Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  He ran up the stairs, two at a time. Gerry followed more slowly behind; Emily came last. ‘Oh--I forgot to tell you, Emily,’ he called down. ‘I’m going to G.H.Q. in France tomorrow--back two days later.’

  She said nothing.

  Peter left the house at eight the next morning, debonair in his battle-worn khaki, so that the nursemaid on the corner gazed at him with open adoration, and the sun made gold the commonplace houses of Minden Square.

  Emily took the children to Regent’s Park in the afternoon, and in the evening sat in the chair in her bedroom, polishing her nails, brushing her auburn hair, looking at her grey eyes in the mirror, and wondering what lay beyond the sunset. She and Peter had come to each other with a peculiar passion last night in this room. There should have been nothing strange about that, since the embrace of her flesh had the power to charge him with a frenzied, seeking energy, and he had been nearly ten months away from her. The strangeness lay more in herself. She had made up her mind that she must stay aloof from his ecstasies since she hated him, and would he served coldly as a duty and nothing more. Usually when she was at all withdrawn from him he knew at once and either went directly to sleep or did what he did with brief precision and a short word of thanks. Last night he had seen her coldness, had heard her say: ‘Please make sure I do not become pregnant, Peter,’ and had yet come forward.

  And now she was here, making herself more desirable than Helen, with her eyes deep with love and pain, and her bosom swelling under the dull green velvet of an old, loved dress, her movements softened with the voluptuous lassitude her daemon husband had implanted in her, hair curving as a sea wave over her forehead and a single diamond--her mother’s--on a pendant in the valley of her breasts.

  She heard Gerry come into the house while she stayed in her room, wondering at her own image in the mirror. While he bathed and changed she went to her children, who stared at her with big eyes, and she played with them and at last swept slowly down to the drawing-room. Nothing was formed in her mind. Looking at herself, she had thought: That woman is too beautiful to have a mind; what she causes she must cause by instinct, surely, or by mere being--as Helen, only being beautiful and desired, launched a thousand ships.

  They ate in the dining-room, which looked out across the small green square of summer, and the syringa spread flowering arms against the farther wall. This they had done a hundred times--and more before, when they were young. Gerry had stopped short when he came into the drawing-room before dinner, with something of the same fearful wonder that Peter’s arrival had caused. Almost the same emotions had moved, like a stirring on the surface of deep water, across his face, but at the end there was not even the vague disquiet of enquiry left there. Everything is settled, he seemed to be saying, and I cannot allow myself to be moved by this beauty--or by my longings to be a doctor; they are both dreams, foolish and perhaps wicked.

  During dinner, and in the drawing-room afterwards, while Gerry played Bach--why did he choose those records from the stacks under the gramophone table?--she became weak with love for him, for the strained, fine thread of his character, that made him so wonderful and desirable to Peter. It was an unusual love that she felt, impossible to classify as ‘affection,’ or ‘pity,’ or in any other single category. He was a young man, found dying in the street, and no one else was there--only he, and she holding him tight and whispering: What can I do? What can I give?

  The hours ticked by, and at last he would hear no more music. ‘Bedtime,’ he muttered, half looking at her. She lay back in the corner of the sofa, the single light behind her head and in her hair. When he stood up and moved towards her to kiss her good night she moved her thighs gracefully, for there was warmth flowing between them. A violent tremor of lasciviousness sent her arms out, crawling up and round his neck as he stooped over her--and somewhere, now smooth as polished silver in her right hand, now floating like the vision of it before Macbeth, the half of a dagger, and Peter. The eyes above her had dulled, man’s eyes, and swayed from side to side, and there was a pulling-away inside the circle of her arms. She dragged her arms down and to her, dragging him into her open mouth and where the velvet curved close to the inside of her spread thighs. She was soft and strong, and suddenly the gold thread broke. She closed her eyes and moved, and held. The dagger in her hand thrust into flesh. She guided it, forced it deep home, and it was done.

