The Numbered Account (14 page)

‘Yes, of course I had—but why should those bastards have it? If they'd had any wits they'd have looked at
Paris-Match
themselves.' He sniffed the sweet air, and gazed across at the Blümlisalp range, now turning to a pale rose as the sun sank. ‘How nice it is here! Do let's relax for a few days till something happens. What's the food like at the pub?'

‘Good,' Julia told him.

In fact something happened the very next day. Mrs. Hathaway had quite got over the journey from Gersau, and was perfectly happy either sitting in the garden, or pottering up and down the village street with Watkins, so Julia and Colin decided to go up the Niederhorn, the mountain immediately behind Beatenberg, in the Sessel-Bahn; see the view, and walk down.

The now universal practice of winter sports in Switzerland has conferred one great benefit on travellers at all times of year. Every mountain with slopes suitable for skiing has been provided either with a funicular railway, or at least some form of ski-lift, by which the lazy modern skier can be carried to the summit without effort, shoot down, be carried up again, and shoot down once more—they function in the summer too, so that any tourist can reach the tops of the lesser mountains. The Niederhorn Sessel-Bahn is one of the more elegant of these contraptions, with twin seats (slung from a strong steel cable) complete with foot-board and a little sun-canopy overhead, into which an attendant clamps the passengers by a metal bar across their stomachs. Julia and Colin, so clamped, were wafted out of the small station and up through the tops of the pine-trees. It was delicious sailing through the sunny air; people on other seats coming down on the opposite cable, a few feet away, waved to them out of sheer
joie de vivre
. Colin pulled out a map and looked out the way down—he was very map-minded. One path was visible, zig-zagging through the trees close below them; the only other slanted across the upper slopes to descend at the far end of the village—sheer cliffs cut off the section in between.

Half-way up they swung into a large shed, where the seats were hitched onto an overhead rail and hauled by hand round a semi-circle, to be hooked onto another cable for the upper section of the journey; the sides of this shed were full of enormous white-metal milk-churns.

‘What
can
those be for?' Julia speculated. ‘The cows aren't up on the high pastures yet.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Because they're still down in the village in their stalls—I'll show you. They're only taken up when the lower grass is finished, and it has grown properly up on the alps—a peasant was telling Mrs. H. about it. You can see that there's hardly a bite up here yet,' Julia said, peering down; they were now above the tree-line and swinging up over open pastures, still pallid and brownish after the recently-departed snow. ‘Oh, look!' the girl exclaimed—‘Those must be gentians. We must pick some for Mrs. H., she's mad on wild-flowers.' Colin, also peering from his seat, saw some brilliant blue stars shining in the drab grass. ‘Good idea,' he said.

But on arrival at the small summit station it was at once evident that picking gentians would be a very bad idea indeed. Large placards in four languages proclaimed that the whole
Niederhorn-Gebiet
was a
Natur-Reserve,
where the picking of any flowers was most strictly forbidden. ‘Oh dear,' Julia regretted as they strolled up to the platform on the top, where a panorama of the visible mountains was spread out under a glass frame beside a large telescope. Both panorama and telescope were crowded with tourists, jostling one another for position; Julia and Colin left them alone, and went over and looked down on the farther side. Here the Niederhorn, sloping up easily from the South, ends in a series of vertical cliffs, dropping some hundreds of feet to steep slopes of grass and forest above the Justis-thal, a long narrow valley running in from the Lake of Thun to a grey scree-covered
col
at its head. The valley is bounded on the farther side by similar slopes and cliffs, and a thin white thread of road runs up through the flat green meadows along the valley-floor. Julia was rather startled by the Flüh, or cliff; she drew back her head. They left the platform and walked away from the tourists, eastwards along the ridge, till from a projecting buttress they again looked over into the valley.

‘What's the little town down on the lake?' she asked.

‘Merligen,' Colin said, without consulting his map.

‘Merligen? I have an acquaintance there,' Julia said, remembering the little man from ‘Corsette-Air'. ‘Colin,
wouldn't it be nice to take Mrs. H. to Merligen on the steamer and hire a car, and drive her up the Justis-Thal?—I call it a darling valley. Why Justice, by the way?'

