Читать книгу The Coward - Robert Hugh Benson - Страница 23

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A marmot was feeding on the grass not a hundred yards from the foot of the Riffelhorn, and not fifty from the little lake in whose surface the Matterhorn lies reversed.

It was a day of extraordinary peace down here in the hollow. On all sides lay hummocky and broken ground, rocks, grass, wiry plants, rolling up and up towards the path far away that led to the Gorner Grat. Overhead lay the sky, an enormous hard-looking dome of intense blue deepening to black. It was an entire cosmos in itself, silent, self-sufficient, complete; for the iron crags of the Riffelhorn, black against the glaring sky, were as remote as the sun from the earth. Here was no sound, for the breeze had dropped, and not a thread of water moved; only the minute crunching and tearing of the marmot’s teeth emphasised the stillness. Once he heard the shuffle of feet as his friend over the nearest slope moved to juicier pasture, and then silence fell again.

The isolation was so complete, the spaces so vast, that an interruption would seem to partake of the nature of the miraculous; for the world of consciousness within the marmot’s tiny brain was as well rounded and secure as the hollow in which he browsed and the earth on which he lived. An eternity separated him from the warm morning into which he had come to take air and food and water; an eternity from the evening in which he would go back to his safe darkness and his lined nest. Only the sun moved overhead, a blazing pool of fire, like Destiny across the sky. He had his universe to which his instincts responded: there was that within him that had brought him out a few hours ago, that would send him back a few hours hence; there was that within him too that would respond to the unexpected, should it befall him, that would adapt him to his shattered world....

Well, the unexpected happened, as it always does; and a phenomenon came into his life that of course had come before with the advent of every tourist, that, for all that, he continually forgot.

It began with a tremor of the earth, so subtle, and originated at so great a distance, that it did no more than cause him to lift his brown chin from the grass. Presently it died away, and presently began again.

He sat up abruptly. Still all was as it had been. The vast blue vault was unmoved; the Matterhorn remained unruffled in its perfect mirror; the Riffelhorn stood up abrupt and forbidding. No voice or cry or shot broke the intense, hot silence. Yet Destiny approached.

Five minutes later there was a shrill call and the rush of scampering feet. His neighbour had gone to ground. Down by the shore there rippled across the grass yet another brown body, and vanished. The marmots were going to earth.

Yet still he waited, his ears pricked, his nose moving gently. And then, as against the glaring horizon twenty yards away, a white hat rose swinging, he too whistled and went.

The cosmos was broken up. And beneath, in the secure darkness, he began once more to adapt himself to his environment.

It was about two hours and a half after table d’hôte that Val suddenly found himself wishing he had never been born. That moment comes sooner or later to every living being who climbs a mountain. It arises from a multitude of causes, and usually passes away again with as startling a movement as that with which it arrived. Val’s moment was a typical case.

They had started in less than half an hour after a rather heavy meal, having preceded that meal with an exceedingly hot walk up from the valley, and the ascent to the base of the Riffelhorn seemed almost endless to a mind accustomed only to English slopes and distances. The sun shone straight down with an astonishing force upon their backs as they ascended, and Val had almost despaired ever of reaching even the plateau of the lower Gorner Grat. Then, when that was reached, there was a long walk over tumbled ground, where Val had his first sight of a marmot, and then, at the moment when the first slopes of rock were reached and the Riffelhorn itself, a towering white peak, stood straight overhead—at the moment when Val had expected to be allowed to throw himself flat on the ground to pant and to drink, Tom, with shining eyes, had exclaimed:

“Now we’re going to begin.”

Val looked desperately at Austin, and was enraged to see his calmness. Certainly that brother of his looked hotter than he had ever seen him before; he was flushed heavily, and his face was one thin sheet of wet that dripped off his chin and nose; but he did not seem at all distressingly exhausted, and made no protest. Very well then; Val would not either.

Then, without another word, Tom had set his hands upon the rock and risen some four feet. Austin came next, then Val, and last Mr. Armstrong, a little behind, since he had paused to arrange his handkerchief delicately under his hat and over the back of his neck. He was still in grey flannel trousers....