  Chapter 22

  ’Faster!’ she cried into the speaking tube. ‘We’ve got to catch that train.’

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can, mum,’ the old man in the driving seat threw over his shoulder.

  It was two days later--and two nights full of making love, on her part with affection but no more pleasure, only an urgent desire that he should go, because it was done.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Gerry had muttered a hundred times, and she had answered sadly: ‘Yes. We must never see each other again.’ It was all true, the sadness and the joy that it was done, and the joy that Gerry was going, and the sadness that she would never see him again.

  ‘I’ve got to go. I can’t face him after this.’

  ‘Yes. You must go.’ But a hundred unexpected things had cropped up, and only now was he on his way.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ he’d asked passionately, knowing before she answered that she could not.

  Now he was going--eleven-thirty p.m. from King’s Cross, and it was eleven-twenty now. The taxi lurched round another corner, headed down another long street between two rows of darkened houses. Pencils of light wandered round the sky. They were there.

  ‘Platform Ten, sir!... Sorry, no porters at this time of night. There’s a war on’--and a cold glance at the blue civilian suit. She hurried him on towards the barrier, the collector waiting under the shaded lights.

  ‘Don’t come any farther, darling.’ He lowered his suitcase to the stone and swung round, his arms open.

  ‘Oh, quick, quick, Gerry!’ She gasped. ‘There are only two minutes left, and you’ve got to go.’ He was kissing her, and the tears were wet on his face--she dry-eyed, full of frenzy that he should go and it be altogether done.

  ‘Good-bye. Oh darling, darling--I can’t leave you.’

  ‘Go!’ She pushed him frantically towards the barrier and the man, his back sympathetically turned.

  ‘Hi--Gerry! Emily!’

  The clear, high voice rang under the vast arch from far away. The ticket collector turned quickly; a woman hurrying to catch the train stopped and looked; two sailors turned--all lingering a moment as Peter, the man in faded khaki, his belt super- naturally, brilliantly black, and the single ribbon on his breast, ran soundlessly across the stone towards them.

  ‘Where are you off to, Gerry?’

  Gerry said: ‘Edinburgh--Edinburgh. I promised--to see, visit McVeigh even if I couldn’t start now. I’ll be back--the day after tomorrow--I promise.’

  Peter said: ‘Well, it’s lucky I caught you. We’re off tomorrow. The operation’s been put forward a week.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked listlessly, because it didn’t matter. She felt that all she had done had been doomed to uselessness before she ever dreamed of doing it. It was a wild coincidence--an act of God--that Peter should be here at this time, and yet it wasn’t. If he hadn’t been here he’d have been at Edinburgh, or would have gone there. ‘Weren’t you going to G.H.Q. in France?’ she said.

  ‘That was a lie,’ Peter said. ‘I went north on other business altogether.’

  The whistles shrilled. ‘Better hurry, sir,’ the man at the gate said.

  ‘He’s not going,’ Peter said. Slowly Gerry turned away. The red tail-light slid into motion; the shining rails unwound in broad steel ribbons behind it.

  Peter said: ‘It’s time we got away alone, Gerry. We’ve got a lot to tell each other, haven’t we? I’ll want to know how you’ve been looking after Emily, for one thing, since I seem fated not to be able to do it myself.’

  She glanced at him with near-fear. Did he know
already? Had he not gone to G.H.Q., or ‘north,’ but stayed in London, spying on them? It was unthinkable, and, scanning his face, she was certain that he did not know.

  Her eyes fell on Gerry, and now she really was afraid. Gerry was certain that Peter did know. He thought Peter’s quick, careless words presaged a time when he would be taxed with his crime and punished for it. He was grey with misery, hiding it as he spoke. Now nothing on earth could stop him from going with Peter, because he knew that he had deserved punishment and must face it.

  Chapter 23

  While Peter listened to the Italian major he was thinking about meeting Gerry and Emily at King’s Cross. It was puzzling. Gerry, of course, had been running away to Edinburgh. It was sad that he should have felt he needed to lie about it--but Peter could not then, nor now, understand what he hoped to achieve by it.

