North Face (4 page)

The thermometer read 97.8; Miss Fisher, rinsing it, decided that no more compunction was called for. She was just opening her mouth when Miss Searle said, gratefully, “And you’ve even brought up my Chaucer. You
are
spoiling me. Now I’ve everything round me I can possibly want.”

Miss Fisher eyed her with mystified concentration. She knew more about human behaviour than about Middle English; this total unselfconsciousness could only be genuine. A happy and charitable thought struck her. It was a long book; Miss Searle couldn’t have got there yet.

“Is it an interesting book?” she asked, delicately sounding.

Miss Searle smiled, on the brink of a polite assent (there really seemed nothing else to say); but the naiveté of the question moved her. She scented in it a stifled intellectual curiosity, to which all that was best of the pedagogue in her responded.

“You’d hardly imagine that anyone
could
find it interesting, after going back to it again and again for fifteen years—” (Fifteen
years,
thought Miss Fisher; she must know it off by heart!)—“but do you know, I never really
get
tired of it. Both technically and humanly, it’s almost inexhaustible. The vitality, the fascinating touches of realism.” Gratified by the rapt stare in Miss Fisher’s eyes, she went on: “It seems unbelievable that for centuries his verse was thought to be irregular and crude. Because of the changing sound-laws, of course—”

Miss Fisher could hold herself in no longer.

“That’s ever so interesting. I thought he was supposed to be—well—rather rude?”

“Well, of course,” said Miss Searle serenely, “some of his humour has a coarseness that would be quite inconceivable in the present day. But …”

The pleasant, well-modulated voice ran on. Groping after enlightenment, Miss Fisher thought: She hasn’t noticed that it’s about
people.
It’s poetry, in a book, with clever rhymes and all that, by someone who’s dead. Advancing from the partial truth another step, she decided. It’s her job, after all. Sort of smooths out one bit of you, and leaves the rest.

Miss Searle too, after her fashion, had been traversing a gap of understanding in the opposite direction. There was a hesitant little pause; neither succeeded in expressing what she felt.

Miss Fisher said, at length, “It must be nice, being able to read it straight off. It looks just like a foreign language, to me.”

“It’s so much a matter of the spelling. If you heard it read—but I’m keeping you.”

“No, do read me a bit, if your throat’s not too sore.”

“Thank you, it’s past that stage. But I’m afraid I shan’t do it justice.” On an impulse, she put aside the
Tales
(so often ruined for the half-educated by popular renderings) and picked up the
Minor Poems
from the bedside table. Something short and self-contained. A little concession to modern pronunciation would, she thought, in this instance be justifiable.

Miss Fisher listened languidly, content to have extended her olive-branch. It was the
Balade de Bon Conseil.
The opening seemed to her rather sententious. The even voice read on, with the slight increase of power which Miss Searle had kept in reserve.

“That thee is sent, receive in buxomness,

The wrestling for this world asketh a fall.

Here is no home, here is but wilderness:

Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!

Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all:

Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead,

And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede.”

Taking Miss Fisher by surprise, a prickling made itself felt in the back of her neck, and a shiver in her throat. She blinked. The next verse was a short one; the poem was finished. She swallowed hard.

“Ta,” she said. “That was ever so nice. I hope your voice isn’t tired.”

“Not at all. Do borrow the book at any time, if you’d care to.”

“Thanks ever so.”

“When this wretched cold of mine is a little better, perhaps we might go exploring together one day, if you’re free.”

“I’d love to. We might go along to the coach-office and see if they’ve any good trips.”

As in many chemical reactions, while the precipitates settled quietly at the bottom of the vessel, the reagent, with a different specific gravity, floated at the top. It was falling dusk; a light defined the lancet windows of the tower. Having decided that he could not face any more civilized conversation today, Neil Langton prepared to slip out quietly for an early dinner somewhere, and get to bed.

