# Pall Mall/The Strange Experience of the Rev. Phillip Ambleside

Pall Mall Mar. 1910: Vol. 45 Iss. 203
The amount of duty and pleasure combined in Alpine summer chaplaincies of a month each just suited the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He was still young enough to climb⁠—carefully; and genuine enough to enjoy seeing the crowd of holidaymakers having a good time. As a rule he was on the Entertainment Committee that organised the tennis, dances, and gymkhanas. During the week one would hardly have guessed his calling. On Sundays he appeared, a bronzed, lean, vigorous figure, in the pulpit of the hot little wooden church, and people liked to see him. His sermons, never over ten minutes, were the same four every year: one for each Sunday of the month; and when he passed on to another month’s duty in the next place he repeated them. The surroundings suggested them obviously: Beauty, Rest, Power, Majesty; and they were more like little confidential talks than sermons. Moreover, incidents from the life of the place⁠—the escape of a tourist, the accident to a guide, and what rot, usually came ready to hand to point a moral. One summer, however, there occurred a singular adventure that he has never yet been able to introduce into a sermon. Only in private conversation with souls as full of faith as himself does he ever mention it. And the short recital always begins with a sentence more or less as follows:
“… Talking of the wondrous ways of God, and the little understanding of the children of men, I am always struck by the huge machinery He sometimes adopts to accomplish such delicate and apparently insignificant ends. I remember once when I was doing summer ‘duty’ In a Swiss resort high up among the mountains of the Valais⁠ ⁠…”
And then follows the curious occurrence I was once privileged to hear, and have obtained permission to retell, duly disguised.
In the particular mountain village where he was taking a month’s duty at the time, his church was full every Sunday⁠—so full indeed that twice a week he held afternoon services for those who cared to worship more quietly. And to these little ceremonies, beloved of his own heart, came two persons regularly who attracted his attention in spite of himself. They sat together at the back; shared the same books, although there was no necessity to do so; courted the shadowy corners of the pews: in a word, they came to worship one another, not to worship God.
But the clergyman took a broad view. Courtships fostered in the holy atmosphere of the sacred building were more likely to be true than those fanned to flame in the feverish surroundings of the dance-room. And true love is ever an offering to God. He knew the couple, too. The man, quiet, earnest, well over forty; the girl, young, dashing, spirited, leader in mischief, hard to believe sincere, flirting with more than one. In spite of the careful concealment with which she covered their proceedings, choosing the deserted afternoon service rather than the glare of the garden or ballroom for their talks, the couple were marked. The difference in their ages, characters, and appearance singled them out, as much as the general knowledge that she was rich, vain, flighty, while he was poor, strenuous, living a life of practical charity in London, that precluded gaiety or pleasure, so called.
“What can she see in that dull man twice her age?” the elder women said to one another⁠—the answer generally being that it probably amused the girl to turn him so easily round her little finger. “What a chance for her fortune to be well spent!” reflected one or two. While the men, when they said anything at all, contented themselves with: “Pretty hard hit, isn’t he? A fine fellow, though! Hope he gets her!”
It is always somewhat pathetic to see a man of real value fall before the conquering beauty of an ordinary young girl of the world. The clergyman, however, with an eye for spiritual values, even deeply hidden, divined that beneath her lightness and love for conquest’s sake there lay the desire for something more real. And he guessed, though at first the wish may have been father to the thought only, that it was the elder man’s fine zeal and power that attracted the butterfly in spite of herself towards a life that was more worth living. Hers, after all, he telt, was a soul worth “saving”; and this middle-aged man, perhaps, was the force God brought into her life to provide her with the opportunity of escape⁠—could she but seize it.
So far Ambleside’s story runs along ordinary lines enough. One sees his man and girl without further detail. From this point, however, it slips into a stride where the sense of proportion seems somehow lost, or else “man’s little understanding” is too close to the thing to obtain the proper perspective. If anyone but this devout and clearheaded clergyman told the tale, one might say “Fancy,” “Delusion,” or any other expression that seemed suitable. But to hear him tell it, with that air of conviction and truth, in those short, abrupt, even jerky sentences, that left so much to the imagination, and with that pallor of the skin that threw into such vivid contrast the fire burning in his farseeing blue eyes⁠—to sit close to him and hear the story grow in that tense low voice, was to know beyond all question that he spoke of something real and actual, in the same sense that a train or St. Paul’s Cathedral are real and actual.
