Daphne du Maurier - The Apple Tree - a short novel & several long stories

"What do you mean? What tragedy?" I asked. "Has there been an accident?"

"He's terribly ill in a nursing-home, here in London," came the answer. "Nervous breakdown. You know his wife has left him?"

"Good God, no," I exclaimed.

"Oh, yes. That's the cause of all the trouble. He's gone quite to pieces. You know he was devoted to her."

I was stunned. I stood staring at the fellow, my face blank.

"Do you mean," I said, "that she has gone off with somebody else?"

"I don't know. I assume so. No one can get anything out of Victor. Anyway, there he has been for several weeks, with this breakdown."

I asked for the address of the nursing-home, and at once, without further delay, jumped into a cab and was driven there.

At first I was told, on making enquiry, that Victor was seeing no visitors, but I took out my card and scribbled a line across the back. Surely he would not refuse to see me? A nurse came, and I was taken upstairs to a room on the first floor.

I was horrified, when she opened the door, to see the haggard face that looked up at me from the chair beside the gas-fire, so frail he was, so altered.

"My dear old boy," I said, going towards him, "I only heard five minutes ago that you were here."

The nurse closed the door and left us together.

To my distress Victor's eyes filled with tears.

"It's all right," I said, "don't mind me. You know I shall understand."

He seemed unable to speak. He just sat there, hunched in his dressing-gown, the tears running down his cheeks. I had never felt more helpless. He pointed to a chair, and I drew it up beside him. I waited. If he did not want to tell me what had happened I would not press him. I only wanted to comfort him, to be of some assistance.

At last he spoke, and I hardly recognised his voice.

"Anna's gone," he said. "Did you know that? She's gone."

I nodded. I put my hand on his knee, as though he were a small boy again and not a man past thirty, of my own age.

"I know," I said gently, "but it will be all right. She will come back again. You are sure to get her back."

He shook his head. I had never seen such despair, and such complete conviction.

"Oh no," he said, "she will never come back. I know her too well. She's found what she wants."

It was pitiful to see how completely he had given in to what had happened. Victor, usually so strong, so well-balanced.

"Who is it?" I said. "Where did she meet this other fellow?"

Victor stared at me, bewildered.

"What do you mean?" he said. "She hasn't met anyone. It's not that at all. If it were, that would be easy…"

He paused, spreading out his hands in a hopeless gesture. And suddenly he broke down again, but this time not with weakness but with a more fearful sort of stifled rage, the impotent, useless rage of a man who fights against something stronger than himself. "It was the mountain that got her," he said, "that God-damned mountain, Monte Verità. There's a sect there, a closed order, they shut themselves up for life — there, on that mountain. I never dreamed there could be such a thing. I never knew. And she's there. On that damned mountain. On Monte Verità…"

I sat there with him in the nursing-home all afternoon, and little by little had the whole story from him.

The journey itself, Victor said, had been pleasant and uneventful. Eventually they reached the centre from which they proposed to explore the terrain immediately below Monte Verità, and here they met with difficulties. The country was unknown to Victor, and the people seemed morose and unfriendly, very different, he said, to the sort of folk who had welcomed us in the past. They spoke in a patois hard to understand, and they lacked intelligence.

"At least, that's how they struck me," said Victor. "They were very rough and somehow undeveloped, the sort of people who might have stepped out of a former century. You know how, when we climbed together, the people could not do enough to help us, and we always managed to find guides. Here, it was different. When Anna and I tried to find out the best approach to Monte Verità, they would not tell us. They just stared at us in a stupid sort of way, and shrugged their shoulders. They had no guides, one fellow said; the mountain was — savage, unexplored."

Victor paused, and looked at me with that same expression of despair.

"You see," he said, "that's when I made my mistake. I should have realised the expedition was a failure — to that particular spot at any rate — and suggested to Anna that we turned back and tackled something else, something nearer to civilization anyhow, where the people were more helpful and the country more familiar. But you know how it is. You get a stubborn feeling inside you, on the mountains, and any opposition somehow rouses you.

"And Monte Verità itself. " he broke off and stared in front of him. It was as though he was looking upon it again in his own mind. "I've never been one for lyrical description, you know that," he said. "On our finest climbs I was always the practical one and you the poet. For sheer beauty, I have never seen anything like Monte Verità. We have climbed many higher peaks, you and I, and far more dangerous ones, too; but this was somehow… sublime."

After a few moments' silence he continued talking. "I said to Anna, 'What shall we do?', and she answered me without hesitation, 'We must go on.' I did not argue, I knew perfectly well that would be her wish. The place had put a spell on both of us."

They left the valley, and began the ascent.

"It was a wonderful day," said Victor, "hardly a breath of wind, and not a cloud in the sky. Scorching sun, you know how it can be, but the air clean and cold. I chaffed Anna about that other climb, up Snowdon, and made her promise not to leave me behind this time. She was wearing an open shirt, and a brief kilted skirt, and her hair was loose. She looked… quite beautiful."

As he talked, slowly, quietly, I had the impression that it must surely be an accident that had happened, but that his mind, unhinged by tragedy, baulked at Anna's death. It must be so. Anna had fallen. He had seen her fall and had been powerless to help her. He had then returned, broken in mind and spirit, telling himself she still lived on Monte Verità.

"We came to a village an hour before sundown," said Victor. "The climb had taken us all day. We were still about three hours from the peak itself, or so I judged. The village consisted of some dozen dwellings or so, huddled together. And as we walked towards the first one, a curious thing happened."

He paused and stared in front of him.

"Anna was a little ahead of me," he said, "moving swiftly with those long strides of hers, you know how she does. I saw two or three men, with some children and goats, come on to the track from a piece of pasture land to the right of us. Anna raised her hand in salute, and at sight of her the men started, as if terrified, and snatching up the children ran to the nearest group of hovels, as if all the fiends in hell were after them. I heard them bolt the doors and shutter the windows. It was the most extraordinary thing. The goats went scattering down the track, equally scared."

Victor said he had made some joke to Anna about a charming welcome, and that she seemed upset; she did not know what she could have done to frighten them. Victor went to the first hut and knocked upon the door.

Nothing happened at all, but he could hear whispers inside and a child crying. Then he lost patience and began to shout. This had effect, and after a moment one of the shutters was removed and a man's face appeared at the gap and stared at him. Victor, by way of encouragement, nodded and smiled. Slowly the man withdrew the whole of the shutter and Victor spoke to him. At first the man shook his head, then he seemed to change his mind and came and unbolted the door. He stood in the entrance, peering nervously about him, and, ignoring Victor, looked at Anna. He shook his head violently and, speaking very quickly and quite unintelligibly, pointed towards the summit of Monte Verità. Then from the shadows of the small room came an elderly man, leaning on two sticks, who motioned aside the terrified children and moved past them to the door. He, at least, spoke a language that was not entirely patois.