If Winter Comes Part 46

"'Let me tell you, sir, this is no place to inquire after Mr. Sabre,'

said he. 'Let me tell you--'

"Well, I'd ha' let him tell me any old thing. That was what I was there for. But he shut himself up with a kind of gasp and cannoned himself into his tabernacle under the stairs and left me there, wondering if I was where I thought I was, or had got into a moving-picture show by mistake. The clerk had fallen through the floor or something. I was alone. Friendless. n.o.body wanted me. I thought to myself, 'Percival, old man, you're on the unpopular side of the argument. You're nonsuited, old man.' And I thought I wouldn't take any more chances in this Biblical film, not with old father Abraham Fortune or Friend Judas Iscariot Twyning; I thought I'd push out to Penny Green and see old Sabre for myself.

"So I did. I certainly did....

"You can imagine me, old man, in my natty little blue suit, tripping up the path of Sabre's house and guessing to myself that the mystery wasn't a mystery at all, but only the office perhaps rather fed up with Sabre for staying away nursing his game leg so long. By Jove, it wasn't that.

House had rather a neglected appearance, I thought. Door k.n.o.b not polished, or blinds still down somewhere or something. I don't know.

Something. And what made me conscious of it was that I was kept a long time waiting after I'd rung the bell. In fact, I had to ring twice. Then I heard some one coming, and you know how your mind unconsciously expects things and so gives you quite a start when the thing isn't there; well, I suppose I'd been expecting to see one of Sabre's two servants, 'my couple of Jinkses' as he calls them, and 'pon my soul I was quite startled when the door opened and it wasn't one of them at all, but a very different pair of shoes.

"It was a young woman; ladylike, dressed just in some ordinary sort of clothes; I don't know; uncommonly pretty, or might have been if she hadn't looked so uncommonly sad; and--this was what knocked me carrying a baby. 'Pon my soul, I couldn't have been more astonished if the door had been opened by the Kaiser carrying the Crown Prince.

"I don't know why I should have imagined she was the kid's mother, but I did. I don't know why I should have looked at her hands, but I did. I don't know why I should have expected to see a wedding ring, but I did.

And there wasn't one.

"Well, she was saying 'Yes?' in an inquiring, timid sort of way, me standing there like a fool, you understand, and I suddenly recovered from my flabbergasteration and guessed the obvious thing--that the Sabres had let their house to strangers and gone away. Still more obvious, you might say, that Mrs. Sabre had produced a baby, and that the girl was her sister or some one, but that never occurred to me. No, I guessed they'd gone away, and I said, 'I was calling to see Mr. Sabre.

Has he gone away?'

"I'd thought her looking timid. She was looking at me now decidedly as if she were frightened of me. 'No, no, Mr. Sabre's not gone away. He's here. Are you a friend of his?'

"I smiled at her. 'Well, I used to be,' I said. She didn't smile. What the d.i.c.kens was up? 'I used to be. I always thought I was. My name's Hapgood.'

"'Perhaps you'd better come in.'

"You know, it was perfectly extraordinary. Her voice was as sad as her face. I stepped in. What on earth was I going to hear? Sabre dying? Wife dying? Air-raid bomb fallen on the house and everybody dead? 'Pon my soul, I began to feel creepy. Scalp began to p.r.i.c.k. Then suddenly there was old Sabre at the head of the stairs. 'What is it, Effie?' Then he saw me. 'Hullo, Hapgood!' His voice was devilish pleased. Then he said again, rather in a thoughtful voice, 'Hullo, Hapgood,' and he began to come down, slowly, with his stick.

"Well, _he_ wasn't dead, anyway; that was something to go on with. I took his hand and said, 'Hullo, Sabre. How goes it, old man? Able to do the stairs now, I see. I was down to Tidborough and thought I'd come and look you up again.'

"'Fine,' he said, shaking my hand. 'Jolly nice of you.' Then he said, 'Did you go to the office for me, Hapgood?'

"'Just looked in,' I said offhandedly. 'Saw a clerk who said you weren't down to-day, so I came along up.'

"He was doing some thinking, I could see that. He said, 'Jolly good of you. I _am_ glad. You'll stay a bit, of course.' The girl had faded away. He went a bit along the pa.s.sage and called out, 'Effie, you can scratch up a bit of lunch for Mr. Hapgood?'

"I suppose she said Yes. 'Lunch'll be on in about two minutes,' he came back to me with. 'You're later than when you came up last time. Come along in here.'

