The Dark Tower

by Phyllis Bottome

  “I shouldn’t make that noise if I were you; it’s out of place. I came here to give you bad news.”

  This time Mrs. Bouncing didn’t scream. She took hold of the edge of the table and repeated three times in a strange, expressionless voice:

  “George is dead! George is dead! George is dead!”

  Winn thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t. She held on to the table.

  “What ought I to do, Major Staines?” she asked in a quavering voice.

  Winn considered the question gravely. It was a little late in the day for Mrs. Bouncing to start what she ought to do, but he approved of her determination.

  “I think,” he said at last – “I think you ought to go in and look at him. It’s usual.”

  “Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Bouncing, with a shiver, “I never have seen a corpse!”

  Winn escorted her to the bedside and then turned away from her. She looked down at her dead husband. Mr. Bouncing had no anxiety in his face at all now; he looked incredibly contented and young.

  “I – I suppose he really is gone?” said Mrs. Bouncing in a low voice. Then she moved waveringly over to a big armchair.

  “There is no doubt about it at all,” said Winn. “I didn’t ring up Gurnet. He will come in any case first thing to-morrow morning.”

  Mrs. Bouncing moved her beringed hands nervously, and then suddenly began to cry. She cried quietly into her pocket-handkerchief, with her shoulders shaking.

  “I wish things hadn’t happened!” she sobbed. “Oh, dear! I wish things hadn’t happened!” She did not refer to the death of Mr. Bouncing. Winn said nothing. “I really didn’t mean any harm,” Mrs. Bouncing went on between her sobs – “not at first. You know how things run on; and he’d been ill seven years, and one does like a little bit of fun, doesn’t one?”

  “I shouldn’t think about all that now,” Winn replied. “It isn’t suitable.”

  Mrs. Bouncing shook her head and sobbed louder; sobbing seemed a refuge from suitability.

  “I wouldn’t have minded,” she said brokenly, “if I’d heated his milk. I always thought he was so silly about having skin on it. I didn’t believe when he came up-stairs it was because he was really worse. I wanted the sitting-room to myself. Oh dear! oh dear! I said it was all nonsense! And he said, ‘Never mind, Millie; it won’t be for long,’ and I thought he meant he’d get down-stairs again. And he didn’t; he meant this!”

  Winn cleared his throat.

  “I don’t think he blamed you,” he said, “as much as I did.”

  Mrs. Bouncing was roused by this into a sudden sense of her position.

  “Oh,” she said, “what are you going to do to me? You’ve always hated me. I’m sure I don’t know why; I took quite a fancy to you that first evening. I always have liked military men, but you’re so stand-offish; and now, of course, goodness knows what you’ll think! If poor old George were alive he’d stand up for me!”

  “I’m not going to do anything to hurt you, Mrs. Bouncing,” said Winn, after a short pause. “You’ll stay on here, of course, till after the funeral. We shall do all we can to help you, and then you’ll go back to England, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, shivering, “I suppose so. I shall go back to England. I shall have to see George’s people. They don’t like me. Will – will that be all?”

  “As far as I am concerned,” said Winn, more gently, “there is only one thing further I have to suggest. I should like you to promise me, when you leave here, to have nothing more to do with young Rivers. It’s better not; it puts him off his work.”

  Mrs. Bouncing reddened.

  “Oh,” she said, “I know; I didn’t mean any harm by that. You can’t help young men taking a fancy to you, can you? At least I can’t. It looked better didn’t it, in a way – you know what I mean. I didn’t want people to think anything. If only George hadn’t been so good to me! I don’t suppose you can understand, but it makes it worse when they are.”

  It seemed to Winn as if he could understand, but he didn’t say so. Bouncing should have pulled her up. Winn always believed in people being pulled up. The difficulty lay in knowing how to carry the process out. It had seemed to Mr. Bouncing simpler to die.

  “You’d better go to bed now,” Winn said at last. “People will be up soon. He died quite peacefully. He didn’t want you to be disturbed. I think that’s all, Mrs. Bouncing.”

