The 4th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

THE ACCIDENT Ann Bridge

The grey-haired man sitting on the wall opposite the Hotel Monte Rosa at Zermatt folded his copy of The Times, knocked out his pipe against the cement parapet on which his feet rested, and, groaning a little, hoisted himself up out of his wicker chair. “The wall” at Zermatt, it should be explained, is not really a wall at all, but a narrow terrace raised a foot or so above the narrow street, with just room on it for a single row of chairs. There, since the earliest days of mountaineering, Englishmen with skinless noses, wearing baggy trousers and shabby tweed coats, have sat during the months of August and September—smoking pipes, reading The Times, or discussing routes up Swiss mountains, propping their feet on the narrow ledge in front of them; watching other climbers enter and leave the hotel, and above all, gossiping as only Englishmen of the more learned professions on holiday know how to gossip. This sin besets climbers in particular: a small class of men, somewhat a race apart, the interest they take in the exploits and even the personal idiosyncrasies of each other is something of a portent.

Now, as the grey-haired man went over to the door of the hotel, tapped the barometer, and then took his large, powerful, and slightly heavy figure off down the street, two much younger men, drinking an early tea at one of the little green-painted iron tables by the hotel doorway, looked after him with interest. They were climbers, too—the button of the Alpine Club adorned their jackets; nailed boots their feet; in the afternoon sunshine the wall was now deserted, and the grey-haired man disappearing past the bootmaker’s, the only subject of interest or speculation in sight.

“Who’s that?” the younger asked.

“That’s old Allard. The alienist chap.”

“What is an alienist?” the very young man inquired, pouring out another cup of tea.

“A loony specialist, my dear Billy. He’s a great swell. Runs that big asylum in Hampshire. He climbs with old Franz Leukerbad. He did that new route on the Pretzelhorn last year.”

Dr. Allard meanwhile wandered on down the small street. He was taking an off day, and was filling in the time as one does fill in off days at Zermatt. He went into the Wega bookshop and found a new French volume on dementia praecox, which he bought. It was still too early for tea, and he pottered idly up into the little cemetery and stared, as two generations of mountaineers have stared, at the monument commemorating the four climbers who perished on the first ascent of the Matterhorn. The imagination cannot resist the dramatic quality of that episode—success at last, after years of undaunted and fruitless struggle on the part of Edward Whymper, darkened in the very hour of triumph by an unexpected and still inexplicable tragedy. “Lord Francis Douglas,” Dr. Allard read. He turned away, sighing a little; poor old Whymper, he remembered him the last time he came to Zermatt—the little stocky man, old and shabby, with a square face rather like Lord Beaverbrook’s. He looked across to the Matterhorn, an obelisk of brown and silver, dominating the end of the valley; plastered with new snow, it was, and lovely to see—but no hope of doing the Zmutt ridge for days yet. Well, Whymper was dead now—but when Lord Beaverbrook and his papers and his wealth were forgotten, the Matterhorn would still stand there, he thought, and Whymper be remembered; no one could look at the Matterhorn for ever without remembering Whymper—the man who had made the mountain his monument. And his courage and tenacity, and selfless devotion to that shape of ferocious beauty.

There were two newly made graves in the cemetery, and drawn by some curious fascination he went and stood by them, and read the names on the small temporary wooden boards set up at the foot of each mound of raw earth: “James Bull, July 16th, 19——”; “George Henry Whitelegg, July 16th, 19——.” Just a month ago. Poor chaps—no one would ever know why they had fallen either; they were alone, climbing guideless, when they were killed. There was nothing much wrong with the north-east face of the Weisshorn—it had been done at least four times before, and once by a girl of nineteen. Bull—well, one ought not to speak ill of the dead, but he was rather a nasty bit of work. Unscrupulous, jealous, touchy, always on the make, Allard thought with distaste; crabbing other climbers, puffing his own exploits, writing himself up. The best thing about him was his passion for mountaineering; but even that he sullied—everything turned to journalism at his touch. Poor young Whitelegg was quite under his spell—he had that power of dominating another person, almost of possessing them.

Sometimes one’s own thoughts give one a start. When Dr. Allard got as far as “possessing them,” he pulled up short. No, he didn’t really mean that; not even of Bull. The word “possession” had for Dr. Allard a perfectly definite technical meaning; that form of mental derangement when the personality is invaded by some alien intruder which, in its attempts at domination, wrecks the delicately adjusted mechanism of the human reason. He specialised in this little-studied branch of psychiatry; he had written a book about it.

As if his thoughts tired him, he sat down on a bench in the sun. His poor Rose! So eager, so beautiful, so good—and struck down, just six weeks before their wedding, by that appalling malady. He could never forget the days when, gentle and amiable as she still seemed, she had begun to look at him with the eyes of a stranger; that memory clung more hauntingly even than the shocking moment when she attacked him with demoniac fierceness. She had been certified, and died shortly after in an asylum, but she had turned Allard into a mental specialist. All his spare time had since been spent in investigating this special form of derangement. For years he had never come to Zermatt—he had met her here; but latterly he had begun to do so again—it was so long ago, and time blunts the edge of even the most passionate memories. This time, however, it had all been brought back to him vividly by the presence of that nice child, Phyllis Strangways. She reminded him strangely of Rose. Not in person—she was smaller, fairer; but in her ardent love of mountains and the beauty of mountains, her tireless enthusiasm for climbing them. They could never be still, she and that brother of hers; they must be doing something every day of their precious three weeks. Yesterday they had gone off, on his advice, to do the Bieshorn, the only thing which might conceivably be expected to go with these masses of new snow; their guides, the young Kaufmatters, were in his opinion rather too frivolous and reckless to be entrusted with such a pair of babes. Dr. Allard had an almost tender feeling, half parental, half something more wistful, connected with memories of his own youth and another’s, about those two; he felt that they wanted looking after. And eagerly, sweetly, deferentially they accepted any advice he gave; they had even begun to come and seek it, and his company too.

