by John Masters
‘Please yourself,’ Peter said. ‘There are your orders. Gerry, are you ready?’
The tent leaned gently this way and that in the slow air, and the first touch of light glinted on the peaks of the Needles.
‘Good luck,’ Harry said to Gerry.
Gerry said: ‘Thanks, old boy.’
They roped up. Gerry’s eyes glowed like fires; then they put on their goggles and started up the ridge.
As the light strengthened, Peter saw that a heavy storm was brewing somewhere to the south-west. Above the mountain lay a crochet-work coverlet of high, pale clouds, closely knit, and becoming more solid to the south-west. There the clouds swirled down in heavy, dark spirals towards India over the Parasian plain. There was no sun, only different shades of black and grey and, close at hand, bluish snow and the lifeless rock. They climbed fairly quickly as far as Peter had been, and after that what little energy he had left was expended in admiring the work that Gerry, Harry, and Cadez had done on the route. It was fantastic.
On Three, at the long lead, Gerry pointed down, and they paused a moment. It was difficult to tell anything about a man’s face in that light, under the dirty beard, but Peter thought Gerry had lost all colour and was perhaps far away in his mind. Time and again Peter wished that he also could be far away from here, as one vertical pitch succeeded another and he felt his will to go on being pulled tauter and tauter, and each moment the fraying at it continued, step after step, reach after reach.
At the hour when the sun struck the cloudbanks above, and some of its heat filtered through the heavy air, rocks began to break loose from the Needles. The climbers moved steadily on under a fire like small arms, the stones falling silently or whining past or hitting the cliff like pistol bullets, then leaping out over the Bowl, where Cadez had gone.
At ten o’clock they came down the north side of Cleopatra’s and stood at the foot of the sloping nevé, perhaps a thousand feet high. They were at about 24,600 feet. Above the nevé there must be another 1,500 feet. Gerry turned to him and thrust out his gloved hand.
‘We’ve done it!’
Peter wanted desperately to believe it, but it was not true. The far clouds had come perceptibly nearer. He took over the lead, and they went on.
As soon as he began to break the clean snow he knew that he had, so far, been working at only half-throttle. He had done his best all the time, but that best was nothing to what he could do now. His headache faded; new strength came to his legs. He could not see the summit, but it was there, and now nothing, nothing could stop him.
They went up the nevé at a good speed, reaching the rolling crest at about noon. Ahead lay a new ridge, and Peter’s breath was coming very short. He felt good, but the weakness of human physique laid heavy hands on him and dragged him back. An easy step became a long reach--place the foot down, struggle against the thing that was trying to prevent him from breathing, wait for the congealed lead that had risen to the thigh to sink back to the calves; another step; reach up, the fingers like woollen bales--on. He realized slowly that the wind had stopped. They were high, high--26,300, perhaps. Half-past one. Couldn’t go on after two, two-thirty.
The wind began to whistle a slow tune, almost like a love song, across the face of the rock. The great clouds had come, and towered above him now. The snow scurried across the steep slope to the right of the ridge. Far above he could see the projecting sharp edge of a big rock--the top itself. Or the end of this ridge and the beginning of the summit dome.
He reached across and up a steep, warped rock. The snow lying on its upper edge ten feet above him trickled down in a stream into his eyes. He struggled up, waited to catch his breath, anchored, belayed. Gerry did not move.
He beckoned with his hand. Gerry was standing like a sack of potatoes under the left side of the knife-ridge, twenty feet behind and ten or twelve feet down. Between them lay a slope of snow with a step cut in it, a good foot-hold on rock, a handhold, two flat steps on sloping ice, two holds on the rock--and the rope.
Gerry let go his hold and cupped his hands, the ice-axe swinging loosely across the front of his body by its thong. His voice came very loud and clear. ‘I can’t cross that, Peter.’ Peter felt that he was praying ... Not here, not now, please! Controlling his voice, he shouted back, though the sound came out as a feeble croak: ‘Come on--nothing difficult. Rock firm.’ Gerry shook his head and bawled with that unnatural strength: ‘I can’t cross that, Peter. Out of the question.’
The wind was bitter as salt and strong as hammers in his face now. He could tell Gerry to sit down where he was, while he, Peter, went on to the top. He could do it. He opened his mouth --Gerry would understand.
