The Apple Tree: a short novel & several long stories

Monte Verità

THEY TOLD ME afterwards they had found nothing. No trace of anyone, living or dead. Maddened by anger, and I believe by fear, they had succeeded at last in breaking into those forbidden walls, dreaded and shunned through countless years — to be met by silence. Frustrated, bewildered, frightened, driven to fury at the sight of those empty cells, that bare court, the valley people resorted to the primitive methods that have served so many peasants through so many centuries: fire and destruction.

It was the only answer, I suppose, to something they did not understand. Then, their anger spent, they must have realised that nothing of any purpose had been destroyed. The smouldering and blackened walls that met their eyes in the starry, frozen dawn had cheated them in the end.

Search parties were sent out, of course. The more experienced climbers amongst them, undaunted by the bare rock of the mountain summit, covered the whole ridge, from north to south, from east to west, with no result.

And that is the end of the story. Nothing more is known.

Two men from the village helped me to carry Victor's body to the valley, and he was buried at the foot of Monte Verità. I think I envied him, at peace there. He had kept his dream.

As to myself, my old life claimed me again. The second war churned up the world once more. Today, approaching seventy, I have few illusions; yet often I think of Monte Verità and wonder what could have been the final answer.

I have three theories, but none of them may be true.

The first, and the most fantastic, is that Victor was right, after all, to hold to his belief that the inhabitants of Monte Verità had reached some strange state of immortality which gave them power when the hour of need arrived, so that, like the prophets of old, they vanished into the heavens. The ancient Greeks believed this of their gods, the Jews believed it of Elijah, the Christians of their Founder. Throughout the long history of religious superstition and credulity runs this ever-recurrent conviction that some persons attain such holiness and power that death can be overcome. This faith is strong in eastern countries, and in Africa; it is only to our sophisticated western eyes that the disappearance of things tangible, of persons of flesh and blood, seems impossible.

Religious teachers disagree when they try to show the difference between good and evil: what is a miracle to one becomes black magic to another. The good prophets have been stoned, but so have the witch-doctors. Blasphemy in one age becomes holy utterance in the next, and this day's heresy is tomorrow's credo.

I am no great thinker, and never have been. But this I do know, from my old climbing days: that in the mountains we come closest to whatever Being it is that rules our destiny. The great utterances of old were given from the mountain tops: it was always to the hills that the prophets climbed. The saints, the messiahs, were gathered to their fathers in the clouds. It is credible to me, in my more solemn moods, that the hand of magic reached down that night to Monte Verità and plucked those souls to safety.

Remember, I myself saw the full moon shining upon that mountain. I also, at midday, saw the sun. What I saw and heard and felt was not of this world. I think of the rock-face, with the moon upon it; I hear the chanting from the forbidden walls; I see the crevasse, cupped like a chalice between the twin peaks of the mountain; I hear the laughter; I see the bare bronzed arms outstretched to the sun.

When I remember these things, I believe in immortality…

Then — and this is perhaps because my climbing days are over, and the magic of the mountains loses its grip over old memories, as it does over old limbs — I remind myself that the eyes I looked into that last day on Monte Verità were the eyes of a living, breathing person, and the hands I touched were flesh.

Even the spoken words belonged to a human being. "Please do not concern yourself with us. We know what we must do." And then that final, tragic word, "Let Victor keep his dream."

So my second theory comes into being, and I see nightfall, and the stars, and the courage of that soul which chose the wisest way for itself and for the others; and awhile I returned to Victor, and the people from the valley gathered themselves together for the assault, the little band of believers, the last company of those seekers after Truth, climbed to that crevasse, between the peaks, and so were lost.

My third theory is one that comes to me in moods more cynical, more lonely, when, having dined well with friends who mean little to me, I take myself home to my apartment in New York. Looking from the window at the fantastic light and colour of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding. Then, I tell myself, perhaps the inhabitants of Monte Verità had long prepared themselves against departure, and when the moment came it found them ready, neither for immortality nor for death, but for the world of men and women. In stealth, in secret, they came down into the valley unobserved, and, mingling with the people, went their separate ways. I wonder, looking down from my apartment into the hub and hustle of my world, if some of them wander there, in the crowded streets and subways, and whether, if I went out and searched the passing faces, I should find such a one and have my answer.

Sometimes, when travelling, I have fancied to myself, in coming upon a stranger, that there is something exceptional in the turn of a head, in the expression of an eye, that is at once compelling and strange. I want to speak, and hold such a person instantly in conversation, but — possibly it is my fancy — it is as though some instinct warns them. A momentary pause, a hesitation, and they are gone. It might be in a train, or in some crowded thoroughfare, and for one brief moment I am aware of someone with more than earthly beauty and human grace, and I want to stretch out my hand and say, swiftly, softly, "Were you among those I saw on Monte Verità?" But there is never time. They vanish, they are gone, and I am alone again, with my third theory still unproven.

As I grow older — nearly seventy, as I have said, and memory shortens with the lengthening years — the story of Monte Verità becomes more dim to me, and more improbable, and because of this I have a great urge to write it down before memory fails me altogether. It may be that someone reading it will have the love of mountains that I had once, and so bring his own understanding to the tale, his own interpretation.

One word of warning. There are many mountain peaks in Europe, and countless numbers may bear the name of Monte Verità. They can be found in Switzerland, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in the Tyrol. I prefer to give no precise locality to mine. In these days, after two world wars, no mountain seems inaccessible. All can be climbed. None, with due caution, need be dangerous. My Monte Verità was never shunned because of diiliculties of height, of ice and snow. The track leading to the summit could be followed by anyone of sure and certain step, even in late autumn. No common danger kept the climber back, but awe and fear.

I have little doubt that today my Monte Verità has been plotted upon the map with all the others. There may be resting camps near the summit, even an hotel in the little village on the eastern slopes, and the tourist lifted to the twin peaks by electric cable. Even so, I like to think there can be no final desecration, that at midnight, when the full moon rises, the mountain face is still inviolate, unchanged, and that in winter, when snow and ice, great wind and drifting cloud make the climb impassable to man, the rock-face of Monte Verità, her twin peaks lifted to the sun, stares down in silence and compassion upon a blinded world.

We were boys together, Victor and I. We were both at Marlborough, and went up to Cambridge the same year. In those days I was his greatest friend, and if we did not see so much of each other after we left the 'Varsity it was only because we moved in rather different worlds: my work took me much abroad, while he was busily employed running his own estate up in Shropshire. When we saw each other, we resumed our friendship without any sense of having grown apart.

My work was absorbing, so was his; but we had money enough, and leisure too, to indulge in our favourite pastime, which was climbing. The modern expert, with his equipment and his scientific training, would think our expeditions amateur in the extreme — I am talking of the idyllic days before the first world war — and, looking back on them, I suppose they were just that. Certainly there was nothing professional about the two young men who used to cling with hands and feet to those projecting rocks in Cumberland and Wales, and later, when some experience was gained, tried the more hazardous ascents in southern Europe.

In time we became less foolhardy and more weather-wise, and learnt to treat our mountains with respect — not as an enemy to be conquered, but as an ally to be won. We used to climb, Victor and I, from no desire for danger or because we wanted to add mountain peaks to our repertoire of achievement. We climbed from desire, because we loved the thing we won.

The moods of a mountain can be more varying, more swiftly-changing, than any woman's, bringing joy, and fear, and also great repose. The urge to climb will never be explained. In olden days, perhaps, it was a wish to reach the stars. Today, anyone so minded can buy a seat on a 'plane and feel himself master of the skies. Even so, he will no have rock under his feet, or air upon his face; nor will he know the silence that comes only on the hills.

