It was odd how Winn looked forward to seeing Staines; he couldn’t remember ever having paid much attention to the scenery before; he had always liked the bare backs of the downs behind the house where he used to exercise the horses, and the turf was short and smelt of thyme; and of course the shooting was good and the house stood well; but he hadn’t thought about it till now, any more than he thought about his braces.
He decided to walk up from the station. There was a short cut through the fields and then you came on the Court suddenly, over-looking a sheet of water.
It was a still November day, colorless and sodden. The big elms were as dark as wet haystacks and the woods huddled dispiritedly in a vague mist.
The trees broke to the right of the Court and the house rose up like a gigantic silver ghost.
It was a battered old Tudor building with an air of not having been properly cleaned; blackened and weather-soaked, unconscionably averse from change, it had held its own for four hundred years.
The stones looked as if they were made out of old moonlight and thin December sunshine. A copse of small golden trees, aspen and silver birches made a pale screen of light beside the house and at its feet, the white water stretched like a gleaming eye.
There wasn’t a tree Winn hadn’t climbed or an inch he hadn’t explored, fought over and played on. He wanted quite horribly to come back to it again, it was as if there were roots from the very soil in him tugging at his menaced life.
His mother advanced across the lawn to meet him. She wore a very old blue serge dress and a black and white check cap which looked as if it had been discarded by a jockey.
In one hand she held a trowel and in the other a parcel of spring bulbs. She gave Winn the side of her hard brown cheek to kiss and remarked, “You’ve just come in time to help me with these bulbs. Every one of them must be got in this afternoon. Philip has left us — your father threw a watering can at him. I can’t think what’s happened to the men nowadays, they don’t seem to be able to stand anything, and I’ve sent Davis into the village to buy ducks. He ought to have been back long ago if it was only ducks, but probably it’s a girl at the mill as well.”
Winn looked at the bulbs with deep distaste. “Hang it all, Mother,” he objected, “it’s such a messy day for planting bulbs!” “Nonsense,” said Lady Staines firmly, “I presume you wash your hands before dinner, don’t you, you can get the dirt off then? It’s a perfect day for bulbs as you’d know if you had the ghost of country sense in you. There’s another trowel in the small greenhouse, get it and begin.” Winn strode off to the greenhouse smiling; he had had an instinctive desire to get home, he wanted hard sharp talk that he could answer as if it were a Punch and Judy show.
In his married life he had had to put aside the free expression of his thoughts; you couldn’t hit out all round if the other person wouldn’t hit back and started whining. Every member of the Staines family had been brought up on the tradition of combative speech, the bleakest of personalities found its nest there. Sometimes, of course, you got too much of it. Sir Peter and Charles were noisy and James and Dolores were apt to be brutally rough. They were all vehement but there were different shades in their ability. Winn got through the joints in their armor as easily as milk slips into a glass. It was Lady Staines and Winn who were the deadly fighters.
They fought the others with careless ease, but they fought each other watchfully with fixed eyes and ready implacable brains.
It was difficult to say what they fought for but it was a magnificent spectacle to see them fight, and they had for each other a regard which, if it was never tender, had every element of respect.
They worked now for some time in silence. Suddenly Lady Staines cocked a wintry blue eye in her son’s direction and remarked, “Why ain’t your wife going with you to Davos?” Winn hurled a bulb into the small hole prepared for it before answering, then he said:
“She’s too delicate to stand the cold.”
“Is there anything the matter with her?” asked his mother.
Winn preferred to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn’t going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. “Marriage don’t seem to have agreed with either of you particularly well,” observed Lady Staines with a grim smile.
“We haven’t got your constitution,” replied her son. “If either you or Father had married any one else — they’d have been dead within six months.”
“Humph!” said his mother. “That only shows our sound judgment; we took what we could stomach! It’s her look-out of course, but I suppose she knows she’s running you into the Divorce Court, letting you go out there by yourself? All those snow places bristle with grass widows and girls who have outstayed their market and have to get a hustle on! Sending a man out there alone is like driving a new-born lamb into a pack of wolves!” Lady Staines with her eye on the heavily built and rather leathery lamb beside her gave a sardonic chuckle. Winn ignored her illustration.
“You needn’t be afraid,” he replied. “I’m done with women; they tempt me about as much as stale sponge cakes.”
“Ah!” said his mother, “I’ve heard that tale before. A man who says he’s done with women simply means one of them’s done with him. Besides, you’re to be an invalid, I understand! An invalid man is as exposed to women as a young chicken to rats. You won’t stand a ghost of a chance. Look at your father, if I left him alone when he was having an attack of gout with a gray-haired matron of a reformatory, he’d be on his knees to her before I could get back.”
“You can take it from me,” said Winn, “that even if I should need such a thing as a petticoat, I’d try a kind that won’t affect marriage. I’ll never look at another good woman again — the other sort will do for me if I can’t stick it without.”
“Don’t racket too much,” said Lady Staines, planting her last bulb with scientific skill. “They say keeping women’s very expensive up there — on account of the Russian Princes.”
“By the by,” said Winn, “thanks for the money. Had any difficulty in extracting it?”