Suddenly Gerry began to shiver and shake. The ice-axe began to swing, like a loose anchor at the bow of a rolling tramp ship. It swung wider and wider, a pendulum in Gerry’s hand, and his wrist was out of the thong. Then deliberately he cast it away. It swung out, the adze blade flashing momentarily in the thick sky, and vanished. Thin snowflakes lashed Peter’s face, and Gerry cried: ‘You’re right. Easy. I don’t need it,’ and stepped out towards him, swaying, stumbling, his eyes looking at nothing but Peter’s face. Peter whipped off his goggles and held Gerry’s eyes and kept the rope taut between them. It was no use telling him to look for his holds, no use to do anything but imprison his eyes and will him across--so, step by step, lurching, shaking, Gerry came on. At the foot of the rock where Peter was, when he could almost have touched Peter’s hands, he stepped off over the cliff.
Peter held him. Then, with the rope on its anchor, he went down to him. Gerry was lying on his front in the steep snow, looking down into the whirling blizzard that hid the ridge, the nevé, the Needles, the Bowl, the South Glacier. He was crying, his mouth full of snow.
‘No good. Failed.’
Peter leaned down and slapped him as hard as he could across the side of his face with a gloved hand. He gave Gerry his own ice-axe and told him angrily to get up to the rock. Gerry dragged himself up, the tears running down under his goggles and freezing in long icicles on his cheek and in the matted hair of his beard.
Peter rejoined him, using neither rope nor axe, and patted his shoulder. ‘Time to go down now, Gerry. We can’t reach it. Another year, eh?’
They went down, not as slowly as he had expected. Harry and Lapeyrol and six porters were at Camp II, and it was seven o’clock. Harry gave him one glance and then put his arms around Gerry’s shoulders and helped him into his tent. Peter followed. Gerry did not speak until he had drunk some cocoa. Then he said: ‘Peter saved my life again. And I lost my nerve. If it hadn’t been for me, we would have climbed Meru today. Now he’ll have to go again.’ His eyes widened. ‘Again,’ he stammered, ‘ag-again. He’ll have to go again!’
Peter saw that Harry was glaring at him with open hatred. He said: ‘Gerry, if it hadn’t been for you we wouldn’t have got past Needle Three. Now we know the way. The only reason we failed today was because we didn’t have enough time. When we come again---‘
‘No,’ Harry shouted, the wind suddenly roaring against him. ‘Neither of you are coming again.’
‘Of course we are,’ Gerry said. ‘Aren’t we, Peter?’
Peter said: ‘I don’t know about me, Gerry. I won’t be able to leave Rudwal again for a few years. Harry will come, though, I’m sure, and he can climb Meru, now that we’ve made the trail for him.’ He spoke bitterly, because that was what was going to happen, and he could not bear to think of Harry Walsh’s conquering this mountain. Harry would call him a sadistic swine before the world, but that would not prevent him from using the route he, Peter, had launched them on, and held them to, while they, like curs, tried to get away from the lash. But on Meru, and in the world, if you were going to the top you had to take the lash, stand up to it, go forward against it, break it, and break the will of the gods or men wielding it.
A blizzard snarled around the ridge and the porters in the other tent were moaning like lost men, and Lapeyrol was yelling
at them in French to hold their tongues.
After all, he had failed. That was the fact that mattered; that was what remained after all the heroics and the hysterics. Gerry was ill--mentally, and now, Peter thought, physically as well, for he had begun to spit a little blood and he was very pale. They would go home to Rudwal, and Emily would make Gerry well again.
Then--another year, Meru again. One failure was not going to stop him any more than one obstacle, one cliff could.
Chapter 16
Emily noticed that it was ten o’clock; time to go back to the bungalow. The new baby did not kick so violently as Rodney had, but at six months it was an uncomfortable burden enough. So, when Gerry had asked one more question of Dr Parkash, she interrupted smoothly to say that they would be back tomorrow at eight, or perhaps in the early afternoon, to continue their discussion.
Dr Parkash said: ‘Certainly, madame, very good--ah, no.’ He raised one big brown hand in a theatrical gesture and boomed: ‘Not tomorrow in the afternoon, madame--in the morning, or in the evening. Tomorrow afternoon, March twenty-eighth, at three p.m., is the appointed hour for the small riot. It will take place near here. Your husband will not wish you to come, especially in your condition, and I myself will be busy stitching up heads and setting broken bones.’
