Death of a Huntsman (16 page)

‘That's where we're going,' he said to Miss Vane. ‘See?—up there.'

‘It looks farther off than I thought,' she said.

‘We've got all day,' he said. ‘After all it's only Monday—you don't have to catch the
Alacantara
today.'

As he spoke of the
Alacantara
he remembered the town: Monday morning, the drawn sun-shutters of the office, the spiritless flat dustiness of rooms shut up for the weekend, the horrible Monday lassitude. A signal from the opposing rocks across the valley shot off with a trick of winking semaphore and expressed his astonished joy at being no longer part of that awful office, watching the cabs on the water-front, the listless boot-blacks rocking on the pavements, the funerals racing away up the hill.

He realized, with a remarkable surge of confidence, that he was free.

‘By the way, are you going to catch the
Alacantara
? Have you made up your mind?'

‘Not quite.'

‘I know her captain,' he said. ‘I'd come aboard with you and see that he knew who you were.'

She turned and held out her hand suddenly and said:

‘There's room for you to walk on the track with me. Come on. I hate walking alone.'

A fragment of his hesitation came back.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Come and walk with me. I hate the feeling of someone being just behind me.'

She reached out and caught his hand and they walked abreast.

‘That's better,' she said. ‘Now I feel you're with me.'

Sometimes the swaying coolie-like scales of Manuel's baskets disappeared beyond dark shoulders of rock. Manson felt then that Manuel was not part of himself and Miss Vane. He looked up at the enlarging plateau, assuring himself of its unexciting domesticity, feeling contemptuous of people like Manuel who saw it as a formidable and fearsome thing.

At the same time the feeling grew on him also that Miss Vane was slightly afraid. That was why she wanted him to walk with her; that was why she would ask him now and then if he still wanted to go to the top. He had the increasing impression too that she had something on her mind. Perhaps that was why she was continually so forgetful of things like her handbag.

Half way through the morning one of his shoe-laces came undone. He had not brought with him very suitable shoes for walking and the best he could find that day was a pair of old canvas sandals, with rubber soles.

As he stooped to tie the shoe-lace Miss Vane stopped to wait for him. He had some difficulty with the shoe-lace and was afraid of breaking it. When he looked up again Manuel had disappeared and Miss Vane was alone, staring at something far down a long spoon-shaped gorge of rock.

His feelings at seeing her there alone gave him a sort of buoyancy. His shoes were soft on the path. He had nothing to do but creep up to her and put his hands on her hair and turn her face to him and kiss her.

Before he could do anything she turned and pointed down the gorge and said:

‘There's something down there. Do you see? Right down. A house or something—two or three houses.'

‘Yes. They're houses,' he said.

‘I didn't think there were villages up here.'

‘It's a longish way away,' he said. ‘Probably two or three hours by path.'

‘We must ask Manuel about it,' she said.

His feeling of buoyancy died and when they walked on again he automatically fell into the way of walking behind her until she reminded him about it and held out her hand.

Before lunch, which Manuel laid out in a small clearing of pines, in one of those places where water dripped like summery rain from fissures of cacti-studded rock, Manuel asked her stiffly:

‘Would you like something to drink before you eat, madame?'

‘I would,' she said. ‘What is there?'

‘There's beer, madame,' he said. ‘And gin.'

‘What gin is it?' Manson said.

‘The best, sir.' Manuel held up the bottle for Manson to see and Manson said:

‘Good. We don't want local muck. I'll have gin too.'

He drank the gin rather quickly. Then, looking down over the sliced-out gorges, streamless far below, he used exactly the words Miss Vane had used on the journey up with the mules.

‘Well, this is marvellous,' he said. The village of obscure white houses seemed of paltry insignificance, far away. ‘It's absolutely marvellous, I think. Don't you?'

‘It's lovely.'

‘I think it's stunning. How far to the top, Manuel?'

‘This is as far as the track goes, sir.'

