Colonel Julian and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Any news of your wife?’ we said.

  ‘Coming today!’

  We said we were very pleased. ‘What time?’

  ‘Coming by the afternoon boat. Gets in at three.’

  He looked at the lake, the roses on the terrace, the blue-grey eucalyptus tree shining on the balcony of his room and then at the vast snows towering and glistening beyond the lake. ‘I can’t tell you how she will adore all this,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ we said. ‘You must be very excited.’

  ‘Just like a kid with a toy!’ he said. ‘You see, I came out first to arrange it all. Choose the place. Choose the hotel. Choose everything. She doesn’t know what she’s coming to. You see? It’s all going to be a great surprise for her.’

  ‘Don’t forget you have to conquer the Jungfrau,’ I said. ‘The soldanella are wonderful above the Scheidegg now.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Well, I must go. Perhaps you’d join us for an apéritif about six? I do very much want you to meet her.’

  We said we would be delighted and he went singing away up to the hotel.

  ‘Your remark about the Jungfrau was very pointed,’ my wife said.

  ‘I saved it with the soldanella,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, be careful what you say tonight,’ she said.

  From the lower terrace we could watch the steamers come and go. The afternoon was very hot and we stayed under the dark shade of the chestnut trees to watch the three o’clock boat come in. Among the hotel porters with their green and plum-coloured and scarlet and brown caps and uniforms the major stood out, in cool spruce shantung, as a very English, very conspicuous visitor on the quay.

  When the white steamer came up the lake at last, tooting in the hot afternoon air, the major had taken up his stand in front of all the porters, by the water’s edge. I got up and leaned on the railings of the terrace to get a better view.

  The steamer came swinging in with a ring of engine-room bells, with six or seven passengers waiting by the gangway.

  ‘There she is,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ My wife had come to stand beside me.

  ‘The lady with the green case,’ I said. ‘Standing by the captain. She looks about the major’s age and about as English.’

  ‘She looks rather nice—yes,’ my wife said, ‘it could be.’

  The steamer bounced lightly against the quay and the gangway came down. The hotel porters adjusted their caps and the passengers began to come ashore. In his eagerness the major almost blocked the gangway.

  To my astonishment the lady with the green case came down the gangway and went straight past the major, and the porter from the Hôtel du Lac raised his green and gold cap and took the case away from her. The major was looking anxiously up the gangway for the figure of his wife, but in less than two minutes all the passengers had come down. When the steamer moved away again the major was standing on the quay alone, still staring anxiously and still waiting for the wife who had not come.

  That evening we went down to the terrace for the apéritif with the major. ‘For goodness’ sake don’t make that joke about the Jungfrau,’ my wife said. ‘He’ll be in no mood for that.’ The five o’clock steamer had come in, but the major’s wife had not arrived.

  ‘It’s his joke,’ I said. ‘Not mine.’

  ‘You twist it round,’ she said.

  On the terrace the major, dressed in a dark grey suit and with his evening false teeth in, had an appearance of ebullient gaiety. He had a peculiar taste in drinks and drank four or five glasses of Kirsch because there was no whisky and after it he did not seem so tired.

  ‘Met a friend in Paris,’ he explained to us. ‘Amazing coincidence.’ He kept waving a rather long telegram about in front of us. ‘Hadn’t seen this friend for years, and then suddenly ran into her. Of course, it’s only a night. She’ll be here on Thursday.’

  Three weeks went past, but the major’s wife did not arrive. The best of the roses by that time were over on the terrace and long salmon-scarlet lines of geraniums were blooming there instead. In the beds behind the chestnut trees there were purple petunias with inter-plantings of cherry-pie and in the hot still evenings the scent of them was delicious against the cool night odour of water. ‘It’s a pity for her to be missing all this,’ we said.

  Now when we met the major we avoided the subject of his wife. We met on several excursions to the mountains and sometimes on the steamers the major was to be seen on the first-class deck champing with his false teeth at the spaniel-eared ham sandwiches and drinking many cups of coffee. As he talked to the Swiss girl who served him he laughed quite often. But I did not think he laughed so much. I thought in a way he seemed not only less happy and less laughing, but more alone. He had stopped making explanations, and I thought he seemed like a man who had given up hoping.

