by Ann Bridge
At last, one day when she and Gloire had been talking about mountaineering, Miss Glanfield did what she had failed to do on the walk to Shpali, and tackled, quite directly, the subject of Captain Thurston.
“I climbed once with your husband—did you know?” she said to Gloire, who sat working at a piece of embroidery which she was doing for Lisa.
The younger woman put down her work and looked across at her with large eyes.
“No—did you really? When?”
“In 1914, early in July. We did the Nord-End of Monte Rosa together. We were both in the Bétemps Hut one night; I wanted to do the Nord-End and he was going to do the Dufourspitze from the Grenz-glacier. But he had two wretched guides—he was only a boy then—”
“Yes, he’d have been nineteen,” Gloire interrupted.
“Oh, was he? Well, he looked even younger. Anyhow the weather turned beastly in the night, snow was falling right down to the hut in the morning, and his guides wouldn’t start. He was in absolute despair—it was his last day. I was so sorry for him, I asked Christian if we couldn’t take him on our rope. You see, we had talked the evening before, and I was tremendously struck by—well, by a sort of religious quality in his feeling for mountains.”
Gloire leant forward, her face transfigured by an intensity of expression such as Miss Glanfield had never seen on it, even in these last gay contented days.
“Oh, did you feel that? Even then? I mean so early on?”
“Yes, I did. That was why I was determined to take him. Christian wasn’t keen—it was really a beast of a day, and it was taking a chance to try at all. Of course Christian knew that I could come down at least as fast as I went up, which is the vital thing,” said Miss Glanfield with a sort of post-dated self-satisfaction which amused Gloire—“or that he and Knubel could sling me down!” she amended. “But I coaxed him—I told him what Antony had done; he’d had decent guides for the first three weeks, and had a terrific season—even traversed the Ober Gabelhorn from the Wellenkuppe. So at last he agreed. Antony’s guides were as sick as mud! I loved the tough way he paid them off, there and then, at four in the morning, and told them, in first-class Berner-Deutsch, that he hoped he’d never see them again, and that they would strangle themselves in their own rope getting down to Zermatt! The whole hut was laughing”—Miss Glanfield herself laughed at the recollection—“even the parties that weren’t starting either.”
“Fun!” Gloire said, her topaz eyes sparkling. “He could be most frightfully tough. Do go on. Did you manage it?”
“Oh yes, rather. The snow took off by the time we reached the foot of the rocks, and we had a grand climb. But it came on again coming down, and my nose got frost-bitten—I shall never forget Christian turning round, and coming back at me with a handful of snow, and plastering it all over my face, and rubbing it!” said Miss Glanfield with immense relish. “I thought he’d gone mad. After that we all tied handkerchiefs over our noses, and got down off the ridge out of the wind, and put brandy in our boots; and we ended up by making a new route down, because we didn’t dare face the wind on the ridge again. But your husband was splendid—he was faster than I was,” she said with characteristic naïveté. “I remember Christian saying afterwards—“Sie hatten recht, Fräulein. Der Junge wird ein berühmter Bergsteiger sein.”
Gloire’s face dimmed at the last words.
“Well he did become a famous climber, but in the bloodiest possible way,” she said bitterly. “He only made headlines when he was dead—and because of how he died. But”—she made a visible effort—“can you tell me what he was like, then? I mean, so very young? Was he shy? He was shy later. How old were you, anyway?”
“I was twenty-four, and fell at least fifty!” said Miss Glanfield lightly. “No, he wasn’t very shy, once we got started; he was very courteous and formal at first—so amusing with that baby face—and that made it all the funnier when he came out with all those dialect oaths at his wretched guides.”
“You didn’t keep up with him at all?” Gloire asked.
“Not really—no. You see the war came at once, and he went out to France, of course, and I got married and worked in London. He wrote to me once or twice—he couldn’t spell,” said Miss Glanfield, smiling.
“He never could!” said Gloire, smiling too. “And that was the last you saw of him?”
