Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (19 page)

‘Would you mind if I took my stockings off?' She spoke without anger. ‘You can look at the mountains——'

She did not finish because he was in fact already looking at the mountains; he was not interested in her naked white legs as she rolled her stockings down; and she said:

‘Come and lie down. It's cool in the grass.'

‘If I lie down I can't look at the mountains.'

She stared savagely at the sky and said: ‘When did you get this thing about mountains?'

‘I didn't know I had a thing about mountains. Who said?——'

‘Said?' She felt she must scream. ‘You've talked of nothing else all day!'

‘Yes, but there's nothing
wrong
with it, is there? I mean neither one of us is bound to think just like the other. We're old enough——'

‘Old!' she said. ‘Old! I'll die of it if we don't get out and
do
something——'

After that she walked back to the hotel alone, carrying her shoes, getting a curious thwarted pleasure out of walking barefoot in the grass.

On that steaming evening Frau Roth chose to give them
for supper a dish called
Berner plat
. It was rich and salty and gross and Miss Shortland felt they ought to have eaten it with shovels.

Half way through the meal Arthur looked at her with the glassy, over-kindly, bulging eyes that she always felt would have looked better in spectacles and said:

‘I suppose I ought to tell you I'm going off tomorrow for a day alone.'

She dug her fork into nauseating messes of fat meat, not speaking.

‘Would you mind?'

‘Mind? Why should I mind?'

‘I thought you might.'

‘You think the oddest things, don't you?'

After supper they sat together on the verandah outside the hotel. The lighted windows of the lunatic asylum winked beyond woods of pines, and the stars, wonderfully scintillating in the dark summer sky, winked above the mountains. The
Berner plat
had given Miss Shortland heart-burn. When Herr Roth appeared, smoking a heavy black cigar and talking, almost champing, in Bernese, she got up and excused herself and went to bed.

In her bedroom the air seemed more stuffy and stifling than ever. Her head ached as she undressed and lay down outside the coverlet, in her nightgown, having left the door on the catch so that she could hear Arthur when he came to bed. Irritation, suspense, the fretful bickerings of the day: all of them could, she felt, if Arthur only understood, be so simply and pleasantly and finally dissolved. In a few moments, there on the bed, he could remove all the wretchedness she felt about asylums and sauerkraut and heart-burn and walking on mountains.

When she heard Arthur come upstairs to bed at last she felt her heart racing.

‘Arthur: is it you?'

‘Yes.'

With her breast bounding and racing she waited for him to come in, but he made no sign of coming in.

‘Are you really going tomorrow?'

‘I wanted to.'

‘Where are you going?'

‘To the Neiderhorn.'

‘What's the Neiderhorn?'

‘A mountain.'

Writhing on the bed, hugging herself, staring at the lights of the lunatic asylum reflected on the ceiling, she did not answer.

‘I'll try not to be late,' he said.

She did not answer.

‘Goodnight,' he said.

Again she did not answer.

‘Sleep well,' he said. After this there was a silence as if perhaps he was not certain of something. ‘You're not peeved?'

‘Not peeved!' She writhed once more on the bed. ‘Goodnight.'

The lights of the asylum, for some reason or another, did not go out till dawn.

ii

Next day he climbed his first mountain.

Years later he would look back on that day with amused but affectionate awe. He did the first part of the journey by post-bus, carrying with him a pile of bread and sausage and
hard boiled eggs packed for him by Frau Roth, and the second by funicular. The third was mostly an affair of paths carefully marked, winding up through spinach green woods dripping with heavy dew. It was nothing more than a scramble for an hour or two. But years of steady and attentive waiting in the little shop had left him flabby and on the hot mountainside he had difficulty in getting his breath. He rushed up the damp but hot paths with clumsy and excited steps, sweating, mouth open, head down. Whenever there was a spring in the woods he doused his face and mouth and hands, feeling curiously light-headed with fatigue and heat and altitude.

