North Face (31 page)

“Yes,” he said. “That seems to cover everything, doesn’t it?” This was his line, in the script as it stood, he waited, unconsciously, for some director to recognise the impossibility of the whole sequence, to shout “Cut!” and bring them back to the beginning, with the lighting changed, new dialogue, and a not incredible plot.

She was still too, except that gropingly she put out her hand and closed it round the trunk of an ash-tree beside her. It was the tree on which it was necessary to hang one’s weight as one swung from the ledge to the rocky path. For a moment he saw reflected in her eyes his own helpless incredulity, as if the tree had been a prompter, signalling her exit from the scene which, unbelievably, had been shot and left to stand. In this instant strangely at one, they expressed the same instinctive appeal, the same dawning realisation of the irretrievable, the same desolate protest. When she spoke aloud, it was in a dead, formal little voice; it sounded like a comment on an incident many years closed.

“I want to apologise. You’ve been very considerate, and I’ve treated you very badly. One doesn’t know oneself how one will feel. We just have to remember it would have been worse than this, if we hadn’t found out in time.”

His silence had, like her words, the quality of retrospection.

“I said a horrible thing to you just now,” she began again. “I didn’t mean it and it wasn’t true. It’s you who deserve someone better. I’m a drifter, you see, I realise things when it’s too late. It’s not much use to say I’m sorry now. Is it?” The flatness of her voice changed, on the last words, to a sharp insistence, flung at his silence as her endurance of it snapped suddenly and unforeseen.

“Never mind,” he said. “I daresay I asked for most of it.”

“No. I—” To their half-stunned minds all this futility became for the first time audible, like the loose slamming of a door on an empty room.

Her arm bent, putting her weight on the tree, and she began to turn. At the last moment, her set face broke; her other hand groped at her neck; and he saw in the movement what he had been too fixed in unhappiness to see when she had made it once before: frustrated seeking, an unaccustomed insecurity, loss. Seeing the realisation in his face, she cried with a helpless bitterness directed nowhere, “I knew this morning … I knew something terrible would happen when I took it off.”

He started to his feet; an involuntary physical exclamation, without aim. She shrank back. “No. It’s no use. You know it’s too late for anything. Oh, please. We
must
get away from each other now.”

As she swung upward to the path, her blindly placed foot slipped; it seemed for a moment that she would fall, and, without thought, he ran forward and put out his arm to catch her. But her grip on the tree saved her balance; she found her feet, then the path above, and went into the thick trees out of sight.

T
HE CLOUD-GAPS HAD
closed together, making the sky a solid grey blanket over the parched and breathless land. Giving it a moment of half-dulled attention, Neil thought the leaden light must mean that the storm was about to break, though he could neither hear nor feel the signs. He looked at his watch; it was the day itself that was failing. The cliff-shadows, reinforced by trees, caught the long autumn twilight first of all. The time he had spent here, putting off the first movement that would have its counterpart of quickening in the mind, had seemed infinite, yet he had supposed it shorter by the clock. Now the hours of inertia behind him gave him a sickened sense of defilement, like a drug or a debauch. The lunch-wrappings still lay on the ledge beside him, pointing the squalor; he screwed them up, to bury them under a stone.

Some different texture in the handful of rubbish gave him pause; he had gathered up with it the yellow cotton belt from Ellen’s dress. He remembered her saying, as she threw it off impatiently, that one could fancy it weighed pounds. It seemed no heavier than the paper with which it was entangled. Separated from her, the stuff and the white buckle looked thin and cheap; the plainness of her things and their fresh harmless colours, had deceived him for some time into thinking them good. He turned the strip over in his hand; it was, probably, essential. When he got back he must leave it somewhere, where it could be found. He stuffed it into his pocket, and put on his shirt.

The dusk, so far, was premonitory only; beyond the trees the sea still reflected, flatly, the heavy day. He threaded the cliffs by one of the wandering paths, working gradually downward; he did not mean to return till very late. Tomorrow he supposed he would leave; but from the thought of packing and looking up. trains his stretched mind bolted with the furious revulsion of weariness; tomorrow could look after itself. He walked on, emptiness like an intolerable burden which there was no place to lay down.