The best hours of my life were spent, when I was young, upon the mountains. That urge to spill all energy, all thought, to be as nothing, blotted against the sky — we called it mountain fever, Victor and I. He used to recover from the experience more quickly than I did. He would look about him, methodical, careful, planning the descent, while I was lost in wonder, locked in a dream I could not understand. Endurance had been tested, the summit was ours, but something indefinable waited to be won. Always it was denied me, the experience I desired, and something seemed to tell me the fault was in myself But they were good days. The finest I have known…

One summer, shortly after I returned to London from a business trip to Canada, a letter arrived from Victor, written in tremendous spirits. He was engaged to be married. He was, in fact, to be married very soon. She was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, and would I be his best man? I wrote back, as one does on these occasions, expressing myself delighted and wishing him all the happiness in the world. A confirmed bachelor myself; I considered him yet another good friend lost, the best of all, bogged down in domesticity.

The bride-to-be was Welsh and lived just over the border from Victor's place in Shropshire. "And would you believe it," said Victor in a second letter, "she has never as much as set foot on Snowdon! I am going to take her education in hand." I could imagine nothing I should dislike more than trailing an inexperienced girl after me on any mountain.

A third letter announced Victor's arrival in London, and hers too, in all the bustle and preparation of the wedding. I invited both of them to luncheon. I don't know what I expected. Someone small, I think, and dark and stocky, with handsome eyes. Certainly not the beauty that came forward, putting out her hand to me and saying, "I am Anna."

In those days, before world war one, young women did not use make-up. Anna was free of lipstick, and her gold hair was rolled in great coils over her ears. I remember staring at her, at her incredible beauty, and Victor laughed, very pleased, and said, "What did I tell you?" We sat down to lunch, and the three of us were soon at ease and chatting comfortably. A certain reserve was part of her charm, but because she knew I was Victor's greatest friend I felt myself accepted, and liked into the bargain.

Victor certainly was lucky, I said to myself, and any doubt I might have felt about the marriage went on sight of her. Inevitably, with Victor and myself the conversation turned to mountains, and to climbing, before lunch was halfway through.

"So you are going to marry a man whose hobby is climbing mountains," I said to her, "and you've never even gone up your own Snowdon."

"No," she said, "no, I never have."

Some hesitation in her voice made me wonder. A little frown had come between those two very perfect eyes.

"Why?" I asked. "It's almost criminal to be Welsh, and know nothing of your highest mountain."

Victor interrupted. "Anna is scared," he said. "Every time I suggest an expedition she thinks out an excuse."

She turned to him swiftly. "No, Victor," she said, "it's not that. You just don't understand. I'm not afraid of climbing."

"What is it, then?" he said. He put out his hand and held hers on the table. I could see how devoted he was to her, and how happy they were likely to become. She looked across at me, feeling me, as it were, with her eyes, and suddenly I knew instinctively what she was going to say.

"Mountains are very demanding," she said. "You have to give everything. It's wiser, for someone like myself, to keep away."

I understood what she meant, at least I thought then that I did; but because Victor was in love with her, and she was in love with him, it seemed to me that nothing could be better than the fact that they might share the same hobby, once her initial awe was overcome.

"But that's splendid," I said, "you've got just the right approach to mountain climbing. Of course you have to give everything, but together you can achieve that. Victor won't let you attempt anything beyond you. He's more cautious than I am."

Anna smiled, and then withdrew her hand from Victor's on the table.

"You are both very obstinate," she said, "and you neither of you understand. I was born in the hills. I know what I mean."

And then some mutual friend of Victor's and my own came up to the table to be introduced, and there was no more talk of mountains.

They were married about six weeks later, and I have never seen a lovelier bride than Anna. Victor was pale with nerves, I remember well, and I thought what a responsibility lay on his shoulders, to make this girl happy for all time.

I saw much of her during the six weeks of their engagement, and, though Victor never realised it for one instant, came to love her as much as he did. It was not her natural charm, nor yet her beauty, but a strange blending of both, a kind of inner radiance, that drew me to her. My only fear for their future was that Victor might be a little too boisterous, too light-hearted and cheerful — his was a very open, simple nature — and that she might withdraw into herself because of it. Certainly they made a handsome pair as they drove off after the reception — given by an elderly aunt of Anna's, for her parents were dead — and I sentimentally looked forward to staying with them in Shropshire, and being godfather to the first child.

Business took me away shortly after the wedding, and it was not until the following December that I heard from Victor, asking me down for Christmas. I accepted gladly.

They had then been married about eight months. Victor looked fit and very happy, and Anna, it seemed to me, more beautiful than ever. It was hard to take my eyes off her. They gave me a great welcome, and I settled down to a peaceful week in Victor's fine old home, which I knew well from previous visits. The marriage was most definitely a success, that I could tell from the first. And if there appeared to be no heir on the way, there was plenty of time for that.

We walked about the estate, shot a little, read in the evenings, and were a most contented trio.

I noticed that Victor had adapted himself to Anna's quieter personality, though quiet, perhaps, is hardly the right definition for her gift of stillness. This stillness — for there is no other word for it — came from some depth within her and put a spell upon the whole house. It had always been a pleasant place in which to stay, with its lofty rambling rooms and mullioned windows; but now the peaceful atmosphere was somehow intensified and deepened, and it was as though every room had become impregnated with a strange brooding silence, to my mind quite remarkable, and much more than merely restful, as it had been before.

It is odd, but looking back to that Christmas week I can recollect nothing of the traditional festivity itself. I don't remember what we ate or drank, or whether we set foot inside the church, which surely we must have done, with Victor as the local squire. I can only remember the quite indescribable peace of the evenings, when the shutters had been fastened and we sat before the fire in the great hall. My business trip must have tired me more than I realised, for sitting there, in Victor and Anna's home, I had no desire to do anything but relax and give myself up to this blessed, healing silence.

The other change that had come upon the house, which I did not fully take in until I had been there a few days, was that it was much barer than it had been before. The multiple odds and ends, and the collection of furniture handed down from Victor's forebears, seemed to have disappeared. The big rooms were now sparse and the great hall, where we sat, had nothing in it but a long refectory table and the chairs before the open fire. It seemed very right that it should be so, yet, thinking about it, it was an odd change for a woman to make. The usual habit of a bride is to buy new curtains and carpets, to bring the feminine touch into a bachelor house. I ventured to remark upon it to Victor.

"Oh yes," he said, looking about him vaguely, "we have cleared out a lot of stuff. It was Anna's idea. She doesn't believe in possessions, you know. No, we didn't have a sale, or anything like that. We gave them all away."

The spare room allotted to me was the one I had always used in the past, and this was pretty much as it had been before. And I had the same old comforts — cans of hot water, early tea, biscuits by my bed, cigarette box filled, all the touches of a thoughtful hostess.

Yet once, passing down the long corridor to the stair-head, I noticed that the door of Anna's room, which was usually closed, was open; and knowing it to have been Victor's mother's room in former days, with a fine old four-poster bed and several pieces of heavy solid furniture, all in keeping with the style of the house, ordinary curiosity made me glance over my shoulder as I passed the open door. The room was bare of furniture. There were no curtains to the windows, and no carpet on the floor. The wooden boards were plain. There was a table and a chair, and a long trestle bed with no covering upon it but a blanket. The windows were wide open to the dusk, which was then falling. I turned away and walked down the stairs, and as I did so came face to face with Victor, who was ascending. He must have seen me glance into the room and I did not wish to appear furtive in any way.

"Forgive the trespass," I said, "but I happened to notice the room looked very different from your mother's day."

"Yes," he said briefly, "Anna hates frills. Are you ready for dinner? She sent me to find you."

