Phyllis Bottome - The Dark Tower

Sometimes they went far down the valley to Sils and on to the verge of the Maloja. Sometimes they drove through the narrower valleys to Pontresina and on into the impenetrable winter gloom of the Mortratsch glacier. The end was the same solitude, sunshine, and their love. The world was wrapped away in its winter stillness. The small Swiss villages slept and hardly stirred. In the hot noonday a few drowsy peasants crept to and from the barns where the cattle passed their winter life. Sometimes a woman labored at a frozen pump, or a party of skiers slipped rapidly through the shady streets, rousing echoes with their laughter; but for the most part they were as much alone as if the world had ceased to hold any beings but themselves. The pine-trees scented all the air, the snow dripped reluctantly, and sometimes far off they heard the distant boom of an avalanche. They sat together for long sunlit hours on the rickety wooden balcony of a friendly hospice, drinking hot spiced glüwein and building up their precarious memories.

There were moments when the hollow present snapped under their feet like a broken twig, and then the light in their eyes darkened and they ran out upon the safer path of make-believe.

It was Winn who, curiously enough, began it, and returned to it oftenest. It came to him, this abolishing of Estelle, always more easily than it came to Claire. It was inconceivable to Claire that Winn didn’t, as a rule, remember his wife. She could have understood the tragedy of his marriage, but Winn didn’t make a tragedy of it, he made nothing of it at all. It seemed terrible to Claire that any woman, bearing his name, the mother of his child, should have no life in his heart. She found herself resenting this for Estelle. She tried to make Winn talk about her, so that she might justify her ways to him. But Winn went no further in his expressions than the simple phrases, “She’s not my sort,” “We haven’t anything in common,” “I expect we didn’t hit it off.” Finally he said, terribly, under the persistency of Claire’s pressure, “Well, if you will have it, I don’t believe a single word she says.”

“Oh, but sometimes, sometimes she must speak the truth!” Claire urged, breathless with pity.

“I dare say,” Winn replied indifferently. “Possibly she does, but what difference does it make to me when I don’t know which times?”

Claire waited a little, then she said:

“I wasn’t thinking of the difference to you; I was thinking of the difference to her.”

“I tell you,” Winn repeated obstinately, “that I don’t care a hang about the difference to her. People shouldn’t tell lies. I don’t care that for her!” He snapped a crumb off the table. He looked triumphantly at Claire, under the impression that he had convinced her of a pleasing fact. She burst into tears.

He tried to take her in his arms, but for a moment she resisted him.

“Do you want me to love Estelle?” he asked in desperation.

Claire shook her head.

“I’d like her — to be loved,” she said, still sobbing.

Winn looked wonderingly at her.

“Well, as far as that goes, so would I,” he observed, with a sardonic grin. “There’d be some way out for us then.”

Claire shook her head vehemently, but she made no attempt to explain her tears. She felt that she couldn’t alter him, and that when he most surprised her it was wiser to accept these surprises than to probe her deep astonishment.

He surprised her very often, he was in such a hurry to unburden himself of all he was. It seemed to him as if he must tell her everything while he had her. He expressed himself as he had never in his wildest dreams supposed that any man could express himself to another human being. He broke down his conventions, he forced aside his restraint, he literally poured out his heart to her. He gave her his opinions, his religion, his codes of conduct, until she began a little to understand his attitude toward Estelle.

It was part of his exterior way of looking at the world at large. Up till now people, except Lionel, had never really entered into his imagination. Of course there were his servants and his dogs and, nearer still, his horses. He spent hours telling her about his horses. They really had come into his life, but never people; even his own family were nothing but a background for wrangles.

He had never known tenderness. He had had all kinds of odd feelings about Peter, but they hadn’t got beyond his own mind. His tenderness was beyond everything now; it over-flowed expression. It was the radical thing in him. He showed her plainly that it would break his heart if she were to let her feet get wet. He made plans for her future which would have suited a chronic invalid. He wanted to give her jewels, expensive specimens of spaniels, and a banking account.

She would take nothing from him but a notebook and a little opal ring. Winn restrained his passion, but out of revenge for his restraint his fancies ran wild.

It was Claire who had to be practical; she who had spent her youth in dreams now clung desperately to facts. She read nothing, she hardly talked, but she drew his very soul out to meet her listening soul. There were wonders within wonders to her in Winn. She had hardly forced herself to accept his hardness when she discovered in him a tolerance deeper than anything she had ever seen, and an untiring patience. He had pulled men out of holes only to see them run back into them with the swiftness of burrowing rabbits; but nothing made him feel as if he could possibly give them up.

“You can’t tell how many new starts a man wants,” he explained to Claire; “but he ought to have as many as he can take. As long as a man wants to get on, I think he ought to be helped.”

His code about a man’s conduct to women was astonishingly drastic.

“If you’ve let a woman in,” he explained, “you’ve got to strip yourself to get her out, no matter whether you care for her or not. The moment a woman gets caught out, you can’t do too much for her. It’s like seeing a dog with a tin can tied to its tail; you’ve got to get it off. A man ought to pay for his fun; even if it isn’t his fault, he ought to pay just the same. It’s not so much that he’s the responsible person, but he’s the least had. That ought to settle the question.”

He was more diffident, but not less decided, on the subject of religion.