An enormous shadow stopped him, like an out-thrust hand. He looked up. Just ahead, above and below him, split in the cliff at right-angles to the sea, was its one considerable face. The near side of the cleft, on which he stood, had crumbled and broken and was overgrown like all the rest; on the far side, a hundred and fifty feet were sheer. This was the cliff of which Ellen had spoken. Seizing, then, on a pretext which had been as good as any other, he had conveniently forgotten that in no case would he have taken her there. Even if he had had a rope, it would have been criminally unjustifiable; her form was not within miles of such a climb. It would have been a thing to try with Sammy, on the right day. With vivid clearness he could see Sammy standing beside him in a characteristic pose, his weight on one hip, his head tilted up and askew, rubbing the back of his neck and saying with pleased anticipation, as he studied the face, “Looks a bit ’aughty from here, doesn’t it?”

Everywhere dark with shadow, the grey rock was streaked more deeply by oozings of water from within. Its almost vertical pitches were broken here and there by ledges, all sloping and mostly with evil loose surfaces. Quietly and insistently, its question sucked at his emptiness; like a lover whose word is to be trusted, it promised that the vacuum should be abundantly filled. He had no sense at all of making a decision; there was simply this, and nothing else in particular, anywhere, to do.

He climbed down the wet boulders of the gully stream, and studied it again from the foot. He had on the rubber-soled, shoes he used for dry rock-climbing, worn today for lightness in the heat. Useless on a wet surface, they would restrict considerably his choice of route; but if he went back for his boots, he might meet someone, and in any case the light would be gone. Accustomed to think clearly on such matters, he confronted for a moment the fact that he had never before knowingly begun a climb with unfit equipment, and that this climb was not one for a casual approach. All this was true but irrelevant, like a timetable for some place where one does not mean to go.

Having scraped his soles on dry earth (his passage down the stream had already made them slippery) he began to climb.

The first pitch was moderately difficult; the holds, following the strata like the ledges, sloped downward, but not at an impossible angle and rubbers gripped them well. Though the whole of his mind seemed engaged with their problems, there was still a part remaining which tested, as it always had since his boyhood, the relationship between himself and the rock. Once always met and satisfied, more recently frustrated and hungry, in the last week unconsciously content, this instinct encountered for the first time a complete nullity. The holds were there, one leading to another; the rock was of such a type, and such a formation. He climbed like a textbook, the conventional phrases for each step forming themselves in his head.

The first ledge offered a better stance than he had expected; the scree was superficial and easily cleared. With dry accuracy he marked a projection where, if a second man had been following, he could have belayed the rope. From here there was, or should have been, a choice of ways; but the narrow chimney which first drew his eye was slimy with water. He would have to work up by small holds to the third ledge, traverse along it, and get to a crack at the other end which looked clean and dry.

It was when he was halfway up the next pitch that he heard, for the first time, the roll of thunder over the sea.

In the first moment of hearing it, it said very little to him. He was not on a mountain, and carried no steel. Soon however he became aware of a nagging, then of an alarm-bell in his conscious thought. When the storm broke, there would be rain.

To a man climbing in boots it would have meant awkwardness, a drag on speed, discomfort to be shrugged off and put-up with. To a man climbing in rubbers, it meant that within minutes his feet would encounter, not points of grip and friction, but a greased slide. Socks might have served, if he had been wearing any; but it had been too hot.

The thunder sounded again, nearer. For the first time that day, he felt an eddy of air cross his face, and in the eddy a faint touch of chill.

He was already past the halfway point. With a reasonable hope that his route would go, a total certainty that retreat would be slow and (to say the least) highly delicate, there was nothing but to go on.

The second ledge sloped steeply and was covered with friable stuff. His instincts recoiled from it at sight; with a sound handhold, it was good enough to brace one foot on for a rest. There was no time to rest long. Working out to a small buttress he edged up to the third ledge. This, somehow, he would have to use.

