The Dark Tower

by Phyllis Bottome

  “Look here, you know, those high-heeled things on your feet are absolutely murderous. They might give you a bad tumble. Don’t let me see you in ’em again. Are you sure you’re quite comfortable, and all that?”

  He made the same absurd fuss about Estelle’s comfort in the railway carriage; but it was one of the last occasions on which he did it, because he discovered almost immediately that however many things you could think of for Estelle’s comfort, she could think of more for herself, and no matter how much care or attention was lavished upon her, it could never quite equal her unerring instinct for her own requirements.

  After this he was prepared to be ardent, but Estelle didn’t care for ardor in a railway train, so she soon stopped it. One of the funny things she discovered about Winn was that it was the easiest possible thing to stop his ardor, and this was really odd, because it was not from lack of strength in his emotion. She never quite discovered what it did come from, because it didn’t occur to her that Winn would very much rather have died than offend or tire the woman he loved.

  She thought that Winn was rather coarse, but he wasn’t as coarse as that!

  Estelle had a great deal that she wanted to talk over about the wedding. The whole occasion flamed out at her – a perfect project, perfectly carried out. She explained to Winn at length who everybody was and how there had been some people there who had had to be taken down, and others who had had to be pushed forward, and her mother explained to, and her father checked, and the children (it was too dreadful how they’d let Bobby run after Winn), kept as much out of the way as possible.

  Winn listened hard and tried to follow intelligently all the family histories she evolved for him. At last after a rather prolonged pause on his part, just at a point when he should have expressed admiration of her guidance of a delicate affair, Estelle glanced at him and discovered that he was asleep! They hadn’t been married for three hours, and he could go to sleep in the middle of their first real talk! She was sure Lionel Drummond wouldn’t have done any such thing. But Winn was old – he was thirty-five – and she could see quite plainly now that the hair round the tops of his ears was gray. She looked at him scornfully, but he didn’t wake up.

  When he woke up he laughed.

  “By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I believe I’ve been to sleep!” but he didn’t apologize. He began instead to tell her some things that might interest her, about what Drummond, his best man, and he, had done in Manchuria, just as if nothing had happened; but naturally Estelle wouldn’t be interested. She was first polite, then bored, then captious. Winn looked at her rather hard. “Are you trying to pay me back for falling asleep?” he asked with a queer little laugh. “Is that what you’re up to?” Estelle stiffened.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “I simply wasn’t very interested. I don’t think I like Chinese stories, and Manchuria is just the same, of course.”

  Winn leaned over her, with a wicked light in his eyes, like a naughty school boy. “Own up!” he said, laying his rough hand very gently on her shoulder. “Own up, old lady!”

  But has anybody ever owned up when they were being spiteful?

  Estelle didn’t. She looked at Winn’s hand till he withdrew it, and then she remarked that she was feeling faint from want of food.

  After she had had seven chicken sandwiches, pâté de foie gras, half a melon, and some champagne, she began to be agreeable.

  Winn was delighted at this change in her and quite inclined to think that their little “breeze” had been entirely due to his own awkwardness. Still, he wished she had owned up.

  CHAPTER V

  It took Winn a month to realize that he had paid his money, had his shy, and knocked down an empty cocoanut.

  He couldn’t get his money back, and he must spend the rest of his life carrying the cocoanut about with him.

  It never occurred to him to shirk the institution of marriage. The church, the law, and the army stood in his mind for good, indelible things. Estelle was his wife as much as his handkerchief was his handkerchief. This meant that they were to be faithful to each other, go out to dinner together, and that he was to pay her bills. He knew the great thing in any tight corner was never under any circumstances to let go. All the dangers he had ever been in, had yielded, only because he hadn’t.

  It was true he had not been married before, but the same rule no doubt held good of marriage. If he held on to it, something more bearable would come of it. Then one could be out of the house a good deal, and there was the regiment. He began to see his way through marriage as a man sees his way through a gap in an awkward fence. The unfortunate part of it was that he couldn’t get through the gap unless Estelle shared his insight.

