Читать книгу Collected Short Stories - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 9

SNOW HAD FALLEN in the night and it lay on all the ground above five hundred feet, showing brave in the sun and making the sky so blue that it was a living pleasure to look at it.

To the men walking fast up the Nantmor road the sharp cold was a pleasure too, for their hurry had warmed them to a fine heat. They had already come some miles over the mountains before they had struck the metalled road, along an ancient track that wound among the high bogs, often ambiguous and always hard to be found: they had followed it without losing it, but it had taken time above their allowance. They were hurrying, therefore, with the fear of lateness behind them, and their nailed boots rang quick on the hard road, and they steamed in the frosty air.

It was to a meet of foxhounds that they were hurrying, a meet right under Snowdon, at ten o’clock. Moel Ddu was on their left, and Moel Hebog after it, and the snow lay well down their sides; the men could not see Snowdon yet, for the hills shut in the top of the valley. The cruel black rocks of the Arddu rose sheer on the right hand, and the Nantmor river ran fierce below them. Far along on the road ahead a man was walking fast: he was a dark figure, dressed in black, incongruous among the rocks, and he was singing passionately. It was a hymn in Welsh and he was a shepherd: presently he vanished at a turning in the road, and although they heard his singing high up among the stunted trees they did not see the man again.

The road continued to rise and soon there were no more trees on either hand, and the black rocks showed harsher. The top of the valley was desolate with the gigantic spew of a dead slate quarry, high and lonely on the deserted road. Marching lines of square pillars showed where the aqueduct had run: many of them leaned strangely, and some had fallen. Huge, unprofitable slate rocks lined the road, holding back the black hills of jagged spoil.

The men had spoken little for the last half-hour, but now they said to one another that the road would soon turn to the left, and Gonville began to talk about how birds cannot tell how fast they are going in the air if there is a cloud or no light at all. Brown did not believe what he was told, but he was unable to refute it. Gonville, aware of his disbelief, went on in a dogmatic tone, telling him more about the birds of the air and the way they know nothing except possibly by magnetism. However, Brown did not quarrel with him, and when the road turned to the left all thoughts of wrangling went out of his head.

Right before them was Snowdon, sharp and brilliant in the sky, with Lliwedd jutting fiercely on the right and deep new snow over all, sparkling nobly in the sun. New clean snow, unspoiled by runnels, and Snowdon’s eastern face looked smooth by reason of the depth of the snow.

They were looking at Snowdon from a fair height and with a deep valley between: this waste of air below and before them gave the mountain an altitude and a majesty far beyond the amount of its height in feet. The sun was behind them, and it shone on the incisive, spectacular ridge that joins Lliwedd and Snowdon, separating the peaks with a great sweep of hard shadow.

It was a sight to make even a dull man’s heart leap and exult, like sudden good news or a lost thing found.

The way was downhill now, down into Nant Gwynant, with the big lakes one on either hand and the river joining them. The hard walking they had done had caught up with the clock, and when they came down into Nant Gwynant, to the Glaslyn and to the gate leading up to the farm of Hafod Llan they were before their time. For all that, anxiety harassed them as they waited by the gate where the milk churn stood, and they discussed the misadventures that might have happened, the possibility of a mistake in the time and of an error in their route – suppose, they said, the Captain has gone up by another way? But when they had been worrying themselves for a quarter of an hour the car and the trailer passed them and swung up the cart track to Hafod Llan. They ran after it and came up as the Master was going into the farmhouse to ask after his fox. There were a few other people, and the farm children stared at them and the hounds.

Eight couples were there, stretching and walking about: there was a strong smell of hounds everywhere. The outraged farm dogs bawled from a distance, but offered nothing more. The hunt terriers ran busily to and fro; all hard-bitten and many with recent scars and bald patches. The hounds were mixed. There were Welsh hounds, fell-hounds, and crosses, and there was an English bitch with a noble, judicious head who looked strange among the slim, fine-boned creatures around her. Benign hounds they were, but not effusive like some; Ranter, Rambler, Ringwood, Driver and Melody, Drummer, Marquis, and Music, the surest of them all.

The Master came out of the farmhouse. He was of an ancient family, and his people had hunted this country above three hundred years. He had a falcon’s nose and eye, and his moustache curled with a magnificent arrogance. He wore a very old cloth cap and a torn Burberry which concealed his horn and the whip he carried over the shoulder of his jacket. He spoke to the huntsman in Welsh and they moved off towards the Gallt y Wenallt, the mountain behind the wood.