What he saw, he really saw: though the sight may have been of a kind unfamiliar to the majority. He was used as a real pawn in a real game. The girl’s life and soul were rescued, so to speak, by the marriage brought about, and her forces of mind and spirit lifted bodily for what they were worth into the scheme that God had ordained for them from the beginning of the world. Only⁠—the machinery brought to bear upon the end in view seemed so prodigious, so extraordinary, so unnecessary. One thinks of the sentence with which Ambleside always began his tale. One wonders. But no one who heard the tale ever asked questions at its close. There was absolutely nothing to say.
Even to the smallest details the affair seemed thought out and planned, for that particular Tuesday Ambleside started without the guide-porter who usually carried his telescope, camera, and lunch. He went off at six a.m., with merely an ice-axe and a small knapsack containing food and Shetland vest, for the summit.
It was one of those days towards the end of August when some quality in the atmosphere⁠—usually sign of approaching rain⁠—brings the mountains uncannily close, yet, at the same time, sets out every detail of pinnacle, precipice, and ridge with a terror of size and grandeur that makes one realise their true and gigantic scale. They press up close, yet at the same time stand away in the depths of the sky like unattainable masses in some dream world. This mingling of proximity and distance has a confusing effect upon the eye. When Ambleside toiled up the zigzags without actually looking beyond, he felt that the towering massif of the Valais Alps all about him loomed very close; but when he stopped for breath and raised his eyes steadily into their detail, he felt that their distance was too great to be conquered by any little two-legged being like himself merely taking steps. And as he rose out of the valley into the clearer strata of air this effect increased. The whole scale of the chain of Alps about him seemed raised to an immeasurably higher power than he had ever known. He felt like an insect crawling over the craters of the moon. The prodigious, giant splendours of the scenery all round oppressed him more than ever before with his own futile littleness, and at the same time made him conscious of the grandeur of his soul before the God who had set him and his kind above all this chaos of tumbled planet.
He thought of the mountains as part of the “garment of God,” and of nature as expressing some portion of the Deity that was not intended to be expressed by man⁠—all part of His purpose, alive with His informing will. This glory of the inanimate Alps linked on to some stranger glory in himself that interpreted for him, as in a mystical revelation, God’s thundering message and purpose as known in the great forms and moods of nature. Closely in touch with the spirit of the mountains he was; glad to be alone.
This, in a sentence, expresses his mood: that the mountains accepted him, Forces in his deepest being that were akin to the life of the planet on which he made his tiny track rose up and triumphed. Over the treacherous Pas d’Iliez, where he usually felt giddy and unsafe, he felt this morning only exhilaration. The gulf yawning at his feet touched him with its splendour, not its terror.
Thus, feeling inclined to shout and run, he eventually reached the desolate valley of rock and shale that lies, unrelieved by a single blade of grass, between the glacier-covered slopes that shut it in impassably on three sides. The bed of this valley lies some 7,000 feet above the sea. The peaks and ridges that rear about it reach 12,000 feet. Here, being a good climber, he rested for the first time at the end of two hours’ steady ascent. The air nipped. The loneliness and desolation were very impressive. Beyond him hung the glaciers like immense thick blankets of blue-white upon the steep slopes, dropping from time to time lumps of ice into the shale-strewn valley below. For the sun shining in a cloudless sky was fierce. The clergyman, before attacking the long snowfield that began at his very feet, took out his blue spectacles and disentangled the cord. He ate some chocolate, and took the dried prunes from his knapsack, knowing that thirst would soon be upon him, and that ice-water was not for drinking.
“What a mite I am, to be sure, amid all this appalling wilderness!” he exclaimed; “and how splendid to be able to hold my own!”
And then it was, just as he stood up to arrange the glasses on his forehead, ready to pull down at a moment’s notice, that he became aware of something that was strange⁠—unaccustomed. Through the giant splendours of the scorching August day, across all this stupendous scenery of desolation and loneliness, something fine as a needle, delicate as a hair, had begun picking at his mind. The idea came to him that he was no longer alone. Like a man who hears his name called out of darkness he turned instinctively to find the speaker; almost as though someone had been speaking to him for a considerable time, and he had only just had his attention drawn to it. He looked keenly up and down the immense, deserted valley.
