Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

Winn was aware that their entire awfulness was concentrated upon his companion.

“Please sit down,” he said a little authoritatively. Her brother ought to have backed her up, but the young fool wouldn’t; he stood shamefacedly over by the door. “I’ll get hold of your brother,” Winn added, turning away from her. The waiter hovered nervously in their direction.

“Am I to set for the three, sir?” he ventured. Claire turned quickly toward Winn.

“Yes,” she said; “why not? If you don’t mind, I mean. You aren’t really a bit horrid.”

“How can you possibly tell?” Winn asked, with a short laugh. “However, I’ll get your brother, and if you really don’t mind, I’ll come back with him.”

Claire was quite sure that she could tell and that she didn’t mind.

The waiter came back in triumph, but Winn gave him a sharp look which extracted his triumph as neatly as experts extract a winkle with a pin. Maurice apologized with better manners than Winn had expected. He looked a terribly unlicked cub, and Winn found himself watching anxiously to see if Claire ate enough and the right things. He couldn’t, of course, say anything if she didn’t, but he found himself watching.

Winn was from the first sure that it was perfectly all right. She wouldn’t notice him at all. She would merely look upon him as the man who was there when there were skates to clean, skis to oil, any handy little thing which the other fellows, being younger and not feeling so like an old nurse, might more easily overlook. Women liked fellows who cut a dash, and you couldn’t cut a dash and be an old nurse simultaneously. Winn clung to the simile of the old nurse. That was, after all the real truth of his feelings, not more than that, certainly not love. Love would make more of a figure in the world, not that it mattered what you called things provided you behaved decently. Only he was glad he was not in love.

He bought her flowers and chocolates, though he had a pang about the chocolates, not feeling quite sure that they were good for her; but flowers were safe.

He didn’t give her lilies — they seemed too self-consciously virginal, as if they wanted to rub it in — he gave her crimson roses, flowers that frankly enjoyed themselves and were as beautiful as they could be. They were like Claire herself. She never stopped to consider an attitude; she just went about flowering all over the place in a kind of perpetual fragrance.

She enjoyed herself so much that she simply hadn’t time to notice any one in particular. There were a dozen men always about her. She was so young and happy and unintentional that every one wanted to be with her. It was like sitting in the sun.

She never muddled things up or gave needless pain or cheated. That was what Winn liked about her. She was as fair as a judge without being anything like so grave.

They were all playing a game, and she was the leader. They would have let her break the rules if she had wanted to break them! but she wouldn’t have let herself.

Of course the hotel didn’t approve of her; no hotel could be expected to approve of a situation which it so much enjoyed. Besides Claire was lawless; she kept her own rules, but she broke everybody else’s. She never sought a chaperon or accepted some older woman’s sheltering presence; she never sat in the ladies’ salon or went to tea with the chaplain’s wife. On one dreadful occasion she tobogganed wilfully on a Sunday, under the chaplain’s nose, with a man who had arrived only the night before.

When old Mrs. Stewart, who knitted regularly by the winter and counted almost as many scandals as stitches, took her up on the subject out of kindness of heart, Claire had said without meaning to be rude:

“I really don’t think the chaplain’s nose ought to be there, to be under, do you?”

Of course, Mrs. Stewart did. She had the highest respect for the chaplain’s nose; but it wasn’t the kind of subject you could argue about.

For a long time Claire and Winn never really talked; she threw words at him over her shoulder or in the hall or when he put her skates on or took them off at the rink. He seemed to get there quicker than any one else, though the operation itself was sometimes a little prolonged. Of course there were meals, but meals belonged to Maurice, and Claire had a way of always slipping behind him, so that it was really over the skates that Winn discovered how awfully clever she was.

She read books, deep books; why, even Hall Caine and Marie Corelli didn’t satisfy her, and Winn had always thought those famous authors the last words in modern literature. He now learned others. She gave him Conrad to read, and Meredith. He got stuck in Meredith, but he liked Conrad; it made him smell the mud and feel again the silence of the jungle.

