If Winter Comes Part 29

He used to think, "Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind.

But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her."

To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured words, as one p.r.o.nouncing sentence, rect.i.tude's austere asylum for their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle acquiescence,--these were most terrible to his governance upon himself.

VI

He said one day, "You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's terrific, Nona.

"Nona, that's how life gets us; there's just one way we can get life and that's by thinking forward before we do a thing. By remembering that it's going to be there for always. What's in our hearts for one another, Nona, is no hurt to to-morrow or to next year or to twenty years hence, either to our own lives or to any one else's--no hurt while it's only there and not expressed, or acted on. I've never told you what's in my heart for you, nor you told me what's in your heart for me. It must remain like that. Once that goes, everything goes. It's only a question of time after that. And after that, again, only a question of time before one of us looks back and wishes for the years over again."

She made the smallest motion of dissent.

He said, "Yes. There's right and wrong, Nona. Nothing else in between.

No compromise. No way of getting round them or over them. You must be either one thing or the other. Once we took a step towards wrong, there it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it--deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.--It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You can't replace it. I couldn't--"

The austere asylum of their pains. He looked back upon it as he had unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested, not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny, "But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead you downward."

She said, "Upward, Marko. You help me upward."

Her gentle acquiescence!

There swept upon him, as one reckless in sudden surge of intoxication, most pa.s.sionate desire to take her in his arms; and on her lips to crush to fragments the barriers of conduct he had in d.a.m.nable sophistries erected; and in her ears to breathe, "You are beloved to me! Honour, honesty, virtue, rect.i.tude--words, darling, words, words, words!

Beloved, let the foundations of the world go spinning, so we have love."

He called most terribly upon himself, and his self answered him; but shaken by that most fierce onset he said thickly, "I'll have this. If ever it grows too hard for you, tell me--tell me."

VII

It must be kept locked. In grievous doubt of his own strength, in loneliness more lonely for his doubt, more deeply, as advancing summer lengthened out his waking solitude, he explored among his inmost thoughts; more eagerly, in relief from their perplexities, turned to the companionship of Fargus and the Perches. How very, very glad they always were to see him! It was the strong happiness they manifested in greeting him that most deeply gave the pleasure he had in their company.

He often pondered the fact. It was, in their manifestation of it, as though he brought them something,--something very pleasurable to them and that they much wanted. Certainly he, for his own part, received such from them: a sense of warmth, a kindling of the spirit, a glowing of all his affections and perceptions.

His mind would explore curiously along this train of thought. He came to determine that infinitely the most beautiful thing in life was a face lighting up with the pleasure of friendship: in its apotheosis irradiating with the wonder of love. That frequent idea of his of the "wanting something" look in the faces of half the people one saw: he thought that the greeting of some one loved might well be a touching of the quality that was to seek. The weariest and the most wistful faces were sheerly transfigured by it. But he felt it was not entirely the secret. The greeting pa.s.sed; the light faded; the wanting returned. But he determined the key to the solution lay within that ambit. The happiness was there. It was here in life, found, realised in loving meeting, as warmth is found on stepping from shadow into the sun. The thing lacking was something that would fix it, render it permanent, establish it in the being as the heart is rooted in the body.--Something? What?

He thought, "Well, why is it that children's faces are always happy?

There's something they must lose as they grow out of childhood. It's not that cares and troubles come; the absurd troubles of childhood are just as terrific troubles to them as grown-ups' cares are to grown-ups. No, it is that something is lost. Well, what had I as a child that I have not as a man? Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it be belief?"

He thought, "I wonder if they're all the same, those three--belief, faith, hope? Belief in hope. Faith in hope. It may be. Is it that a child knows no limitation to hope? It can hope impossible things. But a man hopes no further than he can see--I wonder--"

And suddenly, in one week, life from its armoury discharged two events upon him. In the next week one upon the world.

CHAPTER III

I

Towards the end of July there was some particularly splendid excitement for the newspaper-reading public. Ireland provided it; and the newspapers, as the events enlarged one upon the other, could scarcely find type big enough to keep pace with them. On the twenty-first, the King caused a conference of British and Irish leaders to a.s.semble at Buckingham Palace. On the twenty-fourth, the British and Irish leaders departed from Buckingham Palace in patriotic halos of national champions who had failed to agree "in principle or detail." Deadlock and Crisis flew about the streets in stupendous type; and though they had been doing so almost daily for the past eighteen months, everybody could see, with the most delicious thrills, that these were more firmly locked deadlocks and more critical crises than had ever before come whooping out of the inexhaustible store where they were kept for the public entertainment. Austria, and then Germany, made a not bad attempt on public attention by raking up some forgotten sensation over a stale excitement at a place called Sarajevo; but on the twenty-sixth, Ireland magnificently filled the bill again by the far more serious affair of Nationalist Volunteers landing three thousand rifles and marching with them into Dublin. Troops fired on the mob, and the House of Commons gave itself over to a most exciting debate on the business; the Irish Party demanded a large number of brutal heads to be delivered on chargers; and Unionist politicians, Press, and public declared that the heads were not brutal heads but loyal and devoted heads and should not be delivered; on the contrary they should be wreathed. It was delicious.