He glanced at his watch. The 4.05 from Randa would just about be in; they ought to have caught it. He would go and see. Hoisting himself up out of his seat—this beastly rheumatic stiffness!—he left the cemetery.

He met them in the street. Yes, they had done the Bieshorn all right—a frightful plug, though, in all that snow. But he missed their usual accents of joyful enthusiasm. The girl looked tired, and rather white; she was unusually silent while he gave them tea at one of the little green tables. Something in her aspect troubled Dr. Allard, and when she went in to have a bath he detained the boy. “Roger, what’s wrong with your sister?”

The boy frowned. It was that fool Christian. On the way down he had insisted on making a detour across the Bies-glacier to show them the place on the Weisshorn where the accident was a month ago—and that had upset her.

How like guides, Dr. Allard thought, with their morbid love of horrors! Still, he was a little surprised at its having so much effect on her; she had seemed a person of considerable nervous stability. “I’m sorry, Roger,” he said. “Still, there was nothing to see, was there, after all this time, and this new snow?”

The boy said nothing—he still frowned, with a puzzled, uncertain look. “Roger, what is it?” Dr. Allard asked him now. sharply.

“Well . . . I think I’d better tell you, sir, though you’ll think us all fools,” said the boy, flushing at his tone. “As a matter of fact, we did see something. It was as we came away. We’d left the foot of the face, and got right out on to that flat snowfield that lies below it, when suddenly we came on tracks in the snow.” He stopped.

“Well, what of that?” said Dr. Allard, a little testily. “Some other party might easily have been there. Where were they coming from?”

“That’s just it,” said Roger. “They weren’t coming from anywhere. They just began, right out in the open. We didn’t somehow notice at first how odd it was, and we followed them, because it was easier going. But then the guides began to talk between themselves, like they do, discussing how on earth those tracks could have begun just from nowhere, right out in that huge open space—and Phyl caught the drift of what they were saying, and just as they began to go downhill she turned all white and said to me: ‘Those are those men’s tracks!” And nothing would make her go that way any more.”

Dr. Allard pulled at his pipe. “And what did the guides say?” he asked.

“Oh, Christian laughed and said: ‘Es war nur Spuren’; but he and Hans didn’t much like it either, because unless someone was dropped from an aeroplane, how could they begin like that? It was . . . nasty,” said the boy, wriggling his shoulders, as if to throw off some oppression. “So we branched off to the left and came down the rocks by the side of the ice-fall, and back that way. But that’s what has upset Phyllis.”

Dr. Allard pondered this information all the evening. When he had sent Roger off to change, he sought out the guides and questioned them. They confirmed Roger’s story in every particular; the footsteps had begun, quite suddenly, in the snow, right out in the flat open space below the N.E. face of the Weisshorn, as if the makers of them had dropped from a Flugmaschine. But the men were not at all anxious to talk about it, and from their rather foolish and giggling manner, more than from anything they actually said, he divined that they shared Roger’s discomfort about the whole matter. In fact, Hans and Christian Kaufmatter had got the wind up. That was the one thing which emerged clearly. Why, they would not or could not say.

After the children had gone to bed—Dr. Allard always thought of them as children, though Phyllis was nearly twenty and the boy at least seventeen—the doctor strolled a little way up the valley road in the warm starlight, smoking. In front of him rose the Matterhorn; barely visible, a shadowy, almost transparent shape of sky-colour, which held no stars. He began to set the facts in order in his head. No aeroplane had crossed the valley, so Alois, the porter, said, “within the last thirty-six hours—since the last snow fell, in fact.” Therefore that explanation of the phenomenon was ruled out. But four people had seen it. Were they all four mistaken? Possibly—Dr. Allard knew too much about hallucinations to exclude that possibility. But even if they were mistaken, the problem remained; four people experiencing the same hallucination, and all, though in varying degrees, feeling precisely the same sense of discomfort about it. Phyllis had felt it most, Roger next most—and Phyllis alone, he noted, had connected it with the two dead men. H’m. It wasn’t very nice, however you looked at it. He dallied with the thought of going up next day to the Bies-glacier, to see what was to be seen for himself, but on further consideration he decided against that plan. He would do better to stay with the children, keep them amused, and talk to Phyllis. He knew the importance, in any case of shock or disturbance, of making the person talk it out—suck the poison from the wound, as it were, and prevent an injury to the subconscious. He would get on to that in the morning.

Dr. Allard had reason, next day, to be extremely glad that he had not gone off to the Bies-glacier, for the afternoon brought a fresh and far more disturbing shock. The morning passed quietly enough. He and Phyllis went for a stroll, into the meadows beyond the town—the hay was cut, but small bright flowers bloomed in the stubbly grass and on the ledges of the scattered rocks; the air was aromatic with thyme. Sitting in those sweet and peaceful surroundings, Dr. Allard had his talk with the girl. It was not very satisfactory. Phyllis, to his surprise, took a rather superior line about herself. She had been tired; she must have been fanciful. No, she didn’t really mind it a bit now. It was odd, but it didn’t worry her, really, Dr. Allard. This disconcerted the doctor a good deal. She would not come out into the open—and why wouldn’t she? There were two possible reasons—either that she really had got over the shock, and thought herself silly; or that she was so profoundly frightened that her mind was shying away from the subject. The latter was the more likely, but so long as she would not talk about it, he could not be positive; and more important, he could not help her.

