It was time, Estelle felt, that the real things of life should come back to her. She had had them before marriage—these real things—light, swift, contacts with chosen spirits; friendships not untinged with a liability to become something less capable of definition. But since her marriage she had been forced into a world of secondary experiences. Winn, to begin with, had stood very much in the way, and when he had ceased to block the paths of sentiment she had not found a substitute. At Aldershot, where they lived, there was an unspoken rule that brides should be left alone. Women called, and men were polite, but when Estelle began those delicate personal conversations which led the way to deeper spiritual contacts she discovered that nothing followed. She could not say that she found the men elusive; stone walls are not elusive, but they do not lend themselves to an easy way across country. As to women, theoretically Estelle desired their friendship just as much as that of men; but in practice she generally found them unsympathetic, and incapable of the finest type of intimacy. They did not seem to know what the word devotion meant. Men did, especially young men, though the older ones talked more about it. Estelle had already seen herself after marriage as a confidante to Winn's young brother officers. She would help them as only a good woman can. (She foresaw particularly how she would help to extricate them from the influences of bad women. It was extraordinary how many women who influenced men at all were bad!) Estelle never had any two opinions about being a good woman herself. She couldn't be anything else. Good women held all the cards, but there was no reason why they shouldn't be attractive; it was their failure to grasp this potentiality, which gave bad women their temporary sway.
It was really necessary in the missionary career open to young and attractive married women, to be magnetic. Up to a certain point men must be led on, because if they didn't care for you in the right way you couldn't do anything with them at all. After that point, they must be gently and firmly stopped, or else they might become tiresome, and that would be bad both for them and for you. Especially with a husband like Winn, who seemed incapable of grasping fine shades, and far too capable of dealing roughly and brutally with whatever he did grasp. There had been a dress, for instance, that he simply refused to let Estelle wear—remarking that it was a bit too thick—though that was really the last quality it had possessed.
The question of congenial friendship was therefore likely to be a difficulty, but Estelle had never forgotten Lionel Drummond. When she stopped thinking about Winn except as an annoyance, it became necessary for her to think of somebody else, and her mind fixed itself at once upon her husband's friend. It seemed to her that in Lionel Drummond she would find a perfect spiritual counterpart. She dreamed of a friendship with him too deep for mere friendliness, too late for accepted love; and it seemed to her exactly the kind of thing she wanted. Hand in hand they would tread the path of duty together, surrounded by a rosy mist.
They might even lead Winn to higher things; but at this point Estelle's imagination balked. She could not see Winn being led—he was too truculent—and he had never in his tenderest moments evinced the slightest taste for higher things. It would be better perhaps if they simply set him a good example. He would be certain not to follow it.
She and Lionel would have terrible moments, of course. Estelle thrilled at the thought of these moments, and from time to time she slightly stretched the elastic of the path of duty to meet them. They would still keep on it, of course; they would never go any further than Petrarch and Laura. These historic philanderers should be their limit, and when the worst came to the worst, Estelle would softly murmur to Lionel, "Petrarch and Laura have borne it, and we must bear it too."
She became impatient for Lionel's arrival and bought a new and exquisitely becoming blue chiffon dress. Both she and her maid were so struck by her appearance that when Estelle heard Winn banging about at the last moment in his dressing room, she knocked at his door. Even the lowest type of man can be used as a superior form of looking glass. He shouted "Come in!" and stared at her while he fumbled at his collar stud; then he lifted his eyebrows and said "War-paint—eh?"
"I only wanted to remind you, dear," said Estelle patiently, "that the key of the wine cellar is in my bureau drawer."
Lionel arrived before Winn had finished dressing. Estelle greeted him with outstretched hands. "I am so very glad to see you at last," she said in her softest, friendliest voice. "I think it will do Winn good to have you here."
Lionel laughed shyly.
"I shouldn't have thought," he said, "that Winn would need much more good."
"Ah, my dear fellow!" said Winn's voice behind him, "you don't know how great my needs are. Sorry I couldn't meet you."
Estelle's beautiful, wavering eyes rested for a moment on her husband. She had never known a man to dress so quickly, and it seemed to her an unnecessary quality.
The dinner was a great success. Both men were absurdly gay. Winn told good stories, laughed at Lionel, and rallied his young wife. She had never seen him like this before, and she put it down to the way one man sets off another.
Estelle felt that she was being a great success, and it warmed her heart. The two men talked for her and listened to her; she had a moment when she thought that perhaps, after all, she needn't relegate Winn to a lower world.
They accepted with enthusiasm her offer to sing to them after dinner and then they kept her waiting in the drawing-room for an hour and a half.
She sat there opposite a tall Italian mirror, quivering with her power, her beauty, her ability to charm, and with nothing before her but the empty coffee-cups.
She played a little, she even sang a little (the house was small) to recall them to a sense of her presence, but inexplicably they clung to their talk. Winn who at ordinary times seemed incapable of more than disconnected fragments of speech was (she could hear him now and then quite distinctly) talking like a cataract; and Lionel was, if anything, worse. Her impatience turned into suspicion. Probably Winn was poisoning his friend's mind against her. Perhaps he was drinking too much, Sir Peter did, and people often took after their fathers. That would have to be another point for Lionel and her to tackle. At last they came in, and Lionel said without any attempt at an apology:
"We should love some music, Mrs. Winn."
Winn said nothing. He stuck his hands into his pockets, and stood in front of the fireplace in a horribly British manner while she turned over her songs. Estelle sang rather prettily. She preferred songs of a type that dealt with bitter regret over unexplained partings. She sang them with a great deal of expression and a slight difficulty in letting go of the top notes. After she had sung two or three, Lionel said:
"Now, Winn, you sing."
Estelle started. She had never before heard of this accomplishment of her husband's. It occurred to her now that Lionel would think it very strange she hadn't, but he need never know unless Winn gave her away. She need not have been afraid. Winn said quietly, as if he said it to her every evening, "D'you mind playing for me, Estelle?" Then he dragged out from under her music a big black book in which he had painstakingly copied and collected his selection of songs.
He had a high, clear baritone, very true and strangely impressive; it filled the little room. When he had finished, Lionel forgot to ask Estelle to sing again. Winn excused himself; he said he had a letter or two to write and left them.
"It's jolly, your both singing," Lionel said, looking at her with the same admiring friendliness he had shown her before. She guessed then that Winn had said nothing against her. After all, at the bottom of her heart she had known he wouldn't. You can't live with a man for five months and not know where you are safe.
Estelle smiled prettily.
"Yes," she said gently, "music is a great bond," and then she began to talk to Lionel about himself.
