JOHN SALTUS

I remember meeting John Saltus for the first time as vividly as any coloured patch in my life. It was in the middle of Clubland and a day that I was feeling unusually sore after being blackballed for the Bachelors’. I was vaguely trying to decide whether to join the Y.M.C.A. or to chance the ballot of the Athenæum under a nom de plume. For I had to have some place in London in which to lunch. My real name I had disgraced irretrievably, unintentionally enough, but foolishly beyond belief. I need not recall that celebrated baccarat case in which I had been mixed. It was quite enough to keep me out of any London Club. I had been a fool, and folly, alas, does not connote innocence.

It simply made me a pariah in Mayfair. I had played at a table where a Duchess with thirty thousand a year had been very rightly fleeced. I enjoyed watching her being cheated by my best friend. There was a sudden scene and I was held as an accomplice. Nothing could be proved, but nothing was ever disproved. I went sniffing about Belgravia like an hyena with his teeth drawn. In the suburbs of course I became rather a lion, and tradesmen’s wives, and even my own wife’s tradesmen, welcomed me to their Sunday socials. The hand that was believed to have cheated at the tables of the great was greeted with considerable sympathy by the great provision dealers, who, I may say, by less dramatic methods extract even larger sums from the same tables. But every class admires some vice from which it is circumstantially free. Possessors of great wealth secretly admire burglars—an admiration which sometimes breaks out in mild kleptomania. Atheists cause a secret fascination to the wives of clergy. Sinners bow to the innocent. The innocent kneel to sinners. It is based on the love of opposites. Many a perfect draughtsman has cherished the ambition to write one drivelling lyric. Browning said he liked “to know the butcher paints,” which the Exhibition at the Royal Academy shows is often the case. Anyhow, as one who had once cheated by accident at cards, I became the object of much vicious veneration in Golders Green.

In Mayfair I was used to being cut as often as a pack of cards. Tom Smithson was the only friend who stuck to me and showed his belief in me by proposing me every year for the Bachelors’. And this, I remember so well, was my fourth blackballing and here was Smithson coming down St. James’s Street accompanied by a man to me unknown. Smithson was the queerest fellow. He always claimed to be the rightful Duke of Northumberland. He said the Percies had chivied him out.

Smithson turned sheepish the moment he caught sight of me, a natural consequence, I supposed, of the social denigration I had received under his auspices that morning. I only felt that he owed me the necessary lunch to cover his humiliation and mine. It was the least he could do. But after making an obvious effort to disembarrass himself of his companion he showed signs of wishing to avoid me. I could not believe I was such a pariah that he would not even introduce a friend. I felt stirred to force an introduction for myself, and the casual crowd assisted the manœuvre, for we were thrown into touch by an eddy of passers. Even so, he chose to forget our names! He only placed a hand on each of our shoulders and murmured: “I am going to leave you two excellent fellows together without telling you who you are. You are both well known in your way and you should have rather an amusing lunch trying to find out who the other is. I have an engagement myself. I am so sorry.” And he slipped into White’s with the nervous superiority of an archangel leaving two imperfect beings outside the Paradisal fence. I was left alone with the stranger.

“Lunch is a good idea, as ideas go,” I ventured to say, “but unluckily I have no Club as yet.” A tinge of disappointment crossed his iron-grey face as he echoed, “Nor have I!” I felt frank and did not mind telling a stranger, who did not even know my name, that I had been badly blackballed at the Bachelors’ that morning. At the word blackball he turned livid white.

“I have never been blackballed, I suppose because nobody has ever dared to propose me for a London Club,” he stated with a mechanical smile. I then perceived the good looks under the sullen pitch of his countenance. I proposed that we should evacuate the blind rut into which Smithson had thrown us by quickly disclosing our names and lunching in the first restaurant. I revealed my humble autonym, for which he feigned immediate recognition, and, while I was wondering which of the minors or minims his might represent in English art or letters, he bespake his nomenclature: “I am John Saltus; you know Saltus?”

Hope of lunch compelled me to utter some such pretended surprise as: “Oh, Saltus? Not John Saltus? Why, of course. I am so glad to meet you. So curious, isn’t it, after all these years?” But my over-ready recognition seemed to pain rather than please. I had been as polite as I could be under extempore circumstances, and yet he seemed annoyed. Did he also prefer to keep his name under a bushel? Surely he couldn’t be a pariah as well as myself? “I should like to have honoured myself by giving you lunch at the Athenæum,” I said, trying to be more than courteous.

