The Dark Tower

by Phyllis Bottome

  “Of course I understood,” Claire went on; “you had to be with poor Mr. Bouncing. It was just like you to stay with him.” She had said a good deal, considering that Mr. Ponsonby and Lionel were there. Still, Winn did not misunderstand her. Of course she meant nothing.

  “Well,” he said, holding out his hand, “I’m extremely glad, Miss Rivers, to have run across you like this, because I’m off this afternoon to St. Moritz. I want to have a look at the Cresta.”

  Claire ignored his outstretched hand.

  “Oh,” she cried a little breathlessly, “you’re not going away, are you? But you’ll come back again, of course?”

  “I hope so, I’m sure, some day or other,” said Winn. Then he turned to Ponsonby. “Have you been down the Cresta?” he asked.

  Mr. Ponsonby shook his head.

  “Not from Church Leap,” he replied. “I’ve got too much respect for my bones. It’s awfully tricky; I’ve gone down from below it. You don’t get such a speed on then.”

  “Oh, Major Staines, you won’t toboggan?” Claire cried out. “You know you mustn’t toboggan! Dr. Gurnet said you mustn’t. You won’t, will you? Captain Drummond, aren’t you going with him to stop him?”

  Lionel laughed.

  “He isn’t a very easy person to stop,” he answered her. “I’ll join him later on, of course; but I want to see a little more of Davos before I go.”

  “There isn’t the slightest danger,” Winn remarked, without meeting Claire’s eyes. “The Cresta’s as safe as a church hassock. There isn’t half the skill in tobogganing that there is in skating. Good-by, Miss Rivers. I never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed our skating competition. I’m most grateful to you for putting up with me.”

  Claire gave him her hand then, but Winn remembered afterward that she never said good-by. She looked at him as if he had done something which was not fair.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Winn’s chief objection to St. Moritz was the shabby way in which it imitated Davos. It had all the same materials – endless snows, forests of fir-trees, soaring peaks and the serene blueness of the skies – and yet as Davos it didn’t in the least come off. It was more beautiful and less definite; the peaks were nearer and higher; they streamed out around the valley like an army with banners. The long, low lake and the small, perched villages, grossly overtopped by vulgar hotel palaces, had a far more fugitive air.

  It was a place without a life of its own. Whatever character St. Moritz might once have had was as lost as that of the most catholic of evening ladies in Piccadilly.

  Davos had had the dignity of its purpose; it had set out to heal. St. Moritz, on the contrary, set out to avoid healing. It was haunted by crown princes and millionaire Jews, ladies with incredible ear-rings and priceless furs; sharp, little, baffling trans-atlantic children thronged its narrow streets, and passed away from it as casually as a company of tramps.

  There was this advantage for Winn: nobody wanted to be friendly unless one was a royalty or a financial magnate. Winn was as much alone as if he had dropped from Charing Cross into the Strand. He smoked, read his paper, and investigated in an unaccommodating spirit all that St. Moritz provided; but he didn’t have to talk.

  Winn was suffering from a not uncommon predicament: he had done the right thing at enormous cost, and he was paying for it, instead of being paid. Virtue had struck her usual hard bargain with her votaries. She had taken all he had to give, and then sent in a bill for damages.

  He was not in the least aware that he was unhappy, and often, for five or ten minutes at a time, he would forget Claire; afterward he would remember her, and that was worse. The unfortunate part of being made all of a piece is that if you happen to want anything, there is really no fiber of your being that doesn’t want it.

  Winn loved in the same spirit that he rode and he always rode to a finish. In these circumstances and in this frame of mind, the Cresta occurred to Winn in the light of a direct inspiration. No one could ride the Cresta with any other preoccupation.

  Winn knew that he oughtn’t to do it; he remembered Dr. Gurnet’s advice, and it put an edge to his intention. If he couldn’t have what he wanted, there would be a minor satisfaction in doing what he oughtn’t. The homely adage of cutting off your nose to spite your face had never been questioned by the Staines family. They looked upon a nose as there chiefly for that purpose. It was a last resource to be drawn upon, when the noses of others appeared to be out of reach.

  There were, however, a few preliminary difficulties. No one was allowed to ride the Cresta without practice, and it was a part of Winn’s plan not to be bothered with gradual stages. Only one man had ever been known to start riding the Cresta from Church Leap without previous trials, and his evidence was unobtainable as he was unfortunately killed during the experiment. Since this adventure a stout Swiss peasant had been placed to guard the approaches to the run. Winn walked up to him during the dinner-hour, when he knew the valley was freest from possible intruders.

  “I want you to clear off,” he said to the man, offering him five francs, and pointing in the direction of St. Moritz. The peasant shook his head, retaining the five francs, and opening the palm of his other hand. Winn placed a further contribution in it and said firmly:

  “Now if you don’t go I shall knock you down.” He shook his fist to reinforce the feebleness of his alien speech. The Swiss peasant stepped off the path hurriedly into a snow-drift. He was a reasonable man, and he did not grasp why one mad Englishman should wish to be killed, nor, for the matter of that, why others equally mad, should wish to prevent it. So he walked off in the direction of St. Moritz and hid behind a tree, reposing upon the deeply rooted instinct of not being responsible for what he did not see.

  Winn regarded the run methodically, placed his toboggan on the summit of the leap, and looked down at the thin, blue streak stretching into the distance. The valley appeared to be entirely empty; there was nothing visibly moving in it except a little distant smoke on the way to Samaden. The run looked very cold and very narrow; the nearest banks stood up like cliffs.

  Winn strapped a rake to his left foot, and calculated that the instant he felt the ice under him he must dig into it, otherwise he would go straight over the first bank. Then he crouched over his toboggan, threw himself face downward, and felt it spring into the air.

  He kept no very definite recollection of the sixty-odd seconds that followed. The ice rose up at him like a wall; the wind – he had not previously been aware of the faintest draught of air – cut into his eyes and forehead like fire. His lips blistered under it.

  He felt death at every dizzy, dwindling second – death knotted up and racketing, so imminent that he wouldn’t have time to straighten himself out or let go of his toboggan before he would be tossed out into the empty air.

  He remembered hearing a man say that if you fell on the Cresta and didn’t let go of your toboggan, it knocked you to pieces. His hands were fastened on the runners as if they were clamped down with iron. The scratching of the rake behind him sounded appalling in the surrounding silence.

  He shot up the first bank, shaving the top by the thinness of a hair, wobbled sickeningly back on to the straight, regained his grip, shot the next bank more easily, and whirled madly down between the iron walls. He felt as if he were crawling slowly as a fly crawls up a pane of glass, in a buzzing eternity.

  Then he was bumped across the road and shot under the bridge. There was a hill at the end of the run. As he flew up it he became for the first time aware of pace. The toboggan took it like a racing-cutter, and at the top rose six feet into the air, and plunged into the nearest snow-drift.

  Winn crawled out, feeling very sick and shaken, and as if every bone in his body was misplaced.

  “Oh, you idiot! You idiot! you unbounded, God-forsaken idiot!” a voice exclaimed in his ears. “You’ve given me the worst two minutes of my life!”

  Winn looked around him more annoyed than startled. He felt a great disinclination for spe
ech and an increasing desire to sit down and keep still; and he did not care to conduct a quarrel sitting down.

  However, a growing inability to stand up decided him; he dragged out his toboggan and sat on it.

  The speaker appeared round a bend of the run. She had apparently been standing in the path that overlooked a considerable portion of it.

  She was not a young woman, and from her complexion and the hardness of her thickly built figure she might have been made of wood.

  She wore a short, strapped-in skirt, leather leggings, and a fawn-colored sweater. Her eyes were a sharp, decided blue, and the rest of her appearance matched the sweater.

  Winn pulled himself together.

  “I don’t see, Madam,” he remarked slowly, but with extreme aggressiveness, “what the devil my actions have to do with you!”

  “No,” said the lady, grimly, “I don’t suppose from the exhibition I’ve just been watching, that you’re in the habit of seeing farther than to the end of your own nose. However, I may as well point out to you that if you had killed yourself, as you richly deserved, and as you came within an ace of doing, the run would have been stopped for the season. We should all have been deprived of the Grand National, and I, who come up here solely to ride the Cresta, which I have done regularly every winter for twenty years, would have had my favorite occupation snatched from me at an age when I could least afford to miss it.”

  “I haven’t been killed, and I had not the slightest intention of being so,” Winn informed her with dangerous calm. “I merely wished to ride the Cresta for the first time unobserved. Apparently I have failed in my intention. If so, it is my misfortune and not my fault.” He took out a cigarette, and lit it with a steady hand, and turned his eyes away from her. He expected her to go away, but, to his surprise, she spoke again.

  “My name,” she said, “is Marley. What is yours?”

  “Staines,” Winn replied with even greater brevity. He had to give her his name, but he meant it to be his last concession.

  “Ah,” she said thoughtfully, “that accounts for it. You’re the image of Sir Peter, and you seem to have inherited not only his features, but his manners. I needn’t, perhaps, inform you that the latter were uniformly bad. I knew your father when I was a girl. He was stationed in Hong-Kong at the time and he was good enough to call me the little Chinese, no doubt in reference to my complexion. Plain as I am now, I was a great deal plainer as a girl, though I dare say you wouldn’t think it.”

  Winn made no comment upon this doubtful statement; he merely grunted. His private opinion was that ladies of any age should not ride the Cresta, and that ladies old enough to have known his father at Hong-Kong should not toboggan at all.

  It was unsuitable, and she might have hurt herself; into these two pitfalls women should never fall.

  Miss Marley had a singularly beautiful speaking voice; it was as soft as velvet. She dropped it half a tone, and said suddenly:

  “Look here, don’t do that kind of thing again. It’s foolish. People don’t always get killed, you know; sometimes they get maimed. Forgive me, but I thought I would just like to point it out to you. I could not bear to see a strong man maimed.”

  Winn knew that it was silly and weak to like her just because of the tone of her voice, but he found himself liking her. He had a vague desire to tell her that he wouldn’t do it again and that he had been rather a fool; but the snow was behaving in a queer way all around him; it appeared to be heaving itself up. He said instead:

  “Excuse me for sitting down like this. I’ve had a bit of a shake. I’ll be all right in a moment or two.” Then he fainted.

  Miss Marley stooped over him, opened his collar, laid him flat on the ground – he had fallen in a heap on his toboggan – and chafed his wrists and forehead with snow. When she saw that he was coming round, she moved a little away from him and studied his toboggan.

  “If I were you,” she observed, “I should have these runners cut a little finer; they are just a shade too thick.”

  Winn dragged himself on to the toboggan and wondered how his collar came to be undone. When he did it up, he found his hands were shaking, which amazed him very much. He looked a little suspiciously at his companion.

  “Of course,” Miss Marley continued pleasantly, “I ought to have that watchman discharged. I am a member of the Cresta committee, and he behaved scandalously; but I dare say you forced him into it, so I shall just walk up the hill and give him a few straight words. Probably you don’t know the dialect. I’ve made a point of studying it. If I were you, I should stay where you are until I come back. I want you to come to tea with me at Cresta. There’s a particularly good kind of bun in the village, and I think I can give you some rather useful tobogganing tips. It isn’t worth while your climbing up the hill just to climb down again, is it? Besides, you’d probably frighten the man.”

  “Thanks,” said Winn. “All right; I’ll stay.” He didn’t want the Cresta bun, and he thought that he resented Miss Marley’s invitation; but, on the other hand, he was intensely glad she was going off and leaving him alone.

  He felt uncommonly queer. Perhaps he could think of some excuse to avoid the tea when she came back.

  All the muscles of his chest seemed to have gone wrong; it hurt him to breathe. He sat with his head down, like a man climbing a hill against a strong wind. It was rather funny to feel ill again when he had really forgotten he was up there for his health. That was what he felt – ill.

  It was not nearly as painful a feeling as remembering Claire. Unfortunately, it was very quickly followed by the more painful feeling.

  When Miss Marley came back, he had the eyes of a creature caught in a trap.

  She took him to Cresta to tea, and it did not occur to Winn to wonder why a woman who at forty-five habitually rode the Cresta should find it necessary to walk at the pace of a deliberating snail. It was a pace which at the moment suited Winn precisely.

  On the whole he enjoyed his tea. Miss Marley’s manners, though abrupt, had certain fine scruples of their own. She showed no personal curiosity and she gave Winn some really valuable tips. He began to understand why she had so deeply resented his trifling with the Cresta.

  Miss Marley was one of the few genuine workers at St. Moritz, a member of the old band who had worked devotedly to produce the Monster which had afterward as promptly devoured them. This fate, however, had not as yet overtaken Miss Marley. She was too tough and too rich to be very easily devoured. The Cresta was at once her child and her banner; she had helped to make it, and she wound its folds around her as a screen for her invisible kindnesses.

  Menaced boys could have told how she had averted their ruin with large checks and sharp reproofs. She had saved many homes and covered many scandals. For girls she had a special tenderness. She had never been a beautiful young girl, and she had a pathetic reverence for what was frail and fair. For them she had no reproofs, only vast mercy, and patient skill in releasing them from the traps which had caught their flurried young senses; but for those who had set the traps she had no mercy.

  Miss Marley was not known for any of these things. She was celebrated for fights with chaplains and sanitary inspectors, and for an inability to give in to authority unless authority knew what it was about. She had never once tried to please, which is the foundation of charm. Perhaps it would have been a useless effort, for she was not born to please. She was born to get things done.

  After Miss Marley had talked to Winn for an hour, she decided to get him to join the Bandy Club. He was the kind of man who must do something, and it was obviously better that he should not again tempt fate by riding the Cresta from Church Leap without practice. This course became clearer to Miss Marley when she discovered that Winn had come up for his health.

  “Of course a fellow who wasn’t seedy wouldn’t have made an ass of himself over riding the Cresta,” Winn explained, eyeing her thoughtfully.

  He must have got somehow off his toboggan on to the snow, and he had no r
ecollection at all of getting there. Miss Marley said nothing to enlighten him further. She merely suggested bandy. After dinner she introduced Winn to the captain of the St. Moritz team, and at three o’clock the next afternoon she watched him play in a practice-match.

  Winn played with a concentrated viciousness which assured her of two things: he would be an acquisition to the team, and if he felt as badly as all that, it was just as well to get some of it worked off on anything as unresponsive as a ball.

  After this Miss Marley let him alone. She considered this the chief factor in assisting the lives of others; and for nearly two hours a day, while he was playing bandy, Winn succeeded in not remembering Claire.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Winn’s way of playing bandy was to play as if there wasn’t any ice. In the first few practices it had the disadvantage of a constant series of falls, generally upon the back of his head; but he soon developed an increasing capacity of balance and an intensity of speed. He became the quickest forward the St. Moritz team had ever possessed.

  When he was following the ball he took up his feet and ran. The hard clash of the skates, the determined onrush of the broad-built, implacable figure, were terrible to withstand. What was to be done against a man who didn’t skate, but tore, who fell upon a ball as a terrier plunges, eyeless and intent, into a rat-hole? The personal safety of himself or others never occurred to Winn. He remembered nothing but the rules of the game. These he held in the back of his mind, with the ball in front of it.

  All St. Moritz came to watch the great match between itself and Davos. It was a still, cold day; there was no blue in the sky; the mountains were a hard black and white and the valley very colorless and clear. There was a hush of coming snow in the air, and the sky was covered by a toneless, impending cloud.

  The game, after a brief interval, became a duel between two men: Winn, with his headlong, thirsty method of attack, and the champion player of Davos, Mavorovitch, who was known as the most finished skater of the season.