  Gerry was going to be a doctor. Emily, and some kinship with the sick that he had discovered in himself, had persuaded him that that was his only hope of happiness. So be it. But he was also coming back to Rudwal and Parkash--or going back, for Peter could no longer be so sure of himself; he was finding the military life so full of rewards and summits, in wartime at any rate. But how could Gerry hope to work with him, Peter, in any relationship, if he ran away from a job that only he could do--and he knowing it? And also knowing the importance of this mission?

  Emily, being a woman and loving Gerry as she might a brother or an only son, thought Peter could get someone else instead of Gerry. There were aspects that Emily didn’t understand. Suppose, for instance, that he, Peter, went out to do this job with some incompetent or fearful companion, and was killed--what would Gerry do then? He might shoot himself. What would Gerry have thought, how would he have felt, if he had learned that Peter was hunting round for a mountaineer to accompany him and had not come to him first? The mountaineering fraternity, these same people Peter would be asking amongst to find a companion, had turned their backs on Gerry because of what he had done, for Peter’s sake, to Harry Walsh. Peter could not also turn his back. Besides, there was the fact that the mountaineering Brahmins would have had nothing to do with him. There was no one left for him but Gerry; and for Gerry no one but him. There was nothing bad about that. Rudwal waited for them--the sound and the sick. Meru waited for them. They had a place, they two and Emily; and Adam belonged there, and Dr Parkash, and young Baber.

  He realized, vaguely annoyed, that Emily’s promised land, the flowered Canaan he could never see very clearly, was still in his mind. He tried to smother the lure of its lotus promises. He was not born to lie among lotus flowers. Gerry had been trying to get away; and it was not clear how or why he had brought himself to the point of forgetting everything else to do it. Emily must have practically dragged him to the station.

  Peter turned his whole attention to the Italian major. The man spoke very good English, and, looking at him more closely, Peter knew that he had seen him before, or pictures of him. He was called Gabriele Cammarota and had done a couple of spectacular ascents with Di Celia, about 1910. Therefore he must know about Meru and Peter Savage. But he had made no sign of recognition and no mention of ever having heard of Peter or Gerry. He was a tall man, angular, blue-eyed, as unlike the conventional picture of an Italian as could be. They were sitting opposite each other in the back room of an inn twelve miles behind the Italian front in the Alps.

  The rest of the reconnaissance party, which would set out tomorrow, were hunched over the table to right and left. There was a dark young lieutenant, Count Fraschelli, who showed little stomach for the job ahead; Gerry; and two men in the uniform of Italian corporals, but the uniform sat tight on their broad shoulders, they were considerably older than most corporals, and they spoke very politely in deep voices. There was no doubt what their peace-time occupation was--mountain guiding. They were Italians from this region, who had lived all their lives as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Staldi and Carana were their names.

  Cammarota was explaining the operation again to the two guides. There was no need. They might not know much about drill or warfare but they knew the lie of the land and could use their eyes a deal better than the next man. Besides, their task was really to act as close escort, riflemen of great accuracy and cross-country ability, to protect the core of the party--Cammarota and Peter himself--on their reconnaissance. Peter needed Gerry as a reliable second in all things, and as witness and corroboration for his eventual report. The Italians had then sent Count Fraschelli too, ostensibly to act as commanding officer over the two corporals; but it would probably end up the other way round, they looking after Fraschelli. Peter decided that Fraschelli had probably been sent in order that the Italians should not be socially out-ranked by the English milord.