‘I don't get that,' Manson said. ‘You can see a path going up there as plain as daylight. I've been watching it. You can see it going most of the way.'

‘It's probably made by goats, sir.'

The remark seemed to Manson to have in it the slightest touch of oblique insolence, and he asked abruptly for another gin. He was very glad that Miss Vane decided to have one too.

But the lunch was good. He awarded absolutely top marks to Manuel for the lunch. A slight breeze blew off the upper mountain and cooled the glare of sun. He took another gin and was aware of the semaphore spark of signals ignited over the black of distant rocks and he remarked several times, munching on big open sandwiches of red beef and peeled eggs and ham, that food always tasted so much better in the open air.

‘What is the village, Manuel?' Miss Vane said.

‘That's the village of Santa Anna, madame.'

‘How far away is it?'

Manson said: ‘Several hours. It would probably take more than half a day to get there. Sometimes there are bad mists too. Then it takes more than a day.'

With another gin, in which he was glad Miss Vane joined him, Manson felt all the flare of antagonism against Manuel come back. The man was a damn know-all. Too smooth by half. Too smooth. Too knowing. Worst of all too damned right.

‘Good God, look—there's an eagle,' he said.

A large bird, suspended between the two shoulders of mountain, seemed to hold for a moment the entire sky in its claws.

‘That's a buzzard, sir,' Manuel said. ‘There are no eagles here.'

Manson stared at the bird that seemed, with motionless deceit, to hold the sky in its claws.

‘I'd like another gin,' he said. ‘Would you?'

‘I will if you will,' she said.

‘Good,' he said. ‘That'll get us steamed up for the top.'

During lunch Miss Vane took off her shoes and for some moments after lunch, when she appeared to have some difficulty in getting them on again, Manson felt impatient and disappointed.

‘Oh! it's nothing. It's only that my feet ache a bit.' He saw her look up at the plateau of rock that spanned and blocked, exactly like the barrier of a dam, the entire western reach of valley.

‘It looks awfully far,' she said.

‘Don't you want to go?'

‘It isn't that. I was only wondering about time.'

‘I thought you were the one with plenty of time,' he said. ‘We ought to have brought the hammock. Then we could have carried you.'

He said the words rather breezily, with a smile.

‘You think we can make it?' she said. ‘I mean in the time? Perhaps we ought to ask Manuel?'

‘Oh! damn Manuel,' he said.

Manuel was washing the lunch things under a small fissure of water that broke from perpendicular rock above the path.

‘Manuel—how far is it to the top?' she said. ‘How long should it take us?'

‘You should give two hours, madame.'

‘There and back?—or just there?'

‘There and back,' he said.

‘Oh! that's nothing,' Manson said. ‘That's no time.'

The sight of Manuel deferentially wiping a plate with a tea-cloth, in his shirt-sleeves, so like a waiter who had lost his way, made him feel suddenly superior again.

‘You're coming, Manuel, aren't you?' she said.

‘No, madame, I'm not coming. I shall wait here for you.'

A moment of strained silence seemed to be pinned, suspended, ready to drop, in the immense space of hot noon sky. With irritation Manson heard her break it by saying:

‘We've got all afternoon. Won't you change your mind?'

‘No thank you, madame.'

‘Oh! if the fellow doesn't want to come he doesn't want to come. That's that.'

‘I was simply asking,' she said.

A moment later, fired by something between annoyance and exhilaration, he was ready to start.

‘If you get tired of waiting,' he said to Manuel, ‘you can start back. We know the way.'

The path made a series of regular spiral ascents with growing sharpness, narrowing to a single-line track on which Manson and Miss Vane could well walk together. Disturbed by their feet a rock fell, flattish, skimming like a slate from a house-roof, pitching down, crashing with gunshot echoes into a cauldron of steamy, sunlit haze.

‘It's hot, isn't it?' she said. ‘You don't really want to go to the top, do you?'

‘Of course I do. That's what we came for, didn't we?'