She had a theory that all men liked to talk exclusively about themselves, and it is certain that most men enjoyed their conversation with her; but in this particular instance she made a mistake. Lionel did not like talking about himself, and above all he disliked sympathetic admiration. He was not a conceited man, and it had not occurred to him that he was a suitable subject for admiration. Nor did he see why he should receive sympathy. He had had an admirably free and happy life with parents who were his dearest friends, and with a friend who was to him a hero beyond the need of definition.
Still, he wouldn't have shrunk from talking about Winn with Estelle. It was her right to talk about him, her splendid, perfect privilege. He supposed that she was a little shy, because she seemed to slip away from their obvious great topic; but he wished, if she wasn't going to talk about Winn, she would leave his people alone.
She tried to sympathize with him about his home difficulties, and when she discovered that he hadn't any, her sympathy veered to the horrible distance he had to be away from it.
"Oh, well," said Lionel, "it's my father's old regiment, you know; that makes it awfully different. They know as much about my life as I do myself, and when I don't get leave, they often come out to me for a month or two. They're good travelers."
"They must be simply wonderful!" Estelle said ecstatically. Lionel said nothing. He looked slightly amazed. It seemed so funny that Winn, who hadn't much use for ecstasy, should have married a so easily ecstatic wife.
"I do envy you," she said pathetically, "all that background of home companionship. We were brought up so differently. It was not my parents' fault of course—" she added rather quickly. Something in Lionel's expression warned her that he would be unsympathetic to confidences against parents.
"Well, you've got Winn," he said, looking at her with his steadfast encouraging eyes, "you've got your background now." He was prepared to put up with a little ecstasy on this subject, but Estelle looked away from him, her great eyes strangely wistful and absorbed. She was an extraordinary exquisite and pretty little person, like a fairy on a Christmas tree, or a Dresden china shepherdess, not a bit, somehow, like a wife.
"Yes," she said, twisting her wedding ring round her tiny manicured finger. "But sometimes I am a little anxious about him—I know it's silly of me."
Lionel's shyness fell away from him with disconcerting suddenness. "Why are you anxious?" he demanded. "What do you mean, Mrs. Winn?"
Estelle hesitated, she hadn't meant to say exactly what her fear was, she only wanted to arouse the young man's chivalry and to talk in some way that approached intimacy.
Everything must have a beginning, even Petrarch and Laura.
She found Lionel's eyes fixed upon her with a piercing quality difficult to meet. He obviously wouldn't understand if she didn't mean anything—and she hardly knew him well enough to touch on her real difficulties with Winn, those would have to come later.
But she must be anxious about something—she was forced into the rather meager track of her husband's state of health.
"I don't quite know," she mused, "of course he seems perfectly strong—but I sometimes wonder if he is as strong as he looks."
Lionel brushed her wonder aside. "Please tell me exactly what you've noticed," he said, as if he were a police sergeant and she were some reluctant and slightly prevaricating witness.
She hadn't, as a matter of fact, noticed anything. "He sometimes looks terribly tired," she said a little uncertainly, "but I dare say it's all my foolishness, Mr. Drummond. I am afraid I am inclined to be nervous about other people's health—" Estelle sighed softly. She often accused herself of faults which no one had discovered in her. "Winn, I am sure, would be the first to laugh at me."
"Yes, I dare say he would," said Lionel quietly. "But I never will, Mrs. Winn." She raised her eyes gratefully to him—at last she had succeeded in touching him.
"You see," Lionel explained, "I care too much for him myself."
Her eyes dropped. She had a feeling that Petrarch and Laura had hardly begun like that.
The next few days were very puzzling to Estelle; nobody behaved as she expected them to behave, including herself. She found Lionel always ready to accept her advances with open-hearted cordiality, but she had to make the advances. She had not meant to do this. Her idea had been to be a magnet, and magnets keep quite still; needles do all the moving. But this particular needle (except that it didn't appear at all soft) might have been made of cotton wool.
And Winn wouldn't behave at a disadvantage; he was neither tyrannical nor jealous. He left her a great deal to Lionel, and treated her with good-natured tolerance in private and with correct attention before his friend.
In theory Estelle had always stated her belief in platonic friendship, but she had never been inconvenienced by having to carry it out. One thing had always led to another. She had imagined that Lionel (in his relations with her) would be a happy mixture of Lancelot and Galahad. The Galahad side of him would appear when Lancelot became inconvenient—and the Lancelot side of him would be there to fall back upon when Galahad got too dull. But in their actual relation there seemed to be some important ingredient left out. Of course Lancelot was guilty and Estelle had never for a moment intended Lionel to be guilty, but on the other hand Lancelot was in love with the Queen.
This quality was really essential.
Lancelot had had a great affection for the King of course, but that had been subsidiary; and this was what puzzled Estelle most, was Lionel's feeling for her subsidiary to his feeling for Winn?
Lionel was delightful to her; he waited on her hand and foot; he studied all her tastes and remembered everything she told him. Could playing polo with Winn, going out for walks in the rain, and helping to make saddles in Winn's musty, smelling den appeal to him with greater force than her society? He wasn't in love with any one else, and if men weren't in love with any one else, they were usually in love with Estelle. But with Lionel everything stopped short. They conversed confidentially, they used each other's Christian names, but she was left with the sensation of having come up against an invisible barrier. There was no impact, and there was no curtness; there was simply empty space. She was not even sure that Lionel would have liked her at all if she hadn't been Winn's wife. As it was, he certainly wanted her friendship and took pains to win it. It must be added that he won more than he took pains to win. Estelle for the first time in her life stumbled waveringly into a little love.
The visit prolonged itself from a week to a fortnight. Estelle did not sleep the night before Lionel went. She tossed feverishly to and fro, planning their parting. Surely he would not leave her without a word? Surely there must be some touch of sentiment to this separation, horrible and inevitable, that lay before them?
She remembered afterwards that as she lay in the dark and foresaw her loneliness she wondered if she wouldn't after all risk the Indian frontier to be near him? She was subsequently glad she had decided that she wouldn't.
It was a very wet morning, and Lionel was to leave before lunch. Winn went as usual into his study to play with his eternal experiments in leather. Lionel went with him. She heard the two men laughing together down the passage. Could real friends have laughed if they had minded parting with each other?
She sat at her desk in the drawing-room biting nervously at her pen. He was going; was it possible that there would be no farewell?
Just some terrible flat hand-shake at the door under Winn's penetrating eyes.
But after a time she heard steps returning. Lionel came by himself.
"Are you busy?" he asked. "Shall I bother you if we talk a little?"
"No," she said softly. "I hoped you would come back."
Lionel did not answer for a moment. For the first time in their acquaintance he was really a little stirred. He moved about the room restlessly, he wouldn't sit down, though half unconsciously she had put her hand on the chair beside her.
"Do you know," he said at last, "I've got something to say to you, and I'm awfully afraid it may annoy you."
