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.
CHAPTER X
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.