If Winter Comes Part 25

CHAPTER VII

I

He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.

He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden unbridling of his bridled pa.s.sions, to grapple his mind back from its wild and pa.s.sionate desires and from its amazed coursings upon the immense prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments, hopes, dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks upon the hunter's gaze, amazingly awarded from the hill, savannas boundless, new, unpathed,--from these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty, obligation, rect.i.tude. He had not left them. But for that cry of her name wrung from him by sudden application of pain against whose shock he was not steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable disclosure. This which he now knew, these violent pa.s.sions which now he felt, but lit for him more whitely the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried consciously to see his life and Mabel's from Mabel's point of view, now, when his mind threatened disloyalty to her, he must try. And would! The old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side, acted never so strongly upon him as when unkindness appeared to lie in his own att.i.tude. Unkindness was unfairness and unfairness was above all qualities the quality he could not tolerate. And here was unfairness, open, monstrous, dishonourable.

Mabel should not feel it.

But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in his ears, "You have struck your tents. You are upon the march."

II

He approached the town. The school lay in this quarter and his way ran through its playing fields and its buildings. Nature in her moods much fas.h.i.+oned his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode his daily journey on his bicycle. He now carried his thoughts into her mood that stood about him.

Nature was to him in October, and not in spring, poignantly suggestive, deeply mysterious, in her intense and visible occupation. She was enormously busy; but she was serenely busy. She was stripping her house of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite cert.i.tude of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable a.s.surance for spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again; and burst again,--in stout affairs of outposts in sheltered banks and secret nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and daffodil and primrose; in mult.i.tudinous clamour of all her buds in May; and last in her resistless tide and flood and avalanche of beauty to triumph and possession.

That was October's voice to him; that he apprehended and tingled to it, as the essence of its strange, heavy odours; secret of its veiling mists; whisper of its moisture-laden airs; song of its swollen ditches, brooks and runnels. It was not "Take down. It is done." It was "Take down. It is beginning."

Mankind, frail parasite of doubt, seeks ever for a sign, conceives no certainty but the enormous cert.i.tude of uncertainty. A sign! In death: "Take down, then; but leave me this--and this--for memory. Perhaps--who knows?--it may be true.... But leave me this for memory." In promise: "So be it, then--but give me some pledge, some proof, some sign." Not thus October. October spoke to Sabre of Nature's sublime imperviousness to doubt; of her enormous certainty, old as creation, based in the sure foundations of the world. "Take down. It is beginning."

Sabre used to think, "It gets you--terrifically. It's stupendous. It's too big to bear." He had this thought out of October: "You can't, _can't_ walk along lanes or in woods in October and see all this mysterious business going on without knowing perfectly well that this astounding certainty must apply equally to human life. I'd wish the death of any one I loved to be in early autumn. No one can possibly _doubt_ in early autumn. In winter, perhaps; and in spring and in summer you can know, cynically, it will pa.s.s. But in October--no. Impossible then. And not only death, Life. Life as one lives it. You can't, _can't_ feel in autumn that in the lowest depths there is lower yet. You only can feel, _know_, that the thing will break, that there's an uplift at the bottom of it all. There _must_ be."

III

Take down: it is beginning. The spirit and the message of the season (as they communicated themselves to him) began, as opiate among enfevered senses, to steal about his thoughts. Had anything happened? His feeling was rather that he was at the beginning of something; or at the end of something, which was the same thing. The place whereon he stood entered into his thoughts. He had left the main road and was skirting through the school precincts. He was crossing The Strip, historic sward whereon were played the First XV football matches. Impossible to be upon The Strip without peopling it again with the tremendous battles that had been here, the giants of football who here had made their fame and the school's fame; the crowded, tumultuous touch lines; the silent, tremendous combat in between. Memories came to him of his own two seasons in the XV; his own name from a thousand throats upon the wintry air. His muscles tautened as again he fought some certain of those enormous moments when the whole of life was bound up solely in the unspeakable necessity to win. Astounding trick of thought from what beset him! He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something vast, dark, threatening, unfathomable.