“At the home of literary discoveries and lost wits?” he murmured with a ghastly smile. I felt quite annoyed, for the Athenæum was to me one of the fixed points in the English world, like Punch or Lord’s Cricket Ground or our sanitary system, and I could not brook the scornful.

“In that case will you partake with me at my favourite Aerated Bread Shop?” I continued to say. He bowed, and we walked towards the City. My favourite shop was empty, except for a mother giving her schoolboy sons a farewell holiday meal. The quick lunchers and cheap eaters had gone. It was late in the afternoon. I was lunching with a cynic, a not unpleasing form of appetiser.

With his bitter sauce he irrigated the homely pudding of life until I half enjoyed his quaint misanthropy. It was so unusual in an Aerated Bread Shop. The lady at the next table seemed equally interested and strained her ears to overhear what he had to say. The schoolboys gulped as though about to be left stranded on some cakeless shore or some iceless Sahara. They were in the middle of a second strawberry ice when their mother caught the eye of John Saltus. There was a flash of real recognition, and I watched her rise to her feet, flint-faced, and order the boys to follow her out of the shop. In vain they protested, with streaming lips. “Your father would not like you to eat here; no, not for a moment,” and with her eyes, half afraid and half horrified, fixed on Saltus she withdrew her brood. They left their ice unfinished. She made one jerk with her parasol, as though she had just found a decayed rat in the soup, and was gone.

I am neither curious nor critical. The past cannot interest me and the future, being only the unborn past, is even dull to me. As for the present, the evil of the day is sufficient to the day. Confidences bore me and I never encourage le récit d’une vie. But this time I felt that a little explanation was in season. I was used to being blackballed at the clubs, but, when it comes to women stamping out of Aerated Bread Shops rather than allow their children to eat in the same room, I confess I felt a little annoyed.

I was wondering which of the seven unforgivable sins against Society Saltus could have committed. Had he sinned like me basely at baccarat? Or had he forged a Lord Chamberlain’s ticket to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or gone uninvited to the Gillies’ Ball at Balmoral? Had the police arrested him embracing his wife with over fervour amid the moonlit shadows of Hyde Park? Or, even more iniquitous, had he affixed the pennant of the Royal Yacht Squadron to a houseboat on the Upper Thames? I could not imagine.

Well, I never asked, and we walked together that afternoon as though some subtle bond lay between us. We were fellow-pariahs and clung to each other. There are some to whom the joys of ostracism make their appeal and who even enjoy being seen with the notorious. But it was a kind of self-protection that held us together.... That winter I often lunched with Saltus and enjoyed his company. I came to appreciate the fine-grained cynicism of his talk, and I guessed that he liked me because I was neither curious nor critical. Such friendships can last. All the same, I could not help observing that his notoriety was greater than mine, for I often saw men turn aside from us, or at least Saltus imagined they did, and his brow puckered like a frill and his long shapely hand tightened upon mine. It was not one of the radiant or rhapsodical friendships of my life, but I felt spellbound at times and all the more attracted to his company. I felt I knew him well enough to propose a jaunt in Paris. I knew he went abroad for his summers, instead of pursuing those very uninteresting fauna at home, the deer, salmon and grouse. I felt that Paris was a safe proposal, the great caravanserai of the uninvited and unwanted and unmentionable of all nations. To my surprise he bit his lip and said: “Paris? Not Paris. I can never return there.” With an apologetical farewell he left me the next moment.

Next day I received an invitation to follow him to his chalet in Switzerland. I never knew he had one, but the address conveyed meaning to the railway agent, and a week later I had taken my ticket. Switzerland seemed an odd place for an Englishman seeking social concealment. However, I am not curious and my mind was occupied by the decision I had to make between the firms of Cook or Lunn. Lunn seemed localised in Switzerland and the name bespoke avalanches of London Alpinists, but Cook was a world-fact, one of the Catholicities from which there is no escape. I was in suspense between Cook the Guelf and Lunn the Ghibelline, between Capulet Cook and Montagu Lunn. It was about as considerable a decision as my mind can attain to.

Eventually I purchased a ticket at Cook’s and drifted into a herded party labelled Lunn, at whose expense I obtained a free transit between two Paris stations. Saltus had written to me previously from Germany. I wondered whether he minded my coming by Paris.... At any rate, the next day I looked out of the carriage and took my first glimpse of the Alps. I found them magnificently disappointing. However, I had not been curious to see them, so I had no right to be critical.