  She got up and went again to the bed.

  “I suppose I oughtn’t to kiss him?” she whispered. “I haven’t any right to now, have I? You know what I mean? But I would have liked to kiss him.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe he’d mind,” said Winn, turning away.

  Mrs. Bouncing kissed him.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Winn felt no desire to go to bed. He went out into the long, blank corridor and wondered if the servants would be up soon and he could get anything to drink. The passage was intensely still; it stretched interminably away from him like a long, unlighted road. A vague gray light came from the windows at each end. It was too early for the shapes of the mountains to be seen. The outside world was featureless and very cold.

  There was no sound in the house except the faint sound behind the green baize doors, which never wholly ceased. Winn had always listened to it before with an impatient distaste; he had hated to hear these echoes of dissolution. This morning, for the first time, he felt curious.

  Suppose things had gone differently; that he’d been too late, and known his fate? He could have stayed on then; he could have accepted Claire’s beautiful young friendliness. He could have left her free; and yet he could have seen her every day; then he would have died.

  Weakness has privileges. It escapes responsibility; allowances are made for it. It hasn’t got to get up and go, tearing itself to pieces from the roots. He could have told her about Peter and Estelle and what a fool he had been; and at the end, he supposed, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had just mentioned that he loved her.

  Now there wasn’t going to be any end. Life would stretch out narrow, interminable, and dark, like the passage with the windows at each end, which were only a kind of blur without any light.

  However, of course there was no use bothering about it; since the servants weren’t up and he couldn’t get any coffee, he must just turn in. It suddenly occurred to Winn that what he was feeling now was unhappiness, a funny thing; he had never really felt before. It was the kind of feeling the man had had, under the lamp-post at the station, carrying his dying wife. The idea of a broken heart had always seemed to Winn namby-pamby. You broke if you were weak; you didn’t break if you were strong. What was happening now was that he was strong and he was being broken. It was a painful process, because there was a good deal of him to break, and it had only just begun. However, this was mercifully hidden from him. He said to himself: “I dare say I’m run down and fidgety with having had to sit up with Bouncing. I shall feel all right to-morrow.” Then the door behind him opened, and Lionel joined him. He was still dressed as he had been when he came back from the ball some hours earlier.

  “Hullo!” he said. “I wondered if that was you; I thought I heard something stirring outside. You weren’t in your room when I came in. Been with Bouncing?”

  “Yes,” said Winn; “he’s dead. I’m looking for some coffee. These confounded, tow-headed Swiss mules never get up at any decent hour. Why are you still dressed? Nothing wrong, is there?”

  “Well, I didn’t feel particularly sleepy, somehow,” Lionel acknowledged. “Are you going to stand outside in this moth-eaten passage the rest of the night, or will you come in with me and have a whisky and soda? You must be fagged out.”

  “I don’t mind if I do,” Winn agreed. “We may as well make a night of it.”

  For a few minutes neither of them spoke, then Winn said: “Had a jolly dance?”

  Lionel did not answer him directly; but he turned round, and met his friend’s eyes with his usual unswerving honesty.

&nb
sp; “Look here, old Winn,” he said, “it’s up to you to decide now. I’ll stay on here or go with you, whichever you like.”

  “You like her, then?” Winn asked quickly.

  “Yes,” said Lionel, “I like her.”

  “Well, then, you’ll stay of course,” said Winn without any hesitation. “Isn’t that what we damned well settled?”

  Lionel’s eyes had changed. They were full of a new light; he looked as if some one had lit a lantern within him. Love had come to him not as it had come to Winn, bitterly, unavailingly, without illusion; it had fallen upon his free heart and lit it from end to end with joy. He loved as a man loves whose heart is clean and who has never loved before, without a scruple and without restraint. Love had made no claims on him yet; it had not offered him either its disappointments or its great rewards. He was transformed without being altered. He simply saw everything as glorious which before had been plain, but he did not see different things.