IV

Down the steep hill flanked by masters' houses. Twilight merging now into darkness. Boys pa.s.sing in and out of the gateways. Past Telfer's which had been his own house. All this youth was preparing for life; all these houses eternally, generation after generation, pouring boys out into life as at Shotley iron foundry he had seen molten metal poured out of a cauldron. And every boy, poured out, imagined he was going to live his own life. O hapless delusion! Lo, as the same moulds awaited and confined the metal, so the same moulds awaited and confined the living stuff. Mysterious conventions, laws, labours; imperceptibly receiving; implacably binding and shaping. The last day he had come down the steps of Telfer's--jumped down--how distinctly he remembered it! It was his own life he was coming down, eagerly jumping down, into.--Well, here he was, pa.s.sing those very steps, and whose life was he living? Mabel's?

Old Fortune's? And to what end?

V

Whose life was Nona living?

He had asked her, "Tell me about you and Tybar."

With pitiable gentleness of voice she had approached that quant.i.ty which had been missing from her first statement of her position. And she had done tribute to her husband's parts with generosity, nay with pride.

"Tony does everything better than any one else." She had said it on that occasion of their first reencounter; its burthen had been the opening of her recital of what else she had for him.

"Marko, I think Tony's the most wonderful person that ever was. He does everything that men do and he does everything best. And everybody admires him and everybody likes him. You've no idea. You've no idea how he wins everybody he meets. People will do anything for him. They love him. Well, you've only got to look at him, haven't you? Or hear him talk? I think there's never been any one so utterly captivating as Tony is to look at and to hear."

Most engagingly, with such words, she had presented him: one that pa.s.sed through life airily, exquisitely; much fairy-gifted at his cradle with gifts of beauty, charm, preeminence in all he touched; knowing no care, knowing no difficulty, knowing no obstacle, or danger, or fear, or illness, or fatigue, or anything in life but gay and singing things, which touching, he made more bright, more tuneful yet; meeting no one, of whatever age or degree, but his charm was to that age or degree exactly touched; captivating all, leading all, by all desired in leaders.h.i.+p. Fortune's darling!

"And, Marko," she at last had come to. "And Marko--this is the word--graceless. Utterly, utterly graceless. Without heart, Marko, without conscience, without morals, without the smallest sc.r.a.p of an approach to any moral principle. Marko, that's an awful, a wicked, an abominable thing for a wife to say of her husband. But he wouldn't mind a bit my telling you. Not a bit. He'd love it. He'd laugh. He'd utterly love to know he had stung me so much. And he'd utterly love to know he'd driven me to tell you. He'd think--he'd love like anything to drive me to do awful things. He's tried--especially these two years. He'd love to be able to point a finger at me and laugh and say, 'Ah! Ha-ha! Ah!' You know, he hasn't got any feelings at all--love or hate or anything else; and it simply amuses him beyond anything to arouse feeling in anybody else. There have been women all the time we've been married and he simply amuses himself with them until he's tired of them, and until the next one takes his fancy, and he does it quite openly before me, in my house, and tells me what I can't see before my own eyes just for the love of seeing the suffering it gives me. You saw that Mrs. Winfred.

He's done with her now. And he's as shameless about me with them as he is about them with me. And what he loves above all is the way I take it; and I can take it in no other way. You see I won't, I simply will not, Marko, let these women of his see--or let any one in the world suspect--that I--that I suffer. So when we are together before people I keep up the gay way we always show together. He loves it; it's delicious to him, because it's a game played over the torture underneath. And I won't do any other way, Marko. I will keep my face to the world--I won't have any one pity me."

"I pity you," he had said.

"Ah, you...."

VI

And he was suddenly shot into an encounter of extraordinary incongruity with his thoughts and of extraordinary intensity. A voice accosted him.

