The Numbered Account

by Ann Bridge

  Watkins was carrying her mistress’s wrap over her arm: that old-fashioned but delightful garment formerly known as an ‘Inverness Cape’—a long coat with a cloak slung over it from the shoulders; Mrs. Hathaway’s was in a discreet pepper-and-salt tweed, and looked immensely elegant when she put it on. Then they climbed in, and all sat together; Antrobus and Mrs. Hathaway got on like a house on fire, both staring out of the window on the watch for flowers, and pointing out to one another any treasure that they espied. ‘Oh, there’s Astrantia major! Mrs. Hathaway exclaimed in the lower meadows, ‘and the purple columbine—do look!’ Higher up in the beechwoods—‘Oh, quickly, Cephalanthera rubra!’ Antrobus said, pointing out some tall spikes of a reddish-pink orchis, just before the train plunged into a tunnel. The moment it emerged Antrobus’s head was at the window again, indicating the Martagon Lily, in bud, on the bank.

  Julia was more pleased with Antrobus than ever because of his niceness and considerateness with Mrs. Hathaway; after a brief halt at the small station of Breitlauenen (‘the Broad Avalanches’) it became really chilly in the draughty windowless little carriage. But still there was more to see, and the detective knew all about it.

  ‘Come over to the other side, now,’ he said. ‘In a big stony valley we’re just coming to on the right you might see a marmot.’ They all moved across the carriage—the train was not very full—and there on the stone-flecked slopes they actually caught a glimpse of two marmots before they fled whistling into their burrows, frightened, idiotic creatures, by the familiar noise of the train.

  ‘They look so like seals,’ Mrs. Hathaway said, delighted.

  At the top they went straight to the Alpine Garden; Antrobus was greeted warmly by the girl at the entrance who sold tickets. It is certainly a most charming place, the wild plants grouped in situations approximating to the natural habitat of each, and every group with a metal label bearing its name; little paths wander to and fro, up and down; at intervals there are seats on which to rest and admire the splendid view. Mrs. Hathaway moved slowly along the little paths, peering, examining, admiring. Presently they came on a girl in breeches and a blue gardener’s apron who knelt beside a new bed, carefully arranging stones and setting in some tiny plants; she too recognised Antrobus and got up, wiping the earth off her hands, to greet him in German with a rueful grin.

  ‘Ah, you caught us completely over Petasites niveus var: paradoxus! We learn from you!’

  ‘That one is a paradox,’ the man replied, smiling.

  ‘Please send us some more—you make us aufmerksam,’ the girl said, and knelt down to her task again.

  As they strolled on, Antrobus told Mrs. Hathaway about the two girls, youthful botanists from Zürich University, who took care of the garden; ‘They share that house down by the entrance, and eat at the hotel. They have a laboratory and a library, and prepare specimens. I often send them plants to identify, and they are so helpful and enthusiastic, bless them.’

  Mrs. Hathaway presently said that she would sit and rest for a little, and then make her way up to the restaurant. Antrobus instantly suggested that he and Julia should take a short walk outside the garden —‘There’s a gate at the top that one can get out by’—and return for lunch. Mrs. Hathaway openly applauded this idea; so, in her heart, did Julia.

  The Schynige Platte garden lies at just over six thousand feet, facing South, on the top of a ridge running East and West above the Lake of Brienz; as with the Niederhorn, on the northern side this ridge falls away in vertical cliffs and buttresses; one or two tall rocky towers stand up from it. A path leads under the nearest of these, known as Der Turm, and Julia and Antrobus wandered along it across the open slopes. Here they were soon among the anemones, the white and the yellow—drifts of great sulphur and silvery-white stars nearly two inches across, flowering up out of the rough pale grass—Julia fairly gasped at the sight. Then they climbed by narrow zigzags to the crest of the ridge through a miniature forest of Alpenrosen, the Alpine rhododendron, not yet in bloom, and the dwarf juniper, J. nanus; none were as much as two feet high, but it was a true forest all the same, on this minute scale. There were flowers too: the strange-looking Cerinthe and the tiny leafless veronica, V. apkylla, carrying its minute blue heads on bare stalks among the white rocks—Antrobus named them all, as botanists do out of pure love; Julia picked one or two of everything for Mrs. Hathaway.