‘Two English missionaries, Justus and Beatus, originally converted this part of Switzerland to Christianity. ‘Ence the word orse-'air,' Colin said, using an old Glentoran nonsense. ‘Beatenberg, too. But one can't drive up the Justis-Thal; it's a military area, where no cars are allowed.'

Julia cautiously peered over into the green depths. ‘It doesn't look very military,' she said. ‘I don't see any barracks, or anything.'

‘No, you don't; that's the point. The barracks are in the mountains. Those cliffs opposite, and these plumb under us here, are bung full of ammunition and guns and so forth—in some parts they even have military hospitals inside the mountains, so I heard in Berne. Terrific people, the Swiss.'

Julia sat down on the yellowish turf and lit a cigarette.

‘I'm beginning to think so.'

Colin gestured back at the Lake of Thun, of which a segment was visible at the mouth of the valley.

‘That's full of stores, too—years' and years' supply of butter and cheese and flour and corn, sunk in metal containers hundreds of feet down. These lakes are very deep.'

Julia was entranced by this.

‘But doesn't it get stale?—especially the cheese and butter?'

‘Oh, they howk up the containers every so often, and empty them and put in fresh. A Swiss I met was telling me about it. The butter they always get out while it's still usable; and if the cheese is a bit dry they grate it and sell it in bottles.'

They wandered on a little farther, and came on a patch of still unmelted snow, dirty and pock-marked; round its edges small white crocuses were springing from the brown sodden turf, making a new snowiness to replace the old. ‘Oh, I wish I could take just one to Mrs. H.,' Julia said.

‘Better not—they mean what they say about picking
flowers, as about everything else,' Colin said. ‘I saw a type in uniform wandering about near the station. Come back to the pub and have a beer before we go down.'

The pub was a long low building with a restaurant and a broad terrace outside, on which numerous people sat drinking beer or coffee at little tables; Colin and Julia sat there too and drank their beer in the sun. ‘It's a nice clean wash-place,' Julia said; ‘boiling hot water.'

‘I wonder how they get their water up here,' Colin speculated. ‘There's no sign of a spring.'

‘Pumped, I suppose,' Julia replied indifferently.

They had strolled and idled so long on the top that Julia said they had better not walk down, or they would be madly late. ‘Let's come up another day and walk right along and down to the village at the far end.' Colin agreed to this, and presently they were swinging down through the air again, over the high meadows.

Now on the Sessel-Bahn you can see passengers travelling in the opposite direction a hundred yards away or more; and coming up towards them Julia now saw the girl she had seen at Victoria, perched in a seat beside the dark young man. ‘Colin,
look!'
she breathed.

Colin stared. ‘It can't be!' he exclaimed.

‘No, it isn't. It's her double. But look well at the man—it's them all right.'

Colin looked hard at the pair as they were borne past in the air, only a few feet away; then he and Julia discussed rapidly what to do. They decided that Julia should get out at the half-way halt and return to the summit, to see what she could of the pair, while in case she was not in time to meet them, Colin should go on to the bottom and wait there; when they came down he would follow them, whether they took the bus to Interlaken, or the funicular to Beatenbucht and the lake. ‘They certainly can't get away at the top,' Julia said, thinking of that dizzy range of limestone cliffs and buttresses.

‘Unless they do what we were planning just now, and walk all the way across and down to Wahnegg.'

‘Oh, she couldn't. She was wearing the silliest little
high-heeled shoes. Here we are'—and as they swung into the shed she called to one of the men who were manoeuvring the seats round the circular rail leading to the lower section to unclamp her bar and let her out. ‘
Der Herr auch?'
the man asked.

‘Nein,
not the Herr.' She sprang out. ‘Stick to them like
glue,'
she called to Colin as he swung out of the shed and off into space.