All he could do was to keep the pair of them occupied, and with this end in view they went up to the little restaurant at the Corner Gorge for tea. Phyllis seemed really merry up there, which made the shock when it came all the greater. The post had come in when they got back, and Dr. Allard took his letters from fat old Alois and sat on the wall with them; absorbed, he was vaguely conscious of the children sitting close by, chattering over their own mail, when he heard Roger say . . . “What’s this card, Phyl? Who on earth is J. Bull?”

The name hit the doctor at once, with a little sharp tap like a hammer. He looked up quickly at the pair. Phyllis was turning a picture postcard over in her fingers, with a puzzled look on her face. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “Stresa . . . I don’t know anyone at Stresa; and I didn’t think I knew anyone called Bull. Why should he want to climb with us? And yet the name is familiar, somehow—I know I’ve seen it lately.”

Dr. Allard got up and went over to them. “Some mistake?” he said . . .” let me see, may I?” He did it all very gently and naturally, like a person moving up to a wild bird; whatever was on that card, he wanted to know it before Phyllis remembered where she had recently seen the name J. Bull—on the wooden board at the foot of that new grave in the cemetery, where he himself had seen it, only yesterday. But even as he went to take the card from her, the girl’s face blanched; she put one hand over her mouth with a curious gesture, and stared at him with darkened eyes. “James Bull,” she said, almost in a whisper, from behind her hand, “he . . . he was one of them!”

“My dear child, that’s got nothing to do with this postcard,” said Dr. Allard, firmly and heartily. “Let me see it, will you?” She gave it to him, and he read it through. It was written in pencil, which came out rather faint on the glossy surface on the card, below a picture of Stresa. “George and I are making our way over to Zermatt, and hope to find you and your brother there. We mean to climb with you. Yours . . . J. Bull.” That was all. The doctor turned it over. It was addressed, correctly enough to Miss Phyllis Strangways, Hotel Mont-Rose, Zermatt, and bore the Stresa postmark of two days before; just one day, Dr. Allard noted, before the children had seen those strange footsteps on the Bies-glacier. George—that was young Whitelegg’s name. It wasn’t very nice, it was a horrible practical joke to play on anyone. Before he could think of the next thing to say, young Roger of course must needs do the silliest thing he possibly could. “George Whitelegg was the other chap’s name, surely?” he blurted out.

Dr. Allard had to control his irritation with the boy. “Yes, it was,” he said quietly and rather sternly, “and that shows that someone is playing a very stupid and heartless practical joke on your sister. I can’t conceive of anything in worse taste.” He turned to Phyllis, who still sat staring at him with those fixed and darkened eyes. “You’re sure you don’t know the writing?” he asked in a very everyday voice. “Look at it again.”

But neither Phyllis nor Roger could recognise the writing in the least. So Dr. Allard took the card, promising to institute inquiries about the practical joker; he was so firm about this person that presently he saw the girl’s colour restored, and a more natural expression come into her face.

But his inquiries did not take the form that a listener to the foregoing conversation might have expected. It is true that he did, from the post-office, ring up the office of the small local journal which published the visitors’ lists at Stresa, and ascertained that no one within the last week had registered in the name of Bull at any of the hotels or pensions there; he hardly expected to find that they had; but when the children were out of the way he went and looked up James Bull’s signature in the hotel register. Written with the usual deplorable Swiss nib, in the usual gluey hotel ink, it was mostly a purple blot, hardly legible, and quite useless for purposes of comparison with the faint pencilling on the postcard. He further ascertained at the bureau that Bull had paid his bill in notes, not by cheque. Finally he was driven to inquiries among the few English climbers in the hotel, as to whether any of them had known Bull well enough to recognise his writing. But none had—Bull was not generally popular. Dr. Allard was obliged to admit himself stumped in this direction.

Next day they did a climb on the Riffelhorn. The children appeared to have swallowed the practical joke theory fairly easily, and if Dr. Allard’s own thoughts took a rather darker turn he kept them to himself. Phyllis climbed well, and after a huge tea at the Riffel-alp they ran down the path through the pine woods in the usual happy spirits of descending mountaineers. At the door of the hotel Dr. Allard met an old friend, just come in from traversing the Matterhorn, and stopped to exchange greetings with him—he was interrupted by Roger, who came out from the hall and touched his arm, with a disturbed face. “Could you come to Phyl a moment, sir? She’s had another.”

The doctor hurried in. Phyllis sat, white and frightened, on a chair at the foot of the stairs, holding a postcard. It bore the postmark of Ornavasso, and a similar message to the first; the date was twenty-four hours later. Dr. Allard took the girl up to his room—the hall was full of people—and there talked to her. Now she did come out into the open; half crying, she admitted that she was frightened, and with just the same fear as she had felt on the Bies-glacier. “I don’t believe it is a joke—I believe it’s them. I have a feeling—I don’t quite know how—that they’re trying to get at me!” she said, staring at him with terrified eyes.

