Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  Peter told me to tell you that if you would like to come and live with us out here for a time he’d be honoured to have you, and you know I’d love it.

  All my love,

  Emily

  PS.--Gerry is too cut up to write just yet, but he will.

  D.C.’S BUNGALOW

  RUDWAL, PUNJAB

  July 22nd 1912

  Dearest Daddy,

  Did you get Peter’s cablegram? In case you didn’t, it was a boy after all, just as Peter said it would be, and we’re going to call him Rodney after his great-grandfather, the old general. He weighed 7 lb. 14 oz. and began making a terrible noise right after he was born--that was last Saturday week, very early in the morning, soon after I got to Lahore, and was the old surgeon grumpy at having to leave the Pig at that hour! I was feeling very exhausted for the first few days and only now that I am back with Peter in Rudwal can I really understand what’s happened, that I’m a mother, that I have a son. I wish Mally could have lived just this long.

  Perhaps he’ll be a mountaineer, like his father. But I hope not, really. For one thing, Peter won’t leave him any mountains to conquer... I don’t like that word but have got used to using it. Peter is silly about him. He was lifting him on his knee and asking me when he was going to be able to walk--at ten days! He has big ears rather like yours, but the rest of him is all Savage as far as I can see. He is a very greedy little baby, too, and I almost have to smack him to tell him that it’s the end of dinner-time.

  Peter is doing very well. He was officially commended by the Lt.-Governor the other day for the way he dealt with a very complicated religious dispute we had here between the Dogras and the Mohammedans. And a few days earlier Peter’s judgement in a civil case was appealed to the high court in Lahore and the plaintiff hired the most expensive lawyer there, an Englishman, but the judge said that the ruling of the district magistrate in the case (that was Peter), ‘although at first sight so unexpected as to be almost startling, on deeper study showed itself to be most penetrating of the real intent of the framers of this singularly obscure piece of legislation’ (I am copying from the Civil and Military!) ‘and that it must stand, as it probably will for generations to come, as a model of clear, forceful, and original thinking.’

  It’s just as well, as he has already written the letter telling the Commissioner he intends to take twelve weeks’ leave next year, for the big attempt on Meru, and will need a hot-weather replacement here. Junior men in the I.C.S. just don’t get that much leave every two years, but Peter made it clear that they are going to have no alternative, except to throw him out, and they know that if they even thought of that there’d be a terrible outcry here--and, of course, from Gerry in the Lords. He is asking one other Englishman besides Harry and Gerry, someone called James Lyon. You may have heard of him. Also two French guides, Lapeyrol and Cadez, from Chamonix.

  The household staff has been increased by an ayah and the ayah’s little girl, aged three, since I came back with Rodney. I have always had an ayah, of course, a sort of personal maid (aged fifty), but she wouldn’t stay because she said she didn’t like babies. Actually I think it was too dull for her here, and I didn’t have gentlemen friends calling as soon as Peter went to the office, which I understand was the custom at her last employment in Simla--from which she got enormous tips.

  The heat was appalling this year, and now the rains have broken and mould starts to grow on clothes if you leave them for more than a few days in the wardrobes.

  All my love, Emily

  PS.--A letter has just arrived saying that an assistant secretary and another man are coming up from Madras to look at the co-operative breeding station Peter started here a year ago!

  PPS.--Please tell the broker to sell another thousand shares of Central Copper for me, please and credit the proceeds to my account at Martin’s.

  D.C.’S BUNGALOW

  RUDWAL, PUNJAB

  May 9th, 1913

  Dearest Daddy,

  Just a hurried line as the expedition has reached Bombay and telegrams are flying back and forth about lost kit and stuff being held up in customs. The Times has sole rights to the story, and Peter’s been writing a long article describing the preparations. I do hope they succeed as it will be terribly disappointing for him otherwise, especially the way he has been writing, as though there is no chance of failure, but the weather is not subject to anyone, not even Peter, and there are times when no one could climb Meru, or even Cader Brith.

