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Authors: Paul Watkins

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BOOK: The Ice Soldier
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“I think that Carton would have wanted it that way.”
“I'd heard that you would never climb again.” Webb's voice merged with the static so that the static itself seemed to be speaking. “What made you change your mind?”
“Something Carton told me long ago. I just didn't understand it until now.”
“What was it?” he asked. “What did he tell you?”
“He said I should hold fast to the dreams of my youth.”
He repeated the words I had just said. And then he added, “I understand.”
“You do?” Somehow I doubted it. He didn't seem the type to understand.
“Words like that,” said Webb. “They carry the weight of the world as lightly as a feather.”
Then I knew that I'd been wrong. He understood after all.
By sunset the following day, just as Webb had predicted, Stanley and I and the news of Carton's last request were on the front page of every paper in the country.
 
 
THE COFFIN LAY ON a long table in the middle of the Climbers' Club. Its sides were bare metal which had been polished in a series of swirls. The top had been welded shut, with brass handles bolted to its sides. The coffin was beautiful in its simplicity, and stood out against the darkly complex Persian rugs, the sleek fur of the trophy heads, and the otherworldly shaping of their horns.
It also clashed with the somberly dressed crowd which had gathered to pay tribute to Carton before he began his final journey to the mountains.
A chamber orchestra set up behind a barricade of shifted furniture played Albinoni's “Adagio” and Pachelbel's “Canon.”
So many people had showed up that it became necessary to usher them in a dozen at a time. They filed past the coffin, laid flowers on it, touched it, ran their fingers along its sides, kissed it. Some people cried. Most just stared, with the same glazed and strangely hungry look that Carton had drawn from them in his lectures.
I thought of what he had said about the show being over.
But it wasn't. Even in death, he had managed not to disappoint his thousands of admirers.
Outside, through the open doors of the club, hundreds of people milled about in the street. The press was there, photographing anyone who seemed particularly overwhelmed as they emerged from the building.
Helen and I were sitting on the stairs, at that place where the big Chinese vase bristled with Zulu spears. There was nowhere else for us to sit, so we looked through the banister railing at the tweed caps and cloche hats of the people who filed through the room.
I was glad Helen was there. I felt comfortable around her. She was one of the few people I knew who understood firsthand the mountains that stood behind the legend of Henry Carton. It was what set her apart from the crowd down below, and bonded her to Stanley and to me.
With as much dignity as possible, Stanley led the mourners past the coffin and made sure, with polite taps on shoulders or kind words whispered in ears, that no one dawdled longer than was necessary.
Over the past few days, he had taken on the role of spokesman for our expedition. Each day, there were meetings with journalists, and I saw a little of his uncle's showmanship in the way Stanley avoided the topic of his inheritance and the rancor which had existed between them for so long. In fact, Stanley had nothing bad to say about his uncle, which was a first in my experience.
The interviews were held at the Montague, up on the second floor, where there was a space too grandly named the Banquet Room. On the walls hung colored drawings of people foxhunting. The pictures were supposed to show the progression
of the hunt: the Scent, the View-Hallo, the Chase, and so on. Stanley installed himself at one end of the table and received a seeming endless series of journalists. Barber ran an irregular shuttle service of tea from the kitchen to the private dining room. The journalists scribbled furiously in their notepads, while Stanley paced the room, bounced his fist off the table, or seesawed on the back legs of his chair. He never seemed to tire.
In between classes, I usually managed to attend a couple of interviews each day. When asked, I chipped in the odd bit of Alpine geography or explained the difference between a piton and a crampon, but otherwise I minded my own business. I couldn't stand it for long in that little room, eyes drawn repeatedly and annoyingly to those red-jacketed foxhunting men, forever frozen in midair over a fallen tree or toasting one another with wine their lips would never touch. I always found reasons to be moving on.