In every direction, however, he saw nothing but miles of rock, dazzling snowfields, dark precipices, and endless peaks cutting the blue sky overhead with teeth that gleamed like burnished steel. It was desolation everywhere. The gentle wind that fanned his cheek made no sound against the stones. There was neither tree nor grass for it to rustle through. No bird’s wing whirred the air; and the far-off falling of a hundred cascades was of too regular and monotonous a character to have taken on the quality of a voice or the rhythm of uttered words. He examined, so far as he could, the enormous sides of mountain about him, and the great soaring ridges. It was just possible some climber in distress had spied him out, and shouted down upon him from the heights. But he searched in vain. There was no moving human figure. The sound, if sound it had been, was not repeated; only he was no longer alone, as before. That, at least, was certain. He nibbled more chocolate, put a couple of sour prunes into his mouth to suck, arranged the blue snow-glass over his eyes, and started on again for a steady pull up to the next ridge.
And as he rose the scale of the surrounding mountains rose appallingly with him. The true distance of the peaks proclaimed itself; the tremendous reaches that from below appeared telescoped up into a little space opened up and stretched themselves. The hour grew into two. It was considerably after twelve before he reached the arête where he had promised himself lunch. And all the way, without ceasing, the idea that he was being accompanied remained insistent in his mind. It troubled and perplexed him. Perhaps it frightened him a little, too. More than once it came close enough to make him pause and consider whether he should continue or turn back.
For the curious part of it was that this idea exercised a direct and deliberate effect upon him. By a hundred little details that seemed to be spontaneous until he examined them, it kept suggesting somehow that he should change his route. Something in his consciousness grew that had not been there before. He thought of a bird bringing tiny morsels of grass and twig until a nest formed. In this way the steady stream of thoughts from somewhere outside himself came nesting in his brain until at length they acquired the consistency of an impression, next of a distinct desire, lastly, the momentum of a definite intention. They acted upon his volition, stirring softly among the roots of his will. Before he realised how it had quite come about he had changed his mind.
“Instead of going on to the top, as I intended,” he said to-himself, as he sat on the dizzy ledge munching hard-boiled eggs and sugar sandwiches, “I shall strike off to the left and find my way back into the valley again. That, I think, would be⁠—nicer!”
He had no real reason; he invented none.
And the moment he said it there was a sense of pressure removed, a consciousness of relief, the knowledge, in a word, that he was following a route that it was desired he should follow.
To a man, of course, whose habit it was to seek often the will of a personal Deity he worshipped, there was nothing very out-of-the-way in all this, although he never remembered to have felt any guidance so distinctly and forcibly indicated before. The feeling that he was being “guided” now became a certainty, and in order to follow instructions as well as possible he made his will of no account and opened himself to receive the slightest token this other Directing Agency might care to vouchsafe.
After lunch, therefore, he struck out a diagonal course across a steep snow-slope that would eventually bring him down again to the valley a little nearer its head. And before he had gone a hundred yards he ran into the track of another climber. The marks were a couple of days old, perhaps, for in their hollows lay little heaps of fine snow-dust, freshly blown. Judging by the size there had been two men. He noted the trace of the ice-axe and the occasional streak of the trailing rope. The men had made straight for the valley far below. Here and there they had glissaded. Here and there, too, they had also tumbled gloriously, for the snow was tossed about by their floundering. Yet there was no danger; no precipices intervened; the snow sloped without a break right down into the shale below.
“I’ll follow their example,” said the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He strapped on the extra leather seat he carried for sliding and sat down. A moment later he was rushing at high speed over the hard surface. There were hollows of softer snow, however, which stopped him from time to time, drifts as it were into which he plunged, and from which he emerged, wet and shivering. Then he stood up and leaned on his axe, trying to glissade on his feet. For this, however, the surface was not smooth enough. The result was, he tumbled, rolled, slid, sat down, and took immense gliding strides. It was very exhilarating. He revelled in it.
But all the while he kept his eyes sharply about him, for in his heart he felt that he was obeying that guiding Influence so strongly impressed upon him⁠—the Power that had persuaded him to change his route, and was now leading him to some particular point with some particular purpose. Now, too, for the first time a vague sense of calamity touched him. Once introduced, it grew. Soon it amounted to a positive foreboding, a presentiment of disaster almost. He could not avoid the idea that he was being led by supernatural means to the scene of some catastrophe where he was to prove of use⁠—a rescue, an arrival in the nick of time to save someone. He actually looked about him already for⁠—yes, for the body. And through his subconscious mind, with the force of habit, ran the magnificent use he could make of it all in a future sermon.
Yet nothing came. The tracks of the other men stretched clear and unbroken into the valley of rocks below. He traced the wavering thin line the whole way down.
