The Blue Flower [26]
"I promised to give you an explanation to-day--to take you
on one of my long walks. Well, there is only one of them. It
is always the same. You shall see where it leads, what it
means. You shall share my secret--all the wonder and glory of
it! Of course I know my conduct, has seemed strange to you.
Sometimes it has seemed strange even to me. I have been
doubtful, troubled, almost distracted. I have been risking a
great deal, in danger of losing what I value, what most men
count the best thing in the world. But it could not be
helped. The risk was worth while. A great discovery, the
opportunity of a lifetime, yes, of an age, perhaps of many
ages, came to me. I simply could not throw it away. I must
use it, make the best of it, at any danger, at any cost. You
shall judge for yourself whether I was right or wrong. But you
must judge fairly, without haste, without prejudice. I ask you
to make me one promise. You will suspend judgment, you will say
nothing, you will keep my secret, until you have been with me
three times at the place where I am now taking you."
By this time it was clear to me that I had to do with a
case lying far outside of the common routine of life;
something subtle, abnormal, hard to measure, in which a clear
and careful estimate would be necessary. If Keene was
labouring under some strange delusion, some disorder of mind,
how could I estimate its nature or extent, without time and
study, perhaps without expert advice? To wait a little would
be prudent, for his sake as well as for the sake of others.
If there was some extraordinary, reality behind his mysterious
hints, it would need patience and skill to test it. I gave
him the promise for which he asked.
At once, as if relieved, he sprang up, and crying, "Come
on, follow me!" began to make his way up the bed of the brook.
It was one of the wildest walks that I have ever taken. He
turned aside for no obstacles; swamps, masses of interlacing
alders, close-woven thickets of stiff young spruces,
chevaux-de-frise of dead trees where wind-falls had mowed down
the forest, walls of lichen-crusted rock, landslides where heaps
of broken stone were tumbled in ruinous confusion--through
everything he pushed forward. I could see, here and there, the
track of his former journeys: broken branches of witch-hazel and
moose-wood, ferns trampled down, a faint trail across some
deeper bed of moss. At mid-day we rested for a half-hour to
eat lunch. But Keene would eat nothing, except a little
pellet of some dark green substance that he took from a flat
silver box in his pocket. He swallowed it hastily, and
stooping his face to the spring by which he had halted, drank
long and eagerly.
"An Indian trick," said he, shaking the drops of water
from his face. "On a walk, food is a hindrance, a delay. But
this tiny taste of bitter gum is a tonic; it spurs the courage
and doubles the strength--if you are used to it. Otherwise I
should not recommend you to try it. Faugh! the flavour is vile."
He rinsed his mouth again with water, and stood up,
calling me to come on. The way, now tangled among the
nameless peaks and ranges, bore steadily southward, rising all
the time, in spite of many brief downward curves where a steep
gorge must be crossed. Presently we came into a hard-wood
forest, open and easy to travel. Breasting a long slope, we
reached the summit of a broad, smoothly rounding ridge covered
with a dense growth of stunted spruce. The trees rose above
our heads, about twice the height of a man, and so thick that
we could not see beyond them. But, from glimpses here and
there, and from the purity and lightness of the air, I judged
that we were on far higher ground than any we had yet
traversed, the central comb, perhaps, of the mountain-system.
A few yards ahead of us, through the crowded trunks of the
dwarf forest, I saw a gray mass, like the wall of a fortress,
across our path. It was a vast rock, rising from the crest of
the ridge, lifting its top above the sea of