H R Wakefield Read online

  The Third Shadow

  ‘And the other man on the rope, Andrew,’ I asked, ‘did you ever encounter him?’

  He gave me a quick glance and tapped the ash from his cigarette.

  ‘Well, is there such a one?’ he asked, smiling.

  ‘I’ve many times read of him,’ I replied. ‘Didn’t Smythe actually see him on the Brenva Face and again on that last dread lap of Everest?’

  Sir Andrew paused before replying.

  No one glancing casually at that eminent and superbly discreet civil servant, Sir Andrew Poursuivant, would have guessed that in his day and prime he had been the second-best amateur mountaineer of all time, with a dozen first ascents to his immortal fame, and many more than a dozen of the closest looks at death vouchsafed to any man. One who had leaped almost from the womb on to his first hill, a gravity defier by right of birth, soon to revolutionise the technique of rock-climbing and later to write two of the very finest books on his exquisite art. Yet there was something about that uncompromising buttress, his chin, the superbly modelled arête, his nose, those unflinching blue tarns, his eyes, and the high, wide cliff of his brow, to persuade the reader of faces that here was a born man of action, endowed with that strange and strangely named faculty, presence of mind, which ever finds in great emergency and peril the stimulus to a will and a cunning to meet and conquer them.

  We were seated in my stateroom in the Queen Elizabeth bound for New York, he for some recurrent brawl, I on the interminable quest for dollars. The big tub was pitching hard into a nor-west blizzard and creaking her vast length.

  I am but an honorary member of the corps of mountaineers, having no ‘head’ for the game. But I love it dearly by proxy, and as the sage tells us, ‘He who thinks on Himalcha shall have pardon for all sins,’ and the same is true, I hope, of lesser ranges.

  I dined with Sir Andrew perhaps half-a-dozen times a year and usually persuaded him on these felicitous occasions to tell me some great tale of the past. Hence on this felicitous occasion my ‘fishing’ enquiry.

  ‘Yes, so I remember,’ he presently said, ‘but are there not nice, plausible explanations for that? The illusions consequent on great height, great strain? You may remember Smythe, who is highly psychic, saw something else from Everest, very strange wings beating the icy air.’

  ‘He isn’t the only one,’ I said, ‘it’s a well-documented tradition.’

  ‘It is, I agree. Guides, too, have known his presence, and always at moments of great stress and danger, and he has left them when these moments passed. And if they do not pass, the fanciful might suggest he meets them on the Other Side. But who he is no one knows. I grant you, also, I myself have sometimes felt that over, say twelve thousand feet, one moves into a realm where nothing is quite the same, or, perhaps, and more likely, it is just one’s mind that changes and becomes more susceptible and exposed to—well, certain oddities.’

  ‘But you have never encountered this particular oddity?’ I insisted.

  ‘What an importunate bag-man you are!’

  ‘I believe you have, Andrew, and you must tell me of it!’

  ‘That is not quite so,’ he replied, ‘but—it will be thirty-five long years ago next June, I did once have a very terrible experience that had associated with it certain subsidiary experiences somewhat recalcitrant to explanation.’

  ‘That is a very cautious pronouncement, Andrew.'

  ‘Phrased in the jargon of my trade, Bill.’

  ‘And you are going to relate it to me?’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ve never actually told it to another, and it will give me no pleasure to rouse it from my memory. But perhaps I owe it you.’

  ‘Fill your glass, mind that lurch, and proceed.’

  ‘I haven’t told it before,’ said Sir Andrew, ‘partly because it’s distasteful to recall, and partly, for the reason that the prudent sea-captain turns his blind eye on a sea serpent and keeps a buttoned lip over the glimpse he caught; no one much appreciates the grin of incredulous derision.’

  ‘I promise to keep a straight face,’ I assured him.

  ‘Yes, I rather think you will. Well, all those years ago, in that remote and golden time, I knew and climbed with a man I will call “Brown”. He was about my age. He had inherited considerable position and fortune and he was heir, also, to that irresistible and consuming passion for high places, their conquest and company, which, given the least opportunity, will never be denied, and only decrepitude or death can frustrate. Technically, he was a master in all departments, a finished cragsman and just as expert on snow and ice. But there was just occasionally an unmastered streak of recklessness in him which flawed him as a leader, and everyone, including myself, preferred to have him lower down the rope.

