Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

Ashley nods. — It’s part of the same massif.

He lifts his napkin from the table, pulling off the silver ring and spreading the square of linen. He draws his fountain pen from his pocket and touches the nib twice on the linen to start the ink. This makes a pair of black dashes and from here Ashley begins to draw a crude map of the mountain range.

— This is the Mont Blanc massif, he says. Here’s Mont Blanc itself, a little under sixteen thousand feet. Here’s Chamonix Valley and the town. You probably stayed there. The whole range is less than twenty miles long. Perhaps ten across.

The pen’s nib glides across the linen, Ashley pressing down to thicken the ridgeline where peaks connect.

— Here’s Maudit, about fourteen thousand six hundred. Damned good climb up the southern face.

— You’ve climbed it?

Ashley nods. — Here’s the Aiguille du Midi. So called because from Chamonix the sun hovers right above the needle of the peak at midday. Here’s the Grandes Jorasses. Brilliant north face. Haven’t climbed that. This is your Mer de Glace. Did you know it flows a hundred yards a year?

Imogen shakes her head. — Have you been on it?

— Once. It was very slick. We came down it at midnight without crampons. Rather unpleasant business.

— It must have been beautiful.

— I wasn’t paying attention.

They order a second round from the waitress. Ashley takes another brandy, Imogen a crème de cassis.

— I’m surprised at you, she says. You speak as though you’re only interested in the heights of the mountains, or their features. I imagined it was something different.

— Talking about it doesn’t do any good. The best parts can’t be explained.

— You might try. I’d like to understand.

Ashley frowns, capping his pen. He takes a silver case from his tunic pocket and lights a cigarette, setting the case on the table. Imogen takes a cigarette for herself and Ashley raises his eyebrows.

— You’re going to smoke here?

She gives a coy nod in reply. Ashley lights her cigarette and stares down into the cut glass ashtray. He begins to speak, his words coming slowly and deliberately.

It is impossible to live without danger, Ashley explains. The danger is always there, the hazard of wasted lives, of decades bent over a desk, of squalid and lonely deaths in hospital beds. Fools turned their faces away from danger and pretended at immunity, but others went to the fountainhead of life.

— And what, Imogen wonders, is that?

Ashley taps his cigarette on the ashtray.

— I couldn’t say. It’s different for every man.

— Or woman. But what is it to you?

— There isn’t a name for it, Ashley says. One could call it endeavor, or struggle, or give it a name, but then it only sounds silly. It’s something one needs that isn’t essential. Something one wants for no good reason at all. Not an animal desire. A desire that comes not from one’s body, but from one’s soul.

— But why do you want it?

— I can’t explain it.

— You have been explaining it. Please go on.

Ashley looks at the tablecloth and shakes his head. He says that for one thing, lasting comfort becomes no comfort at all. All things in the world are perceptible only by contrast. For just as there is no heat without cold nor light without darkness, it is climbing that throws all of Ashley’s life into sharp relief. It is climbing that makes one feel. It is the driving mountain cold that makes the fire in an alpine hut so delicious; it is the sore and cramped muscles that transform an ordinary hot bath into a sensory revelation; it is the hours of grueling ascent that make a supper of sardines and biscuits and jam so much better than a thousand dinners at the Criterion.

And it is impossible to live without hardship. The hardship of daily trifles, Ashley explains, ever accumulating and impossible to ignore, is so much meaner than pain or cold or fatigue. These annoyances make one weak and petty and shallow, just as greater struggles make one brave and wise.

— It’s the little things that bring one down. Delayed trains and burnt puddings and drafty rooms. I was never so miserably cold on a mountain as I was in a drafty room. One can rise to dire occasions, but most of the time one worries about one’s burnt pudding. It takes real struggle to see what life is. Then you realize you don’t give two straws if your pudding’s been burnt.

Imogen watches Ashley across the table. Her gaze is steady and unblinking, her hand turning the silver band around her wrist.

— Then you climb for what it does for your other life?

Ashley nods. — Sometimes. But not always.

For there is also the beauty. Ashley sweeps his cigarette across the room and says that to him all of human architecture is little but a screen, an elaborate facade of iron and glass erected to hide the majesties beyond. There is nothing in the untamed earth that is not beautiful. Of tamer beauties, Ashley swears that if one follows their streams up to the headwaters, the source of their fineness is very wild indeed. To walk the Mer de Glace at midnight is not only to be witness to the exquisite mystery of the natural world. It is to step away from the metropolis, from mankind’s hall of mirrors, and to assume one’s place among the wild.

— One doesn’t see beautiful things in the mountains, Ashley says. One becomes them.

Imogen smiles. She draws a little from her cigarette.

— It was a wonderful speech. And I’m glad to have dug it out of you. But I wonder if it’s another joke of yours. Do you really mean all this, or is it only what you think I wish to hear?

— You give me too much credit. I’m not so good a liar.

— I bet you’re a very good liar, Imogen says. But I also think you’re afraid to be serious, because somehow you are so very serious.

Ashley does not answer. He is looking at something beyond Imogen’s shoulder. He closes his cigarette case and puts it back in his pocket, leaning across the table until he is very close to her.

— That couple across from us, he whispers. They’ve been watching us.

Imogen turns around discreetly. A few tables away, a man with a Van Dyke beard is reclined deep into his chair. He wears a white dinner jacket and his bow tie hangs unknotted around his neck. The woman beside him is laughing, her hand draped over the man’s lapel. The man’s eyes meet Imogen’s and he raises his glass in a salute. He rises and comes to their table, towing the woman in hand.

— I wonder, he addresses them, if you could settle a wager for my companion and me. We couldn’t help but notice such a lovely pair of young people.

The man’s voice is hoarse, his accent difficult to place.

— With pleasure, Ashley says.

The man fans his arm toward the giggling woman.

— My companion swears you are blood relations.

— Siblings, the woman adds, or at least first cousins. One can see it about the eyes.

The man shakes his head.

— But I say that you are lovers.

Ashley turns in awkward embarrassment, looking at Imogen, but she only laughs and takes a drink. Ashley puffs from his cigarette.

— You’re both correct, he says. This is in fact my first cousin. And this very evening we’ve become engaged to be married.

The man raises his glass again in a salute. His drink is milky green and it swishes over the rim.

— I knew as much. I wish you joy.

The couple slinks back to their seats.

— What sort of people are these? Ashley wonders.

— Drunk people, Imogen says. I thought he was rather charming.

Imogen excuses herself to the powder room and Ashley lights another cigarette to pass the time. There is no band to watch here, nor any kind of entertainment. He glances back at the drunk couple. The woman is kissing the man’s wrist and tugging at his bow tie. Ashley looks down at his wristwatch, flipping back the metal cover that protects the crystal. He had bought it yesterday and the salesman had said the hands were luminous, but in the half-lit room it is hard to tell.