‘What riot?’ she asked, mildly interested. She could not, offhand, think of any religious occasion due so soon after the Hindu Holi, just finished, which might lead to any ‘small riot.’ Dr Parkash said: ‘The Committee for Good Government has voted, late last night, to hold a procession of protest against the impending execution of that assassin in Dacca, Bengal. The vote was four for the protest procession and three against. There is much astonishment that the chairman, Mr Adam Afzal Khan, cast his vote for the protest. So, the procession is likely to proceed.’
Dr Parkash was a big, full-natured buffalo of a man, who looked as if he should have been a wrestler. Peter had found him working with venomous gusto at a rejuvenation and venereal practice in Lahore two or three years ago, and persuaded him to come to the wilds of Rudwal to take charge of this tiny dispensary, whose facade was hardly long enough to support the name hand-painted in blue letters on a red board across the front of the veranda--THE MARCHIONESS OF CURZON AND KEDLESTON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL. Dr Parkash had hated his Lahore patients and had plunged into the work here with an enormous enthusiasm that had seemed to grow rather than diminish. Peter had also persuaded the hospital’s board of trustees, headed by the Old Captain (who had given the money to build the hut, in Philipson’s time), to accept Parkash, a Bengali Hindu, as doctor in charge of a hospital whose patients were equally divided among Punjabi Moslems and hill Dogras, with a few Sikhs, and a few Buddhists from the Northern Tehsils.
Gerry said: ‘Adam Khan voted in favour of a protest? Against the punishment of a murderer? The man who shot the judge’s wife?’
‘Oh, yes, milord,’ Dr Parkash shouted genially. He had somewhere picked up a manner of saying ‘milord’ which would have done credit to the cockaded doormen at Claridge’s. ‘Mr Adam Khan is becoming quite a revolutionary fellow.’
‘But what is going to cause the riot?’ Gerry insisted anxiously.
‘Ah! I can explain.’ He raised his voice a few decibels. ‘The District Magistrate--madame’s husband--has forbidden all processions, or any procession, to use Akbar Street. The Committee for Good Government will not want to proceed in seclusion, obviously, skulking down back alleys and so forth. They will march down Akbar Street. The police will stop them. The bad hats--and, great Scott, we have plenty--will throw stones. A riot. A small riot. But it would be a big riot if Mr Harnarayan had his way. He is a very revolutionary fellow.’
Emily said thoughtfully: ‘Tomorrow afternoon. Mr Savage is going on tour this evening, you know, to look at the cooperative breeding station. He confirmed it this morning.’
Dr Parkash lowered his voice until it was almost normal, and a somewhat guilty expression settled on his large face. He said: ‘There is also a rumour that there will be no procession. And one that the C.G.G. has been dissolved. But it is best to play safe, what? Now, my God, it is ten-fifteen and I am due to operate at ten-thirty--poor woman from Bhasoli, carcinoma of the left breast. Not a job for amateurs, milord, I fear. Good day, madame, good day, milord--tomorrow, but not in the afternoon, eh, just in case?’
She raised her parasol and stepped out into the sun. It seemed cooler there than in the stuffy little room with its smells of ether and its resigned, disease-eroded faces, like a frieze, around the walls.
‘I hope no one gets hurt--not even Mr Harnarayan,’ Gerry said with an attempt at a laugh; but she saw that the doctor’s tale had disturbed him. Any kind of intrigue, violence, or political dissension disturbed him. He didn’t want to know about it and had confided to her that he positively dreaded to think of the time when he would be governor of a vast province, and such matters would be his daily bread. His mind returned, as she knew it would, to the hospital. He began to talk of Dr Parkash’s problems, and she answered when necessary.
Whenever, now, something approached that Gerry had grown to fear he would turn his mind away and think of the hospital, almost as though he were taking refuge, as a patient, inside it. She had known the old Gerry well, of course, but since his return from Meru she had had an opportunity to see into a new Gerry, the one that her husband was moulding. This new Gerry she now understood as well as she had the old, for his had been a long convalescence, and it was the hospital--the Marchioness of Curzon and Kedleston Memorial Hospital, and the plans for the new, bigger one--that had done the most to lift him out of the strange world of physical sickness and mental inertia wherein he had lived for the first four months after they had come back--Harry, Lapeyrol, and young Mr Lyon silent in one group; Peter and Gerry silent in another. The new Gerry was conceived, for her, that moment when she first saw them; and the new baby in her flesh that night, when Peter had come to her like a tiger, but there too had failed, again, to pass over the known boundaries.
