“Thanks,” said Winn. “All right; I’ll stay.” He didn’t want the Cresta bun, and he thought that he resented Miss Marley’s invitation; but, on the other hand, he was intensely glad she was going off and leaving him alone.
He felt uncommonly queer. Perhaps he could think of some excuse to avoid the tea when she came back.
All the muscles of his chest seemed to have gone wrong; it hurt him to breathe. He sat with his head down, like a man climbing a hill against a strong wind. It was rather funny to feel ill again when he had really forgotten he was up there for his health. That was what he felt – ill.
It was not nearly as painful a feeling as remembering Claire. Unfortunately, it was very quickly followed by the more painful feeling.
When Miss Marley came back, he had the eyes of a creature caught in a trap.
She took him to Cresta to tea, and it did not occur to Winn to wonder why a woman who at forty-five habitually rode the Cresta should find it necessary to walk at the pace of a deliberating snail. It was a pace which at the moment suited Winn precisely.
On the whole he enjoyed his tea. Miss Marley’s manners, though abrupt, had certain fine scruples of their own. She showed no personal curiosity and she gave Winn some really valuable tips. He began to understand why she had so deeply resented his trifling with the Cresta.
Miss Marley was one of the few genuine workers at St. Moritz, a member of the old band who had worked devotedly to produce the Monster which had afterward as promptly devoured them. This fate, however, had not as yet overtaken Miss Marley. She was too tough and too rich to be very easily devoured. The Cresta was at once her child and her banner; she had helped to make it, and she wound its folds around her as a screen for her invisible kindnesses.
Menaced boys could have told how she had averted their ruin with large checks and sharp reproofs. She had saved many homes and covered many scandals. For girls she had a special tenderness. She had never been a beautiful young girl, and she had a pathetic reverence for what was frail and fair. For them she had no reproofs, only vast mercy, and patient skill in releasing them from the traps which had caught their flurried young senses; but for those who had set the traps she had no mercy.
Miss Marley was not known for any of these things. She was celebrated for fights with chaplains and sanitary inspectors, and for an inability to give in to authority unless authority knew what it was about. She had never once tried to please, which is the foundation of charm. Perhaps it would have been a useless effort, for she was not born to please. She was born to get things done.
After Miss Marley had talked to Winn for an hour, she decided to get him to join the Bandy Club. He was the kind of man who must do something, and it was obviously better that he should not again tempt fate by riding the Cresta from Church Leap without practice. This course became clearer to Miss Marley when she discovered that Winn had come up for his health.
“Of course a fellow who wasn’t seedy wouldn’t have made an ass of himself over riding the Cresta,” Winn explained, eyeing her thoughtfully.
He must have got somehow off his toboggan on to the snow, and he had no recollection at all of getting there. Miss Marley said nothing to enlighten him further. She merely suggested bandy. After dinner she introduced Winn to the captain of the St. Moritz team, and at three o’clock the next afternoon she watched him play in a practice-match.
Winn played with a concentrated viciousness which assured her of two things: he would be an acquisition to the team, and if he felt as badly as all that, it was just as well to get some of it worked off on anything as unresponsive as a ball.
After this Miss Marley let him alone. She considered this the chief factor in assisting the lives of others; and for nearly two hours a day, while he was playing bandy, Winn succeeded in not remembering Claire.
CHAPTER XXII
Winn’s way of playing bandy was to play as if there wasn’t any ice. In the first few practices it had the disadvantage of a constant series of falls, generally upon the back of his head; but he soon developed an increasing capacity of balance and an intensity of speed. He became the quickest forward the St. Moritz team had ever possessed.
When he was following the ball he took up his feet and ran. The hard clash of the skates, the determined onrush of the broad-built, implacable figure, were terrible to withstand. What was to be done against a man who didn’t skate, but tore, who fell upon a ball as a terrier plunges, eyeless and intent, into a rat-hole? The personal safety of himself or others never occurred to Winn. He remembered nothing but the rules of the game. These he held in the back of his mind, with the ball in front of it.
All St. Moritz came to watch the great match between itself and Davos. It was a still, cold day; there was no blue in the sky; the mountains were a hard black and white and the valley very colorless and clear. There was a hush of coming snow in the air, and the sky was covered by a toneless, impending cloud.
The game, after a brief interval, became a duel between two men: Winn, with his headlong, thirsty method of attack, and the champion player of Davos, Mavorovitch, who was known as the most finished skater of the season.
Mavorovitch never apparently lifted his skates, but seemed to send them forward by a kind of secret pressure. He was a very cool player, as quick as mercury and as light as thistledown. Winn set himself against him with the dogged fury of a bull against a toreador.
“That man’s not brave; he’s careless,” a St. Moritz potentate remarked to Miss Marley. Miss Marley gave a short laugh and glanced at Winn.
“That’s my idea of courage,” she said, “carelessness toward things that don’t count. Major Staines isn’t careless with the ball.”
“A game’s a game,” the foreign prince protested, “not a prolonged invitation to concussion.”
“All, that’s where your foreign blood comes in, Your Highness,” argued Miss Marley. “A game isn’t a game to an Englishman; it’s his way of tackling life. As a man plays so he reaps.”
“Very well, then,” remarked her companion, gravely. “Mark my words, Madame, your friend over there will reap disaster.”
Winn tackled the ball in a series of sudden formidable rushes; he hurled himself upon the slight form of Mavorovitch, only to find he had before him a portion of the empty air. Mavorovitch was invariably a few inches beyond his reach, and generally in possession of the ball.
Twice Winn wrested it forcibly from him and got half way up the ice, tearing along with his skates crashing their iron way toward the goal, and twice Mavorovitch noiselessly, except for a faint scraping, slid up behind him and coaxed the ball out of his very grip. St. Moritz lost two goals to nothing in the first half, and Winn felt as if he were biting on air.
He stood a little apart from the other players, with his back turned to the crowd. He wished it wasn’t necessary always to have an audience; a lot of people who sat and did nothing irritated him. Mavorovitch irritated him, too. He did not like a man to be so quiet; the faint click, click of Mavorovitch’s skates on the ice was like a lady knitting.
The whistle sounded again, and Winn set upon the ball with redoubled fury. He had a feeling that if he didn’t win this game he was going to dislike it very much. He tore up the ice, every muscle strained, his stick held low, caressing the round, flying knob in front; he had got the ball all right, the difficulty was going to be, to keep it. His mind listened to the faint distant scraping of Mavorovitch’s approach. Winn had chosen the exact spot for slowing up for his stroke.