Читать книгу The Small Dark Man (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition) - Maurice Walsh - Страница 7

O’er mountain walls

Your road lies steep.

Down dim dark glens

That road you keep.

No fear or foe your road may bar—

But Fate has lit a yellow star.

I

Down the white road marched Hugh Forbes, the swift Croghanmoyle singing on one hand with the birch trees leaning down to listen, and, on the other, a brown moor rolling up to the horizon. Sturdily he went and fast—and yet he gave the curious impression of being unbeholden to time, space, or goal. At the high-cocked bridge, a mile down the road, he leant over the ancient stone parapet and looked down into the river, here feet deep in a still pool and showing every pebble in its green-grey bed. A ten-inch speckled trout seemed to soar fin still half-way down, but, the moment after the dark head appeared, it darted, too quick for eye, under the blackness of a ledge.

“Clear water of the Croghanmoyle,” he murmured sonorously, “I give you best. The hills that ring Glounagrianaan are hills of my heart, but the waters that slide down the wide aprons are the sad brown of peat. Well, one can’t have everything, even in Glounagrianaan.

Sad I was and sore I was,

And lonely to the bone.

Grey o’ grass and green o’ grass

And water over stone,

Set a dream upon a dream

And washed away the lone.”

The bass drone of his singing seemed to vibrate in the grey stone of the bridge. And for long after the song was done he leant on the parapet in some quiet apathy of thought—or no-thought.

The road beyond the Croghanmoyle swerved in towards the foot of Cairn Ban, and the armies of drooping birches flanked it closely. In time he came to that nice but traitorous path winding enticingly upwards among the trees and bracken, and halted at the mouth of it. “The wayward devil you are, Hugh Forbes!” he addressed himself frowningly. “I know you. You hate trailing after that blonde lad and his blonde woman. In spite of anything I can do you’ll set foot on this path and break your damn neck. You will? Go and have a look, then.”

In addressing himself he gave the odd impression of addressing a man he knew well and had no great liking for. It was something more than ordinary thinking aloud, for he seemed to project a personality outside himself and make it the butt of criticism and comment. A man like that might be remote, but never would he be lonely.

Grumblingly he stepped off the road, but, once in the path, resigned himself to himself and buckled down to the work in hand. He climbed well, lifting springingly from heel to toe and placing his whole foot on the upward slope. The path steepened as it ascended; the birches that first brushed him with trailing fronds receded and thinned; and at last he came out on a dome plumed only with grey grass. It says well for his wind that his first deep-breathing halt was on the crown of this dome. He smiled pityingly. He was looking down and across a wide tilt of stone at the impossibly steep face of Cairn Ban. The outline of it was an almost perfect triangle, shaved as with a mighty plane except for a narrow boulder-filled corrie that gashed upward a little to the left of the middle line. That corrie had to be his road—or else he must circle round to an easier face of the mountain.

“Try it, you devil!” he urged warmly, and obeyed that urge.

Out on that hot tilt of stone he found the going not so easy and yet not too difficult. The surface had been split and twisted by primeval fires, and it was pitted with scooped out basins varying in diameter from inches to yards, and all mysteriously full to the brim of limpid water—water as clear as a blue diamond, so nearly invisible that the eye could not gauge it but for the exquisite refraction of light playing through it when some faint tremor of air shivered across its surface. Once the small man lay full length and drank out of a tiny basin. “Wow!” he cried, “but it’s cold. A gallon of good whisky in the punchbowl of it and I’d climb that mountain up there and two more on the top of it.”

At a distance of half a mile the gash in the face of Cairn Ban seemed to be forbiddingly perpendicular, but on a nearer approach it promised better, and actually leant back so that, standing upright, a man could touch the rock with outstretched hand.

“A cataract of stone,” he murmured, his head back into his shoulders and his eyes tracing the terrifying slant above him. “A pebble loose-footed up there, and give me back the cliff at Suvla Beach.”

He tied the sleeves of the old burberry round his neck, drew in a full breath, and started to climb—a persistent grey ant crawling doggedly up the huge, calm face of the mountain. Head steady, hand and foot cunningly seeking sure grip, he went upwards, boulder over boulder, while the valleys and moors below him sank and widened and dwindled.