She had thought at first that there was something unhealthy in Gerry’s persistent desire to visit the hospital--to sit there for hours at a time while Dr Parkash dealt with cuts, glaucoma, dysentery, tuberculosis, leopard slashes, hookworm. He had even watched operations with awed attention, and learned enough about operating-room procedures to be more than a little help to the doctor in those primitive circumstances where, as Dr Parkash bellowed: ‘We do our best, milord! If I waited for you to get the proper degree, I’d have to wait a long, long time, and no one would get their bloody leg cut off, eh?’
Then she noticed something. One evening Gerry upheld Dr Parkash’s opinion, in some administrative matter, against Peter’s. She didn’t think Peter had noticed; he was not a vain man and really believed that Gerry agreed with him from conviction, not from absorption; but she noticed. From then on she made no attempt to discourage Gerry’s interest in the hospital--rather the opposite. Most English women went down to Lahore, where there were English doctors (Irish and Scottish, really), for whatever pre-natal examinations were considered necessary; but she went to Dr Parkash; and she made other opportunities to accompany Gerry as often as she could.
Dr Parkash had become something of a hero to Gerry--a worthy one, she thought, though he was probably not a very learned doctor. From watching the work of healing, Gerry had progressed to administration. He wanted to know what hospitals cost to build and run; how nurses were trained, and by whom; where the medicines and the instruments and the beds came from (there were eight beds in the Lady Curzon, and the nurses were really midwives and nothing else). But, whatever the subject of his interest, he came to it with a new sense of personally chosen commitment. And the foundation of his interest and concern was always in the individual man or woman. When he talked about scalpels, it was not only of the shining blades that he thought, and of their cost, but of what they could do of good or bad to human flesh. Pillows and sheets interested him because they affected the patient. Every s
ick man became Gerry’s personal concern. He thought like a doctor.
Peter had noticed that, of course, and suggested that Gerry might do some work for the new Hospital Committee while he was here--investigate different plans, talk to the architects in Lahore, in general help to make the decisions that would be put into effect as soon as an additional lakh of rupees was raised.
Gerry had agreed eagerly, and this latest visit was one of several they had made to Dr Parkash to talk over with him his ideas on what was needed.
She glanced at Gerry as they turned into the crowded main street of the bazaar. ‘Of course it’ll be better,’ he was saying-- he was talking about the new hospital--’but will it be enough? Look! Look!’ He pointed out the hobbling man, the girl with the streaming eyes. ‘What can be done for them?’ His voice was compounded of concern and guilt.
She said: ‘We do our best. If we wait for everything to become perfect--”no one will get their bloody leg cut off.” ‘ He laughed then, and she squeezed his arm gently.
The people made way for them, many salaaming, for they were both well known in the city, especially in this street. The clamour of the bazaar surrounded them, but they were alone, as alone and together as they had been through a hundred evenings, while she read and Gerry sat in the chair opposite her, a book in his hands; and his eyes, dull and deep, would suddenly focus, but not on the book, or anywhere in the room; and Peter worked in his study, and they could hear the low voices of the visitors at the side door, and the pad-pad of bare feet as the chuprassi led them along the passage; the opening and gentle closing of a door; sometimes Peter’s sharp, tireless voice.
Gerry was physically well now, though his face was thin, his eyes sunk a little deeper in his head, the structure of his bones clearer under the fair skin, the skin itself more deeply grooved. Well, he was thirty-three, and she herself, twenty-nine. There had been so many things wrong with him when he came back from Meru, none of them ordinary, few nameable. He did not have frostbite, though he had come near it; no bones were broken, though he was marked by many deep bruises, and he had suffered those not on Meru but on the way back--he had fallen on paths flat and six feet wide, on stones, in streams, down a gentle grassy bank. He did not have malaria, cholera, or dysentery--none of the symptoms of the people waiting patiently back there at the Lady Curzon; yet he had been sicker than most of them--temperatures and fevers for days on end, delirium, vomiting fits, headaches, diarrhoea.
