The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  The strain between them was made worse by the fact that, after the death of Stanley’s father in September of 1945, only weeks after the end of the war, Stanley had quit the family meat-canning company and was looking forward to a leisurely existence of living off his inheritance. Unfortunately for Stanley, his father had anticipated this and, being a man of solid work ethics, had placed his brother Henry in charge of the inheritance. With this came the discretionary power to distribute the money to Stanley in whatever amounts Carton saw fit.

  The result of this was that Stanley soon found himself employed as his uncle’s assistant at the club. Here, Carton had calculated, he could not only keep an eye on his nephew but could also ensure that he earned an honest living.

  “Is your uncle still making you miserable?” I asked Stanley, remembering the days when they had not hated each other quite so much.

  “I should say he is,” Stanley growled. “I’m not his assistant. I’m his bloody servant. He tells people I’m his Nitty Gritty Man and has me doing all the boring paperwork. Whenever I stick my head up from the accounts books, he starts making suggestions as to how I could better myself. I know that nothing would please him more than to hear I’d taken up mountaineering again. But he’d better not hold his breath, what little he’s got of it. He may have talked me into climbing once, but I’m damned if he’ll do it again.”

  Both Stanley and his uncle were equally obstinate. That was why I had no hope for any reconciliation between them.

  “Why don’t you just get another job?” I had asked him this question before, and he never liked answering it.

  “I can’t be bothered,” he said.

  But the truth was, and we both knew it, that his uncle did not work him very hard, and to earn as much as Carton paid him Stanley would have had to find a real job, with real hours and slim holidays. As it was, Stanley’s efforts at the club were slack at best, no matter how hard Carton tried to push him. He kept irregular hours, took endless lunch breaks, and seemed to be under the impression that the Christmas holiday lasted until February. More than this, it seemed to me that the two men had grown so accustomed to being at each other’s throats that they had, in a way, forgotten how to exist any differently.

  “Look, you really haven’t heard of her?” demanded Stanley, returning to the topic of his latest romance.

  “What’s her name again?” I asked.

  “Helen Paradise. I told you.”

  I shrugged myself a little deeper into my chair. “I’d remember a name like that.”

  “You’d remember if you saw her, too.” He held a wine bottle upside down over his glass, shaking the last drops from its dark green mouth. “I first spotted her when she came in to hear a lecture in the last series we had at the club. Well, then we happened to get talking—”

  “You mean you threw yourself at her feet.”

  He ignored me. “—and then it turned out she was also a mountaineer and then she got invited to give the next lecture series.”

  “You mean you begged your uncle to let her give a talk.”

  “I didn’t beg,” he sniffed. “I just mentioned it to him as a possibility.”

  “How many times did you mention it?”

  “As many as it took,” he said exasperatedly. “Anyway, she’s exactly my type.”

  “I don’t know about your taste in women,” I muttered. By this, I meant that I knew all too much about it. There had been several dismal and expensive failures. Many times I had accompanied Stanley and whatever woman had currently captured his heart to the fanciest restaurants in London: the Ash Grove, Tamesin’s, and La Borsa. There were moments in those evenings when the sweat of witty banter was glistening on Stanley’s forehead and I would catch the eye of these sad and beautiful women—they were always beautiful and always sad—and we would tell each other with a glance that this was not going to work. And while these glances were exchanged, Stanley would continue to ramble through his usual jokes, Adam’s apple quivering in his throat like a bobber on a fishing line. It wasn’t Stanley who made these women sad. They were sad before they met him and for reasons that had nothing to do with his feverish charm. Stanley and I referred to them as “Melancholy Angels,” and often debated whether they were sad because they were so beautiful or whether their sadness was, in some twisted way, the very source of their loveliness.

  Whatever the answer, Stanley was drawn helplessly to this sadness just as the women were drawn to his laughter and precariously punch-lined anecdotes, and his money, of which he had more than most people, despite his uncle’s choke hold on the trust fund. The difference was that these women were drawn to him only in a transitory way, as a diversion from their sadness, and when they no longer found him diverting, they would leave. Stanley, on the other hand, lived in a world of perpetual hope in which true love was not a thing to be ridiculed and, if found, would last forever.

  There were nights when Stan and I walked back to the club, having said good night to the woman, and I would dread the moment when he’d ask how I thought it had gone. We both knew exactly how it had gone, and Stanley would be in the process of what seemed to be one long exhaling of breath, as he slowly returned to himself. With me, he had no reason to be anything other than who he was, and if he had been this same person when he was with the ladies, they might have liked him better for it. Or perhaps the Melancholy Angels would have steered clear of him to begin with. But something clicked in him when he was trying to impress these ladies, and he became like a dancing bear, lumbering about on the stage, without reward, without dignity, without a chance.

  I would never tell him it was useless. It was important to let Stanley decide that for himself. I would always say, “There are possibilities.”

  And so, for a while at least, he would bask in the glow of potential. It was what the French call l’extase langoureuse. An ecstasy of languishing.

  The next day, or the day after, we would be talking about something completely different and Stanley would suddenly exclaim, “No, it’s pointless.”

