If Winter Comes Part 20

He turned away. "Oh, well, that's enough," he said.

V

She moved about the room, touching things, looking at things.

"Show me something else. Is that where the old trout basks? Can he hear us? I'm glad I've seen your room, Marko. I shall imagine you puzzling in here."

Touching things, looking at things.... He thought the room would always look different--after this. He felt strangely disturbed. He could with difficulty reply to her. His mind threw back, in its habit, to some dim occasion when he had felt in some degree as he was feeling now. When?

Certainly he had felt it before. When?

He remembered. It was a Sat.u.r.day in the first month of his first term at Tidborough School when his father had come over to see him. The loneliness of newness was still upon him. He had been affected almost to tears by being with some one whose mind was open, as it were, for him to jump into: some one to whom he could open his mind, unseal the home thoughts, unlock the timid tongue. He had talked how he had talked! He had felt bursting to talk; and only talking could ease the feeling; and how it had eased! Yes, this was the same again. He did not want her to go. He wanted to talk--how he wanted to talk!--to tell, unseal, unlock, expose.

He said, "I tell you what, Nona. I'll tell you something. I've an idea sometimes of cutting out from all this place and starting an educational publis.h.i.+ng business on my own."

She was enormously interested. "Oh, Marko, if only you would!"

"Well, I think about it. I do. I can see a biggish thing in it. The Tidborough Press, I'd call it. Like the University Press, you know, Oxford and Cambridge. By Jove, it might go any distance, you know!"

"Oh, you must! You must!"

He began to pour out the tremendous and daring scheme.

VI

He talked animatedly,--these long pent up enthusiasms. She attended, rapt and gleaming-eyed, following him with most delicious "Yes--yes" and with little nods; and he suddenly became aware of how poignant to him was the sympathy of her interest,--and stopped. Thus to pour out, thus to be heard, was to experience the exquisite pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable pain, as when an anodyne steals through the veins of torture. He stopped. He could not bear it.

"Well, that's all," he said.

She declared, "It's splendid. How well you're doing, Marko. I knew you would." She paused. "Not that that matters," she said.

He asked her, "What do you mean--'not that that matters'?"

She made a little face at him. "Marko, you're not to snap me up like that. I've noticed it two or three times. I mean it doesn't matter what a man does. It's what he is that matters."

He laughed. "Well, that lets me down pretty badly if that's the estimate. I'm awful, you know."

She shook her head. "Oh, you're not so bad."

"You don't know me. I've been growing awful these years."

"Tell me how awful you are. Does Mabel think you're awful?"

"You ask her! I'm the most unsatisfactory sort of person it's possible to meet. Really."

"Go on; tell me, Marko. I like this."

"What, like hearing how unsatisfactory I am?"

"I like hearing you talk. You've got rather a nice voice--I used to tell you that, didn't I?--and I like hearing you stumbling about trying to explain your ideas. You've got ideas. You're rather an ideary person. Go on. Why are you unsatisfactory?"

How familiar her voice was on that note,--caressing, drawing him on.

He said, "I'll tell you, Nona. I'm unsatisfactory because I've got the most infernal habit of seeing things from about twenty points of view instead of one. For other people, that's the most irritating thing you can possibly imagine. I've no convictions; that's the trouble. I swing about from side to side. I always can see the other side of a case, and you know, that's absolutely fatal--"

She said gently, "Fatal to what, Marko?"

He was going to say, "To happiness"; but he looked at her and then looked away. "Well, to everything; to success. You can't possibly be successful if you haven't got convictions--what I call bald-headed convictions. That's what success is, Nona, the success of politicians and big men whose names are always in the papers. It's that: seeing a thing from only one point of view and going all out for it from that point of view. Convictions. Not mucking about all round a thing and seeing it from about twenty different sides like I do. You know, you can't possibly pull out this big, booming sort of stuff they call success if you're going to see anybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. Yes, and narrower than that, not convictions but conviction. Only one conviction--that you're right and that every one who thinks differently from you is wrong to blazes." He laughed. "And I'm dashed if I ever _think_ I'm right, let alone conviction of it. I can always see the bits of right on the other side of the argument.

That's me. Dash me!"

She said, "Go on, Marko. I like this."

"Well, that's all there is to it, Nona. These conviction chaps, these booming politicians and honours-list chaps, these Bagshaw chaps--you know Bagshaw?--they go like a cannon ball. They go like h.e.l.l and smash through and stick when they get there. My sort's like the footb.a.l.l.s you see down at the school punt-about. Wherever there's a punt I feel it and respond to it. My sort's out to be kicked--" He laughed again. "But I couldn't be any other sort."

She said, "I'm glad you couldn't be, Marko. You're just the same as you used to be. I'm glad you're the same."

He did not reply.

VII

She sat briskly forward in the big armchair in which she faced him, making of the motion a movement as though throwing aside a turn the conversation had taken. "Well, go on, Marko. Go on talking. I'm not going to let you stop talking yet. I love that about how people get success nowadays. It's jolly true. I never thought of it before. Yes, you're still a terribly thinky person, Marko. Go on. Think some more.

Out loud."

Caressing--drawing him on--just as of old.

He said thoughtfully, "I tell you a thing I often think a lot about, Nona. You being here like this puts it in my mind. Conventions."

She smiled teasingly. "Ah, poor Marko. I knew you'd simply hate it, my coming in like this. Does it seem terribly unconventional, improper, to you, shut up with me in your office?"

He shook his head. "It seems very nice. That's all it seems. But it does bring into my mind that you're the sort of person that doesn't think tuppence about what's usually done or what's not usually done; and that reminded me of things I've thought about conventions. Look here, Nona, this really is rather interesting--"

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Just so he used to bring ideas to her; just so, with "Yes--yes," she used to receive them.

But he went on. "Why, convention, you know, it's the most mysterious, extraordinary thing. It's a code society has built up to protect itself and to govern itself, and when you go into it it's the most marvellous code that ever was invented. All sorts of things that the law doesn't give, and couldn't give, our conventions shove in on us in the most amazing way. And all probably originated by a lot of Mother Grundy-ish old women, that's what's so extraordinary. You know, if all the greatest legal minds of all the ages had laid themselves out to make a social code they could never have got anywhere near the rules the people have built up for themselves. And that's what I like, Nona--that's what I think so interesting and the best thing in life: the things the people do for themselves without any State interference. That's what I'd encourage all I knew how if I were a politician--"

He broke off. "I say, aren't I the limit, ga.s.sing away like this? I hardly ever get off nowadays and when I do!--Why don't you stop me?"

She made a little gesture deprecatory of his suggestion. "Because I like to hear you. I like to watch your funny old face when you're on one of your ideas. It gets red underneath, Marko, and the red slowly comes up.

Funny old face! Go on. I want to hear this because I'm going to disagree with you, I think. I think conventions, most of them, are odious, hateful, Marko. I hate them."

VIII

He had been strangely affected by the words of her interruptions: a contraction in the throat,--a twitching about the eyes.... But he was able, and glad that he was able to catch eagerly at her opinion.