Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (20 page)

‘Alley-oop now, shentlemen! Alley-oop!'

They spent that night at the Theodule Pass. The boy had been limping badly for some time before they got there; and for the last mile or two Arthur had fussed over him like a hen.

Then, to Arthur's annoyance, there were already other climbers in the hut. Two Swiss from Zurich, systematically drying wet socks and sweaty shirts, had cornered one end, and at the other were two English students, one a girl. She was very dark, with bronzy black eyes and smooth healthy brown arms from which the sleeves of her scarlet jumper, rolled up, came away like the tight peel of fruit. She was busy combing her hair when Arthur arrived, pulling it in long sweeps from the nape of her neck and then over, in a black curtain, to one side of her face, and then tossing it away again, in an arching, upward jerk. These gestures produced in him the uneasy creeping coldness at the back of the neck that he had experienced with Miss Shortland.

The girl took one quick look at him and then, for the rest of the evening, hardly another that did not mock him. She began from the first to be fascinated by Parkman. The student, a big boned man with a shock of coarse yellow hair and a face skinned raw by alpine sun, sat at the table gnawing lumps of rye bread and drinking red wine and reading a detective novel. Outwardly he did not seem to care whether the girl looked at Parkman, at Arthur or at the two Swiss. He spoke to her with drawling and weary affection, always gnawing bread: ‘Oh! don't be so footling, darling. Don't drivel, sweetheart.'

All the time Arthur was fussily anxious for Parkman's foot. ‘We must get it right,' he kept saying. ‘We must. We can't neglect it, you know.'

‘It's really not bad,' the boy said.

‘You looked pretty grim as we came up.'

‘I don't think it's anything to worry about.'

‘On mountains feet are always of importance,' Arthur said. ‘It's the first axiom of climbing. Isn't that so?' he said to the student. ‘You'd agree, wouldn't you?'

‘Oh! Jesus, yes. First axiom,' the student said. ‘Never have a foot off.'

‘Did you ever see a good climber with a wooden leg?' the girl said.

Sitting at the table, her face pressed into her cupped hands, she watched Parkman take off his boots. She looked at him for some time with a long sleepy under-glance, still and quiet. Presently he limped over to his rucksack and she followed him with slow dark eyes.

Arthur, for some reason he could not fathom, felt suddenly pained as he watched the boy come back to the table with a packet of cigarettes and offer one to the girl.

‘Not now,' she said. ‘Perhaps later.'

‘Light one for me, sweetheart,' the student said and went on reading and gnawing wine-soaked bread.

‘Anything else?' she said.

‘Darling, you wring my poor tired heart.'

She took a cigarette and put it in her mouth. She took the matches from Parkman's hand and lit the cigarette and drew at it slowly.

The student, without looking up from his book, held out his hand. She put the cigarette into Parkman's mouth instead.

‘There,' she said softly, ‘that'll soothe your nerves.

Small flames of anger raced about Arthur's chest, dying quickly, leaving him cold.

‘Oh! come on, poppett, light me one,' the student said. ‘Stop bandying.'

‘Men are all alike, aren't they, Mr Browning?' she said.

Arthur, clenched and coldly earnest, did not answer.

‘I think I'll get to bed,' Parkman said.

‘Oh! no. You can't!' the girl said. ‘Oh! no. Mr Browning has to look at your foot.'

‘I'm very tired myself,' Arthur said. ‘We ought to be up early tomorrow.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Seriously. Feet are feet. Especially on mountains.'

She got up from the table, pushing the sleeves of her jumper farther up her brown full arms.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Give me that foot.'

Suddenly, resolute and capable and physically sure of herself, her full breasts tightening under the scarlet jumper, she lifted her body and threw back her hair.

‘Get that sock off.'

‘Oh! no really,' Parkman said.

‘Obey the beautiful bitch,' the student said. ‘Obey her.'

‘Shut up, thug,' she said. She looked steadily and, as Arthur afterwards realised, quite tenderly at Parkman. ‘I'm not kidding,' she said. ‘Mr Browning is quite right. Feet can be fatal.'

‘Feet
fatale, femme fatale,'
the student said. ‘What difference?'

