Dr. Gurnet's house was like an eye, or a pair of super-vigilant eyes,
stationed between Davos Dorf and Davos Platz.
It stood, a small brown chalet, perched high above the lake. There was
nothing on either side of it but the snows, the sunshine, and the sense
of its vigilance; inside, from floor to ceiling, there were neat little
cases with the number of the year, and in each year there was a
complete, exhaustive, and entertaining history of those who wintered,
unaware of its completion and entertainment, in either of the villages.
No eye but his own saw these documents, but no secret policeman ever so
controlled the inner workings of a culprit's mind. There was nothing in
Dr. Gurnet himself that led one to believe in his piercing quality. He
was a stout little man, with a high-domed, bald head, long arms, short
legs, and whitish blue eyes which had the quality of taking in
everything they saw without giving anything out.
Sometimes they twinkled, but the twinkle was in most cases for his own
consumption; he disinfected even his jokes so that they were never
catching. The consulting-room contained no medical books. There were two
book-shelves, on one side psychology from the physical point of view,
and in the other bookcase, psychology as understood by the leading
lights of the Catholic religion.
Dr. Gurnet was fond of explaining to his more intelligent patients that
here you had the two points of view.
"Psychology is like alcohol," he observed; "you may have it with
soda-water or without. Religion is the soda-water."
Two tiger skins lay on the floor. Dr. Gurnet was a most excellent shot.
He was too curious for fear, though he always asserted that he disliked
danger, and took every precaution to avoid it, excepting, of course,
giving up the thing which he had set out to do. But it was a fact that
his favorites among his patients were, as a rule, those who loved danger
for its own sake without curiosity and without fear.
He saw at a glance that Winn belonged to this category. Names were like
pocket electric lamps to Dr. Gurnet. He switched them on and off to
illuminate the dark places of the earth. He held Winn's card in his hand
and recalled that he had known a former colonel of his regiment.
"A very distinguished officer," he remarked, "of a very distinguished
regiment. Probably perfectly unknown in England. England has a
preference for worthless men while they live and a tenderness for them
after they are dead unless corrected by other nations. It is an odd
thing to me that men like Colonel Travers and yourself, for instance,
care to give up your lives to an empire that is like a badly deranged
stomach with a craving for unhealthy objects."
"We haven't got to think about it," said Winn. "We keep the corner we
are in quiet."
"Yes," said Dr. Gurnet sympathetically, "I know; but I think it would be
better if you had to think about it. Perhaps it wouldn't be necessary to
keep things quiet if they were more thoroughly exposed to thought."
Winn's attention wandered to the tiger skins.
"Did you bag those fellows yourself?" he asked. Dr. Gurnet smilingly
agreed. After this Winn didn't so much mind having his chest examined.
But the examination of his chest, though a long and singularly thorough
operation, seemed to Dr. Gurnet a mere bead strung on an extended
necklace. He hadn't any idea, as the London specialist had had, that
Winn could only have one organ and one interest. He came upon him with
the effect of bouncing out from behind a screen with a series of funny,
flat little questions. Sometimes Winn thought he was going to be angry
with him, but he never was. There was a blithe impersonal touch in Dr.
Gurnet, a smiling willingness to look on private histories as of less
importance than last year's newspapers. It was as if he airily explained
to his patients that really they had better put any facts there were on
the files, and let the housemaid use the rest for the kitchen fire; and
he required very little on Winn's part. From a series of reluctant
monosyllables he built up a picturesque and reliable structure of his
new patient's life. They weren't by any means all physical questions. He
wanted to know if Winn knew German. Winn said he didn't, and added that
he didn't like Germans.
"Then you should take some pains to understand them," observed Dr.
Gurnet. "Not to understand the language of an enemy is the first step
toward defeat. Why, it is even necessary sometimes to understand one's
friends."
Winn said that he had a friend he understood perfectly; his name was
Lionel Drummond.
"I know him through and through," he explained; "that's why I trust
him." Dr. Gurnet looked interested, but not convinced.
"Ah," he said, "personally I shouldn't trust any man till he was dead.
You know where you are then, you know. Before that one prophesies. By
the by, are you married?" Dr. Gurnet did not raise his eyes at this
question, but before Winn's leaden "Yes" had answered him he had written
on the case paper, "Unhappy domestic life."
"And--er--your wife's not here with you?" Dr. Gurnet suavely continued.
