Complete weird tales of.., p.1241
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1241
There grew a sudden chill across the floor; the cracks of the boards let it in. He leaned down and drew his sabots toward him from their place near the andirons, and slipped them over his chaussons; and as he straightened up, his eyes mechanically sought the mantel above, where in the dusk another pair of sabots stood, little, slender, delicate sabots, carved from red beach. A year’s dust grayed their surface; a year’s rust dulled the silver band across the in-step. He said this to himself aloud, knowing that it was within a few minutes of the year.
His own sabots came from Mort-Dieu; they were shaved square and banded with steel. But in days past he had thought that no sabot in Mort-Dieu was delicate enough to touch the instep of the Mort-Dieu passeur. So he sent to the shore lighthouse, and they sent to Lorient, where the women are coquettish and show their hair under the coiffe, and wear dainty sabots; and in this town, where vanity corrupts and their is much lace on coiffe and collarette, a pair of delicate sabots was found, banded with silver and chiselled in red beach. The sabots stood on the mantel above the fire now, dusty and tarnished.
There was a sound from the window, the soft murmur of snow blotting glass panes. The wind, too, muttered under the roof eaves. Presently it would begin to whisper to him from the chimney — he knew it — and he held his hands over his ears and stared at the clock.
In the hamlet of Mort-Dieu the pines sing all day of the sea secrets, but in the night the ghosts of little gray birds fill the branches, singing of the sunshine of past years. He heard the song as he sat, and he crushed his hands over his ears; but the gray birds joined with the wind in the chimney, and he heard all that he dared not hear, and he thought all that he dared not hope or think, and the swift tears scalded his eyes.
In Mort-Dieu the nights are longer than anywhere on earth; he knew it — why should he not know? This had been so for a year; it was different before. There were so many things different before; days and nights vanished like minutes then; the pines told no secrets of the sea, and the gray birds had not yet come to Mort-Dieu. Also, there was Jeanne, passeur at the Carmes.
When he first saw her she was poling the square, flat-bottomed ferry skiff from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu, a red handkerchief bound across her silky black hair, a red skirt fluttering just below her knees. The next time he saw her he had to call to her across the placid river, “Ohé! Ohé, passeur!” She came, poling the flat skiff, her deep blue eyes fixed pensively on him, the scarlet skirt and kerchief idly flapping in the April wind. Then day followed day when the far call “Passeur!” grew clearer and more joyous, and the faint answering cry, “I come!” rippled across the water like music tinged with laughter. Then spring came, and with spring came love love, carried free across the ferry from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu.
The flame above the charred log whistled, flickered, and went out in a jet of wood vapour, only to play like lightning above the gas and relight again. The clock ticked more loudly, and the song from the pines filled the room. But in his straining eyes a summer landscape was reflected, where white clouds sailed and white foam curled under the square bow of a little skiff. And he pressed his numbed hands tighter to his ears to drown the cry, “Passeur! Passeur!”
And now for a moment the clock ceased ticking. It was time to go — who but he should know it, he who went out into the night swinging his lantern? And he went. He had gone each night from the first — from that first strange winter evening when a strange voice had answered him across the river, the voice of the new passeur. He had never heard her voice again.
So he passed down the windy wooden stairs, lantern hanging lighted in his hand, and stepped out into the storm. Through sheets of drifting snow, over heaps of frozen seaweed and icy drift he moved, shifting his lantern right and left, until its glimmer on the water warned him. Then he called out into the night, “Passeur!” The frozen spray spattered his face and crusted the lantern; he heard the distant boom of breakers beyond the bar, and the noise of mighty winds among the seaward cliffs.
“Passeur!”
Across the broad flat river, black as a sea of pitch, a tiny light sparkled a moment. Again he cried, “Passeur!”
“I come!”
He turned ghastly white, for it was her voice — or was he crazy? — and he sprang waist deep into the icy current and cried out again, but his voice ended in a sob.
Slowly through the snow the flat skiff took shape, creeping nearer and nearer. But she was not at the pole — he saw that; there was only a tall, thin man, shrouded to the eyes in oilskin; and he leaped into the boat and bade the ferryman hasten.