Dr. Allard mixed her a sedative, and talked to her reassuringly. She mustn’t give way, he said, to those ideas; she must at least think of it as a practical joke, till they had proved whether it was or not. “Spirits don’t write postcards,” said Dr. Allard. He gave her a new Tauchnitz novel and sent her to bed for supper—but he went down to dinner very ill-at-ease. No—spirits didn’t write postcards, but they did cause the hands of others to write them. He had seen that. It looked—well, to Dr. Allard it looked very nasty indeed. “We mean to climb with you”—what could that imply but a determination to climb most intimately with them, in their persons, possessing them? If, that is, it wasn’t a joke. And the doctor didn’t really believe it was. The whole thing hung together too well. Ornavasso was almost at the mouth of the Val Anzasca, which led up to Macugnaga and the Monte Moro—mountaineers would come that way if they came on foot. No, he didn’t like it—didn’t like it at all.

He took the only precaution he could—of telling Alois to keep all postcards for Miss Strangways and give them to him. So Phyllis escaped the one which arrived next day—from Bannio, as the doctor expected, half-way up the Val Anzasca, with a still more recent postmark. The day after that there wasn’t one—and he took the pair out step-cutting on the Findelen glacier. But on the afternoon of the fifth day, when they came in for tea after a walk, Alois, the porter handed the girl a note. A party, he said, had given it in on their way down from the Regina Margherita Hutte on Monte Rosa, an hour before. Phyllis opened it—turned white, and handed it to the doctor without a word. It bore the date of that very day, and contained only the words: “See you in Zermatt this evening. . . . J. B.”

Dr. Allard’s first thought was to trace the bringers of the note. But here Alois could give little help. They were Italians, Führerlosen (guideless climbers)—they had handed in the note, asked the time of the next train to Visp, and gone on to the station, where a train actually left within half an hour. They would, it was clear, be gone some time since.

But these inquiries and considerations were soon cut short by concern for Phyllis’s state. Roger, very sensibly, had taken her up to her room; but he presently sent a chambermaid down to request the Herr Doktor’s presence immediately. Allard went up. The girl was sitting huddled in a chair, staring in front of her; she started violently at his entry, sprang up, and then stood, trembling all over. “They’ll get me,” she said, in a low vibrating voice; “they’ll be here to-night and they’ll get us.” Dr. Allard spoke soothingly to her, putting his hand on her arm: “Phyllis, I will take care of you—you mustn’t get so excited.”

“You can’t—you can’t keep them off. They’ve been coming, and coming, and coming—and now they’ll be here—this evening!” she said, her voice rising almost to a scream. “Oh!” She sank down in the chair again, covering her face with her hands, while shudders shook her body.

Dr. Allard was thoroughly alarmed. Whether there was any reality in the menace he feared, or whether it was merely a horrid practical joke, the effect on the girl was the same—she was nearly frantic. He began to fear for her reason—if this state of panic terror went on, anything might happen. In such cases argument, he knew, was useless; the only chance was some definite action which would relieve the tension. He took a sudden resolution.

“Roger, go and get hold of Franz and Christian and tell them to be ready to start the moment after tea,” he said decisively. “And tell Marie to put up some food for tomorrow. We’re going up to the Trift to do a climb.” The boy ran off and the man put his hand firmly on the girl’s shoulder. “Phyllis!” he said. She looked up, and he held her eyes with his, steadily—a trick he had long since learned to use in his piteous profession.

“Listen to me, Phyllis,” he said. “If anyone does comes, they won’t find us here. We’re going up to the Trift for the night, and if the weather holds we’ll traverse the Rothhorn to-morrow, to the Mountet hut.” He saw that he had caught her attention—she had heard; she was taking in his meaning, and the trembling lessened. He went on, pursuing his advantage. “As for all this business, it’s very nasty and mysterious, my dear; but if you will trust me, and do exactly what I tell you, I will keep you safe, you two. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said faintly, but a little more naturally.

“That’s right,” he said. “I can take care of you, if you will obey me—but you must do what I say. Now, put your things together for two or three days—we might even go over the Dent Blanche, if the weather is good and you don’t get too tired. Have you got spare unders? and your woollies? Well, put them all in, and then come down and have tea, and we’ll start the moment after.”

He waited, while she began to collect her effects in heaps on the bed—asking her where her rucksack was, commenting on items of her outfit, keeping her attention on these practical details, till Roger came back. “When you’ve done your things, help Roger with his,” he said, and grasped the boy’s arm till he winced, to check his protest. The boy, startled, looked at him and understood, thank goodness. “Try and be down in ten minutes,” he said, and left them.

Walking up through the narrow gorge which leads to the Trift Hut, after tea, Dr. Allard took the opportunity of having a talk to Roger. He had got hold of old Franz, his leading guide, and put a little of the situation to him. The Fräulein, he explained, had got an idée fixe as the result of being taken to the scene of the accident—it was very unfortunate, but these things did happen. “Ja-Ja”—Franz nodded acceptance of the statement. It was therefore most important to keep her mind occupied, Dr. Allard pursued, and he, Franz, was to come up to her on the path and enter into conversation with her, and keep her talking. But he was not to mention accidents, or death, or Gespenster (ghosts), or any such thing—nor Herr Whitelegg, or Herr Bull, naturally. “Ja-Ja”—Franz nodded again. (His style, Dr. Allard reflected, would be greatly cramped by cutting out two of the Swiss guides’ favourite topics; but Franz was an old friend, and absolutely trustworthy.)

