It hadn't seemed dismal at first, it had only seemed quite unnatural.
Everything had stopped being natural when the small creature in lawn,
only the height of his knee, had been torn reluctantly away from its
hold on his trousers. This parting had made Winn feel as if something
inside him was being unfairly handled.
There was nothing he could get hold of in Peter to promise security, and
the only thing that Peter could grasp was the trousers, which had had to
be forcibly removed from him.
Later on Peter would be consoled by a Teddy Bear or the hearth brush,
but Winn had had to go before Peter was consoled, and without the
resources of the hearth brush.
Estelle wept bitterly in the hall, but Winn hadn't minded that; he had
long ago come to the conclusion that Estelle had a taste for tears, just
as some people liked boiled eggs for breakfast. He simply patted her on
the shoulder and looked away from her while she kissed him.
He had enjoyed starting from Charing Cross, intimidating the porters and
giving the man who registered his luggage dispassionate and unfavorable
pieces of his mind. But when he was once fairly off he began to have a
new feeling. It came over him when he was out of England and had crossed
the small gray strip of formless familiar sea--the sea itself always
seemed to Winn to belong much more to England than to France--so much so
that it annoyed him at Boulogne to have to submit to being thought
possibly unblasphemous by porters. He began to feel alone. Up till now
he had always seen his way. There had been fellows to do things with and
animals; even marriage, though disconcerting, had not set him adrift. He
had been cramped by it, but not disintegrated. Now what seemed to have
happened was that he had been cut loose. There wasn't the regiment or
even a staff college to fall back upon. There wasn't a trail to follow
or horses to gentle; his very dog had had to be left behind because of
the ridiculous restrictions of canine quarantine.
It really was an extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling, as if he were a
damned ghost poking about in a new world full of surprises. It was quite
possible that he might find himself among bounders. He had always
avoided bounders, but that had been comparatively easy in a world where
everybody observed an unspoken, inviolable code. If people didn't know
the ropes, they found it simpler to go, and Winn had sometimes assisted
them to find it simpler; but he saw that now bounders could really turn
up with impunity, for, as far as ropes went, it was he himself who would
be in the minority. He might meet men who talked, long-haired,
mysterious chaps too soft to kick or radicals, though if the worst came
to the worst, he flattered himself that he had always the resource of
being unpleasant.
He knew that when the hair rose up on his head like the back of a
challenged bull-dog, and he stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at
people rather straight between the eyes, they usually shut up.
He didn't mind doing this of course, if necessary; only if he had to do
it to everybody in the hotel it might become monotonous, and he had a
nervous fear that consumption was rather a cad's disease.
Fortunately he had got his skates, and he supposed there'd be toboggans
and skis. He would see everybody in hell before he would share a table.
It was curious how one could get to thirty-six and then suddenly in the
middle of nothing start up a whole new set of feelings--feelings about
Peter, who had, after all, only just happened, and yet seemed to have
belonged to him always; and his lungs going wrong, and loneliness, like
a homesick school-girl! Winn had never felt lonely in Central Africa or
Tibet, so that it seemed rather absurd to start such an emotion in a
railway train surrounded by English people, particularly as it had
nothing to do with what he looked upon as his home. His feeling about
leaving the house at Aldershot had been, "Thank God there aren't going
to be any more dinners!"
Still, there it was. He did feel lonely; probably it was one of the
symptoms of bad lungs which Travers hadn't mentioned, the same kind of
thing as the perfectly new desire to lean back in his corner and shut
his eyes.
He felt all right in a way, his muscles acted, he could easily have
thrown a stout young man with white eyelashes passing along the corridor
through the nearest window; but there was a blurred sensation behind
everything, a tiresome, unaccountable feeling as if he mightn't always
be able to do things. He couldn't explain it exactly; but if it really
turned up at all formidably later, he intended to shoot himself quickly
before Peter got old enough to care.
One thing he had quite made up his mind about: he would get well if he
could, but if he couldn't, he wasn't going to be looked after. The mere
thought of it drove him into the corridor, where he spent the night
alternately walking up and down and sitting on an extremely
uncomfortable small seat by a draughty door to prove to himself that he
wasn't in the least tired.
He began to feel rather better after the coffee at Basle, and though he
was hardly the kind of person to take much interest in mere scenery, the
small Swiss villages, with their high pink or blue clock-faced churches
made him wish he could pack them into a box, with a slice of green
mountain behind, and send them to Peter to play with.
After Landeck he smelt the snows, and challenged successfully the whole
shivering carriage on the subject of an open window. The snows reminded
Winn in a jolly way of Kashmir and nights spent alone on dizzy heights
in a Dak bungalow.
The valleys ceased slowly to breathe, the dull autumn coloring sank into
the whiteness of a dream. The mountains rose up on all sides, wave upon
wave of frozen foam, aiming steadily at the high, clear skies. The
half-light of the failing day covered the earth with a veil of silver
and retreating gold.
The valleys passed into silence, freezing, whispering silence. The moon
rose mysteriously behind a line of black fir-trees, sending shafts of
blue light into the hollow cup of mountain gorges. It was a poet's
world, Blake or Shelley could have made it, it was too cold for Keats.
