If Winter Comes Part 28

"No, I bet they were your own. You're a great reader, I know."

Her tone was almost bitter. "I suppose you think I read nothing but d.i.c.kens and that sort of thing."

"Well, you might do a good deal worse, you know. There's no one like d.i.c.kens, taking everything together."

She flushed. You could almost see she was going to say something rude.

"That's a very kind thing to say to uneducated people, Mr. Sabre. It makes them think it isn't education that prevents them enjoying more advanced writers. But I don't suffer from that, as it so happens. I daresay some of my reading would be pretty hard even for you."

Sabre felt Mabel pluck at his sleeve. He glanced at her. Her face was very angry. Miss Bypa.s.s, delivered of her sharp words, was deeper flushed, her head drawn back. He smiled at her. "Why, I'm sure it would, Miss Bypa.s.s. I tell you what, we must have a talk about reading one day, shall we? I think it would be rather jolly to exchange ideas."

An extraordinary and rather alarming change came over Miss Bypa.s.s's hard face. Sabre thought she was going to cry. She said in a thick voice, "Oh, I don't really read anything particularly good. It's only--Mr.

Sabre, thank you." She turned abruptly away.

When they were outside, Mabel said, "How extraordinary you are!"

"Eh? What about?"

"Making up to that girl like that! I never heard such rudeness as the way she spoke to you." Sabre said, "Oh, I don't know."

"Don't know! When you spoke to her so politely and the way she answered you! And then you reply quite pleasantly--"

He laughed. "You didn't expect me to give her a hard punch in the eye, did you?"

"No, of course I didn't expect you to give her a hard punch in the eye.

But I should have thought you'd have had more sense of your own dignity than to take no notice and invite her to have a talk one day."

He thought, "Here we are again!" He said, "Well, but look, Mabel. I don't think she means it for rudeness. She is rude of course, beastly rude; but, you know, that manner of hers always makes me feel frightfully sorry for her."

"Sorry!"

"Yes, haven't you noticed many people like her with that defiant sort of way of speaking--people not very well educated, or very badly off, or in rather a dependent position, and most frightfully conscious of it. They think every one is looking down on them, or patronising them, and the result is they're on the defensive all the time. Well, that's awfully pathetic, you know, all your life being on the defensive; back against the wall; can't get away; always making feeble little rushes at the mob.

By Jove, that's pathetic, Mabel."

She said, "I'm not listening, you know."

He was startled. "Eh?"

"I say I'm not listening. I always know that whenever I say anything about any one I dislike, you immediately start making excuses for them, so I simply don't listen."

He mastered a sudden feeling within him. "Well, it wasn't very interesting," he said.

"No, it certainly wasn't. Pathetic!" She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You think such extraordinary things pathetic; I wonder you don't start an orphanage!"

He halted and faced her. "Look here, I think I'll leave you here. I think I'll go for a bit of a walk."

Pretty hard, sometimes, not to--

III

At The Precincts the increasing habit of seeing the other side of things was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no welcome there. He began to look forward with a new desire for the escape and detachment of the bicycle ride; he began to approach its termination at either end with a sense of apprehension, gradually of dismay.

They were as unexpected, the conflicts of opinion, in the office as they were at home. The subject would come up, he would enter it according to his ideas and without foreseeing trouble, and suddenly he would find himself in acute opposition and giving acute offence because he was in acute opposition.

The Suffragettes! The day when Mr. Fortune received through the post letters upon which militancy had squirted its oppression and its determination in black and viscid form through the aperture of the letter box. "And you're sticking up for them!" declared Mr. Fortune in a very great pa.s.sion. "You're deliberately sticking up for them.

You--pah!--pouff!--paff! I have got the abominable stuff all over my fingers."

Sabre displayed the "wrinkled-up nut" of his Puzzlehead boyhood. "I'm not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I said was that, things being as they are, you can't help seeing that their horrible ways are bringing the vote a jolly sight nearer than it's ever been before.

Millions of people who never would have thought about woman suffrage are thinking about it now. These women are advertising it as it never could be advertised by calmly talking about it, and you can't get anything nowadays except by shouting and smashing and abusing and advertising. I only wish you could. No one listens to reason. It's got to be what they call a whirlwind campaign or go without. That's not sticking up for them. It's simply recognising a rotten state of affairs."

"And I say to you," returned Mr. Fortune, scrubbing furiously at his fingers with a duster, "and I say to you what I seem to be perpetually forced to say to you, that your ideas are becoming more and more _repugnant_ to me. There's not a solitary subject comes up between us but you adopt in it what I desire to call a stubborn and contumacious att.i.tude towards me. Whoof!" He blew a cyclonic blast down the speaking tube. "Send Parker up here. Parker! Send _Parker_ up here! Parker!

_Parker! Parker!_ Pah! Pouff! Paff! Now it's all over the speaking tube!

I am by no means recovered yet, Sabre, I am very far from being yet recovered, from your remarks yesterday on the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill. Let me remind you again that your att.i.tude was not only very painful to me in my capacity of one in Holy Orders, it was also outrageously opposed to the traditions and standing of this firm.

We are out of sympathy, Sabre. We are seriously out of sympathy; and let me tell you that you would do well to reflect whether we are not dangerously out of sympathy. Let me--"

The door porter entered in the venerable presence of the summoned Parker, much agitated.

Sabre began, "If you can't see what I said about the Disestablishment Bill--"

"I did not see; I do not see; I cannot see and I shall not see. I--"

Sabre moved towards his door. "Well, I'd better be attending to my work.

If anything I've said annoyed you, it certainly was not intended to."

And there followed him into his room, "Pumice stone! Pumice stone!

Pumice stone! Go to the chemist's and get some pumice stone.... Very well then, sir, don't stand there staring at me, sir!"

IV

Like living in two empty houses: empty this end; empty that end. More frequently, for these estrangements, appealed to him the places of his refuge: the room of his mind, that private chamber wherein, retired, he a.s.sembled the parts of his puzzles; that familiar garment in which, invested, he sat among the fraternity of his thoughts; the evenings with Young Perch and old Mrs. Perch; the evenings with Mr. Fargus.

Most strongly of all called another refuge; and this, because it called so strongly, he kept locked. Nona.

They met no more frequently than, prior to her two years' absence, they had been wont to meet in the ordinary course of neighbourly life; and their lives, by their situations, were much detached. Northrepps was only visited, never resided at for many months together.

His resolution was not to force encounters. Once, very shortly after that day of her disclosure, he had said to her, "Look here, we're not going to have any arranged meetings, Nona. I'm not strong enough--not strong enough to resist. I couldn't bear it."

She answered, "You're too strong, Marko. You're too strong to do what you think you ought not to do; it isn't not being strong enough."

He told her she was very wrong. "That's giving me strength of character.

I haven't any strength of character at all. That's been my failing all my life. I tell you what I've got instead. I've got the most frightfully, the most infernally vivid sense of what's right in my own personal conduct. Lots of people haven't. I envy them. They can do what they like. But I know what I ought to do. I know it so absolutely that there's no excuse for me when I don't do it, certainly no credit if I do. I go in with my eyes open or I stay out merely because my eyes are open. There's nothing in that. If it's anything it's contemptible."

She said, "Teach me to be contemptible."

V

In those words he had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed--that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it--was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind circ.u.mstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his strength. He could "at least" (he used to think) prevent his limbs from taking him to her. But his mind--his mind turned to her; automatically, when he was off his guard, as a swing door ever to its frame; frantically, when he would abate it, as a prisoned animal against its bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked, using the expression and envisaging it.