Winn thought himself non-committal when he confined himself to saying:
"No; she's in England with my boy." He was as non-committal for Dr.
Gurnet as if he had been a wild elephant. He admitted Peter with a
change of voice, and asked eagerly if things with lungs were hereditary
or catching?
"Not at present in your case," Dr. Gurnet informed him. "By the by,
you'll get better, you know. You're a little too old to cure, but you'll
patch up."
"What does that mean?" Winn demanded. "Shall I be a broken-winded,
cats'-meat hack?"
Dr. Gurnet shook his head.
"You can go back to your regiment," he said, "and do anything you like
bar pig-sticking and polo in a year's time. That is to say, if you do as
you are told for that year and will have the kindness to remember that,
if you do not, I am not responsible, nor shall I be in any great degree
inconsolable. I am here like a sign-post; my part of the business is to
point the road. I really don't care if you follow it or not; but I
should be desolated, of course, if you followed it and didn't arrive.
This, however, has not yet occurred to me.
"You will be out of doors nine hours a day, and kindly fill in this card
for me. You may skate, but not ski or toboggan, nor take more than four
hours' active exercise out of the twenty-four. In a month's time I shall
be pleased to see you. Remember about the German and--er--do you ever
flirt?"
Winn stared ominously.
"Flirt? No," he said. "Why the devil should I?"
Dr. Gurnet gave a peculiar little smile, half quizzical and half kindly.
"Well," he said, "I sometimes recommend it to my patients in order that
they may avoid the intenser application known as falling in love. Or in
cases like your own, for instance, when a considerable amount of
beneficial cheerfulness may be arrived at by a careful juxtaposition of
the sexes. You follow me?"
"No, hanged if I do," said Winn. "I've told you I'm married, haven't I?
Besides, I dislike women."
"Ah, there perhaps we may be more in agreement than you imagine," said
Dr. Gurnet, increasing his kindly smile. "But I must continue to assure
you that this avoidance of what you dislike is a hazardous operation.
The study of women at a distance is both amusing and instructive. I
grant you that too close personal relations are less so. I have avoided
family life most carefully from this consideration, but much may be
obtained from women without going to extremes. In fact, if I may say so,
women impart their most favorable attributes solely under these
conditions. Good morning."
Winn left the small brown house with a heart that was strangely light.
Of course he didn't believe in doctors any more than Sir Peter did, but
he found himself believing that he was going to get well.
All the morning he had been moving his mind in slow waves that did not
seem like thoughts against the rock of death; but he came away from the
tiger-skins and the flickering laughter of Dr. Gurnet's eyes with a
comfortable sense of having left all such questions on the doorstep. He
thought instead of whether it was worth while to go down to the rink
before lunch or not.
It was while he was still undecided as to this question that he heard a
little shriek of laughter. It ran up a scale like three notes on a
flute; he knew in a moment that it was the same laughter he had
listened to the night before.
He turned aside and found himself at the bend of a long ice run leading
down to the lake. A group of men were standing there, and with one foot
on a toboggan, her head flung back, her eyes full of sparkling mischief,
was the child. He forgot that he had ever thought her a boy, though she
looked on the whole as if she would like to be thought one. Her curly
auburn hair was short and very thick, and perched upon it was a round
scarlet cap; her mouth was scarlet; her eyes were like Scotch braes,
brown and laughing; the curves of her long, delicate lips ran upward;
her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was
tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a
very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles;
a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of
pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been
sixteen, though she was, as a matter of fact, three years older; but she
was not so much an age as a sensation--the sensation of youth,
incredibly arrogant and unharmed. The men were trying to dissuade her
from the run. It had just been freshly iced; the long blue line of it
curved as hard as iron in and out under banks of ice far down into the
valley. A tall boy beside her, singularly like her in features and
coloring, but weaker in fiber and expression, said querulously:
"Don't go and make a fool of yourself, Claire. It's a man's run, not a
girl's. I won't have you do it." It was the fatal voice of authority
without power.
Across the group her eyes met Winn's; wicked and gay they ran over him
and into him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and stared back at her
grimly, like a Staines. He wasn't going to say anything; only if she had
belonged to him he would have stopped her. His eyes said he could have
stopped her; but she didn't belong to him, so he set his square jaw, and
gave her his unflinching, indifferent disapproval.
She appeared after this to be unaware of him, and turned to her brother.
