When halfway up I heard
the voice of a good child enduring, with effort, a painful call upon
its patience. "Any Lloydia yet?" it wistfully said. Between
my feet I saw Darwin below. Well, he was certainly paying the rope
out all right, as I had enjoined; but he did it "like them that
dream." His mind was not in it. All the time he was peering
hungrily over the slabby containing walls of the gully, and now he
just pawed one of them here and there with a tentative foot—you
know how a puppy, when first it sees ice, paws the face of the pond.
"These botanists!" I thought, "These fanatics!"
You know how during a happy physical effort—a race or a hunt, a
fight or a game—you think, with a sort of internal quiet, about a
lot of old things. There came back to my mind the old lines that I
had once had to make Latin verse of: How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays, And their incessant labours see crowned from some single herb or tree. Meanwhile I took a precaution.
I first unroped myself. Then I passed the rope, from below, through
the space behind a stone that was jammed fast in the crack. Then I
roped myself on again, just at my old place on the rope. A plague of
a job it was, too, with all those 60 feet of spare rope to uncoil and
re-coil. But you see how it worked: I had now got the enthusiast
moored.
Between him and me the rope went through the eye of a needle,
so I could go blithely on. I went. In the top of the crack I found a
second jammed stone. It was bigger than number one: in fact, it
blocked the way and made you clamber round outside it rather
interestingly, but it, too, had daylight showing through a hole
behind it. Sounds from below were again improving my natural stock of
prudence. You can't, I thought, be too safe. Once more I unroped,
just under this chockstone, and pushed the rope up through the hole
at its back. When the rope fell down to me, outwards over the top of
the stone, I tied on again, just as before, and then scrambled up
over the outer side of the stone with an ecstatic pull on both arms,
and sat on its top in the heaven that big-game hunters know when they
lie up against the slain tiger and smoke. If you have bent up your
mind to take in the details, you will now have an imposing vision of
the connections of Darwin and me with each other and with the Primary
or Palaeozoic rocks of Cambria. From Darwin, tied on to its end, the
rope ran, as freely as a bootlace runs through the eyelets, behind
the jammed stone 30 feet above his head, and then again behind my
present throne of glory at the top; then it was tied on to me; and
then there were 60 feet, half its length, left over to play with.
Clearly Darwin, not being a thread, or even a rope, could not come up
the way that the rope did, through the two needle-eyes. Nor did I
care, he being the thing that he was, to bid him untie and then to
pull up his end of the rope through the eyes, drop it down to him
clear through the air, and tell him to tie on again. He was, as the
Irish say of the distraught, "fit to be tied," and not at
all fit for the opposite. If he were loose he might at any moment
espy that Circe of his in some place out of bounds. There seemed to
be only one thing to do. I threw down the spare 60 feet of the rope,
and told him first to tie himself on to its end, and then, but not
before, to untie himself from the other. I could not quite see these
orders obeyed. A bulge of rock came between him and my eyes, but I
was explicit. "Remember that fisherman's bend!" I shouted.
Perhaps my voice was rather austere; but who would not forgive a wise
virgin for saying, a little dryly, to one of the foolish, "Well,
use your spare can"? As soon as he sang out "All right"
I took a good haul on what was now the working half of the rope, to
test his knot-making.
Yes, he was all right. So I bade him come up,
and he started. Whenever he looked up I saw that he had a wild,
gadding eye; and whenever he stopped to breathe during the struggle
he gasped, "I can't see it yet." He came nearly half-way,
and then he did see it. He had just reached the worst part. Oh, the
Sirens know when to start singing! That flower of evil was far out of
his reach, or of what his reach ought to have been. Some twelve feet
away on his right it was rooted in some infinitesimal pocket of blown
soil, a mere dirty thumb-nailful of clay. For a moment the lover eyed
the beloved across one huge slab of steep stone with no real foothold
or hand-hold upon it—only a few efflo-rescent minutias small as the
bubukles and whelks and knobs on the nose of some fossil Bardolph.
The whole wall of the gully just there was what any man who could
climb would have written off as unclimbable. Passion, however, has
her own standards, beyond the comprehension of the wise: His eye but
saw that light of love, The only star it hailed above. My lame
Leander gave one whinny of desire. Then he left all and made for his
Hero.
