A Mountain Lover

I

LIESEL ROTH had a romantic imagination — that is to say, the outer facts of life hardly troubled her at all. Penury, an insignificant exterior, the absence of all tender ties, and the enforced presence of a wholly unappetizing stepmother, slid off her like water off a duck’s back.

All round her native valley stood mountains; and out of these Liesel formed her intimacies. They were good comrades, their variety was limitless; and they never interfered with their friends, except to kill them if their friends should happen to be on them at inconvenient moments.

Liesel augmented this select society by that of the heroes of history and literature. She flooded her attentive mind with their exploits, and when the words of her heroes equaled their deeds, she remembered them.

A scholarship kept Liesel blissfully happy for three years in an ancient city made out of men’s dreams. The dreams were forgotten, but the stones remained; and Liesel arranged her own dreams to suit them. It was not perhaps a happier time in her life than any other, but the door stood open, and the future rose on all sides of her like the friendly mountains, high and limitless, but not, she modestly hoped, inaccessible.

At the end of the three years, Fate returned Liesel to her native valley to teach peasant children at a microscopic salary in a village school. She reminded herself that she was better off than some people, for her father had made her part sharer of all that he was able to leave when he had successfully shaken off his second wife, in the only way open to respectable husbands to shake off nagging wives. Half a small chalet, and the whole of her stepmother’s tongue, were Liesel’s heritage, and when she once more entered her native valley she heard the door of the Future close behind her with hopeless finality.

Still, the mountains remained, and even the most docile of human beings, when backed by a little money, can assert herself.

Liesel gave part of her small salary to her stepmother on condition that she might call — as well as her soul — one private room, a bathroom, and a cat, her own. The kitchen, a living room, the best bedroom, and two caged and piercingly shrill canaries, she left to her stepmother. Liesel had a gas-ring put into the bathroom, and a stove, which warmed the two apartments sufficiently for the cat to prefer them to the snow outside. Liesel always locked the door before she left her side of the house; and once inside again, the cat on her knee, a kettle on the gas-ring, and with Schiller’s ballads, she would relock the door, leaving her stepmother to scold and bicker over her empty hearth.

This was no doubt a very cruel piece of spiritual evasion on Liesel’s part, but, although Liesel was a romantic, she knew where to draw the line. She thought it sufficient to work with immature human beings all day long, teaching what she did n’t believe to stuffy little children whom she did not really like, without wasting what remained of her brain when she came home on a vulgar and spiteful old woman, who had practically killed her father.

Her stepmother tried various ways of breaking down Liesel’s privacy. She outrivaled the canaries in shrillness. She upbraided, whined, and passionately scolded. She scalded her foot and got chronic bronchitis, but it was all no use. Liesel paid for a girl to run errands for her and arranged with the district nurse, a heartless young woman who did not believe lies when told them, to visit her stepmother twice a day — but she went on reading Schiller behind locked doors.

Every morning Liesel went to school with the utmost punctuality, and returned home only in time for supper. After dark she sat by herself, or with her cat, if it was in the mood for it. She neither talked scandal nor gave her stepmother relief by producing it.

II

Liesel came from a better family than her stepmother — of super-peasants who rarely had babies before their marriages. She herself went further than this, for she refused to indulge in those frank provocative parleyings with young men at street corners which lead sometimes to babies without marriage, and sometimes to marriage itself. It was true that on summer evenings Liesel disappeared, and that on Sundays she was up at dawn and out all day, but it was generally admitted that, if you climb mountains for their sakes alone, you cannot be improper.

Liesel treated the mountains as all women should treat their lovers, with respect and without fear; so they never did her any harm and shared with her many of their secrets. The children in her class loved her, in spite of Liesel’s not being at all particularly fond of them — for this absence of affection did not prevent Liesel from being kind, just, and quiet. Everybody in the valley respected Liesel, although they thought her mad.

Time went on very peacefully for Liesel as soon as she grew used to the fact that she would never have any earthly prizes — except, with luck, if she survived her stepmother, the whole of her father’s house. Her imagination took her fast and far; and nature never stopped pouring into her receptive soul an inexhaustible supply of beauties. Animals and birds returned her unexacting companionship, and as for flowers, they invariably revealed themselves to Liesel in places and under conditions which usually baffle the most ardent botanists.

Liesel could have become quite famous as a botanist if she had known or cared anything about publicity. As it was, she merely collected and carefully studied the rare specimens she found, and, rather fiercely, kept them alive in the bathroom during the hardest winters.

Still, however intelligent and impersonal one contrives to be, it is seldom that a human being goes through life without attaching undue importance to some other human being, and even Liesel fell a victim to this universal misfortune. Her mind was so riddled with Schiller’s frenzied and self-sacrificing heroes that she was never in any danger of falling in love with an eligible person. Nor indeed would she have known how to meet the object of her affections had there been any danger of his returning them. But there was no such danger.