"Led me into the morning room and we sat down and pretended to talk.

Very poor pretence, I give you my word. Both of us manifestly straining to do the brisk and hearty, and the two of us producing about as much semblance of chatty interchange as a couple of victims waiting their turn in a dentist's parlour. The door was open and I could hear some one moving about laying the lunch. That was all I could hear (bar Sabre's spasmodic jerks of speech) and I don't mind telling you I was a deal more interested in what I could hear going on outside than in anything we could put up between us. Or rather in what I couldn't hear going on outside. No voices, none of those sounds, none of that sort of feeling that tells you people are about the place. No, there was some mystery knocking about the place somewhere, and it was on the other side of the door, and that was where my attention was.

"Presently I heard the girl's voice outside, 'Lunch is ready.'

"We jumped up like two schoolboys released from detention and went along in. More mystery. Lunch at Sabre's place was always a beautifully conducted rite, as I was accustomed to it. Announced by two gongs, warning and ready, to begin with, and here we'd been shuffled in by a girl's casual remark in the pa.s.sage; and beautifully appointed and served when you got there and here was--Well, there were places laid for two only and a ramshackle kind of cold picnic scattered about the cloth.

Everything there, help yourself kind of show. Bit of cold meat, half a cold tart, lump of cheese, loaf of bread, a.s.sortment of plates, and so on.

"Sabre said, 'Oh, by the way, my wife's not here. She's away.'

"I murmured the polite thing. He was staring at the two places, frowning a bit. 'Half a minute,' he said and hopped off on his old stick. Then I heard him talking to this mysterious girl. At least I heard her voice first. 'Oh, I can't! I can't!'

"Then Sabre: 'Nonsense, Effie. You must. You must. I insist. Don't be silly.'

"Then a door slammed.

"Well, I ask you! If I didn't say to myself, 'The plot thickens,' if I didn't say it, I can promise you I thought it. I did. And it proceeded to curdle. The door that had slammed opened and presently in comes Sabre with the girl. And the girl with the baby in her arms. Sabre said in his ordinary, easy voice--he's got a particularly nice voice, has old Sabre--'This is a very retiring young person, Hapgood. Had to be dragged in. Miss Bright. Her father's in the office. Perhaps you've met him, have you?'

"Well, I don't know what I said, old man. I know what I thought. I thought just precisely what you're thinking. Yes, I had a furiously vivid shot of a recollection of old Bright as I'd seen him a couple of hours before, of his blazing look, of his gesture of wanting to hurl the Tables of Stone at me, and of his extraordinary remark about Sabre,--I had that and I did what you're doing: I put two and two together and found the obvious answer (same as you) and I jolly near fell down dead, I did. Jolly near.

"But Sabre was going on, pleasant and natural as you please. 'Miss Bright was here as companion to my wife while I was in France. Now she's staying here a bit. Put the baby on the sofa, Effie, and let's get to work. I'd like you two to be friends. Hapgood and I were at school together, you know, about a thousand years ago. They used to call him Porker because he was so thin.'

"The girl smiled faintly, I put up an hysterical sort of squeak, and we sat down. The meal wasn't precisely a banquet. We helped ourselves and stacked up the soiled plates as we used them. No servants, d'you see?

That was pretty clear by now. No wife, no servants, no wedding ring; nothing but old Bright's daughter and old Bright's daughter's baby--and--and--Sabre.

"I suppose I talked. I heard my voice sometimes. The easy flow Sabre had started with didn't last long. The girl hardly spoke. I watched her a lot. I liked the look of her. She must have been uncommonly pretty in a vivacious sort of way before she ran up against her trouble, whatever it was. I say Whatever it was. I'd no real reason to suppose I knew; though mind you, I was guessing pretty shrewdly it was lying there on the sofa wrapped up in what d'you call 'ems--swaddling clothes. Yes, uncommonly pretty, but now sad--sad as a young widow at the funeral, that sort of look. It was her eyes that especially showed it. Extraordinary eyes.

Like two great pools in a shadow. If I may quote poetry, at you,

Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even.

And all the sorrow in them of all the women since Mary Magdalen. All the time but once. Once the baby whimpered, and she got up and went to it and stooped over it the other side of the sofa from me, so I could see her face. By gad, if you could have seen her eyes then! Motherhood!

Lucky you weren't there, because if you've any idea of ever painting a picture called Motherhood, you'd ha' gone straight out and cut your throat on the mat in despair. You certainly would.