So while Franz amused the young lady with anecdotes of Wills and Whymper, Davidson and Coolidge, Dr. Allard talked to Roger. He wanted to ascertain what Roger himself felt about the whole business—worried as he had been over Phyllis, he had given little thought to the boy; besides, he could be a most useful ally in dealing with his sister, if he could be got to grasp the situation. The doctor was careful to begin by being very medical, explaining the danger to Phyllis’s mind and nerves involved in the strain of such terrors; the importance of keeping her attention occupied, and of not leaving her alone. (He remembered that point afterwards.) On what justification there might be for her fears he did not touch, at first. But Roger did. After listening thoughtfully to Dr. Allard’s injunctions, he put a question on his own account: “Phyl thinks—she’s convinced—that those men want to go on climbing, and haven’t bodies to climb with now, and want to use ours. That seems pretty fantastic, but”—he paused—“is it possible, sir?”

Dr. Allard chose his words carefully before replying. There was a form of mental illness, he said, for which the word “possession” was used; but generally it was, so to speak, by some attribute of personality, like violence or cruelty, rather than by a whole personality itself, that the sufferer was enslaved. “And even then we are guessing, really; judging the cause by the effects.”

“So you don’t think it possible?” the boy said, looking at him.

Dr. Allard stopped, and took off his grey felt hat. They had emerged from the gorge, and the open upper valley where the Trift Hut stands, lay spread out before them, the mountains round it catching the last sunlight; a cool wind off the snow touched his damp forehead gratefully.

“I simply don’t know,” he said at length, returning the boy’s look, steadily, with his grey eyes under the jutting brows. “All I can say is that in a lifetime on this job I have never known a case of direct possession by a personality newly dead.” He wiped his forehead—finding those words and saying them had made him as hot as the steep pull up through the gorge. But Roger seemed satisfied. “Good!” he said.

“Are you frightened at all, Roger?” the doctor then asked.

The boy in his turn paused before replying. The doctor saw him look at his sister’s figure, slender and trim in breeches and shirt, walking lightly across the rough valley ahead of them beside old Franz—then he ran his eyes round that group of noble and lovely mountain-shapes enclosing the valley. “Not much,” he said at length, “. . . apart from Phyl, that is. And not so much up here. It was getting rather beastly down there”—he nodded towards the Zermatt valley over his shoulder—“but I always feel safe among these chaps”; he swept a hand round the circle of mountains.

The Trift hut is really a small inn, stone-built, with bedrooms and a salle à manger, and quarters for the guides. There the had party supper—the usual Maggi soup, thickened with cheese; coarse bread, stringy veal, and compote. Soon afterwards the doctor sent the children off to bed. He gave each of them a strong sleeping-draught, and went in, paternally, to tuck them up. Drowsy with the Dial, Phyllis smiled at him from her pillow. “Sleep well, child,” the doctor muttered, stirred by the childish face. “I’ll take care of you.” And went out.

But he did not go to bed. He had a curious feeling that he would be better awake and on the watch that night. One by one the few other climbers went off to bed and the doctor remained alone in the little salle à manger, propped in a wicker chair. He had a book, but he did not read; he would reserve that till he began to feel sleepy. Instead, he ran over the affair in his mind from the beginning. That matter of the writing was curious. The doctor took out a pocket-book and extracted from it three postcards, a note, and a letter; he spread them on the bare wooden table and examined them. Oddly enough old Morrison, the friend who had turned up after traversing the Matterhorn the other day, had been in correspondence with Bull on some debated point of topography, and had actually had a letter of his by him—it was this which the doctor now compared with the three postcards and the note which had been sent to Phyllis. No—the writings were not really the same; and yet there was a likeness—just the sort of likeness you would expect if someone was trying to imitate a handwriting, under whatever compulsion. It was rather uncanny. And why had that phrase, “under whatever compulsion,” suddenly come into his mind in connection with it? No—the more he looked at it, the less he liked it. The door rattled suddenly; the doctor started, rose up, went and opened it. There was no one there—the moon was rising behind the inn, and its light just touched the summits of the Wellen-kuppe and the Gabelhorn, opposite, with silver; from the gorge below rose the strong voice of the stream. Peaceful and still the valley lay; Dr. Allard remembered the boy’s remark about the mountains. Soothed, he went in again, shutting the door. His thoughts now ran on Phyllis and her symptoms; poor child, if this expedient failed she would be in poor case. That huddled staring which his entrance had interrupted in her room at Zermatt had frightened the doctor more even than her trembling and her cries; it was a bad sign. He thought of Rose, his lost Rose; so she too had sat, with far less apparent reason, nerveless, sunk together, gazing before her. Eh dear! how that child’s face brought it all back. A bad business—a horrid business. Were they asleep, he wondered? Removing his old leather slippers the doctor stole upstairs and peeped into each room. Yes—sleeping sweetly, the pair of them. He went down again. But his anxiety returned, and remained with him all night. The shutters outside the windows, the door, the stairs, made faint sounds, creaked, and were still. And ever and again, more stiffly each time, at some particularly loud and alarming sound, Dr. Allard hoisted himself out of his chair and crept upstairs to listen outside the children’s room; or went to the hut door, opened it noiselessly, and looked out. But ever and again, nothing was to be seen save the grey shape of the moraine in the shadowed empty valley, and the mountains white under the moon.