“It’s nothing to do with these men, at any rate,” he said to himself, as he sat down for the final slide that should take him to the bottom of the slope. “No accident could possibly have happened here. The snow’s too soft, and there are no rocks to fall over or⁠ ⁠…”
The sentence, or the thought, whichever it was, remained unfinished, for the mouth of the Rev. Phillip was stopped temporarily with wet snow as he lost his balance and rushed sideways with an undignified plunge into a drifted hollow. His eyes were blinded, his feet twisted, the skin of his back drenched and icy. He rose spluttering and gasping. Luckily his axe had a leather loop, or he would have lost it; as it was, his slouch hat was already a hundred feet below, sliding and turning like a top on its way to the bottom, followed by the snow-goggles.
And in the act of brushing himself free of snow, the truth came to him. It was as though a hand had struck him on the back and pointed⁠—as though a voice had uttered the five words: “This is the place. Look!”
Swiftly, searchingly, keenly he looked, and saw⁠—nothing; nothing, at least, that explained the impression of disaster that had possessed him. There was no body certainly, nor any sign of an accident; no place, indeed, where an accident could possibly have come about. He dug quickly in the loose snow with his axe, but the snow was barely two feet deep in this particular hollow, and all round it was a hard surface of smoothly and tightly packed stuff that was almost ice. Nothing bigger than a cat could have lain buried there!
“This is the place! Look well!” the words seemed to ring in his ears.
Yet the more he looked and saw nothing, the more strongly beat this message upon his brain. “This was the place where he was to come, where he was to fulfil some purpose, to find something, do something, accomplish the end intended by the Will that had so carefully guided him all day.” The feeling was positive; not to be denied. It was, at the same time, distressingly vast⁠—mighty.
Fixing himself securely against his axe, he stood and stared. The sun beat back into his face from the glittering snow on all sides. Tremendous black precipices towered not far behind him; to his left rolled the frozen mass of the huge glacier, its pinnacles of tottering ice catching the afternoon sun; to his right stretched into bewildering distance the interminable and desolate reaches of shale and moraine till the eye rested upon summits of a dozen peaks that literally swam in the sky where white clouds streamed westwards. There was no sound but falling water, no sign of humanity except the single track of those other climbers, no indication of any disturbance upon the vast face of nature that spread all about him, immense, still, terrific.
Then, piercing the monotony of the falling water, a faint sound of fluttering, heard for the first time, reached his ear. He turned as at the sound of a pistol-shot in the direction whence it came⁠—but again saw nothing. The sound ceased. From the slope below came a breath of icy wind that made him shiver, and with it, he fancied, came the faint hissing noise of his sliding hat and spectacles. This, perhaps, was the sound he had heard as “fluttering.”
At length, after prolonged and vain searching, the clergyman decided there was nothing for him to do but continue his journey, for the sun was getting low, and he had a long way to go before darkness could be regarded with equanimity, He felt exhausted, wearied, impatient too if the truth were told, yet ashamed of his impatience.
“If this is all real,” he argued under his breath, “why isn’t it made clear what I’m to do?”
And immediately upon the heels of the thought came again that faint and curious sound of something fluttering.
Now, there can be no question that he understood perfectly well that this sound of fluttering had a direct connection with the whole purpose of the day⁠—that it was the clue to his presence in this particular spot, and that he had been forced to halt here by means of his fall in order that he might investigate something or other on this very spot. He knew it; he felt it. But he was too impatient, too cold, too weary to spend any further time over it all. Alarm, too, was plucking uneasily at his reins.
So this time he affected to ignore the sound. Leaning back on his axe he threw his body into position for sliding down to the bottom of the slope. In another second he would have started⁠—when something that froze him into the immobility of a terror worse than death arrested him with a Power beyond anything he had ever known before in his life⁠—a Power that seemed to carry behind it the pressure of the entire universe.
There, close beside him in this mountain wilderness, had risen up suddenly a Face⁠—close as the handle of the ice-axe he so tightly grasped, yet at the same time so far away, so immense, so stupendous in scale that he has never understood to this day how it was he could have perceived that it was⁠—a Face. Yet a face it undoubtedly was, a living face; and its eyes⁠—its regard, at any rate, for eyes he divined rather than saw⁠—were focused upon some object that lay at his very feet.