Was it really coming, the place at which he would have to be stopped, after all her fruitless endeavors to get him to move in any direction at all? It looked like it; he was very obviously embarrassed and flushed; he did not even try to meet her eyes.
"The fact is," he went on, "I simply can't go without saying it, and you've been so awfully good to me—you've let me feel we're friends." He paused, and Estelle leaned forward, her eyes melting with encouragement.
"I am so glad you feel like that, Lionel," she murmured. "Do please say anything—anything you like. I shall always understand and forgive, if it is necessary for me to forgive."
"You're awfully generous," he said gratefully. She smiled, and put out her hand again toward the chair. This time he sat down in it, but he turned it to face her.
He was a big man and he seemed to fill the room in which they sat. His blue-gray eyes fixed themselves on hers intently, his whole being seemed absorbed in what he was about to say.
"You see," he began, "I think you may be making a big mistake. Naturally Winn's awfully fond of you and all that and you've just started life, and you like to live in your own country, surrounded by jolly little things, and perhaps India seems frightening and far away." Estelle shrank back a little; he put his hand on the back of her chair soothingly. "Of course it must be hard," he said. "Only I want to explain it to you. Winn's heart is yours, I know, but it's in his work, too, as a man's must be, and his work's out there; it's not here at all.
"When I came here and looked about me, and saw the house and the garden and the country, where we've had such jolly walks and talks—it all seemed temporary somehow, made up—not quite natural, I can't explain what I mean but not a bit like Winn. I needn't tell you what he is, I dare say you think it's cheek of me to talk about him at all, I can quite understand it if you do, only perhaps there's a side of him I've seen more of, and which makes me want to say what I know he isn't—what I don't think even love can make him be—he isn't tame!"
He stopped abruptly; Estelle's eyes had hardened and grown very cold.
"I don't know what you mean," she said. "Has he complained of my keeping him here?"
Lionel pushed back his chair.
"Ah, Mrs. Winn! Mrs. Winn!" he exclaimed half laughingly, and half reproachfully; "you know he wouldn't complain. He only told me that he wasn't coming back just yet, and I—well, I thought I saw why he wasn't."
"Then," she said, turning careful eyes away from him, "if he hasn't complained, I hardly see why you should attack me like this. I suppose you think I am as unnatural and—and temporary as our surroundings?"
Lionel stood up and looked down at her in a puzzled way.
"Oh, I say, you know," he ventured, "you're not playing very fair, are you? Of course I'm not attacking you. I thought we were friends, and I wanted to help you."
"Friends!" she said. Her voice broke suddenly into a hard little laugh. "Well, what else have you to suggest to me about my husband—out of your friendship for me?"
"You're not forgiving me," he reminded her gently, not dreaming what it was she had been prepared to forgive. "But perhaps I'd better go on and get it all out while I'm about it. You know it isn't only that I think he won't care for staying on here, but I think it's a bit of a risk. I don't want to frighten you, but after a man's had black water fever twice, he's apt to be a little groggy, especially about the lungs. England isn't honestly a very good winter place for him for a year or two—"
Estelle flung up her head.
"If he was going to be an invalid," she said, "he oughtn't to have married me!"
The silence that followed her speech crept into every corner of the room. Lionel did not look puzzled any more. He stood up very straight and stiff; only his eyes changed. He could not look at her; they were filled with contempt. He gave her a moment or two to disavow her words; he would have given his right hand to hear her do it.
"I beg your pardon," he said at last. "I have overstated the case if you imagine your husband is an invalid. I think, if you don't mind," he added, "I'll see if my things are ready."
"Please do," she said, groping in her mind for something left to hurt him with. "And another time perhaps you will know better than to say for my husband what he is perfectly competent to say for himself."
"You are quite right," Lionel said quietly; "another time I shall know better." The rain against the windows sounded again; she had not heard it before.
He did not come back to say good-by. She heard him talking to Winn in the hall, the dogcart drove up, and then she saw him for the last time, his fine, clear-cut profile, his cap dragged over his forehead, his eyes hard, as they were when he had looked at her. He must have known she stood there at the window watching, but he never looked back. She had expected a terrible parting, but never a parting as terrible as this. Mercifully she had kept her head; it was all she had kept.
It was shortly after Lionel's departure that Estelle realized there was nothing between her and the Indian frontier except the drawing-room sofa. She fixed herself as firmly on this shelter as a limpet takes hold upon a rock. People were extremely kind and sympathetic, and Winn himself turned over a new leaf. He was gentle and considerate to her, and offered to read aloud to her in the evenings.
Nothing shook her out of this condition. The baby arrived, unavailingly as an incentive to health, and not at all the kind of baby Estelle had pictured. He was almost from his first moments a thorough Staines. He was never very kissable, and was anxious as soon as possible to get on to his own feet. At eight months he crawled rapidly across the carpet with a large musical-box suspended from his mouth by its handle; at ten he could walk. He tore all his lawn frocks on Winn's spurs, screamed with joy at his father's footsteps, and always preferred knees to laps.
His general attitude towards women was hostility, he looked upon them as unfortunate obstacles in the path of adventure, and howled dismally when they caressed him. He had more tolerance for his mother who seemed to him an object provided by Providence in connection with a sofa, on purpose for him to climb over.
Her maternal instinct went so far as to allow him to climb over it twice a day for short intervals. After all he had gained her two years.
Estelle lay on the sofa one autumn afternoon at four o'clock, with her eyes firmly shut. She was aware that Winn had come in, and was very inconsiderately tramping to and fro in heavy boots. He seldom entered the drawing-room at this hour, and if he did, he went out again as soon as he saw that her eyes were shut.
Probably he meant to say something horrible about India; she had been expecting it for some time. The report on Tibet was finished, and he could let his staff work go when he liked.
He stood at the foot of her couch and looked at her curiously. Estelle could feel his eyes on her; she wondered if he noticed how thin she was, and how transparent her eyelids were. Every fiber in her body was aware of her desire to impress him with her frailty. She held it before him like a banner.
"Estelle," he said. When he spoke she winced.
"Yes, dear," she murmured hardly above a whisper.
"Would you mind opening your eyes?" he suggested. "I've got something I want to talk over with you, and I really can't talk to a door banged in my face."
"I'm so sorry," she said meekly; "I'm afraid I'm almost too exhausted to talk, but I'll try to listen to what you have to say."
"Thanks," said Winn. He paused as if, after all, it wasn't easy to begin, even in the face of this responsiveness. She thought he looked rather odd. His eyes had a queer, dazed look, as if he had been drinking heavily or as if somebody had kicked him.
"Well," she asked at last, "what is it you want to talk about? Suspense of any kind, you know, is very bad for my heart."
"I beg your pardon," he said. "It was only that I thought I'd better mention I am going to Davos."
