Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

When he woke up he laughed.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I believe I’ve been to sleep!” but he didn’t apologize. He began instead to tell her some things that might interest her, about what Drummond, his best man, and he, had done in Manchuria, just as if nothing had happened; but naturally Estelle wouldn’t be interested. She was first polite, then bored, then captious. Winn looked at her rather hard. “Are you trying to pay me back for falling asleep?” he asked with a queer little laugh. “Is that what you’re up to?” Estelle stiffened.

“Certainly not,” she said. “I simply wasn’t very interested. I don’t think I like Chinese stories, and Manchuria is just the same, of course.”

Winn leaned over her, with a wicked light in his eyes, like a naughty school boy. “Own up!” he said, laying his rough hand very gently on her shoulder. “Own up, old lady!”

But has anybody ever owned up when they were being spiteful?

Estelle didn’t. She looked at Winn’s hand till he withdrew it, and then she remarked that she was feeling faint from want of food.

After she had had seven chicken sandwiches, pâté de foie gras, half a melon, and some champagne, she began to be agreeable.

Winn was delighted at this change in her and quite inclined to think that their little “breeze” had been entirely due to his own awkwardness. Still, he wished she had owned up.

It took Winn a month to realize that he had paid his money, had his shy, and knocked down an empty cocoanut.

He couldn’t get his money back, and he must spend the rest of his life carrying the cocoanut about with him.

It never occurred to him to shirk the institution of marriage. The church, the law, and the army stood in his mind for good, indelible things. Estelle was his wife as much as his handkerchief was his handkerchief. This meant that they were to be faithful to each other, go out to dinner together, and that he was to pay her bills. He knew the great thing in any tight corner was never under any circumstances to let go. All the dangers he had ever been in, had yielded, only because he hadn’t.

It was true he had not been married before, but the same rule no doubt held good of marriage. If he held on to it, something more bearable would come of it. Then one could be out of the house a good deal, and there was the regiment. He began to see his way through marriage as a man sees his way through a gap in an awkward fence. The unfortunate part of it was that he couldn’t get through the gap unless Estelle shared his insight.

He would have liked to put it to her, but he didn’t know how; he never had had a great gift of expression, and something had brought him up very short in his communications with his wife.

It was so slight a thing that Estelle herself had forgotten all about it, but to a Staines it was absolutely final. She had told the gardener that Winn wanted hyacinths planted in the front bed. Winn hadn’t wanted a garden at all, and he had let her have her way in everything else; but he had said quite plainly that he wouldn’t on any account have hyacinths. The expression he used about them was excessively coarse, and it certainly should have remained in Estelle’s memory. He had said, that the bally things stank. Nevertheless, Estelle had told the gardener that the master wanted hyacinths, and the gardener had told Winn. Winn gazed at the gardener in a way which made him wish that he had never been a gardener, but had taken up any other profession in which he was unlikely to meet a glance so “nasty.” Then Winn said quietly:

“You are perfectly sure, Parsons, that Mrs. Staines told you it was my wish to have the hyacinths?” And the gardener had said:

“Yes, sir. She did say, sir, as ’ow you ’ad a particler fancy for them.” And Winn had gone into the house and asked Estelle what the devil she meant? Estelle immediately denied the hyacinths and the gardener. People like that, she said, always misunderstand what one said to them.

“Very well, then,” Winn replied. “He has lied to me, and must go. I’ll dismiss him at once. He told me distinctly that you had said I liked them.”

Estelle fidgeted. She didn’t want the gardener to go. She really couldn’t remember what she’d said and what she hadn’t said to him. And Winn was absurd, and how could it matter, and the people next door had hyacinths, and they’d always had them at home!

Winn listened in silence. He didn’t say anything more about the gardener having lied, and he didn’t countermand the hyacinths; only from that moment he ceased to believe a single word his wife said to him. This is discouraging to conversation and was very unfair to Estelle; for she might have told the truth more often if she had not discovered that it made no difference to her husband whether she told it to him or not.

Estelle knew that her heart was broken, but on the whole she did not find that she was greatly inconvenienced.