Several times, I ended up having lunch with Helen down in the main dining room. She was concerned, as I was, about the technical aspects of the journey. There was the ice field of the Dragon's Tongue to be crossed beforehand. There, the danger of avalanche or of crevasses hidden below thin crusts of snow was enough to deter most mountaineers from ever reaching Carton's Rock. Once the climb began, even with no extraordinary gear to carry, all indications were that it would be a difficult ascent. But with the coffin as well, and what appeared in Helen's photographs to be several unavoidable vertical rock walls, we were not sure it could be done.
In the wake of the recent disaster in Patagonia, talk of climbing was everywhere. Not for the first time, the dangers of mountaineering, and the point of mountaineering at all, was brought into question. Editorials railed against what they
saw as a needless loss of life while one engaged in a pursuit which had no purpose except to tempt fate.
Despite this, the Carton Expedition, as it was now being called, was finding in the public eye some measure of redemption for the corpses left in Patagonia. We were not climbing a mountain as much as we were honoring the dead. For that, risks were worth taking.
In the space of one week, Stanley evolved from the service-dodging bon vivant of the Montague Club, the co-president of the now defunct Society of Former Mountaineers, and the unemployed and unemployable slack-chinned wasteful spender of his father's hard-earned money to an almost saintly figure of personal sacrifice, familial love, and, the press was quick to point out, the love of Helen Paradise as well. Stanley had turned into an actual hero, a fact which he seemed both anxious to prove and just as eager to deny. These denials only made him more popular, as he had known they would.
I, on the other hand, had been cast as something of a silent partner. I was the former mountaineer, invalided out of the sport by the war, returning to the Alps to help out an old friend. Without complaint, I settled into this supporting role, rather than insist upon the facts. The alternate reality had been so quickly manufactured by the press that it seemed almost easier to be swept along by its half-truths than to remember the real reasons for my going.
The image they had created for Stanley was almost as heroic as that of his uncle. The two of them were, in a way, closer than they had ever been before. Henry Carton had become, in death, the father figure that he'd always wished he'd been for Stanley. And Stanley became the thing he had so stubbornly refused to be, which was, if such a thing were possible now, his uncle's pride and joy.
The only interruption to the smooth running of that afternoon occurred at the arrival of a little man whose antique-looking clothes and large black hat gave him a dwarfish, supernatural look. I could see nothing of his eyes, but his lips were bloodlessly thin and his nose was long and rounded at the end. Ignoring the orderly line which filed past the coffin, the man stood in the middle of the room and began waving a walking stick above his head.
“Henry Carton is a fraud and a scoundrel!” shouted the little man.
A gasp went up from the line of waiting people.
“Do you mind?” asked Stanley, his voice hoarse with sudden anger.
“You've all been cheated!” yelled the man. “The whole thing is a swindle!”
“What is?” demanded Stanley.
With a flick of his wrist, the man brought his walking stick level with Stanley's chest and kept it there as if aiming the barrel of a gun. “Your uncle thinks he has fooled the whole world. But he hasn't fooled me!”
“Who the hell are you?” asked Stanley.
“My name is Joseph Pringle!”
There was a sound almost like growling from the people in the line.
Pringle heard this, and he turned on them. “You can all just pack it in! You don't know anything. If you did, you wouldn't be here kowtowing to this man. And you!” He swung his stick to where I sat with Helen on the stairs. “You ought to have the sense to leave this fool where he is lying now, instead of risking your life for the sake of this blackguard's reputation!”
I had never heard anyone use the word
blackguard
seriously before.
The whole room stood in shock.
The press crowded into the doorway.
Pringle looked around, snorting in his breaths like a bull before it charges. “I tell you all now,” he shouted, “that this journey will never take place!” Then he let out a shrill birdlike cry and, with one sweep of his cane, cleared the flowers from the top of the coffin.
This was too much for the crowd. They descended upon him. One man grabbed Pringle's walking stick, broke it over his knee, and sent the two ends clattering away into the corner of the room. They took his hat and stamped on it. They tore the buttons off his coat.
