If Winter Comes Part 19

She tossed her gauntlets on to a chair. She walked past him towards the window. "You got my letter?"

"Yes."

Her face was averted. Her voice had not the bantering note with which she had spoken at her entry.

"You never answered it."

"Well, I'd just seen you--just before I got it."

She was looking out of the window. "Why haven't you been up?"

"Oh--I don't know. I was coming."

"Well, I had to come," she said.

He made no reply. He could think of none to make.

II

She turned sharply away from the window and came towards him, radiant again, as at her entry. And in her first bantering tone, "I know you hate it," she smiled, resuming her first suggestion, "me coming here, like this. It makes you feel uncomfortable. You always feel uncomfortable when you see me, Marko. I'd like to know what you thought when they told you I was here--"

He started to speak.

She went on, "No, I wouldn't. I'd like to know just what you were doing before they told you. Tell me that, Marko."

"I believe I wasn't doing anything. Just thinking."

"Well, I like you best when you're thinking. You puzzle, don't you, Marko? You've got a funny old head. I believe you live in your old head, you know. Puzzling things. Clever beast! I wish I could live in mine." And she gave a note of laughter.

"Where do you live, Nona?"

"I don't live. I just go on"--she paused--"flotsam."

Strange word to use, strangely spoken!

It seemed to Sabre to drop with a strange, detached effect into the conversation between them. His habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and from the word dropped into it ripples that came to his feet upon his margin of the pool and to her feet upon hers.

III

He took the word away from its personal application. "I believe that's rather what I was thinking about when you came, Nona. About how we just go on--flotsam. Don't you know on a river where it's tidal, or on the seash.o.r.e at the turn, the ma.s.s of stuff you see there, driftwood and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily, brought in and left there--from somewhere; and then presently the tide begins to take it and it's drawn off and moves away and goes--somewhere. Arrives and floats and goes. That's mysterious, Nona?"

She said swiftly, as though she were stirred, "Oh, Marko, yes, that's mysterious. Do you know sometimes I've seen drift like that, and I've felt--oh, I don't know. But I've put out a stick and drawn in a piece of wood just as the stuff was moving off, just to save it being carried away into--well, into that, you know."

"Have you, Nona?"

She answered, "Do you think that's what life is, Marko?"

"It's not unlike," he said. And he added, "Except about some one coming along with a stick and drawing a bit into safety. I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for--"

He suddenly realised that he was back precisely at the thoughts his mind had taken up on the morning he had met her. But with a degree more of illumination. Two feelings came into his mind, the second hard upon the other and overriding it, as a fierce horseman might catch and override one pursued. He said, "It's rather jolly to have some one that can see ideas like that." And then the overriding, and he said with astonishing roughness, "But you--you aren't flotsam! How can you be flotsam--the life you've--taken?"

And, lo, if he had struck her, and she been bound, defenceless, and with her eyes entreating not to be struck again, she could not deeper have entreated him than in the glance she fleeted from her eyes, the quiver of her lids that first released, then veiled it.

It stopped his words. It caught his throat.

IV

He got up quickly. "I say, Nona, never mind about thinking. I'll tell you what's been doing. Rotten. Happened just after I met you the other day."

"The dust on these roads!" she said. She touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "What, Marko?"

"Well, old Fortune promised to take me into partnership about an age ago."

"Marko, he ought to have done it an age ago. What's there rotten about that?" Her voice and her air were as gay as when she had entered.

"The rotten thing is that he's turned it down. At least practically has.

He--" He told her of the Twyning and Fortune incident. "Pretty rotten of old Fortune, don't you think?"

"Old fiend!" said Nona. "Old trout!"

Sabre laughed. "Good word, trout. The men here all say he's like a whale. They call him Jonah," and he told her why.

She laughed gaily. "Marko! How disgusting you are! But I'm sorry. I am.

Poor old Marko.... Of course it doesn't matter a horse-radish what an old trout like that thinks about your work, but it does matter, doesn't it? I know how you feel. They had an author man at a place we were staying at the other day--Maurice Ash--and he told me that although he says it doesn't matter, and knows it doesn't matter, when an absolutely trivial person says something riling about any of his stuff, still it does matter. He said a thing you've produced out of yourself you can't bear to have slighted--not by the butcher. Gladys Occleve made us laugh.

Maurice Ash said to her, 'It's like a mother's child. Look here, you're a countess,' he said to her. 'You oughtn't to mind what a butcher thinks of your children; but supposing the butcher said your infant Henry was a stupid little brat; what would you do?' Gladys said she'd dash a best end of the neck straight into his face."

Sabre laughed. "Yes, that's the feeling. But of course, all these books"--he indicated the shelves--"aren't mine, not my children, more like my adopted children."

She declared it was the same thing. "More so, in a way. You've invented them, haven't you, called them out of the vasty deep sort of thing and brought them up in the way they should go. I do think it's rather fine, Marko."

She was at the shelves, scanning the books. Her fond, her almost tender sympathy made him, too, feel that it was rather fine. Her light words in her high, clear tone voiced exactly his feelings towards the books.

Talking with her was, in the reception and return of his thoughts, nearer to reading a book that delighted him than to anything else with which he could compare it. There was the same interchange of ideas, not necessarily expressed; the same creation and play of fancy, imagined, not stated.

Her hands were moving about the volumes, pulling out a book here and there; she mused the t.i.tles. "'Greek Unseens--Prose'; 'Greek Unseens--Verse'; 'Latin Unseens--Verse.' Marvellous person, Marko! 'The Sh.e.l.l Algebra'; 'The Sh.e.l.l Latin Grammar'; 'The Sh.e.l.l English Literature': 'The Sh.e.l.l Modern Geography.' That's a series 'The Sh.e.l.l,'

eh? I _do_ call that a good idea. 'The Six Terms Chemistry'; 'The Six Terms Geology.'"

"Yes, that's another series," he said. He was standing beside her.

Delightful this! His pride in his work thrilled anew. "You see the idea of the thing. Gives the boy the feeling of something definite to get through in a definite time."

She was reading one of the prefaces, signed with his initials. "Yes, that's ever so good. I see what you've written here, '...avoiding the formidable and unattractive wilderness that a new textbook commonly presents to the pupil's mind.' I call that jolly good, Marko. I call it all awfully good. Fancy you sitting in here and thinking out all those ideas. Or do you think them out at home? Do you talk them out with Mabel?"

He thought of Mabel's expression. "Those lesson books." He lied. "Oh, yes. Pretty often."

"Show me which was the first one of all--the one you began with."

He showed her. "Fancy!" She handled it. "How fearfully proud of it you must have been, Marko. And Mabel; wasn't she proud? The very first!" She called it "Dear thing" and returned it to its place with a little pat, as of affection.