Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories

by H. E. Bates

  ‘Alley-oop, shentlemen and lady! Alley-oop!’

  Vainly, up there, Arthur tried to come between the girl and Parkman.

  ‘You see, it was worth it, Parkman. Wasn’t it? Don’t you think so? Aren’t you glad you came?’

  Only the student answered, chanting idiotically: ‘Oh! my darling, oh! my darling. Oh! my darling Parkman mine!’ while the girl and Parkman pointed out to each other the vast pearl-blue distances of Italy, far away.

  ‘He will make a good climber, won’t he?’ Arthur said.

  ‘Which?’ the guide said and grinned sardonically at the student. ‘This shentleman?’

  ‘No, no,’ Browning said. ‘The other. The boy.’

  ‘Gut, yes!’ the guide said; and winked. ‘Alley-oop!’

  Next day Parkman, the student and the girl went on down the valley. The student, who had lost his boisterousness, no longer called the girl darling; he had a sort of bruised aloofness as he thrust out his sun-skinned face and walked ahead; and now, behind him, it was the turn of Parkman and the girl to taunt him, laughing at his hunched retreating back.

  In the small hotel Arthur felt restless and alone. For a few hours, starting out there with the boy, in the starry summer morning, he had felt all insecurity and loneliness fade: to be presently replaced by something he had never known in the presence of Miss Shortland. He was not at all sure of that feeling; he could not resolve it into conscious thought. But it was warm and tender, uplifting him exactly as he had been uplifted on his first naïve scramble to the Neiderhorn.

  Two days later he went on by train to Andermatt alone. At the station, in the shops and at the Gasthof where he was to stay, he found that people were talking of very little else except a climbing disaster to three English climbers on a crag. With terror he remembered the idiotic bantering student, the girl who was too beautiful, and Parkman’s foot.

  He was part of a rescue party that found the three bodies in a gorge. It had been nothing but a stupid, futile, tragic afternoon lark by Parkman and the two students to climb a crag that was hardly a mountain at all. With amateurish and clumsy folly they had underestimated it. As the bodies were laid out on the mountainside of raw dark rock he thought the body of Parkman looked hauntingly and unbearably young. He did not look at the girl; but the student, for one ghastly moment, seemed to grin at him in the sun.

  He never quite recovered from the reckless, pointless, mocking folly of that day. It was something that should never have happened. It was summer. It was within reach of peasants solidly mowing deep lush alpine clover-grass. It seemed as safe as the Sussex Downs.

  There was not even any snow.

  iv

  He climbed a great deal during the next ten years, and he began to be solidly competent rather than expert. Even so there would appear, from time to time, a paragraph or two about his feats in the one local paper back at home.

  During this time he graduated from what is sometimes termed a centrist. His world enlarged. He ceased to be a traveller merely estimating, as a centrist does, the surrounding distance from one central peak alone. He learned to explore mountain systems crosswise, by traverse, ascending and descending, discovering them not by individual peaks but as masses of earth-crust, huge and awesome, formidably and wonderfully folded. He ceased to be interested in peaks, especially larger and more famous ones, simply as peaks. They presently began to have significance only as part of a vast system, all of which must be conquered: in his case mostly, except for guides, alone.

  All this time he did not know that Miss Shortland, on that first hot lunatic-haunted holiday in the Oberland, had waited nearly a week for him in Interlaken. He did not know that she had twice taken the post-bus up the road to Frau Roth’s hotel and had walked up and down the road there, half a mile away, in the hope that he would come out and walk there too. He did not know that she had sometimes, at home, posted herself in the ladies’ waiting-room at the branch-line station, so that she could watch his movements, during a few weeks of that autumn, as he cleared up his affairs in and about the shop. Her familiarity with that view across wet granite sets, streaming on rainy days with yellow stains of horse-dung and rainbow gleams of spilled oil, across to that unopposed and profitable position that everyone said was one of the best in the world, became as great as his own had been. And he did not know that either.