“No—I met him again once, oh, years later, at some Alpine dinner, when he made a most remarkable speech.” She paused, wondering whether she should mention that speech to Gloire. “He said”—she went on—“and I so often thought of it, afterwards—that however high a price the mountains might exact from you, you would always remain in their debt. That was true, you know, for people like him.”
Gloire was looking in front of her.
“Oh, I know it was!” she said, turning now to Miss Glanfield. “I was there that night,” she said almost wonderingly—“we might have met then! But he knew so many climbers that I didn’t know. But”—and now bitterness and a sort of despair came into her face and voice—“you know that wasn’t true for me! They hadn’t given me enough—not to take away that!” she said, on a sudden sob. “If I’d had more climbing, with him, maybe I might have felt that way. But two seasons was so little. We were so happy,” she said, with the utmost simplicity, feeling about for a handkerchief in her unaccustomed dress—failing to find it, she dabbed her eyes with the corner of her gay apron, as countrywomen the world over have dried their tears for generations.
The words and the gesture moved Miss Glanfield very much, but before she could speak, Gloire went on again. “I have so wanted to talk to you about him. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about him. Everyone thought I was the wrong kind of wife for him; well maybe I was, but he was the right husband for me!” The flood-gates were opened at last, and the bitterness of years was pouring out. “They all thought I didn’t care—but I did care. And if he’d lived, if we’d had more time, I’d have got different, I know I would. I did like some of his things—anyway I loved the mountaineering. I’d have got some good at that too.”
“You did get good—I heard that much,” said Miss Glanfield.
“Did you?” Gloire asked, with a sort of pathetic eagerness. “Did they say that?”
“Of course they did. You were very good, and very fast.” Oh, how could one heal this piteous, resentful complex—loss, self-mistrust, and anger against “they”, her husband’s alien world—which Love, who can translate everything, had never had time to translate for her? That love had translated the meaning of mountains, had translated the ultra-English Tony Thurston himself, Susan Glanfield could not doubt. Pity moved in her, as it so easily did, almost unbearably.
But Gloire was going on again.
“You’ll think this crazy, but someone has got to understand, some time, or I think I’ll go crazy! And I’ve felt you would—or you might—ever since we picked you up by the marsh that day. Can you see—it sounds selfish, but one is selfish, that’s just one of those things—that I feel I’ve not only lost Tony, I’ve lost myself as well? I mean my chance of being different?”
“Yes, I do see that.” She saw it quite burningly. “Oh Gloire dear, you can’t think how I understand. You see, yourself is important too. And I’m sure he thought that, though probably he never said a word about it. He must have loved you so much.”
At that, the younger woman burst into a passion of weeping. After the years of loss, of silence and deprivation, of cheap solaces and second-bests, in a loneliness she was too unskilled to break, this sudden fullness of comprehension was altogether too much for her. She sat sobbing, in that bare room, her honey-gold head bowed over a piece of Albanian embroidery, her tears falling fast on the lap of her Albanian dress. Miss Glanfield said nothing; she was putting out the strength of her soul for her in silence. No one has measured that strength, or its potency—only Pirandello has known and demonstrated that affection solves problems insoluble by reason or intelligence.
Mrs. Thu
rston’s problem was not solved yet. She raised her head at last, and again dabbed her eyes with her apron.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Look—I’d like to get this straight. It wasn’t the mountains’ fault—I don’t feel that. It was those unspeakable men. They could have saved him if they’d had the guts. They didn’t have them. Oh!” The tone of her voice was indescribable. “Are you surprised,” she said, now in icy tones of hatred, “that I just don’t feel the human race is worth bothering about, any more? People who could do that? Just leave him, to save their own skins?”
And that’s how she’s lived, Susan Glanfield thought, appalled by her voice—she’s lived like that for years, with hatred in her heart. Poison—annihilation.
“Come over here,” she said.
Very slowly Gloire came, and sat down on the red mattress. Decisively, Miss Glanfield took her hand, and held it firmly.
“Listen,” she said. “I do understand—all of it, I think. And it’s natural in a way that you should feel like that. But you’ve got to stop, you know. That’s not getting you anywhere—in fact it’s moral suicide.”
