The Dark Tower

“I tell you,” Winn repeated obstinately, “that I don’t care a hang about the difference to her. People shouldn’t tell lies. I don’t care that for her!” He snapped a crumb off the table. He looked triumphantly at Claire, under the impression that he had convinced her of a pleasing fact. She burst into tears.

He tried to take her in his arms, but for a moment she resisted him.

“Do you want me to love Estelle?” he asked in desperation.

Claire shook her head.

“I’d like her — to be loved,” she said, still sobbing.

Winn looked wonderingly at her.

“Well, as far as that goes, so would I,” he observed, with a sardonic grin. “There’d be some way out for us then.”

Claire shook her head vehemently, but she made no attempt to explain her tears. She felt that she couldn’t alter him, and that when he most surprised her it was wiser to accept these surprises than to probe her deep astonishment.

He surprised her very often, he was in such a hurry to unburden himself of all he was. It seemed to him as if he must tell her everything while he had her. He expressed himself as he had never in his wildest dreams supposed that any man could express himself to another human being. He broke down his conventions, he forced aside his restraint, he literally poured out his heart to her. He gave her his opinions, his religion, his codes of conduct, until she began a little to understand his attitude toward Estelle.

It was part of his exterior way of looking at the world at large. Up till now people, except Lionel, had never really entered into his imagination. Of course there were his servants and his dogs and, nearer still, his horses. He spent hours telling her about his horses. They really had come into his life, but never people; even his own family were nothing but a background for wrangles.

He had never known tenderness. He had had all kinds of odd feelings about Peter, but they hadn’t got beyond his own mind. His tenderness was beyond everything now; it over-flowed expression. It was the radical thing in him. He showed her plainly that it would break his heart if she were to let her feet get wet. He made plans for her future which would have suited a chronic invalid. He wanted to give her jewels, expensive specimens of spaniels, and a banking account.

She would take nothing from him but a notebook and a little opal ring. Winn restrained his passion, but out of revenge for his restraint his fancies ran wild.

It was Claire who had to be practical; she who had spent her youth in dreams now clung desperately to facts. She read nothing, she hardly talked, but she drew his very soul out to meet her listening soul. There were wonders within wonders to her in Winn. She had hardly forced herself to accept his hardness when she discovered in him a tolerance deeper than anything she had ever seen, and an untiring patience. He had pulled men out of holes only to see them run back into them with the swiftness of burrowing rabbits; but nothing made him feel as if he could possibly give them up.

“You can’t tell how many new starts a man wants,” he explained to Claire; “but he ought to have as many as he can take. As long as a man wants to get on, I think he ought to be helped.”

His code about a man’s conduct to women was astonishingly drastic.

“If you’ve let a woman in,” he explained, “you’ve got to strip yourself to get her out, no matter whether you care for her or not. The moment a woman gets caught out, you can’t do too much for her. It’s like seeing a dog with a tin can tied to its tail; you’ve got to get it off. A man ought to pay for his fun; even if it isn’t his fault, he ought to pay just the same. It’s not so much that he’s the responsible person, but he’s the least had. That ought to settle the question.”

He was more diffident, but not less decided, on the subject of religion.

“If there’s a God at all,” he stated, “He must be good; otherwise you can’t explain goodness, which doesn’t pay and yet always seems worth having. You know what I mean. Not that I am a religious man myself, but I like the idea. Women certainly ought to be religious.”

He hoped that Claire would go regularly to church unless it was draughty.

It was on the Bernina, when they were nine thousand feet up in a blue sky, beyond all sight or sound of life, in their silent, private world, that they talked about death.

“Curious,” Winn said, “how little you think about it when you’re up against it. I shouldn’t like to die of an illness. That’s all I’ve ever felt about it; that would be like letting go. I don’t think I could let go easily; but just a proper, decent knock-out — why, I don’t believe you’d know anything about it. I never felt afraid of chucking it, till I knew you, now I’m afraid.”

Claire looked at his strong hands in the sunshine and at her own which lay on his; they looked so much alive! She tried hard to think about death, because she knew that some day everybody must die; but she felt as if she was alive forever.