What Necessity Knows by Lily Dougall (read aloud .TXT) 📖

Without us than within us--."



CHAPTER I.

The bells have solemn sound that from old belfries ring the passing of the year in the hearing of thousands; but perhaps it is a more solemn thing to watch and tell the birth of a new year by the march of stars that look down out of their purple void upon a land of trackless snow. If ceremony and the united sentiment of many hearts have impressive effect, they yet tend to lighten the burden of individual responsibility, which presses with weight, like the weight of the atmosphere upon a vacuum, when a man tries to grapple with his own soul in solitude.

Alec Trenholme was spending another wakeful night in the living-room of his small railway station. Winter lay around him. For a month the blueberry flats and bramble thickets had been wholly lost under the snow, which stretched far whiter than the pure white of the birch trees in the nearest groves. Now the last night but one of the old year had brought a fresh downfall, unusually heavy; the long, straight railway track, and the sleigh-road which was kept open between the station and Turrifs Settlement, had been obliterated by it. Alec Trenholme had awoke that morning to observe that his little station of new wood, and the endless line of rough telegraph poles, were the only remaining signs of man's lordship of earth, as far as his eyes could see. It was upon this sight, when the snow clouds had fled, that he had seen a scarlet sun come up; over the same scene he had watched it roll its golden chariot all day, and, tinging the same unbroken drifts, it had sunk scarlet again in the far southwest. He had not been far from his house, and no one, in train, or sleigh, or on snow-shoes, had happened to come near it.

He would have gone himself to Turrifs for milk, for the pleasure of exchanging a word with his fellow-men, and for air and exercise, had it not been that he had hourly expected to see an engine, with its snow-plough, approaching on the rails. Conversation by telegraph would have been a relief to him, but the wires seemed to have succumbed in more than one place to their weight of snow, and there was nothing for this young station-master to do but wait, and believe that communication would be re-established over the road and the wires sooner or later. In the meantime he suffered no personal inconvenience, unless loneliness can be thus named, for he had abundance of food and fuel. He watched the bright day wane and the sun of the old year set, and filled his stove with wood, and ate his supper, and told himself that he was a very fortunate fellow and much better off than a large proportion of men.

It is not always when we tell ourselves that we are well off that we are happiest: that self-addressed assertion often implies some tacit contradiction.

When darkness came he wondered if he should put on his snow-shoes and run over to Turrifs. Yet for some reason he did not go, in the way that men so often do not do things that they think on the whole would be very good things to do. An hour or two later he knew that the good people there would have gone to bed and that he had no longer the option of going. He did not go to bed himself. He had not had enough exercise that day to make him sleepy; and then, too, he thought he would sit up and see the old year out. He had an indistinct idea that it was rather a virtuous thing to do, rather more pious than sleeping the night through just as if it were any other night. He put his much-handled, oft-read books down before him on the table, and set himself to passing the evening with them. Midnight is actually midnight when the sun goes down before five o'clock and there is no artificial interest for the after hours.

Most men have more religion at heart, latent or developed, than can be seen by others. When they have not, when what shows is as much as what is--God pity them!

Alec Trenholme was not given to self-dissection or to expression of his private sentiments, therefore neither to himself nor to others was the religion of him very visible. Nevertheless, this evening his books, which had become not less but more to him because he had read them often, palled upon his taste. When he was a boy his father had taught him that at New Year's time one ought to consider whether the past had been spent well, and how the future could be spent better. So, as time went on, he pushed his books further and set himself to this consideration. For a while he sat looking at his own doings only by the light, as it were, of two candles--the one, of expediency; the other, of rectitude. Had he been wise? Had he been good?

Not being of a contemplative or egotistical disposition, he soon fidgeted. Thinking he heard a sound outside, which might be wind rising, or might be the distant approach of the iron snow-plough, he got up to look out. The small panes of his window were so obscured by frostwork that he did not attempt to look through the glass, but opened his door. Far or near there was no sign of rising wind or coming engine; only, above, the glowing stars, with now and then a shaft of northern light passing majestically beneath them, and, below, the great white world, dim, but clearly seen as it reflected the light. The constellations attracted his attention. There hung Orion, there the Pleiades, there those mists of starlight which tell us of space and time of which we cannot conceive. Standing, looking upwards, he suddenly believed himself to be in the neighbourhood of God.