“If there’s a God at all,” he stated, “He must be good; otherwise you can’t explain goodness, which doesn’t pay and yet always seems worth having. You know what I mean. Not that I am a religious man myself, but I like the idea. Women certainly ought to be religious.”

He hoped that Claire would go regularly to church unless it was draughty.

It was on the Bernina, when they were nine thousand feet up in a blue sky, beyond all sight or sound of life, in their silent, private world, that they talked about death.

“Curious,” Winn said, “how little you think about it when you’re up against it. I shouldn’t like to die of an illness. That’s all I’ve ever felt about it; that would be like letting go. I don’t think I could let go easily; but just a proper, decent knock-out — why, I don’t believe you’d know anything about it. I never felt afraid of chucking it, till I knew you, now I’m afraid.”

Claire looked at his strong hands in the sunshine and at her own which lay on his; they looked so much alive! She tried hard to think about death, because she knew that some day everybody must die; but she felt as if she was alive forever.

“Yes,” she said; “of course I suppose we shall. But, Winn, don’t you think that we could send for each other then? Wouldn’t that be splendid?”

The idea of death became suddenly a shortening of the future; it was like something to look forward to. Winn nodded gravely, but he didn’t seem to take the same comfort in it that Claire did. He only said:

“I dare say we could manage something. But you feel all right, don’t you?”

Claire laughed until something in his grave eyes hurt her behind her laughter.

The sky changed from saffron to dead blue and then to startling rose color. Flame after flame licked the Bernina heights. Their sleigh-bells rang persistently beneath them. They drank their coffee hurriedly while the sun sank out of the valley, and the whole world changed into an icy light.

They drove off rapidly down the pass, wrapped in furs and clinging to each other. They did not know what anything would mean when they were apart. The thought of separation was like bending from a sunny world over a well of darkness. Claire cried a little, but not very much. She never dared let herself really cry because of what might happen to Winn.

It surprised him sometimes how little she tried to influence his future life. She did not make him promise anything except to go to see Dr. Gurnet. He wondered afterward why she had left so much to his discretion when he had made so many plans, and urgent precautions for her future; and yet he knew that when she left him he would be desperate enough to break any promises and never desperate enough to break her trust in him. Suddenly he said to her as the darkness of the pass swallowed them:

“Look here, I won’t take to drink. I’d like to, but I won’t.” And Claire leaned toward him and kissed him, and he said a moment later, with a little half laugh:

“D’you know, I rather wish you hadn’t done that. You never have before, and I sha’n’t be able to forget it. You put the stopper on to that intention.”

And Claire said nothing, smiling into the darkness.

Claire had never been alone with Miss Marley before; she had known her only as an accompaniment to Winn; but she had been aware, even in these partial encounters, that she was being benevolently judged. It must be owned that earlier in the day she had learned, with a sinking of the heart, that she must give up the evening to Miss Marley. When every hour counted as a victory over time, she could not understand how Winn could let her go; and yet he had said quite definitely: “I want you to go to Miss Marley this evening. She’d like to talk to you, and I think you’d better.”

But something happened which changed her feelings. Miss Marley was a woman despite the Cresta and there are times when only a woman’s judgment can satisfy the heart of a girl. Claire was startled and perturbed by Maurice’s sudden intervention. Maurice said:

“That chap Staines is getting you talked about. Pretty low down of him, as I believe he’s married.” She was pulled up short in the golden stream of her love. She saw for the first time the face of opinion — that hostile, stupid, interfering face. Claire had never thought that by any malign possibility they could be supposed to be doing wrong. She could not connect wrong with either her love or Winn’s. If there was one quality more than another which had distinguished it, it had been its simple sense of rightness. She had seen Winn soften and change under it as the hard earth changes at the touch of spring. She had felt herself enriched and enlarged, moving more unswervingly than ever toward her oldest prayer — that she might, on the whole, be good. She hardly prayed at all about Winn; loving him was her prayer.

If she had meant to take him away from Estelle or to rob him of Peter, then she knew she would have been wrong. But in this fortnight she was taking nothing from Estelle that Estelle had ever had, and she was doing no harm to Peter. It would not be likely to do him any harm to soften his father’s heart.

Claire’s morality consisted solely in the consideration of other people; her instincts revolted against unkindness. It was an early Christian theory much lost sight of, “Love, and do as you please,” the safety of the concession resting upon the quality of the love.

But to-night another idea had occurred to her, and she was very uneasy. Was it really possible that any one could blame Winn? Her first instinct had been sheer anger, and her anger had carried her past fear into the pride of love. She had felt as if she wanted to confront the world and defy it. If the world dared judge them, what did it matter? Their hearts were clean. She was too young to know that under the world’s judgments clean hearts break even more easily than soiled ones.

But her mind had not rested there. She had begun to be afraid for Winn, and with all her heart she longed to see him justified. What had he ever done that he could be judged? He had loved her, spared her, guarded her. He had made, he was making, inconceivable sacrifices for her. He was killing not only his own joy, but hers rather than do her what he thought a wrong.

She sat on a footstool in front of Miss Marley’s wood fire, frowning at the flames. Miss Marley watched her cautiously; there was a good deal she wanted to say, but she hoped that most of it might be said by Claire. A very careful talker can get a good deal expressed in this way; impressions, to be permanent, must always come from the person you wish to impress.