  And then it all began again. This time she was really coming. There had really been some awful business of a hold-up about her visa. It had taken a long time. It was all over now.

  ‘She’ll be here on Sunday,’ the major said. ‘Absolutely certain to be on the boat that gets in at three.’

  The Sunday steamers were always crowded, their decks gay with Swiss families going up the lake for the day, with tourists going to Interlaken. The little landing stages at the lakeside resorts were always crowded too. There were many straw hats and Bernese bodices and much raising of caps by hotel porters.

  So when the steamer arrived this time there was no picking out Mrs. Martineau. Crowds of Sunday holidaymakers stood on the steamer deck and pushed down the gangway and more crowds stood on the quay waiting to go on board. Under the trimmed lime trees of the quayside restaurant the Sunday orchestra was playing, and people at little gay white tables were drinking coffee. It was a very simple, very laughing, very bourgeois, very noisy afternoon.

  On the quay the major waited in his bright shantung suit, with his best teeth in.

  ‘There she is,’ I said.

  ‘You said that last time,’ my wife said.

  ‘You can see her waving, and the major is waving back.’

  ‘Several people are waving.’

  ‘The lady in the grey costume,’ I said. ‘Not the one with the sun-glasses. The one waving the newspaper.’

  At the steamer rails an amiable, greyish Englishwoman of sixty was waving in a nice undemonstrative sort of way to someone on shore. Each time she waved I thought the major waved back.

  ‘Anyway,’ my wife said, ‘let’s go round and meet her.’

  We walked up through the hotel gardens and across the bridge over the stream that came down and fed the lake with green snow-water from the mountains. It was very hot. The sun-blinds in the hotel were like squares of red and white sugar candy in the sun, and in the hot scented gardens under the high white walls almost the only thing that seemed cool was the grey eucalyptus tree growing on the balcony of the major’s room. I had always rather envied the major the eucalyptus tree. Even the steamer whistle seemed stifled as it peeped the boat away.

  ‘Now mind what you say,’ my wife said. ‘No references to any Jungfrau.’

  ‘If she’s that very English lady with the newspaper I shall like her,’ I said.

  Just at that moment we turned the corner of the kiosk that sold magazines and postcards of alpine flowers, and the lady with the newspaper went past us, arm in arm with another English lady carrying a wine-red parasol.

  My wife did not take advantage of this situation. At that moment she became, like me, quite speechless.

  Up from the landing-stage the major was coming towards us with his wife. She staggered us. She was a black-haired girl of twenty-five, wearing a very smart summer suit of white linen with scarlet cuffs and revers, with lipstick of the same colour. I do not know what it was about her, but even from that distance I could tell by the way she walked, slightly apart from the major and with her head up, that she was blazingly angry.

  ‘A Jungfrau indeed,’ I said.
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  ‘Be quiet!’ my wife said. ‘They’re here.’

  A moment or two later we were face to face with them. The major had lost his habitual cool spruceness, I thought, and looked harassed and upset about something and seemed as if he would have gone past us, if possible, without speaking.

  Instead, he stopped and raised his hat. His manners were always very correct and charming, and now they seemed painfully so.

  ‘May I present Mrs. Martineau?’ he said.

  Across the narrow roadway the orchestra on the restaurant terrace was playing at full blast, with sour-sharp violins and a stinging trumpet. Mingled with the noise came the sound of guitars played on the steamer as it drew away.

  We both shook hands with Mrs. Martineau and said we were glad to meet her. She smiled at us in a politely savage sort of way and the major said:

  ‘Had an exhausting journey. Going to get her some tea and let her lie down.’

  ‘Not exhausting, darling,’ she said. ‘Just tiresome.’

  ‘I thought you said you were exhausted, dear.’

  ‘I did not say I was exhausted. I am not exhausted.’