“Not much,” said Lady Staines, withdrawing to the lawn. “Charles got rather in the way.”
“Silly ass,” observed Winn. “Didn’t want me to have it, I suppose?”
“No, he did want you to have it,” replied Lady Staines, “but he needn’t have been such a fool as to have said so. It nearly upset everything. His idea was, you see, that if his father gave you something — he and James would have to be bought off. So they were in the end, but they’d have had more if he’d played his hand better.”
Winn laughed. “Jolly to be home again,” he remarked. “Dinner as usual?”
“Yes,” said Lady Staines, “and don’t forget one of the footmen’s a Plymouth Brother and mustn’t be shocked. It’s so difficult to get any one nowadays, one mustn’t be too particular. He said he could stand your father by constant prayer, but he gave notice over Charles. Charles ought to have waited till dessert to let himself go.”
The dinner passed off well. Sir Peter and Winn had one never failing bone of contention, the rival merits of the sister services. Sir Peter expressed on every possible occasion in his son’s presence, a bitter contempt for the army, and Winn never let an opportunity pass without pointing out the gorged and pampered state of the British Navy.
“If we’d had half the money spent on us, Sir, that you keep guzzling over,” Winn cheerfully threw out, “we could knock spots out of Europe. The trouble with England is — she treats her sailors as if they were the proud sisters — and we are shoved out like Cinderella into the scullery to do all the dirty work.”
“Pooh!” said Sir Peter, “work! Is that what you call it — takin’ a horse out for an hour or two, and shoutin’ at a few men on a parade ground. What’s an army good for — even when it’s big enough to be seen with the naked eye and capable of attacking a few black savages with their antiquated weapons. Why you’re safe, that’s what you are — dead safe! Land’s beneath you — immovable — you can get anywhere you want to as easy as sliding down banisters! Targets keep still too! It’s nothing to hit a thing you can stand to fire at while it stands still to be fired at! Child’s play, that’s what it is. Look at us, something up all the time, peace or war. We’ve got the sea to fight — wind too — and thick weather. We’ve got our pace to mind and if we ever did clinch up we’d have to do our fighting at a rate that’d make an express train giddy — and running after a target goin’ as hard as we do! That’s what I call something of a service. No! No! The Army’s played out. You’re for ornament now, meant to go round Buckingham Palace and talk to nurse-maids in the Park.”
“Not many nurse-maids in the Kyber Pass,” his son observed.
“Frontiers — yes, I dare say,” snorted Sir Peter. “A few black rag dolls behind trees popping at you to keep your circulation going, and you with Maxims and all, going picnics in the hills and burning down villages as easy as pulling fire-crackers — and half the time you want help from us! Look at South Africa!”
They looked at South Africa for some time till the dessert came and the Plymouth Brother thankfully withdrew. After that Winn allowed himself some margin and Lady Staines leaned back in her chair, ate grapes and enjoyed her coffee.
The conversation became pungent, savage and enlivened on Sir Peter’s part by strange oaths.
Winn kept to sudden thrusts of irony impossible to foresee and difficult to parry.
They drank velvety ripe old port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent development suited to James, who was in command of one of them.
As to aëroplanes he said that as we’d now succeeded in imitating infernal birds and fishes — he supposed we’d soon bring off reptiles the kind of creature the modern young would be likely to represent best.
“We shall soon have the police crawling on their bellies up and down the Strand hiding behind lamp-posts,” finished Sir Peter. “Call that kind of thing science! It’s an inverted Noah’s Ark! That’s what it is! And when you get it all going to suit yourself, there’ll be another flood, and serve you all damned well right. I shall enjoy seeing you drown!”
Winn replied that you had to fight with your head now and that people who fought with their fists were about as dangerous as stuffed rabbits.
Sir Peter replied that in the end everything came down to blood, how much you’d got yourself and how much you could get out of the enemy.
Lady Staines was slightly afraid of leaving them in this atmosphere, but at last she reluctantly withdrew to the hall, where she listened to the varying shades of Sir Peter’s voice and decided they were on the whole loud enough to be normal.
At eleven o’clock she and Winn between them assisted Sir Peter to bed.
This was a sharp and fiery passage usually undertaken by the toughest of the gardeners.
Winn however managed extraordinarily well. He insisted on occasional pauses and by a home truth of an appallingly personal nature actually silenced his father for the last half flight.
Sir Peter breakfasted in his room.
He had had a bad night. He wouldn’t, as he explained to his wife, have minded if Winn had been a puny chap; but there he was, sound and strong, with clear hard eyes, broad, straight shoulders and a grip of iron, and yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you had microbes it didn’t matter how strong you were — they were just as likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic.
Microbes! The very thought of such small insignificant creatures getting in his way filled Sir Peter with fury. He had always hated insects. But the worst of it was in the morning he didn’t feel angry, he simply felt chilled and helpless. His son was hit and he couldn’t help him. It all came back to that. There was only one person who could help a sick man, and that person was his wife. Theoretically Sir Peter despised and hated women, but practically he leaned on his wife as only a strong man can lean on a woman; without her, he literally would not have known which way to turn. His trust in her was as solid as his love for a good stout ship. In every crisis of his life she had stood by his side, bitter tongued, hard-headed, undemonstrative and his as much as any ship that had sailed under his flag.
