Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  Peter fired twice more, low over the snow, so that they should not come. He dragged Gerry by his feet to the edge of the drop --dead--and pushed him over, not knowing what lay below, only that it was steep and snow-covered, and jumped after him. Gerry rode faster than he, flat at first, then rolling, jumping, jerking, swirling, and soon disappeared; while for Peter the snow hissed like a wave around him and he went down in the long glissade, the muzzle of his carbine supporting him, as he had practised a hundred times with the ice-axe, until the snow fell away and he was riding out over a gulf, deep blue snow and cloud waiting for him, and Gerry gone for ever.

  Chapter 25

  The smoke hung thick in Victoria Station and set Peter to coughing. There had been a big change, even in the last three months. The slaughter on the Western Front dragged on and on. They were still fighting at Loos, and the casualty lists staggered the imagination. For most it was the sheer numbers that caused the shock. For him, a dull realization that each one of those names had been someone’s ‘Gerry.’

  He had to get to Emily. The moted beams filtered down from a weak October sun. It was khaki, khaki everywhere, and the trudge of khaki men; the women’s dresses dull because it was October, only here and there a brave daub of crimson or green, a feather waving above a big blue bonnet. That was a different war they were fighting in France. You could see it in the hunched shoulders and clay-coloured faces. No one waiting for those trains was having any fun. The yellow smoke swirled high among the girders; out over the Thames a tug tooted; an engine whistled. The women edged closer, a throbbing frieze along the side of the train. The engine whistled again, and slowly the train began to move out. He turned away.

  ‘Taxi!’

  He’d have to tell Peggy the details. She was alone, Harry in France--a major by now, he’d heard. He himself was a lieutenant-colonel, as they’d promised. But first he had to get to Emily.

  ‘Twenty-seven Minden Square.’

  ‘Right-ho, guv’nor.’

  He sank back, his hands clasped across his knees. The taxi driver was wrapped in several mufflers and wore a big moustache, and the air was grey-gold of October, the late sun slanting across the facade of Buckingham Palace. Gerry was dead.

  Peter had been in Italian military hospitals for ten weeks with various bones broken, pneumonia, and--sickness. The Italians had been firm about the impossibility of building a route to the Michele, and he, lying in hospital, had not found the energy to make them see that it must be done. The War Office sent a brigadier-general to talk to him, and the influential M.P. came, and both went away as unsure of what to do as before they came. He could not care. The Kurdistan project was held up, and nothing would come of it unless he went and relighted the fires of enthusiasm he had kindled in the first place. He could not care. The objects which had seemed so bright and worthy of any effort had become dull and grey--still large, but uninteresting.

  Perhaps it was his physical weakness, he told himself. He would go home to Emily, with a month’s sick leave, and get back all his strength. Other men had died. Why had Gerry’s death cut all the sinews of desire? Emily could make him strong again.

  ‘ ‘Ere y’are, guv’nor.’

  He got out, tipped the man carefully, and walked slowly up the steps to the front door. He found he did everything cautiously now. Harvey, Mr Fenton’s valet, opened the door. Of course--he was too old for military service. That must mean Mr Fenton was here.

  ‘Hello, Harvey,’ Peter said.

  ‘Mr Peter!’ Harvey began, his eyes lighting up. Then he remembered some message he had been given and said: ‘We were expecting you, sir. Mr Fenton is in the drawing-room.’

  Peter went in slowly.

  Mr Fenton had The Times in his hands, opened at the page where the casualty lists were. He had aged considerably. Good God, he must sit here all day, every day, reading the roll of the dead, of his friends and the sons of his friends, of his world slowly bleeding to death while daily the light grew dimmer behind the curtains and, without a trace, he too bled.

  He looked up slowly and said: ‘Peter . . .’

  There was no sign of children, and no smell of a woman, no extra hats or coats on the rack in the hall. Peter felt suddenly afraid.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he cried urgently, grabbing the sleeve of his father-in-law’s coat. ‘Is anything the matter?’

  ‘Sit down, Peter,’ Mr Fenton said. He folded the paper carefully and laid it on the occasional table beside his chair.

  ‘Emily’s gone away,’ he said at last.