  ‘It was, perhaps, due to one of these feckless seizures that, after our fourth season together, he proposed to a wench, who replied promptly in the affirmative. He was a smallish fellow, though immensely lithe, active, strong, and tough. She was not far short of six feet and tipped the beam at one hundred and sixty-eight pounds, mostly muscle. With what suicidal folly, my dear Bill, do these infatuate pigmies, like certain miserable male insects, doom themselves with such Boadiceas, and how pitilessly and jocundly do those monsters pounce upon their prey! This particular specimen was terribly, viciously, “County”, immensely handsome, and intolerably authoritarian. Speaking evil of the dead is often the only revenge permitted us and I have no intention of refraining from saying that I have seldom, almost certainly never disliked anyone more than Hecate Quorn. Besides being massive and menacing to the nth degree, she was endowed with a reverberating contralto which loaned a fearsomely oracular air to her insistent spate of edicts. Marry for lust and repent in haste, the oldest, saddest lesson in the world, and one my poor friend had almost instantly to learn. Once she’d gripped him in her red remorseless maw, she bullied him incessantly and appeared to dominate him beyond hope of release. Such an old story I need enlarge upon no more! How many of our old friends have we watched fall prostrate before these daughters of Masrur!

  ‘She demanded that he should at least attempt to teach her to climb, and females of her build are seldom much good at the game, particularly if they are late beginners. She was no exception, and her nerve turned out to be surprisingly more suspect on a steepish slope than her ghastly assurance on the level would have suggested. Poor Brown plugged away at it, because he feared, if she chucked her hand in, he would never see summer snow again. He did his very desperate best. He hired Fritz Mann, the huskiest and best-tempered of all the Chamonix guides, and between them on one searing and memorable occasion they shoved and pulled and hauled and slid her on feet and rump to creditably near the summit of Mt Blanc. She loathed the ordeal, but she refused to give in, just because she knew poor Brown was longing to join up with a good party, and have some fun. I need say no more, you have sufficient imagination fully to realise the melancholy and humiliating pass of my sad friend. And, of course, it wasn’t only in Haute-Savoie and Valais she made his life hell, it was at least purgatory for the rest of the year; his was eternal punishment, one might say. A harsh sentence for a moment’s indiscretion!’

  ‘What about those occasional feckless flashes?’ I asked; ‘had she quenched and overlaid those, too?’

  ‘Permit me to tell this story my own way and pour me out another drink. In the second summer after their marriage the Browns had preceded me by a few days to the Montenvert, which, doubtless you recall, is a hotel overlooking the Mer de Glâce, three thousand feet above Chamonix. When I arrived there late one evening I found the place in a turmoil, and Brown apparently almost out of his mind. Hecate had fallen down a crevasse that morning and, as a matter of fact, her body was never recovered. I took him to my room,
gave him a stiff drink, and he blurted out his sorry tale. He had taken her out on the Mer de Glâce for a morning’s training, he said, determined to take no risks whatsoever. They had wandered a little way up the glacier, perhaps rather further then he’d intended. He’d cut some steps for her to practice on, and so forth. Presently he’d encountered a crevasse, crossed by a snow-bridge, which he’d tested and found perfectly reliable. He’d passed over himself, but, when she followed, she’d gone straight through, the rope had snapped—and that was that. They’d lowered a guide, but the hole went down forever and it was quite hopeless. Hecate must have died instantly; that was the only assuaging thought.

  ‘“Should that rope have gone, Arthur?” I asked. “Can I see it?”