When they came to a gate at the bottom of the wood the Master turned off downward and the huntsman, with the field and the hounds, went up through the copse. Hounds were soon out of sight among the trees, and Gonville and Brown pushed themselves to keep up with the long-legged huntsman. Soon they reached the snow where it lay thin and melting in the open spaces between the trees: they climbed quickly past the height where it was melting and came out at the top of the wood. As they cleared the trees a hound spoke below them, and they paused for a moment. Hounds passed up through the wood, working intently, but with very little sound; they were moving quite fast, and when another hound spoke – a deep-mouthed hound it was – they were far along.

The men had reached a path, and they followed it. It ran up from the wood to the top of a bluff, an almost sheer cliff that rose high above the woods. They could see hounds below them when they reached the top of this bluff and they stopped in a sheltered place – sheltered, because the wind, a small wind that came off the snow, bit very sharp and hard, they being in a sweat with the hurry.

They had come round the shoulder of the Gallt y Wenallt out of the sun, and here it was much colder. The face of Wenallt, running steeply down to Llyn Gwynant, was on their left: below them, at the bottom of the mountain, was a deep belt of trees; above the trees, a long sloping scree that stretched up to the foot of the cliff. Below the wood was the still lake and its river, and beyond the lake the ranks of bare mountains marching away one behind the other.

Hounds were working across the scree just below the snow; they were coming slowly up, and dubiously. However, they puzzled it out across the rocks, up through the heather in the face of the cliff, for the scent lay there, and up almost to the men crouched in their bit of lee.

Now they were hunting more confidently, and it was a rare delight to watch them packed close together with their heads down and almost touching and their backsides wriggling as they carried the line over the hard places, and how they ran streaming out over the easy ones. Down they went again, much faster than they had come up, down and into the wood.

Then the waiting men heard no more for a long time, nor saw anything. Brown talked to the huntsman, a young, tall Welshman who swore in English; he had most of the terriers with him, and the old white bitch nipped precisely into Brown’s lap. The other terriers crawled in the snow, for the pleasure of scratching their bellies against its crust. The huntsman carried a long pole and he wore old blue breeches: he told Brown that the Master would be below the wood, and that if the fox were a Cwm Dyli fox, as he supposed – but as he was speaking there was a crash of savage music in the wood. They all stood up in silence, and directly hounds were speaking again, singly and in a choir. They were running fast. In a minute or two the huntsman said that they had either got him going or they were very near to him, and in that moment the fox came up out of the wood, up to the clear edge of it. A dark brown fox was he, big and rangy, a long-legged fox. He looked up at the men far above him, and plainly they could see him deliberate as he stood there, looking up and damning their eyes. The fox looked down and trotted away along the top of the wood, inclining rather upward to the mountain – a low-pitched diagonal up the great sloping apron of Wenallt.

As the fox went away clear of the wood the huntsman sprang down the face of the cliff and holloed him away with great shrieking hooicks: he went down with a wonderful agility, going too fast to fall, and the snow flew up from his feet. The fox did not hurry for all that, but went steadily on: the men could see him between the rocks and low pieces of broken wall, and once or twice he looked up with a fleeting glance. The huntsman was crying to his hounds to lay them on, but they came up rather slowly, and by the time they were running on the line the fox was farther away than a man would have supposed possible.

He was going toward Cwm Dyli, it appeared, Cwm Dyli, far up at the top of Nant Gwynant, higher up than Llyn Gwynant, and right round the whole mass of the Gallt y Wenallt the men must go to get there.

This mountain, this Wenallt, is the end of the mass of Snowdon on the Nant Gwynant side – the deep valley and the lake define the mass. The mountain faces the lake squarely. Its top part is craggy, but not pointed: two arms run down from the top, arms that would embrace the lake if they ran further, but the one that shelters Hafod Llan is broken by the cliff and the wood swallows it, and the other, the far one towards the top of Nant Gwynant, peters out in the dead ground at the marshy top of the lake. Between these arms and below the crags of the top is a vast stretch of ground, a table tilted to an angle of fifty-five degrees and more. The men must cross this stretch. They were already about two-thirds of the way up it, and the intention of the first man was plainly to go straight across. The rest of the field followed, for he knew the country well. As soon as they left the rock of the cliff they found the going very hard. The sloping face was covered with thin wiry grass growing in shallow soil, and the grass lay under an inch or two of snow. Everywhere there were rocks and stones, nearly all on the surface, and none to be relied upon for a handhold. The snow was too shallow to tread into steps, and it was of that coarse, crystalline sort that makes a foot slip as ice does; much of the stuff was hail. The grass was no help either; the way it lay was all downhill, so it would not hold a foot up, and its roots were so poor in the red scratching of soil that a very little pull brought the whole handful up.