The climbing did not seem impossibly difficult. Certainly it was unlike anything Val had ever done before, and it appeared to him strange that the rope was not put on, since after a quarter of an hour’s climbing, there was a slope of rocks on their right that would certainly kill anyone who happened to fall over. But he made a strong act of faith in Tom Meredith, and went on. On the whole he was pleased with his prowess. He was also pleased that the rope had not been mentioned again.

Then came the moment when he wished himself dead, suddenly and violently—or, rather, that he had never been born, since it seemed to him that death, abrupt and brutal, was his only possible prospect.

They had reached the foot of a little wall of rock about twelve feet in height, up which ran a deep crack, not deep enough to get inside. The wall appeared to Val absolutely insurmountable. Tom turned round.

“Look here,” he said, “I think you’d better watch my feet, if you don’t mind. This is absolutely the only bit of climbing on the thing at all. And if you start with the wrong foot, you’ll find it hard.”

Val regarded him with horror, but he said nothing.

For it seemed to him that not only had they been climbing, but that the climbing was quite tolerably hard. He looked down the side of rock up which they had scaled their way just now. The view ended abruptly some fifteen feet below him, and the next solid earth to be seen beyond was, perhaps, three hundred feet distant. And now they were to ascend on the top of all this, an apparently perpendicular wall. To fall on it would mean certain death. One would pitch first on the slope, roll three yards, fall again, bounce off, and then land—well—three hundred feet below. All this was entirely clear to him; and he marvelled.... He glanced at Mr. Armstrong.

That gentleman still held between his teeth a stalk of grass he had plucked at the foot of the little peak: he was twiddling it about with his tongue.

“This is your patent way up, isn’t it, Tom?”

“Just a variation: we meet the regular way at the top of this.”

“I thought so. Up you go, then.”

Val leaned back and watched.

He looked first at Tom, who now resembled an enormous spider going up a wall, attached to it, it appeared, merely by some mysterious power of suction. His body seemed to have dwindled to nothing; there were just four limbs of unsuspected length, writhing their way upwards. Then he looked at Austin: Austin, silent and apparently unmoved, was watching closely where Tom put his hands and feet. Then he stared out desolately at the huge spaces about him, the gulf of air up which they had come; the enormous sky, hard and near-looking, just beyond those ruddy rocks. He considered that he was a fool; for the agony was not upon him yet—a fool, no more at present.

“Come on,” said a voice; and there was Tom, grinning like a griffin on a gate-post, peering down from the summit of this wall that seemed now the end of all things. His face seemed sinister and dark against that tremendous blue sky—sinister even in its happy grin of physical delight.

But it was Austin’s turn next; and with a kind of fascination, he watched his brother go up, aided by remarks—“Right foot there; ... now your left hand here; ... yes; let go with your right”—until with a heave, Austin wriggled over the top of the wall and instantly vanished.

And then he knew that he must go forward.

“Which foot first?” he stammered....

The moment came when he was half-way up. Up to that point he had obeyed, simply and blindly, with a sense of fatality more weighty even than his own despair. He had found himself rising ... rising, exactly as Tom told him; once even a flush of exultation thrilled through him, as he considered that he was doing very admirably for his first climb.

And immediately after the exultation came the horror. He put out his wrong hand, seeing, as he thought, a corner of rock which simply demanded it; he let go with his left hand, shifted his position, lost control; and for about five seconds hung, he thought, merely by one hand and one foot, and that his foot was slipping. He was entirely unable to speak.... No one spoke....

In those instants came the full horror on him. He saw, as in a vision, the rocks below him, the gulf below the rocks. He was perfectly certain that no power on earth could now save him; and that interior act of which I have spoken, though with a vehemence quite impossible to describe, exploded within him like gunpowder. Why had he ever been born? His cosmos was unexpectedly shattered....

“Go on. I’ve got you,” said a solemn and tranquil voice. “Yes, go on. Do as I tell you. Put your left hand three inches higher.”

He felt something firm grip his ankle. He did what he was told. He felt his knees shaking violently; but the rest was easy; and he too wriggled over the top, gripped by the shoulder as he did so, and stood up on a broad platform, beside Austin. Then the grave face of Mr. Armstrong, with the grass-stalk still in his mouth, rose serene and beneficent over the beetling edge.