  We are so much looking forward to seeing Gerry again. He has been doing splendidly in the Lords, from what we read. But I hope he has been able to keep fit, too. Peter spends his days in court, but is in training all the time, I don’t know how.

  Rodney is screaming his head off and I must see that ayah makes his bottle right. I caught her one day putting a little gin into it when he had been very fretful with his teeth.

  All my love, Emily

  But when she had laid down the pen and sealed up the envelope she did not go and supervise the making of Rodney’s bottle. Outside it was raining, and Peter was at court, and she sat quietly, thinking how little, in all her letters, she had told of the truth of her marriage or even of her life. This failure, which she felt amounted almost to concealment, was yet not deliberate. Only how can you tell even parents whom you love about the inwardness of marriage? Mally would have been able to read more between the lines, but when she died there was only Daddy, and to him you had to speak directly--and that she could not do. She had wanted to make them understand that her marriage was going as she had expected, for she had known very well that Peter Savage could be no ordinary husband, but there was no way of telling them, or anyone, without making them think the opposite.

  There had been chilly, almost silent battles with Peter--about Gerry, about Adam Khan, the Old Captain, Rodney, housekeeping, a hundred things. She never won, in the sense that he gave in to her; but often, after she had been roused to the same high pitch of intensity that was normal with him, she had made him see that she was right, and then he had agreed with her and done what she wanted him to. He never held these ‘victories’ against her, as she knew that many husbands did; and, best of all, he never said that something was not her business. If she chose to argue with him about farming, or the Moslem inheritance laws, he would listen and treat her with no more and no less abruptness than he used to the Commissioner.

  That was good; and the sense of climbing was good, for there could be no doubt that he was brilliant as well as ferociously determined. If he merely sat back and took what was coming to him the service would soon waft him to its highest pinnacles. But of course he would not do that. That would be the easy way, and he would take the difficult, the impossible. Because no I.C.S. man had been Viceroy of India since John Lawrence in 1860--because it had been, since that time, a foundation of government policy that no I.C.S. man should be Viceroy--therefore Peter would be Viceroy. She knew now that that had become his intention. He had even decided when it should happen: in succession to Gerry, probably about 1930. 1930! Seventeen years ahead! The good Lord alone knew what might have happened in India by then--but Peter intended to meet the destiny of India at that point, and from there on take it into his strong hands, with Gerry, by then translated to the India Office, guarding his back against the politicians at home.

  There was excitement in the vistas he described to her. When they were alone in the bungalow late at night, and the work done, he would talk; better still, in the big tent on the cold- weather tours, with the flap raised and the stars flaming over the remote snows. All the Presidency governors were going to be Indians, instead of lords from home. Each province would govern itself according to the customs of its people. The Himalayan torrents would be harnessed to give the country electric power. An Indian Sandhurst would train Indian officers; and there would be ten colleges of engineering and agriculture for every one there was now. He would re-create the Indian middle class, and give its members training, work, and responsi
bility. He . . . he . . . All these and a thousand other seeds lay in his mind, ready to flower.

  Then she remembered that in Lahore they were already calling him (but not to his face, for they too knew where he was going) the Koi-Hai Napoleon, and the Duke of Rudwal, and the Lord of All Asia. Remembering, she felt a pang of savage contempt for them all; then she shook her head. Peter held no one in contempt; he believed most literally that God had made man in His own image; it was man’s fearful refusal to recognize his tremendous destiny that he despised.

  Only--that was not true, not in the way Peter believed. He would break a hundred men before he reached his own horizons and however greatly she valued him she could not think the price worth paying. She thought that if she could make him see only that, she would have fulfilled the purpose of her life, far more than in giving birth to Rodney or being her husband’s wife and lover.