They came to a wall, a wall that ran down the mountain to the wood, one of the innumerable walls that intersect the summer sheep-walks there; it accentuated the angle of the slope, and if Brown had not heard the cry of hounds in front of him he would not have followed the leader over the wall, but would have looked for another way.

It was worse the other side. Brown had not brought a stick – he preferred to have both hands free for climbing – and he missed it sorely now. Gonville was a little way behind him; they were too far apart to talk, and even if they had been closer the difficulty of their way and their hurry would have kept them silent.

For a little way there was the likeness of a path, but this vanished after it had led them well out on to the face of Wenallt. The slope grew a few degrees steeper now, and now they crept painfully and slow. It was a cruel slope: a man could hardly keep his feet standing quite still on it.

From time to time Brown looked down to the distant wood, over the great sheet of white, a sheet that he could now see to be full of boulders that jutted sharply from its surface.

They were all crawling along with their left hands to the snow, sometimes with their whole bodies pressed to it, all with a strong uneasiness. The real present fear, with no interposing doubts or comforting illusions, did not strike into Brown’s heart until he saw a flat stone that the man in front of him had dislodged go sliding easily down, easily and then faster, throwing snow from it like a ski, and at last crashing into an ugly great black rock far, far down. Just after this the man in front turned left-handed directly up the mountain, going up a gully with the help of his iron-pointed stick: he was aiming for a saddle that led behind the rounded brow of the peak. He did not speak to Brown – he was too much occupied for that – and Brown stood considering. He did not like the look of the way up. He kicked the rounded clogs of rammed snow from his boots; they clogged every few steps in this stuff. He looked forward, and again the cry of hounds raised his heart: the slope was surely easier in front, and indeed he must have come over the worst, and by God there was no going back over that stretch. Below him, a great way down, he saw a figure at the far end of the wood; it was the Master, and he was looking steadfastly up to a point on the other side of the shoulder of Wenallt that was in front of Brown.

If they have run him in round there, said Brown, I shall be the first up. He looked round before he started forward and saw Gonville spread-eagled in a bad place; another man was holding out his stick for him to grasp, and it was obvious that they were going back. Brown waved; he felt secretly rather pleased. His fear had receded, and although he knew, with his head, that he was in danger, the real starkness of it had gone. I may slip or fall, he said in effect, and that could be fatal – probably would be – but these are things that happen to other people.

The first ten paces were easy and the next quite plain, but then he saw bad ground ahead and he judged that he must go down a little to get along at all. The huntsman came into sight just below the snow; he was walking with the terriers along the diagonal line the fox had taken. He had been hidden for most of the time by a drop of ground that did not show from above. This confirmed Brown in his plan, and he decided to go down to the good ground and then across to intercept the huntsman’s path as he crossed the far arm of Wenallt. Just at this point the ground went down in steps, still grass-covered: these he negotiated, with his face downward. Below the steps the slope was terrible, but there was no retreat. It had looked just the same, or better, from above. I will go down on my bottom, he said; a little farther down and then across. The immensity of the stretch below him, the snow ending in shale and the far, far trees; the huge sweep sickened him.

He shuffled down – come, it’s not too bad, he said, but while the words were still in him, and he in an awkward position with his legs stretched out and his weight on his elbows and heels, he began to slip. With a furious, controlled energy he gripped into the grass and earth. It tore away without hesitation. Flat on his back, he went; he went with his arms out and his crooked, tense hands scrabbling for a hold, failing, then pressing fiercely on the sliding snow, stemming, breaking, but impotently and in vain, for he was going faster. Faster: with a terrible certainty the momentum increased: the seconds of controllable speed had passed. It is happening to me, he said: and Now for it, he said, as he passed into a hurtling rush down; but still he hunched his shoulders to protect his head and forced his hands into the snow. The sense of responsibility was gone and with it his fear: he expected one dark blow, a smashing blow and the end, but not without a certain constancy of mind.