Halfway across he rose in the skiff, and called, “Jeanne!” But the roar of the storm and the thrashing of icy waves drowned his voice. Yet he heard her again, and she called to him by name.
When at last the boat grated upon the in visible shore, he lifted his lantern, trembling, stumbling among the rocks, and calling to her, as though his voice could silence the voice that had spoken a year ago that night. And it could not. He sank shivering upon his knees, and looked out into the darkness, where an ocean rolled across a world. Then his stiff lips moved, and he repeated her name; but the hand of the ferryman fell gently upon his head.
And when he raised his eyes he saw that the ferryman was Death.
The moving finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
FITZGERALD.
THE KEY TO GRIEF.
The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky
The deer to the wholesome wold,
And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
As it was in the days of old.
KIPLING.
I.
THEY were doing their work very badly. They got the rope around his neck, and tied his wrists with moose-bush withes, but again he fell, sprawling, turning, twisting over the leaves, tearing up everything around him like a trapped panther.
He got the rope away from them; he clung to it with bleeding fists; he set his white teeth in it, until the jute strands relaxed, unravelled, and snapped, gnawed through by his white teeth.
Twice Tully struck him with a gum hook. The dull blows fell on flesh rigid as stone.
Panting, foul with forest mould and rotten leaves, hands and face smeared with blood, he sat up on the ground, glaring at the circle of men around him.
“Shoot him!” gasped Tully, dashing the sweat from his bronzed brow; and Bates, breathing heavily, sat down on a log and dragged a revolver from his rear pocket. The man on the ground watched him; there was froth in the corners of his mouth.
“Git back!” whispered Bates, but his voice and hand trembled. “Kent,” he stammered, “won’t ye hang?”
The man on the ground glared.
“Ye’ve got to die, Kent,” he urged; “they all say so. Ask Lefty Sawyer; ask Dyce; ask Carrots. — He’s got to swing fur it — ain’t he, Tully? — Kent, fur God’s sake, swing fur these here gents!”
The man on the ground panted; his bright eyes never moved.
After a moment Tully sprang on him again. There was a flurry of leaves, a crackle, a gasp and a grunt, then the thumping and thrashing of two bodies writhing in the brush. Dyce and Carrots jumped on the prostrate men. Lefty Sawyer caught the rope again, but the jute strands gave way and he stumbled. Tully began to scream, “He’s chokin me!” Dyce staggered out into the open, moaning over a broken wrist.
“Shoot!” shouted Lefty Sawyer, and dragged Tully aside. “Shoot, Jim Bates! Shoot straight, b’God!”
“Git back!” gasped Bates, rising from the fallen log.
The crowd parted right and left; a quick report rang out — another — another. Then from the whirl of smoke a tall form staggered, dealing blows — blows that sounded sharp as the crack of a whip.
“He’s off! Shoot straight!” they cried.
There was a gallop of heavy boots in the woods. Bates, faint and dazed, turned his head.
“Shoot!” shrieked Tully.
But Bates was sick; his smoking revolver fell to the ground; his white face and pale eyes contracted. It lasted only a moment; he started after the others, plunging, wallowing through thickets of osier and hemlock underbrush.
Far ahead he heard Kent crashing on like a young moose in November, and he knew he was making for the shore. The others knew too. Already the gray gleam of the sea cut a straight line along the forest edge; already the soft clash of the surf on the rocks broke faintly through the forest silence.
“He’s got a canoe there!” bawled Tully. “He’ll be into it!”
And he was into it, kneeling in the bow, driving his paddle to the handle. The rising sun gleamed like red lightning on the flashing blade; the canoe shot to the crest of a wave, hung, bows dripping in the wind, dropped into the depths, glided, tipped, rolled, shot up again, staggered, and plunged on.
Tully ran straight out into the cove surf; the water broke against his chest, bare and wet with sweat. Bates sat down on a worn black rock and watched the canoe listlessly.