She did not answer and he said:

‘I don't wonder the English perfected mountaineering. None of these other chaps seem to have the slightest guts for it.'

The buzzard reappeared in the sky like a growing speck of dust on glass, but this time below and not above him. He stood for a moment in intent exhilaration, watching the descending bird that was really a hundred feet or so below him now. He was amused to think that he had climbed higher than a bird in the sky, higher than Manuel, higher perhaps than anything but a goat or a goat-herd had ever climbed on the island before.

‘You know what?' he began to say.

Another rock fell noisily. It's skimming, sliding fall, in clean curvature into hazy space, had the breathless beauty of a ball well thrown. He heard its crash on other rocks below. He listened for some time to its long double-repeated echoes across the valley. Then he realized suddenly that to his half-finished remark there had been no answer.

He turned and saw Miss Vane already forty or fifty feet above him. She was walking steadily. Before he could call she turned and stared back, eyeless in her black sun-glasses, and waved her hand.

‘I thought you were the big mountaineer.'

‘Oh! wait, wait,' he said. ‘We must keep together.'

She seemed to laugh at him before going on. He scrambled after her. And although she was not really hurrying it was several minutes before he reached her. By that time he was glad she was sitting down.

‘My God, it's getting hot,' he said.

‘You were the one who wanted to do this.'

‘I know. I'm all right. We mustn't rush it, that's all. It's like everything else—easy if you keep to a system.'

‘My system is to lie down at frequent intervals and stop there,' she said.

As she lay down on the ledge of short dry grass she took off her sun-glasses. The glare of sun, too harsh for her, made her suddenly turn and lie on her face, spreading out her arms. Instantly the sunlight, as it had done earlier in the day, shone on the back of her hair with the brilliant effect of edging it with minute thorns of tawny gold.

Suddenly the sensation of uneasy intimacy he had first experienced in the cabin, on the ship, above the dishevelled bed, came rushing back. It became one with the intoxicating experience of having climbed higher than the buzzard on the mountain.

He turned her face and began kissing her. He remembered thinking that that was something he had not
bargained for in any system—would not have bargained for it if he had planned it for a thousand years. She moved her lips in a series of small fluttering pulsations that might have been protest or acceptances—he could not tell. The impression was that she was about to let him go and then that she could not bear to let him go. The effect was to rock him gently, in warm blindness, on the edge of the gorge.

He was still in a world of spinning blood and sunlight and tilting rock when he sat up again. Her eyes were intensely blue under lowered lids in the sun. In a flash she shut them against the glare, parting her mouth at the same time.

‘That was easy,' she said.

‘Easy?'

‘I mean I didn't expect you to do it like that,' she said. ‘I meant I thought it would be different with you.'

He heard the snapped cry of a bird, like the flap of linen, the only sound in a vast and burning chasm of silence, somewhere above the extreme edge of stunted heath and pine.

‘Again,' she said. ‘It made me feel better.'

Long before the end of that second kiss he was perfectly sure that she belonged to him. He was so sure that he found himself thinking of the rest-house, the dark cover of evening, the way they would be together long after the infuriating whistling Manuel had died behind the cage. He felt his pride in his confidence leap up through his body in thrusting, stabbing bursts.

‘That made me feel better still,' she said.

‘Better?'

‘Happier—that's what I mean.'

Suddenly, clearly, and for the first time he found himself wondering why she had bothered to come there at the height of summer.

‘Happier?—weren't you happy before?'

‘We ought to have found some shadier spot,' she said. ‘I'm melting. Can you see my bag? Where's my bag?'

He did not bother to look for the bag.

‘Were you?'

‘No: I wasn't,' she said.

‘Was that why you came here?'

‘Partly.'

Her eyes were shut again. In contrast he felt he saw the shape of her breasts, painfully clear under the thin white dress, stir, wake and look wonderfully up at him.

‘Only partly?'

‘You remember the day I came and I said there wasn't any colour?'

He remembered that. It seemed a thousand years away.

‘It was colour I was looking for,' she said.