12 - At a Winters Fire by Bernard Capes

Immerse yourself in the enchanting tales of Bernard Capes, crafted to captivate your imagination as you cozy up by the fireplace during the long, chilly days of winter. Let A. Gramour guide you through this collection of stories that promise to entertain and warm your spirit.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section twelve of At a Winter's Fire. This is a
LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
At a Winter's Fire by Bernard Capes Dinah's Mammoth. On
a day early in the summer of the present year,

(00:23):
Miss Dinah Groom was found lying dead off a field
path of the little obscure Wiltshire village, which she had
named her rest and be thankful. At the date of
her decease, she was not an old woman, though any
one marking her white hair and much furrowed features might
have supposed her one. The hair, however, was ample in quantity,

(00:44):
the wrinkles rather so many underscores of energy than evidences
of senility. And until the blinds were down over her soul,
she had looked into and across the world with a
pair of eyes that seemed to reflect the very blue
and white of a June sky. No doubt she had
thought to breast the hills and sail the seas again
in some renaissance of vigor. No doubt her retreat, like

(01:08):
a Roman Catholic's, was designed to be merely temporary. She
aped the hermit for the sake of a sojourn in
the hermitage. She came to her island of Avalon to
be restored of her weary limbs and her blistered feet,
so to speak. And there her heart, too weak for
her spirit, failed her, and she fell amongst the young

(01:28):
budding poppies and died. I used the word heart literally
and in no sentimental sense. The talk of associations of
sentiment in connection with this lady would be misleading. She
herself would not have repudiated any responsibility for the term
as applied to her. She would have simply failed to
understand the term itself. There was no least affectation in this.

(01:52):
Throughout her life of sixty years, as I gather, she
acted never once upon principle, impulse, and inclination dominated her,
and she would indulge many primitive instincts without a thought
of conventions. Yet she was not selfish, for at least
only in the self contained and self protected meaning of

(02:13):
the word. She was a perfect animal, conscious of her
supreme brute, cast, shrewd, resourceful, and the plain embodiment of truth.
Miss Groom had I think a boundless feeling of fellowship
with beauty of whatever description, but no least touch of
that sorrow of affection, which, in its very humanity is divine.

(02:36):
Her unswerving creed was that woman was the inheritrix of
the earth, the reversion of which she had wilfully mortgaged
to an alien race, and that she had bartered her
material immortality for a sensation for man. She had no
vulgar and jealous contempt, but she feared and shrank from
him as something moved by scruples with which she had

(02:58):
no sympathy. She understood the world of nature and could
respond to its bloodless caresses and passions. She could not
understand the moodiness that dwells upon a grievance, or that
would sell its birthright of joy for a pitiful memory. Yet,
and here I must speak with discretion, for have no

(03:19):
sufficient data to go upon, there was that of contradictoriousness
in her character, that I have reason to believe. She
had borne children, and had even been right and particular
as to their temporal welfare until such time as in
the nature of things they were of an age to
make shift for themselves. This virtually I know to be

(03:43):
the case, and that once quit of the primitive maternal responsibility,
she gave no more thought to them than a thrush
gives to its fledglings when she has educated them to
their first flights and to the useful knack of cracking
a snail on a stone. My own feeling about Dinah
Groom was that she had thrown back a long way

(04:03):
over the heads of heredity, and that in her fearlessness,
in her undegenerate physique, in the animal regularity of her
face and form, she presented to modern days a startling
aboriginal type. Beautiful save in the sense of symmetry, she
can never have been to the ordinary man, inasmuch as

(04:24):
she would subscribe to no arbitrary standard of his dictating.
She had a high, rich color, but her complexion must
always have been rough, and a pronounced little mustache crossed
her upper lip like an accent to the speech that
was too distinct and uncompromising to be melodious. Her every
limb and feature, however, was instinct with capability, and in

(04:49):
her presence, one must always be moved to marvel over
that indescribable worship of disproportion that has grown to be
the religion of a shapely race. How I first be
I came acquainted with Miss Groom, it is unnecessary to explain.
During the last three years of her life. I was
fortunate to be her guest in the Wiltshire Retreat for

(05:10):
an aggregate of many months. She took a fancy to me,
to my solitariness and moroseness, perhaps, and she not only
liked to have me with her, but after a time
she fell into something of a habit of recalling for
my benefits certain passages and experiences of her past life.
In doing this there was no suggestion of confidence, and

(05:32):
I am breaking no faith in alluding to them. She
was a fine talker, rugged, unpicturesque, but with an instinctive
capacity of selection. In words, if I quote her as
I wish to do, I cannot reproduce her style, and that,
no doubt would appear bald on paper. But at least
the matter is all her own. Now I must premise