  ‘He produced it. It was poor stuff, an Austrian make, which had once been very popular but had been found unreliable and the cause of several accidents. There was also old bruising near the break. It wasn’t a reassuring bit of stuff. “I realise,” said Brown hurriedly, “I shouldn’t have kept that piece. As you know, I’m a stickler for perfection in a rope. But we were just having a little easy work and, as that rope’s light and she always found it so hard to manage one, I took it along. I’d no intention of actually having to trust to it. We were just turning back when it happened. I swear to you that bridge seemed absolutely sound.” “She was a good deal heavier than you, Arthur,” I said. “I know, but I made every allowance for that.” “I quite understand,” I said. “Well, it’s just too bad,” or words to that effect. I was rather at a loss for appropriate expressions. He was obviously acting a part. I didn’t blame him, he had to. He had to appear heavy with grief when he was feeling, in a sense, as light as mountain air. He got a shade tight that evening, and his efforts to sustain two such conflicting moods would have amused a more cynical and detached observer than myself. Besides, I foresaw the troubles ahead.

  ‘The French held an enquiry, of course, and inevitably exonerated him completely, then I took him home to face the music, which, as I’d expected, was strident and loud enough. How far was it justified? I asked myself. He should, perhaps, not have taken Hecate up so far. Even if that rope hadn’t gone, he’d never have been able to pull her up by himself—it would have taken two very strong men to have done that. He could merely have held her there, and she would, I suppose, have died of slow strangulation, unless help had quickly come. Yet there is always risk, however prudently you try to play that game: it is the first of its rules and nothing will ever eliminate it. You must take my word for all this, which is rather outside your sphere of judgement. All the same the condition of that rope—and I wasn’t the only one to examine it—didn’t help things. Still, all that wouldn’t have mattered nearly so much if he’d been a happily married man. I needn’t dwell on that. Anyway the dirty rumour followed him home and resounded there.’

  ‘What was your candid opinion, Andrew?’ I said.

  ‘I must ask you,’ he replied, ‘to believe a rather hard thing, that I had and have no opinion, candid or otherwise. It could have been a pure accident. All could have happened exactly as he said it did. I’ve no valid reason to suppose otherwise. He may have been a bit careless: I might have been so myself. One takes such practice mornings rather lightly. There is risk, as I’ve said, but it’s minuscule compared with the real thing. The expert mountaineer develops an exquisitely nice and certain “feel” for degrees of danger, it is the condition precedent of his survival—and adjusts his whole personality to changing degrees. He must take the small ones in his stride. The errors of judgement, if any, that Brown committed were petty and excusable, His reason for taking that rope was sensible enough in a way.’

  ‘Yes,’ I put in, ‘I can more or less understand all that, but you actually knew him well and you’re a shrewd judge of character. You were in a privileged position to decide.’

  ‘Was I? A very learned judge once told me he’d find it far easier to decide the guilt or innocence of an absolute stranger than of a close friend; the personal equation confuses the problem and pollutes the understanding. I think he was perfectly right. Anyway I am shrewd enough to know when I am baffled, and I have always felt the balance of probability was peculiarly nicely poised. In a word, I have no opinion.’

  ‘Well, I have,’ I proclaimed. ‘I think he had a sudden fearful temptation. I don’t think it was exactly premeditated, yet always, as it were, at the back of his mind. He realised that bridge would go when she had her weight on it, knew a swift, reckless temptation, and let it rip. I think he’d kept that rotten rope because he’d always felt in a vague half-repressed way, it might, as they say, “come in handy one day”.’

  Sir Andrew shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very subtle, no doubt,’ he said, ‘and you may be right. But I know I shall never be able to decide. Perhaps it is that personal equation, for I was always very fond of him, and he saved my life more than once at the greatest peril to his own; and since his marriage, that ordeal of thumb-screw and rack, I had developed profound sympathy for him. Hecate was far better dead. I greeted his release with a saturnine cheer. We will leave that point.

  ‘Well, he had to face a very bad time. Hecate’s relatives were many and influential and they pulled no punches, no stabs in the back, rather. No one, of course, actually cried: “Murder!” in public, but such terms as “Darned odd!”, “Very happy release!”, “Accidents must happen!” and so on, were in lively currency.

  ‘Very few people comprehend the first thing about mountaineering, just sultry, celluloid visions of high-altitude villains slashing ropes, so this sepsis found receptive blood-streams. I did my best to foster antibodies and rallied my fellow-climbers to the defence. But we were hopelessly outnumbered and out-gunned, and it was lucky for poor Brown he had more than sufficient private means to retire from public life to his estate and his farming, and insulate himself to some extent against the slings and arrows which were so freely and cruelly flying about.