  The mission itself was not complicated. The front line lay twelve miles ahead--though the words ‘front line’ conveyed a false impression. In fact the leading Italian troops lived in houses and cowsheds two or three miles back from and three thousand feet below the severe crest line of the mountain ridges that separated this valley, the Paola, from the next one to the north, the Saraco. Nor were the Austrians occupying the crest. It was far too bleak and unpleasant, and the difficulties of supply would have been too great from either side. Like the Italians, the Austrians lived in bivouacs and billets on their side of the crest, as near as they could comfortably get to the top. Both sides maintained sentry posts just below the main pass, the Saraco Pass, which was surmounted, from one valley to the other, by a precipitous cart track. Both sides sent patrols scouting along the ridges in the hours of darkness, and both had posts on the mountains to each flank, linked by field telephone to headquarters and gun positions in the valleys below, so that if either decided to begin an offensive the other would be able to rush up troops and, far more important, bring down heavy artillery fire on the pass and on the approaches to it.

  On the north, the enemy side of the pass, the cart track wound down into the head of the Saraco Valley; became a road that could, with little work, be used by heavy trucks, guns, and supply wagons; and went on towards upper Austria. Twelve miles to the west, along the same ridge, there was another pass, the Julio. The ridge between the Saraco and the Julio passes was big country indeed, containing three different mountains of over 11,000 feet. The Julio was a high pass, not easy for men on foot and impossible for carts or wheeled transport of any kind. Five miles west again, over the huge single block of Monte Michele, was the third and last pass--the Michele Pass. Neither it nor the Julio led directly to the Saraco Valley and its motor road, but from the Julio at least it would probably be possible, without too much trouble, to build or develop roads into the Saraco Valley.

  War had not been declared between Austria and Italy until May 24, 1915--just over a month ago. The easiest way for the Italians to invade Austria was along the Adriatic eastward from Venice; but the lines of communication supporting such an advance would be threatened from the beginning by the Austrian positions along the Alpine ranges forming Italy’s northern border, and every mile of farther advance would be still further threatened. The Italians would be like a diver walking out of one door of a room, trailing his air hose behind him, while his enemy, at the side door, could with progressive ease rush in and cut it. It was therefore certainly necessary to guard that side door--the northern Alps and the passes over them--and it might even be desirable to make the main offensive over it, if only to cause the Austrians to weaken the Adriatic front before a further and major offensive was launched in that direction.

  Years before the outbreak of war, of course, the Italian General Staff had worked out such a plan in some detail. Having interior lines--that is, being in the middle of the room, while the Austrians were forced to rush round the outside--the Italians could shift reserves more easily than the latter, and therefore did not need to be so rigid in their planning. They could launch an offensive and see what happened, being ready to reinforce or switch troops according to their success and the nature of the Austrian reactions.<
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  In the first stages of this plan a feint would be made at the Saraco Pass but the main effort, at least by the infantry in the early days, would be over the Julio. These troops would then swing right to take in rear and flank the Austrian defences of the Saraco. A sufficiency of light-armed men would take a slightly wider swing from the Julio and cut the Saraco road, isolating the defenders of the pass from help. The way would then be opened for a large-scale advance towards Austria; the Austrians would throw in more troops from other fronts, and the Italians could act accordingly.

  When this had first been explained to Peter he had at once asked about the Michele Pass, farther to the west, and had been assured that no kind of major operation could be launched over it, owing to the extremely difficult nature of the approaches on the Italian side. A flank attack over the Julio was as wide a ‘hook’ as they could manage.

  The plans that had been worked out showed that the proposed coup could not be effectively exploited by the Italian Army in its then circumstances. If, however, the British or French cared to help--not to undertake the actual operation, but to supply reinforcements to exploit success once success had been achieved--than all would be well. The French weren’t interested; the British were. But the British General Staff wanted to see with its own eyes, not through the eyes of its allies. It was not that they mistrusted their Italian friends, but . . . Well, the English could not climb like the Italians, et cetera, et cetera.

  ‘Mind, we want an honest report, Savage. The wops seem very excited about it, but--verb. sap.--the C.-in-C. is not going to favour any diversions from France, however favourable this operation may look at first sight.’ So, with a wink and a nod, the War Office major-general who spoke to Peter in Cairo had outlined the mission, also mentioning medals and promotions for him, in a gentlemanly manner, to make sure he got the idea.