Clammy with fear, his heart thumping dreadfully, he dropped back upon the snow. Without looking at any particular detail he became aware that the entire world of giant scenery about him was involved in the building up of this appalling Countenance, whose gaze was directed upon a tiny point immediately before him⁠—the point, he now perceived, whence proceeded that familiar little sound of fluttering.
Words obviously fail him when he attempts to describe the terror of this Visage that rose about him through the day. Pallid and immense, it seemed to sketch itself against the wastes of grey rock, with entire slopes of snow upon the cheeks, ridged and furrowed by precipice and cliff, with torn clouds of flying hair that streaked the blue, and the expanse of glaciers for the splendid brows. Across it the dark line of two moraines tilted for eyebrows, and the massive columns of compressed strata embedded in the whole structure of the mountain chain bulged for the muscles of the awful neck.⁠ ⁠… Moreover, the shoulders upon which it all rested⁠—the vast framework of body that he divined below⁠—the dizzy drop in space where such fearful limbs must seek their resting place!⁠—
His mind went reeling. The titanic proportions of this Countenance of splendour threatened in some horrible way to overwhelm his life. Its calmness, its immobility, its remorseless fixity of mien petrified him. The thought that he had dared to question it, to put himself in Opposition to its purpose, even to be impatient with it⁠—this turned all his soul within him soft and dead with a kind of ultimate terror that bereft him of any clear memory, perhaps momentarily, too, of consciousness.
The clergyman thinks he fainted. Exactly what happened, probably, he never knew or realised. All that he can say in attempting to describe it is that he found his own eyes caught up and carried away in the gigantic stream of vision that this Face of Mountains poured upon the ground⁠—caught up and directed upon a tiny little white object that fluttered in the wind at his very feet.
He saw what the Face was looking at and wished him to look at. It made him see what it saw.
For there, in front of him, unnoticed hitherto, lay a scrap of paper half embedded in the snow. Automatically he stooped and picked it up. It was an envelope bearing the printed inscription of an hotel in the village. It was sealed. On the outside, in a fine handwriting, he read the Christian name of a man. Opening the corner he saw inside a small lock of dark-coloured hair. This was all⁠ ⁠… !
And it was just at this moment that the snow where his feet rested gave way, and he started off at full speed to slide to the bottom of the slope, where he only just stopped himself in time to prevent shooting with a violent collision into a mass of shale and loose stones.
In less than thirty seconds it had all happened⁠ ⁠… and the swift descent and tumble had shaken him back as it were into a normal state of mind. But the oppression that had burdened him all day was gone. The mountains looked as usual. An indescribable sense of relief came over him. He felt a free agent once more⁠—no longer guided, pushed, directed. He had fulfilled the purpose.
Putting the little envelope in his inside pocket, he picked up his slouch hat and snow-goggles, ate some chocolate and dried prunes, and started off at a brisk pace for his return journey of three hours to the village and⁠—dinner. And the whole way home the grandeur of that Face, with its splendid pallor and its expression of majesty, haunted him with indescribable sensations. With it, however, all the time ran the accompanying thought: “What a tremendous business for so small a result! All that vast manoeuvring, all that terror of the imagination, and all that complex pressure upon my insignificant spirit merely: in the end to find a wisp of girl’s hair in an envelope evidently fallen from the pocket of some careless climber!”
The more the Rev. Phillip Ambleside thought about it, the more bewildered he felt. He was uncommonly glad, however, to get in before dark. The memory of that Mountain Countenance was no agreeable companion for the forest paths and lonely slopes through which his way led in the dusk.
That same night it so happened, before he was able to take any steps to trace the owner of the little envelope, there was a Bal de Têtes at the principal hotel. Although the clergyman was on the Entertainment Committee which organised the simple gaieties of the place, he held that honorary position only as a personal compliment to himself; he did not as a rule take an active part in the details, nor did he as a general rule attend the balls.
This particular night, however, he strolled down to the hotel, and after a little conversation with one or two friends in the hall he made his way to a secluded corner of the glass gallery where the dancers sat out between times, and lit his pipe for a quiet smoke. From behind the shelter of a large sham palm, he was able to see all he wanted of the ballroom, to hear the music, and to take in the pleasant sight of all the people enjoying themselves. And the sight did him good. He liked to see it. A number were in costume, which added to the picturesqueness of the scene. Perhaps he sat more in the shadows than he knew, or perhaps the dancers who came to “sit out” near him in the gallery did not realise how their voices carried. Several couples, as the evening advanced, came so close to him that, had he wished, he could have overheard easily every word they uttered. He did not wish, however. His mind was busy with thoughts of its own. That haunting scene of desolation in the mountains obsessed him still; and about ten o’clock, his pipe being finished, he was on the point of getting up to leave, when two dancers came and sat down immediately behind him and began to talk in such very distinct tones that it was impossible to avoid hearing every single word they uttered.