"Davos!" She opened her eyes wide now and stared at him. "That snow place?" she asked, "full of consumptives? What a curious idea! I never have been able to understand how people can care to go there for sport. It seems to me rather cruel; but, then, I know I am specially sensitive about that kind of thing. Other people's pain weighs so on me."
"I didn't say I was going there for sport," Winn answered in the same peculiar manner. He sat down and began to play with a paper-cutter on his knee. "As a matter of fact, I'm not," he went on. "I've crocked one of my lungs. They seem to think I've got to go. It's a great nuisance."
It was curious the way he kept looking at her, as if he expected something. He couldn't have told exactly what he expected himself. He was face to face with a new situation; he wasn't exactly frightened, but he had a feeling that he would like very much to know how he ought to meet it. He had often been close to death—but he had never somehow thought of dying, he wasn't close to death now but at the end of something which might be very horrible there would be the long affair of dying. He hoped he would get through it all right and not make a fuss or be a bother to anybody. It had all come with a curious suddenness. He had gone to Travers one day because when Polly pulled he had an odd pain in his chest. He had had a toss the week before, and it had occurred to him that a rib might be broken; but Travers said it wasn't that.
Travers had tapped him all over and looked grave, uncommonly grave, and said some very uncomfortable things. He had insisted on dragging Winn up to town to see a big man, and the big man had said, "Davos, and don't lose any time about it." He hadn't said much else, only when Winn had remarked, "But, damn it all, you know I'm as strong as a horse," he had answered, "You'll need every bit of strength you've got," and all the way home Travers had talked to him like a Dutch uncle.
It was really funny when you came to think of it, because there wasn't anything to see or even feel—except a little cough—and getting rather hot in the evenings, but after Travers had finished pitching into him Winn had written to Lionel and made his will and had rather wondered what Estelle would feel about it. He hadn't wanted to upset her. He hadn't upset her. She stared at him for a moment; then she said:
"How odd! You look perfectly all right. I never have believed in Travers."
Winn mentioned the name of the big man.
"It does sound rather rot," he added apologetically. He still waited. Estelle moved restlessly on the sofa.
"Well," she said, "what on earth am I to do? It's really horribly inconvenient. I suppose I shall have to go back to my people for the winter unless you can afford to let me take a flat in London."
"I'm afraid I can't afford that," said Winn. "I think it would be best for you to go to your people for the winter, unless, of course, you'd rather go to mine. I'm going down there to-morrow; I've written to tell them. I must get my father to let me have some money as it is. It's really an infernal nuisance from the expense point of view."
"I couldn't go to your people," said Estelle, stiffly. "They have never been nice to me; besides, they would be sure to teach baby how to swear." Then she added, "I suppose this puts an end to your going to India."
Winn dropped his eyes.
"Yes," he said, "this puts an end to my going back to India for the present. I've been up before the board; they're quite agreeable. In fact, they've been rather decent to me."
Estelle gave a long sigh of relief and gratitude. It was really extraordinary how she had been helped to avoid India. She couldn't think what made Winn go on sitting there, just playing with the paper-knife.
He sat there for a long time, but he didn't say any more. At last he got up and went to the door.
"Well," he said, "I think I'll just run up and have a look at the kid."
"Poor dear," said Estelle, "I'm frightfully sorry for you, of course, though I don't believe it's at all painful—and by the way, Winn, don't forget that consumption is infectious."
He stopped short as if someone had struck him. After all, he didn't go to the nursery; she heard him go down the passage to the smoking-room instead.
Sir Peter was having his annual attack of gout. Staines Court appeared at these times like a ship battened down and running before a storm.
Figures of pale and frightened maids flickered through the long passage-ways. The portly butler violently ejected from the dining-room had been seen passing swiftly through the hall, with the ungainly movement of a prehistoric animal startled from its lair.
The room in which Sir Peter sat burned with his language. Eddies of blasphemous sound rushed out and buffeted the landings like a rising gale.
Sir Peter sat in a big arm chair in the center of the room. His figure gave the impression of a fortressed island in the middle of an empty sea. His foot was rolled in bandages and placed on a low stool before him; within reach of his hand was a knobbed blackthorn stick, a bell and a copy of the "Times" newspaper.
Fortunately Lady Staines was impervious to sound and acclimatized to fury. When Sir Peter was well she frequently raised storms, but when he had gout she let him raise them for himself. He was raising one now on the subject of Winn's letter.
"What's that he says? What's that he says?" roared Sir Peter. "Something the matter with his lungs! That's the first time a Staines has ever spoken of his lungs. The boy's mad. I don't admit it! I don't believe it for a moment, all a damned piece of doctors' rubbish, the chap's a fool to listen to 'em! When has he ever seen me catering to hearse-conducting, pocket-filling asses!"
Charles was home on a twenty-four hours' leave—he stood by the mantelpiece and regarded his parent with undutiful and critical eyes. "I should say you send for 'em," he observed, "whenever you've got a pain; why they're always hangin' about. Look at that table chock full of medicines. 'Nuff to kill a horse—where do they come from?"
"Hold your infernal tongue, Sir!" shouted Sir Peter. "What do I have 'em for? I have 'em here to expose them! That's why—I just let them try it on, and then hold them up to ridicule! Do you find I ever pay the least attention to 'em, Sarah?" he demanded from his wife.
"Not as a rule," Lady Staines admitted, "unless you're very bad indeed, and then you do as you like directly the pain has stopped."
"Well, why shouldn't I!" said Sir Peter triumphantly. "Once I get rid of the pain I can do as I like. When I've got red hot needles eating into my toes, am I likely to like anything? Of course not, you may just as well take medicine then as anything else, but as to taking orders from a pack of ill-bred bumpkins, full of witch magic as a dog of fleas, I see myself! Don't stand grinning there, Charles, like a dirty, shock-headed barmaid's dropped hair pin! I won't stand it! I can't see why all my sons should have thin legs, neither you nor I, Sarah, ever went about like a couple of spilikin's. I call it indecent! Why don't you get something inside 'em, Charles, eh? No stamina, that's what it is! Everybody going to the dogs in motor cars with manicure girls out of their parents' pockets—! Why don't you answer me, Charles, when I speak to you?"
"Nobody can answer you when you keep roaring like a deuced megaphone," said Charles wearily. "Let's hear what the chap's got to say for himself, Mater."
Lady Staines read Winn's letter out loud in a dry voice without expression; it might have been an account of a new lawn mower which she held beneath it.
"I've managed to crock one of my lungs somehow, but they say I've got a chance if I go straight out to Davos for six months. Ask the guv'nor if he'll let me have some money. I shall want it badly. My wife and the kid will go to her people. You might run across and have a look at him sometimes. He's rather a jolly little chap. I shall come down for the week-end to-morrow unless I hear from you to the contrary."Your affectionate son,"Winn."
