The Strength of the Rope

HERE were notices, of varying dates, posted in prominent places about the cliffs to warn the public not to go near them—unless, indeed, it were to read the notices themselves, which were printed in a very unobtrusive type. Of late, however, this Dogberrian caveat had been supplemented by a statement, in the local gazette, that the cliffs, owing to the recent rains succeeding prolonged frost, were in so ill a condition that to approach them at all, even to decipher the warnings not to, was—well, to put it politely, to have un grain de folie.

Now, had the Regius Professor a bee in his bonnet? Absurd! He knew the odds of geology as well as any sharp of a scientist. Yet, neither general nor particular caution availed to abate his determination to examine the interior formation of a cave or two out of those, black and innumerable, with which the undercliff was penetrated like a warren.

“Are you coming-with me?” he said.

Judged by his anxious eyes, the question might have been a wistful, rather shamefaced invitation. But the anxiety, never more than apparent, was delusive product of the preposterous magnifying-glasses he wore. Did he ever remove these glasses, one was startled to discover in the seemingly aghast orbs they misinterpreted quite mean little attic windows to a particularly unemotional soul.

“By no means,” said I. “I will wait here and write your epitaph.”

He stared at me a moment with a puzzled expression; smiled slightly and politely; turned, strode off towards the cliffs, and disappeared, never once having hesitated, into the most accessible burrow. I took occasion to observe (or was it already my imagination nudging me?) that there was amongst them all no gullet so sinister in suggestion as the one he had entered. The tilted stratification, under which it yawned oblique, seemed on the momentary poise to sink and close it.

Now I set to pacing up and down, essaying a sort of mechanical preoccupation in default of the philosophy I lacked. Yet the whole time my eyes and ears were conscious of the spectres that moved and rustled without ceasing in the melancholy little bay.

“Tekel upharsin.” The hand never left off writing upon the rocks, or the dust of its scoring to fall and whisper. That came away in flakes; or slid down in tiny avalanches—here, there, in so many places at once that the whole face of the cliffs seemed to crawl like a maggoty cheese.

Here, on no warrant but that of my senses, I proclaimed the gazette's warning to have been less than emphatic. It made no difference that my nerves were at the stretch. One could not hear a silence thus sown with grain of horror, and believe it barren of significance. Then, all in a moment, as it seemed to me, the resolution was taken, the voices hushed, and the whole bay poised on tiptoe of a suspense that preluded some massed movement.

I stood staring at the black mouth that had engulfed the Regius Professor. I thought I saw the rock-face shrug and wrinkle. A blot of gall was expelled from it—and the blot was the Professor himself issued forth, and coming composedly towards me.

As he advanced, I turned my back on him. By the time he reached me, I had made some small success of a struggle for self-mastery.

“Well,” he said, “I left myself none too much of a margin, did I?”

With an effort, I faced about again. The skirting of the cliff was pitted yet with holes, many and irregular; but now some of these that had stared at me like dilated eyes were (I could have sworn it) over-lidded—the eyes of drowsing reptiles. And the wryed gullet was gone.

I gave quite an absurd little giggle. This man was soulless—a monstrosity.

“Look here,” he said, conning my face with a certain commiseration, “it's no good tormenting yourself with what might have happened. Here I am, you know. Supposing we go and sit down yonder against that drift till you're better.”

He led the way, and, dropping upon the sand, lolled easily, talking to himself, through me, for some minutes. It was the kindest thing he could have done. His confident voice made scorn of the never-ceasing rustling and falling sounds to our rear. The gulls skated before my eyes, drawing wide arcs and figures of freedom in the air. Presently I topped the crisis, and drew a deep breath.

“Tell me,” I said—“have you ever in all your life known fear?”

The Regius Professor sat to consider.

“Well,” he answered presently, “I was certainly once near losing hold of my will.”

“Oh!” said I: “will you tell me the story?”

“I never considered it in the light of a story,” said the Professor. “But if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is vivid, I think I may say, to minute details;” and he settled his spectacles and began.

“It was during the period of my first appointment as science demonstrator to the Dardanarius Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the 'Reef-building Serpulæ' was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.

“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley amongst the Shropshire hills. The season was winter, and it was bitterly cold, and the prospect of the dreariest—just white wastes and leaden sky, and the two fusing in a never-qualified distance. I was wondering, without feeling actually dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a hill that had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages, and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory—doubtless their manor to these small dependent tenancies.

“A stark little oasis in my desert, sure enough—the most grudging of moral respites from depression. Only from one stock of the many that were rooted, seeming so lifeless, in the snow, broke a green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a window. Deathlily exclusive, the dark small buildings stood apart from one another, incurious, sullen and self-contained.