  Fifteen years after the holiday at Frau Roth’s hotel, sausage-ridden and ruined by trivialities like lunatics and heartburn, the local paper printed a warm account of Arthur’s part in the rescue of two German climbers on a peak above the Ragli glacier.

  ‘Well-known local Alpinist, Mr Arthur Browning, formerly a familiar figure in the town, last week accomplished, together with a party of Swiss guides, a remarkable rescue feat in the Bernese Oberland’ and so on. There had even been a line or two about it, though he did not know it, in the national papers; and the local paper had also managed to print an agency picture of himself taken with the party of Swiss guides, outside his hotel at Lauterbrunnen.

  About a week later he received a letter:

  ‘Dear Arthur: I simply wanted you to know that an old friend felt very proud when she read of your feat in the Alps last week. Everyone was talking about it here. It isn’t often one gets the chance of saying one knows a celebrity, but I must say it was a very pleasant experience for me. Sincerely: Olive Sanderson.’

  For some time he had not the least idea who Olive Sanderson could be. There were, he knew, Sandersons at home, in leather, a family of solid bovine sons who had built or bought for themselves solid red-brick houses on the valley-side; but he had never known them well. He thought of them as frequenting golf-circles and Rotarian dinners and dances and perhaps, though not frequently, Nonconformist church on Sunday.

  He pondered on this for some time; and then it occurred to him suddenly that Olive Sanderson, Mrs Olive Sanderson, could only be Miss Shortland. He had never known another person named Olive; and it was unlikely that there was anyone else who could claim to call herself an old friend.

  In his polite, attentive, unexciting way he wrote back:

  ‘Dear Olive: Thank you very much for your letter. You may be sure it always gives me considerable pleasure to hear from someone at home. I’m afraid I don’t often get back there now and I did not know you were married. If it is not too late please allow me to offer my congratulations and to say that I hope you will be very happy.’

  A few days later the former Miss Shortland wrote back:

  ‘My husband and I have been thinking of coming to Switzerland for a week or two next month but I’m afraid we don’t know much about hotels and the best places and so on. Would it be asking too much of you, I wonder, to recommend us something? I have always wanted to see the Oberland again. I’ve never forgotten the autumn crocuses and it must be very thrilling when one knows it better. It could hardly be less thrilling than here, as you can probably guess. Sincerely, Olive.’ P.S. ‘Not too high in the mountains please. We’re not all such expert alpinists as you, I’m afraid.’

  With politeness and attention he wrote back: ‘There is such a choice of hotels here that it isn’t easy to know what to recommend. I think the best thing for you and your husband to do is to come up here as far as Lauterbrunnen (you take the little train from Interlaken) and pick on something you like. You couldn’t find a better spot; the scenery is magnificent. I shall probably be here or hereabouts until the end of July and if you let me know when you are coming I shall be only too pleased to do all I can to get you comfortably fixed up. I know the lie of the land pretty well.’

  A little later he heard that they would be coming in July. All summer the weather had been very beautiful. From the time in May when children on Sundays came down from snow-freed upper pastures with bunches of canary-yellow primula and all the lower meadows were purple with wild salvia there had been a fragrance in the air of buttery, pine-steeped, clover-laden richness. Fresh crowds of crocus, like small white flames, had seemed to spring overnight from me
adows of snow-pressed darkened grass, and after them the mauve bells of soldanella. But it was now not only very beautiful and very exhilarating but very much, after all this time, his own; and he began to look forward to showing it off to the former Miss Shortland and her leather-manufacturing husband: the insular small-town couple who, he thought with some amusement, could not trust themselves to book a room in a foreign country.

  Presently she wrote to say that they would be coming on the seventh. ‘We don’t want to be caught up too much in the tourist season,’ she wrote.

  But on the evening of the sixth, as he came out of the hotel before dinner, he saw a vaguely familiar figure sitting at one of the terrace tables. In the woman stirring a lump of ice in a glass of vermouth he did not at first recognise the former Miss Shortland. She was plumper than he remembered her; her hips seemed wide and rather fleshy; and it was only the jet black hair, growing in the same strong and rather coarse way from her neck, that made him quiver with his first real start of recognition.

