Winn was from the first sure that it was perfectly all right. She
wouldn't notice him at all. She would merely look upon him as the man
who was there when there were skates to clean, skis to oil, any handy
little thing which the other fellows, being younger and not feeling so
like an old nurse, might more easily overlook. Women liked fellows who
cut a dash, and you couldn't cut a dash and be an old nurse
simultaneously. Winn clung to the simile of the old nurse. That was,
after all the real truth of his feelings, not more than that, certainly
not love. Love would make more of a figure in the world, not that it
mattered what you called things provided you behaved decently. Only he
was glad he was not in love.
He bought her flowers and chocolates, though he had a pang about the
chocolates, not feeling quite sure that they were good for her; but
flowers were safe.
He didn't give her lilies--they seemed too self-consciously virginal, as
if they wanted to rub it in--he gave her crimson roses, flowers that
frankly enjoyed themselves and were as beautiful as they could be. They
were like Claire herself. She never stopped to consider an attitude; she
just went about flowering all over the place in a kind of perpetual
fragrance.
She enjoyed herself so much that she simply hadn't time to notice any
one in particular. There were a dozen men always about her. She was so
young and happy and unintentional that every one wanted to be with her.
It was like sitting in the sun.
She never muddled things up or gave needless pain or cheated. That was
what Winn liked about her. She was as fair as a judge without being
anything like so grave.
They were all playing a game, and she was the leader. They would have
let her break the rules if she had wanted to break them! but she
wouldn't have let herself.
Of course the hotel didn't approve of her; no hotel could be expected to
approve of a situation which it so much enjoyed. Besides Claire was
lawless; she kept her own rules, but she broke everybody else's. She
never sought a chaperon or accepted some older woman's sheltering
presence; she never sat in the ladies' salon or went to tea with the
chaplain's wife. On one dreadful occasion she tobogganed wilfully on a
Sunday, under the chaplain's nose, with a man who had arrived only the
night before.
When old Mrs. Stewart, who knitted regularly by the winter and counted
almost as many scandals as stitches, took her up on the subject out of
kindness of heart, Claire had said without meaning to be rude:
"I really don't think the chaplain's nose ought to be there, to _be_
under, do you?"
Of course, Mrs. Stewart did. She had the highest respect for the
chaplain's nose; but it wasn't the kind of subject you could argue
about.
For a long time Claire and Winn never really talked; she threw words at
him over her shoulder or in the hall or when he put her skates on or
took them off at the rink. He seemed to get there quicker than any one
else, though the operation itself was sometimes a little prolonged. Of
course there were meals, but meals belonged to Maurice, and Claire had
a way of always slipping behind him, so that it was really over the
skates that Winn discovered how awfully clever she was.
She read books, deep books; why, even Hall Caine and Marie Corelli
didn't satisfy her, and Winn had always thought those famous authors the
last words in modern literature. He now learned others. She gave him
Conrad to read, and Meredith. He got stuck in Meredith, but he liked
Conrad; it made him smell the mud and feel again the silence of the
jungle.
"Funny," he explained to Claire, "because when you come to think of it,
he doesn't actually write about the smell; only he's got it, and the
jungle feeling, too. It's quiet, you know, in there, but not a bit like
the snows out here; there's nothing doing up in this snow, but God alone
knows what's happening in the jungle. Odd how there can be two sorts of
quiet, ain't it?"
"There can be two sorts of anything," said Claire, exultantly. "Oh, not
only two--dozens; that's why it's all such fun."
But Winn was inclined to think that there might be more fun where there
were fewer candidates for it. There was, for instance, Mr. Roper.
Maurice was trying to work up for his final examination at Sandhurst
with Mr. Roper. He was a black-haired, polite man with a constant smile
and a habit of agreeing with people much too promptly; also he read
books and talked to Claire about them in the evening till every one
started bridge. Fortunately, that shut him up.
Winn was considered in Anglo-Indian clubs, where the standard of bridge
is high, to play considerably above it, and Claire played with a relish,
that was more instinctive than reliable; nevertheless, Winn loved
playing with her, and accepted Mr. Roper and Maurice as one accepts
severity of climate on the way to a treat. He knew he must keep his
temper with them both, so when he wanted to be nasty he looked at
Claire, and when Claire looked at him he wanted to be nice. He couldn't,
of course, stop Claire from ever in any circumstances glancing in the
direction of Mr. Roper, and it would have startled him extremely if he
had discovered that Claire, seeing how much he disliked it, had reduced
this form of communion to the rarest civility; because Winn still took
for granted the fact that Claire noticed nothing.
It was the solid earth on which he stood. For some months his
consciousness of his wife had been an intermittent recognition of a
disagreeable fact; but for the first few weeks at Davos he forgot
Estelle entirely; she drifted out of his mind with the completeness of a
collar stud under a wardrobe.
He never for a moment forgot Peter, but he didn't talk about him because
it would have seemed like boasting. Even if he had said, "I have a boy
called Peter," it would have sounded as if nobody else had ever had a
boy like Peter. Besides, he didn't want to talk about himself; he wanted
to talk about Claire.
She hadn't time to tell him much; she was preparing for a skating
competition, which took several hours a day, and then in the afternoons
she skied or tobogganed with Mr. Ponsonby, a tall, lean Eton master
getting over an illness. Winn privately thought that if Mr. Ponsonby was
well enough to toboggan, he was well enough to go back and teach boys;
but this opinion was not shared by Mr. Ponsonby, who greatly preferred
staying where he was and teaching Claire.
Claire tobogganed and skied with the same thrill as she played bridge
and skated; they all seemed to her breathless and vital duties. She did
not think of Mr. Ponsonby as much as she did of the toboggan, but he
gave her points. In any case, Winn preferred him to Mr. Roper, who was
obliged to teach Maurice in the afternoons.
If one wants very much to learn a particular subject, it is surprising
how much of it one may pick up in the course of a day from chance
moments.
In a week Winn had learned that Maurice and Claire were orphans, that
they lived with an aunt who didn't get on with Claire and an uncle who
didn't get on with Maurice, and that there were several cousins too
stodgy for words. Claire was waiting for Maurice to get through
Sandhurst--he'd been horribly interrupted by pleurisy--and then she
could keep house for him somewhere--wherever he was sent--unless she
took up a profession. She rather thought she was going to do that in any
case, because they would have awfully little money; and besides, not
doing things was a bore, and every girl ought to make her way in the
world, didn't Major Staines think so?
Major Staines didn't, and emphatically said that he didn't.
"Good God, no! What on earth for?" was how he expressed it. Claire
stopped short, outside the office door, just as she was going to pay her
bill.
"We shall have to talk about this," she said gravely. "I'm awfully
afraid you're a reactionary."
"I dare say I am," said Winn, who hadn't the faintest idea what a
reactionary was, but rather liked the sound of it. "We'll talk about it
as much as you like. How about lunch at the Schatz Alp?"
That was how they went to the Schatz Alp and had their first real talk.