The peasant surveyed him from the further side.

“Don’t be afraid!” cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French, and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite sufficiently loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.

“Damn!” whispered Benham, but he took the hand.

Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school French.  “Pas de peur,” he said.  “Pas de peur.  Mais la tete, n’a pas l’habitude.”

The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no danger.

("Damn!”)

Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an old lady crossing a glacier.  He was led into absolute safety, and shamefacedly he rewarded his guide.  Then he went a little way and sat down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and plunging down towards Lens until he was out of sight.

“Now,” said Benham to himself, “if I do not go back along the planks my secret honour is gone for ever.”

He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well, that the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a very good chance indeed of getting killed.  Then it came to him suddenly as a clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain, that it is better to get killed than go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as his.  The change came into his mind as if a white light were suddenly turned on—­where there had been nothing but shadows and darkness.  He rose to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole way back, going with a kind of temperate recklessness, and, because he was no longer careful, easily.  He went on beyond his starting place toward the corner, and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was falling away, and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest.  Then he recrossed the Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to the crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.

After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but instead he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear above incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slippery footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the middle and headed him down and down. . . .

The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those dreams like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it was an exercise for young ladies. . . .

7