  ‘I spent a weekend with him in April and was shocked at his appearance: even life with Hecate had never reduced him to such a pass. His nerves were forever on the jump, he had those glaring insomniac eyes, he was drinking far more and eating far less than was good for him; he looked a driven, haunted man.’

  ‘Haunted?’ I asked.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Sir Andrew, ‘but I don’t think I can be more definite. I will say, however, I found the atmosphere of the house unquiet and was very glad to quit it. Anyway, something had to be done.

  ‘ “You must start climbing again, Arthur,” I said.

  ‘ “Never! My nerve’s gone!” he replied.

  ‘ “Nonsense!” I said. “We’ll leave on June 3rd for Chamonix. You must conquer all this and at the very place which tests you most starkly. You will be amongst friends. It will be a superb nerve tonic. This tittle-tattle will inevitably die down—it has started to do so already, I fancy. There is nothing to fear, as you’ll discover once you’re fit again. Come back to your first, your greatest, your only real love!”

  ‘ “What will people say?’ he muttered uncertainly.

  ‘ “What say they, let them say! Actually I think it’ll be very good propaganda: no one’d believe a guilty man would return to the scene of such a crime. My dear Arthur, you’re a bit young to die, aren’t you! If you stay moping here you’ll be in the family vault in a couple of years. I’ll get the tickets and we’ll dine together at the Alpine Club on June the second at eight p.m. precisely.”

  ‘To this he promptly agreed and his fickle spirits rose. So the fourth of June saw us entering the Montenvert, where our reception was cordial enough.

  ‘It took him over a week, far longer than usual, to get back to anything like his old standard, but I’d expected that. On the ninth day I decided it was time for a crucial test of his recovery. It was no use frittering about, he’d got to face the hard thing, something far tougher than the practice grounds.

  ‘After some deliberation I chose the Dent du Géant for the trial run. It was an old
friend of ours, and the last time we’d done it, four years before, we’d simply raced to the aluminium Madonna which more or less adorns its summit. The Géant, I will remind you, is a needle, some thirteen thousand feet high, situated towards the southern rim of that great and glorious lake of ice, part French, part Swiss, part Italian, from which rise some of the most renowned peaks in the world, and of those the acknowledged monarchs are the Grandes Jurasses, the Grépon Aiguilles, and, of course, the Mont Blanc Massif itself. It is sacred ground to our fraternity and the very words ring like a silver peal. The Géant culminates in a grotesque colossal “tooth” of rock, some of which is in a fairly advanced state of decay. These things are relative, of course, it will almost certainly be standing there, somewhat diminished, in five thousand years’ time. It provides an interesting enough climb, not, in my view, one of the most severe, but sheer and exposed enough. Nowadays, I understand, the livelier sections are so festooned with spikes and cords that it resembles the fruit of the union of a porcupine and a puppet. But I have not revisited it for years and, for very sure, I never shall again.

  ‘Brown agreed with my choice, which he declared himself competent to tackle, so off we went late on a promising morning and made our leisurely way up and across the ice to the hut. He seemed in pretty good shape, and once, when a most towering and displeasing sérac fell almost dead on our line, he kept his head, his footing, and his life. Yet somehow I didn’t quite like the look of him. He didn’t improve as the day wore on and, to tell the truth, I didn’t either.’

  Here Sir Andrew paused, lit a cigarette, and continued more slowly. ‘You are not familiar with such matters, but I will try and explain the cause of my increasing preoccupation. We were, of course, roped almost all day, and from very early on I began to experience those intimations—it is difficult to find the precise, inevitable word—which were increasingly to disturb and perplex me on that tragic expedition. It is extremely hard to make them plain and plausible to you, who have never been hitched to a manila. When merely pursuing a more or less untrammelled course over ice it is our custom to keep the rope neither trailing nor quite taut, but always—I speak as leader—of course, one is very conscious of the presence and pressure of the man behind. Now—how shall I put it?—Well, over and over again it seemed to me as if that rope was behaving oddly, as though the “pull” I experienced was inconsistent with the distance Brown was keeping behind me, as though something else was exercising pressure nearer to me. Do I make myself at all plain?’