The canoe dwindled to a speck of gray and silver; and when Carrots, who had run back to the gum camp for a rifle, returned, the speck on the water might have been easier to hit than a loon’s head at twilight. So Carrots, being thrifty by nature, fired once, and was satisfied to save the other cartridges. The canoe was still visible, making for the open sea. Some where beyond the horizon lay the keys, a string of rocks bare as skulls, black and slimy where the sea cut their base, white on the crests with the excrement of sea birds.
“He’s makin’ fur the Key to Grief!” whispered Bates to Dyce.
Dyce, moaning, and nursing his broken wrist, turned a sick face out to sea.
The last rock seaward was the Key to Grief, a splintered pinnacle polished by the sea. From the Key to Grief, seaward a day’s paddle, if a man dared, lay the long wooded island in the ocean known as Grief on the charts of the bleak coast.
In the history of the coast, two men had made the voyage to the Key to Grief, and from there to the island. One of these was a rum-crazed pelt hunter, who lived to come back; the other was a college youth; they found his battered canoe at sea, and a day later his battered body was flung up in the cove.
So, when Bates whispered to Dyce, and when Dyce called to the others, they knew that the end was not far off for Kent and his canoe; and they turned away into the forest, sullen, but satisfied that Kent would get his dues when the devil got his.
Lefty spoke vaguely of the wages of sin. Carrots, with an eye to thrift, suggested a plan for an equitable division of Kent’s property.
When they reached the gum camp they piled Kent’s personal effects on a blanket.
Carrots took the inventory: a revolver, two gum hooks, a fur cap, a nickel-plated watch, a pipe, a pack of new cards, a gum sack, forty pounds of spruce gum, and a frying pan.
Carrots shuffled the cards, picked out the joker, and flipped it pensively into the fire. Then he dealt cold decks all around.
When the goods and chattels of their late companion had been divided by chance — for there was no chance to cheat — somebody remembered Tully.
“He’s down there on the coast, starin’ after the canoe,” said Bates huskily.
He rose and walked toward a heap on the ground covered by a blanket. He started to lift the blanket, hesitated, and finally turned away. Under the blanket lay Tully’s brother, shot the night before by Kent.
“Guess we’d better wait till Tully comes,” said Carrots uneasily. Bates and Kent had been campmates. An hour later Tully walked into camp.
He spoke to no one that day. In the morning Bates found him down on the coast digging, and said: “Hello, Tully! Guess we ain’t much hell on lynchin!”
“Naw,” said Tully. “Git a spade.”
“Goin’ to plant him there?”
“Yep.”
““Where he kin hear them waves?”
“Yep.”
“Purty spot.”
“Yep.”
“Which way will he face?”
“Where he kin watch fur that damned canoe!” cried Tully fiercely.
“He — he can’t see,” ventured Bates uneasily. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”
“He’ll heave up that there sand when the canoe comes back! An it’s a-comin! An’ Bud Kent’ll be in it, dead or alive! Git a spade!”
The pale light of superstition nickered in Bates’s eyes. He hesitated.
“The — the dead can’t see,” he began; “kin they?”
Tully turned a distorted face toward him.
“Yer lie!” he roared. “My brother kin see, dead or livin’! An he’ll see the hangin’
of Bud Kent! An’ he’ll git up outer the grave fur to see it, Bill Bates! I’m tellin’ ye! I’m tellin’ ye! Deep as I’ll plant him, he’ll heave that there sand and call to me, when the canoe comes in! I’ll hear him; I’ll be here! An we’ll live to see the hangin’ of Bud Kent!”
Ahout sundown they planted Tully’s brother, face to the sea.
II.
On the Key to Grief the green waves rub all day. White at the summit, black at the base, the shafted rocks rear splintered pinnacles, slanting like channel buoys. On the polished pillars sea birds brood white-winged, bright-eyed sea birds, that nestle and preen and flap and clatter their orange-coloured beaks when the sifted spray drives and drifts across the reef.
As the sun rose, painting crimson streaks criss-cross over the waters, the sea birds sidled together, huddling row on row, steeped in downy drowse.
Where the sun of noon burnished the sea, an opal wave washed, listless, noiseless; a sea bird stretched one listless wing.
