Pensez-y donc, mortels, et pensez-y d’avance.”
That night he stared at it. The piece of advice was as good as ever. But the involutions of the meridian mean curve, drawn with such careful exactness on the stone and painted with such a light hand in the gayest colours, struck him now as being the exact counterfeit of the ribbons on the snow. Was he not breaking away from his ordinary piety in accusing his church dial of taking after an un-Christian pattern? Surely, he was wronging his dial. And the good curé kept poring over the unholy coincidence, in so far at least as his mind could find time to spare for meditation upon matters of paramount importance.
On the morning of St. Martin’s Day, the village showed itself to be all in a tangle of loops. The diabolical spoor went in and out round every house. The figure eight of the sundial had thrown off innumerable copies upon the ground. The bells were tolled in vain. To no purpose did the chimes peal. In vain did the most Christianlike of all suns that ever poured its kindly light upon Lens, kindle the most reassuring smile upon the wrinkled stones of the old tower. Not a single parishioner was bold enough to spurn with his foot the cabalistic loops that embraced the bosom of Mother Earth in their oppressive grasp. Not a child dare step across them, not even to go and dip his fingers in the holy water at the church door.
The most thunder-struck was the curé. A truculent pentagram in red chalk was displayed all over his distich, surrounded by a double circle that looked like a green fairies’ ring designed in moss upon the church tower.
As for the good men of the largest commune in Canton Valais, they bethought themselves of a day of fasting, the natural remedy for their orthodox faith to point out. But there was a sign against that too. The pewter pots and mugs of the village tavern appeared that morning all set up in a row upon the railings of the churchyard gate, upside down. They would have to be fetched and brought back to their proper place. The hardiest commoners were summoned. They took heart from their thirst. The general anxiety was soothed by such an obvious way of drowning care.
The frequenters of the forests, whether they were honest day-labourers or night-birds, knew alone, beyond all doubt, the identity of the mischief-maker. For them the prime mover in the big upset was none other than the Strubel, about whom the village elders would still relate, in the dim light of the evening fires, dreadful stories of an ancient stamp, such as suggest themselves in the woods after dark, when the old tree stumps are phosphorescent and glow-worms come out of their retreats to set up their tiny lamps on the edges of the rocks.
Of all creatures born of local lore the Strubel was to them the nearest in kin. When the north wind blows the Strubel races from crest to crest, from the Gemmi to the Rawyl, and from the Rawyl to the Gemmi. Up there his long white shock of hair streaming in the wind, and upturned by the gale, spreads as a plume across the sky. The tumbling folds of his beard fill the precipitous ravines. A hail of icicles rattles out of his roaring breast. The rush of his huge body, soaring amid snowflakes and in glacier dust, awakens the slumbering elements. At night the Aurora Borealis gathers in streamers around his brow. At dawn and at sunset a diadem of snow-crystals sets a many-coloured band about his hoary head. He flies, and his feet do but tip the top of the peaks, and his stature rises aloft in an immense upward sweep. In a blue-and-white transparency, such as one sees in glacier crevasses and in pure ice water, the spring of his sinuous limbs uplifts him to the confines of atmosphere and firmament.
Such is the poetic picture of the dread being which the shepherds still worship secretly, far down in the recesses of their primitive hearts. And it is he whose image the antics of an enigmatic ski-runner revived for several winters, as our story shows, under the low and gloomy roofs of the white-hooded chalets.
There is an evening hour, when, after cooking and partaking of the day’s last meal, the family gathers round the domestic hearth. Then the last embers are fanned into a congenial flame. The dying light of the hearth kindles anew the memories of a bygone age. Is the time near when these will die out for want of fuel, as the flame of that hearth when the family goes to bed? But why should we link any melancholy after-thought with their well-earned rest? The thought of the reward granted to their toil pleases one’s moral sense. Yet he who, like me in this chapter, uses figments of the past as a page decoration, cannot but regret that such picturesque elements should be gradually, but surely, vanishing for ever from the face of our modern world.
The accepted idea is that things have progressed. So they have. A nice hotel crowns the Vermala rock. At night real electric light of industrial origin has taken the place of the fantastic rays of old. There is a chauffage central, fed with colliers’ coal, and stoked by porters who never could produce heat without matter and on terms that were not commercial. Now people dance at Vermala, they have music at night, they lounge about in smoking-jackets, and, when all is said and done, I am one of those who most enjoy the new situation.