  Soon Gerry would be here again, and he and Peter would go off on that other journey of mountaineering where she could not be a partner because she was a woman and when she reached the physical ends of her strength they would still be no farther than at the foot of the garden. It would be wonderful to have Gerry close even for a few days, wonderful and nerve-racking. She had spent the best part of twenty years seeing him as a husband and lover, and he had never been in focus. Then Peter gave the lens one fierce twist, in that moment of discovery under the loom of the Matterhorn, and showed her the truth. Gerry was her younger brother, even her son. She wanted to look after him, and when she saw him going about with Peter, unchained, beside him, it was about Gerry’s safety that she thought--as it would have been if Peter had suddenly tried to eat the baby Rodney. But (she smiled ruefully) baby Rodney could look after himself. He seemed to need nothing from her, now that she had weaned him. He had an almost appalling determination, and knew many ways both of protecting himself and of getting what he wanted. If Gerry and that baby were left out in the sun it would not be Gerry who would find, crawl to, and occupy the only piece of shade.

  And Harry Walsh would be here. It was a pity that Peggy had not been able to come. Next time, perhaps--but there must not be a next time. Peter had set his feet on the mountain Meru, and if he did not climb it the earth would fall, and she and Gerry and Adam Khan with it.

  Chapter 13

  Tonight, because the expedition would be with them tomorrow, she had had the long candles lighted in the dining-room and put on her best evening dress and told the bearer to serve champagne. She could still afford that, she thought ruefully, although she--and Peter--were certainly making a hole in her money.

  It was a hot night, but what else should it be in the middle of May in Rudwal, where her husband worked and where she had made a home? The smell of wood-smoke drifted in across the city, across the polished English table, reminding her among the crystal and the damask that all over the country and the world men and women ate together, being married, and their babies slept in another room, and in those things alone achieved the fullness of human destiny.

  Across from her, Peter looked almost relaxed, sitting a little back in his chair, the candle lights rippling with the irregular breeze from the punkah, moving in waves across his white dinner jacket and black cummerbund, glowing in points of dull gold down his shirt and at his cuffs. All her gifts, she thought with a secret smile--those, and the expensive wines, and the Shiraz carpets, even the expedition to Meru--all paid for by her money, and yet not exactly gifts, for Peter had merely taken the money and got what he--or they--wanted. Three years ago she might have thought it somehow wrong that he should, but not now, any more than she had thought it wrong when she began the pregnancy that gave her Rodney.

  Tonight he looked less like a hawk than he had for a long while, and she smiled again. Tomorrow the mountains would be upon them, and that great peak which might claim Gerry’s life (she could not believe it would take Peter’s; it might try). Tonight she would show him that between them, as a by-product of three and a half years of marriage, they had created a world with satisfactions and triumphs as great as anything Meru could offer. She looked lovely, and she knew that she did, and tonight in the luminous darkness of the veranda, looking out across the flowers and the rooftops, Pachmann would play for them and they would sit with fingers touching, their son asleep under the dim, barred twilight in his room; and without words she would show Peter that this too was the intention of God. Perhaps he would remember on the mountain, in the cold fury of those hours when the world would not bend to his will and men broke in his hands.

  When the meal was over, silently he walked round the table to her, stepping like a cat, and bent down and kissed her ear. She stood up, leaning a moment back against him, and they went together, hand in hand, through the drawing-room, through the opened french windows, and out on to the veranda. She began to wind up the gramophone (hers, but who could listen to it as Peter could?).

  Peter said: ‘Chopin,’ and she smiled at him. The music began, the notes falling as clear and clean as white pebbles into the silence. She sank down into one side of the conversation chair she had had put there and patted the other half. Peter had lighted a cheroot, and for a moment she thought he would not come but would pace silently up and down the long veranda behind her, listening to the music with the intentness of a piano-tuner. But after a while he stood over her, and the glow dimmed on the end of the cigar; he sank down. She reached out her hand and touched him. Peace, with love, was so very near, and coming nearer in the joining of their fingers.

  ‘Huzoor sahib!’

  ‘No!’ She found herself on her feet, her eyes dry and angry, glaring at the doorway. It was the office chuprassi who stood there, his red coat like fire in the night.

  ‘A visitor has come for the Deputy Commissioner Sahib,’ the chuprassi said serenely in Punjabi, secure in his government coat against any chatterings of women.