“Does that meet your fancy? I think, perhaps, I might write a romance if I tried. But at least the aspect of things was as exhilarating as one might look for in a colony of factory hands. Uncoupled for an hour or two from the mechanic half of himself, a man is inclined to withdraw deep into the other half for his recreation; and so, in such places, the social tone is wont to be unclubbable.

“Now, however, I was aware of the green shoot; and the stock from which it proceeded was the school building. That was unlovely enough—a bleak little cabin of stone in an arid enclosure. It looked hunched and gray with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of its wall was just an underscoring of dismality. But, even as I stood, the chant of children rose within; and at once the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted.

“I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time I am free to admit that this sound, though it dismissed me promptly on my way, dismissed me to a certain degree refreshed, and reinspired to what lay before me. I passed through that little frigid camp of silence, and swung down the road towards the factory, wondering only that the sense of desolation I brought away seemed to concentrate rather than to dissipate with my advance. But in a moment I saw the reason. This great forge in the hills was but a wracked and deserted ruin—its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. And so it seemed the strange thing that any of the human part of its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood—strange, and yet never so strange as when I came to learn, as I did later, how its devastation was at this date an ancient story.

“What a squalid monster it looked in its dead impotency—gaunt, and unclean, and ravaged by fire from crown to basement! The great flue of it stood up a blackened monument to the arrogance that would sport with what at the last it was unable to conduct or control. Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of machinery shrunk and fallen from the walls of a carcase they had once vivified. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places under the merciless bombardment of the weather. And here and there a scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the draught like a kite caught in a tree. Bats of sooty cobweb hung from the beams; and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with frosted soot.

“It was an ugly, sordid ruin, to be sure; and I was not exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black opening of what looked like a shed or annexe to the main factory. Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither, and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered. I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom; and then I discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little dead-locked chamber, its details only partially decipherable in the reflected light that came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke, strode the twilight at a height a little above my own; and I could easily understand, by the apparent diameters of its barrel and of the brick rim beneath, that the well was of a considerable depth.

“Now, as my eyes a little accustomed themselves to the obscurity, I noticed how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness of its enemy. For the rope, that was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched in one place as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted there. It was an insignificant fact in itself; but my chance observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been removed) hung down a yard or so below the big drum.

“You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity to begin with, as, a foot from its mouth, it was already a vortex of reeling night), I caught with my left hand at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. That was a wise thing to do, wasn't it? On the instant the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and shoulders, hanging over and actually into the well, pulled me, without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last desperate hold, and my legs came whipped helpless over the well-rim. The weight of their falling near jerked me from my clutch; and the sweat of that shock had scarce surged over me, when another, of a more deliberate humour, stole out and abided. For I became aware all in a moment that the rusty long-disused windlass was beginning slowly to revolve, and was letting me down into the abyss.

“Now, despite that sweating—a mere diaphoretic of nature, a sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves—I don't think we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was exalted, rather—rallied to the unravelling of a scarce mortal, very exquisite problem. My wits were called upon to vindicate themselves, under the utmost stress of apprehension, as they hung by a hair over the pit of quenching night. I felt—ridiculous as it was—as if the surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory waiting, curious, to test the value of my philosophy.

“Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved persistently. If I would remain with my head above the well-rim—which, I freely confess, I had a morbid desire to do—I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and airy sort of treadmill: to climb, and climb, and always climb, paying out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place. It was to repudiate Time, that dropped beneath and fled into the depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I paused, some nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking that seized me would always send me, struggling and wriggling as I have seen a drowning mouse do, up to the surface again. Fortunately I was small then, and light and active; yet I knew that wind and muscle must some time give out in this swarming competition with Death. I measured them against the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound. Moreover, as I grew the more weary, there grew the need of my greater, activity; for there were already signs that the great groaning windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck—paused one minute in its eternal round, I might have swung, gradually and cautiously, till I could seize with one hand, then another, upon the brick rim that was otherwise beyond my effective reach. But now, did I stop climbing an instant and essay a frantic clutch at it, down I sank like the striking weight of a Dutch clock, my fingers trailed a yard in cold slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more—the madder that I must now make up for lost ground.

