The Dark Tower

“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.