  Peter turned slowly. She knew, miserably, that she had been very near success, for he turned unwillingly; his face was still soft and his voice, when he spoke, as tender as the kind of love she had been leading him towards.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘The Old Captain’s son, Adam Khan.’

  He stood a moment longer against her, then put the cheroot back in his mouth. The spark began to burn, and his voice hardened. ‘I’ll see him in the study.’

  When he had gone she sat down again and heard the rhythmic scratching of the needle at the end of the record. She turned it over without thinking, wound the machine, and sat down again.

  Time passed, but she did not know how much until she felt Peter’s hand on her neck and his fingers pushing up, widespread and angry, into her back hair.

  ‘Is he all right?’ she asked at last, wishing she did not have to worry about anything except themselves, but knowing she could not gain any peace, let alone lead Peter towards it, unless she knew what had driven Adam Khan here at this hour.

  ‘No,’ Peter said.

  ‘What is the matter?’

  He sat down. ‘The C.G.G., I suppose. Only it isn’t. It’s Adam.’

  ‘I thought he wasn’t supposed to come to you.’

  ‘He isn’t. But he came tonight because he doesn’t believe he’s fit to guide the C.G.G. any more. He’s lost his confidence. Put it another way--he doesn’t believe that his ideas are better than theirs. Put it still another way--he’s finding it damn cold and lonely being out by himself. He wants to get back into the pen with the rest of them. He doesn’t trust himself as a leader any more. He wants to be one of a committee of privates.’

  Now he was pacing up and down as he spoke, taking short turns, the cigar dead in his hand. She did not speak. Poor Adam. Poor Peter.

  He went on, speaking in a low, hard voice. ‘Oh, I talked him out of it. But what kind of India are we going to make with men like that?’

  ‘It’s democracy, I suppose,’ she said hesitantly.

  ‘It’s democracy without a head,’ he said coldly. ‘Democracy has to have the last say, as to
whether it agrees or disagrees, but it won’t--it can’t lead. Did Abraham Lincoln lead, or was he pushed? You know he led. Pitt led, England followed. A leader’s no better than his followers, of course, but by God, followers without a leader are no good at all.’ He sat down abruptly in the chair and said: ‘Let’s forget the C.G.G. now, and even Adam.’

  She turned to the gramophone. Peter’s face was taut as he sank into the chair. Still, perhaps in time she could coax him back to the place where they had been, especially as he seemed to have found it so hard to drag himself away from it.

  ‘Huzoor sahib!’

  This time it was Peter who jumped to his feet, his voice edged like a razor. ‘What?’

  ‘Sahib log a-gye.’

  Peter said: ‘What sahib log? At this time of night? Kitne?’

  ‘Panchh, huzoor.’

  ‘Five!’

  ‘Lord Wilcot--sahib.’

  She said wearily: ‘I know what’s happened. It’s the expedition. They caught the Mail from Lahore.’

  Then she heard Gerry’s voice from the front steps--’Aren’t you going to let us in? Where are you?’--and his familiar footsteps running along the passage. He burst in with arms outstretched, crying: ‘Peter! It’s good to see you again! All our personal stuff is in a couple of tongas outside. We’re on our way to the dak bungalow, but we had to drop in to tell you we’re here. Emily!’

  ‘Hullo, Walsh,’ Peter was saying. ‘And you must be Lyon? I’m Savage.’

  Harry Walsh introduced the two big, quiet men in the background, one blue-eyed and blond, one dark and short. ‘Fernand Lapeyrol--and I think you met Oliver Cadez in Chamonix?’

  ‘Yes. Tout va bien?’

  ‘Fait chaud, monsieur. Enchanté, madame.’

  The time of peace was past now, and only the mountain mattered. Gerry kissed her cheek. Peter was telling the bearer to bring the decanters and the soda bottles off the ice in the godown. The two guides stood nervously, rolling their tweed caps in their hands, sweating like bulls in their heavy wool-suits. The whisky gurgled out; bottles and glasses clinked--Meru! The summit! Victory! Conquest!