III

Herr Andreas von Mecklen came once a year for a very few weeks to Obermais in order to enjoy the exceptional variety of its ski tours. He was a great and rightly renowned skier. A man of poor but distinguished family, very handsome in a cinquecento way. If he had worn more clothes instead of fewer, and had any tendency to armor, there is no niche or tomb on which Andreas would not have more than held his own. As to his exploits, they outrivaled the busiest of Schiller’s heroes.

Andreas was not particularly young, and, although he had always been aggravatingly irresistible to women, he had remained unmarried for over forty years. He had a great but impersonal kindness for women. He liked teaching them to ski; and then leaving them alone to do it. He considered them to be the weaker sex, but not on that account to be either despised or given way to; and he was one of those rare men who do not wish women to make fools of themselves over an inclination he felt no prompting to return.

Liesel always went to Andreas’s late afternoon classes upon the nursery slopes, where he obligingly showed to intelligent novices, for nothing but love of it, the finer subtleties of his art. Anyone can learn how to ski who has common courage and balancing power, but to be a pretty skier, no danger to others and a pleasure to yourself, is a much more difficult business. Liesel, who had never had much practice in the refinements of skiing, soon became the best and safest of his pupils.

It is doubtful if Andreas even knew her name, but he knew her way of taking a steep slope, and after a time he discovered her knowledge of the neighboring mountains. When the class was over, he often discussed with Liesel what tours to take.

‘It is possible to climb the Kitz Horn from the north side,’ Liesel would say quietly, and without looking at Andreas, as if she were speaking to the listening air, but putting it under no obligation to return an answer.

‘But, I thought that had never been done in winter on account of the big drop?’ Andreas might object. ‘It is pure rock, is it not?’

‘On the left of the big drop there is a narrow snow slope which can be managed if the snow is firm,’ Liesel informed the universe at large; and, if the universe was in an accommodating frame of mind, Andreas and Liesel managed it.

Sometimes Andreas asked Liesel to try out a tour in advance with him in order to find out if it was safe enough for the others; and sometimes he asked her to climb a more difficult mountain which would just be fun for themselves. While they were negotiating, in intelligent peace, the stiffest of her mountains, Liesel would sometimes wonder if human beings could not die of joy. Her whole being felt soaked in light and warmth, thrilled through and through with flying air, and quiet as the listening snows.

Liesel was used to mountains. She had known, not once but many times, the intoxication of delight when dawn flings out its banners into blue air. The moon could not surprise her by pouring its brilliant greeting over a lonely peak; but these ecstasies grew sharper when Andreas, uncommunicative but entranced, stood by her side. The earth was shot with joy, and all her transfixed heart was one with it.

IV

Herr Andreas soon grew used to the tireless woman by his side, sexless and silent, as he himself loved to be. It was almost as good as if she were not there, even at times more convenient.

He noticed one or two things about Liesel, as a sportsman will. She never showed off. Her attention did not wander from the job in hand. She made no careless mistakes. She was an admirable guide, apt to carry spare parts of kit, and capable of sewing things on or binding things up. Her hands were large, but not clumsy, and they never trembled. Disagreeable surprises deepened her serenity. She did nothing to make bad moments worse. Nor did she seem to think that anything adverse was necessarily somebody else’s fault.

Herr Andreas knew many women who were good sportsmen; but Liesel differed from all of them. She put no emphasis upon her sportsmanship and she seemed mercifully unaware that her companion was an attractive man.

‘This Liesel,’ Andreas asked one of his favorite guides, ’from Obermais — what kind of woman is she off the mountains — in her private life?’

‘She is a good girl, without pride,’ Herr Fuchs answered, ‘but if you understand what I mean — she has no private life. As we say here, “a woman made of wood”! Would you believe it — she has turned thirty and has never had a lover! That doesn’t happen often in our valley, I can assure you!’

Andreas laughed and thought to himself: ‘Well, at last I have met a woman whom I can go about with in safety!’

And indeed Andreas was safe, for Liesel consumed her own danger.

There were winters when Andreas never came to Obermais. Liesel would wait, week after week, month after blind month, for any news of him. His name spoken once in a day would ease her heart. Once at a dentist’s she saw his picture in a newspaper. After her tooth had been very painfully extracted, Liesel stole the newspaper. She cut out Andreas’s portrait and put it at the bottom of a locked drawer. It was as if she held spring captive there — with all its flowers.

The next winter Andreas came again, and paid Liesel their kind of compliment.

They had taken with them on tour a whole class of beginners — good beginners, of course, not unworthy of Andreas’s patient skill in teaching. But, as often happens with novices, a young girl set off on a steep run and forgot, in the excitement of pace, how to prevent herself from colliding with a tree. She took a bad toss and broke her leg. Andreas reached her first, with the satin-easy swoop of a plover over its nest, and by the time he had seen the extent of the injury Liesel was beside him. She handed him her ski stick, which he cut in equal halves, binding the leg between them.

‘Now,’ Andreas said, lifting the girl in his arms and balancing her in front of him on his ski, her hands upon his shoulders and his at her waist, ‘she will stand very well like this, and I will run her down the mountain to the nearest doctor. You, Liesel, will take the class over the Hohe and down by Partenkirchen. They can go back from there by train. Be careful of the south slope!’

