Читать книгу The Coward - Robert Hugh Benson - Страница 21

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“BY George, you chaps!” said Tom Meredith, “but this is hot.”

He sat down hastily above the angle of the path and wiped his face hard all over.

It was almost impossible to believe that forty-eight hours ago, at this very time, they had been struggling in the luggage-room of Victoria Station, between charging porters and half-hysterical women and furious vindictive-looking men in tweeds, all at other times civilised beings, but in the midst of this anxiety once more barbarous individualists. And now the three young men were on their way up from Zermatt to the Riffel. The elders were somewhere behind, on mules.

They had come out with as much speed as these days permitted. All the previous afternoon they had wound through the Rhone valley, passing hot little stations with green-shuttered official residences abutting on to the platform, looking up almost continually from the sweltering valley to the great hummocky hills on this side and that—hills that, in their turn, aspired here and there to vast crags of brown and black, and even to spires and towers, beyond which, now and again, looked down the serene snows, dazzling bright against the intense blue. Then, by haste, they had arrived at Zermatt the same evening.

Tom Meredith was the kind of young man with whom boys inevitably make friends almost immediately. In physical build he was impressive; in his short, jerky sentences he was even more impressive, for his speech was full of allusiveness and vivid detail, singularly unlike the periods of Professor Macintosh, who had held forth three days ago on the same subject. In appearance he was a lean, well-made young man, hard and strenuous, thin-faced, with projecting cheek-bones, and extremely keen blue eyes beneath rather prominent brows. He was the proper colour, too, for a young man of his age and vocation, browned even with the suns of England; his hands were nervous and sinewy.

His outlook on life too was just now extraordinarily inspiring. Val had learned, by merciless questioning, that he had played football for Rugby for two years before he left and during one year for Oxford. But what impressed him prodigiously was Tom’s entire detachment from mere games. Obviously these things were, for Tom, just a recreation for boys; the real thing was climbing, for in climbing you were facing natural facts and not artificial situations. It stood, towards games, in the relation in which fencing stands to fighting.

On climbing, then, Tom was inexhaustible. In periods between conversations in the train he had indeed looked out with unconscious contempt now and again at wayside stations; he had emerged from silence to point out a stationmaster who was unusually fat; he had said that he believed that Sion had a cathedral; but he had detected the Weisshorn, and indicated it with a lean finger, when there was no more to be seen of it but a flash of white, seen between two hills and gone again. And all the rest of the time, till his mother fell asleep, he had discoursed almost endlessly on technical points. Val had even come into his bedroom late last night to hear some more, and Tom had sat up in bed to gratify him.

Well, even Val was too hot and breathless to ask anything more just now (they had come for fifty minutes without a break), and he too sat down and took out his handkerchief. Austin was already breathing rather emphatically, though even then with a certain reserve of self-respect, in the shade of a rock.

The view at which Val presently began to look is, most certainly, one of the finest in the world. They were just emerging out of the pines on to the first slopes of the vast plateau on the top of which stands the Riffelalp hotel. Beneath them lay the valley from which they had come, sloping abruptly down from the trees over which they looked down to Zermatt itself, a village of toy-houses, far away to the right. Then on the other side rose up the great bastions of rock and pine and scree, stripping themselves as they rose higher, up into the giant fortifications that protect the mountains proper—first the spires and pinnacles of the lower peaks, purple-shadowed here and there, lined with delicate white; and then the enormous solemnities of the eternal snows. Over all lay the sky, brilliantly blue, seeming to scorch the eyes with its intensity; while the grave murmur of the fly-haunted woods beneath, the ponderous far-off roar of the streams, did little else but emphasise to the subconscious attention the huge scale of the silence and the space and the vastness in which all expressed itself.

“By gad!” said Val presently.

Tom waved a hand.

“Ah! but that’s the chap!” he said.

Val nodded.

For, hugely greater in its isolation than all else, standing clear out, built as it seemed, as on a foundation, on the high line of which other peaks looked but a continuation, towered, out to the left, against the high sky, that enormous abrupt wedge of rock, so steep that the snow lies on it but in patches and drifts and lines—that wedge of rock known as the Matterhorn—a monster who has, all to himself, a little cemetery outside Zermatt where lie, as if ennobled by their fate, the “victims of Mont Cervin.”

“And we’re going to do him before we leave?”

Tom nodded. “We’ll have a try,” he said. And Val continued to stare.

Already even this peak bore to his mind a certain air of personality. For first he had read all about it; he had followed, almost breathlessly, Mr. Whymper’s adventures on it, and had formed an opinion on the famous question as to whether the rope, whose parting had cost four lives, were snapped or deliberately cut; next he had heard Tom discourse upon the peak; and thirdly he now saw for himself what a self-sufficient giant it was, broad-based as if on great claws, with that famous sharp head, tilted ever so little as if to see who were the next adventurers who were going to attack. It was upon the Matterhorn, then, that his heart was chiefly set; it stood for him as a symbol of all he meant to do in life generally.

“They say there are a lot of chains on it now,” he suddenly said.

“That’s nonsense!” said Tom. “They’re fused by lightning within a year or two. Besides, the climbing’s just as difficult. Besides, you needn’t use them.”

“And we start on the Riffelhorn to-morrow?”

“This afternoon, if you’re game.”

“Tell us about it.”

“Well, we must be getting on. I’ll tell you as we go.... Look; isn’t that them?”

He stood up, pointing down the slopes; and there, tiny as mechanical toys, there moved out of the shadow of the trees, five hundred feet below, the small and solemn procession of mules and porters with which the Meredith parents were ascending. Mr. Meredith had been perfectly explicit this morning. He would walk, he said, where it was absolutely impossible to be conveyed, provided it was reasonably flat going, and not too far. The boys might kill themselves as soon as they liked; but they must not ask him to accompany them.

“Yes; let’s get on,” said Val, getting to his feet once more.

It appeared that the Riffelhorn had been designed by an indulgent Providence as a kind of gymnasium for rock-climbers. It was a small peak of rock, jutting out from the Gorner Grat over the Gorner glacier; it possessed precipices quite deep enough to test the head (that on the glacier was a good thousand feet); it was constructed of excellent rock; and, best of all, there were no fewer than six ways to the top, namely, the ordinary way, the “sky-line,” the ascent from the glacier, the ascent from the Gorner side, with two more on the side facing the Matterhorn—these latter both short, but exceeding steep. The ascent known as the Matterhorn chimney contained but two footholds in forty feet.

“Then how do you get up it?” panted Val; for they were swinging on again at a good pace.

“Shoulders and knees,” said Tom tersely, “right across the chimney.”

“Have you done it?”

“Lord, yes.”

“And if you fall?”

“Oh! you’d go on to the glacier, I should think. But of course you have a rope.”