Slowly Parkman pulled off his sock, putting his foot on a stool; and Arthur, peering over, saw where the knuckled boot had rubbed the white flesh to a skinless red scar.

‘Can I do something?'

‘No, we'll manage,' she said.

Her voice, almost curt after all the casual banter with the student, cut Arthur cruelly. He could not speak. He stood staring down at Parkman's foot as she held it in the lap of her skirt between her bare brown knees.

‘It's badly blistered, that's all,' she said. ‘Tender?'

Gently she touched the foot with the tips of her fingers and Parkman winced. ‘It's better to get it done.' She smiled softly, and Parkman smiled back at her.

‘Would you see to the boot, Mr Browning?' she said. ‘Grease it a bit. See if you can soften it.'

Dismally Arthur walked across the hut to find the boot; and the student, yawning with raw wine-wet mouth, said:

‘Ah! well, bed for this boy.'

He leaned across the table, scrutinising with pained curiosity Parkman's foot, making dry noises of alarm.

‘It is my considered view you should call in a second opinion.'

‘Shut up. Go to bed.'

‘It is my considered view that the foot should be amputated.'

‘How is it now?' the girl said. She had bathed it clean and was covering it, now, with clean lint. ‘Comfortable?'

‘Absolutely all right,' the boy said.

‘Once we have amputated you won't feel a thing,' the student said.

‘Go to bed,' she said. ‘I think you're drunk.'

‘Who wanted this bloody jaunt in the first place?' he said.

After Arthur and the student had gone to bed Parkman and the girl sat for more than an hour at the table, talking. Arthur listened to them unhappily as he rolled in his sleeping-bag, unable to catch a word.

In the morning, as he had feared, the five of them climbed to the top together. From there the view was stupendous and beautiful; the wide glacial flashing world, clear of cloud, was terrible and beautiful in the sun. But the privacy, the intimacy, the final fearful moment of ecstasy he had hoped for were not there. The student shouted wildly across the heights, waiting for his own boisterous echoes to come ringing back. Parkman
limped a little with his foot. The girl helped him along and the guide kept shouting:

‘Alley-oop, shentlemen and lady! Alley-oop!'

Vainly, up there, Arthur tried to come between the girl and Parkman.

‘You see, it was worth it, Parkman. Wasn't it? Don't you think so? Aren't you glad you came?'

Only the student answered, chanting idiotically: ‘Oh! my darling, oh! my darling. Oh! my darling Parkman mine!' while the girl and Parkman pointed out to each other the vast pearl-blue distances of Italy, far away.

‘He will make a good climber, won't he?' Arthur said.

‘Which?' the guide said and grinned sardonically at the student. ‘This shentleman?'

‘No, no,' Browning said. ‘The other. The boy.'

‘Gut, yes!' the guide said; and winked. ‘Alley-oop!'

Next day Parkman, the student and the girl went on down the valley. The student, who had lost his boisterousness, no longer called the girl darling; he had a sort of bruised aloofness as he thrust out his sun-skinned face and walked ahead; and now, behind him, it was the turn of Parkman and the girl to taunt him, laughing at his hunched retreating back.

In the small hotel Arthur felt restless and alone. For a few hours, starting out there with the boy, in the starry summer morning, he had felt all insecurity and loneliness fade: to be presently replaced by something he had never known in the presence of Miss Shortland. He was not at all sure of that feeling; he could not resolve it into conscious thought. But it was warm and tender, uplifting him exactly as he had been uplifted on his first naïve scramble to the Neiderhorn.

Two days later he went on by train to Andermatt alone.
At the station, in the shops and at the Gasthof where he was to stay, he found that people were talking of very little else except a climbing disaster to three English climbers on a crag. With terror he remembered the idiotic bantering student, the girl who was too beautiful, and Parkman's foot.

He was part of a rescue party that found the three bodies in a gorge. It had been nothing but a stupid, futile, tragic afternoon lark by Parkman and the two students to climb a crag that was hardly a mountain at all. With amateurish and clumsy folly they had underestimated it. As the bodies were laid out on the mountainside of raw dark rock he thought the body of Parkman looked hauntingly and unbearably young. He did not look at the girl; but the student, for one ghastly moment, seemed to grin at him in the sun.