  Then I would know he had put away his dreams, at least with this particular woman. And as for the woman, we might see her again at some party, on the arm of some other languishing and grinning man. She was also languishing, but it had nothing to do with the men whose hearts she broke. What she languished for, no joke could mend, no bottle of champagne, no warmth of adoration.

  “You must meet her,” he said.

  “I’d be happy to,” I lied, because it was understood that I would lie.

  “She’s doing another lecture at the Climbers’ Club tonight,” he continued. “You could come along. I’ll introduce you.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Your uncle and I haven’t spoken in years.”

  “All the more reason for you to come! Besides, I don’t need you to meet him. I need you to meet her.”

  “What sort of climbing has she done, anyway?”

  “Well, she’s just returned from photographing a lot of the mountains down in the Alps, including that one which is named after my uncle.”

  Carton’s Rock, as it had been named, was a jagged pinnacle of stone and ice which rose almost sheer out of a glacier called La Lingua del Dragone, the Dragon’s Tongue. It lay in a section of the Italian Alps known as the Val Antigorio, north of Turin, and jutting up towards the St. Gotthard Pass. The Dragone glacier covered a large area in the mountains west of the town of Formazza. It was here that Carton had found himself, in the summer of 1905, having taken a wrong turn at the village of Crevoladossola on his way down from Switzerland to Milan.

  By the time he realized his mistake, he had traveled a considerable distance north along the only road which ran through the Antigorio Valley and stopped to spend the night in Formazza before retracing his steps towards Milan.

  At a guesthouse in Formazza, Carton met another Englishman, whose intention had been to travel out across the Dragone glacier. Until that time, the glacier, and in fact the whole area around it, had received ve
ry few visitors. Bigger mountains and less dangerous glaciers could be found just across the border in Switzerland.

  It had never been Carton’s intention to go out on the ice. Until he met the Englishman, he had not even known of the glacier’s existence. He had not intended to do any mountaineering on his trip, and had come to the Alps only on the advice of his doctor, as a cure for the asthma he’d had since childhood. After hearing the Englishman’s description of the wild and barren landscape of the glacier, Carton grew curious. He would have remained merely interested if the Englishman had not revealed that he was suffering from gout and would not be able to make use of the guide he had hired. The Englishman kindly offered to let the guide take Carton instead, and even offered him the use of his mountaineering equipment.

  Invigorated as much by the Englishman’s stories as by the Alpine air, Carton accepted. The next day, instead of heading south on his original course, Carton traveled west along a dirt road to the village of Palladino; no more than a cluster of houses on the banks of a lake called Vannino. Palladino was the last outpost before the mountains, and the closest starting point for a voyage across the Dragone glacier.

  At Palladino, Carton was met by the guide, who, after hearing Carton’s explanation, agreed to take him instead.

  At first light the following day, the two-man team set off.

  Two weeks later, Carton staggered into Palladino alone, starving, snow-blind, with the skin sunburned off his nose and cheeks and his fingers so badly frostbitten that he spent a week with his hands in a bath of vinegar before he regained feeling in them.

  The story he told was that after several days of grueling exertion over the ice of the Dragon’s Tongue and up the Dragon’s Teeth, the two men reached the tallest of these jagged peaks, shook hands, and started down again across the glacier. They were roped together, testing the snow ahead of them with their long ice axes. At some point on the descent, the guide fell through a thin patch of snow, beneath which lay a crevasse hundreds of feet deep. Carton was able to roll onto his stomach and jam his ax into the snow to provide an anchor. The ax caught fast in ice which lay beneath the snow, stopping his slide, but when the rope came taut it broke. The guide fell into the abyss, leaving Carton by himself up on the glacier. It took Carton seven days to find his way back to Palladino.

  Despite an exhaustive search, the body of the guide was never found.

  Having seen that glacier for myself, I knew how lucky Carton had been to survive. To call the glacier the Dragon’s Tongue, and Carton’s Rock the Dragon’s Teeth, was no mistake.

  When Carton returned to London, his hands bandaged and face still badly burned, he was front-page news in every paper in the country. Inspired by the unexpected attention, he rented out a small dance hall in Ealing and gave a lecture to a half-filled space about his experiences, which he titled “Peril in the Heights.” It soon became clear that Carton knew very little about mountaineering, but this did not seem to matter. What mattered was that he had survived in spite of how little he knew. Even more important, he knew how to tell the story, hurling himself across the stage, flailing his arms in the air, retrieving from his ice-burned brain the most obscure but telling details.

  The next week, he rented out the hall again. This time the place was full.

  Throughout the months ahead, two, three, four times, the same people showed up to hear Carton describe the sight of the guide as he slipped away to his death. The eyes of the audience grew wide as he held up his hands and spoke of his frozen fingernails turning black and falling off, of the blood he coughed into the snow as the altitude punished his lungs.

  Despite what he had endured, he always finished his talks by speaking of the view once he had arrived at the summit. He told his audience it was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen, like something out of a dream. This view, which only he had ever glimpsed and lived to tell of, since Carton’s Rock remained unclimbed except by him and the unfortunate guide, became a thing of mythic beauty, beyond all earthly comparison.