And without waiting for Liesel to do more than nod, Andreas, on a smooth glide, swept over the brim of the mountain.

It did not surprise Liesel to hear that Andreas had got the injured girl to the doctor without so much as a jerk down three thousand feet of difficult mountain. Nor did it surprise Andreas to hear that Liesel had led his class in safety off the Hohe in good time for their train.

V

This was the high-water mark of Liesel’s romance; but she never resented its static quality. Her imagination taught her that love of an individual is at its best when it holds most dear certain qualities possessed by its beloved. Liesel loved Andreas because he was brave and without selfseeking. She knew that he was a great and very gallant artist, practising his art without thinking of anything else but how to do it better.

Liesel thought that she had succeeded in her love because she recognized these golden qualities in Andreas, and very modestly, and as it were a long way off, she tried to reproduce them in herself. Sometimes Liesel wished that Andreas was not so good to look at, for fear that the sharp joy his beauty gave her should disturb her deep attention to his virtues. But on the whole she was safe with Andreas, for he was no better to look at than he was to learn from.

It was not even necessary that he should be visible — for, whether he was at Obermais or at Mount Everest, Liesel could go on building up in herself the qualities she knew him to possess. The only real difference was that if he was present she looked at him economically, and that when he was absent she was a little extravagant about her inner vision.

‘How would it be,’ Andreas asked her, in the tenth winter of their slight acquaintance, ‘ to try the Great Bear — if this frost lasts? Johann Adler is engaged this week, and the Bear is too stiff a mountain for anyone else in our neighborhood, but as far as I can see he would not be too hard a nut for us to crack together.’

’The slope down from the summit is the best long run we have,’ Liesel answered thoughtfully, ‘but you remember that beneath the run — before one is off the mountain — there are crevasses? Most of them are well marked, and naturally one has been over them often in the late spring, but under deep snow they sometimes change a little. Still, he is an easy mountain in good weather. I have not often tried him in winter, but last January I went up him alone, and the run down was — good.’

‘You should not have done that, of course!’ Herr Andreas said reprovingly, but his eyes twinkled.

‘Yes, it was wrong,’ Liesel agreed humbly, ’and I told no one I had done it. I would not set such an example — but perhaps now it will be useful!'

‘Well, never do such a thing again!’ Andreas said with a smile. For though he knew how very wrong it is for a single skier to climb a mountain alone, he knew that, had the occasion arisen, he might have committed the same sin himself. Neither he nor Liesel belonged to that selfish class of the foolhardy who seek risks for the sake of their vanity, and drag in other people to clear up the accidents caused by it.

Still, even the most prudent trust to luck sometimes — and sometimes pull it off!

‘No, I will never do it again,’ Liesel agreed obediently. ‘It was only that last winter — well, it sometimes happens that there is no one to do what one wants with one — and then — and then one does it by one’s self!'

Herr Andreas nodded; it was on the tip of his tongue to say that naturally one preferred doing things by one’s self, but that one could not always allow one’s self so great a privilege — but it occurred to him that it was not courteous to tell a good comrade this rather exclusive truth.

VI

They set off to climb the Great Bear at five o’clock on a January morning, with the end of moonlight to set them on their way. They climbed, with unhurrying steadiness, hour after hour until the clear and biting night grew into an apricot dawn. A sea of white mist floated beneath them, while far above their heads, in the bright air, rose their peak, in an unearthly purity. The sun shot up suddenly over a lower range, and smote the snow under their feet into cloth of gold.

‘We must turn here,’ said Liesel, ‘for higher up it is too steep to run!’

Andreas measured the heights above them thoughtfully. ‘Still a little higher,’ he murmured under his breath; and they climbed on.

‘Now!’ Andreas said. Obediently Liesel turned; he was above her, and she let him pass her before she plunged after him into a gulf of air which had turned blue.

Like birds, like clouds with the wind behind them, they fled down the side of their great protagonist. Every now and then they pulled up sharply to negotiate a difficult piece of mountain or to slide warily round the threat of a snow cornice. But for the most part they escaped into the spirit of speed.

When they had reached the flat region of the glacier they drew near each other.

‘Here we must go slow,’ Andreas said. ‘The snow is deep — it would be safer to give me your hand.’

Liesel gave it to him, as casually as though her hand were a ski stick.

‘Very slow here,’ she agreed quietly.

The sun was blinding hot. There was a tense stillness from end to end of the glacier. The air, the snows, the mountain, all seemed to have lived so long ago that they had passed beyond the region of sound.

Liesel felt the snow beneath her feet move uneasily. She wrenched her hand away from Andreas. She saw his face in the sunlight — before the blue ice opened to swallow her.

Andreas spent hours trying to reach her and could not. She never answered his calls; but at last two guides from the hut below heard him, and joined in his search.

He made them let him down into the crevasse, and there he found her, frozen and clenched between the walls of ice. The smile upon her lips was so happy that Andreas knew it could not have been death alone that had caused it.

The guides too spoke of it when they had drawn them both up into the pitiless light.

‘Look at her!' one of them said in an awed voice. ‘One would say that she had met her lover!’