He never quite recovered from the reckless, pointless, mocking folly of that day. It was something that should never have happened. It was summer. It was within reach of peasants solidly mowing deep lush alpine clover-grass. It seemed as safe as the Sussex Downs.

There was not even any snow.

iv

He climbed a great deal during the next ten years, and he began to be solidly competent rather than expert. Even so there would appear, from time to time, a paragraph or two about his feats in the one local paper back at home.

During this time he graduated from what is sometimes termed a centrist. His world enlarged. He ceased to be a traveller merely estimating, as a centrist does, the surrounding distance from one central peak alone. He learned to explore mountain systems crosswise, by traverse, ascending and
descending, discovering them not by individual peaks but as masses of earth-crust, huge and awesome, formidably and wonderfully folded. He ceased to be interested in peaks, especially larger and more famous ones, simply as peaks. They presently began to have significance only as part of a vast system, all of which must be conquered: in his case mostly, except for guides, alone.

All this time he did not know that Miss Shortland, on that first hot lunatic-haunted holiday in the Oberland, had waited nearly a week for him in Interlaken. He did not know that she had twice taken the post-bus up the road to Frau Roth's hotel and had walked up and down the road there, half a mile away, in the hope that he would come out and walk there too. He did not know that she had sometimes, at home, posted herself in the ladies' waiting-room at the branch-line station, so that she could watch his movements, during a few weeks of that autumn, as he cleared up his affairs in and about the shop. Her familiarity with that view across wet granite sets, streaming on rainy days with yellow stains of horse-dung and rainbow gleams of spilled oil, across to that unopposed and profitable position that everyone said was one of the best in the world, became as great as his own had been. And he did not know that either.

Fifteen years after the holiday at Frau Roth's hotel, sausage-ridden and ruined by trivialities like lunatics and heartburn, the local paper printed a warm account of Arthur's part in the rescue of two German climbers on a peak above the Ragli glacier.

‘Well-known local Alpinist, Mr Arthur Browning, formerly a familiar figure in the town, last week accomplished, together with a party of Swiss guides, a remarkable rescue feat in the Bernese Oberland' and so on. There had even been a line or
two about it, though he did not know it, in the national papers; and the local paper had also managed to print an agency picture of himself taken with the party of Swiss guides, outside his hotel at Lauterbrunnen.

About a week later he received a letter:

‘Dear Arthur: I simply wanted you to know that an old friend felt very proud when she read of your feat in the Alps last week. Everyone was talking about it here. It isn't often one gets the chance of saying one knows a celebrity, but I must say it was a very pleasant experience for me. Sincerely: Olive Sanderson.'

For some time he had not the least idea who Olive Sanderson could be. There were, he knew, Sandersons at home, in leather, a family of solid bovine sons who had built or bought for themselves solid red-brick houses on the valley-side; but he had never known them well. He thought of them as frequenting golf-circles and Rotarian dinners and dances and perhaps, though not frequently, Nonconformist church on Sunday.

He pondered on this for some time; and then it occurred to him suddenly that Olive Sanderson, Mrs Olive Sanderson, could only be Miss Shortland. He had never known another person named Olive; and it was unlikely that there was anyone else who could claim to call herself an old friend.

In his polite, attentive, unexciting way he wrote back:

‘Dear Olive: Thank you very much for your letter. You may be sure it always gives me considerable pleasure to hear from someone at home. I'm afraid I don't often get back there now and I did not know you were married. If it is not too late please allow me to offer my congratulations and to say that I hope you will be very happy.'

A few days later the former Miss Shortland wrote back:

‘My husband and I have been thinking of coming to Switzerland for a week or two next month but I'm afraid we don't know much about hotels and the best places and so on. Would it be asking too much of you, I wonder, to recommend us something? I have always wanted to see the Oberland again. I've never forgotten the autumn crocuses and it must be very thrilling when one knows it better. It could hardly be
less
thrilling than here, as you can probably guess. Sincerely, Olive.' P.S. ‘Not
too
high in the mountains please. We're not all such expert alpinists as you, I'm afraid.'