When the keen air upon his bare head had driven him indoors, he sat down again to formulate his good resolutions, he found that his candles of expediency and morality had gone out. The light which was there instead was the Presence of God; but so diffused was this light, so dim, that it was as hard for him now to see distinction between right and wrong as it would have been outside upon the snow to see a shadow cast by rays which had left their stars half a century before. All, all of which he could think seemed wrong, because it was not God; all, all of which he could think seemed right, because it was part of God. The young man's face sank on his arms and lay buried there, while he thought, and thought, and thought, trying to bring a life of which he could think into relation with that which is unthinkable.

Was ever reverie more vain! He raised his head and stared about him. The glaring lamp showed all the details of the room, and made it seem so real, so much more real than mere thoughts, let alone that of which one cannot think. He got up to alter the stove-damper, pushing it shut with a clatter of iron, burning his fingers slightly, and sat down again, feeling it a relief to know, if by the smart, that he had touched something.

The wood within the stove ceased blazing when the damper was shut, and when its crackling was silenced there was a great quiet. The air outside was still; the flame of the lamp could hardly make sound. Trenholme's watch, which lay on the table, ticked and seemed to clamour for his attention. He glanced down at it. It was not very far from midnight.

Just then he heard another sound. It was possibly the same as that which came to him an hour ago, but more continuous. There was no mistaking this time that it was an unusual one. It seemed to him like a human voice in prolonged ejaculatory speech at some distance.

Startled, he again looked out of his door. At first he saw nothing, but what he had seen before--the world of snow, the starry skies. Yet the sound, which stopped and again went on, came to him as if from the direction in which he looked. Looking, listening intently, he was just about to turn in for his coat and snow-shoes in order to go forth and seek the owner of the voice, when he perceived something moving between him and the nearest wood--that very birch wood in which, more than a month before, he had sought for the man Cameron who had disappeared from his own coffin. In an instant the mood of that time flashed back on him as if there had been nothing between.

All the search that had been made for Cameron in the first days of the snow had resulted in nothing but the finding of his coarse winding-sheet in this birch wood. Then and since, confused rumours had come that he was wandering from village to village, but no one had been brave enough to detain him. Trenholme knew that people on the railway line to the south believed firmly that the old man was still alive, or that his ghost walked. Now, as his eyes focussed more intently upon the moving thing, it looked to him like a man.

Again he heard the sound of a voice, a man's voice certainly. It was raised for the space of a minute in a sort of chant, not loud enough for him to hear any word or to know what language was spoken.

"Hi!" cried Trenholme at the top of his voice. "Hi, there! What do you want?"

There was no doubt that a man out there could have heard, yet, whatever the creature was, it took not the slightest notice of the challenge.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light he saw that the figure was moving on the top of the deep snow near the outskirts of the wood--moving about in an aimless way, stopping occasionally, and starting again, raising the voice sometimes, and again going on in silence. Trenholme could not descry any track left on the snow; all that he could see was a large figure dressed in garments which, in the starlight, did not seem to differ very much in hue from the snow, and he gained the impression that the head was thrown back and the face uplifted to the stars.

He called again, adjuring the man he saw to come at once and say why he was there and what he wanted. No attention was paid to him; he might as well have kept silent.

A minute or two more and he went in, shut and bolted his door, even took the trouble to see that the door of the baggage-room was secured. He took his lamp down from the wall where, by its tin reflector, it hung on a nail, and set it on the table for company. He opened the damper of the stove again, so that the logs within crackled. Then he sat down and began to read the Shakespeare he had pushed from him before. What he had seen and heard seemed to him very curious. No obligation rested upon him, certainly, to go out and seek this weird-looking creature. There was probably nothing supernatural, but--well, while a man is alone it is wisest to shut out all that has even the appearance of the supernatural from his house and from his mind. So Trenholme argued, choosing the satirical fool of the Forest of Arden to keep him company.

"Now am I in Arden; the more fool