Fordham's Feud

Chapter Twenty

On The Summit

A narrow apex of solid rock, surrounded by a little cairn of stones and four human figures. And around – what a panorama! Everywhere rolling billowy summits, snowy and hump-like, or rearing up sharp and defined in craggy pinnacles – everywhere they rise – north, south, east, or west, the eye wanders confused over a vast sea of them. Below, a mighty array of snowfields, great ice rivers flowing silently down between their rock-bound walls – divided, separated from each other by stupendous ramparts of cliff and snow. Further down still – far, far beneath the region of ice and snow – a confused labyrinth of tortuous valleys, green, and sprinkled here and there with clusters of brown specks, haply representing a town or village, the faintly glittering star above which resolves itself under the lens of the telescope into the metal-sheathed cupola of a church tower. The very immensity of the panorama is overwhelming in its bewildering vastness. The eye, the senses, are burdened with it – can hardly take it in. The whole world seems to lie spread out around and beneath, for this apex of rock soaring up in mid-air seems in very truth to tower above the rest of the world. It is the summit of the Rothhorn.

The two guides – good representatives of their class – with their thoughtful bronzed faces and horny hands, their quasi-uniform attire of grey frieze, and black-cock feather adorned hat – are busily engaged in examining the contents of a bottle, which they have extracted from its snug hiding-place in the heart of the cairn aforesaid – not in the hope of finding it to contain liquid refreshment, let us hasten to explain – nor are the contents precisely of a solid nature. They are calculated to appeal to the mind rather than the body, for they happen to consist, for the most part, of an assortment of visiting cards, bearing the names of such climbers as have hitherto gained this altitude, together with those of their guides, and any other remarks their owners may have seen fit to pencil thereon by way of record.

“Well, Phil? Think my prescription was good enough, eh?” says Fordham, cheerfully. “Worth while undergoing something to get such a view as this?”

But there is no cheerfulness about Philip Orlebar to-day, nor does he seem to take any interest in the view. Sprawling on his back, on the hard rock, with his hands behind his head, he is staring up at the sky – a phase of observation equally well undertaken at the bottom of a valley, thinks his companion. He merely growls in reply, and relapses into his abstraction.

It is the second day after the somewhat stormily concluding interview between Fordham and old Glover, but poor Philip’s prospects had in no wise been improved thereby – indeed, he could not but realise that they were hopelessly ruined. The only result achieved was that of, so to say, drawing the teeth of the aggrieved but scheming parent. That crafty plutocrat had been left, in a manner of speaking, on his back. He had been met with a crisp, healthy decisiveness, which had left nothing to be inferred, whereas had Philip himself constituted the other party to the interview, we fear that a tendency to temporise might have wedged him into the morass firmer and deeper than ever. So far Fordham had rendered him yeoman’s service.

But while released from one horn of the dilemma there was another upon which he remained firmly impaled, and whence it was beyond the power of any friend to extricate him, and that was a woman’s outraged pride. Alma Wyatt’s self-contained nature was a fearfully proud one, and it had been wounded to the quick. She, to allow herself to be deceived, fooled, made a plaything of, a mere pastime to add zest to a summer holiday – while all the time this man who had been whispering undying love to her was plighted to some one else! Her face fairly blanched with fierce wrath at the thought. And the insult, the publicity of the insult which he had put upon her – for his attentions were, of course, thoroughly understood by those around! No, she would never forgive him; never as long as he lived – or even on his deathbed!

Even then the natural fairness of her mind moved her to do him what justice she could. Her own heart told her that in his love for herself there was, at any rate, no make-believe. That, at any rate, was genuine. So much the worse. It argued weakness in her eyes, an unpardonable fault in a man. And, again – that he had dared to offer her a mere place in his affections – to suppose that she would share them with anybody, let alone the overdressed, underbred creature to whom he was already plighted, and who had come there and claimed him – publicly claimed him – under her eyes! It was an outrage which she could not bring herself so much as to think of condoning.

The only consolation was that she had all this time steadfastly refused to give him a definite answer – to allow him to give anybody to understand in definite terms that she was engaged to him. But what then? Had she not more than justified by implication such a conclusion on the part of those around her! Even now she was conscious of the exchanged glance, the hastily-stifled smile which her appearance evoked amid this or that group she happened to be passing, but this she could afford to treat with unconcern. Still the sting penetrated – penetrated and rankled. Her bitterness towards the chief offender hardened to white heat.