(05:56):
that I arrogate to myself no exhibitory rights in this lady.
She was familiar with and to many from the foremost
ranks of those who follow knowledge like a sinking star,
those great and restless spirits to whom inaction reads stagnation
to such in all probability, I tell, in speaking of

(06:16):
Dinah Groom a twice told tale. And therefore, inasmuch as
I make it my business only to print what is
hitherto unrecorded to them, I give the assurance that I
do not claim to have discovered their friend. On a
wall of the little embowered sitting room hung a queer
picture by Earnest Grisette of the overwhelming of the mammoths

(06:40):
in the ice. From the first this odd conception had
engaged my curiosity purely for its fanciful side, and one evening,
in alluding to it, I made the not very profound
remark that imagination had no anatomy. They are true beasts,
said Dinah. They are the mastodons of Cuvier, no doubt.

(07:01):
But then Cuvier never saw a mastodon, you know, but
I have, and I tell you Grisette and Cuvier are
very nearly right. I expressed no surprise. In what were
they astray? I asked? The mammoth as I saw it
had a huge hump like the steam chest of an
enormous engine over its shoulders. And where did you see it?

(07:24):
And when you are curious to know. Yes, I think
I am. And there is a quiet of expectancy abroad.
I hear the ghost of my dead brother walking in
the corridor. Dinah, and we are all waiting for you
to speak. She smiled, and said, push me over the cigarettes.
She struck a match, kindled the little crackling tube, and

(07:46):
threw the light out into the shrubbery. It traced a
tiny arc of flame and vanished. The sky was full
of the mewing of lost kittens. It seemed the sound
came from innumerable pea wits that fled and circled above
the slopes of the darkening meadows below. What an uncomfortable
seer you are, she said to people, this dear human knight,

(08:07):
with your fancies, no doubt now you will read between
the lines of that bird speech down there. She looked
at me curiously, but with none of the mournful speculativeness
of a soul struggling against the dimness of its own vision.
To me, it is articulate happiness, nothing more abstruse. Yes,
I have seen a mastodon, and I was glad to

(08:28):
happen on the beast, as a naturalist is glad to
find a missing link in a chain of evidence. From
the moment I knew myself quite clearly to be the
recovered air to this abused planet. She paused a moment
and contracted her brows, as if regretfully and in anger.
If I had only seen it sooner, she cried, Lo

(08:48):
before I had, in my pride of strength, tested the
poison that has bewildered the brains of my sisters. Her
general reserve was her self armor against the bolts of
the Philistines. What worldling would not have read mania in
much that was spoken by this sane woman. Yet, indeed,
if we were all to find the power to give

(09:09):
expression to our inmost thoughts, madness and sanity would have
to change places in the order of affairs, once said Dinah.
And it was when I was a young woman, a
man in whom I was interested shipped as passenger on
a whaling vessel. This friend was what is called a
degenerate physically and morally. He had yielded his claim to

(09:32):
any share in that province of the Sun that his
race had conquered and annexed, only to find it antipathetic
to its needs. Combative effort was grown impossible to him,
as in time it will grow to you all you
drop from the world like dead flies from a wall.
He could not physic his soul with woods and groves

(09:52):
and waters. To his perceptions, life was become an abnormality,
a disease of which he sickened, as all must. When
the last of the fever of aggression has been diluted
out of your veins, you die of your triumph as
the bee dies of its own weapon of offense, and
you can find no antidote to the poison in the
nature you have inoculated with your own virus. This man

(10:16):
contemplated self destruction as the only escape. He had sought
distraction of his moral torments. In travel long and varied
many of the most beautiful of the historically interesting places
in the world he had visited and sojourned in without avail.
His haunting feeling, he said, was that he did not
belong to himself. Pursued by his nemesis, he came home

(10:38):
to end it all. He still proclaimed his spiritual independence,
but it was immeshed, and he must tear the strands.
This was wonderfully perplexing to me, and out of my
curiosity I must persuade him to make one more attempt.
His late efforts, I assured him, were nothing but an
endeavor to cure nausea with sweet syrups. He would not

(11:00):
get his change out of nature by such pitiful wooing.
Let him rather emulate if he could not feel the
spirit of his remote forebears and rally his nerves to
an expedition into the harsh and awful places of the earth.
I would accompany him, and watch with and for him,
and supply that of the fiber he lacked. He consented, and,

(11:23):
after some difficulty, for there is an economy of room
in Whaler's, we obtained passage in a vessel and sailed
into the unknown. Our life and our food were simple
and rugged. But the keen air, the relief from luxury,
the novelty, and the wonder brought upon my companion and
renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note