  In these lectures, Carton steered clear of formal mountaineering terminology, most of which would have been meaningless to his audience. Instead of verglas, for example, he said “icy rock.” Instead of firnspiegel, he said “icy snow.” Col became ridge, couloir became gully, and so on.

  The lecture series went so well that the following year, after spending his summer traveling through the Alps, he rented a larger dance hall. The second year’s lecture series, given twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday nights, was augmented with paintings of the Alps which Carton hung on easels on the stage. Wearing a tweed mountaineering suit and carrying an ice ax, he walked among these paintings as if he were the “Wild Huntsman” of German mythology.

  The hall was always full.

  I myself had been to see him, when he came to give a lecture in Oxford. I’d only gone because Stanley had nagged me and Stanley, who had never been to one of Carton’s talks, had gone only because his uncle had promised him a free dinner at the Randolph Hotel afterwards.

  If I had to name the single thing which first drew me to mountaineering, it would be the darkly resonant voice of Henry Carton. Even Stanley, who had almost turned into an art form his ability to remain unimpressed by everything he saw or heard or did, became swept up in the momentum of his uncle’s words.

  Carton spoke with such urgency that it seemed as if his very life depended on our seeing what he was trying to describe. He talked in epic phrases. Even the way he paused to catch his breath had something grand about it. Sometimes he clawed at the air, grasping for images like a man catching leaves as they fluttered to the ground before him. Other times, his head thrashed from side to side, as if the colors which vibrated in his head would burn through the bone casing of his skull if he did not set them free with words.

  For Carton, the Alps were the ultimate proving ground. Up there, all that one could be and all that one was would become clear. Carton was the only man I had ever heard use the word honor who wasn’t trying to sell me something. In the Alps, Carton told us, no climber could be sheltered by his wealth, or by his social connections, or his clever turns of phrase. In the mountains, you learned who you were, for better and for worse.

  “There are those who climb,” he said, “and those who dream of climbing. For some, the dream is all they need, and perhaps they are the lucky ones. But not all of us can be content with dreams alone. We are drawn up to the stony rafters of the world, like migrating animals who travel thousands of miles without knowing why they do this, only knowing that they must. Those who have been to these places know that they are not only worlds of rock and snow and ice. They are worlds of bleak but unforgettable beauty. To those who climb, the mountains are part of a dream, which we all have when we are young. It is the dream of wanting more than anything to know who you really are. The poet Friedrich von Schiller once wrote, ‘Hold Fast to the Dreams of Your Youth.’ This we must all do, or else we risk forgetting what it means to be alive.”

  Carton finished his lectures so exhausted that it was hard to imagine how he would ever be able to speak of the mountains again. But he did. Night after night, his energy never subsiding.

  It wasn’t long before he bought the dance hall outright and rebuilt it as his own club. Few of its members were actual climbers. The Climbers’ Club had no membership criteria other than that people had to be interested in mountains or, failing that, at least interested in Carton.

  Carton also gave private lectures, in which he guaranteed to reveal information “too horrific” for his regular audiences. For this, he charged extraordinary amounts of money and never revealed the names of those people who received the private lectures. He also swore these private audiences to secrecy, forbidding them to disclose the “terrifying facts” kept hidden from the regular audiences. Because no one knew who these private audiences were, the rumors surrounding their identities soon included most of the famous people in Britain, including the royal family. And because swearing a group of people t
o secrecy was a virtual invitation to gossip, more rumors emerged concerning the “facts.”

  This was, of course, exactly what Carton had hoped for.

  One story was that Carton had discovered the remains of an actual dragon frozen in the ice and had shown his high-paying audience one of its teeth. Another story was that Carton had been guided back to safety by the ghost of a mountaineer who had died on the Dragon’s Tongue over a century before. Carton never admitted to any of these, but he never denied them, either, so the rumors flourished.

  Carton was a force of nature, so much larger than life that he became, in the eyes of his audiences, as mystical a presence as the mountains he described.

  His only critic was a man named Joseph Pringle. Pringle was a small, slope-shouldered man with big ears and impossibly small eyes. He rarely smiled, and his fashion sense had come to a halt some fifty years before. His clothes were almost exclusively black, and instead of a tie, or any modern concept of a tie, he wore a large floppy neck scarf knotted into a bow. The neck scarf shambled off down his front and across the lapels of his heavy woolen coat, which buttoned all the way up to the throat but on which only the top button was fastened.

  Pringle had spent many years climbing, particularly in the Alps, and had several first ascents to his name. Like Carton, Pringle had originally been sent to the Alps by a Harley Street doctor, although in Pringle’s case in the hopes of curing chronic eczema. Pringle’s eczema remained unchanged, but he fell in love with the Alps and soon became what was known as a “peak bagger,” obsessed with being the first to climb as many mountains as he could. One story often told about Pringle was that while vacationing in Turin, he read about a man who was attempting a small but unclimbed peak in the Cottian Alps near Monte Viso. Unable to rein in his competitiveness, Pringle decided he would get there first and steal the prize of first ascent. He raced up to the mountains, half-killed himself climbing the peak, and when he returned, ready to gloat about his victory, learned that this unnamed man attempting the climb was, in fact, himself.