The traverse of the Zinal Rothhorn is one of the pleasantest climbs round Zermatt. The peak itself stands, like a great canine tooth of reddish rock, on the high ridge forming the watershed between the Val d’Anniviers and the Zermatt valley—a watershed which runs almost throughout its length above the snow-line. The Rothhorn cannot compare for beauty with its neighbour the Weisshorn, that lovely pyramid whose exquisite outline is so completely satisfying from all sides; but it has a splendour of its own, a tilted curve, at the summit, as of a breaking wave—so that he who will may fling his prune-stones between his boots sheer down to the snow hundreds of feet below. The ascent on the Zermatt side is on the whole easy: a walk up the Trift valley to the little glacier-fed tarn at its head, a long weary grind up the Trift-glacier moraine—that curious geological formation, long and curved as a snake and pointed as a roof, into which the fallen stones from the surfaces of glaciers are loosely piled up; on and upwards over the easy snow-slopes above, bearing always to the right, till at last—how thankfully!—the climber takes to the rocks. This first part of the climb is what Roger called “a plug”—the rest is pure pleasure. Above the first easy rocks a snowy ridge leads upwards till it merges into the steep slabs of the final peak; slabs of hard red rock, sound and firm, so that the smallest holds for toes or fingers give a sense of absolute security.

Up this route the party from the Trift inn made their way next morning. It was dark when they started at 3 a.m., and the lights from the lanterns carried by the guides winked like a procession of wandering stars as they plodded up the faint path and floundered painfully over the loose stones of the moraine. It was warm—a thing not only unpleasant in itself, but ominous as indicating a change in the weather; climbers like a cold air at dawn. Dr. Allard perspired freely. At the foot of the rocks they halted to put on the rope; the breather was welcome to the doctor, who found that a “white night” in a wicker chair is not a helpful preliminary to a first-class expedition. The sun by now had risen, and they were already high enough to look out southward over the peaks beyond the Zermatt valley; they glowed a furious rose, beautiful to see but threatening for the future; the guides spat and muttered at the sight. The Matterhorn was visible, looming up over the gap in the ridge between the Ober- and Unter-Gabelhörner; distinct, among so many others, by something wild, almost savage, about its shape. Refreshed by a good night, the children were in tolerable spirits; Phyllis had made a poor breakfast down at the inn, but Dr. Allard saw her munch biscuits and chocolate with alacrity while she identified the various summits and discussed the ways up them.

And how she loved climbing! Long afterwards Dr. Allard was to remember her happiness that day on the Rothhorn. For after they had roped up and proceeded on their way, up the rocks and along the snow arête, she seemed to forget all her fears, and her spirits to mount within her as her body, triumphing over gravitation, mounted towards that sky of intensest blue overhead. When they reached the steep rocks of the final peak, she went up the slabs like a cat—hardy, fearless, and strong; pausing in some exposed and airy situation, where ordinary people are wont to cling with concentrated attention to their holds, to look back at the doctor, and call down some gay remark or a question. Old Franz was delighted with her, and exchanged flattering remarks on her performance with the Kaufmatters in guttural Swiss. On the top, when they reached it at 10.30—slow time, but Dr. Allard was no longer so fast as he had been—she sat in a trance of rapture, right on the edge of the overhanging drop, her feet dangling gaily into several hundred feet of blue air, eating her lunch and gazing at the view. Dr. Allard’s hopes rose; it really seemed as if his expedient had succeeded beyond expectation. If only they could keep it up—not return to Zermatt at all, perhaps, but go on to Zinal or Arolla, letting their luggage follow them. He set off for the descent in spirits almost as high as Phyllis’s own.

The descent from the Rothhorn to the Mountet hut is at no time such a simple matter as the ascent from the Trift. Three large towers of rock, known to climbers as gendarmes, block the ridge and must be carefully negotiated. The third and largest of these is rather a teaser: a steep and very exposed wall of rock, straddling the narrow ridge below it; cracks in the surface of the slabs afford the only hand- and foot-hold. It is a place needing care and a good head even when the conditions are good, and on this occasion they were not good. The party were now on the north side of the mountain, and whereas on the southern side the rocks had been warm and dry, here on the northern ridge snow and even ice still lingered in all the interstices—the cracks on the great gendarme were plastered with them, making the negotiation of the steep face a matter of extreme difficulty. They had to unrope, and using one of the ropes, looped round a point of rock, as an extra handhold, go down one at a time, after old Franz, with much swearing and scuffling, had been lowered and cleared the cracks as well as he could. All this delayed them considerably, and it was 3 p.m., four hours after they had left the summit, before they were all reassembled on the ridge at the foot of the gendarme. By this time the weather was becoming a source of anxiety. The threat of that warm wind at daybreak, that rosy flush at sunrise, seemed about to be fulfilled—clouds were gathering to the south, behind them, and puffs of grey vapour were beginning to boil through the wide gap in the ridge between the Rothhorn and the Weisshorn. The guides, as usual when bad weather threatens, became nervous and fidgety, and wanted to hurry on down; but Dr. Allard, to whom Phyllis’s health was an over-riding consideration, insisted on a pause and a little food as soon as they should reach a suitable place.

They took it, perched as and where they could find room on both sides of the ridge; it so happened that Dr. Allard and Franz alone were on the west side—the other three guides and the two children were on the opposite side, looking out towards the Weisshorn. The valley in which the Mountet hut stands still lay in sunshine, a vast expanse of dazzling snow, narrowing on the north where the Durand glacier, hidden by the slope of the Besso, swept round the corner to flow down the Val d’Anniviers; Dr. Allard could see the hut at the foot of this slope, just above the moraine. Studying the surface of the glaciers with the automatic care of the mountaineer, the doctor’s eye was caught by something—some tracks in the snow below them, leading in the direction of the hut. There was nothing unusual in this—the ordinary route off the ridge down to the Mountet would strike the glacier about where the tracks were visible, but he could not see quite where they came from. He took his field-glasses out of his rucksack, focused them, and began to examine the tracks.