It was mid-afternoon before he reached the top. All the way up, under the physical stress of the climb, he had been vaguely aware that he had committed some sort of injustice against Miss Shortland. It was his business, somehow, to make it up to her. Perhaps a sprig or two of edelweiss was the answer: a peace offering from the summit of his first mountain.

But when he got to the top, about three o'clock, he was finished. In utter exhaustion he lay face downwards against a rock. All his spirit, his naïve and rushing enthusiasm, had drained sickly away. For about twenty minutes he could not drag himself to his feet again.

When he staggered upright at last he felt himself choking. Not, this time, with fatigue or sickness, or with any remembered sense of injustice against Miss Shortland. He was exalted into speechless ecstasy by the view. Below him the lake glittered like snakeskin in the breeze and heat of afternoon and all beyond it, repeated and repeated into great distances, like the crested back of a white dinosaur, stretched the pure icy world of summer snow. Out of all that terrific range of Jungfrau and Eiger and Mönch and Schreckhorn and Silberhorn,
flashing and monumental under the blue hot sky, he could not name a single peak. He simply stood choking and staring, the core of himself quivering and pumping with joy.

Thirty years later they put a ski-lift up there, so that tourists could do in twenty minutes the two thousand five hundred feet that had taken him half a day. When he heard of it he felt it did him a keen and personal wrong. It was a vulgar affront to the feelings that had stormed and stunned him that afternoon.

And what he did feel was a curious mixture. His joy was shot through, in a strange way, with an odd sadness. Underneath all his naïve ecstasies there was a numb pain of unforeshadowed regret. Out of the rose bright web of feeling came the thought of his mother. Insecure and lost, he grieved for her so painfully up there that he began to cry. Many weeks of conventional solicitude had left him without any visible sort of grief for her, but now he let the tears for her come readily and quickly, in a sticky hot flow, until they burned and dazzled his eyes, turning the mountains as he stared at them into painful white splinterings against the sun.

But there was no edelweiss for Miss Shortland; and in fact he did not think of it again. The painful fusion of joy and insecurity, of his mother who had gone and the mountains that had so suddenly unlocked his tears for her, left him with a stunning impression of wonder and yet of something unsatisfied. In a way it was as if he had almost, but not quite, rediscovered her there.

He climbed down to the hotel in a numb and sobered way, his feelings lessening as he came down. His joy resolved itself into a deep pleasure that he felt would not be complete until he had spoken of it, somehow, to someone else; and he was
once again troubled by thoughts of injustice to Miss Shortland.

But at the hotel Miss Shortland was not in her room; and in his own room he found a letter.

Miss Shortland explained that she had left for Interlaken. She understood there were nice shops there and sociable people and hotels with decent food and orchestras to which one could dance at night. She dwelt with pointed delicacy on the fact that he did not understand her. She hoped he would get over his thing about mountains. Perhaps when they were both back home again they would, as she put it, begin to see things in their right perspective. She at any rate thought they might, and she hoped that he would think so too.

Arthur did not think so; and he did not go to Interlaken.

iii

He stayed alone among the mountains until the end of September, a month longer than he had intended, and then he went back home.

He did not open the little shop. The microcosm of the station corner, with its travellers and their newspapers, drays and dray horses, its smell of coal and leather, smoke and sweets in bottles, had died. The little manufacturing town, where he knew almost every face and every brick and where, as they all said, that position of his on the corner was one of the best in the world, no longer meant anything to him at all. There was an end, suddenly, of ‘Arthur will see to it; Arthur will find out; Arthur will be only too pleased; Arthur will attend to you.' There was also an end, or at least he hoped, to Miss Shortland. In fact he was not to see her again for many years.

After he had sold the shop he had, with his mother's money and his own, a little under ten thousand pounds. He calculated it might last him, with care, for forty years. He was going to live modestly, existing in little
pensions
and travelling third class. He was going to live among mountains.

By the fourth year after all this he had acquired a certain aloof bearing, silent and rather solemn. The early thirties had begun to put on him a sort of shell-like puffiness that travelling and mountains did not take away. And until that year he travelled—in and out of Switzerland, over to Austria, across to Germany, once or twice to the Pyrenees and the Dolomites—quite alone.