His feet were against a rock, a firm rock. It was all over; and he was still, unmoving and unhurt. He lay for a moment, for some minutes, breathing and looking at the sky. He was wet, soaked through and through; the whole of his back was wet through and the caked snow was forced into his clothes. Was he hurt? No, he was not hurt. His hands were strange to him, but he was not hurt – all whole. He got up, trembling and shaken: he did not think very clearly now, in this strong reaction.

The trees were a good deal nearer: Brown was halfway down the mountain-face. He could not see the others when he looked up, nor could he be sure of the place where he had started. He looked down, but the huntsman was no longer to be seen.

He felt that there was a strong necessity to go on, not to stop, not to make anything of it. He thought slowly: perhaps he had been stunned, had been unconscious for a while without knowing it? How otherwise could Emrys have vanished like that?

He went on a few steps farther down to look from side to side: no man could he see, but there was a neat precipice, only fifteen or twenty feet deep, but sheer, and if he had not fetched up where he did he would have gone over it without any sort of doubt. This shocked him unreasonably and he turned his face to the dark crags above him. How he longed for the rough, strong rocks, firm and true: their steepness was nothing, he said inwardly, for they were reft and fissured and it was like going up a ladder.

Without thinking any more he started to move up. From where he was the crags seemed continuous right from where the grass ended to the very top, and once the rock was gained it did not look at all difficult to go up over the summit of Wenallt.

His new way was easier than creeping sideways across the mountain, but it meant going on all fours, and soon the snow had so numbed his battered hands that all the strength left them. They would hardly even open and close, so when he reached the first of the rocks he could not go up. He rested a long while before they recovered, and in a few minutes that he took in climbing the first stretch their strength went again. Again he rested, this time under an overhanging rock where sheep had stood years beyond counting in hard weather. By some freak his sandwiches had escaped being crushed into a mess, and eating them brought Brown back to common things and to a comforting sense of ordinariness – a feeling that had been quite stripped from him for some time before. He was shivering in his soaked clothes, soaked in front now as well as behind, for he had groped upward through deeper snow on his hands and knees; but his courage was fairly well as he came out of the sheep’s place.

He could see three separate masses of rock above him, and no more: he would be climbing them, he could see, in the right direction – that is, his path would carry him over toward Cwm Dyli, and he reckoned that from the top of the third crag he would see round into the valley on the other side.

The first crag was steady, exhausting climbing, not difficult, but needing continual strong effort. At the top of it was a stretch of open shale before the foot of the next crag. This was anxious going, very, for the snow was far thicker at this height, and it was not a pretty task to creep over unseen shale pitched at that angle and with that vast amount of world below. Brown set himself to it, and worked up along the edge of the scree, where he knew the bigger stones would be lying under the snow.

His good fortune brought him up to the top, under the second crag, trembling with the effort. He had to wait for his hands again, and now for the first time, as he squatted out of the way of the little breeze, cramps seized him with force and anguish, so that he grunted aloud. Now his heart began to falter a little, less at the pain and the fear that they might grasp him again when he was crucified on a rock than at the new appearance of the crag above him: rocks that had appeared to be joined when he decided to climb them now had showed themselves to be far apart, separated by stretches of snow that might conceal anything, stretches that tilted shockingly, so that some of them looked almost vertical.

However, he hoisted himself up the nearest rock, and reached for the next handhold; it was a high, flat rock-face that he was going up now, and he had to walk up it with his feet while he held on with both hands. As he looked down to see whether his right foot was well placed, looking down with his chin in his chest, he saw beyond his foot black rock and snow stretching down forever, then that horrible plane slope, and infinitely far away the trees and the lake. These he saw upside down, and he sickened at the sight. With a convulsive, wasteful effort he struggled to the top and lay there. He knew that he must not look down any more, for his courage was beginning to go, and with it his freedom from the terror of height.

It was while he was on the third mass of rock, worming himself across a gully to a climbable rock, that he came face to face with a hound. It was Ringwood, obviously coming down from the top. He was followed by others: they looked momentarily at Brown and went on. Even with four legs they found it hard, and one slipped twenty feet and more while Brown watched them. He no longer minded about hounds: all that he wanted, and the huge want filled him to the exclusion of all else, was firm ground, level ground, under his feet and the sky in its right place over his head.