Nothing had been said between them. She took care to allow him no opportunity for that. No explanations were needed. The situation would admit of none – absolutely none. She made no external difference in her manner towards him – did not even change her place beside him at table. She was too proud to give him or the lookers-on to suppose that she was sorely wounded. But there was a steeliness in her tone when she addressed him or answered any remark of his, which conveyed as severe a punishment as even she could have wished. He was miserable.

Then he wrote to her – a piteous and heartbroken letter – explaining, protesting, and, above all, entreating. To ensure her receipt of this he slipped it himself beneath her door at a time when it could not escape her observation. As a result she did afford him an opportunity of speaking with her alone – an interview of just sufficient duration to allow her deliberately to tear his letter into small fragments before his face, carefully letting him see that it was unopened. Not a word did she speak. She could not trust herself. Her great eyes blazing forth such scorn from her pale face seemed to sear and burn into his. Then she turned and left him.

After that he was desperate. Poor Phil, soft-hearted and sensitive, felt that he had wrecked his whole life. He wished he could get up a corresponding indignation. But he could not, not even the fraction of a semblance of it. His heart seemed turned to water – his brain was ablaze. He would relieve his feelings by undertaking some desperate feat – thank Heaven, it was always easy to break one’s neck. And on this object intent he bounded upstairs three steps at a time in quest of his ice-axe.

But Providence, or his own forgetfulness, stood him in good stead that time, for the implement he sought was not in his room. He must have left it in Fordham’s. Thither he repaired.

“What’s the row, Phil?” said the latter, looking up quickly, taking in at the same time the obvious fact that things were not merely wrong with his unlucky friend, but very much more so than ever.

“Got my axe here? I’m just going for a – er – walk.”

“Well, you can put it off then, for I’ve just been scheming out a promising climb. Got two first-rate Zermatt guides, who turned up last night and want to go back there. Everything is ready. What do you say to doing the Rothhorn? We can start for the Mountet cabin soon after lunch; sleep there, get to the top any time by midday, and go down the other side to Zermatt. What do you say?”

“I’m your man, Fordham. Just the very thing I should like. And, I say – while we are about it – we might stay at Zermatt a few days and do the Matterhorn and two or three others, eh?”

Fordham looked at him curiously.

“Just the very thing I was going to suggest,” he said, “only I doubted whether you’d cotton. A smart shaking up and a change will do you all the good in the world, just now, Phil. We’ll start half an hour after lunch – there goes the second bell! – and go up to the hut quietly.”

This they had done, and now after an excruciatingly early start from that convenient tarrying-place, and about six hours of really difficult climbing, of scrambling from rock to rock, worming round “corners” overhanging dizzy heights – work that called into full play every muscle and braced every nerve – here they were on the summit with the world at their feet.

During the actual process of ascent Philip’s spirits seemed to return. The hard, and, in places, really hazardous, nature of the undertaking demanded all his attention, and whether clinging spreadeagled against the face of the cliff with no real hold to speak of, or balancing with one foot upon a rock projection about the size of a walnut, the other dangling over nothing, what time the next man above should secure a footing, or skirting gingerly the treacherous line of a curling snow cornice, where the thrust of the handle of an ice-axe left a hole through which lay viewed the awful depth of space which it overhung – all this constituted such a strain upon his faculties as to leave room for no other thought. Though strong and active, and in good training all round, Philip, be it remembered, was a novice at this sort of thing, consequently he found enough to do in ensuring his own safety, and, relatively, that of his companions. At one point of their progress a cloud had come over the mountain, rendering the rocks rimy and slippery, throwing out the ridge of ice crowning a sharp arête spectral and drear against the misty murk, magnifying the cliffs to gigantic proportions in their uncertain and ill-defined outlines. Gazing down upon the snow-flecked rocks far, far beneath, losing themselves in the swirling vortex of vapour, Philip felt rather small as he remembered his reckless intentions of the day before. Life, strange to say, seemed still worth having; at any rate such a way of ending it as a sudden dash through space on to those hideous black and white rocks struck him as grim and horrible in the extreme.

But the excitement and physical exertion over, and the summit attained, his depression returned. More over he was tired, for he had hardly slept the night before, was, in fact, just dropping off, when roused by his indefatigable friend at 2 a.m. to make a pretence at devouring the breakfast which the guides were preparing over the weather-beaten stove. Now the magnificence and extent of the view was nothing to him. It seemed to lie outside his gaze. In spirit he was back again at the hotel at Zinal. Was Alma beginning to miss him – to think more kindly of him, now that they would not see each other for some days? Would those execrable Glovers have left by the time he returned? And would all come right again? If only it might!

But if his younger friend’s thoughts were far-away down in the valley they had come up out of, Fordham’s were not. That saturnine individual was, for him, in high spirits. He had got out an excellent map – in the production of such Switzerland stands in the foremost place – and with the guides was busy verifying the topographical details of the stupendous panorama lying beneath and around. The cloud which had overshadowed them during their ascent had long since vanished, and now the sky was blue and clear, and the air like an elixir of life. The only clouds were those from three pipes, for the two guides and Fordham were smoking like chimneys.

But they had been an hour on the summit, and the air, though exhilarating, was uncommonly chill. It became time to start downwards. The guides were beginning to repack the haversacks.

“Have a pull at this, Phil,” said Fordham, handing him a flask. “And – I tell you what it is, man. You don’t know when you’re well off.”

“Oh, I don’t?”

“Rather not. Look at this,” with a comprehensive sweep of the hand. “Think what a splendid climb we had to get up here. Think what a splendid one we are going to have to get down, better, in fact, because less of sheer fag, and then think how many poor devils there are who would give their heads to be here to-day, instead of slaving their hearts out all their lives to support some snarling, ungrateful female, and a mob of more or less dirty and wholly detestable brats.”

“Candidly, my dear chap,” returned Philip, “you are becoming somewhat of the nature of a bore. I seem to have heard something very like that before – not once, nor yet twice. The salutary instructions of the immortal Mr Barlow, of ‘Sandford and Merton’ fame, shine forth as very masterpieces of sparkling pungency when contrasted with your latter-day harangues. I want to know what the devil all this has to do with me.”

“You shall! The gist of the parable is this. You are thinking all this time that Paradise lies at present in the Zinal valley in general, and very particularly in the Hôtel Durand; whereas in actual fact, so far as any semblance of that institution may be said to exist, it lies around and before you. For you are free at present, Phil, free as the air up here which is making us shiver, your freedom is as boundless as this rolling view of half a continent upon which we look down. You have the world at your feet as literally as we have it before us now.”

“Go on, Mr Barlow. Pray proceed.”

“I will. At present you are thinking what a Paradise every moment of life would be if coupled with the charmer down yonder. You are drawing all manner of glowing mental pictures of the bliss of a home illumined by her divine presence. All fustian, my dear fellow, all fustian! These superstitions are encouraged by the women from obvious motives. But they have no foundation in actual fact. Now what I am thinking of is this. I am thinking of you in two or three years’ time, caged up with your charmer in some shabby-genteel suburban semi-detached – for she hasn’t a shilling of her own, I believe – I am thinking of you, I say, the proud possessor of two or three unruly brats – who may or may not be kept clean – thus caged up, with a domineering, bad-tempered woman, who has parted with her illusions, in proportion as she has contributed towards populating this interesting orb. I am thinking of you toiling the day through, week in week out, at some sordid and uncongenial drudgery for a mere pittance. You can never be well off, my dear Phil, for to do you justice, you lack the essential qualities of rascality and sycophancy which are requisite to the manufacture of the ‘successful man.’ And while your scanty leisure is taken up policing a series of ever-changing and refractory domestics, or carrying on epistolary war with your landlord, in re his inevitable refusal to observe the most obvious provisions of his agreement, your much-needed slumbers will be invaded by the piercing and colicky yells of the last overfed cherub, and your night devoted to hospital duties in regard to that same. And then when you look back to – this day, for instance – I am not far out in asserting that you will catch yourself wondering whether such an unparalleled ass is even worth the sixpenny-worth of laudanum which should send him in search of the decisive change which may possibly be for the better, but can hardly be for the worse. There – that’s the other side of the orange, and now you can’t say it hasn’t been shown you.”