Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

Mrs. Bouncing was in a young man’s arms receiving a prolonged farewell. It wasn’t young Rivers, and it was an accustomed kiss. Mrs. Bouncing screamed. She was the kind of woman who found a scream in an emergency as easily as a sailor finds a rope.

It wasn’t Winn’s place to say, “What the devil are you doing here, sir?” to Mr. Roper; it was the question which, if Mr. Roper had had the slightest presence of mind, he would have addressed to Winn. As it was he did nothing but snarl — a timid and ineffectual snarl which was without influence upon the situation.

“You’d better clear out,” Winn continued; “but if I see you in Davos after the eight o’clock express to-morrow I shall give myself the pleasure of breaking every bone in your body. Any one’s at liberty to play a game, Mr. Roper, but not a double game; and in the future I really wouldn’t suggest your choosing a dying man’s wife to play it with. It’s the kind of thing that awfully ruffles his friends.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Mr. Roper, hastily edging toward the door; “your language is most uncalled for. And as to going away, I shall do nothing of the kind.”

“Better think it over,” said Winn, with misleading calm. He moved forward as he spoke, seized Mr. Roper by the back of his coat as if he were some kind of boneless mechanical toy, and deposited him in the passage outside the door.

Mrs. Bouncing screamed again. This time it was a shrill and gratified scream. She felt herself to be the heroine of an occasion. Winn eyed her as a hostile big dog eyes one beneath his fighting powers. Then he said:

“I shouldn’t make that noise if I were you; it’s out of place. I came here to give you bad news.”

This time Mrs. Bouncing didn’t scream. She took hold of the edge of the table and repeated three times in a strange, expressionless voice:

“George is dead! George is dead! George is dead!”

Winn thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t. She held on to the table.

“What ought I to do, Major Staines?” she asked in a quavering voice.

Winn considered the question gravely. It was a little late in the day for Mrs. Bouncing to start what she ought to do, but he approved of her determination.

“I think,” he said at last — “I think you ought to go in and look at him. It’s usual.”

“Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Bouncing, with a shiver, “I never have seen a corpse!”

Winn escorted her to the bedside and then turned away from her. She looked down at her dead husband. Mr. Bouncing had no anxiety in his face at all now; he looked incredibly contented and young.

“I — I suppose he really is gone?” said Mrs. Bouncing in a low voice. Then she moved waveringly over to a big armchair.

“There is no doubt about it at all,” said Winn. “I didn’t ring up Gurnet. He will come in any case first thing to-morrow morning.”

Mrs. Bouncing moved her beringed hands nervously, and then suddenly began to cry. She cried quietly into her pocket-handkerchief, with her shoulders shaking.

“I wish things hadn’t happened!” she sobbed. “Oh, dear! I wish things hadn’t happened!” She did not refer to the death of Mr. Bouncing. Winn said nothing. “I really didn’t mean any harm,” Mrs. Bouncing went on between her sobs — “not at first. You know how things run on; and he’d been ill seven years, and one does like a little bit of fun, doesn’t one?”

“I shouldn’t think about all that now,” Winn replied. “It isn’t suitable.”

Mrs. Bouncing shook her head and sobbed louder; sobbing seemed a refuge from suitability.

“I wouldn’t have minded,” she said brokenly, “if I’d heated his milk. I always thought he was so silly about having skin on it. I didn’t believe when he came up-stairs it was because he was really worse. I wanted the sitting-room to myself. Oh dear! oh dear! I said it was all nonsense! And he said, ‘Never mind, Millie; it won’t be for long,’ and I thought he meant he’d get down-stairs again. And he didn’t; he meant this!”

Winn cleared his throat.

“I don’t think he blamed you,” he said, “as much as I did.”

Mrs. Bouncing was roused by this into a sudden sense of her position.

“Oh,” she said, “what are you going to do to me? You’ve always hated me. I’m sure I don’t know why; I took quite a fancy to you that first evening. I always have liked military men, but you’re so stand-offish; and now, of course, goodness knows what you’ll think! If poor old George were alive he’d stand up for me!”

“I’m not going to do anything to hurt you, Mrs. Bouncing,” said Winn, after a short pause. “You’ll stay on here, of course, till after the funeral. We shall do all we can to help you, and then you’ll go back to England, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, shivering, “I suppose so. I shall go back to England. I shall have to see George’s people. They don’t like me. Will — will that be all?”

“As far as I am concerned,” said Winn, more gently, “there is only one thing further I have to suggest. I should like you to promise me, when you leave here, to have nothing more to do with young Rivers. It’s better not; it puts him off his work.”

Mrs. Bouncing reddened.

“Oh,” she said, “I know; I didn’t mean any harm by that. You can’t help young men taking a fancy to you, can you? At least I can’t. It looked better didn’t it, in a way — you know what I mean. I didn’t want people to think anything. If only George hadn’t been so good to me! I don’t suppose you can understand, but it makes it worse when they are.”

It seemed to Winn as if he could understand, but he didn’t say so. Bouncing should have pulled her up. Winn always believed in people being pulled up. The difficulty lay in knowing how to carry the process out. It had seemed to Mr. Bouncing simpler to die.

“You’d better go to bed now,” Winn said at last. “People will be up soon. He died quite peacefully. He didn’t want you to be disturbed. I think that’s all, Mrs. Bouncing.”

She got up and went again to the bed.

“I suppose I oughtn’t to kiss him?” she whispered. “I haven’t any right to now, have I? You know what I mean? But I would have liked to kiss him.”

“Oh, I don’t believe he’d mind,” said Winn, turning away.

