“It doesn’t matter,” she answered, very quietly. “I am obviously not the type to whom men wish to attach themselves for very long. But in the case of Bruce I never looked upon him as my property.”
“And as for the other man in your life,” he murmured coolly, “you plainly never desired him to be your property. You sent him about his business with great eagerness!”
“For which you should be grateful to me now,” she replied, meeting his eyes steadily—“if I ever did send you about your business! I was under the impression you washed your hands of me!”
He regarded her narrowly.
“In any case, why should I be grateful to you now?”
“Because you would have long ago discovered that there is a good deal of difference between mediocrity and undeniable glamour. And having had an opportunity to study both Miss Freer and Miss Van Johnson at close quarters I simply cannot understand why you ever considered the mediocre interlude necessary! Unless, of course, glamour does pall sometimes, and you wanted to experiment! But it could have proved a very dangerous experiment for you if I’d turned out to be the type that clings, instead of the type that lets go!”
She thought that his eyes were darker than the deepest pools, and the queer little lights that flickered in them had never disconcerted her quite so much.
“You know very well that you’re talking rather a lot of nonsense, don’t you, Susan?” he said.
She looked down at the strap he had just fastened for her.
“No,” she answered, with a simplicity that had in it rather a desolate acceptance of truth. “A few months ago I might have tried to persuade myself I was talking nonsense, but not now. Now I don’t even want to try!”
“That’s nonsense, too,” he said, with a greater roughness than before.
She shook her head. She was looking away from him through the trees, watching for a yellow parka.
“I’m sorry if it hurts your vanity, but I’ve had a lot of time to think, and I’ve decided that my escape was probably just as lucky as yours. Inevitably, sooner or later, I’d have been the tasteless filling in a sandwich.... And if you’d committed the major indiscretion of marrying me, how would you have reacted to that? Now, at least, you’re free to marry Miss Van Johnson if you want to, because Rosalie’s married, and I’ve reverted to my early opinion of you! And like you I am not likely
ever to change it again!”
She turned away, proving how awkwardly she moved on skis, and he caught at her arm. Ignoring all that she had just said he exclaimed with a strange, intense note in his voice:
“Susan, I never knew you were ill! . . . Not as ill as you seem to have been! If only someone had let me know... ”
“Why should anyone let you know?” she enquired coolly.
“Because I’d have come home that much sooner! ... I mean, I’d have returned to England.”
“Bringing Miss Van Johnson with you, or leaving her behind? To be collected later!” Her soft voice quivered with disdain. “Unfortunately you couldn’t have left all those gossip-writers’ stories behind you as well, because we’d collected quite a few ourselves, and they provided most interesting reading for our rather wet summer! You seem to have had a simply splendid time in the sun, and the one thing we were really grateful for was that you were plainly not suffering from a broken heart as a result of your shattered marriage plans! Or because any other plans you had dallied with had come adrift!”
She felt herself shaking with an anger she had never felt before in her life, and as the words poured out of her it was like a release from a violence of feeling and resentment she had been struggling with for days. Ever since he had appeared in the hotel dining-room with the American girl practically clinging to his arm. . . .
She had turned pale in the wood, but now he turned very pale, and she didn’t even notice it. She was looking for the yellow parka, and almost willing it to appear on the scene and claim him for ever ... to lead him away out of her sight, and to where she would never see him again. Never even need to think about him! If by the mere act of leading him away out of the little pine wood, with its blue-green twilight, she could destroy even the smallest desire in Susan to think about him.
But the yellow parka, for once, didn’t appear to be close at hand, and Susan realised that the one to disappear must be herself. She started down the slope in the clumsiest possible fashion, her very knees wobbling, and he called after her:
“Susan, you’re not fit to be on the ski slopes alone! I’m coming after you!...”