And we went downstairs together without further conversation. Somehow I could not forget that bare sparse bedroom, comparing it with the soft luxury of my own, and I felt oddly inferior that Anna should consider me as someone who could not dispense with ease and elegance, which she, for some reason, did so well without.

That evening I watched her as we sat beside the fire. Victor had been called from the hall on some business, and she and I were alone for a few moments. As usual I felt the still, soothing peace of her presence come upon me with the silence; I was wrapped about with it, enfolded, as it were, and it was unlike anything I knew in my ordinary humdrum life; this stillness came out of her, yet from another world. I wanted to tell her about it but could not iind the words. At last I said, "You have done something to this house. I don't understand it."

"Don't you?" she said. "I think you do. We are both in search of the same thing, after all."

For some reason I felt afraid. The stillness was with us just the same, but intensified, almost overpowering.

"I am not aware," I said, "that I am in search of anything."

My words fell foolishly on the air and were lost. My eyes, that had drifted to the fire, were drawn, as if compelled, to hers.

"Aren't you?" she said.

I remember being swept by a feeling of profound distress. I saw myself; for the first time, as a very worthless, very trivial human being, travelling here and there about the world to no purpose, doing unnecessary business with other human beings as worthless as myself; and to no other end but that we should be fed and clothed and housed in adequate comfort until death.

I thought of my own small house in Westminster, chosen after long deliberation and furnished with great care. I saw my books, my pictures, my collection of china, and the two good servants who waited upon me and kept the house spotless always, in preparation for my return. Up to this moment my house and all it held had given me great pleasure. Now I was not sure that it had any value.

"What would you suggest? " I heard myself saying to Anna. "Should I sell everything I have and give up my work? What then?"

Thinking back on the brief conversation that passed between us, nothing that she said warranted this sudden question on my part. She implied that I was in search of something, and instead of answering her directly, yes or no, I asked her if I must give up all I had? The significance of this did not strike me at the time. All I knew then was that I was profoundly moved, and whereas a few moments before I had been at peace, I was now troubled.

"Your answer may not be the same as mine," she said, "and anyway, I am not certain of my own, as yet. One day I shall know."

Surely, I thought to myself in looking upon her, she has the answer now, with her beauty, her serenity, her understanding. What more can she possibly achieve, unless it is that up to the present she lacks children, and so feels unfulfilled?

Victor came back into the hall, and it seemed to me his presence brought solidity and warmth to the atmosphere; there was something familiar and comfortable about his old smoking jacket worn with his evening trousers.

"It's freezing hard," he said. "I went outside to see. The thermometer is down to 30. Lovely night, though. Full moon." He drew up his chair before the fire and smiled affectionately at Anna. "Almost as cold as the night we spent on Snowdon," he said. "Heavens above, I shan't forget that in a hurry." And turning to me with a laugh he added, "I never told you, did I, that Anna condescended to come climbing with me after all?"

"No," I said, astonished. "I thought she had set herself against it."

I looked across at Anna, and I noticed that her eyes had grown strangely blank, without expression. I felt instinctively that the subject brought up by Victor was one she would not have chosen. Victor, insensitive to this, went prattling on.

"She's a dark horse," he said. "She knows just as much about climbing mountains as you or I. In fact, she was ahead of me the whole time, and I lost her."

He continued, half-laughing, half-serious, giving me every detail of the climb, which seemed hazardous in the extreme, as they had left it much too late in the year.

It seemed that the weather, which had promised well in the morning for their start, had turned by mid-afternoon, bringing thunder and lightning and finally a blizzard; so that darkness overtook them in the descent, and they were forced to spend the night in the open.

"The thing I shall never understand," said Victor, "is how I came to miss her. One moment she was by my side, and the next she had gone. I can tell you I had a very bad three hours, in pitch darkness and half a gale."

Anna never said a word while he told the story. It was as though she withdrew herself completely. She sat in her chair, motionless. I felt uneasy, anxious. I wanted Victor to stop.

"Anyway," I said, to hasten him, "you got down all right, and none the worse for it."

"Yes," he said ruefully, "at about five in the morning, thoroughly wet and thoroughly frightened. Anna came up to me out of the mist not even damp, surprised that I was angry. Said she had been sheltered by a piece of rock. It was a wonder she had not broken her neck. Next time we go mountain climbing, I've told her that she can be the guide."

"Perhaps," I said, with a glance at Anna, "there won't be a next time. Once was enough."

"Not a bit of it," said Victor cheerfully, "we are all set, you know, to go off next summer. The Alps, or the Dolomites, or the Pyrenees, we haven't decided yet on the objective. You had better come with us and we'll have a proper expedition."

I shook my head, regretfully.

"I only wish I could," I said, "but it's impossible. I must be in New York by May and shan't be home again until September."

"Oh, that's a long way ahead," said Victor, "anything may happen by May. We'll talk of it again, nearer the time."

Still Anna said no word, and I wondered why Victor saw nothing strange in her reticence. Suddenly she said good-night and went upstairs. It was obvious to me that all this chatter of mountain climbing had been unwelcome to her. I felt an urge to attack Victor on the subject.

"Look here," I said, "do think twice about this holiday in the mountains. I am pretty sure Anna isn't for it."

"Not for it?" said Victor, surprised. "Why, it was her idea entirely."

I stared at him.

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Of course I'm sure. I tell you, old fellow, she's crazy about mountains. She has a fetish about them. It's her Welsh blood, I suppose. I was being light—hearted just now about that night on Snowdon, but between ourselves I was quite amazed at her courage and her endurance. I don't mind admitting that what with the blizzard, and being frightened for her, I was dead beat by morning; but she came out of that mist like a spirit from another world. I've never seen her like it. She went down that blasted mountain as if she had spent the night on Olympus, while I limped behind her like a child. She is a very remarkable person: you realise that, don't you?"

"Yes," I said slowly, "I do agree. Anna is very remarkable."

Shortly afterwards we went upstairs to bed, and as I undressed and put on my pyjamas, which had been left to warm for me before the fire, and noticed the Thermos flask of hot milk on the bedside table, in case I should be wakeful, and padded about the thick carpeted room in my soft slippers, I thought once again of that strange bare room where Anna slept, and of the narrow trestle bed. In a futile, unnecessary gesture, I threw aside the heavy satin quilt that lay on top of my blankets, and before getting into bed opened my windows wide.

I was restless, though, and could not sleep. My fire sank low and the cold air penetrated the room. I heard my old worn travelling clock race round the hours through the night. At four I could stand it no longer and remembered the Thermos of milk with gratitude. Before drinking it I decided to pamper myself still further and close the window.

I climbed out of bed and, shivering, went across the room to do so. Victor was right. A white frost covered the ground. The moon was full. I stood for a moment by the open window, and from the trees in shadow I saw a figure come and stand below me on the lawn. Not furtive, as a trespasser, not creeping, as a thief. Whoever it was stood motionless, as though in meditation, with face uplifted to the moon.

Then I perceived that it was Anna. She wore a dressing-gown, with a cord about it, and her hair was loose on her shoulders. She made no sound as she stood there on the frosty lawn, and I saw, with a shock of horror, that her feet were bare. I stood watching, my hand on the curtain, and suddenly I felt that I was looking upon something intimate and secret, which concerned me not. So I shut my window and returned to bed. Instinct told me that I must say nothing of what I had seen to Victor, or to Anna herself; and because of this I was filled with disquiet, almost with apprehension.

Next morning the sun shone and we were out about the grounds with the dogs, Anna and Victor both so normal and cheerful that I told myself I had been overwrought the previous night. If Anna chose to walk bare-foot in the small hours it was her business, and I had behaved ill in spying upon her. The rest of my visit passed without incident; we were all three happy and content, and I was very loath to leave them.