  On the crest itself, where there is a small hut to shelter the wayfarer, with—so Swiss—a telephone, they sat on a sun-warmed rock, looking out in front of them at that splendid mountain group of Jungfrau, Mönch, and Eiger, all blazing and glittering under the sun. Up on the ridge there was nothing but ‘the peaks and the sky, and the light and the silence’—Julia herself was silent, suddenly moved; they sat so for a long moment. Then Antrobus turned from the snowy Jungfrau in the distance to the tawny-gold Jungfrau seated beside him.

  ‘I get the impression that this says something to you?’ he said.

  Julia didn’t answer at once. Then—‘I never realised that anything like it was possible,’ she said, slowly.

  ‘Those are almost exactly the words that Keyserling used about the Taj Mahal,’ he said, looking pleased. ‘But have you never been to Switzerland before?’

  ‘Only in winter—Zermatt. I can’t think why not, since it’s like this.’

  ‘Well when you’ve finished your cigarette we’ll see more flowers; we’re too high here for some things.’

  Julia went off at a tangent.

  ‘That’s the Lake of Brienz down there behind us, isn’t it?’ she asked, looking over her shoulder. ‘Is it true that it’s full of stores, sunk on the bottom?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. Who told you? Not that it isn’t common knowledge; the very bus-drivers taking tourists over the Furka-Pass show them the entrances to the underground barracks and hospitals, and the embedded gun-emplacements. In some ways the Swiss are strangely casual about security; curious, because their military dispositions are some of the most complicated in the world.’

  ‘Couldn’t the metal containers with all that butter and cheese be spotted from the air?’Julia asked—‘like those forts and circles that Crawford or someone used to photograph?’

  ‘Not very well. It’s much harder to photograph, or spot, objects under six hundred feet of water than under six feet, or a few inches, of soil. And strange planes cruising over these lakes would stir up a hornet’s nest of Swiss fighters to buzz them. But who told you?’ he persisted.

  Julia regretted her careless question. She was in an idyll at the moment, and the need to mention Colin jerked her back to the world of reality, in which this delightful companion at her side might be an enemy— the enemy. The thought hurt her surprisingly.

  ‘Oh, my cousin,’ she said airily, to conceal her discomfort.

  ‘The second Mr. Monro?’

  ‘Or would you say the first?’ she answered brusquely, turning to look him straight in the face.

  He smiled his gothic smile at her, and moved one hand in a gesture of brushing something away.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said gently. ‘I’m sorry I said that. Just for today can’t we sink Fatima and Bluebeard to the bottom of the Lake of Brienz along with the butter and cheese, and simply enjoy ourselves?’

  ‘I was enjoying myself,’ Julia said plaintively.

  ‘Well go on! Do please. I’m so sorry; this is all my fault. And by the way I think Julia a much prettier name than Fatima.’

  She blushed at that—hard-boiled as she was in many ways, Julia could never control her blushes, and the man watched the apricots ripening in her cheeks.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked rather defiantly. ‘Oh, Nethersole of course.’

  ‘Yes—don’t you remember that he said you would complete my education?’

  ‘At least you’re continuing mine!—all these names of flowers.’

  ‘Ah, they’re my besetting sin—flowers, and birds. Now I want to show you some more—come on.’

  They retur
ned down the zigzags to the path below the Turm; there he stopped, and looked at her feet.

  ‘What are your soles?—rubber or nails? Do you think you can manage this slope? It’s much quicker than going round by the garden.’

  Julia was wearing stout leather shoes with thick ridged rubber soles; she held one up for his inspection.

  ‘Yes, those ought to be all right. Better take my hand, though; this top bit is fairly steep.’ Without waiting for a reply he took her hand and led her down the rough grassy slope, tacking diagonally across and across it; he went rather fast and Julia, who had never acquired the mountaineers’ trick of the loose-kneed descent—toes out, heels in, and practically sitting back on one’s heels—found herself rather breathless when they reached the bottom. (Holding his hand was a faintly breathless affair, too.) Here in a grassy hollow stood three grey-shingled wooden sheds, long and low; these, Antrobus explained, were Senn-Hütte, the huts to which the peasants repaired when they brought their cows up to the high alpine pastures for the summer months—the great time for cheese-making. As they mounted up a rutted muddy track on the farther slope—‘Oh, here they are!’ he exclaimed. ‘Coming up to get the place ready.’