II

It was delicious and it was, moreover, rea.s.suring. In these same days between the summoning of the Buckingham Palace Conference and the landing of the Nationalist guns, Continental events arising out of the stale Sarajevo affair reared their heads and looked towards Great Britain in a presumptuous and sinister way to which the British public was not accustomed, and which it resented. The British public had never taken any interest in international affairs and it did not wish to take any interest in international affairs. It certainly did not wish to be disturbed by them, and at this moment of the exciting Irish deadlock the Wilhelmstra.s.se, the Ball Platz, the Quai d'Orsay and similar stupid, meaningless and unp.r.o.nounceable places intruded themselves disturbingly in British homes, much as the writing on the wall vexatiously disturbed Belshazzar's feast, and were similarly resented. Belshazzar probably ordered in a fresh troupe of dancers to remove the chilly effect of the stupid, meaningless and unp.r.o.nounceable writing, and in the same way the British public turned with relief and with thrills to the gun-running and the shooting.

It was characteristically intriguing in the nature of its excitement. It was characteristically intriguing because, like all the domestic sensations to which the British Public had become accustomed, it in no way interfered with the lives of those not directly implicated in it.

Like them all, it entertained without inconveniencing. They knew their place, the deadlocks, the crises and the other sensations of those glowing days. They caused no member of their audience to go without his meals. They interfered neither with pleasure nor with business.

III

Sometimes this was a little surprising. Fresh from newspaper instruction of the deadness of the deadlock, the poignancy of the crisis, or the stupendity of the achievement, one rather expected one's own personal world to stand still and watch it. But one's own personal world never did stand still and watch it.

Sabre, coming into his office on the day reporting the affray in Dublin, was made to experience this.

In the town, on his arrival, he purchased several of the London newspapers to read other accounts and other views of the gun-running and its sensational sequel. His intention was to read them the moment he got to his room. He put them on a chair while he hung up his straw hat and filled a pipe.

They remained there unopened till the charwoman removed them in the evening. On his desk, as he glanced towards it, was a letter from Nona.

He turned it over in his hands--the small neat script. She never before had written to him at the office. It bore the London postmark. She would be writing from their town house. It would be to say she was coming back.... But she never wrote on the occasions of her return; they just met.... And she had never before written to the office.

Mr. Fortune appeared at the communicating door. Sabre put the letter into his pocket and turned towards him.

Mr. Fortune came into the room. With him was a young man, a youth, whose face was vaguely familiar to Sabre; Twyning behind.

"Ah, Sabre," said Mr. Fortune. "Good morning, Sabre. This is rather a larger number of visitors than you would commonly expect, but we are a larger staff this morning than we have heretofore been. I am bringing in to you a new member of our staff." He indicated the young man beside him. "A new member but bearing an old name. A chip of the old block--the old Twyning block." He smiled, stroking his whale-like front rather as though this pleasantry had proceeded from its depths and he was congratulating it. The young man smiled. Twyning, edging forward from the background, also smiled. All the smiles were rather nervous. This was natural in the new member of the staff but in Twyning and Mr.

Fortune gave Sabre the feeling that for some reason they were not entirely at ease. His immediate thought had been that it was an odd thing to have taken on young Twyning without mentioning it even casually to him. It was significant of his estrangement in the office; but their self-conscious manner was even more significant: it suggested that he had been kept out of the plan deliberately.

He gave the young man his hand. "Why, that's very nice," he said. "I thought I knew your face. I think I've seen you with your father. You've been in Blade and Parson's place, haven't you?"

Young Twyning replied that he had. He had his father's rather quick and stiff manner of speaking. He was fair-haired and complexioned, good-looking in a sharp-featured way, a juvenile edition of his father in a different colouring.

Mr. Fortune, still stroking the whale-like front, produced further pleasantry from it. "Yes, with Blade and Parson. Twyning here has s.n.a.t.c.hed him from the long arm of the law before he has had time to develop the long jaw of the legal shark. In point of fact, Sabre"--Mr.

Fortune ceased to stroke the whale-like front. He moved a step or two out of the line of Sabre's regard, and standing before the bookshelves, addressed his remarks to them as though what else he had to say were not of particular consequence--"In point of fact, Sabre, this very natural and pleasing desire of Twyning to have his son in the office, a desire which I am most gratified to support, is his first--what shall I say?--feeling of his feet--establishing of his position--in his new--er--in his new responsibility, duty--er--function. I like this deeper tone in the 'Six Terms' binding, Sabre. I distinctly approve it.

Yes. What was I saying? Ah, yes, Twyning is now in partnership, Sabre.

Yes. Good."

He came abruptly away from the shelves and directed the whale-like front towards his door in process of departure. "A little reorganisation.

Nothing more. Just a little reorganisation. I think you'll find we shall all work very much the more comfortably for it." He paused before young Twyning. "Well, young man, now you've made your bow before our literary adviser. I think we decided to call him Harold, eh, Twyning? Avoid confusion, don't you agree, Sabre?"

"If that's his name," Sabre said. He had remained standing looking towards father and son precisely as he had stood and looked at the party's entry.

Mr. Fortune glanced sharply at him and compressed his lips. "It is," he said shortly. He left the room.

IV