The clergyman pushed his chair aside to make room to go, when, in doing so, he threw a passing glance at the couple⁠—and instantly recognised them. The girl, a Carmen, and a very becoming Carmen, was the one who frequented his afternoon services, and the man, who wore simple evening dress and was not in costume at all, was the middle-aged Englishman who had been at her heels like a slave all the summer. They were absorbed in one another, and evidently unaware of his presence.
To say that he hesitated would not be true. Some force beyond himself simply took him by the shoulders, and pushed him back into the chair. Against his own will⁠—for Mr. Ambleside was no eavesdropper⁠—he remained there deliberately to listen.
In telling the story he tells it just lke this, making no excuses for conduct that was certainly dishonourable. He declares he could not help himself; the instinct was too imperious to be disobeyed. Again, as in the afternoon, he understood that he was merely being used as a pawn in the game, a game of great importance to some intelligence that saw through to the distant end.
The man was quiet, but tremendously in earnest, with the kind of steady manner that no woman likes unless she finds it in her to respond with a similar sincerity, Under the bronze his skin showed pale a little. He began to speak the instant they sat down; and in his voice was passion.
“I want you, and I want your money, and I want your life and soul⁠—everything,” he said, evidently continuing a conversation; ’your youth and energy, your talents, your will, all that is you and yours⁠—all.’ His voice was pitched very low, yet without tremor. He was playing the whole stake, as a strong man of middle age plays it when he is utterly in earnest. “For my scheme, for our scheme, for God’s scheme I want you; and no one else but you will do. I want you to awake, and change your life, and be your true, fine self. We can make a success, you and I, a success for ourselves and for others, I shall never give you up until⁠—until you give yourself to the world, or”⁠—his voice dropped very low⁠—“to another.”
The clergyman waited breathlessly for the answer. The man’s words vibrated with such suppressed fire that only a serious reply could be forthcoming. But for a space Carmen merely toyed with her fan, the little red spangled fan that swung from a single finger. Behind the black domino her eyes sparkled, but the expression of her face, was hidden.
“The difference in age is nothing,” he continued almost sternly. “For me, you are the woman, and for you I will prove that I am the man. I see clean through to the great soul hidden in you. I can bring it out. I can make you real⁠—a soul of value in the big order of God’s purposes. What can, these boys ever be, or do, for you? I’ve got a big, useful, practical scheme that can use you, just as it can use me. And my great unselfish love has picked you out of the whole world as the one woman necessary. Will you come to me?”
Still the girl was silent. She tapped him on the knee two or three times, would-be playfully, with the tip of her fan. Her head was bent down a little.
“And I’m strong,” he went on earnestly; “I’m a man. The power in me recognises and calls to the power in you. Let me hold you and mould you, and let us take the fine, high life together. Drop this life of child’s play you’ve been leading. Come to me; my arms are hungry for you! But I want you for a higher purpose than my own happiness⁠—though I swear I can make you happy as no woman in this world has ever before been happy. And without you,” he added more softly, after a slight pause, “this splendid scheme of mine, of ours, can come to nothing. For I cannot do it alone⁠—and there is only one You in the world. Answer me, Mary. It was tonight, remember, you promised. I leave tomorrow, and London days lie far ahead. Give me your answer to go back with.”
It was a curious way to make love. The reverend gentleman thought he had never heard anything quite like it. An ordinary frivolous girl, of course, would have been impatient long ago. But the fine passion of the man broke everywhere through his rather lame words, and set something in the air about them aflame. The violins sounded thin and trashy compared to the rhythm of this earnest voice; all the glitter of the ballroom seemed cheap⁠—the costume of Carmen absurdly incongruous. Mr. Ambleside slipped back somehow into the key of the afternoon when Cosmic Powers had held direct communion with his soul. He understood that he was meant to listen. Something big was in progress, something important in a high sense. He did listen⁠—to every word. It was Carmen speaking now; but her voice marred the picture. It was thin, trifling, even affected.
“It’s very flattering,” she simpered, “but⁠—don’t you see⁠—it means the end of all my fun and enjoyment in life. You’re so fearfully in earnest. You’d exhaust me in the first week!” She cocked her pretty head on one side, holding the fan against her cheek. Something, nevertheless, belied the lightness of her words, the listener felt.