  ‘Where? Gone away? What do you mean, sir?’ Peter cried.

  Mr Fenton spoke coldly. ‘She’s gone away. That’s all I can tell you. She left a letter for you. There, in the top left-hand drawer of the writing desk.’

  Peter found the letter and gazed at it for a moment before opening it. It was addressed to ‘Major Peter Savage, D.S.O.’ This was like the first quiet hiss of powder snow, when the mountain spoke in a quiet voice, and the sky was blue overhead, and the ice-axe had a good grip in the slope, and the rope was taut and well anchored and the climbers all in harmony and climbing with the rhythm of success. That was when the mountain spoke, not to be argued with--the little hiss that would grow and become a surge like the surf, and then the grumble of the deep snow underneath as it moved, and then the avalanche, sweeping away shining axe and rough rope and brave climbers and all. He opened the letter.

  Dear Peter,

  I am going away, with the children, because I cannot bear to see you or speak to you again. As long as you make no attempt to find me, or see the children, ever, I will say nothing. If you do, I will publish everything, and though I am sure you can never be punished there will be a scandal which even you will not be able to surmount.

  Emily

  Dated August second. That would be a week or so after the War Office heard of Gerry’s death. He had wondered vaguely why he had not received any letters, but the mails to Italy were very bad, and they had moved him from one hospital to another. It had all seemed quite reasonable. Nothing could happen to Emily, because he loved her, and he had been absorbed in such lassitude that he had hardly noticed the absence of news from her.

  He turned to Mr Fenton. He found he could speak gently because a kind of strength was coming back to him. Whatever had to be done to find Emily, that he would be able to do. Nothing else mattered.

  ‘You know where she is,’ he said.

  Mr Fenton said: ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘Will you tell me, sir?’

  ‘No, Peter. I’m sorry.’

  Peter said: ‘I am going to find her, sir, whether you help me or not--if necessary, through the police.’ He meant it. Nothing was going to stop him ... Oh, God, it was true again, already!

  ‘Don’t do that, it’s no use.’ Mr Fenton got up, clutching the paper, as though its freight of dead names was the only reality to him now.

  But Peter said: ‘Good-bye, sir,’ picked up his bag, which Harvey had left in the hall, and went out into the street. He stood awhile on the corner, slowly drawing out a cigar and lighting it. Where to now? D.S.O. and bar. Hero of the Kingdom and Empire. Appointment with the King at Buckingham Palace next week. Gerry dead. Emily . . . Oh, Emily! The hiss of the snow grew louder in his ears, but for the moment he had not lost control.

  A taxi cruised by. ‘Two ninety-three Nashe Street, Kensington,’ he said.

  ‘I know it, sir.’

  That was his grandfather’s house. He didn’t know why he was going there or what he would say when he arrived. Perhaps Grandfather was dead too.

  He arrived, and the taxi puttered off along the darkening street. The door was unlocked, and he let himself in and walked slowly up the stairs. Ashraf creaked out on to the landing just before he reached it and peered down at him under the high, round globe of the gas light. ‘Peter sahib,’ he whispered, stooping, putting out both hands.

  Peter touched them. ‘General sahib gol-kamra men hai,’ the bearer said.

 
‘So-raha?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Nahin, huzoor.’ Ashraf opened the door into the drawing-room and walked with painful slowness ahead of him into the room, so that Peter saw his bent back and, beyond, his grandfather in a high chair, The Times fallen on his lap, opened at those same stark columns. For a moment the two old men--eighty-nine and eighty-four--were close together; then Ashraf stood aside, his hand indicating Peter. Then he went out.

  Grandfather said: ‘I’m a little deaf now, Peter. Speak clearly and close to my ear. It doesn’t matter which ear.’

  He left the paper in his lap. Of course it was not his friends or the sons of his friends who gave those lists their mass. The names could have been little more than names to him, reminding him of events long past. He was thinner, and the veins stood out with the thin blueness of tattooed snakes against the parchment brown of his long eagle-talon hands. His eyes were clear under the bushy white eyebrows and the Regency whiskers, white as snow now, curled down his hollow cheeks.

  ‘Another D.S.O.,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, thank God. Where did you get that?’