I saw them again for a brief moment, some months later, before I left for America. I had gone into the Map House, in St. James's, to buy myself some half-dozen books to read on that long thrash across the Atlantic — a journey one took with certain qualms in those days, the Titanic tragedy still fresh in memory — and there were Victor and Anna, poring over maps, which they had spread out over every available space.

There was no chance of a real meeting. I had engagements for the rest of the day, and so had they, so it was hail and farewell. "You find us," said Victor, "getting busy about the summer holiday. The itinerary is planned. Change your mind and join us."

"Impossible," I said. "All being well, I should be home by September. I'll get in touch with you directly I return. Well, where are you making for?"

"Anna's choice," said Victor. "She's been thinking this out for weeks, and she's hit on a spot that looks completely inaccessible. Anyway, it's somewhere you and I have never climbed."

He pointed down to the large-scale map in front of them. I followed his finger to a point that Anna had already marked with a tiny cross.

"Monte Verità," I read.

I looked up and saw that Anna's eyes were upon me.

"Completely unknown territory, as far as I'm concerned," I said. "Be sure and have advice first, before setting forth. Get hold of local guides, and so on. What made you choose that particular ridge of mountains?"

Anna smiled, and I felt a sense of shame, of inferiority beside her.

"The Mountain of Truth," she said. "Come with us, do."

I shook my head and went off upon my journey.

During the months that followed I thought of them both, and envied them too. They were climbing, and I was hemmed in, not by the mountains that I loved but by hard business. Often I wished I had the courage to throw my work aside, turn my back on the civilised world and its dubious delights, and go seeking after truth with my two friends. Only convention deterred me, the sense that I was making a successful career for myself which it would be folly to cut short. The pattern of my life was set. It was too late to change.

I returned to England in September, and I was surprised, in going through the great pile of letters that awaited me, to have nothing from Victor. He had promised to write and give me news of all they had seen and done. They were not on the telephone, so I could not get in touch with them direct, but I made a note to write to Victor as soon as I had sorted out my business mail.

A couple of days later, coming out of my club, I ran into a man, a mutual friend of ours, who detained me a moment to ask some question about my journey, and then, just as I was going down the steps, called over his shoulder, "I say, what a tragedy about poor Victor. Are you going to see him?"

"What do you mean? What tragedy?" I asked. "Has there been an accident?"

"He's terribly ill in a nursing-home, here in London," came the answer. "Nervous breakdown. You know his wife has left him?"

"Good God, no," I exclaimed.

"Oh, yes. That's the cause of all the trouble. He's gone quite to pieces. You know he was devoted to her."

I was stunned. I stood staring at the fellow, my face blank.

"Do you mean," I said, "that she has gone off with somebody else?"

"I don't know. I assume so. No one can get anything out of Victor. Anyway, there he has been for several weeks, with this breakdown."

I asked for the address of the nursing-home, and at once, without further delay, jumped into a cab and was driven there.

At first I was told, on making enquiry, that Victor was seeing no visitors, but I took out my card and scribbled a line across the back. Surely he would not refuse to see me? A nurse came, and I was taken upstairs to a room on the first floor.

I was horrified, when she opened the door, to see the haggard face that looked up at me from the chair beside the gas-fire, so frail he was, so altered.

"My dear old boy," I said, going towards him, "I only heard five minutes ago that you were here."

The nurse closed the door and left us together.

To my distress Victor's eyes filled with tears.

"It's all right," I said, "don't mind me. You know I shall understand."

He seemed unable to speak. He just sat there, hunched in his dressing-gown, the tears running down his cheeks. I had never felt more helpless. He pointed to a chair, and I drew it up beside him. I waited. If he did not want to tell me what had happened I would not press him. I only wanted to comfort him, to be of some assistance.

At last he spoke, and I hardly recognised his voice.

"Anna's gone," he said. "Did you know that? She's gone."

I nodded. I put my hand on his knee, as though he were a small boy again and not a man past thirty, of my own age.

"I know," I said gently, "but it will be all right. She will come back again. You are sure to get her back."

He shook his head. I had never seen such despair, and such complete conviction.

"Oh no," he said, "she will never come back. I know her too well. She's found what she wants."

It was pitiful to see how completely he had given in to what had happened. Victor, usually so strong, so well-balanced.

"Who is it?" I said. "Where did she meet this other fellow?"

Victor stared at me, bewildered.

"What do you mean?" he said. "She hasn't met anyone. It's not that at all. If it were, that would be easy…"

He paused, spreading out his hands in a hopeless gesture. And suddenly he broke down again, but this time not with weakness but with a more fearful sort of stifled rage, the impotent, useless rage of a man who fights against something stronger than himself. "It was the mountain that got her," he said, "that God-damned mountain, Monte Verità. There's a sect there, a closed order, they shut themselves up for life — there, on that mountain. I never dreamed there could be such a thing. I never knew. And she's there. On that damned mountain. On Monte Verità…"

I sat there with him in the nursing-home all afternoon, and little by little had the whole story from him.

The journey itself, Victor said, had been pleasant and uneventful. Eventually they reached the centre from which they proposed to explore the terrain immediately below Monte Verità, and here they met with difficulties. The country was unknown to Victor, and the people seemed morose and unfriendly, very different, he said, to the sort of folk who had welcomed us in the past. They spoke in a patois hard to understand, and they lacked intelligence.

"At least, that's how they struck me," said Victor. "They were very rough and somehow undeveloped, the sort of people who might have stepped out of a former century. You know how, when we climbed together, the people could not do enough to help us, and we always managed to find guides. Here, it was different. When Anna and I tried to find out the best approach to Monte Verità, they would not tell us. They just stared at us in a stupid sort of way, and shrugged their shoulders. They had no guides, one fellow said; the mountain was — savage, unexplored."

Victor paused, and looked at me with that same expression of despair.

"You see," he said, "that's when I made my mistake. I should have realised the expedition was a failure — to that particular spot at any rate — and suggested to Anna that we turned back and tackled something else, something nearer to civilization anyhow, where the people were more helpful and the country more familiar. But you know how it is. You get a stubborn feeling inside you, on the mountains, and any opposition somehow rouses you.

"And Monte Verità itself. " he broke off and stared in front of him. It was as though he was looking upon it again in his own mind. "I've never been one for lyrical description, you know that," he said. "On our finest climbs I was always the practical one and you the poet. For sheer beauty, I have never seen anything like Monte Verità. We have climbed many higher peaks, you and I, and far more dangerous ones, too; but this was somehow… sublime."

After a few moments' silence he continued talking. "I said to Anna, 'What shall we do?', and she answered me without hesitation, 'We must go on.' I did not argue, I knew perfectly well that would be her wish. The place had put a spell on both of us."

They left the valley, and began the ascent.

"It was a wonderful day," said Victor, "hardly a breath of wind, and not a cloud in the sky. Scorching sun, you know how it can be, but the air clean and cold. I chaffed Anna about that other climb, up Snowdon, and made her promise not to leave me behind this time. She was wearing an open shirt, and a brief kilted skirt, and her hair was loose. She looked… quite beautiful."

As he talked, slowly, quietly, I had the impression that it must surely be an accident that had happened, but that his mind, unhinged by tragedy, baulked at Anna's death. It must be so. Anna had fallen. He had seen her fall and had been powerless to help her. He had then returned, broken in mind and spirit, telling himself she still lived on Monte Verità.

"We came to a village an hour before sundown," said Victor. "The climb had taken us all day. We were still about three hours from the peak itself, or so I judged. The village consisted of some dozen dwellings or so, huddled together. And as we walked towards the first one, a curious thing happened."

He paused and stared in front of him.