“Funny,” he explained to Claire, “because when you come to think of it, he doesn’t actually write about the smell; only he’s got it, and the jungle feeling, too. It’s quiet, you know, in there, but not a bit like the snows out here; there’s nothing doing up in this snow, but God alone knows what’s happening in the jungle. Odd how there can be two sorts of quiet, ain’t it?”

“There can be two sorts of anything,” said Claire, exultantly. “Oh, not only two — dozens; that’s why it’s all such fun.”

But Winn was inclined to think that there might be more fun where there were fewer candidates for it. There was, for instance, Mr. Roper. Maurice was trying to work up for his final examination at Sandhurst with Mr. Roper. He was a black-haired, polite man with a constant smile and a habit of agreeing with people much too promptly; also he read books and talked to Claire about them in the evening till every one started bridge. Fortunately, that shut him up.

Winn was considered in Anglo-Indian clubs, where the standard of bridge is high, to play considerably above it, and Claire played with a relish, that was more instinctive than reliable; nevertheless, Winn loved playing with her, and accepted Mr. Roper and Maurice as one accepts severity of climate on the way to a treat. He knew he must keep his temper with them both, so when he wanted to be nasty he looked at Claire, and when Claire looked at him he wanted to be nice. He couldn’t, of course, stop Claire from ever in any circumstances glancing in the direction of Mr. Roper, and it would have startled him extremely if he had discovered that Claire, seeing how much he disliked it, had reduced this form of communion to the rarest civility; because Winn still took for granted the fact that Claire noticed nothing.

It was the solid earth on which he stood. For some months his consciousness of his wife had been an intermittent recognition of a disagreeable fact; but for the first few weeks at Davos he forgot Estelle entirely; she drifted out of his mind with the completeness of a collar stud under a wardrobe.

He never for a moment forgot Peter, but he didn’t talk about him because it would have seemed like boasting. Even if he had said, “I have a boy called Peter,” it would have sounded as if nobody else had ever had a boy like Peter. Besides, he didn’t want to talk about himself; he wanted to talk about Claire.

She hadn’t time to tell him much; she was preparing for a skating competition, which took several hours a day, and then in the afternoons she skied or tobogganed with Mr. Ponsonby, a tall, lean Eton master getting over an illness. Winn privately thought that if Mr. Ponsonby was well enough to toboggan, he was well enough to go back and teach boys; but this opinion was not shared by Mr. Ponsonby, who greatly preferred staying where he was and teaching Claire.

Claire tobogganed and skied with the same thrill as she played bridge and skated; they all seemed to her breathless and vital duties. She did not think of Mr. Ponsonby as much as she did of the toboggan, but he gave her points. In any case, Winn preferred him to Mr. Roper, who was obliged to teach Maurice in the afternoons.

If one wants very much to learn a particular subject, it is surprising how much of it one may pick up in the course of a day from chance moments.

In a week Winn had learned that Maurice and Claire were orphans, that they lived with an aunt who didn’t get on with Claire and an uncle who didn’t get on with Maurice, and that there were several cousins too stodgy for words. Claire was waiting for Maurice to get through Sandhurst — he’d been horribly interrupted by pleurisy — and then she could keep house for him somewhere — wherever he was sent — unless she took up a profession. She rather thought she was going to do that in any case, because they would have awfully little money; and besides, not doing things was a bore, and every girl ought to make her way in the world, didn’t Major Staines think so?

Major Staines didn’t, and emphatically said that he didn’t.

“Good God, no! What on earth for?” was how he expressed it. Claire stopped short, outside the office door, just as she was going to pay her bill.

“We shall have to talk about this,” she said gravely. “I’m awfully afraid you’re a reactionary.”

“I dare say I am,” said Winn, who hadn’t the faintest idea what a reactionary was, but rather liked the sound of it. “We’ll talk about it as much as you like. How about lunch at the Schatz Alp?”

That was how they went to the Schatz Alp and had their first real talk.

Claire was not perfectly sure of life — it occurred to her at nineteen that it might have in store for her certain surprises — but she was perfectly sure of herself. She knew that she ought to have been a boy, and that if she had been a boy she would have tried to be like General Gordon. Balked of this ambition by the fact of her sex, she turned her attention to Maurice.