L
ATE SUN SLANTED ALONG
the bracken, throwing every clump and curve into relief; deeply luminous towards the west, to the east richly shadowed; on the grand scale, the hills repeated the theme. Far ahead, beyond the thickly wooded cliffs which hid the shore, the sea lay in tiny glittering pleats. Every pebble and rut on the track seemed to yield up, under the loving exploration of the light, a separate rejoicing personality.

Neil’s shadow, grotesquely lengthened, shot obliquely before him, playing in a spirit of good-humoured caricature with the limp from his blistered heel. Either his sock must be through, or he had darned it in hurry; he must really get himself out of this. The pain should have offered a kind of distraction, but he was worried lest he should be too lame to walk tomorrow. “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.” The second alternative still remained an aspiration.

The lit bracken shivered, subtly, in a light breeze; a dark cloud-shadow caressed a hill in passing. Conversations were going on everywhere, in which once he had been included. It was foolish, he supposed, not to have been prepared for this destruction along with the rest. He should be grateful, perhaps, for the illusion that such things would remain; it had kept him alive for the first few weeks, till living had established itself as a habit. Besides, what was happening now would have happened anyway, he supposed, in another twenty years, though imperceptibly then, like the stiffening of muscles and the resistance of the intellect to new ideas. Little by little the spirit would have ceased to answer the eyes, the mind would quietly have taken over. A fine day, a temperate breeze, an interesting conformation there in the hills. “I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway.” William Wordsworth.

Perhaps it had been some inner reluctance to make the test which had sent him, when he left the school, to London. At the time he had only said to himself that no one attracted more than five seconds’ notice there. From this point of view, it had been quite a success. His friends had well-defined orbits, easily avoided; he had existed for some months untroubled by any human contacts beyond those involved in saying “Yes, thank you,” to a mercifully laconic landlady, and “No, thank you,” to the varied assortment of prostitutes whom he attracted by a tendency to take long walks at night. They seemed to have a sixth sense for him (like flies for a carrion, he thought) but with practise were easily out-manoeuvred, except when they emerged from doorways in one’s path. With all these assets, it was a pity that London had to produce its customary effect in the end. The half-felt surrounding swarm, the great skep in which it was a social distinction if one had space to breathe, began to affect him like the smell of a rank sick animal in a room. When he took to staying in all night as well as all day, he knew that this could not go on much longer. Why should it? It was time now for the mountains. The matter of training would right itself; and at last, there, so would everything else.

He reached Scotland well aware that he was not fit to climb, and spent a week walking himself into condition. It took him another week to know what had happened, and several more to believe it.

If his nerve had gone, or his staying-power, he would have been presented with an object in life, and an unimpaired promise beyond it. Indifferent to death, he had been at the top of his form, and it had shown him the truth. The contact was broken. The technique was exercise; the route a mechanical problem; the summit a terminus. Two two-thousands of feet made exactly four.

Always when he had come to the hills happy in himself, which was good, they had freed him from himself, which was better. When he had come with what had seemed at the time like trouble, they had lifted it and left him again with something fit to lose. What he brought them now was not acceptable; they handed him back to himself to keep. He had wrestled with them, for a blessing at first like Jacob with the angel, then in anger and for revenge. He had always hoped, when his time came, to die on a climb by some mischance not shaming to his skill. Now, taking meticulous care on increasingly severe routes, he refused to a treacherous ally the satisfaction of killing him; he could manage without this final humiliation. He had done nothing unjustifiable by the strictest standards, except to climb alone. He did not feel qualified, now, to lead a party, and saw no reason why other leaders should be responsible for him on a rope. In their place, he would have preferred to pick someone else.