"I've managed to crock one of my lungs somehow, but they say I've got a chance if I go straight out to Davos for six months. Ask the guv'nor if he'll let me have some money. I shall want it badly. My wife and the kid will go to her people. You might run across and have a look at him sometimes. He's rather a jolly little chap. I shall come down for the week-end to-morrow unless I hear from you to the contrary.
"Your affectionate son,"Winn."
"Your affectionate son,"Winn."
"I think that's all," said his mother.
"What!" shouted Sir Peter. He had never shouted quite like this before. Charles groaned and buried his head in his hands. Even Lady Staines looked up from the lawn mower's letter, which she had placed on the top of Winn's; the medicine bottles sprang from the table and fell back again sufficiently shaken for the next dose.
"Do you mean to tell me!" cried Sir Peter in a quieter voice, "that that little piece of dandelion fluff—that baggage—that city fellow's half baked, peeled onion of a minx is going to desert her husband? That's what I call it—desertion! What does she want to go back to her people for? She must go with him! She must go to Davos! She shall go to Davos! if I have to take her there by the hair! I never heard of anything so outrageous in my life! What becomes of domesticity? where's family life? That's what I want to know! and is Winn such a milk and water noodle that he's going to sit down under it and say 'Thank you!' Not that I think he needs to go to Davos for a moment, mind you. Let him come here and have a nice quiet time with me, that's what he wants."
"That's all very well, Father," said Charles. "But what you mean is you don't want to fork out! If the chap's told to go to Davos, he's got to go to Davos, and it's his own look-out whether he takes his wife with him or not. Consumption isn't a joke, and I tell you plainly that if you don't help him when he's got a chance, you needn't expectmeto come to the funeral. No flowers and coffins and beloved sons on tombstones, are going to make me move an inch. It'll be just the same to me as if you'd shoved him under with your own hand, and that's all I've got to say, and it's no use blowing the roof off about it!"
"You'd better go now, Charles," said Lady Staines quietly.
When Sir Peter had finished saying what he thought of Charles and what he intended to do to the entail, Lady Staines gave him his medicine.
"Look here, Peter," she said, "this is a bad business about our boy."
Sir Peter met her eyes and nodded.
"Yes," he agreed, "a damned bad business!"
"We'd better get him off," she added after a moment's pause.
"It's all nonsense," grumbled Sir Peter, "and I told you from the first you ought never to have let him marry that girl. Her father's the poorest tenant I ever had, soft-headed, London vermin! He doesn't know anything about manure—and he'll never learn. I shall cut down all his trees as soon as I'm about again. As for the girl, keep her out of my sight or I'll wring her neck. I ought to have done it long ago. How much does he want?"
"Let's make it three hundred," Lady Staines said. "He may as well be comfortable."
"Pouring money into a sieve," grumbled Sir Peter. "Send for the doctor and bring me the medical dictionary. I may as well see what it says about consumption, and don't mention the word when Winn's about. Iwillhave tact! If you'd used common or garden tact in this house before, that marriage would never have taken place. I sit here simmering with it day in and day out and everybody else goes about giving the whole show away! If it hadn't been for my tact Charles would have married that manicure girl years ago. Bring me my check-book. It's nothing but a school-boy's lark, this going to Davos. Why consumption's a pin-prick compared to gout! No pain—use of both legs—sanguine disposition. Where the hell's that medical dictionary? Ah, it's there, is it—then why the devil didn't you give it me before?"
Sir Peter read solemnly for a few minutes, and then flung the book on the floor.
"Bosh!" he cried angrily. "All old woman's nonsense. Can't tell what's going on inside a pair of bellows—can they? Then why make condemned asses of themselves, and say they can! Don't tell Charles I've written this check—he's the most uncivil rascal we've got."
It was odd how Winn looked forward to seeing Staines; he couldn't remember ever having paid much attention to the scenery before; he had always liked the bare backs of the downs behind the house where he used to exercise the horses, and the turf was short and smelt of thyme; and of course the shooting was good and the house stood well; but he hadn't thought about it till now, any more than he thought about his braces.
He decided to walk up from the station. There was a short cut through the fields and then you came on the Court suddenly, over-looking a sheet of water.
It was a still November day, colorless and sodden. The big elms were as dark as wet haystacks and the woods huddled dispiritedly in a vague mist.
The trees broke to the right of the Court and the house rose up like a gigantic silver ghost.
It was a battered old Tudor building with an air of not having been properly cleaned; blackened and weather-soaked, unconscionably averse from change, it had held its own for four hundred years.
The stones looked as if they were made out of old moonlight and thin December sunshine. A copse of small golden trees, aspen and silver birches made a pale screen of light beside the house and at its feet, the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.
There wasn't a tree Winn hadn't climbed or an inch he hadn't explored, fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging at his menaced life.
His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it had been discarded by a jockey.
In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs. She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked, "You've just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us—your father threw a watering can at him. I can't think what's happened to the men nowadays, they don't seem to be able to stand anything, and I've sent Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago if it was only ducks, but probably it's a girl at the mill as well."
Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. "Hang it all, Mother," he objected, "it's such a messy day for planting bulbs!" "Nonsense," said Lady Staines firmly, "I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don't you, you can get the dirt off then? It's a perfect day for bulbs as you'd know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There's another trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin." Winn strode off to the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and Judy show.
In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn't hit out all round if the other person wouldn't hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their armor as easily as milk slips into a glass. It was Lady Staines and Winn who were the deadly fighters.
They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.
It was difficult to say what they fought for but it was a magnificent spectacle to see them fight, and they had for each other a regard which, if it was never tender, had every element of respect.
They worked now for some time in silence. Suddenly Lady Staines cocked a wintry blue eye in her son's direction and remarked, "Why ain't your wife going with you to Davos?" Winn hurled a bulb into the small hole prepared for it before answering, then he said:
"She's too delicate to stand the cold."
"Is there anything the matter with her?" asked his mother.
Winn preferred to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn't going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. "Marriage don't seem to have agreed with either of you particularly well," observed Lady Staines with a grim smile.
"We haven't got your constitution," replied her son. "If either you or Father had married any one else—they'd have been dead within six months."
"Humph!" said his mother. "That only shows our sound judgment; we took what we could stomach! It's her look-out of course, but I suppose she knows she's running you into the Divorce Court, letting you go out there by yourself? All those snow places bristle with grass widows and girls who have outstayed their market and have to get a hustle on! Sending a man out there alone is like driving a new-born lamb into a pack of wolves!" Lady Staines with her eye on the heavily built and rather leathery lamb beside her gave a sardonic chuckle. Winn ignored her illustration.
"You needn't be afraid," he replied. "I'm done with women; they tempt me about as much as stale sponge cakes."
