly harmonious in the rising morning breeze which, in fair weather, always blows DOWN from the upper peaks into the valleys. Into the shadows they passed together a little way; then halted. The girl rested one shoulder against a great pine, leaning there and facing him where he also rested, listening.

  There reigned in the woods that intense stillness which precedes dawn — an almost painful tension resembling apprehension. Always the first faint bird-note breaks it; then silence ends like a deep sigh exhaling and death seems very far away.