“I’ve got to damned well do it,” he said to himself. He remembered that he had had once to shoot a spy in cold blood, and that he used those words to himself before he did it.
A couple passed close to their table. The woman was over-dressed, and hung with all kinds of jingling chains and bangles; she was pretty, and as she sat with her profile turned a little toward them she was curiously like Estelle. This was his opportunity. It must come now; all the morning it had lain in the back of his mind, behind delight, behind their laughter, like some lurking jungle creature waiting for the dark.
“Do you see that woman,” he asked Claire, “the pretty one over there by the pillar? She’s awfully like – ”
Claire stopped him. “Pretty!” she cried. “Do you really think she’s pretty? I think she’s simply loathsome!”
Winn checked himself hurriedly; he obviously couldn’t finish his sentence with “she’s awfully like my wife.”
“Well, she sets out to be pretty, doesn’t she?” he altered it rather lamely. Claire continued extremely scornful.
“Yes, I dare say,” she admitted. “She may set out to be smart too, hung round with things like a Christmas-tree, but she’s as common as a sixpenny bazaar. I’ll tell you why I don’t like her, Major Staines, and who she reminds me of, but perhaps you think her pretty, too? I mean that horrid woman, Mrs. Bouncing in our hotel?”
“But can’t horrid women be pretty, too?” Winn ventured with meekness.
“No, of course not,” said Claire, with great decisiveness. “Why, you know horrid men can’t be handsome. Look at Mr. Roper!” Winn was uncertain if this point of knowledge had ever reached him; but he wasn’t at this time of day going to look at Mr. Roper, so he gave in.
“I dare say you’re right,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you know, I never do look at Roper.”
“But that’s not the reason,” Claire went on, slightly softened by her victory, “that I dislike her. I really dislike her because I think she is bad for Maurice; but perhaps you haven’t noticed the way he keeps hanging about her. It makes me sick.”
Winn admitted that he had noticed it.
“Still,” he said, “of course if you hadn’t proved to me that by being horrid she couldn’t be pretty, I should have supposed that he simply hung about Mrs. Bouncing because she was – well, not precisely plain.”
Claire looked doubtfully at him, but he wasn’t smiling; he was merely looking at her with sufficient attention.
“There are only two of us,” she said in a low voice, “Maurice and me, and I do so awfully want him to be a success. I don’t think anybody else does. I don’t even know how much he wants it himself. You see, Maurice is so young in many ways, and our people having died – he hasn’t had much of a chance, has he? Men ought to have fathers.”
Winn listened intently; he always remembered anything she said, but this particular opinion sank deep into the bottom of his heart: “Men ought to have fathers.”
“I’ve done the best I can,” Claire went on, “but you see, I’m young, too; there are lots of things I don’t really know about life. I think perhaps I sometimes believe too much that things are going to be jolly, and that makes me a bad adviser for Maurice. Do you know what I mean?”
Winn nodded, but he determined that whether she expected or not, she should have things jolly. He must be able to manage it. If one wanted a thing as much as he wanted this, surely one could bring it off.
Hadn’t he pulled off races on the scratchiest of polo ponies, when he couldn’t afford better, out of sheer intention? He had meant to win, moved the pony along, and won. Was life less controllable than a shoddy polo pony?
He set his mouth and stared grimly out over the sparkling snow. He did not ask himself how a man with a wife hung round his neck like a millstone was going to manage the perpetual happiness of a stray young woman. He never asked himself questions or saw how things were to be done, but when the crisis came his instinct taught him in a flash the short cut to victory.
“Now,” said Claire, unexpectedly, “you are looking awfully dangerous – you do rather sometimes, you know – like a kind of volcano that might go off.”
Winn turned his eyes slowly toward her.
“I shall never be dangerous for you, Miss Rivers,” he said gently.
He did not know how much he promised her or that he was already incapable of keeping his promise. She looked away from him with smiling lips and happy, mysterious eyes. She had known long ago that all the force he had was as safe with her as if he had laid it in her hands; safer than that, because he held it in his own – for her.
It seemed to Claire that you were only perfectly secure when you were with a man who could be dangerous to everybody else, but always safe for you.
“You will help me with Maurice?” she said softly. “Then I sha’n’t feel worried any more.”
“I shouldn’t let it worry me for a moment if I were you,” Winn assured her. “He hasn’t come to much harm so far. He’s young, that’s all. I’ll keep my eye on him, of course.”
Winn knew quite well what he would do with a subaltern of Maurice’s type. He would take him out shooting and put the fear of God into him. If this were done often and systematically enough, the subaltern would improve or send in his papers. But Davos did not offer equal advantages. One could not get the fear of God everywhere on a tap; besides, there was Mrs. Bouncing.
Claire turned suddenly toward him.
“I want Maurice,” she said rather breathlessly, with shining eyes, “to be a good soldier; I want him to be like you.”
Winn felt a pang of fear; it was a pang that was half horrible pain, and half passionate and wild delight. Was Claire perfectly safe? Why did she want Maurice to be like him? It was Claire herself who banished his fear; she added hastily:
“He really must get through Sandhurst properly.”
Of course she hadn’t meant anything. In fact, if she really had liked him in any particular way she’d have been shot before she showed it. What she wanted was simply the advice of an older man in the service. It did not occur to Winn that Claire had been shot already without knowing it.
He went on being reassured all the way back because Claire talked persistently about tigers. Winn explained that once you thoroughly knew where you were, there was no real danger in a tiger.
PART II
CHAPTER XIV
Winn discovered almost immediately that what assistance he could give to Maurice would have to be indirect. He had not a light hand for weak, evasive, and excitable people, and Maurice did not like to be driven off the rink with “Better come along with me” or “I should think a good brisk walk to Clavedel would be about your mark.” Winn’s idea of a walk was silence and pace; he had a poor notion of small talk, and he became peculiarly dumb with a young man whose idea of conversation was high-pitched boasting.
When Maurice began telling stories about how he got the better of so-and-so or the length of his ski-jumps, Winn’s eyes became unpleasantly like probes, and Maurice felt the élan of his effects painfully ebbing away. Still, there was a certain honor in being sought out by the most exclusive person in the hotel and Winn’s requests, stated in flat terms and with the force of his determination behind them, were extraordinarily difficult to refuse.
It was Mr. Roper who gave Maurice the necessary stiffening. Mr. Roper didn’t like Winn, and though their intercourse had been limited to a series of grunts on Winn’s part, Mr. Roper felt something unerringly inimical behind each of these indeterminate sounds.
“That man’s a spoil-sport,” he informed his pupil. Maurice agreed.