In an unhappy marriage the woman generally scores unless she is in love with her husband. Estelle never had been in love with Winn; she had had an agreeable feeling about him, and now she had a disagreeable feeling about him, but neither of these emotions could be compared with beaten-brass hot-water jugs, which she had always meant to have when she was married.

If Winn had remained deeply in love with her, besides making things more comfortable at meals it would have been a feather in her cap. Still his cruelty could be turned into another almost more becoming feather.

She said to herself and a little later to the nearest clergyman, “I must make an offering of my sorrow.” She offered it a good deal, almost to every person she met. Even the cook was aware of it; but, like all servants, she unhesitatingly sided with the master. He might be in the wrong, but he was seldom if ever in the kitchen.

They had to have a house and servants, because Estelle felt that marriage without a house was hardly legal; and Winn had given way about it, as he was apt to do about things Estelle wanted. His very cruelty made him particularly generous about money.

But Estelle was never for a moment taken in by his generosity; she saw that it was his way of getting out of being in love with her. Winn was a bad man and had ruined her life — this forced her to supplement her trousseau.

Later on when he put down one of his hunters and sold a polo pony so that she could have a maid, she began to wonder if she had at all found out how bad he really was?

There was one point he never yielded; he firmly intended to rejoin his regiment in March.

The station to which they would have to go was five thousand feet up, lonely, healthy, and quite unfashionable. Winn had tried to make it seem jolly to her and had mentioned as a recommendation apparently that it was the kind of place in which you needn’t wear gloves. It was close to the border, and women had to be a little careful where they rode.

Estelle had every intention of being careful; she would, she thought, be too careful ever to go to the Indian frontier at all. She had often heard of the tragic separations of Anglo-Indian marriages; it was true that they were generally caused by illness and children, but there must be other methods of obtaining the same immunities.

She had never had any difficulty with the doctor at home; she relied on him entirely, and he had invariably ordered her what she wanted, after a nice quiet talk.

Travers, the regimental doctor, was different, he looked exactly like a vet, and only understood things you had actually broken. Still Estelle put her trust in Providence; no self-respecting higher Power could wish a woman of her type to be wasted on a hill station. Something would happen to help her, and if not, she would be given grace to help herself.

One day Winn came down to breakfast with a particularly disagreeable expression. He said “good-morning” into his newspaper as usual without noticing her pathetic little smile.

He only unburied himself to take his second cup of coffee, then he said, without looking at her,

“It’s a beastly nuisance, the War Office want me to extend my leave — hanged if I do.”

Estelle thanked Heaven in a flash and passed him the marmalade. She had never dreamed the War Office could be so efficient.

“That shows,” she said gracefully, “what they think of you!”

Winn turned his sardonic eyes towards her. “Thanks,” he drawled, “I dare say it’s the kind of thing you’d like. They propose that I should stay on here at the Staff College for another year and write ’em a damned red tape report on Tibet.” His irony, dropped from him. “If it was a job,” he said in a low voice, “I’d go like a shot.”

“Mightn’t it mean promotion?” she asked a little nervously. Winn shrugged his shoulders. “I can write anything they want out there,” he said gloomily. “All I want is ink! What I know I’ve got in my head, you see. I’d take that with me.”

“But you couldn’t talk things over with them or answer their questions, could you?” Estelle intelligently ventured. She had an intelligence which ripened along the line of her desires.

“I could tell them anything they want to know in ten minutes!” said Winn impatiently. “They don’t want information, they want a straight swift kick! They know what I think — they just want me to string out a lot of excuses for them not to act! Besides the chief thing is — they’d have to send for me, if there was a row — I know the ground and the other chaps don’t. I wish to God there’d be a row!”

Estelle sighed and gazed pathetically out of the window. Her eyes rested on the bed where the hyacinths were planted, and beyond it to gorse bushes and a corrugated iron shed.

They were at Aldershot, which was really rather a good place for meeting suitable people. “What do you intend to do?” she asked, trembling a little. Winn was at his worst when questioned as to his intentions; he preferred to let them explode like fire-crackers.