Ashley hails a motorcab and Imogen talks excitedly in the shadowed backseat, her mind arcing from one subject to another with giddy pleasure. She tells Ashley about a village in Brittany she wishes to live in; she describes an Autographic Kodak camera that her father gave her last month. She reads mainly in French and she likes the Symbolist poets best, Verlaine and De Gourmont and Corbière, but she has never seen anything so lovely in her life as Nijinsky onstage in Le Sacre du Printemps.
— They’ve interned him in Hungary now, can you believe it? A dancer in prison—
Imogen looks at Ashley. She smiles.
— You think I’m mad, don’t you? But I don’t mind.
The motorcab rounds the fountain at Piccadilly Circus, strange and gloomy with the lights darkened and the curtains drawn in all the windows, the rooftop billboards like huge blank slates. Ashley watches the silhouette of the Anteros statue at the center of the fountain, the nude archer loosing his arrow into the blackness. The taxi halts beside a maroon awning. Ashley pays the driver and holds the door open for Imogen, offering his hand. The girl regards him skeptically, then smiles and steps out, as if granting him this moment as an indulgence.
They are seated at a table in the café beside the mirrored wall, their bodies perching and sinking into gaudy stuffed chairs of scarlet velour. The fog of tobacco smoke is tremendous. A female waiter emerges from the haze to take their order, her paper collar soiled and yellowing, a starched napkin hung over the sleeve of her black jacket. She eyes them with weary indifference. Imogen orders a pair of brandies, winking at Ashley. He cranes his neck to look around the room.
— Rather jolly in its own way. Isn’t it queer to see women waiters—
The waitress returns bearing two short-stemmed snifters on her tray. The brandy twirls in the glasses as she sets them on the tablecloth. Imogen leans across the table.
— I want you to tell me about your climbing. Once and for all.
— What do you want to know?
— Anything and everything. I’ve always been curious. We used to go to Switzerland when I was little, when we lived in Paris. I remember being terrified of the mountain guides. In the early morning they’d be waiting in front of the hotel for the guests. They’d never come in, they’d only stand outside smoking their pipes and talking in frightful dialect. I knew they lived high up, so I thought the mountains were a whole other country where ordinary people couldn’t go, not without guides. And the places had such mysterious names. The Mer de Glace — it’s near Mont Blanc, isn’t it?
Ashley nods. — It’s part of the same massif.
He lifts his napkin from the table, pulling off the silver ring and spreading the square of linen. He draws his fountain pen from his pocket and touches the nib twice on the linen to start the ink. This makes a pair of black dashes and from here Ashley begins to draw a crude map of the mountain range.
— This is the Mont Blanc massif, he says. Here’s Mont Blanc itself, a little under sixteen thousand feet. Here’s Chamonix Valley and the town. You probably stayed there. The whole range is less than twenty miles long. Perhaps ten across.
The pen’s nib glides across the linen, Ashley pressing down to thicken the ridgeline where peaks connect.
— Here’s Maudit, about fourteen thousand six hundred. Damned good climb up the southern face.
— You’ve climbed it?
Ashley nods. — Here’s the Aiguille du Midi. So called because from Chamonix the sun hovers right above the needle of the peak at midday. Here’s the Grandes Jorasses. Brilliant north face. Haven’t climbed that. This is your Mer de Glace. Did you know it flows a hundred yards a year?
Imogen shakes her head. — Have you been on it?
— Once. It was very slick. We came down it at midnight without crampons. Rather unpleasant business.
— It must have been beautiful.
— I wasn’t paying attention.
They order a second round from the waitress. Ashley takes another brandy, Imogen a crème de cassis.
— I’m surprised at you, she says. You speak as though you’re only interested in the heights of the mountains, or their features. I imagined it was something different.
— Talking about it doesn’t do any good. The best parts can’t be explained.
— You might try. I’d like to understand.
Ashley frowns, capping his pen. He takes a silver case from his tunic pocket and lights a cigarette, setting the case on the table. Imogen takes a cigarette for herself and Ashley raises his eyebrows.
— You’re going to smoke here?
She gives a coy nod in reply. Ashley lights her cigarette and stares down into the cut glass ashtray. He begins to speak, his words coming slowly and deliberately.
It is impossible to live without danger, Ashley explains. The danger is always there, the hazard of wasted lives, of decades bent over a desk, of squalid and lonely deaths in hospital beds. Fools turned their faces away from danger and pretended at immunity, but others went to the fountainhead of life.
— And what, Imogen wonders, is that?
Ashley taps his cigarette on the ashtray.
— I couldn’t say. It’s different for every man.
— Or woman. But what is it to you?
— There isn’t a name for it, Ashley says. One could call it endeavor, or struggle, or give it a name, but then it only sounds silly. It’s something one needs that isn’t essential. Something one wants for no good reason at all. Not an animal desire. A desire that comes not from one’s body, but from one’s soul.
— But why do you want it?
— I can’t explain it.
— You have been explaining it. Please go on.
Ashley looks at the tablecloth and shakes his head. He says that for one thing, lasting comfort becomes no comfort at all. All things in the world are perceptible only by contrast. For just as there is no heat without cold nor light without darkness, it is climbing that throws all of Ashley’s life into sharp relief. It is climbing that makes one feel. It is the driving mountain cold that makes the fire in an alpine hut so delicious; it is the sore and cramped muscles that transform an ordinary hot bath into a sensory revelation; it is the hours of grueling ascent that make a supper of sardines and biscuits and jam so much better than a thousand dinners at the Criterion.
And it is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashley explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise.
— It’s the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one’s burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don’t give two straws if your pudding’s been burnt.
Imogen watches Ashley across the table. Her gaze is steady and unblinking, her hand turning the silver band around her wrist.
— Then you climb for what it does for your other life?
Ashley nods. — Sometimes. But not always.
For there is also the beauty. Ashley sweeps his cigarette across the room and says that to him all of human architecture is little but a screen, an elaborate facade of iron and glass erected to hide the majesties beyond. There is nothing in the untamed earth that is not beautiful. Of tamer beauties, Ashley swears that if one follows their streams up to the headwaters, the source of their fineness is very wild indeed. To walk the Mer de Glace at midnight is not only to be witness to the exquisite mystery of the natural world. It is to step away from the metropolis, from mankind’s hall of mirrors, and to assume one’s place among the wild.