The buttress ended as an extension of the ledge itself; but as soon as he got his head over, he saw he must work round to another point. From the buttress-top to the face, there was nothing but a long steep tongue of scree; not, like that of the first ledge, a thin coating over rock, but thick, indefinite, based loosely on dry earth. There was no sign of a handhold, and he had no time to waste on digging about for one. Leaving the buttress, he made his way with some trouble to the tapered edge of the ledge. The other end would have been better, but that way there were no holds.

A complete view of the ledge confirmed his worst surmises. The surface, combined with the angle, made it clearly impossible unless the handholds were sound. They had better be; he saw at once that there was no hope of a higher traverse to the crack, or any alternative way to the top.

The thunder was a good deal closer now. The first distant flicker of lightning made him realise, by contrast, how little daylight was left. A long, quiet sigh sounded across the trees. He called “Anyone below there?” and heard an echo slap back the last word at him, but nothing more; he tested the ledge, at once dislodging stones. The sound of the first brought back a memory, from which he pulled his mind away. The sense of urgency pressed on him, with alternative waves of disturbance and release. He was aware of being on a bad, careless, unjustifiable climb, of which all the roots of his training were ashamed; but the new unconsidered passenger within him, its vacuum filled, felt the negative pleasure which is the cessation of pain.

The handholds were there. He shifted on to the first by degrees, trying to argue with the distrust which flowed into him through his fingers. There had been no doubt, till now, of the soundness of the rock. Here it was sharper, more recently broken; it felt solid, but linked itself unpleasantly in mind with the chute of rubble on the slide. He distributed his weight with catlike circumspection, the main to the hands, the lesser to the feet.

A mounting rumour rustled in the trees. Just after the next thunder-roll a new air touched his face, cool, and damply sweet.

He tested each handhold he came to; but the thought of speed, increasingly pressing on his mind, made the tests a little less exhaustive than they had been. Now he was above the tongue that sloped down to the buttress; there were only another few feet to go before he reached the crack. When he found the next and necessary handhold, he discovered that it was an undercut.

It was a hold that must be taken from below, giving no lift, only a counterpoise, a straight pull outward from the rock, along the line of the strata: when the rock has one’s perfect confidence, a useful hold enough. He gave it every test which was possible while still committing his weight to the other hand; but if he were to use it, he must put more on his feet. In the deepening dusk, his eyes was gladdened by a small tuft of grass; it argued a certain coherence below. By crossing the place quickly and lightly, he could make the crack. In it, just out of reach, there was a good deep hold. The structure of the crack reassured.

Setting his foot on the grass-tuft, he pulled on the undercut, shifting his balance to it from the other hand. There would be only a second, while he changed hands on it, when it would take the whole outward pull. The moment came; and, at the point of direct tension, he felt it move. An instantaneous reflex brought his foot down on the grass-tuft. There was a little dry, tearing noise; his foot slipped downward. He flung his whole weight out against the undercut. With a motion that seemed grading, almost lethargic, it parted from its root in the face, and came away.

As his hands left the rock, and his feet slipped lower, his efforts to grasp the receding face seemed protracted, rational, an infinite exploration of possibilities. Then he was face down on the scree, feeling it heap under him, experiencing with flat unbelief his gathering speed; while his body, which understood before him, dragged and struggled, and thrust fingers bent in violent and useless strength among the shifting stones. He thought, This is it, with the unreality of knowing that Australia is under the world; and felt his feet leave the edge.

A sharp tearing, not like pain, wrenched his right hand; his arm, among unrealised movement, felt racking tension and arrest. His body swung sideways on it, and stopped.

Among the scree, indistinguishable to the eye, projected a jag from the underlying rock. In his mind’s absence, the mysterious animal he inhabited, whipped back to its primeval swiftness, had found it, clawed and clung. Obeying the creature (his consciousness so far behind that it was still trying to apprehend the fact of death) he clenched his grip, and tried to reinforce it with that of the other hand, which would not reach. His legs from the knees down hung in space. When his mind overtook his body, it was to remark that in a few seconds he must let go.