What had taken Stephen Forrester to the Exhibition would be difficult to say. He had told his friends that snow and ice and anything higher than a first floor made him feel ill, and had then proceeded to lose himself very pleasantly among the fleshpots. Well, he had earned his fleshpots. Yet here he was, at three o’clock on a sunny afternoon, paying his entrance fee like anybody else to the Association Rooms, to see Macrae’s photographs.
“The large photographs of Mount Forrester are in Room C,” said the very efficient young person with the bobbed hair who gave him his change. “Kindly keep to the right.” He thanked her humbly and clicked through the turnstile in the wake of a large woman in musquash and carnations, who would probably have given much to know him. For Forrester was something of a lion that winter.
He went into Room C, after a guilty glance about A and B. But no one was there who knew him. No one said: “That’s Forrester! Yes, the fellow with the limp. You’d never dream he was fond of that sort of thing, would you?” His first thought was: “Mac did some good work!” Then, with an involuntarily catching of the breath, he stopped short before the great photograph that held the end wall alone.
And as he did so he knew with sure foreknowledge that any time in his life he might be brought up with that little thrill, that while he lived, a hundred chance scents or colours or silences would have power to renew for him that air of ineffable space, those sheathed and virgin rocks, those upper snows austere against the burning blue; that the impersonal passion of the climber had been, was, and forever would be the moving force of his soul.
“Mount Forrester from the South-east,” the catalogue had it. Just that! He was the man who had conquered Mount Forrester; and he was the man who knew how utterly the great height had conquered him.
He sat down on one of the leather divans placed at intervals down the centre of the room, staring at the enlarged photograph with half-closed eyes. The heated air grew cold in his throat; inside his irreproachable gloves the scars of his old frost-bites burned and tingled; he tapped one well-shod foot—the lame one—on the floor. There in the extreme left-hand corner of the picture was the bit of ice that had slid and crushed him. That had been on the return journey. They said he’d never walk again. Macrae himself had been all in when he took that picture. Why, they’d put him in the tent in the middle of a snow flurry; the cloud had cleared and the light was right; they’d found Mac up to his ears in snow half a mile away, clutching the camera—raving, but he’d taken the picture.
“Excuse me, boss—you done any climbin’?”
Forrester came to earth with a start, and leaned round the curve of the leather seat-back the better to see and answer the man who had so suddenly spoken to him. But he was slow in answering as the details of the questioner’s face presented themselves to him around the curve of the fat green morocco. For what possible interest could such a one have in climbing mountains? An elderly clerk out of work? Scarcely educated enough, judged Forrester. A night watchman? More likely. Anyway, a sub-under-assistant at whatever he set his hand to do. The stamp of the man born to work under other men was on him, on his respectable garments, on his vague face set in graying bristles; one could guess him treading forever the same smoothed rut, running on the same rail, until pushed off at last into a still deeper obscurity. And he was already growing old. Forrester, clean from his heights, was quick to pity. “One of the Great Unlucky,” he said to himself; and aloud: “Yes, I’ve climbed a good bit. Are you—interested in it?”
The stranger smiled slowly. Then he drew out seven coppers and arranged them along his dingy palm. There was a certain youthfulness, a hovering and unexpected sweetness in his smile that attracted Forrester. “These here,” he said, “are all I got left o’ what Maggie allows me fer baccy this week, after payin’ me admission.” He returned the coins to his pocket and resumed his slow contemplation of the picture.
For a moment Forrester was in doubt. But the shabby-respectable man was oblivious of him, his whole attention absorbed in the picture. And it was Forrester who renewed the conversation on some impulse of sympathy, saying: “Where have you done your climbing?”