“But I’ll teach you a different kind of happiness,” replied the man eagerly, “so that you’ll never again want this passing excitement, this ‘unrest which men miscall delight.’ Give me your answer⁠—now. I see it in your eyes. Let me go away tomorrow with this great new happiness in my heart.” He leaned forward. “Tell me now, Mary. Let your real self speak out once for all!” He took her fan away and she made no resistance. She clapped her hands in her lap, still looking at him mischievously through her mask.
“Let’s wait till we meet later in town,” she sighed at length prettily, coaxingly, “I shall be able to enjoy myself here then for the rest of the summer first⁠—I feel so young for such a programme.”
But the man cut her short.
“Now,” he said, holding her steadily with his eyes. “You said that to me a year ago, remember. I have waited ever since. It is your youth I want.” .
The girl played with him for another ten minutes, while the clergyman listened, wondering greatly at the other’s patience. Clearly, she delighted to feel his great love beating up against the citadel she meant in the end to yield. The lighter side of her was vastly interested and amused by it; but all the time the deeper part was ready with its answer. It was only that the “child” in her wanted to enjoy itself a little longer before it capitulated forever to the strength that should take her captive, and lead her by sharp ways of sacrifice to the high role she was meant to fill.
It would all have vexed and wearied Mr. Ambleside exceedingly, but for this singular feeling that it was part of some much larger scheme of which he might never know the whole perhaps, but in which he was playing his little part with a secret thrill. Through the tawdry glitter of that scented ballroom he saw again that terrible white-lipped Face, and felt the measure of this great purpose rolling past him⁠—immense, remorseless⁠—which, for all its splendour, could include even so small a thing as this vain and silly girl. The tide of it rose about him with a flood of power. He glanced at the small black domino of the Carmen opposite him⁠ ⁠… he saw the little flashing eyes, the pert lips and mouth⁠—thinking with something like a shudder of that other Countenance in the hollow of whose eyes hid tempests, yet which could look down upon a tiny fluttering paper, because that paper was an item of importance in its great scheme of which both beginning and end were nevertheless veiled.⁠ ⁠…
His thoughts must have wandered for a time. The conversation, at any rate, had meanwhile taken a singular turn, The girl was on her feet, the man facing her.
“Then what is this test of yours?” he was saying, half serious, half laughing⁠—“this test which you say will prove how much I care?”
The girl put back between her lips the small red rose that was part of the Carmen costume. Either it was that the stalk made her lisp a little, or else that a sudden rush of the violins in the waltz drowned her words. The Reverend Phillip, standing there trembling⁠—he never quite understood why he should have awaited her answer so nervously⁠—only caught the second half of her phrase.
“… that I gave you in this very room six weeks ago, and that you promised to carry about with you always?” he heard the end of her sentence, in a voice that for the first time that evening was serious; “because, if you’ve kept your word in a small thing like that I can trust you to keep it in bigger things. It was a part of myself, you know, that little bit of hair!” She laughed deliciously in his face, raising herself on tiptoe with her hands behind her back. “You said so yourself, didn’t you? You promised it should never, never leave you.”
The man made a curiously sudden gesture as though a pain beyond his control passed through him. His hands were on the back of a chair. The chair squeaked audibly along the polished floor beneath a violent momentary pressure. He looked straight into his companion’s eyes, but made no immediate reply.
Carmen’s gaze behind the black mask became hard. With a truly feminine idiocy she was obviously playing this whim as a serious move in the game.
“For if you have lost that,” she continued, her face flushing beneath the paint, “how can you expect to keep the rest of me, the important part of me?” She spoke as though she believed that he, too, was half-playing⁠—that the next minute he would put his hand into his pocket and produce it. His delay, his awkwardness, above all his silence, angered her. For the surface of her self-contradictory character was obviously⁠—minx.
After a pause that seemed interminable the man spoke, and for the first time his deep voice shook a little.
“This time tomorrow night you shall have it,” he said.
“But you’re leaving, you said, in the morning!” The tone was piqued and shrill.
“I shall stay another day⁠—on purpose.” A pause followed.
Then you really have lost it⁠—envelope and all⁠—with your name in my writing on the outside, and my hair for all to recognise who find it⁠—and to sneer.’