And into the silence of the waters a canoe glided, bronzed by the sunlight, jewelled by the salt drops stringing from prow to thwart, sea weed a-trail in the diamond-flashing wake, and in the bow a man dripping with sweat.
Up rose the gulls, sweeping in circles, turning, turning over rock and sea, and their clamour filled the sky, starting little rippling echoes among the rocks.
The canoe grated on a shelf of ebony; the seaweed rocked and washed; the little sea crabs sheered sideways, down, down into limpid depths of greenest shadows. Such was the coming of Bud Kent to the Key to Grief.
He drew the canoe halfway up the shelf of rock and sat down, breathing heavily, one brown arm across the bow. For an hour he sat there. The sweat dried under his eyes. The sea birds came back, filling the air with soft querulous notes.
There was a livid mark around his neck, a red, raw circle. The salt wind stung it; the sun burned it into his flesh like a collar of red-hot steel. He touched it at times; once he washed it with cold salt water.
Far in the north a curtain of mist hung on the sea, dense, motionless as the fog on the Grand Banks. He never moved his eyes from it; he knew what it was. Behind it lay the Island of Grief.
All the year round the Island of Grief is hidden by the banks of mist, ramparts of dead white fog encircling it on every side. Ships give it wide berth. Some speak of warm springs on the island whose waters flow far out to sea, rising in steam eternally.
The pelt hunter had come back with tales of forests and deer and flowers everywhere; but he had been drinking much, and much was forgiven him.
The body of the college youth tossed up in the cove on the mainland was battered out of recognition, but some said, when found, one hand clutched a crimson blossom half wilted, but broad as a sap pan.
So Kent lay motionless beside his canoe, burned with thirst, every nerve vibrating, thinking of all these things. It was not fear that whitened the firm flesh under the tan; it was the fear of fear. He must not think — he must throttle dread; his eyes must never falter, his head never turn from that wall of mist across the sea. With set teeth he crushed back terror; with glittering eyes he looked into the hollow eyes of fright. And so he conquered fear.
He rose. The sea birds whirled up into the sky, pitching, tossing, screaming, till the sharp flapping of their pinions set the snapping echoes flying among the rocks.
Under the canoe’s sharp prow the kelp bobbed and dipped and parted; the sunlit waves ran out ahead, glittering, dancing. Splash! splash! bow and stern! And now he knelt again, and the polished paddle swung and dipped, and swept and swung and dipped again.
Far behind, the clamour of the sea birds lingered in his ears, till the mellow dip of the paddle drowned all sound and the sea was a sea of silence.
No wind came to cool the hot sweat on cheek and breast. The sun blazed a path of flame before him, and he followed out into the waste of waters. The still ocean divided under the bows and rippled innocently away on either side, tinkling, foaming, sparkling like the current in a woodland brook. He looked around at the world of flattened water, and the fear of fear rose up and gripped his throat again. Then he lowered his head, like a tortured bull, and shook the fear of fear from his throat, and drove the paddle into the sea as a butcher stabs, to the hilt.
So at last he came to the wall of mist. It was thin at first, thin and cool, but it thickened and grew warmer, and the fear of fear dragged at his head, but he would not look behind.
Into the fog the canoe shot; the gray water ran by, high as the gunwales, oily, silent. Shapes flickered across the bows, pillars of mist that rode the waters, robed in films of tattered shadows. Gigantic forms towered to dizzy heights above him, shaking out shredded shrouds of cloud. The vast draperies of the fog swayed and hung and trembled as he brushed them; the white twilight deepened to a sombre gloom. And now it grew thinner; the fog became a mist, and the mist a haze, and the haze floated away and vanished into the blue of the heavens.
All around lay a sea of pearl and sapphire, lapping, lapping on a silver shoal.
So he came to the Island of Grief.
III.
On the silver shoal the waves washed and washed, breaking like crushed opals where the sands sang with the humming froth.
Troops of little shore birds, wading on the shoal, tossed their sun-tipped wings and scuttled inland, where, dappled with shadow from the fringing forest, the white beach of the island stretched.