But the same providence that looks after drunken men, and brings sailors home through the stormiest seas, looked after Susan in those moments, and not merely did she cease to have any fear of the white slopes rushing up to meet her, but she experienced a kind of temporary ecstasy in the thought that for once she was doing all the right things, and the skis on her feet had turned to wings. She was free to glide over the wastes as other people glided, and she felt like a bird that had escaped from a cage.
She was free, free! . . . But unfortunately the mood of exhilaration only lasted until she reached the hotel, and she never knew what happened to Justin behind or when and where it was that he decided to let her go on alone. She only knew that when she reached the hotel she was so exhausted that she could hardly walk into the lift— separated, of course, from her skis—having struggled up the last steep rise from the valley with panting breath, and her spirits, too, had been cast down as if they were no more than a balloon that had been pricked.
When she entered her bedroom she was glad that Jennifer was not in the adjoining room, otherwise she might have burst in at the sound of weeping to discover why Susan was lying full length on her bed and drowned in tears. For the first time for many, many months!
But that night she put on one of her prettiest and newest dresses, a soft flesh-coloured net with some rhinestones patterning the bodice and sending out flashes of blue and green fire, and danced until long after midnight with one or two of the most persistent young men who were still staying in the hotel.
She looked flushed and gay, and her small polished brown head shone beneath the lights, and she even disappeared into the rear veranda with a red-headed young man who had asked her to marry him—it was just possible, she realised, that he knew about her twenty thousand pounds, and being a struggling young architect could do with a little ready cash to start him in life—the night before. She didn’t allow him to kiss her, but she did promise to think over his proposal of marriage, and had him looking hopeful and almost as bright-eyed as herself long before the hour of midnight struck. And when she ran into Bruce her cheeks were so feverishly flushed that he said quietly but insistently that she must go to bed, whereupon she laughed in his face and announced that she was enjoying herself, and nothing would induce her to go to bed.
“I’m not an invalid,” she declared. “I’m as fit as a fiddle since we came here, and I must make the most of it!”
Jennifer was at Bruce’s elbow, and she looked just a little anxious. On the far side of the room Justin was partnering his lovely American on the dance floor, and his face was grave and shut-in, and he didn’t look in the least as if he was enjoying himself. Elizabeth, swaying dreamily in his arms, murmured to him once: “I’m here, right under your nose, darling! Remember me?”
He looked down at her, a strange expression in his eyes. “Remember you? I’ll say I do!” he exclaimed, making use of an Americanism. “How could I not remember you?”
She smiled languorously up at him.
“How you flatter me!” she sighed.
Susan, recognising defeat at last, stood swaying on the back veranda, with the red-headed young man beside her, when Justin made his appearance suddenly and ordered her curtly to bed.
“Susan, you’re absolutely all-in! Be sensible and go upstairs at once!”
She turned and looked at him, big-eyed, amazed, and the red-headed young man grunted surlily:
“I can’t honestly see it�
��s any affair of yours when Susan goes to bed ... ”
For answer Justin repeated simply: “Up you go, Susan!” His eyes held her wide, distended ones. “You’ve made quite a night of it.”
“Well!” She laughed shrilly. “But I don’t take my orders from you, Sir Justin, and as Derek here says, what business is it of yours... ?”
This time his answer was to take her slim bare arm, and to guide her towards the lift. She went with a strange meekness, for a feeling of intolerable exhaustion was dragging at her every limb, and she wasn’t at all sure she could walk alone once he let her go. He put her into the lift very gently, and instructed the lift attendant to convey her to her floor.
“And if you will keep late nights, you’d better have your breakfast in bed in the morning,” he said. “And don’t imagine that, because you were lucky this afternoon and got away with it, you’ve all at once become a skier! You’ve got a very long way to go before you leave the Nursery Slopes behind!”
“I’ve already left them behind,” she answered defiantly, but it was a tired defiance—almost a childish defiance—and he smiled at her gently.
“Good-night, Susan!”