"Anna was a little ahead of me," he said, "moving swiftly with those long strides of hers, you know how she does. I saw two or three men, with some children and goats, come on to the track from a piece of pasture land to the right of us. Anna raised her hand in salute, and at sight of her the men started, as if terrified, and snatching up the children ran to the nearest group of hovels, as if all the fiends in hell were after them. I heard them bolt the doors and shutter the windows. It was the most extraordinary thing. The goats went scattering down the track, equally scared."

Victor said he had made some joke to Anna about a charming welcome, and that she seemed upset; she did not know what she could have done to frighten them. Victor went to the first hut and knocked upon the door.

Nothing happened at all, but he could hear whispers inside and a child crying. Then he lost patience and began to shout. This had effect, and after a moment one of the shutters was removed and a man's face appeared at the gap and stared at him. Victor, by way of encouragement, nodded and smiled. Slowly the man withdrew the whole of the shutter and Victor spoke to him. At first the man shook his head, then he seemed to change his mind and came and unbolted the door. He stood in the entrance, peering nervously about him, and, ignoring Victor, looked at Anna. He shook his head violently and, speaking very quickly and quite unintelligibly, pointed towards the summit of Monte Verità. Then from the shadows of the small room came an elderly man, leaning on two sticks, who motioned aside the terrified children and moved past them to the door. He, at least, spoke a language that was not entirely patois.

"Who is that woman?" he asked. "What does she want with us?"

Victor explained that Anna was his wife, that they had come from the valley to climb the mountain, that they were tourists on holiday, and they would be glad of shelter for the night. He said the old man stared away from him to Anna.

"She is your wife? " he said. " She is not from Monte Verità?"

"She is my wife," repeated Victor. "We come from England. We are in this country on holiday. We have never been here before."

The old man turned to the younger and they muttered together for a few moments. Then the younger man went back inside the house, and there was further talk from the interior. A woman appeared, even more frightened than the younger man. She was literally trembling, Victor said, as she looked out of the doorway towards Anna. It was Anna who disturbed them.

"She is my wife," said Victor again, "we come from the valley."

Finally the old man made a gesture of consent, of understanding.

"I believe you," he said. "You are welcome to come inside. If you are from the valley, that is all right. We have to be careful."

Victor beckoned to Anna, and slowly she came up the track and stood beside Victor, on the threshold of the house. Even now the woman looked at her with timidity, and she and the children backed away.

The old man motioned his visitors inside. The living-room was bare but clean, and there was a fire burning.

"We have food," said Victor, unshouldering his pack, "and mattresses too. We don't want to be a nuisance. But if we could eat here, and sleep on the floor, it will do very well indeed."

The old man nodded. "I am satisfied," he said, "I believe you."

Then he withdrew with his family.

Victor said he and Anna were both puzzled at their reception, and could not understand why the fact of their being married, and coming from the valley, should have gained them admittance, after that first odd show of terror. They ate, and unrolled their packs, and then the old man appeared again with milk for them, and cheese. The woman remained behind, but the younger man, out of curiosity, accompanied the elder.

Victor thanked the old fellow for his hospitality, and said that now they would sleep, and in the morning, soon after sunrise, they would climb to the summit of the mountain.

"Is the way easy?" he asked.

"It is not difficult," came the reply. "I would offer to send someone with you, but no one cares to go."

His manner was diffident, and Victor said he glanced again at Anna.

"Your wife will be all right in the house here," he said. "We will take care of her."

"My wife will climb with me," said Victor. "She won't want to stay behind."

A look of anxiety came into the old man's face.

"It is better that your wife does not go up Monte Verità," he said. "It will be dangerous."

"Why is it dangerous for me to go up Monte Verità?" asked Anna.

The old man looked at her, his anxiety deepening. "For girls," he said, "for women, it is dangerous."

"But how?" asked Anna. "Why? You told my husband the path is easy."

"It is not the path that is dangerous," he answered; "my son can set you on the path. It is because of the…" and Victor said he used a word that neither he nor Anna understood, but that it sounded like 'sacerdotessa', or 'sacerdozio'."

"That's priestess, or priesthood," said Victor. "It can't be that. I wonder what on earth he means?"

The old man, anxious and distressed, looked from one to the other of them.

"It is safe for you to climb Monte Verità, and to descend again," he repeated to Victor, "but not for your wife. They have great power, the 'sacerdotesse'. Here in the village we are always in fear for our young girls, for our women."

Victor said the whole thing sounded like an African travel tale, where a tribe of wild men pounced out of the jungle and carried off the female population into captivity.

"I don't know what he's talking about," he said to Anna, "but I suppose they are riddled with some sort of superstition, which will appeal to you, with your Welsh blood."

He laughed, he told me, making light of it, and then, being confoundedly sleepy, arranged their mattresses in front of the fire. Bidding the old man good evening, he and Anna settled themselves for the night.

He slept soundly, in the profound sleep that comes after climbing, and woke suddenly, just before daybreak, to the sound of a cock crowing in the village outside.

He turned over on his side to see if Anna was awake. The mattress was thrown back, and bare. Anna had gone…

No one was yet astir in the house, Victor said, and the only sound was the cock crowing. He got up and put on his shoes and coat, went to the door and stepped outside.

It was the cold, still moment that comes just before sunrise. The last few stars were paling in the sky. Clouds hid the valley, some thousands of feet below. Only here, near the summit of the mountain, was it clear.

At first Victor felt no misgiving. He knew by this time that Anna was capable of looking after herself and was as sure-footed as he — more so, possibly. She would take no foolish risks, and anyway the old man had told them that the climb was not dangerous. He felt hurt, though, that she had not waited for him. It was breaking the promise that they should always climb together. And he had no idea how much of a start she had in front of him. The only thing he could do was to follow her as swiftly as he could.

He went back into the room to collect their rations for the day — she had not thought of that. Their packs they could fetch later, for the descent, and they would probably have to accept hospitality here for another night.

His movements must have roused his host, for suddenly the old man appeared from the inner room and stood beside him. His eye fell on Anna's empty mattress, then he searched Victor's eyes, almost in accusation.

"My wife has gone on ahead," Victor said. "I am going to follow her."

The old man looked very grave. He went to the open door and stood there, staring away from the village, up the mountain.

"It was wrong to let her go," he said, "you should not have permitted it." He appeared very distressed, Victor said, and shook his head to and fro, murmuring to himself.

"It's all right," said Victor. "I shall soon catch her up, and we shall probably be back again, soon after midday."

He put his hand on the old fellow's arm, to reassure him.

"I fear very much that it will be too late," said the old man. "She will go to them, and once she is with them she will not come back."

Once again he used the word 'sacerdotesse', the power of the 'sacerdotesse', and his manner, his state of apprehension, now communicated itself to Victor, so that he too felt a sense of urgency, and of fear.

"Do you mean that there are living people at the top of Monte Verità?" he said. "People who may attack her, and harm her bodily?"

The old man began to talk rapidly, and it was difficult to make any sense out of the torrent of words that now sprang from him. No, he said, the 'sacerdotesse' would not hurt her, they hurt no one; it was that they would take her to become one of them. Anna would go to them, she could not help herself, the power was so strong. Twenty, thirty years ago, the old man said, his daughter had gone to them: he had never seen her again. Other young women from the village, and from down below, in the valley, were called by the 'sacerdotesse'. Once they were called they had to go, no one could keep them back. No one saw them again. Never, never. It had been so for many years, in his father's time, his father's father's time, before that, even.

It was not known now when the 'sacerdotesse' first came to Monte Verità. No man living had set eyes upon them. They lived there, enclosed, behind their walls, but with power, he kept insisting, with magic. "Some say they have this from God, some from the Devil," he said, "but we do not know, we cannot tell. It is rumoured that the 'sacerdotesse' on Monte Verità never grow old, they stay forever young and beautiful, and that it is from the moon they draw their power. It is the moon they worship, and the sun."