You know the way that a
man, who has no idea how badly he bats, will sometimes go in and hit
an unplayable bowler right out of the ground, simply because the
batsman is too green to know that the bowler cannot be played.
Perhaps that was the way. Or perhaps your sound climber, having his
wits, may leave, at his boldest, a margin of safety, as engineers
call it, so wide that a madman may cut quite a lot off its edge
without coming surely to grief. Or was it only a joke of the gods
among themselves over their wine? Or can it be that the special
arrangements known to be made for the safety of sailors, when in
their cups, are extended at times to cover the case of collectors
overcome by the strong waters of the acquisitive instinct? Goodness
knows! Whatever the powers that helped him, this crippled man, who
had never tried climbing before, went skating off to his right flank,
across that impossible slant on one foot and one stilt, making a fool
of the science of mountaineering. I vetoed, I imprecated, I grew
Athanasian. All utterly useless. As soon could you whistle a dog back
to heel when he fleets off on fire with some fresh amour. I could
only brace myself, take a good hold of the rope in both hands, and be
ready to play the wild salmon below as soon as he slipped and the
line ran out tight. While I waited I saw, for the first time, another
piquant detail of our case. Darwin, absorbed in his greed, had never
untied the other end of the rope. So he was now tied on to both ends.
The whole rope made a circle, a vicious circle. Our whole caravan was
sewn on to the bony structure of Wales with two big stretches, one at
each jammed stone You see how it would work. When Darwin should fall,
as he must, and hang in the air from my hands, gravitation would
swing him back into the centre of the chimney, straight below me,
bashing him hard against the chimney's opposite wall. No doubt he
would be stunned. I should never be able to hoist his dead weight
through the air to my perch, so I should have to lower him to the
foot of the chimney. That would just use up the full 60 feet of rope.
It would run the two 60-foot halves of the rope so tight that I
should never be able to undo the bad central knot that confined me.
Could I but cut it when Darwin was lowered into provisional safety,
and then climb down to see to him! No; I had lost my knife two days
ago. I should be like a netted lion, with no mouse to bite through
his cords: a Prometheus, bound to his rock. But life spoils half her
best crises. That wretch never slipped. He that by this time had no
sort of right to his life came back as he went, treading on air, but
now with that one bloom of the spiderwort in his mouth.
Apologising
for slowness, and panting with haste, he writhed up the crack till
his head appeared over the chockstone beside me. Then he gave one cry
of joy, surged up over the stone, purring with pleasure, and charged
the steep slope of slippery grass above the precipice we had scaled.
"You never told me!" he cried; and then for the first time
I noticed that up here the whole place was speckled with Lloydia. The
next moment Darwin fell suddenly backwards, as if Lloyd himself or
some demon gardener of his had planted a very straight one on the
chin of the onrushing trespasser in his pleasaunce. You guess? Yes.
One of his two tethers, the one coming up from behind the lower
jammed stone, had run out; it had pulled him up short as he leapt
upon the full fruition of his desire. It was easy to field as he
rolled down the grass. But his tug on the rope had worked it well
into some crevice between the lower jammed stone and the wall of the
crack. We were anchored now, good and fast, to that stone, more than
three fathoms below. What to do now? Climb down and clear the jammed
rope? Leave that lame voluptuary rioting upon a precipice's edge?
Scarcely wise—would it have been? Puzzled and angry, I cast away
shame. I knew well that as Spartan troops had to come back with their
shields or upon them, or else have trouble with their mothers, a
climber who leaves his tackle behind in a retreat is likely to be a
scorn and a hissing.
Still, I cast away shame. Ours was no common
case; no common ethics would meet it. I untied us both, and threw
both ends of the rope down the chimney; then I let Darwin graze for a
minute; then I drove him relentlessly up the steep grass to the top
of the crag, and round by the easy walking way down. As we passed
down the valley below, I looked up. The whole length of our chimney
was visibly draped with the pendent double length of that honest
Scots mountaineer's rope. "I don't really know how to thank you
enough," Darwin was babbling beside me, "for giving me such
a day!" But I felt as if I were one of the villains in plays who
compromise women of virtue and rank by stealing their fans and
leaving them lying about in the rooms of bad bachelors. Much might be
said for climbing alone, no matter what the authorities thought. A
good time it would be, all to myself, when I came back to salvage
that rope.
C E Montague
First Published in Fiery Particles
in February 1923
