Rotters?
“Easy enough for a man who never leaves London’s sea level to say,” commented the Deacon as we traveled by rail to Zurich in January of 1925.
“I’d like to transport Mr. Hinks to twenty-six thousand feet on Everest and watch him gasp, retch, and flop around like a fish out of water,” continued the Deacon, “and then ask him if he considers himself a ‘rotter.’ I certainly consider him such, even when he stays at sea level.”
This was why we were tentatively planning to take twenty-five sets of the Irvine-improved Finch oxygen rigs and one hundred tanks of oxygen on our own expedition. (This was more than the ninety tanks that Mallory and his team had taken along for their 1924 expedition to serve dozens of the climbers and high-altitude porters. And there would be only the three of us.) “What about ‘Cousin Reggie’?” Jean-Claude had asked, reminding the Deacon of Lady Bromley’s condition that we take Bromley’s tea plantation cousin with us.
“‘Cousin Reggie’ can bloody well stay at Base Camp and breathe the thick yak-scented air at sixteen thousand five hundred feet,” said the Deacon.
And now, in the cold first month of the year in which we’d try or die on Mount Everest, the Deacon wanted us to meet and speak with George Finch in his adopted hometown of Zurich. (The Deacon had invited him to London, offering to pay his expenses, which made sense since there were three of us and only one Finch, but the irascible climber had cabled back, “There’s not enough money in all of England to induce me to return to London now.”)
We met George Ingle Finch at the Restaurant Kronenhalle, an upscale place even by Zurich’s high standards for fancy restaurants, and one well known throughout Europe. The Deacon had informed us that, despite its once proud history, Kronenhalle had become pretty run-down in recent years and during Germany’s era of hyperinflation, the old restaurant floating by on its nineteenth-century reputation for excellence. But then a certain Hilda and Gottlieb Zumsteg had recently purchased and renovated the place, bringing the whole large establishment, including a new chef, a menu that was a combination of the best Bavarian, classic, and Swiss cuisine, and superlative service, up to the true standards of Swiss and Zurich excellence. So while Germans were starving a few miles across the border, the Swiss bankers, merchants, and other upper-class citizens could dine in luxury.
Restaurant Kronenhalle was situated at Rämistrasse 4, less than a mile southwest of the University of Zurich (where two of Jean-Claude’s three older brothers attended classes before returning to France to die in the Great War) and precisely where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich. The late January wind blowing off that lake, blocked only intermittently on the broad Rämistrasse by softly rumbling streetcars, froze me to the bone despite my heaviest wool formal overcoat.
It’s at this moment that I found myself wondering, If I’m freezing with chattering teeth just crossing the Rämistrasse in Zurich in a slight breeze from a Swiss lake for a few moments exposed to the wind, how in God’s name am I going to survive and conquer the space-blown sub-arctic winds of Mount Everest above 26,000 feet?
I thought I’d dined well in Boston, New York, London, and Paris—all on my aunt’s bequest money or through the largesse of Lady Bromley with the Deacon picking up the actual tab—but the Kronenhalle certainly had to be the largest and most formal-feeling restaurant I’d ever set foot in. The day we met Finch was the only day of the week when they served lunch, and still the waiters, maître d’, and other personnel were dressed in tuxedos. Even the tall potted plants configured here and there, in this corner and next to that pillar and over near that window, looked too formal to be mere vegetable matter; they seemed to wish they were also wearing tuxedos.
I was wearing the dark suit that the Deacon had purchased for me in London, but crossing the vast open spaces of Zurich’s Restaurant Kronenhalle, its luncheon tables filled mostly with formally dressed men but also a few elegant women, made me realize how insecure I still felt in European high society. Even though I was wearing my best (and only) pair of highly polished black dress shoes, I suddenly thought how clodhopperish and scuffed they must look to everyone in the huge restaurant.
Sitting alone at the white-linen- and silver-service-covered table to which we were led was a short, thin, sharp-faced man. He was ignoring the glasses of wine and water already poured and seemed to be lost in a book he was reading. Finch was the only man in the room wearing a regular daytime-wear tweed suit and waistcoat—neither looking all that clean at the moment (there were cigarette ashes on his waistcoat)—and his posture was the comfortable, oblivious, cross-legged sprawl that I associate with the very, very rich or simply the very, very self-confident. The Deacon cleared his throat, and the gaunt-faced man looked up, folded the book, and set it on the table. The title was a long one in large-word German that I couldn’t translate.
Finch removed his reading glasses and looked up at us as if he had no idea who we were or why we were standing by his table. I couldn’t be sure if the smudge under his nose was the rough sketch of a brownish mustache on his tanned face or simply more of the brownish stubble that already stippled his jaw and cheeks.
The Deacon reintroduced himself, although the two men had spent the entire 1922 Mount Everest expedition in each other’s company, and then introduced each of us. Finch didn’t bother to get to his feet but raised what looked like a limp hand dangling—almost as if he expected it to be kissed rather than shaken. Still, his handshake was surprisingly firm—almost shockingly firm, given the long, thin fingers. Then I noticed the damage to those hands and fingers and nails; if nothing else this man was an alpinist who’d spent years jamming his bare hands into cracks and holds in granite, limestone, and sharp ice.
“Jake, Jean-Claude,” continued the Deacon, “I’d like to present Mr. George Ingle Finch. You both know that two and a half years ago, Mr. Finch and I were on the expedition that climbed to just above twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet on the East Ridge and North Face of Everest…without oxygen. It was an altitude record at the time. But even though we climbed without the tanks that day, George helped design the oxygen apparatus that Mallory and Irvine were using when they disappeared last June, and he’s been kind enough to offer to take us to his workshop here in Zurich after lunch to show us how it works…and to give us some advice on various aspects of our…recovery expedition.”
The Deacon seemed embarrassed to have used so many words and—most rare for the Deacon—not sure of what to say next. Finch rescued the moment by lazily waving us to the three empty chairs.
“Sit down, please,” said Finch. “I took the liberty of ordering a wine but we can certainly get a different bottle for the table…especially if you’re paying, Richard.” Finch’s brief flash of smile showed small, slightly nicotine-stained but strong teeth. Despite the Alpine Club’s discriminatory insults about Finch, it was obvious that he brushed those teeth more than once a year. “This joint has good food and I can rarely afford to dine here, even for lunch,” he continued in his slightly German-accented British English, “which is why I suggested we meet here when you said you would be picking up the tab.” He casually waved over the headwaiter and—surprising, considering how Finch was dressed—the tuxedoed gentleman responded with alacrity and obvious respect. Perhaps people in Zurich were well aware of Finch’s alpine successes. Or perhaps the waiters simply assumed that anyone who could afford to dine at Restaurant Kronenhalle was wealthy enough to deserve such respectful treatment.