  ‘Well!’ she said. ‘Do you recognise me? Do I look the same?’

  ‘I think so——’

  ‘You don’t look a day older, Arthur. You look absolutely the same.’

  ‘I thought you were not coming until——’

  She began to laugh, rather heavily, a little fleshily, and tapped the seat of the chair next to her.

  ‘Come and sit down. Oh! there was the most awful mess up. It was to have been the seventh and then the eighth and then we changed it to the tenth and then we very nearly didn’t come at all.’

  ‘How tiresome.’

  ‘My husband was called away on business to Northern Ireland of all places and I even had the telegram written out to send to you to say that we couldn’t come.’

  ‘And hasn’t he come?’

  ‘He hopes to get here next week,’ she said. ‘Even then he’s not sure.’

  He said once again how tiresome it was, how disappointing. She rang the bell for the waiter. A flush of excitement coloured the tiny veins of her pallid cheeks and when the waiter came she said: ‘I’m dying for another drink and I’m sure you are, Arthur. What will you have?’

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I want you to have one with me.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I insist. I’m going to be firm. This is my party.’

  He said it was very kind of her; she smiled and said that it was after all not every day that old friends met together. Down the valley, through black rifts of pines, there was no sun at that hour of the day, but a white tongue of snow-water, flashing through the rock-green gorge, seemed to light up all the central deep mountain shadow.

  ‘Isn’t it absolutely wonderful up here? Cheers. Here’s to us,’ the former Miss Shortland said. For some reason Arthur could not bring himself to think of her as Mrs Sanderson. ‘It’s marvellous. I don’t wonder you always live here.’ She talked quickly as she drank, eyes moistly excited. ‘I do envy you. Will you show it to me a little while I’m here?—I mean which mountains are which and so on? You know?’

  In his attentive, woollen, almost formal way he began to say he would do his best about that; but she interrupted and said:

  ‘What about another drink? I might as well confess I had several before you came on the scene.’

  ‘No, really, I won’t. Thanks all the same.’

  ‘Oh! heavens, Arthur, you must. After all it’s a sort of celebration and one has to show something——’ She giggled weakly and he thought she suddenly looked middle-aged, confused and tired, her eyes slightly bagged by fatigue, her mouth loose and uncertain as if, he thought, she had been shaken up a little by the long journey alone. He felt awkward and sorry for her and said:

  ‘It must be so tiresome for you, your husband not being able to come. It must be frightfully disappointing. I’m sorry.’

  She rang the bell for the waiter. ‘Do you know the Sandersons? My husband is the middle one: George. Did you ever meet him?’

  ‘I think I knew Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s all. Wasn’t there Freddy too?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She stared down at the flashing tongue of snow-water far below. ‘Freddy, Tom, Bill, George—when you’ve met one you’ve met them all.’

  That evening they sat together at the same table for dinner; afterwards they had coffee on the terrace outside and the former Miss Shortland—out of sheer habit he kept thinking of her like that—drank brandy with her coffee and talked a great deal.

  ‘Oh! I do envy you this. You know what it’s like back home, don’t you? You don’t need me to tell you that. Oh! that town!’

  ‘Little towns are all much the same, aren’t they?’

  ‘Oh! Are they? You think so?’ She laughed heavily, her plump body creaking in the wicker chair. ‘Anyway what do we have to talk about towns for? Let’s talk about us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘You, then,’ she said. ‘Tell me about you.’

  It did not seem to him that there was very much he had to tell her about himself.

  ‘You must have had the most awfully exciting things happen to you,’ she said. ‘I mean this rescue and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Nothing much happens to me.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. You’re so modest,’ she said. ‘You’re so quiet. Just like you always were. You haven’t changed a bit.’

  He did not know what to say; she had put on a rather full open-necked dinner dress of mauve silk, floppy and fussy about the sleeves and bust: the sort of dress she would wear, he thought, to go with George Sanderson to Rotarian dances. It was quite out of place, he felt, in the little hotel. Out of its low cut shoulders her chest and neck bulged plumply, in rolls of flesh that quivered when she laughed. And whenever she laughed that evening, as she drank her brandy, he would smile politely and awkwardly in return.