  He would have liked to put it to her, but he didn’t know how; he never had had a great gift of expression, and something had brought him up very short in his communications with his wife.

  It was so slight a thing that Estelle herself had forgotten all about it, but to a Staines it was absolutely final. She had told the gardener that Winn wanted hyacinths planted in the front bed. Winn hadn’t wanted a garden at all, and he had let her have her way in everything else; but he had said quite plainly that he wouldn’t on any account have hyacinths. The expression he used about them was excessively coarse, and it certainly should have remained in Estelle’s memory. He had said, that the bally things stank. Nevertheless, Estelle had told the gardener that the master wanted hyacinths, and the gardener had told Winn. Winn gazed at the gardener in a way which made him wish that he had never been a gardener, but had taken up any other profession in which he was unlikely to meet a glance so “nasty.” Then Winn said quietly:

  “You are perfectly sure, Parsons, that Mrs. Staines told you it was my wish to have the hyacinths?” And the gardener had said:

  “Yes, sir. She did say, sir, as ’ow you ’ad a particler fancy for them.” And Winn had gone into the house and asked Estelle what the devil she meant? Estelle immediately denied the hyacinths and the gardener. People like that, she said, always misunderstand what one said to them.

  “Very well, then,” Winn replied. “He has lied to me, and must go. I’ll dismiss him at once. He told me distinctly that you had said I liked them.”

  Estelle fidgeted. She didn’t want the gardener to go. She really couldn’t remember what she’d said and what she hadn’t said to him. And Winn was absurd, and how could it matter, and the people next door had hyacinths, and they’d always had them at home!

  Winn listened in silence. He didn’t say anything more about the gardener having lied, and he didn’t countermand the hyacinths; only from that moment he ceased to believe a single word his wife said to him. This is discouraging to conversation and was very unfair to Estelle; for she might have told the truth more often if she had not discovered that it made no difference to her husband whether she told it to him or not.

  Estelle knew that her heart was broken, but on the whole she did not find that she was greatly inconvenienced.

  In an unhappy marriage the woman generally scores unless she is in love with her husband. Estelle never had been in love with Winn; she had had an agreeable feeling about him, and now she had a disagreeable feeling about him, but neither of these emotions could be compared with beaten-brass hot-water jugs, which she had always meant to have when she was married.

  If Winn had remained deeply in love with her, besides making things more comfortable at meals it would have been a feather in her cap. Still his cruelty could be turned into another almost more becoming feather.

  She said to herself and a little later to the nearest clergyman, “I must make an offering of my sorrow.” She offered it a good deal, almost to every person she met. Even the cook was aware of it; but, like all servants, she unhesitatingly sided with the master. He might be in the wrong, but he was seldom if ever in the kitchen.

  They had to have a house and servants, because Estelle felt that marriage without a house was hardly legal; and Winn had given way about it, as he was apt to do ab
out things Estelle wanted. His very cruelty made him particularly generous about money.

  But Estelle was never for a moment taken in by his generosity; she saw that it was his way of getting out of being in love with her. Winn was a bad man and had ruined her life – this forced her to supplement her trousseau.

  Later on when he put down one of his hunters and sold a polo pony so that she could have a maid, she began to wonder if she had at all found out how bad he really was?

  There was one point he never yielded; he firmly intended to rejoin his regiment in March.

  The station to which they would have to go was five thousand feet up, lonely, healthy, and quite unfashionable. Winn had tried to make it seem jolly to her and had mentioned as a recommendation apparently that it was the kind of place in which you needn’t wear gloves. It was close to the border, and women had to be a little careful where they rode.

  Estelle had every intention of being careful; she would, she thought, be too careful ever to go to the Indian frontier at all. She had often heard of the tragic separations of Anglo-Indian marriages; it was true that they were generally caused by illness and children, but there must be other methods of obtaining the same immunities.