"Ah!" said his mother, "I've heard that tale before. A man who says he's done with women simply means one of them's done with him. Besides, you're to be an invalid, I understand! An invalid man is as exposed to women as a young chicken to rats. You won't stand a ghost of a chance. Look at your father, if I left him alone when he was having an attack of gout with a gray-haired matron of a reformatory, he'd be on his knees to her before I could get back."
"You can take it from me," said Winn, "that even if Ishouldneed such a thing as a petticoat, I'd try a kind that won't affect marriage. I'll never look at another good woman again—the other sort will do for me if I can't stick it without."
"Don't racket too much," said Lady Staines, planting her last bulb with scientific skill. "They say keeping women's very expensive up there—on account of the Russian Princes."
"By the by," said Winn, "thanks for the money. Had any difficulty in extracting it?"
"Not much," said Lady Staines, withdrawing to the lawn. "Charles got rather in the way."
"Silly ass," observed Winn. "Didn't want me to have it, I suppose?"
"No, he did want you to have it," replied Lady Staines, "but he needn't have been such a fool as to have said so. It nearly upset everything. His idea was, you see, that if his father gave you something—he and James would have to be bought off. So they were in the end, but they'd have had more if he'd played his hand better."
Winn laughed. "Jolly to be home again," he remarked. "Dinner as usual?"
"Yes," said Lady Staines, "and don't forget one of the footmen's a Plymouth Brother and mustn't be shocked. It's so difficult to get any one nowadays, one mustn't be too particular. He said he could stand your father by constant prayer, but he gave notice over Charles. Charles ought to have waited till dessert to let himself go."
The dinner passed off well. Sir Peter and Winn had one never failing bone of contention, the rival merits of the sister services. Sir Peter expressed on every possible occasion in his son's presence, a bitter contempt for the army, and Winn never let an opportunity pass without pointing out the gorged and pampered state of the British Navy.
"If we'd had half the money spent on us, Sir, that you keep guzzling over," Winn cheerfully threw out, "we could knock spots out of Europe. The trouble with England is—she treats her sailors as if they were the proud sisters—and we are shoved out like Cinderella into the scullery to do all the dirty work."
"Pooh!" said Sir Peter, "work! Is that what you call it—takin' a horse out for an hour or two, and shoutin' at a few men on a parade ground. What's an army good for—even when it's big enough to be seen with the naked eye and capable of attacking a few black savages with their antiquated weapons. Why you'resafe, that's what you are—dead safe! Land's beneath you—immovable—you can get anywhere you want to as easy as sliding down banisters! Targets keep still too! It's nothing to hit a thing you can stand to fire at whileitstands still tobefired at! Child's play, that's what it is. Look at us, something up all the time, peace or war. We've got the sea to fight—wind too—and thick weather. We've got our pace to mind and if we ever did clinch up we'd have to do our fighting at a rate that'd make an express train giddy—and running after a target goin' as hard as we do! That's what I call something of a service. No! No! The Army's played out. You're for ornament now, meant to go round Buckingham Palace and talk to nurse-maids in the Park."
"Not many nurse-maids in the Kyber Pass," his son observed.
"Frontiers—yes, I dare say," snorted Sir Peter. "A few black rag dolls behind trees popping at you to keep your circulation going, and you with Maxims and all, going picnics in the hills and burning down villages as easy as pulling fire-crackers—and half the time you want help from us! Look at South Africa!"
They looked at South Africa for some time till the dessert came and the Plymouth Brother thankfully withdrew. After that Winn allowed himself some margin and Lady Staines leaned back in her chair, ate grapes and enjoyed her coffee.
The conversation became pungent, savage and enlivened on Sir Peter's part by strange oaths.
Winn kept to sudden thrusts of irony impossible to foresee and difficult to parry.
They drank velvety ripe old port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent development suited to James, who was in command of one of them.
As to aëroplanes he said that as we'd now succeeded in imitating infernal birds and fishes—he supposed we'd soon bring off reptiles the kind of creature the modern young would be likely to represent best.
"We shall soon have the police crawling on their bellies up and down the Strand hiding behind lamp-posts," finished Sir Peter. "Call that kind of thing science! It's an inverted Noah's Ark! That's what it is! And when you get it all going to suit yourself, there'll be another flood, and serve you all damned well right. I shall enjoy seeing you drown!"
Winn replied that you had to fight with your head now and that people who fought with their fists were about as dangerous as stuffed rabbits.
Sir Peter replied that in the end everything came down to blood, how much you'd got yourself and how much you could get out of the enemy.
Lady Staines was slightly afraid of leaving them in this atmosphere, but at last she reluctantly withdrew to the hall, where she listened to the varying shades of Sir Peter's voice and decided they were on the whole loud enough to be normal.
At eleven o'clock she and Winn between them assisted Sir Peter to bed.
This was a sharp and fiery passage usually undertaken by the toughest of the gardeners.
Winn however managed extraordinarily well. He insisted on occasional pauses and by a home truth of an appallingly personal nature actually silenced his father for the last half flight.
Sir Peter breakfasted in his room.
He had had a bad night. He wouldn't, as he explained to his wife, have minded if Winn had been a puny chap; but there he was, sound and strong, with clear hard eyes, broad, straight shoulders and a grip of iron, and yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you had microbes it didn't matter how strong you were—they were just as likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic.
Microbes! The very thought of such small insignificant creatures getting in his way filled Sir Peter with fury. He had always hated insects. But the worst of it was in the morning he didn't feel angry, he simply felt chilled and helpless. His son was hit and he couldn't help him. It all came back to that. There was only one person who could help a sick man, and that person was his wife. Theoretically Sir Peter despised and hated women, but practically he leaned on his wife as only a strong man can lean on a woman; without her, he literally would not have known which way to turn. His trust in her was as solid as his love for a good stout ship. In every crisis of his life she had stood by his side, bitter tongued, hard-headed, undemonstrative and his as much as any ship that had sailed under his flag.
If she had failed him he would have gone down, and now here was his son's wife—another woman—presumably formed for the same purpose, leaking away from under him at the very first sign of weather.
He thought of Estelle with a staggered horror; she had looked soft and sweet—just the woman to minister to a knocked-out man. The trouble with her was she had no guts.
Sir Peter woke his wife up at four o'clock in the morning to shout this fact into her ear. Lady Staines said, "Well—whoever said she had?" and apparently went to sleep again. But Sir Peter didn't go to sleep: Estelle reminded him of how he had once been done over a mare, a beautiful, fine stepping lady-like creature who looked as if she were made of velvet and steel, no vice in her and every point correct; and then what had happened? He'd bought her and she'd developed a spirit like wet cotton wool, no pace, no staying power. She'd sweat and stumble after a few minutes run, no amount of dieting, humoring or whipping affected her. She'd set out to shirk, and shirk she did—till he worked her off on a damned fool Dolores had fortunately introduced him to—only wives can't be handed on like mares—"Devil's the pity"—Sir Peter said to himself, as he fell off to sleep. "Works perfectly with horses."