The topmost piece of the third crag was an ugly, out-leaning breast of rock with a narrow cleft in it. The strength of his hands was gone again, and as he stood wedged in this cleft he thought he was going to fall at last. He did not fall, though he swayed backward; his elbow held, and with his chin ground down to the top of the rock and a chance grip for his knee he came up to the top. Kneeling there, almost sick with the muscular effort, he saw that what he had climbed was a false crest. Beyond and above him stretched three hundred feet of nearly perpendicular rock, interspersed with gullies and patches of shale. A wide tract of flattish ground that led back from the top of the false peak had hidden all this from him as he stood below: even now what he saw as the top might not be the real summit.

Without allowing himself to formulate anything about this, Brown began to walk across the dead ground. The gesture was very well, but after he had climbed a little way cold despair overtook him. This was worse than the mountain below: the rocks were farther apart, the bare, smooth slopes steeper and wider. It was unclimbable; his strength was almost gone and there was no way down.

When he came to a platform with a sheltering slab over it Brown stopped. The last phase of climbing had had a nightmarish quality; not daring to look down any more, he had won the last fifty feet at the cost of cruel labour and intense apprehension with each movement. All the time stark, naked fear had been on him, and it was on him now, and he knew that it was a rightful fear.

For a long time he squatted, inert and unfeeling. A cramp revived him and he noticed that the sun had come round the edge of the mountain. The sky was still the same unclouded perfection of a sky that it had been in the morning. He did not know the time – could not guess it, either. His watch had stopped when he had gone down.

Now that he was wholly determined not to go on he felt better. He looked down, pressing his back against the firm rock, and he experienced that sense of flying that comes with some kinds of giddiness. This passed, and he surveyed the country below him. He had come a long way: the trees were even more distant. A feeling of utter, desolate remoteness filled him: he seemed quite cut off from the world. But so long as he was no longer going to drive himself up he did not mind very actively: no more fruitless crawling up, with knees and hands slipping and every movement perilous, arduous beyond bearing: to be left alone, that was the thing.

How kind the weather has been, he said after a great timeless pause; if it had blown hard or snowed some more I should have gone before now. How long would it be? he asked; but made no reply.

Far, far down, a little above the wood there was Gonville running with the immense strides of a man going downhill; he was crossing from right to left. Brown could recognize him by the yellow waterproof jacket that he was wearing. He ran to the wall at the end of the wood and stood by the gate.

Brown’s heart went out to him in a kind of envy and a desperate longing to be down there. The thought of shouting came to his mind: on a still day like this he might make himself heard down there. But he dismissed the thought, and in a few moments the whole pack came running fast along the wall toward Gonville; Brown flushed at the sight and stood up to watch them tear along the top of the wood and vanish on his right. By the time he sat down again Gonville had disappeared.

He relapsed into the same dull, marooned feeling; he repeated that it would not be possible to go down the way he had come up, but he did not care very much. Time dropped slowly on and on, and nothing at all happened: no change, no movement.

Two ravens flew out above him from Lliwedd over the lake, flying with steady wing-beats whose sound came down to him. The front one was almost silent, but the second bird spoke all the time in a guttural monotone, gaak gaak gaak: occasionally the front bird replied, deeply, gaak. They flew straight away from him in an undeviating line for his home.

The warmth of the sun was grateful to him: in spite of the sodden coldness of his clothes his spirits rose under it, and presently he was aware of being alive again, with an active mind and his apathy gone.

When he made his great discovery he felt a fool; he could have blushed for it. Ever since the sun had come round the shoulder of Wenallt it had been melting the snow fast. The snow-line on the horrible slope, his chief dread, had been retreating steadily for a great deal of the time that he had been climbing – had crept up after him. Inexplicably, when he had looked down he had never looked for it nor seen it. But by now the slope was free from snow almost to the foot of the crags. A vast sense of relief, of ignominious anticlimax filled him. Without waiting, he let himself down from his place, he let himself down like a sack and he fell safely. He slid and scrambled recklessly down the shale and it submitted to this. He defied the black rocks now and in minutes he threw away the height that he had won with such pain. Twice he slid deliberately down long stretches of snow, squatting on his two feet; the first time he pulled himself up on a rock on the calculated edge of destruction; the second time he let himself go down the last snow of the horrible slope and did not stop until he was on the clean grass. He kicked the last snow from under his boots and ran down the grassy innocent slope laughing like a boy, down to the thorn trees and down safe and happier than Lazarus to the lovely wood and the lake with the blue sky over them, and in ten minutes the real knowledge of naked fear had left him again.