  She had never had any difficulty with the doctor at home; she relied on him entirely, and he had invariably ordered her what she wanted, after a nice quiet talk.

  Travers, the regimental doctor, was different, he looked exactly like a vet, and only understood things you had actually broken. Still Estelle put her trust in Providence; no self-respecting higher Power could wish a woman of her type to be wasted on a hill station. Something would happen to help her, and if not, she would be given grace to help herself.

  One day Winn came down to breakfast with a particularly disagreeable expression. He said “good-morning” into his newspaper as usual without noticing her pathetic little smile.

  He only unburied himself to take his second cup of coffee, then he said, without looking at her,

  “It’s a beastly nuisance, the War Office want me to extend my leave – hanged if I do.”

  Estelle thanked Heaven in a flash and passed him the marmalade. She had never dreamed the War Office could be so efficient.

  “That shows,” she said gracefully, “what they think of you!”

  Winn turned his sardonic eyes towards her. “Thanks,” he drawled, “I dare say it’s the kind of thing you’d like. They propose that I should stay on here at the Staff College for another year and write ’em a damned red tape report on Tibet.” His irony, dropped from him. “If it was a job,” he said in a low voice, “I’d go like a shot.”

  “Mightn’t it mean promotion?” she asked a little nervously. Winn shrugged his shoulders. “I can write anything they want out there,” he said gloomily. “All I want is ink! What I know I’ve got in my head, you see. I’d take that with me.”

  “But you couldn’t talk things over with them or answer their questions, could you?” Estelle intelligently ventured. She had an intelligence which ripened along the line of her desires.

  “I could tell them anything they want to know in ten minutes!” said Winn impatiently. “They don’t want information, they want a straight swift kick! They know what I think – they just want me to string out a lot of excuses for them not to act! Besides the chief thing is – they’d have to send for me, if there was a row – I know the ground and the other chaps don’t. I wish to God there’d be a row!”

  Estelle sighed and gazed pathetically out of the window. Her eyes rested on the bed where the hyacinths were planted, and beyond it to gorse bushes and a corrugated iron shed.

  They were at Aldershot, which was really rather a good place for meeting suitable people. “What do you intend to do?” she asked, trembling a little. Winn was at his worst when questioned as to his intentions; he preferred to let them explode like fire-crackers.

  “Do!” he snorted, “Write and tell ’em when they’ve got any kind of job on the size of six-pence I’ll be in it! And if not Tibet’s about as useful to draw up a report on – as ice in the hunting season – and I’m off in March – and that’s that!”

  A tear rolled down Estelle’s cheek and splashed on the tablecloth; she trembled harder until her teaspoon rattled.

  Winn looked at her. “What’s up?” he asked irritably. “Anything wrong?”

  “I suppose,” she said, prolonging a small sob, “you don’t care what I feel about going to India?”

  “But you knew we were always going out in March didn’t you?” he asked, as if that had anything to do with it! The absurd face value that he gave to facts was enough to madden any woman. Estelle sobbed harder.

  “I never knew I should be so unhappy!” she moaned. Winn looked extremely foolish and rather conscience-stricken; he even made a movement to rise, but thought better of it.

  “I’m sure I’m awfully sorry,” he said apologetically. “I suppose you mean you’re a bit sick of me, don’t you?” Estelle wiped her eyes, and returned to her toast. “Can’t you see,” she asked bitterly, “that our life together is the most awful tragedy?”

  “Oh, come now,” said Winn, who associated tragedy solely with police courts and theaters. “It’s not so bad as all that, is it? We can rub along, you know. I dare say I’ve been rather a brute, but I shall be a lot better company when I’m back in the regiment. We must buck up, that’s all! I don’t like to bother you about it, but I think you’d see things differently if we had a kid. I do really. I’ve seen heaps of scratch marriages turn out jolly well – when the kids began to come!”