Winn came up-stairs soon after breakfast a little set and silent, to say good-by to his father. Sir Peter had thrown his breakfast out of the window and congealed the Plymouth Brother's morning prayers. He wanted to get hold of something tangible to move circumstances and cheat fate, but he couldn't think what you did do, when it wasn't a question of storms or guns—or a man you could knock down for insubordination, simply a physical fact.
He scowled gloomily at his son's approach. "I wish you weren't such a damned fool," he observed by way of greeting. "Why can't you shake a little sense into your wife? What's marriage for? I've been talking to your mother about it. I don't say she isn't a confoundedly aggravating woman, your mother! But she's always stuck to me, hasn't let me down, you know. A wife ain't meant to do that. It's unnatural! Why can't you say to her, 'You come with me or I'll damned well show you the reason why—' That's the line to take!"
"A woman you've got to say that to isn't going to make much of a companion," Winn said quietly. "I'd rather she stayed where she liked."
Sir Peter was silent for a moment, then he said, "Any more children coming?"
"No," said his son, "nor likely to be either, as far as I'm concerned."
"There you are!" said Sir Peter. "Finicky and immoral, that's what I call it! That's the way trouble begins, the more children the less nonsense. Why don't you have more children instead of sitting sneering at me like an Egyptian Pyramid?"
"That's my look-out," said Winn with aggravating composure. "When I want 'em, I'll have 'em. Don't you worry, Father."
"That's all devilish well!" said Sir Peter crossly. "But Ishallworry! Do I know more about the world or do you? Not that I want to quarrel with you, my dear boy," he added hastily. "I admit things are awkward for you—damned awkward—still it's no use sitting down under them when you might have a row and clear the air, is it? What I want to say is—why not have a row?"
"You can't have a row with a piece of pink silk, can you?" his son demanded. "I don't want to blame her, but it's no use counting her in; besides, honestly, Father, I don't care a rap—why should I expect her to? My marriage was a misdeal."
Sir Peter shook his head. "Men ought to love their wives," he said solemnly; "in a sense, of course, no fuss about it, and never letting them know—and not putting oneself out about it! But still there ought to be something to hold on to, and anyhow the more you stick together, the more there is, and your going off like this won't improve matters. Love or no love, marriage is a life."
Winn laughed again. "Life—" he said, "yes—well—how do I know how much longer I shall have to bother about life?"
There was a silence. Sir Peter's gnarled old hands met above his blackthorn stick and trembled.
Winn wished he hadn't spoken. He did not know how to tell his father not to mind. He hadn't really thought his father would mind.
However, there they sat, minding it.
Then Sir Peter said, "I don't believe in consumption, I never have, and I never shall; besides Taylor says Davos is a very good place for it, and you're an early case, and it's all damned nonsense, and you've got to buck up and think no more about it. What I want to hear is that you're back in your Regiment again. I dare say there'll be trouble later on, and then where'll you be if you're an invalid—have you ever thought of that?"
"Yes—that'd be something to live for," Winn said gravely; "trouble."
"You shouldn't be so confoundedly particular," said his father. "Now look at me—if we did have trouble where'd I be? Nowhere at all—old! Just gout and newspapers and sons getting up ideas about their lungs, but when do I complain?
"If you want another £50 any time—I don't say that I can't give it to you—though the whole thing's damned unremunerative! There's the trap. Well—good-by."
Winn stood quite still for a moment looking at his father. It might have been thought by an observer that his eyes, which were remarkably bright, were offensively critical, but Sir Peter, though he wished the last moment to end, knew that his son was not being critical.
Then Winn said, "Well—good-by, Father. I'm sure I'm much obliged to you." And his father said, "Damn everything!" just after the door was shut.
It hadn't seemed dismal at first, it had only seemed quite unnatural. Everything had stopped being natural when the small creature in lawn, only the height of his knee, had been torn reluctantly away from its hold on his trousers. This parting had made Winn feel as if something inside him was being unfairly handled.
There was nothing he could get hold of in Peter to promise security, and the only thing that Peter could grasp was the trousers, which had had to be forcibly removed from him.
Later on Peter would be consoled by a Teddy Bear or the hearth brush, but Winn had had to go before Peter was consoled, and without the resources of the hearth brush.
Estelle wept bitterly in the hall, but Winn hadn't minded that; he had long ago come to the conclusion that Estelle had a taste for tears, just as some people liked boiled eggs for breakfast. He simply patted her on the shoulder and looked away from her while she kissed him.
He had enjoyed starting from Charing Cross, intimidating the porters and giving the man who registered his luggage dispassionate and unfavorable pieces of his mind. But when he was once fairly off he began to have a new feeling. It came over him when he was out of England and had crossed the small gray strip of formless familiar sea—the sea itself always seemed to Winn to belong much more to England than to France—so much so that it annoyed him at Boulogne to have to submit to being thought possibly unblasphemous by porters. He began to feel alone. Up till now he had always seen his way. There had been fellows to do things with and animals; even marriage, though disconcerting, had not set him adrift. He had been cramped by it, but not disintegrated. Now what seemed to have happened was that he had been cut loose. There wasn't the regiment or even a staff college to fall back upon. There wasn't a trail to follow or horses to gentle; his very dog had had to be left behind because of the ridiculous restrictions of canine quarantine.
It really was an extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a damned ghost poking about in a new world full of surprises. It was quite possible that he might find himself among bounders. He had always avoided bounders, but that had been comparatively easy in a world where everybody observed an unspoken, inviolable code. If people didn't know the ropes, they found it simpler to go, and Winn had sometimes assisted them to find it simpler; but he saw that now bounders could really turn up with impunity, for, as far as ropes went, it was he himself who would be in the minority. He might meet men who talked, long-haired, mysterious chaps too soft to kick or radicals, though if the worst came to the worst, he flattered himself that he had always the resource of being unpleasant.
He knew that when the hair rose up on his head like the back of a challenged bull-dog, and he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at people rather straight between the eyes, they usually shut up.
He didn't mind doing this of course, if necessary; only if he had to do it to everybody in the hotel it might become monotonous, and he had a nervous fear that consumption was rather a cad's disease.
Fortunately he had got his skates, and he supposed there'd be toboggans and skis. He would see everybody in hell before he would share a table.
It was curious how one could get to thirty-six and then suddenly in the middle of nothing start up a whole new set of feelings—feelings about Peter, who had, after all, only just happened, and yet seemed to have belonged to him always; and his lungs going wrong, and loneliness, like a homesick school-girl! Winn had never felt lonely in Central Africa or Tibet, so that it seemed rather absurd to start such an emotion in a railway train surrounded by English people, particularly as it had nothing to do with what he looked upon as his home. His feeling about leaving the house at Aldershot had been, "Thank God there aren't going to be any more dinners!"