The Alps at last, bleak and cloudless. I could but feebly compare them in my mind to God’s family pewter and silver stacked in useless and aggravated confusion along the horizon. Brightly polished and metallic they glistened in the sun, silver-plated with the crystallised snow and hall-marked with ancient volcanic scars. I felt no doubt as to their Maker. But my mood led me to view them relatively and from distances in which they grew smaller. My imagination resolved them to the contours of the Mountains in the Moon, which hung aloft that night like a steel mirror parodying the Alps of earth. In that cosmic illumination which we call moonlight I imagined the Alps as seen from Saturn or from the sun, reducing them to mental and relative dust. What interested me most, watching those mountains, was their human associations and the dim thought that in crevasses hidden throughout those heights as remote from man’s eye as the sepulchre of Moses lay the frost-eaten skeletons of dead mountaineers, all the lonely legion who had gone up on the hills and never returned. The great peaks seemed memorable, glamorous and tragic. Without history until men travelled and travailed on them, without dramatic power till men perished in their fastnesses and fissures, dumb and inane the great hills encumbered the earth.

Switzerland is Switzerland, and three things in Switzerland do not stop. Firstly, the wonderfully made clocks; secondly, the ever-tinkling cattle bells, and, thirdly, the Tourists, who at certain and fortunate periods take flight. I arrived in the lull between summer-climbing and winter-sports while the voice of the tourist was low in the land. Saltus met me at the station in the valley and conducted me to the funicular railway leading to his chalet. We began to move slowly up the heights. It was like tobogganing uphill in a kind of collapsed tramcar. We passed through a mist of bell-music. Upon the cattle of a hundred hills the little bells jangled and tinkled. If the bells were intended to trace a lost cow I should imagine the expedient to be as practical as tying a blue ribbon round every sheep on the English Downs. But I dwell on a particular sound which, for me, is always associated with Saltus.

At the top of the funicular we dismounted and began walking through a forest of fir trees, which lost all charm for me when I read a notice to say that it was reserved for hotel visitors! and in the wild thickets Saltus pointed out one of those melancholy timberbuilt depots for consumptives. Farther we met a fellow-countryman, who turned and, looking at Saltus with staring hectic eyes, seemed to fly horrorstruck, as far as I could judge. We were now passing on footpaths through the forest proper, and in half an hour we reached his chalet. It was a dark and dismal den though furnished with modern comforts. A heavy overhanging drip-board shaded the dark-stained timber stories from sun or snow. Piles of books filled the low-ceilinged room amid much mountaineering gear and instruments that I connected with astrology—star charts and astrolabes, crystal balls and the like.

This was a new side to Saltus’s character, and I decided that it accounted for the dread which his neighbour had shown when we passed in the forest, as well as for the awed demeanour of the two Swiss servants, who worked in the chalet by day and withdrew to some Alpine kraal by night. I found a clue to Saltus, at least to the extent of his misanthropy. His chalet held no Visitors’ Book, and there appeared to be no visitor’s room.

I presumed I was the first visitor to reach his abode, for a camp bed and blankets were pitched for me in a corner of the dining-room. I stayed a month with him without making any attempt to lift the personal mystery. I discovered that he was wealthy, and a rich man without friends is a curious phenomenon. He was also an epicure, for the food and cooking were excellent. But there was no variety. Certain vegetables and meats appeared but others never appeared in the round. Yet Saltus surveyed the menu book every morning with an eagle eye. However, I settled down to this solitary form of companionship. Lunn had forgotten me and to Cook I must have been as one that had gone down into the pit, though never had I dwelt at a higher elevation in my life. Of his necromancy Saltus was very open and showed me many things in old books, but I came to regard it as a hobby rather than a practice on his part. I could not feel that his clever cynical mind would waste or loose itself entirely on such barren investigations. His servants thought he had attained some proficiency in the darker arts, for I noticed that whenever he entered the room they crossed their thumbs in his direction. I knew what this meant. They feared him for the evil eye. Did the lady in the Aerated Bread Shop also fear the evil eye? I wondered to myself. It was no business of mine whether the ban upon him was social or supernatural. I would not ask and I could not blame. He could make me his revelation when he wished.

But it was a slight surprise to find that this velvet-dressed lounger and affecter of the occult was a first-class mountaineer. I learnt by observation that he was so keen that he never lost a chance to go out on a search party. There were plenty of accidents in his locality. In face of the chalet rose the colossal cloudpick known as the Spindelhorn, and the ranges of the Schwindelhorn stretched at our back. More than once I saw him go out at a night call with the guides when some party had been reported lost. He seemed to have a passion for danger and not for fame. Unrecorded were these heroic climbs, except what he cared to tell me after he had rested. He told me one day with visual effect how he had been forced to make a glissade down a splitting snow-field. For a moment he had been suspended by the rope over a crevasse, but he laughed as though life held far more terrible situations. It was a ridiculising yet a haunted laugh. But it was a new rôle for this misanthrope to adopt, that of a human St. Bernard, for he never took out his gear except to find the lost. I never knew what to make of it. His expeditions on the hills always left him in a strangely exalted condition, and for a day the cynicism would fall from his real nature like a bright barren husk. I even imagined him sentimental within. The snows and storms of the Alps had no terrors for him; if anything they were a refreshment to his silent, sullen soul.