He was astounded, as if suddenly awakened out of heavy sleep, to see to where he had come. He was in the narrow old ways of Tidborough Old Town, approaching The Precincts, by the ancient Corn Exchange. A keen-looking young man, particularly well set up and wearing nice tweeds, was accosting him. Sabre recognised Otway, captain and adjutant of the depot, up at the barracks, of the county regiment, one of the crack regiments, famous as "The Pinks."

Otway said, "Hullo, Sabre. How goes it? Are you going to this show to-morrow?"

He was pointing with his stick to a poster displayed against the Corn Exchange. Sabre read it. It announced that Field Marshal Lord Roberts was speaking there, under the auspices of the National Service League, on Home Defence--a Citizen Army.

"I hadn't thought about going," Sabre said. He wanted to get away.

Otway was staring at the poster as though he had never seen it before; but he had been staring at it when Sabre came along the street. "You ought to," Otway said. "You ought to hear old Bobs. Of course the little chap's all wrong."

He seemed to be talking to himself, staring at the poster, more than to Sabre. Sabre, despite his preoccupation, was surprised. "All wrong? Good lord, I should have thought you of all people--" And immediately a torrent of Otway was let loose upon him, bursting into his thoughts like a stone chucked through a study window.

Otway spun around in his keen, quick way to face him. "All wrong in the way he's putting his case, I mean. All these National Service chaps are.

Home defence they talk about, nothing but Home Defence. It's like chucking sawdust into a fire--the fire being all the b.l.o.o.d.y fools who are opposed to military training. Any fool can knock the bottom out of this Home Defence business. The Blue Water fools are champions at it.

They say the only defence against invasion is the Navy and that half a million spent on the Navy is worth untold millions chucked away on this 'Nation in Arms' shout. And they're d.a.m.n right."

"Well, then?" said Sabre. "What's the argument? What's the harm in knocking the bottom out of--this?" he nodded towards the poster.

Otway spoke with astonis.h.i.+ng intensity. "Why, good G.o.d alive, man, don't you see, we do want a nation in arms; we want it like h.e.l.l. But we don't want it for here, at home; we want it to fight on the Continent. That's where we've got to fight,--out there. And that's where we're _going_ to fight before we're many years older."

In his intensity he had extended his left hand and was beating his points into it with the handle of his stick. "See that?"

Sabre was not in the mood to see anything. He only wanted to be away.

"No, I'm dashed if I do. What are we going to fight on the Continent for--supposing we ever do have to fight anywhere?"

The stick hammered away again. "Because we've got _obligations_ there.

We've got to defend Belgium, for one. And if we hadn't--if we hadn't any obligations we'd pretty soon, we'd d.a.m.n soon find them as soon as ever Germany breaks loose. That's what these National Service Johnnies ought to tell the people, that's what Bobs ought to tell them, that's what these blasted politicians ought to tell them: you don't want National Service to defend your peris.h.i.+ng homes. The Navy's going to do that. You want it like h.e.l.l because you've got to defend your _lives_--out there."

He waved his stick towards "out there." "My G.o.d!" he said. He was consumed with the intensity of his own emotions. "My G.o.d!"

Despite himself, Sabre was impressed. The man would have impressed anybody. His eyes were extraordinarily penetrating. There actually were tiny little points of perspiration about his nose.

"I never thought about that," Sabre said doubtfully. "I never thought there were any obligations. I doubt any member of the Government would admit there were any."

"I know d.a.m.n well they wouldn't," Otway declared. "And they'd be helped to deny it, or to evade it, by the howl of laughter there'd be in the Commons if any one had the guts to get up and ask if we had any obligations. There's no joke goes down like that sort of joke. Well--"

His manner changed. He tucked his stick under his arm and took out a silver cigarette case. "Cigarette? Well--they'll laugh the other side of their chuckle heads one of these days."

Sabre took a cigarette. "You're pretty sure there's going to be a war, aren't you?"