"Well, anyway, the banquet got more and more awkward to endure as it dragged on, and mighty glad I was when at last the girl got up--without a word--and picked up the baby and left us. Left us. We were no more chatty for being alone, I can promise you. I absolutely could not think of a word to say, and any infernal thing that old Sabre managed to rake up seemed complete and done to death the minute he'd said it.

"Then all of a sudden he began. He fished out some cigarettes and chucked me one and we smoked like a couple of exhaust valves for about two minutes and then he said, 'Hapgood, why on earth should I have to explain all this to you? Why _should_ I?'

"I said, a tiny bit sharply--I was getting a bit on edge, you know--I said, 'Well, who's asked you to? I haven't asked any questions, have I?'

"Sabre said, 'No, I know you haven't asked any, and I'm infernally grateful to you. You're the first person across this threshold in months that hasn't. But I know you're thinking them--hard. And I know I've got to answer them. And I want to. I want to most frightfully. But what beats me is this infernal feeling that I _must_ explain to you, to you and to everybody, whether I want to or not. Why should I? It's my own house. I can do what I like in it. I'm not, anyway, doing anything wrong. I'm doing something more right than I've ever done in my life, and yet everybody's got the right to question me and everybody's got the right to be answered and--Hapgood, it's the most bewildering state of affairs that can possibly be imagined. I'm up against a code of social conventions, and by Jove I'm absolutely down and out. I'm absolutely tied up hand and foot and chucked away. Do you know what I am, Hapgood--?'

"He gave a laugh. He wasn't talking a bit savagely, and he never did talk like that all through what he told me. He was just talking in a tone of sheer, hopeless, extremely interested puzzlement--bafflement--amazement; just as a man might talk to you of some absolutely baffling conjuring trick he'd seen. In fact, he used that very expression. 'Do you know what I am, Hapgood?' and he gave a laugh, as I've said. 'I'm what they call a social outcast. A social outcast. Beyond the pale. Unspeakable. Ostracized. Blackballed.

Excommunicated.' He got up and began to stump about the room, hands in his pockets, chin on his collar, wrestling with it,--and wrestling, mind you, just in profoundly interested bafflement.

"'Unspeakable,' he said. 'Excommunicated. By Jove, it's astounding. It's amazing. It's like a stupendous conjuring trick. I've done something that isn't done--not something that's wrong, something that's incontestably right. But it isn't done. People don't do it, and I've done it and therefore hey, presto, I'm turned into a leper, a pariah, an outlaw. Amazing, astounding!'

"Then he settled down and told me. And this is what he told me."

II

"When he was out in France this girl I'd seen--this Effie, as he called her, Effie Bright--had come to live as companion to his wife. It appears he more or less got her the job. He'd seen her at the office with her father and he'd taken a tremendous fancy to her. 'A jolly kid,' that was the expression he used, and he said he was awfully fond of her just as he might be of a jolly little sister. He got her some other job previously with some friends or other, and then the old lady there died and the girl came to his place while he was away. Something like that.

Anyway, she came. She came somewhere about October, '15, and she left early in March following, just over a year ago. His wife got fed up with her and got rid of her--that's what Sabre says--got fed up with her and got rid of her. And Sabre was at home at the time. Mark that, old man, because it's important. _Sabre was at home at the time_--about three weeks--on leave.

"Very well. The girl got the sack and he went back to France. She got another job somewhere as companion again. He doesn't quite know where.

He thinks at Bournemouth. Anyway, that's nothing to do with it. Well, he got wounded and discharged from the Army, as you know, and in February he was living at home again with his wife in the conditions I described to you when I began. He said nothing to me about the conditions--about the terms they were on; but I've told you what I saw.

It's important because it was exactly into the situation as I then saw it that came to pa.s.s the thing that came to pa.s.s. This:

"The very week after I'd been down there, his wife, reading a letter at breakfast one morning, gave a kind of a snort (as I can imagine it) and chucked the letter over to him and said, 'Ha! There's your wonderful Miss Bright for you! What did I tell you? What do you think of that?

Ha!'

"Those were her very words and her very snorts and what they meant--what 'Your wonderful Miss Bright for you' meant--was, as he explained to me, that when he was home on leave, with the girl in the house, they were frequently having words about her, because he thought his wife was a bit sharp with her, and his wife, for her part, said he was forever sticking up for her.