  ‘Tell me about your friends,’ she said. ‘You can’t think how I’ve been dying to ask you all this. I keep talking away but really I can’t help it, I’ve got so much I want to ask you. What about your friends now?’

  ‘I haven’t made any friends.’

  ‘Oh! that’s awful, that’s bad. You mean none? I imagined you gaily gallivanting about with Swiss and German women and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I make my friends mostly among the guides.’

  ‘How dull! No affairs?’ She laughed loudly and her voice, cracking a little on a forced high note, split away down the rock-strewn valley. ‘Even at home everybody has affairs.’

  ‘Yes?’ He sounded so astonished that once again she gave one of her loud, yapping laughs, her bust heaving as she lay back in the creaking wicker chair.

  ‘I mean one has to,’ she said. ‘It’s a sort of thing. One would go off one’s head if one didn’t break out a little bit now and then. In a town like that——’

  She suddenly jumped up, holding out her hand.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she said, ‘eh? Take me down the valley for a walk?’

  She held his hand; her fingers were plump and moist; and as he touched them he felt a prickling in his spine.

  ‘It’s getting awfully late and I ought to be thinking about bed——’

  ‘Bed can wait. Take me for a walk first, eh?’ she said. ‘Think about bed later. Think as much as you like about bed——’

  She laughed again, pulling at his hand, trying to raise him up from his chair. After he had made a few clumsy and embarrassed efforts to resist she staggered and fell forward. She fell with her arms against him, leaning over him, her bust pressing down like a crinkled silk cushion on his chest.

  ‘Take me for a walk, Arthur. Come on. It’s been a long time since I walked with you.’

  ‘I’d really rather not.’ He had begun to be embarrassed by her to a point, almost, of being frightened; and now as she leaned over him, breathing heavily, with tipsy excitement, he sought desperately for excuses and said:

  ‘If I’m going to show you the mountains tomorrow you ought to get some rest.’

  ‘Oh! tomorrow?’ she said. �
�You’re going to show me them tomorrow? Which ones? Where? You didn’t tell me that. It’s awfully sweet of you and I didn’t expect you to give up your time——’

  ‘Of course I’ll take you. I promised. But if you’re going you ought——’

  ‘You mean I can climb?’

  ‘If you’d like, yes,’ he said. ‘A little way.’

  ‘You mean ropes and axes and that sort of thing? And those big boots? I haven’t got any.’

  ‘We can probably borrow some boots for you in the hotel,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! Good. I want to climb a real mountain. Seriously.’

  As she stood there looking down at him, heavy, panting, over-eager, he experienced a moment of fresh and acute embarrassment. He thought he caught a gleam of moisture in her eyes. For a horrible moment he thought she was going to cry. Instead her lips made a series of floppy trembling bites in the darkness as if trying to find the words she wanted to say; and then she dribbled:

  ‘You’ve been frightfully sweet to me, Arthur. Really one doesn’t know what kindness is until one needs it most, does one? You know what I mean?’

  He did not, at that moment, know what she could possibly mean. A second later she gave a curious almost ugly cry of frustrated pain and rushed away.

  In the morning, when he met her at breakfast she was, to his surprise and relief, extraordinarily sensible and cheerful.

  ‘I’m looking forward so much to this, Arthur,’ she said. ‘I do value it very much.’ And after breakfast:

  ‘I see you’ve brought a rope, after all. Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘You get into the habit of carrying one.’

  ‘But no axe?’

  ‘No axe,’ he said. ‘We shan’t be going very high. We shall be underneath the snow-line.’

  Through the morning and early afternoon they climbed gently. It was mostly an affair, at first, of rock and grass. A few gentians were flowering on the slopes of upper meadows, with occasional tufts of late alpenrose. Crags of rock, the colour of grey lava, began to rise more sheerly from scarred slopes of shale, and gradually the starch-blue cols of ice, the great shoulders of the permanent snow-line, began to swing away above them, foreshortened, finally to disappear.