Gloire looked earnestly at her.
“Do you say that, too?” she asked.
“Of course. Who else does?”
“Mr. Larsen did.”
“He would—naturally.” (What in the world had passed between her and Nils Larsen in the train?) “And he’s quite right. If you’ve just gone on hating the world at large, and trying to get all you can out of it and put nothing in, sort of scourging it—have you?” Gloire nodded. “Well, that’s just hopeless.”
“What can I do about it? I can’t help feeling that way. I have tried, sometimes, and then it all comes back, and I get a sort of mad fit, and go and buy things, or have a terrific affair with someone—and then I feel beastlier than ever.”
Oh, there you were! No tradition to steady her, no background of training and discipline; falling back on the cheapest, the flimsiest of material buttresses against despair, only to have them washed away, every time, by the tide of misery.
“Perhaps you can’t feel otherwise, but you could make yourself do otherwise,” she said, releasing Gloire’s hand and lighting a cigarette. These flies have no sense of timing! she thought. “The only cure that I can think of—do you really want to hear?” she broke off.
“Yes—terribly.”
“Well, I think it would be the exact opposite of what you’ve been doing—to set out to serve the human race, which has so misused you.” (That was a fallacy, but it had to be accepted for the moment. It was not humanity as a whole which had injured Gloire, only a few men who found, in an emergency, that they were not as brave as they had thought.) “By trying to do it good, you would come to feel kindly towards it.”
“Would I, I wonder?”
“I think you would. It always works with individuals.”
“I don’t see how I could serve it. What could I do?” Gloire asked.
“Anything would do—scrubbing floors in hospitals!” said Miss Glanfield vigorously. “But there’s lots of time to think about that. At the moment you’re serving humanity in the shape of one lady with a broken leg!”
Gloire laughed. “I like doing that,” she said. “But—”
Dr. Crowninshield came in.
“How’s Mrs. Pieter?” Miss Glanfield asked. Gloire got up and went to attend to her face.
“Better,” the old Doctor said. “I believe she’s going to pull through.” She looked shrewdly at the others. “And what have you two been up to?” she asked.
“Oh, swapping lies—reminiscing about climbing,” Miss Glanfield replied.
“H’m. ‘Relate stories by day, you will go crazy’—that’s what we say in Albania,” said Dr. Crowninshield.
Chapter Thirteen
Warren Langdon was sitting in the garden-room at Tirana, smoking and rather casually looking through the monitoring of the Bari wireless one afternoon about three weeks after Gloire had set off for Torosh; he was really thinking about her, and wondering how she was getting on up there. He and Miss Anne had been almost petrified with astonishment when Colonel Robinson had rung up from Lesh to report the accident, and informed them further that Mrs. Thurston was staying on with the Lek-Gionajs to take care of Miss Glanfield. “Well, I be darned!” Warren had ejaculated. “Doesn’t she want something sent after her—clothes or something?” Warren was accustomed to Gloire cabling all over the world to have something or other that she wanted expressed or shipped or flown to wherever she happened to be. “She didn’t say so,” the Colonel had replied. And hearing that Dr. Crowninshield was also there, and that nothing seemed to need doing, Warren had relaxed, still marvelling. It was pretty restful without Gloire, he conceded to himself, but he wondered frequently how she was making out.
The servant brought in a card. Warren took it from the silver tray—M. Nils Larsen, he read. He turned it in his long fingers, as if that would help him to place the name. No—he didn’t know anyone called Larsen, and yet he was sure he had heard the name lately; it was lodged in that curious upper limbo of the mind where the recent past, imperfectly attended to and therefore unpigeonholed, resides. Not being an Englishman, Warren did not always have to have a strong reason for seeing anyone; it was sufficient if there was no reason for not seeing them. There was no earthly reason for not seeing Mr. Larsen, whoever he might be, and he told the servant to bring him in.
He rose to greet a tall man, heavily built and yet athletic-looking, with a pale, rather heavy, Scandinavian face, a brow of great intelligence, pale grey eyes, and a great mouth severe as a lawyer’s. The stranger apologised civilly for disturbing him, and came to the point at once.