  Down the track towards them came several men, steadying two enormous wooden sledges, whose upcurved runners slithered in the greasy mud; the sledges were piled high with household and dairying effects—churns, cooking utensils, mattresses, blankets, tools, and topping all two wireless sets. These last made Julia laugh.

  ‘Oh, that’s the modern world,’ Antrobus said. ‘Today the radio is an essential, even for cheese-making.’ As they stood aside to let the clumsy sledges pass he greeted the men in a language incomprehensible to Julia; they laughed cheerfully as they replied.

  ‘What on earth were you talking to them?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Berner-Deutsch—their patois. It’s really more a very archaic form of German than anything else: for instance, instead of gewesen, for ‘been’, they say gesie, taken direct from sein, the infinitive of “to be”—and they usually swallow the last consonant if they can. I rather love it—Germans think it hideous, of course.’

  ‘How did you learn it?’

  ‘I used to come here as a child—for “glands”—and played about with the peasant children. And I’ve gone on coming a good deal ever since.’

  ‘Oh yes—you climb, don’t you?’ By now they had reached the lip of the grassy hollow, and were on the broad track leading to the Faulhorn, and the great range opposite was again visible, glittering under the noonday sun. ‘Have you been up those?’ she asked, gesturing at it.

  ‘Several of them, yes. The Jungfrau three times, the Eiger twice, the Mönch only once. And the Morgenhorn—do you see that very silver one? It’s the first to catch the sunlight in the morning as you look up from Interlaken; that’s why they call it that.’

  ‘Pretty,’Julia said. ‘Any others?’

  ‘Yes, the Lauterbrunnen Breithorn, right at the end of the row.’

  ‘The one that looks like a neolithic axe-head, only white?’

  He laughed.

  ‘What a good comparison! Yes. I was only fifteen when I did that; it was my first real mountain.’ He turned to her. ‘You’ve never climbed?’

  ‘No—it never came my way.’

  ‘You should,’ Antrobus said, displaying the missionary spirit which is so strong in mountaineers. ‘I think you would—well, find the right things in it.’

  They wandered slowly on along the Faulhorn path, talking as they went; crossing a low ridge they came suddenly on another of those patches of discoloured snow half-filling a grassy saucer, surrounded by the white crocuses as by a miniature snow-storm, held motionless three inches above the wintry turf.

  ‘That’s what I wanted you to see,’ the man said.

  ‘It’s exquisite,’ Julia responded. A little farther on they came to another hollow, whence the snow had altogether departed, but only recently; here the soldanellas were growing in hundreds, their foolish little fringed lilac bells, with such an odd look of tiny paper caps out of Christmas crackers, nodding over the brownish earth—Julia was enchanted. He told her then about the Faulhorn path—‘It’s so broad and firm because it’s really an old mule-track, probably dating back to the Middle Ages, by which goods were carried from Interlaken over to the Grosse Scheidegg, and so down to Rosenlaui or Grindelwald; in either case it was a short-cut in the summer months—saved miles.’ They were so happy and easy together, there on the sunny mountainside, that Julia at last had the confidence to ask him, outright, what he was really up to? She felt she had to know—one mustn’t lose one’s heart to an enemy.

  But the attempt was a failure, lightly and gaily as she did it—‘Which Mr. Monro are you really shadowing?’ As he had done at Victoria he smiled, put a finger to his lip, and shook his head; then, serious all of a sudden, he took her hand and held it firmly. ‘My dear, I can’t tell you,’ he said, very gently. ‘Let it alone, please. I asked you just now, up there by the Turm, to sink Fatima and Bluebeard to the bottom of the lake. Whatever happens later, for this one day, this one lovely day, do let us just be Julia and John.’