Pringle screamed and thrashed about, his pale scalp visible beneath a layer of thin gray hair, which made his skull look as fragile as an egg.
If it had not been for Stanley, they probably would have trampled him to death. Instead, Stanley pushed his way through the scrum, took Pringle by the scruff of the neck, and heaved him out among the pressmen.
Flash cubes popped and crackled. Bursts of magnesium light flickered in from outside.
Pringle cursed them all and tried to snatch their cameras.
But the pressmen only fell back out of reach and took more pictures.
At last, Pringle gave up the fight and ran away down the street, still cursing, still promising that our journey would never take place.
The viewing continued for a few more hours. The orchestra packed up at noon. By four, the journalists had gone. At five, Helen went home. At six, Stanley at last called it quits. This still left many people who had not glimpsed the coffin, so Stanley offered to open the place again tomorrow.
With the doors finally closed, Stanley sank into a chair and pressed his hands against his face.
The air was filled with the sickly smell of the flowers which had been left around the coffin. Stanley had replaced some of those that had been knocked off by Pringle, but the floor was still scattered with carnations, lilies, and roses.
Stanley let his head fall back with a groan. “What a day,” he murmured.
I sat down opposite him and grunted in agreement.
“How are we ever going to move that coffin up the side of a mountain?” he asked.
“A lot of brute strength, I imagine.”
“It's going to take more than that,” said Stanley, raising his head. “Just look at the thing. It's made for being lowered into the ground, not sliding up a hill.”
With only a few weeks before our departure, there were still so many details to sort out that I hadn't given the matter much thought. Even getting to Italy was proving more tricky than I had expected. Owing to difficulties with the airlines over transporting Carton's body in a welded-shut coffin, we had arranged to travel there by train, just as we had done in the old days.
“You did a good job today,” I told Stanley.
“I think Uncle Henry would have been pleased with the turnout,” he replied. “Especially old Pringle showing up. I thought he would have gone by now.”
“Gone where?” I asked.
“The Alps,” replied Stanley. “He spends his summers there, you know. Not far from where we're going, actually. My uncle used to say he could sense it when Pringle had left London for the season.” Stanley screwed up his face and did his best
impersonation of Carton's creaky voice: “I feel it, Stanley! I feel it like a freshening of the air!”
“How does Pringle propose to stop us?”
“Bury us under an avalanche of documents, I expect.”
“He must have really hated old Carton.”
Stanley smiled, as if about to let me in on a secret he had known for a long time. “Crossing swords with Carton was all Pringle had to live for, really. In a funny way, I think Pringle will miss him more than anybody else. Archenemies are hard to come by, and with Carton gone, Pringle's got no one left to persecute. Everyone else is either too well behaved or too afraid to stand up to him. But Carton wasn't bothered in the least.” Stanley sat forward, smiling as a memory broke open in his head. “My uncle used to do a skit in his lectures where he would pretend to be Pringle. He wouldn't name him, of course, but would dress himself up like Pringle, ridiculous tie and so on, and everyone knew whom he was mimicking. He would come out onstage right at the beginning of the lecture and start saying all these awful things about Carton. About himself! Sometimes the audience, especially if they were first-timers and hadn't seen Carton in the flesh, wouldn't actually know who this man was. They'd be shocked, of course. Sometimes they would boo him. Carton would carry on listing all the rotten things Pringle had said about him, about how everything Carton said was lies, but then he would pretend that he had an itch, right in the middle of his back. Pringle was always scratching himself because of his eczema. So as part of his act, my uncle would try to scratch his back, but of course he couldn't. So he would start dancing around the stage, all the while trying to carry on with his Carton bashing. He would get so desperately itchy that he would start rubbing his back up
and down against the corner of the chalkboard he used for illustrating his lectures. He'd look like an old bear scratching himself on a tree trunk. Of course, by now the audience would be howling with laughter. Eventually, Carton would reveal who he was. Then you could hear the applause halfway down the street.”

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