  ‘Sorry, dear, I thought you did.’

  ‘You shouldn’t think,’ she said. ‘I’m not exhausted. The last thing I am is exhausted.’

  I could see by the way she looked over her shoulder at the restaurant orchestra that she already hated the place.

  ‘Perhaps you will join us this evening for an apéritif?’ the major said.

  We said we should be delighted, but Mrs. Martineau did not speak, and together, walking apart, she and the major went on to the hotel.

  ‘Oh! dear,’ I said.

  ‘You sum people up so quickly,’ my wife said. ‘Too quickly.’

  ‘I didn’t say a word.’

  ‘Then what was behind that oh! dear?’

  ‘She makes up too much,’ I said.

  I really didn’t know what lay behind that oh! dear. It may have been that Mrs. Martineau was very tired; it may have been that she was one of those women who, though young, get fretful and unsociable and angered by the trials of a journey alone; it may have been that she was a person of sensitive temperament and ear who could not bear without pain the terrace orchestras of Swiss Sunday afternoons. I did not know. I only knew that she was less than half the major’s age and that the major, when he walked beside her, looked like a sorrowful old dog that had been beaten.

  ‘They didn’t say any time for the apéritif,’ my wife said. ‘Or where.’

  It was about six o’clock that same evening and it was still very warm as we went downstairs.

  ‘The major always has his on the terrace,’ I said. ‘We’ll wait there.’

  We waited on the terrace. The red and white sunblinds were still down, casting a rosy-yellow sort of light, and I asked the waiter to pull them up so that we could see the mountains. When he raised the blinds the whole range of the Jungfrau and the Blümlisalp shone, icily rose and mauve above the mountain-green waters of the lake, and in the gardens below us the flowers were rose and mauve too, tender in the evening sun.

  It always seemed to me that you could sit there on the terrace for a long time and do nothing more than watch the changing colours of the lake, the flowers and the mountains.

  ‘The major’s late,’ I said.

  From across the lake the smaller of the white steamers was coming in, and as it came nearer I could hear once again the sound of the guitars that were played by two Italian Swiss who travelled on the lake every Sunday, playing gay little peasant melodies from the south, earning a glass of beer or a coffee as they played on the boat or at the cafés of the landing-places.

  The sound of the guitars over the water was very gay and hungry-sweet and charming in the still air.

  And then suddenly as we sat listening to it the major came hurrying down.

  ‘So sorry.’ He seemed agitated and begged several times that we should forgive him. ‘She’ll be down in a moment. Waiter! Very exhausted after that journey. Awful long way. Waiter—ah! there you are.’

  The major insisted on ordering drinks. He drank very rapidly and finished four or five glasses of Kirsch before Mrs. Martineau came down.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for hours in the lounge,’ she said. ‘How was I to know?’

  ‘Let me get you something to drink,’ I said. ‘What will it be?’

  ‘Whisky,’ she said, ‘if I may.’

  ‘There’s never any whisky,’ the major said.

  ‘Good grief!’ she said.

  I got up. ‘I think it’ll be all right,’ I said.

  I walked to the end of the terrace and found the waiter. The hotel had a bad brandy that tasted spirituous and harsh like poor whisky, and I arranged with the waiter to bring a double one of that.

  When I got back to the table my wife and Mrs. Martineau were talking of the mountains. My wife was trying to remember the names of those you could see from the terrace, but she was never very clear as to which they were.

  ‘I think that’s Eiger,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ the major said, ‘that’s Finsteraarhorn.’

  ‘Then which is the one with pigeons on top?’ she said, and I knew she was trying to avoid the question of the Jungfrau. ‘It has bits of snow on all summer that look like white pigeons,’ she explained.

  ‘You can’t see it from here.’

  ‘The one straight across,’ the major said, ‘the big one is the Jungfrau.’

  My wife looked at me. Mrs. Martineau looked very bored.

  ‘There’s a railway goes almost to the top,’ my wife said. ‘You must really go up while you’re here.’

