Well—I was unaccountable to myself, and of no account to others. Maybe that last is the explanation. My world of conventions was dead, and I lived—as I have already said—a posthumous life. Through it, no doubt, I was drawn by shadows—attracted by the unexplainable—blown by any wind of irresponsibility. This anarchy at least opened out strange vistas of romance to the imaginative soul. It is odd to live apart from, and independent of, the voice of duty. That state shall seldom occur; but, when it does, to experience it is to something feel the marvel of dematerialisation.
Depleted of human life; savage in its loneliness; blistered and flaked by the sun, the country through which I travelled was yet beautiful to a degree. Of food—by means of eking out my little supply with chestnuts and wild berries—I had a poor sufficiency; but thirst tortured me often and greatly. I moved slowly, threshing the land, as it were, for traces of an ignis-fatuus that still fled before me in fancy. And I had my frights and perils—one adventure, also; but that I shall not in this connection relate.
Once, high up on the ridge of a valley, I saw a poor wretch, his arms bound behind him, hurrying forward under escort of a guard. It was evening, soft and tranquil. A cluster of mountain-peaks swam in the long distance; the horizon was barred with a grate of glowing clouds. Therethrough, it seemed, the consumed sun had fallen into white ashes of mist; but the cooling furnace of the sky, to the walls of which a single star clung like an unextinguished spark, was yet rosy with heat; and against the rose the hillside and the figures that crowned it were silhouetted in a sharp deep purple. How beautiful and how voiceless! The figure fell, and his scream came down to me like a bat’s cheep as the soldiers prodded him to rise with their bayonets. Then I cursed the Goths that had spoiled me my picture.
Another time, lying concealed in a little hanging copse above a gorge, I heard bleating below me and the rainy patter of feet, and peered forth to see a flock of goats being driven down the valley. They were shepherded by three or four ‘requisition’ men, as they were called—patriot louts whose business it was to beat up the desolated country for those herds of sheep or swine that had run wild for lack of owners. Their unexpected appearance was a little lesson in caution to me, for I had enjoyed so long an immunity from interference as to have grown careless of showing myself in the most exposed districts.
On two occasions only was I troubled by wolves. The first was on a morning of lassitude and fatigue, when water had failed me for many hours. I was resting, on a heath-covered slope, within a rocky cave or lair in the hillside. For long the sky wraiths had been loading cloud upon cloud, till the gathered steam of the earth, finding no outlet, seemed to scald one’s body. Then, in a moment, such a storm crashed down as I had never before experienced. Each slam of thunder amongst the rocks was like a port of hell flung open; the lightning, slashing through the hail, seemed to melt and run in a marrowy-white flood that palpitated as it settled down on the heather. But the hail! the fury of this artillery of ice—its noise, and the frenzy of the Carmagnole it danced! I was fortunate to be under a solid roof; and when at last the north wind, bristling with blades, charged down the valley like the Duke of Saxony’s Horse at Fontenoy, I thought the earth must have slipped its course and swerved into everlasting winter.
Suddenly the mouth of the ressui was blotted by a couple of shaggy forms. They came pelting up—their tails hooked like carriage-brakes to their bellies, their eyes blazing fear—and, seeing me within, jerked to a rigid halt, while the stones drummed on their hides. The next moment, cowed out of all considerations of caste, they had slunk by me and were huddled, my very sinister familiars, at the extreme end of the cave.
Oh, but this was the devil of an embarrassment! I had sat out sermons that stabbed me below the belt at every second lunge; I had had accepted offers of gallantry that I had never made; I had ridiculed the work of an anonymous author to his face. Here, however, was a situation that it seemed beyond my power of finesse to acquit myself of with aplomb. In point of fact, the moment the storm slackened, I slipped out—conscious of the strange fancy that bristles were growing on my thighs—and, descending hurriedly to the valley, climbed a tree. It was only then (so base is human nature) that I waived the pretence that the wolf is a noble animal.
But my second experience was a more finished one. Then I tasted the full flavour of fright, and almost returned the compliment of a feast to my company. I was padding, towards evening, over a woodland lawn, when from a hollow at the foot of a great chestnut-tree a rumbling snarl issuing vibrated on the strings of my sensibilities, and I saw three or four very ugly snouts project themselves from the blackness. I went steadily by and steadily continued my way, which without doubt was the discerning policy to pursue. But impulse will push behind as well as fly before reason, and presently that which affects the nerves of motion did so frantically hustle me at the rear as to set me off running at the top of my speed. Then the folly of my behaviour was made manifest to me, for, glancing over my shoulder as I sped, I saw that no fewer than five fierce brutes were come out of their lair at the sound, and were beginning to slink in my wake.
I gave a yell that would have fetched Charon from the other side of the Styx; my feet seemed to dance on air; I threatened to outstrip my own breath. Still the patter behind me swelled into a race, and I found myself ghastlily petting a thought as to the length of a wolfs eye-tooth and the first feel of it clamped into one’s flesh. Now, of a sudden, the wood opened out, and I saw before me the butt of a decayed tree, and, on its farther side, a little reedy pond shining livid under a rampart of green that hedged off the sunset. At the water I drove, in a lost hope that the pursuit would check itself at its margin, and, in my blind onset, dashed against a branch of the dead tree and fell half stunned into the pool beyond. Still an inspiring consciousness of my peril enabled me to scramble farther, splashing and choking, until I was perhaps twenty yards from the shore; and then, in shallow water, I sat down, my head just above the surface, and caught at my sliding faculties and laughed. Immediately I was myself again, and the secure and wondering spectator of a very Walpurgis dance that was enacting for my benefit on the bank.
The five wolves appeared, indeed, to be skipping in pure amazement, like the mountains of Judæa; but they howled in tribulation, like the gate of Palestina. They leapt and ran hither and thither; they bit at the air, at their flanks, at their feet; they raked their heads with their paws and rolled on the ground in knots. At last I read the riddle in a tiny moted cloud that whirled above them. In dashing against the rotten branch I had, it seemed, upset a hornets’ nest built in the old tooth of the tree, and the garrison had sallied forth to cover my retreat.