He never left the chalet except to walk in the woods, and always avoided seeing anybody except myself and the servants. Yet he had no appearance of having shrunk into himself or of collapsing into ignoble obscurity. He kept himself in the most magnificent strength and fettle, and his agility in drawing himself over the rocks on the very mild climbs we took together was little less than caprine. And all the while his mystery seemed farther away than ever from solution. This was no broken man, whose co-operation on a jaunt was half the battle. Why did he behave as though his presence polluted the very whiteness of Switzerland? Yet he used to stand for hours watching the Spindelhorn as though he were sifting the snows in his inmost soul. I looked carelessly into his eyes sometimes. They were the cold green colour of the glaciers. They made me shiver and desire to ask questions less than ever. They reminded me of the eyes of a man who had died long ago. The chalet was comfortable enough to a bachelor, but it suffered from what I can only describe as a great spiritual emptiness. Neither good nor evil spirits could find lodging there. It was a sort of vacuum. When I saw all his necromantic gear, I had a feeling that, as he had found himself cut by the living, it was only natural that he should wish to scrape up acquaintance with the dead. One day he told me that he had never imagined once in his life that any survival of the human personality was possible. I supposed his secret was that, though endowed with fine faculties, mental and bodily, he had somehow become dispossessed of his soul, if ever he had one! I felt as though I was really the only human person walking about in that house. His body and his mind were unconnected by the third quantity of soul, which makes a person. He was a unique figure, a striking character in his way, almost a personage; but he was not a real person. He was only a psychical mannequin, after all! However, I was comfortable and I lived on with my automaton friend as with a muscular phantom. I was fond of coining such phrases, but none of them exactly caught John Saltus.

I felt that my patronising pity was inadequate to the power that lay behind his detachment of purpose and life. He was something more than an Alpine Diogenes in his tub. He had something of the martyrised nobility of Prometheus chained to the rocks. But why he lived on those heights, so lonely and so unsatisfied, a woman visitor would have gone mad in a week trying to find out. He was not consumptive. His mountaineering was occasional. His tastes lay with civilisation, and eventually I realised that his astrology was all a blind. The inspiration or fascination or redemption which he drew from the everlasting hills eluded me. What possible sin or secret demanded that he should live in his wooden eyrie, issuing forth on rare and dangerous expeditions? What did he expect the snows of the Schwindelhorn to wipe away from his past?

I used to feel that he was a ghostless body, that he was ever watching those heights for the return of his soul. They were not unpopulated, those uncanny crevasses and glaciers. Human beings had been lured and trapped into their embrace. I could conceive ghosts among those emerald cracks in the sides of the lacquered mountain. There, as in a vision, the dead climbers eternally negotiate the trackless passes, while the noiseless flick of their shadowy axes moves upon the face of the ice, and phantom pulls phantom along the endless rope.

One day the end came with such an unexpected explanation. We were watching the fronting heights, the trillion tonnage of micaed granite, that rises in sheeted cliffs and light-green landing stages, where alpine men actually live, and the higher barren ledges and ragged belts of hirsute fir-trees growing on the gigantic rock jowls and only waiting for a drift of snowlike soap and the razorlike effect of an avalanche to give the illusion of a grandiose operation in Titanic shaving. And over all rose the snowy peaks, worn fine by the workings of sun and rain, or tangled and wounded by the primeval chaos.

Leaving him, I had turned back to the chalet when I suddenly heard him cry to himself: “Onions and veal, onions and veal, there is no peace!” Ridiculous words they sounded, but from Saltus they came with all the force and enunciation of Greek tragedy. And he sighed the words again and again: “No peace, no peace!” While his green eyes still ranged the panorama of the Alps. I knew not what to think. Had he sent his soul out into the waste and had it returned empty to him again? He rejoined me at lunch and showed himself almost human—not that he was not always courteous and hospitable and (when he wished) the fount of good conversation. Whatever his tragedy was, he had seemingly merged it into nature. Whatever had been the primitive shades and sensitiveness of his character, he had reduced himself to the slow patience of the unemotional. He was the triumph of undecontrollable control. In a month of close company those were the only revealing words he had let slip. And they were the most anguished I had ever heard drop from a human creature in my life. Otherwise I could not recollect once seeing him hurried or angry or grieved. I could not conceive him passing in or out of love. Swearing or praying, those two easily reversible processes of approach to the Creator, were not for him. Fortunately I still remained, on the whole, neither curious nor critical.