She didn’t answer, and the lift was wafted upwards, and through the gilded bars of the cage he could see the slight pink figure leaning wearily against the panels behind her. His lips tightened, and he went back to Miss Elizabeth Van Johnson. She greeted him with an inexplicable smile.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The next morning Susan went out with her skis alone, having waited for Jennifer to disappear with Bruce, and having more or less given her word that she would have a quiet morning after the unaccustomed dissipations of the night before.
She didn’t know why she was feeling so childishly rebellious, and why all at once
such a spirit of restlessness filled her that the thought of sitting quietly with a book on the hotel veranda, while everyone else went pouring out into the sunshine, was intolerable to her. Although for once it wasn’t quite such a brilliant day, and the snow looked bleak where the shadows of creeping clouds lay across it, and the thickets of pine and juniper on the hillsides had a grey look instead of an inky blue-black look. The frozen cascades coming down from the heights were sinisterly still, although a thin wind sighed against Susan’s ears as she trudged to the deserted Nursery Slopes.
No one, nowadays, seemed content with Nursery Slopes, and she looked about her with distaste at the gentle shoulders of white. A kind of seething rebellion shook her and tore at her as she thought of Justin and his golden American girl—fearless like most American girls—moving heedlessly out there above the deep hollow of the valley, unhampered by even a moment’s fear of what might happen should a ski buckle work loose, or a disregarded tree trunk rear up in front of them while they were literally in mid-air, and incapable of doing anything about it.
Susan thought of herself nervously clasping Lady Luck’s neck all those months ago in far away Storr park, and she told herself that it was just the same thing, the same besetting weakness that prevented her ever shining in the field of outdoor exercise. She wasn’t an athlete, and people grew tired of her inability to keep up with them, and forged ahead.
Jennifer and Bruce, although very fond of her, and very anxious about her, accepted it that she was one of those nervous people who would never get the better of their nervousness and race down ski runs, and so they left her to potter about and amuse herself where she would be quite safe, and took the daring leaps themselves. They probably forgot all about her while they were laughing and calling to one another in the sparklingly keen air; and people like Justin Storr and Elizabeth Van Johnson never even thought of her at all once they left the hotel behind them—why, indeed, should Elizabeth Van Johnson think of her at any time?—and Justin was kind enough to advise her to stick to the Nursery Slopes when she looked like a wilting, pale pink bird in her net dress with the blue and green rhinestones, so suggestive of brilliant breast feathers!
The Nursery Slopes!... Lady Luck!
As she took gentle little runs, and then returned and took more gentle little runs, her feeling of rebellion began to take entire possession of her. Yesterday she had temporarily lost her fear and done quite well on the way back to the hotel from the little wood where Justin had come upon her. Well, if she could do that on one occasion, she could do it again!
By degrees she found herself leaving the Nursery Slopes far behind her, and adventuring towards the rim of the valley. It really was an adventure, for there didn’t appear to be another human soul in her vicinity, and the descent into the valley was as steep as sitting on the side of the roof of an infinitely tall house, and contemplating a
leap into an unknown garden.
Down there in the valley there was a grey curl of smoke from a farmhouse, and she could see someone towing a sled. There was a red blob that was a cap—almost certainly with a gay bobble attached to it—and a bright blue sweater, or parka. And a little to the left there was a clump of trees, slim pencil-like conifers soaring up into the sky that was now grey all over. If she could avoid the trees, and a rickety bridge over a silent torrent, and bear left all the time, she could practically arrive on the post-office doorstep, and what a triumph that would be! Buy some stamps while she was still flushed from her triumph, have a cup of coffee in the little cafe, and then toil back up the slope and arrive at the hotel with a whole crowd of others in time for lunch!
Not just a solitary, despicable figure making its way from the Nursery Slopes.
She vowed that never again would she have anything to do with the Nursery Slopes.