  I knew the major did not think very much of climbing mountains by rail. ‘I don’t think you’d find it very exciting crawling up in that cold little train.’

  ‘Oh! don’t you?’ Mrs. Martineau said. ‘I think it would be awful fun.’

  ‘No sense of conquest that way,’ the major said.

  ‘Who wants a sense of conquest? The idea is to get to the top.’

  ‘Well, in a way——’

  ‘Oh! don’t be so vague. Either you want to get to the top or you don’t go.’

  I said something very pointed about the mountain being called the Jungfrau, but it made no impression on her.

  ‘Have you been up there yet?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re always meaning to go. We’ve been as far as Wengen, that’s all.’

  ‘Why don’t we all go up together?’ my wife said. ‘I think it would be lovely.’

  ‘Marvellous idea,’ Mrs. Martineau said.

  ‘It means being up very early,’ the major said. ‘Have to be up by six. Not quite your time.’

  ‘Don’t be so rude, darling,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway, you’ll be tired tomorrow.’

  ‘I shall not be tired. Why do you keep saying I’m tired? I’m not tired. I simply don’t know the first thing about being tired, and yet you keep saying so. I can certainly be up by six if you can.’

  I could see that she was very determined to go. The major drank three more glasses of Kirsch and looked more than ever like a beaten dog. The sound of the guitars came faintly over the lake, and Mrs. Martineau said, ‘What is that ghastly row?’ and we ended up by arranging to go to the Jungfrau the following morning, and then went in to dinner.

  The train to Jungfraujoch goes very slowly up through lovely alpine valleys rich in spring and summer with the flowers of the lower meadows, violet salvia and wild white daisy and pink lucerne and yellow burnished trollius, and peasants mow the flowery grass in thick sweet swathes. There is a smell of something like clover and butter in the bright snow-lit air. As the train goes higher the flowers by the track grow shorter and finer until on the slopes about Scheidegg there are thousands of white and pale mauve crocus, with many fragile purple soldanellas, and sharp fierce blue gentians among yellow silken anemones everywhere about the short snow-pressed grass.

  As we rode up in the little trai
n that morning under the dazzling snow-bright peak, the major was very interested in the flowers and kept asking me what they were. He was quite dazzled by the blueness of the gentians, and kept saying, ‘Look at that blue, darling, look at it,’ but I had never seen anyone quite so bored as Mrs. Martineau. Gradually we climbed higher and nearer the snow until at last the air was white with the downward reflection of snow-light from the great peaks above; so that the powder on her cheeks, too heavy and thick for a young girl, looked scaly and blue and dead, and the scarlet of her lips had the flakiness of thin enamel wearing away.

  ‘God, I simply loathe tunnels,’ she said.

  Above the Scheidegg the train goes into the mountain and climbs darkly and coldly inside, with funereal creakings and clankings every yard or so, for several hours. Mrs. Martineau was furious every yard of that cold gloomy climb.

  In the half-darkness she said she could not think why the hell the major had not told her it was this kind of train.

  ‘I did tell you,’ he said. ‘I said it would be no fun.’

  ‘You said absolutely nothing of the kind.’

  ‘My dear, indeed I did. Did you expect the train would climb outside the mountain all the time?’

  ‘How the hell did I know what to expect, darling, if you didn’t say a word?’

  ‘I said——’

  ‘The whole trouble is, darling, you haven’t a clue.’

  ‘It isn’t far to the top, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘It seems a hell of a way to me!’ she said. She looked terribly restless and shouted something about claustrophobia.

  So we climbed up in the cold gloom of the tunnel, with Mrs. Martineau growing more and more furious, exclaiming more and more of claustrophobia, and all the time calling the major darling more often, as her anger grew. In the queer unworldly coldness of the clanking little train it was hard to believe in the pleasant heat of summer shining on the lake below. Mrs. Martineau shivered and stamped her feet at the halts where we changed carriages and in her white and scarlet suit, with her scarlet lips and her white lambskin coat thrown over her shoulders she looked like a cold angry animal pacing up and down.