“At last, faint with fatigue, I must face an alternative resource, very hateful, from the first, in prospect. This was no less than to resign temporarily my the upper, and sink to the under world: in other words, to let myself go with the rope, and, when it was all reeled out, to climb it again. To this course there were three objections: (1) that I knew nothing of the depth of the water beneath; (2) or of how soon I should come to it; and (3) that I was grown physically incapable of any further great effort in the way of climbing. My reluctance to forego the little comfort of what I had of daylight I dismiss as sentimental. But, to go down into that black gaping pit, and then to find oneself bereft of the strength to rise from it! to cling on, deep, deep in a blind and noisome night, and to feel stealing slowly over one that paralysis whose inevitable culmination must be the sobbing fall into what choking and unspeakable gulf!

“I have put it very dramatically, I think, because I have the desire to engage you apart from yourself. But, indeed, it was an ugly enough alternative, and the emotions evoked by it as related by me are true in essence. Nevertheless I was driven to resolve upon it, and was drinking in my last little vision of light before descending, when—I thought of the burnt place in the rope.

“Do you grasp what that sudden thought meant to me? Death, sir, in any case;—death if, with benumbed and aching hands and blistered knees, I continued to work my air-mill; death, no earlier and no later, no less and no more certainly, if I ceased the useless struggle and went down into the depths. So soon as the strain of my hanging told direct upon that scorched strand, that strand must part.

“Then, I think, I knew fear—fear as hideous -and demoralising as it may be, short of the will-paralysis. And, indeed, I am not convinced but that that last reserve of self-masterfulness does not aggravate fear's complaint. Consciousness in extremis never seems to me the desirable thing that some hold it.

“Still, if I suffered for retaining my will-power, there is no doubt that its loss, on the flash of that deadly reflection, would have meant an immediate syncope of nerve and an instant downfall; whereas—well, anyhow, here I am.

“I was drained of all capacity for strenuous effort. I climbed painfully, spasmodically; but still I climbed. hoping I should die of the toil of it before I fell. And, as I climbed, I cast up my despairing eyes at the soulless monster (I shall certainly try my hand at romance by-and-by), that, turning unhurrying above, enjoyed with a periodic drawling chuckle the approach of that revolving scar on its face to the final test.

“It was not many coils away now; and suddenly I was doing what God knows I should have done earlier—screaming—screaming—so that my heart trembled and the marrow crawled in my bones.

“Nothing human answered—not a voice, not the sound of a footfall. But the echoes laughed and chattered like monkeys up in the broken roof of the factory.

“My cries had only sapped my remainder forces. The end was come. Looking up, I saw the burnt strand within the width of a palm from the test, and, with a gulp of horror, I ceased of all motion and let myself descend with the rope, as if by that means I could escape the plague-spot that pursued me.

“Now, coinstantaneous with this last succumbing to despair, my feet relaxed their grip, swung loose, and—touched something. It (the something) gave a little—settled—and there all at once I was standing as firmly as if I were in a pulpit. For the moment I was so benumbed, physically and mentally, that I was conscious of nothing in myself but a small weak impatience over the knowledge that the awful ecstacy of my descent was checked. Then reason, storming in, blew all the near-dead fire in me to a roar. With the cessation of my strain upon it, the windlass had ceased to revolve. Now with a sudden, desperation, I was tugging at the rope once more—pulling it down fist over fist. At the fifth haul there came a little quick report, and I fell upon my hands and knees. The rope had snapped; and the upper slack of it came whipping down upon my shoulders.

“I rose, dimly aware of what had happened. I was standing on the piled-up fathoms of rope I had paid out beneath me. My head was on a level with the well-rim; but that was yet beyond my secure reach. I found the end of the rope that had come away; made a bend in it well clear of the injured part, and, after many vain attempts, slung it clean over the yoke above, coaxed down the slack, spliced it to the other, and so made myself a fixed ladder to climb by. Up this I swarmed, with a reinspired fury, set myself swinging, grasped the brick rim, first with one hand, then with both, and in another instant was flung upon the ground, prostrate, and for the moment quite prostrated. Then, presently, I got up, struck some matches, and investigated.”

The Regius Professor stopped, laughing a little over the retrospect.

“And what” began I.

“Why,” said he, generations of schoolchildren had been chucking litter into that well, till it was filled up to within a couple of yards of the top—just that. The rope did the rest. It was a testimony to the resources of the valley. What the little beggars of to-day do with their odd time, heaven knows—unless they've found other wells. But it was comical, wasn't it?”

“Oh, most!” said I. “And especially for the return the children made you for your bad opinion of them.”

“Well, as to that,” said the Regius Professor, rather shamefacedly, “I wasn't beyond acknowledging a certain indebtedness I felt.”

“Acknowledging? How?”

“Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on the Reef-building Serpulæ; so I went back to the school, and gave it to the mistress to include in her curriculum.”