Running Water

Running Water by A.E.W. Mason (1906)

A.E.W. Mason's Running Water opens aboard the night express from Paris to Geneva, where Mrs. Thesiger, a faded society wanderer, watches her seventeen-year-old daughter Sylvia rise before dawn, absorbed in dreams of the mountains they are approaching. Sylvia, reserved and inwardly private, has been reading an old volume of the "Alpine Journal" recounting the exploits of the climber Gabriel Strood, and her passion for the high peaks stirs in her blood as they near Chamonix. At Annemasse, Captain Hilary Chayne, returning to the Alps after four years posted at Aden, notices Sylvia reading the same journal and is struck by the contrast between her overdressed, doll-like appearance and her evident understanding of mountaineering. In Chamonix, Chayne's reunion with his old guide Michel Revailloud, now visibly aged, is darkened by news that his closest friend, John Lattery, is overdue crossing the dangerous Col des Nantillons with a single guide. A rescue party led by Chayne and Revailloud finds Lattery and his guide dead, swept by an avalanche into a crevasse on the Glacier des Nantillons. Sylvia, witnessing Chayne's grief, offers quiet sympathy. On his last night in Chamonix, Revailloud, mourning his own fading strength and lost chance at love, urges Chayne not to let loneliness claim his old age, and encourages Sylvia toward her first climb. Meanwhile in London, the moneylender Sidney Jarvice reads of Lattery's death and recognizes its significance: it makes the weak, dissipated Walter Hine sole heir to his wealthy uncle Joseph Hine. Jarvice lures Walter into an exploitative loan arrangement secured by a post-obit bond and a life insurance policy naming Jarvice as beneficiary. Back in Chamonix, Sylvia makes her first ascent, the Aiguille d'Argentiere, guided by Jean and accompanied by Chayne, who deliberately joins her party instead of pursuing his own planned crossing of the Col Dolent. Sylvia's natural aptitude on rock and ice startles her guides, one of whom compares her instinctive technique to that of Gabriel Strood himself. Atop the mountain, moved by the revelation of the ice world, Sylvia reaches a private decision about her life. That evening she tells Chayne of his friendship with Lattery, and he tells her she dreams of running water — a detail that lodges in his memory. Sylvia's mother, resentful of her daughter's blossoming beauty and unspoken judgment, needles her about a chance sighting of Monsieur de Camours, a figure from her own scandalous past in Provence. When Sylvia later declares she can no longer bear their aimless, disreputable life and wishes to find her estranged father, her mother spitefully agrees to send her off, revealing his name: Garratt Skinner, living in Hobart Place, London. Sylvia arrives unannounced at her father's house and is astonished to find herself the mistress of an unfamiliar household. Garratt Skinner appears charming but startled, and that evening hosts a supper for disreputable companions — the obsequious Captain Barstow, the vain Archie Parminter, and the weak, boastful young heir Walter Hine. A proposed round of cards, champagne conveniently on hand, and other staged "coincidences" trouble Sylvia's instincts, though her father smoothly deflects suspicion. In the early hours she secretly witnesses Parminter guiding Hine's drunken hand to sign a large check, which she later retrieves and confronts her father with; he burns it and spins a plausible tale of protecting Hine from exploitation by Barstow and Parminter. Garratt Skinner then takes Sylvia to Dorsetshire, to the very house near Weymouth where she was born, explaining her lifelong dream of running water as the sound of the mill stream through its garden. Wallie Hine joins them there, and Sylvia gradually realizes, through his careless remarks and a staged shooting match rigged by a disguised "gardener," that her father is running an elaborate confidence scheme against Hine — and that she herself has been used as a decoy to keep him lured to the house. Resolving to fight her father's design rather than flee, Sylvia recalls Chayne's words about the moral law that "what you know, you must do, if by doing it you can save a life or a soul," and commits herself to secretly protecting Hine. Chayne, having tracked Sylvia down, arrives at the house, witnesses the rigged shooting match, and proposes marriage to her on the spot, urging her to leave immediately. Sylvia, though moved, refuses, citing both her sense of unfinished purpose in protecting Hine and her conviction that she does not yet love him enough to abandon that purpose. Undeterred, Chayne continues visiting, enduring Garratt Skinner's mocking hospitality and his own jealousy of Hine's claim on Sylvia's attention. In a private conversation, Garratt Skinner warns Chayne off, framing Sylvia's presence as necessary to Hine's "reclamation," while probing Chayne with unexpectedly detailed knowledge of great Alpine climbs and voicing an eerie fascination with mountains as places that hide both grandeur and death — a fascination sharpened when he learns that Lattery's death has doubled Walter Hine's inheritance.

By A.E.W. Mason · First published 1906 · Genre: Adventure, Romance, Historical Fiction · 26 chapters · 102,306 words

First lines

The Geneva express jerked itself out of the Gare de Lyons. For a few minutes the lights of outer Paris twinkled past its windows and then with a spring it reached the open night. The jolts and lurches merged into one regular purposeful throb, the shrieks of the wheels, the clatter of the coaches, into one continuous hum. And already in the upper berth of her compartment Mrs. Thesiger was asleep. The noise of a train had no unrest for her.

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