When he joined me, he told me he had seen an avalanche on the sides of the Schwindelhorn. Emotion in his face took the form of chalky solemnity. “I never watch an avalanche without wishing I were under it”; and again he said with unusual feeling, “I believe I could bring myself to pray to be buried under those moving snows if my prayer could be heard.” I said I hoped that the avalanche had brought no accident in its train, and that if he liked I would go down the funicular to the Club that evening to find out if it were so. He nodded grateful agreement. “Yes, do find out. If there has been trouble, I should like to be out on the Alps to-morrow.”

I crawled down by the funicular that evening and found my way to the English Club. The avalanche had caused some stirring among guides and visitors. At least one party was known to have been making in the direction taken by the avalanche. Alpenstocks were clashing and heavy boots beating upon the boarding. Anglo-Saxon superiority upon the mountains was being demonstrated. Casual English voices could be heard with their peculiarly unhumorous drawl. I made bold to inquire if this activity had been caused by rumour of accident. A quiet man looked up and nodded. Then he said: “You come from Saltus, don’t you? I have noticed you with him several times.” I assented. “You live with him?” I nodded. “You eat with him?” I nodded. “Then I bet you haven’t smelt an onion for a twelvemonth,” and he laughed coarsely. “I am afraid I don’t understand you, sir,” I said. “Then wait till this search party gets clear. I dare say they will send for Saltus, if they don’t strike the party which was due to return last night.” And I waited, curious perhaps for the first time in my life. The word “onion” rang like an echo of fatality in my ears.

An hour later we were alone in the club-room, and the other began his yarn. Mercifully it was quickly told. “So you eat with John Saltus day after day and your flesh never creeps?” I sat, nodding and nodding, in a waking trance, but I could not fall asleep. Like the Ancient Mariner, the other told me his ghastly tale as follows:

“I knew John Saltus in Paris when we were both students. We lived in the same rooms for a time. But for a year we always fed at a crowded little restaurant in the Latin Quarter. It was very cheap and very good. The restaurant was kept by an old artist, fallen on evil days, and his handsome wife. We all admired and feebly affected Madame. Saltus had a friend who went further and made love to her. They used to eat together. One day I saw the old man serving them both with a livid face. It really seemed a little hard that they should eat his own food under his nose and make him wait on them both. Two days later I arrived late for the evening meal. To my surprise only Saltus and his friend were sitting there. I joined them, and Saltus explained: ‘The old man has been feeling ill. He refused us admission, but we insisted and tried to put it right. Anyhow, he has closed his windows and let in no one but us. Madame has not appeared yet. She must be doing penance in the kitchen. However, you have missed nothing. The cooking has been execrable. We have had horrible horsemeat with onions. Can’t you catch the smell? You had better go on to another restaurant. They are too much upset here. Our friend has disorganised the establishment by his love-making. The wonder is that he has been served at all. And now Monsieur has not returned from the kitchen. We had better pay the bill and go. I will go in and spare him the trouble of looking upon his rival again.’ All these words and sentences have remained indelible upon my mind,” continued my informant.

“When Saltus came back from the kitchen he was a changed man. He could not speak, but motioned us all to follow him. Madame lay dead on the table, her breasts terribly mangled and her whole body dissected. Her husband had fled and was picked out of the Seine the next day. The stove was burning hard and a saucepan of onions was frizzling to a stinking cinder. No need to discuss or analyse the menu. Saltus has been that way ever since. He thinks he has committed some unforgivable sin or incurred some uncleansable degradation in the sight of men.”

I ran out into the moonlit night. It was late, and I walked about, unable to sleep, and watched the sunrise redden the snowy veins of the Schwindelhorn like a pink unguent applied by Dawn to heal the black bruise of night. I can never forget the first delicate pink that sprayed or rather perfumed the mountain until the sun brought a ruddier rush of light over the mountain-head, and Day succeeded with all her diamond whiteness. And the stark beauty of the Spindelhorn and the Spittlehorn rose up behind me with a whiteness as of fuller’s earth. Then I could understand Saltus longing for the untarnished hills. It was not curious that he should have drawn himself into the heights that his flesh might be cleansed by the snow and his bones one day made one with the unpolluted Alps. But I never returned to his chalet.