  “Yes,” he said, “I know we talked about it; but I’m hanged if I’ll try unless I’m sure you are absolutely keen. I thought it all out after – after I’d seen her, and it seemed to me all very well in the abstract giving her up to another man and all that, but when it came to the point, would you be really sure to want me to carry through? I’ve seen her now, you know, and I’m glad I’ve seen her. I’ll be glad always for that, but it needn’t go any further.”

  Winn looked past him; he was tired with the long night’s strain, and he had no white ideal to be a rapture in his heart. He loved Claire not because she was perfection, but because she was herself. She was faultless to Lionel, but Winn didn’t care whether she was faultless or not. He didn’t expect perfection or even want it, and he wasn’t the man to be satisfied with an ideal; but he wanted, as few men have ever wanted for any women, that Claire should be happy and safe.

  “I’ve told you once,” he said; “you might know I shouldn’t change. I’ve got one or two little jobs to see to about Bouncing’s funeral. That woman’s half a little cat and half an abject fool. Still, you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. I dare say I can get things done by lunch-time; then I’ll drive over the Fluella. I’ll put up at the Kulm; but don’t bother to write till you’ve got something settled. I’m not going to mess about saying good-by to people. You can tell Miss Rivers when I’m gone.”

  “Look here,” Lionel urged, “you can’t do that; you must say good-by to her properly. She was awfully sick at your not turning up at the ball. After all, you know, you’ve seen a lot of her, and she particularly likes you. You can’t jump off into space, as if you were that old chap in the Bible without any beginning or any end!”

  Winn stuck his hands in his pockets and looked immovably obstinate.

  “I’m damned if I do,” he replied. “Why should I? What’s the use of saying good-by? The proper thing to do when you’re going away is to go. You needn’t linger, mewing about like somebody’s pet kitten.”

  Lionel poured out the whiskey before replying, and pushed a glass in Winn’s direction; then he said:

  “Don’t be a fool, old chap; you’ll have to say good-by to her. You don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  “What’s it to you whether I hurt her feelings or not?” Winn asked savagely.

  There was a moment’s sharp tension. It dropped at the tone of Lionel’s quiet voice.

  “It’s a great deal to me,” he said steadily; “but I know it’s not half as much to me as it is to you, old Winn.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Winn after a short pause. “I suppose I’ll say it if you think I ought to. Only stand by if you happen to be anywhere about. By the by, I hope I shall have some kind of a scrap with Roper before the morning’s over. I shall enjoy that. Infernal little beast, I caught him out last night. I can’t tell you how; but unless he’s off by the eight o’clock to-morrow, he’s in for punishment.”

  Lionel laughed.

  “All right,” he said; “don’t murder him. I’m going to turn in now. Sorry about Bouncing. Did he have a bad time, poor chap?”

  “No,” said Winn, “not really. He had a jolly sight harder time living; and yet I believe he’d have swopped with me at the end. Funny how little we know what the other fellow feels!”

  “We can get an idea sometimes,” Lionel said in a queer voice, with his back to his friend. Winn hastened to the door of his room. He knew that Lionel had an idea. He said, as he half closed the door on himself:

  “Thanks awfully for the whiskey.”

  CHAPTER XX

  Unfortunately, Winn was not permitted the pleasure of punishing Mr. Roper in the morning. Mr. Roper thought the matter over for the greater part of an unpleasantly short night. He knew that he could prepare a perfect case, he could easily clear himself to his pupil, he could stand by his guns, and probably even succeed in making Mrs. Bouncing stand by hers; but he didn’t want to be thrashed. Whatever else happened, he knew that he could not get out of this. Winn meant to thrash him, and Winn would thrash him. People like Winn could not be manipulated; they could only be avoided. They weren’t afraid of being arrested, and they didn’t care anything about being fined. They damned the consequences of their ferocious acts; and if you happened to be one of the consequences and had a constitutional shrinking from being damned, it was wiser to pack early and be off by an eight o’clock train.