  “How can you be so disgustingly coarse!” shuddered Estelle. “Besides, I’m far too delicate! Not that you would care if I died! You’d just marry again!”

  “Oh, no! I shouldn’t do that,” said Winn in his horrid quiet way which might mean anything. He got up and walked to the window. “You wouldn’t die,” he observed with his back turned to her. “You’d be a jolly sight stronger all the rest of your life! I asked Travers!”

  “Oh!” she cried, “you don’t mean to tell me that you talked me over with that disgusting red-faced man!”

  “I don’t talk people over,” said Winn without turning round. “He’s a doctor. I asked his opinion!”

  “Well,” she said, “I think it was horrible of you – and – and most ungentlemanly. If I’d wanted to know, I’d have found out for myself. I haven’t the slightest confidence in regimental doctors.”

  Winn said nothing. One of the things Estelle most disliked in him was the way in which it seemed as if he had some curious sense of delicacy of his own. She wanted to think of Winn as a man impervious to all refinement, born to outrage the nicer susceptibility of her own mind, but there were moments when it seemed as if he didn’t think the susceptibilities of her mind were nice at all. He was not awed by her purity.

  He didn’t say anything of course, but he let certain subjects prematurely drop.

  Suddenly he turned round from the window and fixed his eyes on hers. She thought he was going to be very violent, but he wasn’t, he talked quite quietly, only something hard and bright in his eyes warned her to be careful.

  “Look here,” he said, “I’ve thought of something, a kind of bargain! I’ll give in to you about this job, if you’ll give in to me about the other! It’s no use fighting over things, is it?

  “If you’ll have a kid, I’ll stay on here for a year more; if you won’t, I’ll clear out in March and you’ll have to come with me, for I can’t afford two establishments. I don’t see what else to offer you unless you want to go straight back to your people. You’d hardly care to go to mine, if they’d have you.

  “But if you do what I ask about the child – I’ll meet you all the way round – I swear to – you shan’t forget it! Only you must ride straight. If you play me any monkey tricks over it – you’ll never set eyes on me again; and I’m afraid you’ll have to have Travers, because I trust him, not some slippery old woman who’d let you play him like a fish! D’you understan
d?”

  Estelle stared aghast at this mixture of brutality and cunning. Her mind flew round and round like a squirrel in a cage.

  She could have managed beautifully if it hadn’t been for Travers. Travers would be as impervious to handling as a battery mule. She really wouldn’t be able to do anything with Travers. He looked as if he drank; but he didn’t.

  Of course having a baby was simply horrid; lots of women got out of it nowadays who were quite happily married.

  It was disgusting of Winn to suggest it when he didn’t even love her.

  But once she had one, if she really did give way, a good deal might be done with it.

  Maternity was sacred; being a wife on the other hand was “forever climbing up the climbing wave,” there was nothing final about it as there was in being able to say, “I am the mother of your child!”

  Her wistful blue eyes expanded. She saw her own way spreading out before her like a promised land. “I can’t,” she said touchingly, “decide all this in a minute.”

  He could stay on for two years at the War Office, and Estelle meant him to stay without inconvenience to herself. He tried bargaining with her; but her idea of a bargain was one-sided.

  “I sometimes feel as if you kept me out of everything,” she said at last.

  Estelle was feeling her way; she thought she might collect a few extras to add to her side of the bargain.

  Apparently she was right. Winn was all eagerness to meet her. “How do you mean?” he asked anxiously.

  “Oh,” she said contemplatively, “such heaps of things! One thing, I don’t expect you’ve ever noticed that you never ask your friends to stay here. I’ve had all mine; you’ve never even asked your mother! It’s as if you were ashamed of me.”

  “I’ll ask her like a shot if you like,” he said eagerly. Estelle was not anxious for a visit from Lady Staines, but she thought it sounded better to begin with her. She let her pass.