(11:44):
in him signs of a moral preening, some smug resumption
of that arrogant air of superiority that is a tradition
with your race. Miss Groom here puckered her lips and
breathed a little destructive laugh upon her cigarette ash. It
did not last long she said, we encountered very bad weather,
and his nerves again went by the board that was

(12:06):
in the sixtieth longitude I think, where whales were still
to be found in those years, and seven hundred miles
or so to the east of Spitzbergen. On the day
it was August that the storm first overtook us, the
boats were out in pursuit of a right whale, as
I believe the men called it, a great bull creature,
and piebald like a horse, and I saw the spouting

(12:29):
of his breath as if a water main had burst
in a London fog. The wind came in a sudden
charge from the northwest, and the whale dived with a
harpoon in its back, And in the confusion a real fouled,
and one of the boats was whipped under in a
moment half a mile down perhaps, and its crew drawn
with it, and their lungs full of air burst like bubbles.

(12:53):
We had no time to think of them. We got
the other boat load on board, and then the gales
at us, crashing down the slopes of I have no
knowledge of how long we were cursed of the tempest
and the sport of its ravings. I only know that
when it released us at last, we had been hurled
a thousand miles eastward. The long interval was all a

(13:14):
hellish jangle, in which time seemed obliterated. Sometimes we saw
the sun a furious red globe, and we seemed to
stand still while it raced down the sky and ricocheted
over the furthermost waves like a red hot cannonball. Sometimes
in pitch darkness. The wild sense of flight and expectation
was an ecstasy. But to all my friend lay in

(13:38):
a half delirious stupor. At length a morning broke full
of icy scud. But the sea, panting and exhausted of
its rage, as a child catches its breath after a
storm of tears. So it would heave up suddenly and
vibrate and sink, and we rocked upon it a ruined hulk.
We were off a flat, vacant shore, if you could

(14:00):
call it whose margin for miles inland it seemed undulated
with the lifting of the swell. It was treeless desolation manifest,
and on our sea side, as far as the eye
could reach, the water bobbed and winked with countless spars
of ice. I will tell you at once my friend.
We were brought to opposite an inhuman swamp on the

(14:23):
coast of Siberia, fifty miles or more to the west
of Northeast Cape. And there what remained of the crew
made shift to cast anchor, and for a day and
night the ragged ship curtsied to the land like a
blind beggar to an empty street, and we only dozed
in our corners and wandered at the silence. By and by,

(14:45):
the men made a raft, and that took us all ashore.
There was something like a definite coast line then, but
for long before we touched it, the undersides of the
planks were scraping and hissing over vegetation. This was the
winter fur of the land, thick, coarse tundrum moss, and
on that we pitched a camp, and on that we

(15:06):
remained for long weeks while the ship was mending. It
was a weird, lonely time. Once or twice strange wandering
creatures came our way, little belted men with hairless faces
who rode up on strong horses and liked to exhibit
their skillful management of them. They talked to us, and
their chirped jargon tungus i think it was called but jargon.

(15:30):
It must needs remain to us. Well, we made a
patch of the hulk, and we shipped in her again.
We were fortunate to be able to do that, for
with every stiffish wind blowing in shore, we had feared
she would drag her moorings and ground immovably on the swamps.
The land, indeed, was so flat and low that wherever

(15:51):
the sea rose at all, it threshed the very plains
and crackled in the moss. And we were glad, despite
the risk to leaves so lifeless a place. Dinah paused
to light another cigarette and to inhale the ecstasy of
the first puff or so, before she continued up through
the still evening. From a curve of the main road

(16:12):
that crooked an elbow to her front garden, came what
sounded like the purring of a great cat, the wind
in the telegraph wires. And I am now to tell you,
she said, about the mastodon, as you please, I answered,
I do please, For why should I keep it to myself?
It makes no difference. Only I warn you if you

(16:34):
quote me, you will be writ down a fool or
a maniac. This relation lacks witnesses. For the whaler that
I subsequently quitted for another homing vessel, was never heard
of in port any more. She looked at me with
some nervous scrutiny before she went on for these regions.
It had been an extraordinarily hot summer, phenomenally hot, I understand.