“You had, I believe, a Mrs. Thurston staying with you—so they tell me in the hotel; and that she is gone to the mountains, and there had an accident. I am come to enquire after her.”
“No, it wasn’t Mrs. Thurston who had the accident, it was the other one, Miss Glanfield. She broke her leg climbing some rocks up at Torosh, and Mrs. Thurston stayed on to look after her”
“Miss Glanfield? Pardon, but not Miss Susan Glanfield?”
“Susan’s the name,” Warren said, more and more intrigued by his visitor. “You know her too?”
“Yes—I did, years ago. But I did not know that she is here also.”
“It was Miss Glanfield who very kindly took Mrs. Thurston along on the trip,” Warren said, memories of his various embarrassments still lively. “She’s a mighty nice woman.”
“She should be. Young, she was very nice,” Larsen said, with a simplicity which amused Warren. “I am sorry she is hurt. She was a very fine climber in old days.”
“You a climber too? I suppose you were a friend of poor Tony Thurston’s?” Warren asked; his visitor did not look at all likely to be a friend of Gloire’s.
“No, I never knew him.”
“Oh, so you’re a friend of Gloire’s, are you?” Warren pursued.
“Not a friend, no. I am interested in her,” the stranger said surprisingly. “I should perhaps explain,” he said gravely, without any cheap ingratiating smile. “I met Mrs. Thurston in the train not long ago, and we talked much—about many things. I thought her unhappy, and her ideas false. I hope this does not offend you?”
“My dear man, I couldn’t agree more,” said Warren heartily; he was beginning to be delighted with this interruption to a hot dull afternoon. “She’s pretty spoilt, is poor Gloire, and uncommonly futile in most of her ideas.” He looked now keenly at his visitor from under his jutting eyebrows—the name Larsen popped up out of limbo, with where and when he had heard it: Gloire in the car, driving down from Cattaro—asking if he knew a man called Larsen, who was in the I.L.O. “Say, you didn’t advise her to come to Albania, by any chance?”
“I did—yes. But I did not expect that she would,” Larsen replied.
Warren laughed loudly.
“Oh, so you’re the guy that caused all the trouble!” he said. “Did you tell her
she had to go to Torosh at Whitsun, too?”
“I did this also—yes. Did it make trouble? I am sorry.
“Oh, nothing to worry over. She was just set on getting to Torosh, and it didn’t happen to be convenient. But for Miss Glanfield, who’s a most merciful person, she wouldn’t have gone. But we couldn’t make out why she was so keen on going there—Gloire’s not much of a one for unsophisticated places and missing her comforts, as a rule. Now we know,” Warren said, pushing a bell, and laughing again. “Have a drink? You like Old-Fashioneds?”
“Very much. Thank you.” But Larsen picked on one word in Warren’s remarks. His eyes, as deep-set as his host’s, but pale where the other’s were dark, regarded him earnestly. “Merciful—yes, she would now be that. She also thought, then, that Mrs. Thurston needed help?”
Warren’s phrase, like so many of our phrases, had in fact sprung from an intuition below the level of his conscious mind. He was a little embarrassed at having it pinned down; he had never thought whether Miss Glanfield was merciful or not—merely that she was intelligent and agreeable and “mighty nice”.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know that,” he disclaimed. “I just know that she took her along when Gloire asked her to.” He changed the subject. “Are you not in the I.L.O?”
“Yes.”
Pretty interesting, Warren thought that must be. Was he investigating in Albania?
“No, here I am on leave. I was in Sofia—the chocolate and the tobacco factories. There is not much industry in Albania to investigate.”
“No, thank God!” Warren exploded. “That’s what makes these people what they are. But what they should do, of course, is to grow fruit.”
Larsen was now as delighted as Mr. Langdon to meet such a kindred spirit. The deep-set grey eyes gazed earnestly into the deep-set brown ones.
“Oh, but how right you are! This is extraordinary.”
“What’s extraordinary?”
