“Don’t go and make a fool of yourself, Claire. It’s a man’s run, not a girl’s. I won’t have you do it.” It was the fatal voice of authority without power.
Across the group her eyes met Winn’s; wicked and gay they ran over him and into him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and stared back at her grimly, like a Staines. He wasn’t going to say anything; only if she had belonged to him he would have stopped her. His eyes said he could have stopped her; but she didn’t belong to him, so he set his square jaw, and gave her his unflinching, indifferent disapproval.
She appeared after this to be unaware of him, and turned to her brother.
“Won’t have it?” she said, with a little gurgle of laughter. “Why, how do you suppose you can stop me? There’s only one way of keeping a man’s run for men, and that’s for girls not to be able to use it – see!”
She slipped her teasing foot off the toboggan and with an agile twist of her small body sprang face downward on the board. In an instant she was off, lying along it light as a feather, but holding the runners in a grip of steel. In a moment more she was nothing but a traveling black dot far down the valley, lifting to the banks, swirling lightning swift back into the straight in a series of curves and flashes, till at the end the toboggan, girl and all, swung high into the air, and subsided safely into a snow-drift.
Winn turned and walked away; he wasn’t going to applaud her. Something burned in his heart, grave and angry, stubborn and very strong. It was as if a strange substance had got into him, and he couldn’t in the least have said what it was. It voiced itself for him in his saying to himself, “That girl wants looking after.” The men on the bank admired her; there were too many of them, and no woman. He wondered if he should ever see her again. She was curiously vivid to him – brown shoes and stockings, tossed hair, clear eyes. He remembered once going to an opera and being awfully bored because there was such a lot of stiff music and people bawling about; only on the stage there had been a girl lying in the middle of a ring of flames. She’d showed up uncommonly well, rather like this one did in the hot sunshine.
Walking back to the hotel he met a string of bounders, people he had seen and loathed at breakfast. Some of them had tried to talk to him; one beggar had had the cheek to ask Winn what he was up there for, and when Winn had said, “Not to answer impertinent questions,” things at the breakfast-table – there was one confounded long one for breakfast – had fallen rather flat.
He felt sure he wouldn’t see the girl again; only he did almost at once. She came into the salle-à-manger with her brother, as if it belonged to them. After two stormy, obstinate scenes Winn had obtained the shelter of his separate and solitary table. The waiter approached the two young things as they entered late and a little flushed; apparently he explained to them with patient stubbornness that they, at any rate, must give up this privilege; they couldn’t have a separate table. He also tried to persuade them which one to join. The boy made a blustering assertion of himself and then subsided. Claire Rivers did neither. Her eyes ran over the room, mutinous and a little disdainful; then she moved. It seemed to Winn he had never seen anybody move so lightly and so swiftly. There was no faltering in her. She took the room with her head up like a sail before a breeze. She came straight to Winn’s table and looked down at him.
“This is ours,” she said. “You’ve taken it, though we were here first. Do you think it’s fair?”
Winn rose quietly and looked down at her. He was glad he was half a head taller; still he couldn’t look very far down. She caught at the corner of her lip with a small white tooth. He tried to make a look of sternness come into his eyes, but he felt guiltily aware that he wanted to give in to her, just as he wanted to give in, to Peter.
“Of course,” he said, gravely, “I had no idea it was your table when I got it from that tow-headed fool. You must take it at once, and I’ll make him bring in another one.”
“He won’t,” said Claire. “He says he can’t; Herr Avalon, the proprietor, won’t give him another; besides, there isn’t room.”
“Oh, I think he will,” said Winn. “Shall I go over and bring your brother to you? Won’t you sit down?”
She hesitated, then she said:
“You make me feel as if I were being very rude, and I don’t want to drive you away. Only, you know, the other people here are rather awful, aren’t they?”
Winn was aware that their entire awfulness was concentrated upon his companion.
“Please sit down,” he said a little authoritatively. Her brother ought to have backed her up, but the young fool wouldn’t; he stood shamefacedly over by the door. “I’ll get hold of your brother,” Winn added, turning away from her. The waiter hovered nervously in their direction.
“Am I to set for the three, sir?” he ventured. Claire turned quickly toward Winn.
“Yes,” she said; “why not? If you don’t mind, I mean. You aren’t really a bit horrid.”
“How can you possibly tell?” Winn asked, with a short laugh. “However, I’ll get your brother, and if you really don’t mind, I’ll come back with him.”
Claire was quite sure that she could tell and that she didn’t mind.
The waiter came back in triumph, but Winn gave him a sharp look which extracted his triumph as neatly as experts extract a winkle with a pin. Maurice apologized with better manners than Winn had expected. He looked a terribly unlicked cub, and Winn found himself watching anxiously to see if Claire ate enough and the right things. He couldn’t, of course, say anything if she didn’t, but he found himself watching.
CHAPTER XII
Winn was from the first sure that it was perfectly all right. She wouldn’t notice him at all. She would merely look upon him as the man who was there when there were skates to clean, skis to oil, any handy little thing which the other fellows, being younger and not feeling so like an old nurse, might more easily overlook. Women liked fellows who cut a dash, and you couldn’t cut a dash and be an old nurse simultaneously. Winn clung to the simile of the old nurse. That was, after all the real truth of his feelings, not more than that, certainly not love. Love would make more of a figure in the world, not that it mattered what you called things provided you behaved decently. Only he was glad he was not in love.
He bought her flowers and chocolates, though he had a pang about the chocolates, not feeling quite sure that they were good for her; but flowers were safe.
He didn’t give her lilies – they seemed too self-consciously virginal, as if they wanted to rub it in – he gave her crimson roses, flowers that frankly enjoyed themselves and were as beautiful as they could be. They were like Claire herself. She never stopped to consider an attitude; she just went about flowering all over the place in a kind of perpetual fragrance.
She enjoyed herself so much that she simply hadn’t time to notice any one in particular. There were a dozen men always about her. She was so young and happy and unintentional that every one wanted to be with her. It was like sitting in the sun.
She never muddled things up or gave needless pain or cheated. That was what Winn liked about her. She was as fair as a judge without being anything like so grave.
They were all playing a game, and she was the leader. They would have let her break the rules if she had wanted to break them! but she wouldn’t have let herself.
Of course the hotel didn’t approve of her; no hotel could be expected to approve of a situation which it so much enjoyed. Besides Claire was lawless; she kept her own rules, but she broke everybody else’s. She never sought a chaperon or accepted some older woman’s sheltering presence; she never sat in the ladies’ salon or went to tea with the chaplain’s wife. On one dreadful occasion she tobogganed wilfully on a Sunday, under the chaplain’s nose, with a man who had arrived only the night before.