Up to that time he had followed, quite instinctively, the line he afterwards discovered most climbers took: summer in the Oberland, then the Engadine, then Zermatt, with ambitions about the Matterhorn. His first moment above the snow-line had been at the Tiefen glacier. It was early September; great crevices of ice flashed with dazzling vitriolic beauty and he almost choked with joy. From above he saw for the first time too the superb cresting fall of the Rhône glacier, with Galenstock above. It was a fearful and wonderful experience; but again, unexpectedly, he was affected by a sense of insecurity and loneliness that recalled his mother. Out of this insecurity rose a feeling that he wanted her there to share that singular experience of solitude and altitude: that it was really nothing without her.

During this time, occasionally, he thought also of Miss Shortland. It did not strike him as odd that over a considerable distance of time she continued to repel him. He had always shrunk from touching her. Her hair, coarse and black and shining, had grown stiffly out of the thick colourless skin of her neck in a way that made the hairs on his own neck stiffen
and creep cold. Neither in the alpine grass nor the alpine bedroom had he ever quite got over that queer sensation.

The following summer he went to Zermatt, full of ambition to climb the Breithorn. The weather, with the wind in the south, blowing warm low rain, made his first four days in a small hotel, without another Englishman, a misery of lonely frustration. It seemed as if cloud would never lift even from the lower meadows, with their mournful bell-donging cows.

On the fourth evening there came into the bar a young man carrying a rucksack so large that Arthur mistook him at first for one of those German students who then slogged the roads of Europe like obedient snails. He was overjoyed when this lean tired figure asked in English for a room.

After supper he introduced himself.

‘Would you join me in a beer? My name is Browning.'

The young man had eyes of fiery violet blue set in whites of dazzling clearness.

‘Mine's Parkman,' he said.

‘First trip over here?'

‘Not really. I came once with my parents. On holiday.'

‘But first time climbing?'

‘Not really,' the boy said. ‘The first time alone.'

For an hour or more they talked and drank beer; but the boy, tired from a long walk in the rain, seemed except for the fiery violet eyes rather like a pale chrysalis not fully awakened. He seemed unaware of the extent of Arthur's almost ferocious friendliness, of his big protuberant eyes, hungrily impelled, gazing across at him over the heavy beer-mugs in the light of rain-splashed windows.

Arthur spoke at last of the Breithorn. ‘I've got the guide and everything fixed,' he said. ‘We're simply waiting for the cloud to break up. Would you care to come?'

‘I've never really done anything so high.'

‘You would be perfectly all right. You could have absolute trust in the guide. Brucker. He's wonderful.'

The boy did not answer and Arthur remembered how, on his own first naïve scramble to the Neiderhorn, he had longed, tangled up in a web of emotion, for someone to share his joy.

‘It would be a terrific thing for you,' he said. ‘It's one of the great mountains.'

‘I suppose it is.'

‘And of course it's always better with someone with you. Somehow there's an awful sense of frustration—I don't know—if someone isn't there.'

‘I'm probably pushing on tomorrow,' the boy said.

‘It would be an awful pity to miss it,' Arthur said. ‘Would you feel more confident if we went to see the guide?'

Later it turned out that the glass was rising and the guide, old and leathery and sardonic, prophesied the day would be good.

The three of them started the following morning at half-past four. It was starlight and cold and the boy, obviously, did not want to go. One of his boots had knuckled through being badly dried after rain and he complained continually that it hurt him and would not fit.

The guide was sardonically cheerful: ‘Alley-oop, shentlemen!' he kept saying. ‘Alley-oop !'

Throughout the day, together, he and Arthur nursed the boy along. Dawn broke in flying steely feathers of rose and grey, in branching and spinning trails of deeper red and purple that massed into high ridges of snow-pure cloud. For Arthur the experience was full of a wonderful, invigorating buoyancy and all day the guide sang out sardonically: