The Dark Tower

by Phyllis Bottome

  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.

  CHAPTER X

  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.

  CHAPTER XI

  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.