If Winter Comes Part 21

"Yes, yes, I know, odious, hateful, and much more than that, cruel--conventions can be as cruel, as cruel as h.e.l.l. I was just coming to that. But they're all absolutely rightly based, Nona. That's the baffling and the maddening part of them. That's what interests me in them. In their application they're often unutterably wrong, cruel, hideously cruel and unjust, but when you examine them, even at their cruellest, you can't help seeing that fundamentally they're absolutely right and reasonable and necessary. Look, take quite a silly example.

There's a convention against going to church in any but your best clothes. It's easy to conceive wrongness in the application of it. It's easy to conceive a person wanting to go to church and likely to benefit by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it--the idea of presenting yourself decently at wors.h.i.+p, as before princes. That makes you laugh--"

"It doesn't, Marko. I can see much worse things just on the same principle."

He said pleasedly, "Of course you can, can't you? Look at all this stuff there's been in the papers lately about what they call the problem of the unmarried mother. Now there's a brute of a case for you: a girl gets into trouble and while she sticks to her baby she's made an outcast; every door is shut to her; her own people will have nothing to do with her; no one will take her in--so long as she's got the baby with her.

That's convention and you can imagine cases where it's cruel beyond words. But it's no good cursing society about it. You can't help seeing that the convention is fundamentally right and essential. Where on earth would you be if girls with babies could find homes as easily as girls without babies?" He smiled. "You'd have babies pouring out all over the place. See it?"

She nodded. "I _do_ think that's interesting, Marko. I think that's most awfully interesting. Yes, cruel and hateful and preposterous, many of them, but all fundamentally right. I think that's _absorbing_. I shall look out for conventions now, and when they annoy me most I'll think out what they're based on. I will!"

"Well, it's not a bad idea," he said. "It helps in all sorts of ways to think things out as they happen to you. You don't realise what a mysterious business life is till you begin to do that; and once you begin to feel the mysteriousness of it there's not much can upset you.

You get the feeling that you're part of an enormous, mysterious game, and you just wonder what the last move means. Eh?"

She did not answer.

Presently she said, "Yes, you do still think things, Marko. You haven't changed a bit, you know. You're just the same."

He smiled. "Oh, well, it's only two years, you know--less than two years since you went away."

"I wasn't thinking of two years."

"How many years were you thinking of?"

"Ten."

They just sat there.

IX

The insistent shrieking of a motor siren in the street below began to penetrate their silence. When it came to Sabre's consciousness he had somehow the feeling that it had been going on a very long time. He jumped to his feet. The siren had the obscene and terrific note of a gigantic hen in delirium. "What the devil's that?"

She received his question with the blank look of one whose mind had no idea of the question's reason. The strangled gurgle and shriek from without informed her in paroxysms of hideous sound. With a motion of her body, as of one shaking off dreams, she threw away the be-mus.e.m.e.nt in which she had sat. She screwed up her face in torture. "Oh, _wow!_ Isn't it too awful! That's Tony. In the car. I told him I'd look in here." She glanced at the clock. "Marko; it's one o'clock. I've been here two mortal hours!"

The gigantic hen screamed in delirious death agony.

"Oh, good heavens, that noise!" She stepped to the window and opened the cas.e.m.e.nt. "Tony! That noise! Tony, for goodness' sake!"

An extravagantly long motor car was drawn against the curb. Lord Tybar, in a dust coat and a sleek bowler hat of silver grey, sat in the driver's seat. He was industriously and without cessation winding the handle of the siren. An uncommonly pretty woman sat beside him. She was ma.s.sed in furs. In her ears she held the index finger of each hand, her elbows sticking out on each side of her head. Thus severally occupied, she and Lord Tybar made an unusual picture, and a not inconsiderable proportion of the youth and citizens of Tidborough stood round the front of the car and enjoyed the unusual picture that they made.

The spectators looked up at Nona's call; Lord Tybar ceased the handle and looked up with his engaging smile; the uncommonly pretty woman removed her fingers from her ears and also turned upwards her uncommonly pretty face.

"Hullo!" called Lord Tybar. "Did you happen to hear my sighs?"

"That appalling noise!" said Nona. "You ought to be prosecuted!"

"If you'd had it next to you!" piped the uncommonly pretty lady in an uncommonly pretty voice. "It's like a whole s.h.i.+p being seasick together."

"It's nothing of the kind," protested Lord Tybar. "It's the plaintive lament of a husband entreating his wife." He directed his eyes further backward. "Good morning, Mr. Fortune. Did you recognize my voice calling my wife? There were tears in it. