The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  ‘Thank you for telling me the way,’ Martin called after him; but Joan ran on and on, without another word.

  For two hours more the path ran sweetly round the shoulder of Malamort, dipping to a lake: other paths had joined it, coming from valleys to the east, but they were obviously less important; and in any event this lake was marked upon his drawing; it had been named by Joan. All that he had to do now was to walk left-handed round its shore, climb by the stream the other side, reach the high snowy ridge beyond, find the westward pass above two small lakes, and so drop to the road.

  The great hollow, a ring two miles across, was surrounded by cliffs on three sides; they had beds of shale at their feet, and in three places they were broken by streams coming from the higher ridge. Three streams, and one of them a waterfall; yet clearly the first was his. It was much larger; it was directly on the other side of the lake; and there had been no mention of his crossing water.

  The fourth side was filled by a marsh, covered with cotton-grass, and among the boulders on its edge grew a low, fern-like plant in great profusion; the last year’s growth, brown, dry in the sun, and fragrant, made the softest resting-place. He sat down and gazed at the water, his whole body relaxing at once, limp, boneless and pliable: the lake had no banks, in the ordinary sense – there were just these falls of rock, and then, without transition, water. It had no vegetation in it or round it: no clouds passed overhead, no birds. No breeze touched its surface. It seemed that there was no life here, only sky, rock and silence; but presently he saw rings spreading, and later he heard the splash of a rising trout. There were other sounds too: stone avalanches rumbling in the distance; the thunder of rock falling from the cliffs, several times repeated, and startling at first. He watched the rings form, spread and intersect; he dozed, awoke, dozed again, and fell fast asleep in his bed of fern.

  It was a nearer rock-fall and the cold that roused him. The sun had left the water, the whole bottom of the ring, and now it lit only the upper half of the eastern cliff: already the air down here was sharp. There was no time to be lost, and quickly putting on his shoes he hurried round the lake. He climbed fast up along the bed of the first stream, but the shadow climbed faster still: before he had reached the ridge the lower sky was violet, and the arch of the day was closing towards the west. He had seen nothing like a path for the last hour, but now the snow was coming closer, and surely he would find it there.

  Indeed, there it was, a track slanting westwards across the snow, almost exactly where his anxious theory had placed it. But alas, when he came to it there was clearly something wrong – too slender, far too neat – and when he bent in the fading light he saw the mark of cloven hoofs. This was the path, and no doubt the habitual path, of a numerous band of chamois. Certainly it was: ten minutes later he rounded a bluff with the breeze in his face and came full upon them. The group exploded, racing away, leaping skip-skip-skip down and across an impossible rock-face, so that he was in dread for their legs and necks.

  However, they were gone, safely gone, before he could even count them, and his anxiety returned to himself; the twilight was mounting fast to these regions, and the only hint of real path that he could see led upwards, still higher, to no pass that he could discern among the massive peaks ahead.

  ‘Yet it may very well drop again suddenly,’ he said. ‘It may very well show me the pass in half an hour; and as soon as I am on the road I shall find a shepherd’s hut. Joan spoke of one where the road leaves the forest, and two not far from the chapel.’

  On. Higher and higher, winding where the rocks would let him rather than where a fading sense of direction urged him to go on. He often fell now, once losing his hold on a scree and sliding down a hundred feet with stones falling all around and beyond him. Eventually, with his breath gone, his strength going, and a deep cut in his side, he found himself creeping in the near darkness along a snowy ledge with a sheer face on his right hand and a precipice on his left.

  The snow had melted away from the rock-face, where the sun had warmed it, leaving a passage wide enough to stand in – wider in places – and then, on the outward side of the ledge, a firm white mass as high as a counter. He leant on this counter, surveying the night as it rose from the east – Mars blazing already, even the small stars pricking out, but never a hint of the moon – and the dark shapes of the mountains looming against the sky. ‘I am far, far too high,’ he said. ‘But I cannot go any farther. Snow is said to conserve the warmth: I shall try to find a wider place, and there I shall lie.’

  Fifty yards along the ledge turned sharply: he was observing, ‘And if it does not, then I shall run up and down until the day,’ when he heard a snort, a muffled, hurrying sound ahead. At the same moment he caught a goatish smell, and his feet were treading in dung. ‘So this is where the chamois sleep,’ he said. ‘How wise.’

  It was the most sheltered place that could be wished at this great height: beneath the counter there was no wind at all; some warmth still emanated from the cliff, and the smell soon passed unnoticed. His body was so tired that the rock seemed soft at first, and he lay there in a half-doze, watching the stars as they swept over the narrow trench above.

  A long, long night, however, with an increasing cold that reached to his heart at last. By two o’clock it seemed to have been going on for ever. But at least he was beyond hunger, and his thirst he could satisfy from the snow. When the stars were paling he fell into a tormented sleep, cramped and uneasy, but so deep that the sun was as high as the Malamort before it woke him.

  ‘It is over,’ he said, shading his eyes from the glare and unscrewing himself from the tight ball in which he had lain. ‘It is over at last.’ He got on to his knees, then to his feet, and as he slowly straightened so the pure revivifying sunlight darted straight into his upper half: his blood began to flow, the tension and shivering died away as the heat pierced deeper and deeper; his teeth no longer chattered. He took off his soaking bloodstained filthy coat and stood back against the warm rock with his arms spread wide and his eyes closed. All around him there was the drip of melting snow.

  Now his shirt was dry and even his frozen spine was supple; he leant his elbows on the counter and looked out. Below him, cloud. Nothing but that white sea of impenetrable cloud, rising to within five hundred feet of his ledge. Mountains thrusting through it – to his left the familiar praying hands of Malamort – and a perfect sky above. He said, ‘They will lift in time,’ and his eye caught a white-splashed shelf of rock below, within spitting distance below. Three bearded vultures stood upon it, the parents and their huge blowzy child, sluggishly preening themselves and waiting for the day to warm. His gaze made them uneasy, and presently one cocked its head upwards, shuffled to the edge and launched itself silently into the void. The others followed, and for a moment he saw six great sharp-winged forms gliding over the clouds, the birds and their close-following shadows.

  ‘I have slept with vultures too, I find,’ he observed; and wedging its sleeves into a horizontal crack he spread his coat to dry.

  There was no attempting to move except upwards, which was absurd; so during the hours in which the cloud slowly boiled and rolled in upon itself below, sometimes sending off long streamers but never breaking, he also dried his trousers and his handkerchief, luxuriating in the heat as they hung.

  Gradually the unseen waterfall to his right increased in sound and volume as the sun unlocked the higher snow and ice; and when at last the cloud began its definitive rise, the jet came into sight, a single arch of water shooting out from a broken cliff and plunging into the whiteness, now only a hundred feet below.

  Tenuous vapours were drifting overhead: all the sharp definition of the cloud was gone. The sun dimmed, and a moment later it was no more than a white ball in the enveloping fog. He put on his good dry clothes, grateful for their warmth, and relapsed into timeless waiting.

  Would the cloud continue to rise? Or would it hang about the mountain-tops all day, all night, perhaps for weeks on end? A s
mall shining beetle climbed laboriously about the pellet-shaped droppings and the compacted masses of izards’ dung. Several times it fell on its back, waving its legs, and each time he set it on its feet; but it seemed to possess no sense of purpose or direction.

  The cloud lifted. It took a great while to do so, but it lifted, and the last stage was as dramatic as the raising of a curtain. A hint of thinning, and then suddenly it was overhead, completely overhead, revealing the lower world, whole, clear and plain.

  There, immediately below him, was the forest. There, on the flank of a valley, was the road, rising to a saddle to the west. There was the river. And there, on the grassy slopes above the forest, he could see minute shapes that must be grazing cattle. Poring over this landscape spread below him he made out three shepherd’s huts, all far away, the nearest being close to the upper limit of the trees, between the forest and the road, on the far side of the river. From one blue smoke was rising; and each had a strange brown square in front of it, like a field.

  There too were the small lakes, far away to the east; and there to be sure he saw the path, so well trodden by the herds down there that it might have been a road. He had not gone so far wrong: the general direction had been right. Only he was three thousand feet too high. And his precipice fell half that distance without a break. How to get down it? Along the ledge in the hope of its joining that far shoulder? Back the way he had come, trusting to find a way along its foot? There were not so many hours of daylight left, with the tall mountains cutting off the sun so soon, and the best way he must find, or he was lost in sight of home.

  Backwards, forwards, sideways, up and down, climbing, sliding, sometimes falling, it was not until the evening sky flushed red that he was down to the two small lakes, fetching them at last by a long tack that lost him an hour and more. ‘But once I am round this pool,’ he said, forcing his exhausted body through a bog, ‘I am certainly on the one true path: then if I do not fall again I may very well get there by night. And surely I shall not fall upon the road itself?’

  Five minutes later he missed his leap on a shifting rock; but the fall sent him sprawling on to the undoubted path, and now it was only a question of clearing his head, gathering himself together, choosing the right direction, and going on and on for some hours. ‘Providing the shepherd is at home,’ he said.

  Past the lakes, on, and a long haul, to the first of the trees, strangely familiar with their hanging moss in the deepening twilight; down through the trees to the river and the ford. The swift icy current, knee-deep and more; the slippery stones in the darkness. He said, ‘Shall I ever make this last half-mile?’ as he paused long on the farther bank, searching for strength to stand up again. There was only a plain meadow between him and the light of the open door, but now the cruel frost came dropping from the sky and he was as weary as a dying man.

  Ahead of him stood the herd, packed into the trampled square in front of the hut – mares with their mule foals, cows, heifers, beasts, some sheep, two goats, two pigs, with a mist of soft breath rising from them all – a guardian dog at each corner, huge woolly dogs with steel-spiked brass collars. They had heard and smelt him coming since before he crossed the river, but they said nothing: only one young subsidiary dog slunk close behind his legs and gibbered its teeth uneasily; and he walked very slowly past them towards the door.

  It was open to let out some of the smoke, and it showed a glowing stone-built room. There were two fires blazing inside, one on the hearth, another, a small and clear fire of juniper, burning on a stone shelf beside the bench; and this bench, this broad wooden platform against the back wall, filled the entire width of the hut. The shepherd lay there on a deep pile of sheepskins, and he was reading in a book. One arm held it to the light, and the other lay round the lamb that slept against his side. A very old bitch and some cats filled the rest of the bed.

  The very old bitch grunted as Martin appeared in the door, and the shepherd turned his eager smiling face towards him. ‘Have you come?’ he said, closing the book, disengaging the lamb, and beginning to rise. ‘And have you come at last? You are the Christ? I have been waiting and waiting for you.’

  ‘No, my dear,’ said Martin, leaning against the jamb. ‘I am not the Christ.’

  ‘Are you not?’ said the shepherd, touching his arm. His face clouded painfully; but he said, ‘Lie down on the warm bed, while I milk a cow.’ He looked searchingly into Martin’s face again and said, ‘And are you indeed not the Christ? Yet the dogs never spoke; and this is the time. No? Well,’ – smiling once more – ‘then I shall not have to kill the lamb.’

  The Voluntary Patient

  ‘WHAT IS that noise?’

  ‘Which noise?’

  ‘Like a dog howling. There it is again.’

  ‘Oh, that. It is only Mr Philips. He is upstairs this afternoon,’ she said with a satisfied smile. ‘We have been a little troublesome, and we shan’t come down until we are in a better mood. “You can’t do this to me,” he said, “I am here on a voluntary basis, you understand, and can leave whenever I choose, upon giving proper notice.”’

  They both laughed, and the second woman, still tittering, said, ‘Always the same old tale. But which is Mr Philips? The one who looks out of the window?’

  ‘No. Isn’t he a scream? No, this is the one with the fiddle I told you about. You haven’t seen him yet – he is at the back.’

  ‘Well, why doesn’t he play his fiddle?’

  ‘He has quite given it over, and spends all his time writing. I said to him the other day, “Mr Philips,” I said, “why don’t you give us a tune?” No answer. Just scribble scribble scribble, as if his life depended on it.’

  They both laughed again, and the second woman said, ‘You get all the funny ones.’

  ‘Not that he’s as funny as some, but he does get some funny ideas. “Make the punishment fit the crime” is his latest.’ She hummed a bar and they both sang.

  ‘La di da di da di da

  Make the punishment fit the crime.’

  ‘How do you mean, though?’ asked the visitor.

  ‘Well, he says all this psychosomatic stuff – you know what I mean?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Don’t be offended, love. He says it is all part of the same thing, and you bring it on yourself.’ The visitor grinned and nodded, and the tall, black-haired woman went on, ‘It’s all part of the same thing, he says. Oh, we get it by the hour sometimes, and then he writes it all down.’

  ‘You do have more fun than we do,’ said the visitor crossly. ‘On the accidie side they are a dull, mumchance, pompous lot, all puffed up with their own importance.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the other in a modest tone. ‘Here,’ she added, leaning sideways and picking up a closely written sheet, ‘this will tell you all about it. It will make you howl.’

  The visitor, a woman with sparse sandy hair and a dead-white transparent skin, flushed so that the redness could be seen mounting above the rounded protuberance of her forehead and far into her scalp. She took it greedily, but she said at once, ‘This is not the beginning.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter: it’s all the same.’

  ‘“… and as no two crimes are exactly the same,”’ she read aloud, ‘“so every punishment is unlike every other punishment. When a man wakes in the night and finds his head filled with remorse and bitter, old regret, if he chose he could reflect that no other man in the world would be suffering precisely that remorse nor exactly that regret: it might be quite as vain and sterile and long-lived, but it would not be wounding him with the same sharp terms. Of course, he would not choose to do so, for he would be too busy dodging about inside his mind, trying to escape – unless, that is, he were occupied with feeling the wound to see how much it still hurt and trying to persuade himself that there was virtue in mere remorse.” He, he, he,’ went the sandy woman; but putting her glass on the paper she said with an affected prim indifference, ‘He writes very neat.’

 
‘I don’t know that that’s the best piece,’ said the other, peering at the writing upside down. ‘There was a good one I meant to show you the day before yesterday.’

  ‘From Mr Philips?’

  ‘No, the pale fellow.’

  ‘He’s another funny one, isn’t he?’ she said abstractedly, as her eyes ran down the paragraph below the round of the glass’s foot.

  ‘“So in sinning you create your own punishment,”’ she read. ‘“In the act of the particular and unique sin the compensating punishment is born: it is inevitably born, and it always exactly counterbalances its cause.”’

  ‘Does he ever put any address?’ she asked, breaking off.

  ‘No: he’s one of our new boys. They haven’t let on yet.’

  ‘Has he told you what his trouble is?’

  ‘No. But you would have screamed the other day: they were asking him about his eyes and I couldn’t help hearing. Osborne says, “And what about this shadow in the left-hand field of vision, Mr Philips?” And he says, “Oh, it’s nothing much.” So Osborne says, “But it is still there, I collect?” And he says, “I’m afraid so. Do you attach any importance to it?” – trying to put him off, you know. Then Osborne hums and haws about sciasis for a bit, tips old Prince the wink, and leaves them together. Old Prince, of course, begins to lay on the soothing syrup right away – dear, kind old man, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’