  Her failure and his tenderness together quite overset Julia. She turned aside—she could not walk on, for he was still holding her hand in a firm clasp—both to conceal an unexpected stinging of tears in her eyes, and to think of an answer and then control her voice for it. He pressed her hand, watching her averted head, and pursued—‘ Can’t you just say—“Yes, John,” and leave it at that?—for today?’

  She took a moment or two over it—oh, how difficult! Her watch was on her free wrist, and she looked at it. Then she turned back to face him.

  ‘“We maun totter down, John”—we shall be late else,’ she said.

  The man, in his turn, was plainly a little shaken by the quotation. ‘Oh!’ That was all he said, but he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it before he let it go. ‘But really we maun totter up!—quite a long way,’ he added, lightening the thing. ‘We mustn’t keep your delightful friend waiting. What a charmer she is.’

  As they walked back along the mediaeval mule-track and then up a short steep ascent to the hotel, Antrobus pursued the subject of Mrs. Hathaway, who had evidently taken his fancy. ‘Is she inquisitive too?’ he presently asked.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Julia said. ‘If I mayn’t ask questions, nor may you!’

  He laughed—‘So sorry.’ Bu during lunch in the sunny glassed-in verandah of the hotel Julia got the impression that Antrobus was rather warily assessing Mrs. Hathaway. At one point she mentioned Gersau, and Herr Waechter.

  ‘Oh, you know him?’ the man said. ‘Such a wonderful house—and what a patriarch!’

  ‘Well, if that is how you describe a childless widower,’ Mrs. Hathaway observed, ironically.

  Antrobus laughed, and they went on to discuss that so essentially Swiss thing, the long bourgeois pedigrees and the continuing industry and wealth, in the same families. ‘No “Death of a Class” here,’ Antrobus said at length.

  ‘No. But don’t you have to take neutrality into consideration?’ Mrs. Hathaway said. ‘The Swiss have escaped two wars, and therefore the penal taxation resulting from those wars. But if others had not fought, and died, and then been taxed almost out of existence, would Switzerland still be free, and able to revel in her neutrality? I have often thought that neutrality, like patriotism, is really not quite enough.’

  Julia, who knew that Mrs. Hathaway had lost two sons in their late teens in World War I watched with closest interest to see how Antrobus would deal with this.

  ‘That is quite true,’ he said carefully. ‘I was oversimplifying. But I still think that the social structure has something to do with it. The Swiss really only have two classes: peasants—who as a class are always immortal—and the bourgeoisie. In England we have at least four: the aristocracy; the upper-middle and professional class; the artisans; and again the peasants—whom we call ‘country-people’; and of these the
first two are of course by far the most vulnerable.’

  ‘And possible the most valuable,’ Mrs. Hathaway said, a little sharply. ‘No—of course true “peasants” always preserve their precious country values, in spite of the wireless.’ She considered. ‘Perhaps a two-class society has a greater survival value,’ she said slowly.

  Julia put in her oar.

  ‘But surely in Bolshevik Russia, where they aimed at a “class-less society”, they’re now busy creating a new aristocracy all over again, of technicians?’

  ‘A technocracy,’ Antrobus corrected her. ‘Specialised knowledge has its uses, but there is nothing particularly good about it. The word aristos means “best”, don’t forget.’ Mrs. Hathaway was pleased; she laughed.

  Julia was keeping an eye on the time, and on Mrs. Hathaway for signs of fatigue; they finished their meal rather hurriedly, and caught an early train down. Antrobus went with them as far as Breitlauenen, where he got out to walk down to Wilderswyl, hunting for flowers in the beech forests on the way. ‘I’ll bring you anything amusing that I find,’ he assured Mrs. Hathaway.

  Julia had already procured, and carried round in her handbag, a time-table of the Beatenberg buses. This showed her that they would have nearly an hour’s wait in Interlaken, and as the Hotel zum Fluss was quite close to the Ost-Bahnhof, curiosity prompted her to suggest that they should fill in the pause by having coffee there, and then drive down to the West-Bahnhof for their bus. Mrs. Hathaway of course agreed; she liked her coffee after lunch, and in their haste they had missed this up at the Schynige Platte—so to the Fluss they went.