If Winter Comes Part 18

"I told you why I came back. To have a day off with you. Funny day off it's been! You're right there!"

"Yes, it _has_ been a funny day off."

He thought, "My G.o.d, this bickering! Why don't I get out of the room?"

"Come back for a day off with me! It's a funny thing you came back just in time to get that letter! Before it was delivered! There! Now you know!"

He was purely amazed. He thought, and his amazement was such that, characteristically, his anger left him; he thought, "Well, of all the--!"

But she otherwise interpreted his astonishment. She thought she had made an advantage and she pressed it. "Perhaps you knew it was coming?"

"How on earth could I have known it was coming?"

She seemed to pause, to be considering. "She might have told you. You might have seen her."

He said, "As it happens, I did see her. Not three hours before I came back."

She seemed disappointed. She said, "I know you did. We met Lord Tybar."

And he thought, "Good lord! She was trying to catch me."

She went on, "You never told me you'd met them. Wasn't that funny?"

"If you'd just think a little you'd see there was nothing funny about it. You found the letter so amazingly funny that, to tell you the truth, I'd had about enough of the Tybars. And I've had about enough of them."

"I daresay you have--with me. Perhaps you'll tell me this--would you have told me about the letter if I hadn't seen you get it?"

He thought before he answered and he answered out of his thoughts. He said slowly, "I--don't--believe--I--would. I wouldn't. I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought it--funny."

XII

No answer he could have made could have more exasperated her.

"I--don't--believe--I--would." Deliberation! Something incomprehensible to her going on in his mind, and as a result of it a statement that no one on earth (she felt) but he would have made. Any one else would have said boldly, bl.u.s.teringly, "Of course I would have told you about the letter." She would have liked that. She would have disbelieved it and she could have said, and enjoyed saying, she disbelieved it. Or any one else would have said furiously, "No, I'm d.a.m.ned if I'd have shown you the letter." She would have liked that. It would have affirmed her suspicions that there was "something in it"; and she wished her suspicions to be affirmed. It would have been something definite.

Something justifiably incentive of anger, of resentment, of jealousy.

Something she could understand.

For she did not understand her husband. That was her grievance against him. She never had understood him. That den incident in the very earliest days of their marriage had been an intimation of a way of looking at things that to her was entirely and exasperatingly inexplicable; and since then, increasingly year by year, her understanding had failed to follow him. He had retired farther and farther into himself. He lived in his mind, and she could by no means penetrate into his mind. His ideas about things, his att.i.tude towards things, were wholly and exasperatingly incomprehensible to her.

"It's like," she had once complained to her father, "it's like having a foreigner in the house."

Things, in her expression, "went on" in his mind, and she could not understand what went on in his mind, and it exasperated her to know they were going on and that she could not understand them.

"I--don't--believe--I--would." Characteristic, typical expression of those processes of his mind that she could not understand! And then the reason: "I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought it--funny."

And, exasperation on exasperation's head, he was right. She did think it funny; and by his very reply--for she knew him well enough, so exasperatingly well, to know that this was complete sincerity, complete truth--he proved to her that it was not really funny but merely something she could not understand. Robbery of her fancy, her hope that it was something definite against him, something justifiably incentive of resentment, of jealousy!

It was as if he had said, "You can't understand a letter like this.

There's nothing in it to understand. And that's just what you can't understand. Look here, you see my head. I'm in there. You can't come in.

You don't know how to. I can't tell you how to. n.o.body could tell you.

And you wouldn't know what to make of it if you did get in."

Exasperating. Insufferable. Insupportable!

She could not express her feelings in words. She expressed them in action. She arose violently and left the room. The whole of her emotions she put into the slam of the door behind her. The ornaments shivered. A cup sprang off a bracket and dashed itself to pieces on the floor.

XIII

Sabre regarded the broken cup much as Sir Isaac Newton presumably regarded the fallen apple. He "worked back" from the cup through the events of the day, and through the events of the day returned to the cup. It interested him to find that the fragments on the floor were as logical a result of the movements of the day as they would have been of getting the small hand axe out of the woodshed, aiming a blow at the cup, and hitting the cup.

He thought, "I started to break that cup when I rustled the newspaper at breakfast. I went on when I suddenly came back and got into that niggling business over why I had come back. Went on when I walked off to my room after that letter business. Practically took up the axe when I couldn't say, 'Well, how's the Garden Home going on?' at dinner. And smashed it when I chaffed about Bagshaw an hour ago. Rum business!

Rotten business."

That was the day's epitaph. But for the murder of the cup he found--gone to bed and lying awake--a culprit other than himself. He thought, "It was meeting Nona made me come home like that. But if that had been the first time I'd ever met Nona I shouldn't have returned. So it goes back further than that. Nine--ten years. The day she married Tybar. If she hadn't married Tybar she'd have married me. The cup wouldn't have been broken. Nona broke that cup."

CHAPTER IV

I

These events were on a Monday. On the following Thursday Nona came to see him at his office.

She was announced through the speaking-tube on his desk:

"Lady Tybar to see you, sir."

Nona! But he was not really surprised. He had taken no notice of her letter. He had wanted to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not been. When two days pa.s.sed and still he prevented himself from going, he began to have the feeling--somehow--that she would come to see him. It was the third day and she was here, downstairs.

"Ask her to come up," he said.

She came in. She wore (as Sabre saw it) "a pale-blue sort of thing" and "a sort of black hat." He had considered it as an odd thing, in his thoughts of her since their meeting, that, though he could always have some kind of notion what other women were wearing, he never could remember any detail of Nona's dress.

But it was her face he always looked at.

She stood still immediately she was across the threshold and the door closed behind her. She was smiling as though she felt herself to be up to some lark. "Hullo, Marko. Don't you hate me for coming in here like this?"

"It's jolly surprising."

"That's another way of saying it. Now if you'd said it was surprisingly jolly! Well, shake hands, Marko, and pretend you're glad."

He laughed and put out his hand. But she delayed response; she first slipped off the gauntlets she was wearing and then gave him her hand.

"There!" she said.

"There!" It was as though she had now done something she much wanted to do; as one says "There!" on at last sitting down after much fatigue.