If she had failed him he would have gone down, and now here was his son’s wife — another woman — presumably formed for the same purpose, leaking away from under him at the very first sign of weather.
He thought of Estelle with a staggered horror; she had looked soft and sweet — just the woman to minister to a knocked-out man. The trouble with her was she had no guts.
Sir Peter woke his wife up at four o’clock in the morning to shout this fact into her ear. Lady Staines said, “Well — whoever said she had?” and apparently went to sleep again. But Sir Peter didn’t go to sleep: Estelle reminded him of how he had once been done over a mare, a beautiful, fine stepping lady-like creature who looked as if she were made of velvet and steel, no vice in her and every point correct; and then what had happened? He’d bought her and she’d developed a spirit like wet cotton wool, no pace, no staying power. She’d sweat and stumble after a few minutes run, no amount of dieting, humoring or whipping affected her. She’d set out to shirk, and shirk she did — till he worked her off on a damned fool Dolores had fortunately introduced him to — only wives can’t be handed on like mares — “Devil’s the pity” — Sir Peter said to himself, as he fell off to sleep. “Works perfectly with horses.”
Winn came up-stairs soon after breakfast a little set and silent, to say good-by to his father. Sir Peter had thrown his breakfast out of the window and congealed the Plymouth Brother’s morning prayers. He wanted to get hold of something tangible to move circumstances and cheat fate, but he couldn’t think what you did do, when it wasn’t a question of storms or guns — or a man you could knock down for insubordination, simply a physical fact.
He scowled gloomily at his son’s approach. “I wish you weren’t such a damned fool,” he observed by way of greeting. “Why can’t you shake a little sense into your wife? What’s marriage for? I’ve been talking to your mother about it. I don’t say she isn’t a confoundedly aggravating woman, your mother! But she’s always stuck to me, hasn’t let me down, you know. A wife ain’t meant to do that. It’s unnatural! Why can’t you say to her, ‘You come with me or I’ll damned well show you the reason why —’ That’s the line to take!”
“A woman you’ve got to say that to isn’t going to make much of a companion,” Winn said quietly. “I’d rather she stayed where she liked.”
Sir Peter was silent for a moment, then he said, “Any more children coming?”
“No,” said his son, “nor likely to be either, as far as I’m concerned.”
“There you are!” said Sir Peter. “Finicky and immoral, that’s what I call it! That’s the way trouble begins, the more children the less nonsense. Why don’t you have more children instead of sitting sneering at me like an Egyptian Pyramid?”
“That’s my look-out,” said Winn with aggravating composure. “When I want ’em, I’ll have ’em. Don’t you worry, Father.”
“That’s all devilish well!” said Sir Peter crossly. “But I shall worry! Do I know more about the world or do you? Not that I want to quarrel with you, my dear boy,” he added hastily. “I admit things are awkward for you — damned awkward — still it’s no use sitting down under them when you might have a row and clear the air, is it? What I want to say is — why not have a row?”
“You can’t have a row with a piece of pink silk, can you?” his son demanded. “I don’t want to blame her, but it’s no use counting her in; besides, honestly, Father, I don’t care a rap — why should I expect her to? My marriage was a misdeal.”
Sir Peter shook his head. “Men ought to love their wives,” he said solemnly; “in a sense, of course, no fuss about it, and never letting them know — and not putting oneself out about it! But still there ought to be something to hold on to, and anyhow the more you stick together, the more there is, and your going off like this won’t improve matters. Love or no love, marriage is a life.”
Winn laughed again. “Life — ” he said, “yes — well — how do I know how much longer I shall have to bother about life?”
There was a silence. Sir Peter’s gnarled old hands met above his blackthorn stick and trembled.
Winn wished he hadn’t spoken. He did not know how to tell his father not to mind. He hadn’t really thought his father would mind.
However, there they sat, minding it.
Then Sir Peter said, “I don’t believe in consumption, I never have, and I never shall; besides Taylor says Davos is a very good place for it, and you’re an early case, and it’s all damned nonsense, and you’ve got to buck up and think no more about it. What I want to hear is that you’re back in your Regiment again. I dare say there’ll be trouble later on, and then where’ll you be if you’re an invalid — have you ever thought of that?”
“Yes — that’d be something to live for,” Winn said gravely; “trouble.”
“You shouldn’t be so confoundedly particular,” said his father. “Now look at me — if we did have trouble where’d I be? Nowhere at all — old! Just gout and newspapers and sons getting up ideas about their lungs, but when do I complain?
“If you want another £50 any time — I don’t say that I can’t give it to you — though the whole thing’s damned unremunerative! There’s the trap. Well — good-by.”
Winn stood quite still for a moment looking at his father. It might have been thought by an observer that his eyes, which were remarkably bright, were offensively critical, but Sir Peter, though he wished the last moment to end, knew that his son was not being critical.
Then Winn said, “Well — good-by, Father. I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.” And his father said, “Damn everything!” just after the door was shut.