Winn had not read these poets. It reminded him of a particularly good
chamois hunt, in which he had bagged a splendid fellow, after four
hours' hard climbing and stalking. The mountains receded a little, and
everything became part of a white hollow filled with black fir-trees,
and beyond the fir-trees a blue lake as blue as an Indian moonstone, and
then one by one, with the unexpectedness of a flight of glow-worms,
sparkled the serried ranks of the hotels. Out they flashed, breaking up
the mystery, defying the mountains, as insistent and strident as life.
The train stopped, and its contents spilled themselves out a little
uncertainly and stiffly on the platform. Instantly the cold caught them,
not the insidious, subtle cold of lower worlds, but the fresh, brusk
buffet of the Alps. It caught them by the throat and chest, it tingled
in ears and noses; there was no menace in it, and no weakness. It was as
compulsory as a policeman in a street fight.
Winn had just stepped aside to allow a clamorous lady to take possession
of his porter when he saw a man struggle into the light under a
lamp-post; he was carrying something very carefully in his arms.
Winn could not immediately make out what it was, but he saw the man's
face and read utmost mortal misery in his eyes; then he discovered that
the burden was a woman. Her hands were so thin that they lay like
broken flower petals on the man's shoulders; her face was nothing but a
hollow shell; her eyes moved, so that Winn knew she was alive, and in
the glassy stillness of the air he caught her dry whispering voice, "I
am not really tired, dearest," she murmured. In a moment they had
vanished. It struck Winn as very curious that people could love each
other like that, or that a dying woman should fight her husband's fears
with her last strength. He felt horribly sorry for them and impatient
with himself for feeling sorry. After all, he had not come up to Davos
to go about all over the place feeling sorry for strange people to whom
he had never been introduced. The funny part of it was that he didn't
only feel sorry for them, he felt a little sorry for himself. Was love
really like that? And had he missed it? Well, of course he knew he had
missed it, only he hadn't realized that it was quite like that.
Fortunately at this moment a German porter appeared to whom Winn felt an
instant simple antagonism. He was a self-complacent man, and he brought
Winn the wrong luggage.
"Look here, my man," Winn said smoothly, but with a rocky insistence
behind his words, "if you don't look a little sharp and bring me the
_right_ boxes with green labels, I shall have to kick you into the
middle of next week."
This restored Winn even more quickly than it restored his luggage. No
one followed him into the small stuffy omnibus which glided off swiftly
toward its destination. The hotel was an ugly wooden house in the shape
of a hive built out with balconies; it reminded Winn of a gigantic
bird-cage handsomely provided with perches. It was only ten o'clock, but
the house was as silent as the mountains behind it.
The landlord appeared, and, leading Winn into a brilliantly lighted,
empty room, offered him cold meat.
Winn said the kind of thing that any Staines would feel called upon to
say on arriving at a cold place at a late hour and being confronted with
cold meat.
The landlord apologized in a whisper, and returned after some delay with
soup. Nothing, not even more language, could move him beyond soup. He
kept saying that it was late and that they must be quiet, and he didn't
seem to believe Winn when Winn remarked that he hadn't come up there to
be quiet. Winn himself became quieter as he followed the landlord
through interminable passages covered with linoleum where his boots made
a noise like muffled thunder.
Everywhere there was a strange sense of absolute cleanliness and
silence, the subduing smell of disinfectant and the sight of padded,
green felt doors.
When Winn was left alone in a room like a vivid cell, all emptiness and
electric light, and with another green door leading into a farther room,
he became aware of a very faint sound that came from the other side of
the door. It was like the bark of a dog shut up in a distant cellar; it
explained the padding of the doors.
In all the months that followed, Winn never lost this sound, near or
far; it was always with him, seldom shattering and harsh, but always
sounding as if something were being broken gradually, little by little,
shaken into pieces by some invisible disintegrating power.
Winn flung open the long window which faced the bed. It led out to a
small private balcony--if he had to be out on a balcony, he had of
course made a point of its being private--and looked over all Davos.
The lights were nearly gone now. Only two or three twinkled in a narrow
circle on a sheet of snow; behind them the vague shapes of the mountains
hung immeasurably alien and at peace.
A bell rang out through the still air with a deep, reverberating note.
It was a reassuring and yet solemn sound, as if it alone were
responsible for humanity, for all the souls crowded together in the tiny
valley, striving for their separate, shaken, inconclusive lives.
"An odd place--Davos," Winn thought to himself. "No idea it was like
this. Sort of mix up between a picnic and a cemetery!"
And then suddenly somebody laughed. The sound came from a slope of
mountain behind the hotel, and through the dark Winn's quick ear caught
the sound of a light rushing across the snow. Some one must be
tobogganing out there, some one very young and gay and incorrigibly
certain of joy. Winn hoped he should hear Peter laughing like that later
on. It was such a jolly boy's laugh, low, with a mischievous chuckle in
it, elated, and very disarming.
He hoped the child wouldn't get hauled up for being out so late and
making a noise. He smiled as he thought that the owner of the voice,
even if collared, would probably be up to getting out of his trouble;
and when he turned in, he was still smiling.