Victor gathered little from this wild talk. It must all be legend, superstition.

The old man shook his head and looked towards the mountain track. "I saw it in her eyes last night," he said, "I was afraid of it. She had the eyes they have, when they are called. I have seen it before. With my own daughter, with others."

By now the rest of the family had woken and had come by turn into the room. They seemed to sense what had happened. The younger man, and the woman, even the children, looked at Victor with anxiety and a strange sort of compassion. He said the atmosphere filled him not so much with alarm as with anger and irritation. It made him think of cats, and broomsticks, and sixteenth century witchcraft.

The mist was breaking slowly, down in the valley, and the clouds were going. The soft glow in the sky, beyond the range of mountains to the eastward, heralded the rising sun. The old man said something to the younger, and pointed with his stick. "My son will put you on the track," he said, "he will come part of the way only. Further he does not care to go."

Victor said he set off with all their eyes upon him; and not only from this first hut, but from the other dwellings in the little village, he was aware of faces looking from drawn shutters, and faces peering from half-open doors. The whole village was astir now and intent upon watching him, held by a fearful fascination.

His guide made no attempt to talk to him. He walked ahead, his shoulders bent, his eyes on the ground. Victor felt that he went only on command of the old man, his father.

The track was rough and stony, broken in many places, and was, Victor judged, part of an old water-course that would be impassable when the rains came. Now, in full summer, it was easy enough to climb. Verdure, thorn and scrub they left behind them, after climbing steadily for an hour, and the summit of the mountain pierced the sky directly above their heads, split into two like a divided hand. From the depths of the valley, and from the village even, this division could not be seen; the two peaks seemed as one.

The sun had risen with them as they climbed, and now shone in full upon the south-eastern face, turning it to coral. Great banks of clouds, soft and rolling, hid the world below. Victor's guide stopped suddenly and pointed ahead, where a jutting lip of rock wound in a razor's edge and curved southward out of sight.

"Monte Verità," he said, and then repeated it again, "Monte Verità."

Then he turned swiftly and began scrambling back along the way that they had come.

Victor called to him, but the man did not answer; he did not even bother to turn his head. In a moment he was out of sight. There was nothing for it but to go on alone, round the lip of the escarpment, Victor said, and trust that he found Anna waiting for him on the further side.

It took him another half-hour to encircle the projecting shoulder of the mountain, and with every step he took his anxiety deepened, because now, on the southward side, there was no gradual incline — the mountain face was sheer. Soon further progress would be impossible.

"Then," Victor said, "I came out through a sort of gully-way, over a ridge about three hundred feet only from the summit; and I saw it, the monastery, built out of the rock between the two peaks, absolutely bare and naked; a steep rock wall enclosing it, a drop of a thousand feet beneath the wall to the next ridge, and above, nothing but the sky and the twin peaks of Monte Verità."

It was true, then. Victor had not lost his mind. The place existed. There had been no accident. He sat there, in his chair by the gas-fire, in the nursing-home; and this had happened, it was not fantasy, born out of tragedy.

He seemed calm, now that he had told me so much. A great part of the strain had gone, his hands no longer trembled. He looked more like the old Victor, and his voice was steady.

"It must have been centuries old," he said, after a moment or two. "God knows how long it must have taken to build, hewn out of the rock-face like that. I have never seen anything more stark and savage, nor, in a strange way, more beautiful. It seemed to hang there, suspended, between the mountain and the sky. There were many long narrow slits, for light and air. No real windows, in the sense we know them. There was a tower, looking west, with a sheer drop below. The great wall encircled the whole place, making it impregnable, like a fortress. I could see no way of entrance. There was no sign of life. No sign of anyone. I stood there staring at the place, and the narrow window-slits stared back at me. There was nothing I could do but wait there until Anna showed herself. Because now, you see, I was convinced the old man had been right, and I knew what must have happened. The inhabitants had seen Anna, from behind those slit windows, and had called to her. She was with them now, inside. She must see me, standing outside the wall, and presently would come out to me. So I waited there, all day…"

His words were simple. just a plain statement of fact. Any husband might have waited thus for a wife who had, during their holiday, ventured forth one morning to call upon friends. He sat down, and later ate his lunch, and watched the rolling banks of cloud that hid the world below move, and disperse, and form again; and the sun, in all its summer strength, beat down upon the unprotected face of Monte Verità, on the tower and the narrow window-slits, and the great encircling wall, from whence came no movement and no sound.

"I sat there all the day," said Victor, "but she did not come. The force of the sun was blinding, scorching, and I had to go back to the gully-way for shelter. There, lying under the shadow of a projecting rock, I could still watch that tower and those window-slits. You and I in the past have known silence on the mountains, but nothing like the silence beneath those twin peaks of Monte Verità.

"The hours dragged by and I went on waiting. Gradually it grew cooler, and then, as my anxiety increased, time raced instead. The sun went too fast into the west. The colour of the rock-face was changing. There was no longer any glare. I began to panic then. I went to the wall and shouted. I felt along the wall with my hands, but there was no entrance, there was nothing. My voice echoed back to me, again and again. I looked up, and all I could see were those blind slits of windows. I began to doubt everything, the old man's story, all that he had said. This place was uninhabited, no one had lived there for a thousand years. It was something built long ago in time, and now deserted. And Anna had never come to it at all. She had fallen, on that narrow lip-way where the track ended and the man had left me. She must have fallen into the sheer depths where the southern shoulder of the mountain ridge began. And this is what had happened to the other women who had come this way, the old man's daughter, the girls from the valleys; they had all fallen, none of them had ever reached the ultimate rock-face, here between the peaks."

The suspense would have been easier to bear if the first strain and sign of breakdown had come back into Victor's voice. As it was, sitting there in the London nursing-home, the room impersonal and plain, the routine bottles of medicines and pills on the table by his side, and the sound of traffic coming from Wigmore Street, his voice took on a steady monotonous quality, like a clock ticking; it would have been more natural had he turned suddenly, and screamed.

"Yet I dared not go back," he said, "unless she came. I was compelled to go on waiting there, beneath the wall. The clouds banked up towards me and turned grey. All the warning evening shadows that I knew too well crept into the sky. One moment the rock-face, and the wall, and the slit-windows were golden; then suddenly, the sun was gone. There was no dusk at all. It was cold, and it was night."

Victor told me that he stayed there against the wall until daybreak. He did not sleep. He paced up and down to keep warm. When dawn came he was chilled and numb, faint, too, from want of food. He had brought with him only the rations for their midday meal.

Sense told him that to wait now, through another day, was madness. He must return to the village for food and drink, and if possible enlist the help of the men there to form a search-party. Reluctantly, when the sun rose, he left the rock-face. Silence enwrapped it still. He was certain now there was no life behind the walls.

He went back, round the shoulder of the mountain, to the track; and so down into the morning mist, and to the village. Victor said they were waiting there for him. It was as though he was expected. The old man was standing at the entrance of his home, and gathered about him were neighbours, mostly men and children.

Victor's first question was, "Has my wife returned? " Somehow, descending from the summit, hope had come to him again — that she had never climbed the mountain track, that she had walked another way, and had come back to the village by a different path. When he saw their faces his hope went.

"She will not come back," said the old man, "we told you she would not come back. She has gone to them, on Monte Verità."

Victor had wisdom enough to ask for food and drink before entering into argument. They gave him this. They stood beside him, watching him with compassion. Victor said the greatest agony was the sight of Anna's pack, her mattress, her drinking bottle, her knife; the little personal possessions she had not taken with her.