  ‘The Italian Alps, Grandfather,’ he said. ‘Emily’s left me.’ He shouted that very loud, because he didn’t want to repeat it.

  ‘I know,’ the old man said, looking at him suddenly with such keenness that all the marks of age ceased to have any importance. ‘Will you have some whisky?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said. He went to the sideboard in the dining-room next door, opened it, and brought back two bottles, two glasses, and the soda siphon on a tray. Grandfather had always drunk brandy.

  When he had poured out drinks for both of them, he asked his grandfather why he hadn’t written to tell him about Emily. The general had lighted a vile black Trichinopoly cheroot, though the doctors had told him in ‘06 that he must give them up. He said: ‘Emily brought the children here on July twenty-ninth and told me she was leaving you. She did not say why. She obtained my promise not to tell you. I gave it, since it had only been a courteous gesture that had sent her to me at all. She knew I would like to see the children again before I die.’ Peter said: ‘I think she holds me responsible for Gerry’s death. I can’t think of anything else.’

  ‘She gave me no reason,’ the general said, ‘and I did not ask her for one.’

  Peter thought desperately. Had he killed Gerry? Gerry would not have been on Monte Michele if it had not been for him; he would have been safe in Edinburgh. He, Peter, had taken him to Italy--so he had killed him. But the same could be said of hundreds of thousands of men. Everyone from lance-corporal up could be held responsible, as murderer, for the death of men he had ordered on some particular duty, doing his own duty. Many a man had had to send his friend to death. Did Emily think he had enjoyed doing it?

  ‘You tried Gerry high,’ his grandfather said suddenly.

  Yes, he had done that. He knew it, and Gerry had known and accepted it. But this last time? No. Gerry had been different.

  The old general said: ‘Your father--my son--left your mother.’ Peter knew that, of course, and had always held it bitterly against his father. No one had ever talked much about it. His mother had died when he was ten.

  His grandfather said: ‘It was not because he did not love your mother, Peter. It was because he had to go. It was not he, but she, who explained it to me later. He said nothing to me. He had never liked me because he blamed me for the death of his mother in the Mutiny, and because I married again. . . . Your father left because he found that he could not accept the ties of marriage.’

  ‘He’d have done better to find that out before he married Mummy and had two children,’ Peter said shortly. The other child was his twin sister. They kept in desultory touch but meant nothing to each other and never had.

  His grandfather said: ‘Your father felt that the ordinary human ties that most of us welcome would suffocate him. His actual body could not be tied--he had to explore, to go to the lonely places of the earth, alone. But he had to walk alone in the mind and spirit too. He was looking for God.’ Peter glanced up, but his grandfather did not elaborate. ‘It was your mother who married him, knowing what kind of man he was but believing she could forge some way of fife that would give her the ordinary love she wanted, as a woman and a wife and a mother--and allow him to go free as the wind.’

  It was strange to hear his father and mother discussed like this, as though they were living neighbours whose strange problems had become a source of common wonder. His grandfather said: ‘She thought love would find a way. It didn’t, though the love was deep on both sides. He disappeared one night in Peshawar. He had to go.’

  His voice had been fading, and Peter stood up. ‘He had to go.’ Why had his grandfather talked about his missing, disappeared father? It had not had the air of a senile anecdote, without point. Did he imply that Emily also felt she had to go? Peter didn’t think so. It was himself who had been ‘going’ in that sense--on and up and out, impatient of ties, except those with people whom he needed or who would go as fast and as far as he. Then--was the old man asking: ‘Do you have to go on the way you have been going?’ Was he pointing out that he had reached the place his father reached that night in Peshawar? That here he must make up his mind whether his superiority to ordinary men or his kinship with them mattered more to him?

  Peter kissed his grandfather on the cheek. When you had done something like that since you were two, it didn’t come easily to change the habit. The old man said: ‘I think you’d better go and find her, Peter.’

  Peter told Ashraf not to come down the stairs, and let himself out into the street. It was dark, and it took a long time to find a taxi. When he found one: ‘Green Mansion Hotel,’ he said.