There was some difficulty about getting a seat up to the summit of the Niederhorn again; though an occasional passenger got off at the halt to walk up the last stretch over the alpine pastures far more, with return tickets, had walked down half-way, and wished to finish their descent airborne. Julia had a booklet of the invaluable
Ferien-Billets
(holiday tickets), which, issued to foreign tourists, enable them to make mountain excursions at half the official price; she produced this, and after some fuss a ticket was accepted—usually they were only taken at the top or the bottom, she was told. She had to wait some time for a seat, and employed this interval, as was her habit, in ingratiating herself with the people on the spot, men in blue dungarees who manipulated the seats at the halt; from them she enquired about the milk-churns. Oh, those were for water. There was no water at the summit; every drop had to be carried up in the evening after the Sessel-Bahn was closed to passengers, in the churns, and manhandled from the station some hundred yards to fill the cisterns of the restaurant. ‘Both guests and
Geschirr'
(kitchen utensils) ‘need water for washing,' an elderly man said, grinning.

At last she secured an empty half of one of the twin seats, and was again borne upwards. She was tremendously excited—the more so after the delay at the halt; by keeping a sharp eye on the descending seats she had established that the pair she sought had not yet come down, nor did they pass her in the air. ‘Just keep your eyes open—that's all you can do,' she adjured herself as she got out at the summit and began to walk up towards the restaurant.

This activity brought an immediate reward. A little
below the path she saw on the grassy slope the sham Aglaia, a bunch of
Gentiana verna
in her hand, being violently scolded by one of the Nature-Reserve wardens. She ran down to them. The girl was in tears; obviously she could not make out what it was all about. There was no sign of the dark young man.

‘The Fräulein does not understand,' Julia told the official.

‘The notice forbidding to pick flowers is also in English,' he said indignantly.

‘Jawohl
—but the Fräulein must not have looked—I think it is her first journey abroad. Is there some fine to pay?' she asked, opening her bag.

‘Nein
. But let
das Mädchen
not do this again.' He stumped off.

‘Oh, thank you ever so! What did you say to him?' the girl asked Julia, as they began to walk up towards the restaurant. ‘He was being as nasty as anything, and I couldn't understand a single word!'

‘He was scolding you for picking those flowers,' Julia said.

‘Why ever?'

‘Because this is a Nature-Reserve, like our National Parks, and picking flowers is forbidden; there's a big notice in English to say so, just by the station. But I told the man that you hadn't looked at it, because it was your first trip abroad. Is it?' Julia asked, with a friendly smile.

‘Well yes, ackcherly. I don't like it much, either—the food's so funny, and I can't talk to people, except the porter in the hotel, silly old thing! He does talk English, though.'

The imitation Aglaia was obviously the commonest of little Londoners; too suburban for anything as genuine as a Cockney, and not very intelligent. Julia was thrilled by this piece of luck, but a little worried about the dark young man. She tried to play her hand carefully.

‘Did you come up here alone?'

‘Oh no. Mr. Wright'—she corrected herself hastily—‘I mean Mr. Monro came up with me; but he likes climbing
up things, and he's gone off. He said I was to stay on the terrace and look at the mountains—but I hate those old mountains, all snow and ice, and when I saw these little flowers in the grass I came down to pick some. I didn't know it was wrong. I ‘spose I'd better throw them away, if there's all this trouble.'

‘No, give them to me,' Julia said, and stowed
G. verna
in her capacious bag.

‘Well, that's a good idea. Aoh!' The girl gave a little scream, and nearly fell—Julia put out a hand and caught her. One of her idiotic high heels had turned on a loose stone, wrenching her ankle; between pain and shock she could hardly walk. Julia, an arm round the tiny figure, dragged her up to the restaurant and sat her down on a stool in the wash-room; she borrowed a pantry-cloth from the cheerful Swiss maids and applied this as a cold compress, tying it in place with her own head-scarf.

‘Is that any easier?' she asked.

‘Yes, a bit.'

‘Then let's go out and have some coffee on the terrace. Do you like coffee?'

‘Not all that much—but the tea here is so lousy! You
are
being kind.'

Julia ordered coffee for two. Perhaps she was being kind; certainly she was enjoying a most blessed stroke of luck, and set about profiting by it. ‘How long have you been in Switzerland?' she asked.