Still, there it was. He did feel lonely; probably it was one of the symptoms of bad lungs which Travers hadn't mentioned, the same kind of thing as the perfectly new desire to lean back in his corner and shut his eyes.
He felt all right in a way, his muscles acted, he could easily have thrown a stout young man with white eyelashes passing along the corridor through the nearest window; but there was a blurred sensation behind everything, a tiresome, unaccountable feeling as if he mightn't always be able to do things. He couldn't explain it exactly; but if it really turned up at all formidably later, he intended to shoot himself quickly before Peter got old enough to care.
One thing he had quite made up his mind about: he would get well if he could, but if he couldn't, he wasn't going to be looked after. The mere thought of it drove him into the corridor, where he spent the night alternately walking up and down and sitting on an extremely uncomfortable small seat by a draughty door to prove to himself that he wasn't in the least tired.
He began to feel rather better after the coffee at Basle, and though he was hardly the kind of person to take much interest in mere scenery, the small Swiss villages, with their high pink or blue clock-faced churches made him wish he could pack them into a box, with a slice of green mountain behind, and send them to Peter to play with.
After Landeck he smelt the snows, and challenged successfully the whole shivering carriage on the subject of an open window. The snows reminded Winn in a jolly way of Kashmir and nights spent alone on dizzy heights in a Dak bungalow.
The valleys ceased slowly to breathe, the dull autumn coloring sank into the whiteness of a dream. The mountains rose up on all sides, wave upon wave of frozen foam, aiming steadily at the high, clear skies. The half-light of the failing day covered the earth with a veil of silver and retreating gold.
The valleys passed into silence, freezing, whispering silence. The moon rose mysteriously behind a line of black fir-trees, sending shafts of blue light into the hollow cup of mountain gorges. It was a poet's world, Blake or Shelley could have made it, it was too cold for Keats. Winn had not read these poets. It reminded him of a particularly good chamois hunt, in which he had bagged a splendid fellow, after four hours' hard climbing and stalking. The mountains receded a little, and everything became part of a white hollow filled with black fir-trees, and beyond the fir-trees a blue lake as blue as an Indian moonstone, and then one by one, with the unexpectedness of a flight of glow-worms, sparkled the serried ranks of the hotels. Out they flashed, breaking up the mystery, defying the mountains, as insistent and strident as life.
The train stopped, and its contents spilled themselves out a little uncertainly and stiffly on the platform. Instantly the cold caught them, not the insidious, subtle cold of lower worlds, but the fresh, brusk buffet of the Alps. It caught them by the throat and chest, it tingled in ears and noses; there was no menace in it, and no weakness. It was as compulsory as a policeman in a street fight.
Winn had just stepped aside to allow a clamorous lady to take possession of his porter when he saw a man struggle into the light under a lamp-post; he was carrying something very carefully in his arms.
Winn could not immediately make out what it was, but he saw the man's face and read utmost mortal misery in his eyes; then he discovered that the burden was a woman. Her hands were so thin that they lay like broken flower petals on the man's shoulders; her face was nothing but a hollow shell; her eyes moved, so that Winn knew she was alive, and in the glassy stillness of the air he caught her dry whispering voice, "I am not really tired, dearest," she murmured. In a moment they had vanished. It struck Winn as very curious that people could love each other like that, or that a dying woman should fight her husband's fears with her last strength. He felt horribly sorry for them and impatient with himself for feeling sorry. After all, he had not come up to Davos to go about all over the place feeling sorry for strange people to whom he had never been introduced. The funny part of it was that he didn't only feel sorry for them, he felt a little sorry for himself. Was love really like that? And had he missed it? Well, of course he knew he had missed it, only he hadn't realized that it was quite like that.
Fortunately at this moment a German porter appeared to whom Winn felt an instant simple antagonism. He was a self-complacent man, and he brought Winn the wrong luggage.
"Look here, my man," Winn said smoothly, but with a rocky insistence behind his words, "if you don't look a little sharp and bring me therightboxes with green labels, I shall have to kick you into the middle of next week."
This restored Winn even more quickly than it restored his luggage. No one followed him into the small stuffy omnibus which glided off swiftly toward its destination. The hotel was an ugly wooden house in the shape of a hive built out with balconies; it reminded Winn of a gigantic bird-cage handsomely provided with perches. It was only ten o'clock, but the house was as silent as the mountains behind it.
The landlord appeared, and, leading Winn into a brilliantly lighted, empty room, offered him cold meat.
Winn said the kind of thing that any Staines would feel called upon to say on arriving at a cold place at a late hour and being confronted with cold meat.
The landlord apologized in a whisper, and returned after some delay with soup. Nothing, not even more language, could move him beyond soup. He kept saying that it was late and that they must be quiet, and he didn't seem to believe Winn when Winn remarked that he hadn't come up there to be quiet. Winn himself became quieter as he followed the landlord through interminable passages covered with linoleum where his boots made a noise like muffled thunder.
Everywhere there was a strange sense of absolute cleanliness and silence, the subduing smell of disinfectant and the sight of padded, green felt doors.
When Winn was left alone in a room like a vivid cell, all emptiness and electric light, and with another green door leading into a farther room, he became aware of a very faint sound that came from the other side of the door. It was like the bark of a dog shut up in a distant cellar; it explained the padding of the doors.
In all the months that followed, Winn never lost this sound, near or far; it was always with him, seldom shattering and harsh, but always sounding as if something were being broken gradually, little by little, shaken into pieces by some invisible disintegrating power.
Winn flung open the long window which faced the bed. It led out to a small private balcony—if he had to be out on a balcony, he had of course made a point of its being private—and looked over all Davos.
The lights were nearly gone now. Only two or three twinkled in a narrow circle on a sheet of snow; behind them the vague shapes of the mountains hung immeasurably alien and at peace.
A bell rang out through the still air with a deep, reverberating note. It was a reassuring and yet solemn sound, as if it alone were responsible for humanity, for all the souls crowded together in the tiny valley, striving for their separate, shaken, inconclusive lives.
"An odd place—Davos," Winn thought to himself. "No idea it was like this. Sort of mix up between a picnic and a cemetery!"
And then suddenly somebody laughed. The sound came from a slope of mountain behind the hotel, and through the dark Winn's quick ear caught the sound of a light rushing across the snow. Some one must be tobogganing out there, some one very young and gay and incorrigibly certain of joy. Winn hoped he should hear Peter laughing like that later on. It was such a jolly boy's laugh, low, with a mischievous chuckle in it, elated, and very disarming.
He hoped the child wouldn't get hauled up for being out so late and making a noise. He smiled as he thought that the owner of the voice, even if collared, would probably be up to getting out of his trouble; and when he turned in, he was still smiling.