(16:58):
And to this to the melting and breaking away of
the ice from hitherto century locked fastnesses, the captain attributed
the wonderful experience that befell us. The sea was strewn
with blocks and bergs, all hurrying onwards in the strong currents,
as if in haste to escape the pursuing demon of
frost that should refetter them. And their multitude kept the

(17:20):
steerman's arms spinning till the man would fall half fainting
over the spoke handles. Now, one morning, early in September,
a dense, bright fog dropped suddenly upon the waters. We
were making what sail we could with our crippled spars
and stunted trees of masts, and this it were useless

(17:40):
to shorten and so invite a rear word bombardment from
the chasing hummocks. So we kept our course by the
compass and trailed on through a blind mist, while fear
drummed in our throats. The demoralization of my friend was
by this time complete. For myself, I seldom have the
thought but that nature would sheathe her claws when she

(18:03):
played with me. This cannot last long, said the captain.
The words were on his lips. When we struck with
a noise like the splintering of glass. We were all
thrown down, and my companion screamed like a mad thing.
The captain rose and ran to the bows, and in
a moment he came back, and his beard was shaking.

(18:24):
God save us, he cried, And fetch af the rum.
There you have man in his invincible moods. They drank
till they were in a condition to face death. And
then they found that our situation was rather improved than
otherwise by the collision. For so it appeared we had
run full tilt or a perpendicular fissure in a huge block,

(18:47):
and into that our bows were firmly wedged, the nature
of the impact distributing the shock, and the berg itself
carrying us along with it and protecting us. Now the
dipping motion of the vessel was exchanged for a heavy,
regular wash along its stern quarters, for the boughs were
so much raised as that I felt a little strain

(19:07):
on my knees when I went forward to satisfy my
curiosity with a view of the icy mass into which
we were penetrated. I waited, indeed, until the crew were
come aft again from looking, and my friend crept timidly
at my shoulder. But when we reached the stern there
was one of the hands a little soberer than his fellows,

(19:27):
sprawled over the bulwarks and staring with all his eyes
into the green lift of the wall against him. Is
it a mermaid you see, Kligrew, I asked. The man
shifted his gaze to me, slowly and solemnly naut. Naut
said he but a terrible monster, like a pram stuck
in jelly. I laughed, and went to his side. The fog,

(19:50):
as I have said, was dense and bright, and one
could see into it a little way as into milky
white agate. But now and again a film of it
would pull thin, and then sunlight came through and made
a dim radiance of the ice. I can make out nothing,
I said. He cocked an eye and leered up at me.

(20:10):
Look steady and sober, he said, and you'll maken out
like as in a glass darkly. I gave a little gasp,
and my friend a cry. Before the words were issued
from the man's mouth, drawn by some current of air.
The fog at the moment blew out of the cleft
like smoke from a chimney, and there before our gaze
was a great curved tusk coming up through the ice,

(20:32):
and inside it. Now I clasped my hands in agony
lest the fog should close in again, and the vision
faded before my eyes. For following the sweep of the tusk,
I was aware of the phantom presentment of some monster
creature lying embedded within the ice, its mighty carcass prostrate
as it had fallen, the confirmation of its enormous forehead

(20:53):
presented directly to our gaze, Its little toffee ball eyes
little proportionately, that is to say, squinted at us, it seemed,
through half closed lids, and a huge hairy trunk lay
curled like the proboscis of a dead moth between its
treelike fore legs away beyond the great red brown drum

(21:15):
of its hide, bellied upward on ribs as thick as
a Dutch galiot's, and sprouting from its shoulders was the
hump I have mentioned. But here, from its position, sprawled
abroad and lying over in a shapeless mass, there was
something else horribly nauseating. But for its strangeness. The brute
had been partially disemboweled, as there was ample evidence to show,

(21:37):
for the ice had preserved all. Suddenly my companion gave
a high, nervous shriek look. He cried the hand, the
hand sticking out of the side I saw. In a moment,
turned and called excitedly to the captain. He all the
crew came tumbling forward up the slippery deck. I seized
him by the shoulder. Do you see I screw the

(22:00):
human hand? Beckoning to us from that great body? He
gazed stupidly, swaying where he stood. One of them bloomin
prehatomite cows, he muttered, caught in a cold nip by thunder,
and some unfortunate crept into her for warmth. I believed
the creature's rude intuition had flown true. Cannot you get
at it? I gasp? He stared at me all in

(22:23):
an instant, A little paltry demon of avarice blinked out
of his eye holes. Why, he said, slowly, who knows,
But it mayn't be a gal a jinglin from top
to toe with gold curtain rings. He was a furious daredevil.
Immediately and quick and savage and peremptory, his spirit entered
into his men. They went over the side with pikes

(22:45):
and axes, and scrambling for any foothold, set to work
on the ice. Like maniacs in the lust of cupidity.
They did not even think how they wrought against their
own safety and that of the ship. The point of
the uppermost tusk came to within a foot of the
ice surface. This they soon reached, and, prising frantically with crowbars,

(23:08):
flaked off and rolled away half toned blocks of the
superincumbent mass. I need not detail the fierce process. In
half an hour they had laid bare a great segment
of that part of the trunk. Whence the hand protruded.
And then they paused, and at a word, flung down
their tools. I was leaning over the bulwarks watching them.