Mrs. Bouncing kissed him.

Winn felt no desire to go to bed. He went out into the long, blank corridor and wondered if the servants would be up soon and he could get anything to drink. The passage was intensely still; it stretched interminably away from him like a long, unlighted road. A vague gray light came from the windows at each end. It was too early for the shapes of the mountains to be seen. The outside world was featureless and very cold.

There was no sound in the house except the faint sound behind the green baize doors, which never wholly ceased. Winn had always listened to it before with an impatient distaste; he had hated to hear these echoes of dissolution. This morning, for the first time, he felt curious.

Suppose things had gone differently; that he’d been too late, and known his fate? He could have stayed on then; he could have accepted Claire’s beautiful young friendliness. He could have left her free; and yet he could have seen her every day; then he would have died.

Weakness has privileges. It escapes responsibility; allowances are made for it. It hasn’t got to get up and go, tearing itself to pieces from the roots. He could have told her about Peter and Estelle and what a fool he had been; and at the end, he supposed, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had just mentioned that he loved her.

Now there wasn’t going to be any end. Life would stretch out narrow, interminable, and dark, like the passage with the windows at each end, which were only a kind of blur without any light.

However, of course there was no use bothering about it; since the servants weren’t up and he couldn’t get any coffee, he must just turn in. It suddenly occurred to Winn that what he was feeling now was unhappiness, a funny thing; he had never really felt before. It was the kind of feeling the man had had, under the lamp-post at the station, carrying his dying wife. The idea of a broken heart had always seemed to Winn namby-pamby. You broke if you were weak; you didn’t break if you were strong. What was happening now was that he was strong and he was being broken. It was a painful process, because there was a good deal of him to break, and it had only just begun. However, this was mercifully hidden from him. He said to himself: “I dare say I’m run down and fidgety with having had to sit up with Bouncing. I shall feel all right to-morrow.” Then the door behind him opened, and Lionel joined him. He was still dressed as he had been when he came back from the ball some hours earlier.

“Hullo!” he said. “I wondered if that was you; I thought I heard something stirring outside. You weren’t in your room when I came in. Been with Bouncing?”

“Yes,” said Winn; “he’s dead. I’m looking for some coffee. These confounded, tow-headed Swiss mules never get up at any decent hour. Why are you still dressed? Nothing wrong, is there?”

“Well, I didn’t feel particularly sleepy, somehow,” Lionel acknowledged. “Are you going to stand outside in this moth-eaten passage the rest of the night, or will you come in with me and have a whisky and soda? You must be fagged out.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” Winn agreed. “We may as well make a night of it.”

For a few minutes neither of them spoke, then Winn said: “Had a jolly dance?”

Lionel did not answer him directly; but he turned round, and met his friend’s eyes with his usual unswerving honesty.

“Look here, old Winn,” he said, “it’s up to you to decide now. I’ll stay on here or go with you, whichever you like.”

“You like her, then?” Winn asked quickly.

“Yes,” said Lionel, “I like her.”

“Well, then, you’ll stay of course,” said Winn without any hesitation. “Isn’t that what we damned well settled?”

Lionel’s eyes had changed. They were full of a new light; he looked as if some one had lit a lantern within him. Love had come to him not as it had come to Winn, bitterly, unavailingly, without illusion; it had fallen upon his free heart and lit it from end to end with joy. He loved as a man loves whose heart is clean and who has never loved before, without a scruple and without restraint. Love had made no claims on him yet; it had not offered him either its disappointments or its great rewards. He was transformed without being altered. He simply saw everything as glorious which before had been plain, but he did not see different things.

“Yes,” he said, “I know we talked about it; but I’m hanged if I’ll try unless I’m sure you are absolutely keen. I thought it all out after — after I’d seen her, and it seemed to me all very well in the abstract giving her up to another man and all that, but when it came to the point, would you be really sure to want me to carry through? I’ve seen her now, you know, and I’m glad I’ve seen her. I’ll be glad always for that, but it needn’t go any further.”

Winn looked past him; he was tired with the long night’s strain, and he had no white ideal to be a rapture in his heart. He loved Claire not because she was perfection, but because she was herself. She was faultless to Lionel, but Winn didn’t care whether she was faultless or not. He didn’t expect perfection or even want it, and he wasn’t the man to be satisfied with an ideal; but he wanted, as few men have ever wanted for any women, that Claire should be happy and safe.

“I’ve told you once,” he said; “you might know I shouldn’t change. I’ve got one or two little jobs to see to about Bouncing’s funeral. That woman’s half a little cat and half an abject fool. Still, you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. I dare say I can get things done by lunch-time; then I’ll drive over the Fluella. I’ll put up at the Kulm; but don’t bother to write till you’ve got something settled. I’m not going to mess about saying good-by to people. You can tell Miss Rivers when I’m gone.”

“Look here,” Lionel urged, “you can’t do that; you must say good-by to her properly. She was awfully sick at your not turning up at the ball. After all, you know, you’ve seen a lot of her, and she particularly likes you. You can’t jump off into space, as if you were that old chap in the Bible without any beginning or any end!”

Winn stuck his hands in his pockets and looked immovably obstinate.

“I’m damned if I do,” he replied. “Why should I? What’s the use of saying good-by? The proper thing to do when you’re going away is to go. You needn’t linger, mewing about like somebody’s pet kitten.”

Lionel poured out the whiskey before replying, and pushed a glass in Winn’s direction; then he said:

“Don’t be a fool, old chap; you’ll have to say good-by to her. You don’t want to hurt her feelings.”