What he saw made him start so violently that the leather case of the glasses, which he had carelessly laid on his knee instead of slinging it round his neck by the strap, fell, and went clattering down the rocks to the glacier below. The footprints were indeed going towards the hut, well out on the open snow, clear of the rocks and in plain sight—but no other tracks led from the foot of the rocks towards them! As those others on the Bies-glacier had done, they began, impossibly, out on the open glacier, coming from nowhere.

For a moment Dr. Allard felt almost physically sick when he saw that ominous sight through his glasses. But he pulled himself together at once, and took a hurried decision on the next thing to be done. As luck would have it, seated on the farther side of the ridge, Phyllis and Roger had not seen the tracks, and at all costs they must, if possible, be prevented from seeing them. The loss of the case created a certain amount of fuss, of which the doctor made the most; it also furnished him with an excellent excuse for changing the route of their descent, leaving the ridge earlier than usual, so that they would strike the glacier at a considerable distance from the unaccountable start of those beastly footprints. He did not much like the idea of crossing them, as they would have to do to reach the hut, but there was nothing else to be done; there was no other shelter within reach, and even as they re-roped and started down the rocks, snow began to fall.

They climbed down easily enough, retrieved the case, and set out across the glacier. But even as Dr. Allard feared, Phyllis’s mood suddenly changed; she crossed the tracks themselves without comment, but she grew first listless, then uneasy—was silent even when addressed, and occasionally glanced behind her. These signs knocked cold on the doctor’s heart. He treated them as fatigue; on reaching the hut, in snow now falling thickly, he gave her a hot brandy before supper, and sent her off to bed immediately afterwards. But her symptoms of distress increased, and with them the doctor’s despair—oh God, what could he do?

What he could do, he did. The Mountet hut has two stories, the upper reached by a sort of ladder-like stair. Here he put Phyllis and Roger to sleep; he took occasion to remind the boy not to leave her alone, and gave Phyllis an even stronger sleeping-draught than the night before. Then he went downstairs. On the straw-filled bunks the guides lay, snoring already; Dr. Allard stoked up the stove, drew a chair close to it, and once more settled down to keep watch. Outside, when he took a last look from the door, the snow was still falling, thickly and silently.

But Dr. Allard had had a long, stiff day’s climbing, and this was his second night of watching. The warmth of the stove was soothing; he nodded drowsily. Time after time he jerked himself upright, only to nod again; and at last, overcome, he fell asleep.

He was awakened by a feeling of cold, and a sense of light near him. He started up, looking confusedly round. No wonder it was cold—the door stood wide open; outside the snow had ceased, and bright moonlight was pouring, with the keen night air, into the hut.

Dr. Allard glanced at his watch. It was half past two. He went to the door and looked out. Footprints—smallish footprints—led away from it in the smooth newly fallen snow, down over the rough slope towards the glacier. Full of foreboding, he turned back into the hut and climbed the ladder to the upper room. It was as he feared—the straw-filled sleeping-shelf was empty, the dark fusty blankets flung aside in two tumbled heaps. The children were gone.

Cursing himself for his wretched drowsiness, his unpardonable lack of self-control, Dr. Allard bundled down the ladder again. Hurriedly he roused the four guides; with muttered grunts, of which the doctor caught more of the sense than the guides realised, the men tumbled up, pulled on their boots, their jackets; collected the ropes and the ice-axes, and fitted new candles into the lanterns. Lacing up his own boots, his back aching with stiffness, Dr. Allard listened to them. Those tracks yesterday had not escaped the notice of the Kaufmatters anyhow, and whatever form their discomfort took, they had managed to communicate it to Franz and Peter. The Kaufmatters were Grindelwalders and Lutherans, but the Catholic Franz crossed himself as he stepped over the threshold and into the cold bright moonlight outside.

The tracks led down to the edge of the glacier and out across it in a southerly direction. In the clear moonlight there was no difficulty about following them in the freshly fallen snow, and the five men moved forward at a brisk pace. Dr. Allard’s mind was moving even faster than his legs. How on earth the pair could have managed to climb down the ladder, put on their boots, open the door, and leave without rousing anyone, was a mystery—though he reflected presently that none of the guides had heard him go up and down the ladder; they were fast asleep when he roused them up. And what impulse had led the children to leave the hut? Was it flight, or some strong enticement? And where were they making for? Anxiety filled him—farther up the glacier, under the Gabelhorn and the Rudihorn, crevasses might be expected, and they appeared to have taken no rope. Clear as the moonlight was for things near at hand, it was deceptive for distances; peer as he would, he could see no sign of any living thing on the white reaches ahead. And how long a start they had, he had no idea.

Suddenly Christian Kaufmatter, who was leading, stopped dead with a prodigious and startled oath. The rest, coming up to him, halted too. So far there had been just the one set of tracks, with an occasional longer or shorter step showing that two people, not one, had passed that way—but when Dr. Allard came up to where Christian and the rest had halted, he saw that two more sets of footprints had appeared suddenly, one on each side of those which they had been following. The fresh prints did not approach the track—they just began there, suddenly. For a moment the group of men stood staring—then Franz crossed himself again, and suddenly young Hans Kaufmatter began to whisper. For some reason the horror of that moment was complete. With an effort the doctor roused himself—“Vorwärts! Schnell!” At first the guides were so demoralised that he actually had some difficulty in forcing them to go on along that unholy triple track; they walked well to one side of it, and in spite of all his urgings, not quite so quickly as before.