"Won't have it?" she said, with a little gurgle of laughter. "Why, how
do you suppose you can stop me? There's only one way of keeping a man's
run for men, and that's for girls not to be able to use it--see!"
She slipped her teasing foot off the toboggan and with an agile twist of
her small body sprang face downward on the board. In an instant she was
off, lying along it light as a feather, but holding the runners in a
grip of steel. In a moment more she was nothing but a traveling black
dot far down the valley, lifting to the banks, swirling lightning swift
back into the straight in a series of curves and flashes, till at the
end the toboggan, girl and all, swung high into the air, and subsided
safely into a snow-drift.
Winn turned and walked away; he wasn't going to applaud her. Something
burned in his heart, grave and angry, stubborn and very strong. It was
as if a strange substance had got into him, and he couldn't in the least
have said what it was. It voiced itself for him in his saying to
himself, "That girl wants looking after." The men on the bank admired
her; there were too many of them, and no woman. He wondered if he should
ever see her again. She was curiously vivid to him--brown shoes and
stockings, tossed hair, clear eyes. He remembered once going to an opera
and being awfully bored because there was such a lot of stiff music and
people bawling about; only on the stage there had been a girl lying in
the middle of a ring of flames. She'd showed up uncommonly well, rather
like this one did in the hot sunshine.
Walking back to the hotel he met a string of bounders, people he had
seen and loathed at breakfast. Some of them had tried to talk to him;
one beggar had had the cheek to ask Winn what he was up there for, and
when Winn had said, "Not to answer impertinent questions," things at the
breakfast-table--there was one confounded long one for breakfast--had
fallen rather flat.
He felt sure he wouldn't see the girl again; only he did almost at once.
She came into the _salle-a-manger_ with her brother, as if it belonged
to them. After two stormy, obstinate scenes Winn had obtained the
shelter of his separate and solitary table. The waiter approached the
two young things as they entered late and a little flushed; apparently
he explained to them with patient stubbornness that they, at any rate,
must give up this privilege; they couldn't have a separate table. He
also tried to persuade them which one to join. The boy made a blustering
assertion of himself and then subsided. Claire Rivers did neither. Her
eyes ran over the room, mutinous and a little disdainful; then she
moved. It seemed to Winn he had never seen anybody move so lightly and
so swiftly. There was no faltering in her. She took the room with her
head up like a sail before a breeze. She came straight to Winn's table
and looked down at him.
"This is ours," she said. "You've taken it, though we were here first.
Do you think it's fair?"
Winn rose quietly and looked down at her. He was glad he was half a head
taller; still he couldn't look very far down. She caught at the corner
of her lip with a small white tooth. He tried to make a look of
sternness come into his eyes, but he felt guiltily aware that he wanted
to give in to her, just as he wanted to give in, to Peter.
"Of course," he said, gravely, "I had no idea it was your table when I
got it from that tow-headed fool. You must take it at once, and I'll
make him bring in another one."
"He won't," said Claire. "He says he can't; Herr Avalon, the proprietor,
won't give him another; besides, there isn't room."
"Oh, I think he will," said Winn. "Shall I go over and bring your
brother to you? Won't you sit down?"
She hesitated, then she said:
"You make me feel as if I were being very rude, and I don't want to
drive you away. Only, you know, the other people here are rather awful,
aren't they?"
Winn was aware that their entire awfulness was concentrated upon his
companion.
"Please sit down," he said a little authoritatively. Her brother ought
to have backed her up, but the young fool wouldn't; he stood
shamefacedly over by the door. "I'll get hold of your brother," Winn
added, turning away from her. The waiter hovered nervously in their
direction.
"Am I to set for the three, sir?" he ventured. Claire turned quickly
toward Winn.
"Yes," she said; "why not? If you don't mind, I mean. You aren't really
a bit horrid."
"How can you possibly tell?" Winn asked, with a short laugh. "However,
I'll get your brother, and if you really don't mind, I'll come back with
him."
Claire was quite sure that she could tell and that she didn't mind.
The waiter came back in triumph, but Winn gave him a sharp look which
extracted his triumph as neatly as experts extract a winkle with a pin.
Maurice apologized with better manners than Winn had expected. He looked
a terribly unlicked cub, and Winn found himself watching anxiously to
see if Claire ate enough and the right things. He couldn't, of course,
say anything if she didn't, but he found himself watching.