The blood was pounding in her ears as she manoeuvred into position for her take-off. She had received instruction so many times that she ought to know what to do, and she did it. She saw the virgin-white, glittering, pathless waste over which she must travel for the first few yards downhill, the odd ski-tracks crisscrossing it at intervals, and the hummocky mounds of snow that she must at all costs avoid if she wanted to escape disaster, and then stood hesitating on the brink.
Someone swooped right out over the valley not far away from where she was poised, and she caught a bright flash of yellow like a canary’s breast. She thought, her teeth clenching a little behind her whitening cheeks:
“That’s all I needed to act as a spur! Elizabeth Van Johnson giving one of her faultless exhibitions!...”
And then, behind her, someone shouted. It was a man’s voice, incisive, imperative, but she paid it not the slightest heed. She couldn’t, for her feet were slipping from under her—or, rather, her skis were—and she was travelling over iron hard snow at a frantic speed that grew more frantic with every second that launched her into space. She was grasping a pair of ski-sticks, but it never occurred to her to make use of them, or even to attempt to check her descent. Every coherent thought seemed to have gone out of her mind and as she glanced down and saw that her faulty ski-strap was dangling, and knew that it was only a matter of time before she was bereft of one of her skis, she shut her eyes and waited for the moment of doom to claim her.
It hit her a glancing blow from behind, and she rolled over and over down the slope, ending up in a bed of soft snow, while the black and white shape that had catapulted over her head landed several paces away, and lay in a huddled attitude.
When the white world around her ceased to spin like a revolving top, and the grey sky was just a still, grey canopy above her, Susan moved one limb cautiously, and then another, and finally clawed her way out of the snowdrift. She had left one ski half-way up the mountain, her cap had come off and she was smothered in snow, but she had the feeling that she had narrowly escaped complete disaster. She looked about her and saw that the black and white shape near to her was very still, and her heart gave an agonising leap.
She crawled across the space that separated them, and the noisy pounding of her heart was like hammer-strokes in her ears in that frozen silence. Justin Storr lay as if every bone in his body was broken, and the horrib
le inertness of him brought a moan of anguish from her lips. And then a sob of sheer despair left them.
“Justin!” His face was hidden from her, but her shaking hand alighted on his dark, uncovered head, and she managed with the assistance of her other hand to turn it gently towards her. His eyes were closed, the long, thick black eyelashes startlingly black as they rested quietly on his cheeks, his slightly crooked mouth grave and set. “Justin!” she whispered, and then started to cry helplessly, hopelessly, as she lowered her cold cheek to his, not even recognising the warmth and vitality of it until he stirred slightly. And that didn’t stop her from whimpering like a small, wounded animal, and calling his name over and over again, telling him she’d rather be dead if he was dead, too.
“Darling, darling! ...”
His face was soaked with tears when he sat up at last, and gathered her quietly into his arms. The storm of her sobbing was so acute that it wouldn’t abate, and at last he had to order her sternly:
“If you won’t stop washing me away, Susan, I’ll treat you in a manner that will prove to you that I’m very much alive! First I’ll shake you, and then I’ll kiss you!... As
you’ve never been kissed before!”
Susan looked up at him with swimming eyes, and in addition they were very reproachful.
“But you didn’t even move! ... You just lay there!”
“Wilfully deceiving you, my little sweet. And I think, on the whole, it was worth it!” He drew her carefully to her feet, and brushed the snow off her. It was clear from his healthy tan that he wasn’t even slightly jarred, and she wondered why it hadn’t struck her before that he hadn’t lost colour. But the agony of those moments was something she would never forget. . . . She trembled as she lay against him, his arms supporting her, and he drew her fiercely close.
“Susan, my precious, you’re not hurt at all, are you?” he enquired huskily. “When I cannoned into you as I did, it was to prevent you hitting one of those trees down there, which I felt you were certain to do! I couldn’t prevent you taking off, and it was the only thing that occurred to me! But I could have broken your little neck for you!”
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