Presently the moon went down, and behind them dawn began to break. As the light grew stronger Christian, who was now going second, immediately behind Dr. Allard, gave another exclamation. Dr. Allard stopped. Christian came up to him and pointed towards the slopes of the Rudihorn ahead of them. On a snowy ridge two small black figures were visible, moving swiftly upwards. Dr. Allard took out his Zeiss glasses. Yes, sure enough, it was Phyllis and Roger, climbing unroped. But through the glasses the doctor could see something which filled him with fresh dismay. The pair were climbing terribly fast, and though there was no one else in sight, they constantly looked back over their shoulders, as if pursued, and then hurried on faster than before. The ridge of the Rudihorn was no place for such reckless speed; even where the children were climbing, it called for care, with the rocks smothered as they were in new snow; higher up it steepened considerably, till eventually the angle became altogether impracticable. And what would they do then in their desperate flight? For that it was a flight from some unseen pursuit the doctor was now certain.

But the sight of the children themselves seemed to have driven away the guides’ fear. They shouted and whistled to them; there was no reply, and they then set off in pursuit, crossing the glacier at prodigious speed. The Kaufmatters and Peter soon forged ahead—Franz and Dr. Allard could not keep pace with them, but followed as fast as they could. No words were needed; it was clear that the Kaufmatters were determined to catch up their truant patrons. Soon they, followed by Dr. Allard and Franz, were close in under the lower slopes of the Rudihorn; the children at the same time began to move more slowly, the steepness of the going hindering their progress. Now, suddenly, the pair left the ridge, and still with those terrible backward glances, scrambled helter-skelter down into a snow-couloir or gully, crossed it, and traversed out on to a snow-slope on the farther side. Up this they began to race again. But owing to this change of direction, their visible pursuers, the guides, had gained on them; and though high up, they were now not far away in level distance, from where Franz and Dr. Allard stood. The two older men shouted to them till the rocks echoed, but it was as if they had no ears; they paid not the smallest attention, but kept on their desperate course. And how desperate that course was, Dr. Allard could now see clearly. The snow-slope up which they were moving abutted at the top against a blue wall of ice, and on the right sank with appalling steepness into the upper part of the couloir which they had just crossed lower down; on the left it ended abruptly in a cornice—that curious formation, curved out over space like the crest of a wave, into which the wind often moulds the snow. When they reached the top of the slope they would find themselves completely cut off. And in their state of panic, what would they do then?

But the Kaufmatters had evidently grasped the situation too. Cutting left-handed across the glacier, so as to lessen the distance, they took to the rocks below the snow-slope and started directly up them, with the obvious intention of trying to intercept the pair before they reached either the cornice or the ice-wall. They were climbing at terrific speed, and unroped, to increase their freedom of movement—even in that moment of desperate anxiety Dr. Allard noted their superb skill; Christian Kaufmatter, moving fast on difficult rocks, was a beautiful sight. Franz and the doctor now halted—there was nothing they could do, and Dr. Allard was pretty well exhausted as it was by crossing the glacier at such speed in the deep soft snow. They stood where they were, watching that horrible race. The guides’ speed was astonishing, but the children were going up the slope as if their feet were winged. Now, instead of only looking back, Dr. Allard saw through his glasses that they were looking ahead too, and must have noticed the ice-wall above them, cutting off their escape, for they checked for a moment, and glanced wildly to right and left. They chose the left, and started off diagonally across the slope towards the cornice. This sudden move lessened the guides’ chances of intercepting them in time; as the seconds passed. Dr. Allard saw, with sickened certainty, that with all Christian’s matchless skill he must be too late. And now, despairingly, the doctor shouted at them: “Phyllis! Roger! Stop!” . . . shouted till he was hoarse, calling their names, calling on Heaven, calling their names again. Once old Franz heard him cry the name “Rose!” in tones of agony and desperation.

But it was all of no use. Swiftly as Christian climbed—he was close behind them now—the two terrified creatures went faster still. Now, if they had only looked back, they might have seen a familiar face and found safety; but they went on. They reached the cornice and started to go up it, several feet from the edge, but unaware—if they had wits left to be aware of anything—that the solid-seeming snow under their feet overhung empty space. And still, though almost voicelessly now, the doctor cried to them. There was suddenly a curious cracking sound, as a great piece of the cornice gave way under the small extra weight, the vibration of those light hurrying feet—and then a moment of utter silence before the huge mass of falling ice and snow plunged on to the rocks below, to come roaring and thundering down, a white river of leaping blocks and foam-like snow-dust, almost to the doctor’s very feet.

It was evening before they got them dug out, with the help of relief parties from Zinal; but the doctor would not leave the scene of operations for a moment till the two stretchers were on their way down the glacier, the centre of a silent and weary procession. They took them right on to Zinal, the last part of the way by lantern-light, and lodged them in the church; nor would the doctor take food or rest till he had arranged with the old priest that the latter should watch with them all through the night.

Dr. Allard’s fellow-climbers speculated a good deal, both at the time and afterwards, as to why he should have been so insistent with the Strangways family that the two victims of that odd accident on the Rudihorn should not be buried either in Zinal or Zermatt; and actually insisted on bearing the whole cost of having the two coffins taken back to England, to lie in the quiet Sussex churchyard, under the yews and looking towards the Downs. They could not know, of course, how often he saw a sleepy childish face smile up at him from a coarse pillow, trustfully, and heard his own voice saying: “Sleep well, child; I’ll take care of you.” The guides did not know that either. But they did not speculate about his reasons. They knew.