Her eyes flashed as she said it. The girl was disappointed, incensed, furious. It was all silly enough, of course, and utterly out of proportion. But how silly and childish real life is apt to be at such moments, only those who have reached middle age and have observed closely can know. At the time, to the clergyman who stood there listening and observing, it seemed genuinely poignant, even tragic. “Until the day before yesterday it had never left me for a single instant,” he said at length. “I was in the mountains⁠—glissading with your brother. It fell out of my pocket with a lot of other papers. I lost it on the upper snow slopes of the Dents Blanches⁠—”
The rest of his words were drowned by an inrush of people, for the band was beginning a two-step and couples were sorting themselves and seeking their partners. A Frenchman, dressed as Napoleon, came up to claim his dance. Carmen was swept away. Scornfully, angrily, with concentrated resentment in her voice and manner, she turned upon her heel, and from the lips that bit the stalk of the small red rose came the significant words:
“And with it you have also lost⁠—me!”
She was gone. Perhaps the Reverend Phillip Ambleside only imagined the tears in her voice. He never knew, and had no time to think, for he found himself looking straight into the eyes of the lover, thus absurdly rejected, and who now became aware of his close presence for the first time. Even then the absurdity of the whole situation did not wholly reveal itself. It came later with reflection At the moment he felt that it was all like a vivid and singular dream in which the values and proportions were oddly exaggerated, yet in which the sense of tragedy was distressingly real. His heart went out to the faithful and patient man who was being so trifled with, yet who might be in danger of losing by virtue of his very simplicity what was to be of real value in his life⁠—and scheme.
“It’s my move now,” was the thought in his mind as he took a step forward.
The other, embarrassed and annoyed to discover that the whole scene had probably been overheard, made an awkward movement to withdraw, but before he could do so, the clergyman approached him. Only one step was necessary. He moved up from behind a palm, and drawing his hand from an inner pocket, he handed across to him a white envelope bearing the printed name of the hotel and a neat inscription in feminine writing just below it.
“I found this on the snow slopes of the Dents Blanches this afternoon,” he said courteously. The other stared him steadily in the face⁠—his colour coming and going quickly. “Take it to her and say that after all it was you⁠—you, who were applying the test⁠—that you wished to see if for so small a thing she was ready to reject so true a love. And, pray, pardon this interference which⁠—er⁠—chance has placed in my power. The matter, I need hardly say, is entirely between yourself and me.”
The man took the paper awkwardly, a soft smile of gratitude and comprehension dawning in his eyes. He began to stammer a few words, but the clergyman did not stay to listen. He bowed politely and left him.
He went out of the hotel into the night, and a wind from the surrounding snow slopes brushed his face with its touch of great spaces. He looked up and saw the crowding stars, brilliant as in winter. The mountains in this faint light seemed incredibly close. Slowly he walked up the little village street to his rooms in the chalet by the church.
And suddenly the true proportion of normal things in this little life returned to him, and with it a sharp realisation of the triviality of the scene he had been forced to witness⁠—and of the horrible grandeur of the means by which he had been dragged, by the scruff of his priestly neck as it were, so awkwardly into the middle of it all: merely to provide a scrap of evidence the loss of which threatened to bring about a foolish estrangement, and might conceivably have prevented a marriage of apparently insignificant importance.
He felt as though the machinery of the entire solar system had been employed to help a pair of ants carry a-pine needle too heavy for them to the top of the nest.
And then a moment’s reflection brought to him another thought. For who could say what the result of this marriage might be? Who could say that from just the exact combination of those two forces⁠—the earnest man, and the lighter girl⁠—a son might not be born who should shake the world and lead some cherished purpose of Deity to completion? For, truly, of the threads which weave into the pattern of life and out again, men see but the tiny section immediately beneath their eyes. The majority focus their gaze upon some detail⁠—thus losing the view of the whole. The beginning and the end are forever hidden; and what appears insignificant and out of proportion when caught alone at close quarters, may reveal all the splendour of the Eternal Purpose when surveyed with the proper perspective⁠—of the Infinite. The Reverend Phillip Ambleside felt as if for a moment he had been lifted to a height whence he had caught perhaps a glimpse of these larger horizons.
With his faith vastly strengthened, but his nerves considerably shaken, the clergyman went to bed and slept the sleep of a just man who has done his duty by chance as it were. He had helped forward a purpose of which he really understood nothing, but which, he somehow felt, was bigger than anything with which he had so far been connected in his life. Some day⁠—his faith whispered it next morning while he was preparing his sermon⁠—he would see the matter in the proper perspective, and would understand.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1951, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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