When he had eaten they continued to stand there, waiting for him to speak. He told the old man everything. How he had waited all day, and through the night. How there was never a sound, or a sign of life, from those slit windows on the rock-face of Monte Verità. Now and again the old man translated what Victor said to the neighbours.

When Victor had finished the old man spoke.

"It is as I said. Your wife is there. She is with them."

Victor, his nerves to pieces, shouted aloud.

"How can she be there? There is no one alive in that place. It's dead, it's empty. It's been dead for centuries."

The old man leant forward and put his hand on Victor's shoulder. "It is not dead. That is what many have said before. They went and waited, as you waited. Twenty-five years ago I did the same. This man here, my neighbour, waited three months, day after day, night after night, many years ago, when his wife was called. She never came back. No one who is called to Monte Verità returns."

She had fallen, then. She had died. It was that after all. Victor told them this, he insisted upon it, he begged that they would go now, with him, and search the mountain for her body.

Gently, compassionately, the old man shook his head. "In the past we did that too," he said. "There are those among us who climb with great skill, who know the mountain, every inch of it, and who have descended the southern side even, to the edge of the great glacier, beyond which no one can live. There are no bodies. Our women never fell. They were not there. They are in Monte Verità, with the 'sacerdotesse'."

It was hopeless, Victor said. It was no use to try argument. He knew that he must go down to the valley, and if he could not get help there go further yet, back to some part of the country that was familiar to him, where he could find guides who would be willing to return with him.

"My wife's body is somewhere on this mountain," he said. "I must find it. If your people won't help me, I will get others."

The old man looked over his shoulder and spoke a name. From the little crowd of silent spectators came a child, a small girl of about nine years old. He laid his hand upon her head.

"This child," he said to Victor, "has seen and spoken with the 'sacerdotesse'. Other children, in the past, have seen them too. Only to children, and then rarely, do they show themselves. She will tell you what she saw."

The child began her recitation, in a high sing-song voice, her eyes fixed upon Victor; and he could tell, he said, that it was a tale she had repeated so many times, to the same listeners, that it was now a chant, a lesson learnt by heart. And it was all in patois. Not one word could Victor understand. When she had finished the old man acted as interpreter; and from force of habit he too declaimed as the child had done, his tone taking that same sing-song quality.

"I was with my companions on Monte Verità. A storm came, and my companions ran away. I walked, and lost myself, and came to the place where the wall is, and the windows. I cried; I was afraid. She came out of the wall, the tall and splendid one, and another with her, also young and beautiful. They comforted me and I wanted to go inside the walls with them, when I heard the singing from the tower, but they told me it was forbidden. When I was thirteen years old I could return to live with them. They wore white raiment to the knees, their arms and legs were bare, the hair close to the head. They were more beautiful than the people of this world. They led me back from Monte Verità, down the track where I could find my way. Then they went from me. I have told all I know."

The old man watched Victor's face when he had finished his recital. Victor said the faith that must have been put in the child's statement astounded him. It was obvious, he thought, that the child had fallen asleep, and dreamt, and translated her dream into reality.

"I am sorry," he told his interpreter, "but I can't believe the child's tale. It is imagination."

Once again the child was called and spoken to, and she at once ran out of the house and disappeared.

"They gave her a circlet of stones on Monte Verità," said the old man. "Her parents keep it locked up, in case of evil. She has gone to ask for it, to show you."

In a few moments the child returned, and she put into Victor's hand a girdle, small enough to encompass a narrow waist, or else to hang about the neck. The stones, which looked like quartz, were cut and shaped by hand, fitting into one another in hollowed grooves. The craftsmanship was fine, even exquisitely done. It was not the rude handiwork of peasants, done of a winter's evening, to pass the time. In silence Victor handed the circlet back to the child.

"She may have found it on the mountain side," he said.

"We do not work thus," answered the old man, "nor the people in the valley, nor even in the cities of this country, where I have been. The child was given the circlet, as she has told us, by those who inhabit Monte Verità."

Victor knew then that further argument was useless. Their obstinacy was too strong, and their superstition proof against all worldly sense. He asked if he might remain in the house another day and night.

"You are welcome to stay," said the old man, "until you know the truth."

One by one the neighbours dispersed, the routine of the quiet day was resumed. It was as though nothing had happened. Victor went out again, this time towards the northern shoulder of the mountain. He had not gone far before he realised that this ridge was unclimbable, at any rate without skilled help and equipment. If Anna had gone that way she had found certain death.

He came back to the village, which, situated as it was on the eastern slopes, had already lost the sun. He went into the living-room, and saw that there was a meal there prepared for him, and his mattress lay on the floor before the hearth. He was too exhausted to eat. He flung himself down on the mattress and slept. Next morning he rose early, and climbed once more to Monte Verità, and sat there all the day. He waited, watching the slit windows, while the hot sun scorched the rock-face through the long hours and then sank down into the western sky; and nothing stirred, and no one came.

He thought of that other man from the village who some years ago had waited there three months, day after day, night after night; and Victor wondered what limitation time would put to his endurance, and whether he would equal the other in fortitude.

On the third day, at that moment of midday when the sun was strongest, he could bear the heat no longer and went to lie in the gully-way, in the shadow and blessed coolness of the projecting rock. Worn with the strain of watching, and with the despair that now filled his entire being, Victor slept.

He awoke with a start. The hands of his watch pointed to five o'clock, and it was already cold inside the gully. He climbed out and looked towards the rock-face, golden now in the setting sun. Then he saw her. She was standing beneath the wall, but on a ledge only a few feet in circumference, and below her the rock-face fell away sheer, a thousand feet or more.

She waited there, looking towards him, and he ran towards her shouting "Anna… Anna…." And he said that he heard himself sobbing, and he thought his heart would burst.

When he drew closer he saw that he could not reach her. The great drop to the depths below divided them. She was a bare twelve feet away from him, and he could not touch her.

"I stood where I was, staring at her," said Victor. "I did not speak. Something seemed to choke my voice. I felt the tears running down my face. I was crying. I had made up my mind that she was dead, you see, that she had fallen. And she was there, she was alive. Ordinary words wouldn't come. I tried to say 'What has happened? Where have you been?'—but it wasn't any use. Because as I looked at her I knew in one moment, with terrible blinding certainty, that it was all true, what the old man had said, and the child; it wasn't imagination, it wasn't superstition. Though I saw no one but Anna, the whole place suddenly became alive. From behind those window slits above me there were God knows how many eyes, watching, looking down on me. I could feel the nearness of them, beyond those walls. And it was uncanny, and horrible, and real."

Now the strain had come back into Victor's voice, now his hands trembled once again. He reached out for a glass of water and drank thirstily.

"She was not wearing her own clothes," he said. "She had a kind of shirt, like a tunic, to her knees, and round her waist a circlet of stones, like the one the child had shown me. Nothing on her feet, and her arms bare. What frightened me most was that her hair was cut quite short, as short as yours or mine. It altered her strangely, made her look younger, but in some way terribly austere. Then she spoke to me. She said quite naturally, as if nothing had happened, 'I want you to go back home, Victor darling. You mustn't worry about me any more.'"

Victor told me he could hardly credit it, at first, that she could stand there and say this to him. It reminded him of those so-called psychic messages that mediums give out to relatives at a spiritualistic séance. He could hardly trust himself to answer.

He thought that perhaps she had been hypnotised and was speaking under suggestion.

"Why do you want me to go home? " he said, very gently, not wanting to damage her mind, which these people might have destroyed.

"It's the only thing to do," she answered. And then, Victor said, she smiled, normally, happily, as if they were at home discussing plans. "I'm all right, darling," she said. "This isn't madness, or hypnotism, or any of the things you imagine it to be. They have frightened you in the village, and it's understandable. This thing is so much stronger than most people. But I must have always known it existed, somewhere; and I've been waiting all these years. When men go into monasteries, and women shut themselves up in convents, their relatives suffer very much, I know, but in time they come to bear it. I want you to do the same, Victor, please. I want you, if you can, to understand."