  Winn was extremely disappointed at this decision; it robbed him of something which, as he thought, would have cleared the air. However, he spent a busy morning in assisting Mrs. Bouncing. She was querulous and tearful and wanted better dressmakers and a more becoming kind of mourning than it was easy to procure in Davos. It seemed to Winn as if she was under the impression that mourning was more important to a funeral than a coffin; but when it came to the coffin, she had terrible ideas about lilies embroidered in silver, which upset Winn very much.

  Mr. Bouncing had always objected to lilies. He considered that their heavy scent was rather dangerous. Mrs. Bouncing told Winn what everybody in the hotel had suggested, and appeared to expect him to combine and carry out all their suggestions, with several other contradictory ones of her own.

  During this crisis Maurice Rivers markedly avoided Mrs. Bouncing. He felt as if she might have prevented Mr. Bouncing’s death just then. It was a failure of tact. He didn’t like the idea of death, and he had always rather counted oh the presence of Mr. Bouncing. He was afraid he might, with Mr. Bouncing removed, have gone a little too far.

  He explained his position to Winn, whom he met on one of his many errands.

  “One doesn’t want to let oneself in for anything, you know,” he asserted. “I’m sure, as a man of the world, you’d advise me to keep out of it, wouldn’t you? It’s different for you, of course; you were poor Bouncing’s friend.”

  Winn, whose temper was extremely ruffled, gave him a formidable glance.

  “You get into things a bit too soon, my boy,” he replied coldly, “and get out of ’em a bit too late.”

  “Oh, come, you know,” said Maurice, jauntily, “I’m not responsible for poor old Bouncing’s death, am I?”

  “I don’t say you are,” Winn continued, without looking any pleasanter. “Bouncing had to die, and a jolly good thing for him it was when it came off; his life wasn’t worth a row of pins. But I wasn’t talking about him; I was talking about her. If you really want my advice, I’ll tell you plainly that if you want to go the pace, choose women one doesn’t marry, don’t monkey about with the more or less respectable ones who have a right to expect you to play the game. It’s not done, and it’s beastly unfair. D’ you see my point?”

  Maurice wondered if he should be thoroughly angry or not. Suddenly it occurred to him that Winn was waiting, and that he had better see his point and not be thoroughly angry.

  “Yes, I dare say I did go a little far,” he admitted, throwing out a manly chest; “but between you and me, Staines, should you say our friend Mrs. B. was respectable or not?”

  “She isn’t my fri
end,” said Winn, grimly; “but as she ought to be yours, I’ll trouble you to keep your questions to yourself.”

  The idea of being angry having apparently been taken out of Maurice’s hands, he made haste to disappear into the hotel.

  Winn walked on into the village. It was the last time he intended to go there. There was nothing peculiarly touching about the flat, long road, with the rink beneath it and the mountains above. The houses and shops, German pensions and crowded balconies had no particular charm. Even the tall, thin spire of the church lacked distinction; and yet it seemed to Winn that it would be difficult to forget. He stopped at the rink as he returned to pick up his skates. He told himself that he was fortunate when he discovered Claire, with Lionel on one side of her and Ponsonby on the other; he had wanted the help of an audience; now he was going to have one. Claire saw him before the others did, and skated swiftly across to him.

  “But why don’t you put your skates on?” she said, pointing to them in his hand. “You’re not much good there, you know, on the bank.”

  “I’m not much good anywhere, as far as that goes,” said Winn, quickly, before the others came up. Then he said in a different voice, “I hope you enjoyed your dance last night.”

  Claire paused the briefest moment before she answered him; it was as if she were trying quickly to change the key in which she spoke in order to meet his wishes, and as if she did not want to change the key.

  “Yes, I did,” she said, “most awfully. It was a heavenly dance. I was so sorry you couldn’t come, but Captain Drummond told me why.”

  Winn confounded Lionel under his breath for not holding his tongue; but he felt a warmth stir in his heart at the knowledge that, no matter what was at stake, Lionel would not suffer the shadow of blame to attach itself to him. It had been one of Winn’s calculations that Claire would be annoyed at his disappointing her and think the less of him because she was annoyed. He was not a clever calculator.