He might still have been there, defying emptiness, if he had not had the folly (or the wisdom) to repeat a climb that he had first made with Sammy when they were both twenty-five. On a night in May they had camped high, and in the first twilight done a short but exacting route, with one unexpectedly tense moment: reaching the ridge, they had confronted the sunrise on the other side. Above a world folded in every dark gradation of shadow, the sky rose in profound transparencies of green and blue; a vast wing of cloud, shaped like immortal speed, swept the zenith with a deep but brightening fire purer than snow. They had taken out their food; discussed, now that there was time, the awkward rock-fall in the chimney; and stopped talking to watch the sky. Presently, between two bites at a sandwich, Sammy had spoken with the factual simplicity of someone commenting on the weather. “‘We will fall into the hands of God, and not into the hands of men: for as His Majesty is, so is His mercy.’” Neil, continuing to eat in peaceful silence, had reflected in a remote kind of interest that at sea-level it would have been embarrassing.

It had taken the measure of memory to show him that he was through. Standing on the same ridge, fifteen years later, he had known that this must be his last climb. Considering, indifferently, where to go from here, he had found the Wier View address in his pocket-book. It was one of several he had noted six years ago for his honeymoon, but rejected as not being good enough. It seemed, now, that it would do.

His rubbed heel was growing tiresome; the blister must have broken. Perhaps after all there might be a tin of small dressings for this kind of purpose in one of his rucksack pockets; he had snatched it up, in the last stages of packing, and had flung in odds and ends on top of the debris of last year. He sat down with it on a bank of mossy grass, through which the ruins of a centuries-old stone wall broke here and there, and found that he was in luck. The tin was there, and heaven knew what rubbish besides. Something caught in his fingers as he fished about. He examined it; a small and very grubby handkerchief, edged with pale blue. It had been folded and pulled lengthways; two corners still showed the creases of an untied knot, and in the centre was a little brown stain, of the size that comes from a scratched ankle. One of the uncrumpled corners was decorated with the word “Tuesday,” and with a pink rabbit wearing a blue coat.

Beside him on the bank, between the roots of a thorn-tree, was a heavy moss-topped stone. He prised it up, brushed from the cavity with careful thoroughness the creeping things disturbed by the light; and, having pressed the half-handful of cotton flat on the earth, replaced the stone. Opening the box of dressings, he attended to his heel.

The plaster clung firmly; the pain of walking was relieved; the mind was left, less fortunately, disengaged. There remained the sometimes helpful expedient of Virgil. He began in his head, his feet marking the beats of the hexameters:

Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per-terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant
…

He broke off; that had too many associations already. It had been a comfort, now and again, to have sleeplessness resolved into so calm a universal. Perhaps, he thought, the more positive effort of translation? He decided on an early nineteenth-century manner, further imposing on himself the problem of rhyme. By the time he had reached the edge of the town, it had become a not unpresentable effort: the kind of thing Byron might have torn up on an off day, as an undergraduate, having diverted himself while dressing for dinner. It had taken Neil all of two hours; but it had proved some sort of concentration to be within the grip of his will, which was something to go on with. Better still, during all this time the grey and gold hills, and the deepening sea, had ceased to trouble him. Except as a series of surfaces to be traversed, he had not been aware of the moors at all. He even passed the gate of Wier View without seeing it, and had to go back fifty yards. Preoccupied still as he walked into the garden, he did not see Miss Searle’s deck-chair till it was too late to retreat.

Well, he thought, this was as good a time as any to begin recovering the social decencies. At the back of his mind, he recognised this moment as one of decision. If he failed to make the effort with which chance had confronted him, tomorrow would find him where he had been yesterday. In the end, the application to New Zealand would not be sent either; he had only a fortnight longer in which to put it off.

Walking quietly across the lawn, he thought at a nearer approach that she was asleep; the promise of reprieve made him feel, instead of pleasure, a weary sense of defeat. She was awake, however, looking out placidly across the open book sunk on her knees, at the visible strip of sea by which the house modestly justified its name. A good profile, he thought dimly: she could afford to do her hair in one of those piled-up styles that the wrong women always wear. Better not, though; she’d be one of those that leave a bunch of wisps hanging out behind, and look as if they’d screwed it up for a bath …