  The driver looked round at him with a wink. ‘That’s the stuff, mister, after what you been through--a little fling, eh?’ Peter remembered that the G.M. had quite a sordid reputation, but no other name came into his mind.

  They looked grave at first when he asked for a room, but then the girl glanced at his ribbon and rosette and smiled, and it was all right. He went up, bathed, changed into a clean tunic, and rang for the waiter to bring him up a bottle of whisky and some soda. It was stuffy in there, the air-raid curtains drawn and the traffic in Piccadilly a dull roar, throbbing through his head.

  What next? Was he to go round London, asking: ‘Has anyone seen my wife?’ Should he go to the police at once? Or try and forget about her and plunge back into the big plans that were waiting for him, confident that one day she would regain her sense of proportion?

  The last he dismissed at once. He didn’t have the desire to take great affairs into his hands.

  Everything came back to Emily, and her anger at him was hardly relevant, a little misunderstanding that could be brushed aside in a moment’s reasoned talk. The formless weariness of the Italian hospitals had taken shape, and the shape was a need for Emily.

  The whisky swirled in his glass. Peggy, he thought. Lady Margaret Walsh.

  He gulped the rest of the whisky and hurried downstairs. The telephone booth was in the lobby. The telephone girl gave him Peggy’s number, and soon he heard the ring-ring at the other end of the line.

  She answered the call herself. ‘Who’s there, please?’

  ‘Peter Savage,’ he said.

  There was a short pause, then: ‘Peter? How nice to know you’re back safe.’ He gritted his teeth. Then she said what he had been hoping for. ‘How’s Emily?’

  He sighed with relief. Peggy had watched Emily like a hawk all the time she was staying in Rudwal during Harry’s 1914 expedition to Meru. She hated Emily, and himself perhaps a little bit more. He was certain that she would have known about it the moment anything untoward happened to either of them, or to their marriage. He had a strong feeling that Peggy would also have found out where Emily had gone. She’d had time.

  He said: ‘Emily isn’t here. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Not there? What do you mean? Oh, what’s the matter, Peter? Don’t sa
y something’s happened to her too.’

  He fumbled for a cigar and began to light it. Her voice sounded tinny, brittle, and over-solicitous. He said: ‘I’m desperate. Please come round.’ He wasn’t desperate yet but he knew that was the surest way to bring her, offering her the prospect of gloating over his wretchedness. ‘I’m at the Green Mansion,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think it’s all right? I mean, will they let me in?’ she asked girlishly. ‘I mean, the G.M., and war, and a lone woman, and all that.’

  ‘I’ll be standing outside the Albemarle Street entrance,’ he said. ‘How long will you be?’

  ‘Not more than ten minutes. I’m only just round the corner.’ ‘I’ll be waiting,’ he said and hung the receiver carefully on the hook.

  Peggy knew. He did not believe Emily had told her. She had taken pains to find out. July 29 was a long time ago now. Today was October 10. The question was, would she tell him, or would she hug her secret through two or three more meetings? He walked out of the main entrance and stood leaning against the wall in the darkness, his cigar burning fitfully.

  A bull’s-eye of light flashed on him, wandered down his tunic. ‘I should keep that cigar low if I was you, sir. In case the sergeant comes round.’

  ‘Thanks, officer, I will,’ he said.

  The measured footsteps faded. Girls passed, bright eyes closing to his own. He shook his head, and they passed on with a suspicion of a smile. ‘Waiting for someone, dearie?’ He nodded.

  After half an hour Peggy came. He stubbed out the cigar against the wall and threw it in the gutter. She came through the pale fog under a wide hat with a sweeping ostrich feather curled round the brim, and her eyes searching the street, eager for this first triumph of seeing him waiting for her, and Emily gone. He stepped forward and took her arm, and she gave a little scream before she recognized him. ‘Oh--Peter, it’s you. You gave me such a fright.’

  He led her into the lounge. The fog had seeped in there from many openings and closings of the door. Groups of officers, alone and with women, sat drinking in as many small, hazy worlds, and ancient waiters shuffled about with drinks on trays, and Kitchener pointed from the wall: ‘Your King and Country need you.’ She was eyeing him openly as she slowly pulled off her gloves and raised her veil.