She stood there, quite calm, quite peaceful, smiling down at him.

"You mean," he said, "you want to stay in this place always?"

"Yes," she said, "there can be no other life for me, any more, ever. You must believe this. I want you to go home, and live as you have always done, and look after the house and the estate, and if you fall in love with anyone to marry and be happy. Bless you for your love and kindness and devotion, darling, which I shall never forget. If I were dead, you would want to think of me at peace, in paradise. This place, to me, is paradise. And I would rather jump now, to those rocks hundreds of feet below me, than go back to the world from Monte Verità."

Victor said he went on staring at her as she spoke, and he said there was a radiance about her there had never been before, even in their most contented days.

"You and I," he said to me, "have both read of transfiguration in the Bible. That is the only word I can use to describe her face. It was not hysteria, it was not emotion; it was just that. Something — out of this world of ours — had put its hand upon her. To plead with her was useless, to attempt force impossible. Anna, rather than go back to the world, would throw herself off the rock-face. I should achieve nothing."

He said the feeling of utter helplessness was overwhelming, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do. It was as if he and she were standing on a dockway, and she was about to set foot in a ship, bound to an unknown destination, and the last few minutes were passing by before the ship's syren blew, warning him the gangways would be withdrawn and she must go. He asked her if she had all she needed, if she would be given suiiicient food, enough covering, and whether there were any facilities should she fall ill. He wanted to know if there was anything she wanted that he could send to her. And she smiled back at him, saying she had everything, within those walls, that she would ever need.

He said to her, "I shall return every year, at this time, to ask you to come back. I shall never forget."

She said, "It will be harder for you if you do that. Like putting flowers on a grave. I would rather you stayed away."

"I can't stay away," he said, "with the knowledge you are here, behind these walls."

"I won't be able to come to you again," she said, "this is the last time you will see me. Remember, though, that I shall go on looking like this, always. That is part of the belief. Carry me with you."

Then, Victor said, she asked him to go. She could not return inside the walls until he had gone. The sun was low in the sky and already the rock-face was in shadow. Victor looked at Anna a long time; then he turned his back on her, standing by the ledge, and walked away from the wall towards the gully, without looking over his shoulder. When he came to the gully he waited there a few minutes, then looked out again towards the rock-face. Anna was no longer standing on the ledge. There was nothing there but the wall and the slit windows, and above, not yet in shadow, the twin peaks of Monte Verità.

I managed to spare half-an-hour or so, every day, to go and visit Victor in the nursing-home. Each day he appeared stronger, more himself I spoke to the doctor attending him, to the matron and the nurses. They told me there was no question of a deranged mind; he came to them suffering from severe shock and nervous collapse. It had already done him immense good to see me and to talk to me. In a fortnight he was well enough to leave the nursing-home, and he came to stay with me in Westminster.

During those autumn evenings we went over all that had happened again and again. I questioned him more closely than I had done before. He denied that there had ever been anything abnormal about Anna. Theirs had been a normal, happy marriage. Her dislike of possessions, her spartan way of living, was, he agreed, unusual; but it had not struck him as peculiar — it was Anna. I told him of the night I had seen her standing with bare feet in the garden, on the frosted lawn. Yes, he said, that was the sort of thing she did. But she had a fastidiousness, a certain personal reticence, that he respected. He never intruded upon it.

I asked him how much he knew of her life before he married her. He told me there was very little to know. Her parents had died when she was young, and she had been brought up in Wales by an aunt. There was no peculiar background, no skeletons in the cupboard. Her upbringing had been entirely ordinary in every way.

"It's no use," said Victor, "you can't explain Anna. She is just herself, unique. You can't explain her any more than you can explain the sudden phenomenon of a musician, born to ordinary parents, or a poet, or a saint. There is no accounting for them. They just appear. It was my great fortune, praise God, to find her, just as it is my own personal hell, now, to have lost her. Somehow I shall continue living, as she expected me to do. And once a year I shall go back to Monte Verità."

His acquiesccnce to the total break-up of his life astounded me. I felt that I could not have overcome my own despair, had the tragedy been mine. It seemed to me monstrous that an unknown sect, on a mountain side, could, in the space of a few days, have such power over a woman, a woman of intelligence and personality. It was understandable that ignorant peasant girls could be emotionally misled and their relatives, blinded by superstition, do nothing about it. I told Victor this. I told him that it should be possible, through the ordinary channels of our embassy, to approach the government of that country, to have a nation-wide enquiry, to get the press on to it, the backing of our own government. I told him I was prepared, myself, to set all this in motion. We were living in the twentieth century, not in the middle ages. A place like Monte Verità should not be permitted to exist. I would arouse the whole country with the story, create an international situation.

"But why," said Victor quietly, "to what end?"

"To get Anna back," I said, "and to free the rest. To prevent the break-up of other people's lives."

"We don't," said Victor, "go about destroying monasteries or convents. There are hundreds of them, all over the world."

"That is diiferent," I argued. "They are organised bodies of religious people. They have existed for centuries."

"I think, very probably, Monte Verità has too."

"How do they live, how do they eat, what happens when they fall ill, when they die?"

"I don't know. I try not to think about it. All I cling to is that Anna said she had found what she was searching for, that she was happy. I'm not going to destroy that happiness."

Then he looked at me, in a way half puzzled, half wise, and said, "It's odd, your talking in this way. Because by rights you should understand Anna's feelings more than I do. You were always the one with mountain fever. You were the one, in old climbing days, to have your head in the clouds and quote to me—

'The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."'

I remember getting up and going over to the window and looking out over the foggy street, down to the embankment. I said nothing. His words had moved me very much. I could not answer them. And I knew, in the depths of my heart, why I hated the story of Monte Verità and wanted the place to be destroyed. It was because Anna had found her Truth, and I had not…

That conversation between Victor and myself made, if not a division in our friendship, at least a turning point. We had reached a half-way mark in both our lives. He went back to his home in Shropshire, and later wrote to me that he intended making over the property to a young nephew, still at school, and during the next few years intended having the lad to stay with him in the holidays, to get him acquainted with the place. After that, he did not know. He would not commit himself to plans. My own future, at this time, was full with change. My work necessitated living in America for a period of two years.

Then, as it turned out, the whole tenor of the world became disrupted. The following year was 1914.

Victor was one of the first to join up. Perhaps he thought this would be his answer. Perhaps he thought he might be killed. I did not follow his example until my period in America was over. It was certainly not my answer, and I disliked every moment of my army years. I saw nothing of Victor during the whole of the war; we fought on different fronts, and did not even meet on leave. I did hear from him, once. And this is what he said:

In spite of everything, I have managed to get to Monte Verità each year, as I promised to do. I stayed a night with the old man in the village, and climbed on to the mountain top the following day. It looked exactly the same. Quite dead, and silent. I left a letter for Anna beneath the wall and sat there, all the day, looking at the place, feeling her near. I knew she would not come to me. The next day I went again, and was overjoyed to find a letter from her in return. If you can call it a letter. It was cut on flat stone, and I suppose this is the only method they have of communication. She said she was well, and strong, and very happy. She gave me her blessing, and you also. She told me never to be anxious for her. That was all. It was, as I told you at the nursing-home, like a spirit message from the dead. With this I have to be content, and am. If I survive this war, I shall probably go out and live somewhere in that country, so that I can be near her, even if I never see her again, or hear nothing of her but a few words scrawled on a stone once a year.

Good luck to yourself, old fellow. I wonder where you are.