(23:28):
I could contain my excitement no longer come, I said
to my friend, help me down, for I must go.
He climbed over, trembling, and assisted me to a standing
on the ice. We scrambled along the track of debris
left by the crew. At the moment, half a dozen
of the latter were rolling back. A broad flap of
the hide in which they had found a long, l

(23:48):
shaped rent revealed. Then a hoarse cry broke from them,
and I stumbled forward and looked down and saw they
lay beneath the mighty ribs, as in a cage of
which the intercostal spaces were afoot in width, and the
bars of a strength to maintain the enormous pressure of
that which had surrounded and entombed them. They lay in

(24:09):
one close group, their naked limbs smeared with the stain
of their prison, A man, a woman, and a tiny child.
From their faces and their unfallen flesh. They might have
been sleeping, but they were not. They were come down
to us a transfixture of death, prehistoric people in a
prehistoric brute and their eyes their eyes. Dinah's voice trailed

(24:33):
off into silence. Some expression that I could not interpret
was on her face. There was regret in it, but
nothing of pathos or mysticism. Suddenly she breathed out a
great sigh and resumed her narrative. You will want to
know how they looked, these lifeless survivors of a remote
race from a remote time. I will try to tell you.

(24:54):
The men hacked away the ribs with their axes and
laid bare the group lying in the hollow scooped out
of the fallen beast. They were little people, and the man,
according to your modern cannons of taste, was by far
the most beautiful of the three. He sat erect, with
one uplifted arm projected through the ribs, as if surprised

(25:15):
by the frost stroke. He had started to escape, and
had been petrified in the act. His face, wondering and
delicate as a baby's, was hairless, and his head only
a pretty infantile down covered a curling floss as radiant
as spun glass. His wide open eyes glinted yet with
a hyacinth blue, and it was difficult to realize that

(25:37):
they were dead and vacant. The woman was of coarser mold, ruddy, vigorous,
brown haired and eyed. She looked the very hamadriad of
some blossoming tree, a sweet, capricious daughter of the blameless earth.
Everything luxuriated in her color hair and lusty flesh, and

(25:57):
the child she held to her bosom with a manner
that into describably commingled contempt and resentment and a passion
of proprietorship. This baby, joining the prominent characteristics of the two,
was the oddest little mortal I have ever seen. What
did its expression convey to me? I am fairly caught
and must brazen out of the situation there. That was

(26:18):
what it was. I cannot put it or lucidly only
the things we face. Was animal conscious for the first
time of itself, and inclined to rejoice in that primitive
energy of knowledge. Now, my friend, I must tell you
how the sight operated upon me and upon my companion.
For myself, I can only say that, looking upon that fine,

(26:40):
independent foremother of my race, I felt the sun in
my veins and the whiny fragrance of antique woods and pastures.
I laughed, I clapped my hands, I danced on the
ice rubbish, so that they thought me mad. But for
the other, the man, he was in a different plight.
He was transfer figured. His nervousness was gone in a flash.

(27:03):
He cast himself down upon his knees and gazed and gazed,
his hands clasped upon that sleek, mild progenitor of his,
that pure image of gentle self containment, whose very meekness
suggested an indomitable will. Suddenly, he, my friend, cried out,
this is one caught in the process of materialization. It

(27:26):
is not flesh, my god, No, it seemed indeed as
if it were, as he said. I stopped on my
capering and looked down the tarry hinds standing by, grinned
and jeered. On the instant there came a splintering snap,
and the floe rocked and curtsied back. Yelled the captain.
She's breaking through by the head. He shrieked of the ship.

(27:48):
She was clearing herself, had already shaken her prow free
of the ice. There was a wild scamper for safety.
I was carried with a throng. It was not until
I was hauled on board once more that I thought
of my friend. He still knelt where we had fled
from him, a rapt, strange expression on his face. Come back,

(28:09):
I screamed, you will be lost now. At that he
turned his head and looked at me, but he never moved,
and his voice came to me quiet and exultant lost,
he said, aye, for forty three years, and here here
I find myself. We dipped, and the wash of the
water came about our boughs. The block of ice swerved,

(28:32):
made a sluggish half pirouette, and dropped astern come. I
shrieked again, faintly with the echo of my cry. He
was a phantom. A blot had vanished in the rear
word fog. And thereout a little joyous laugh came to me.
And that was a queer good bye forever, wasn't it?

(28:52):
End of Dinah's Mammoth.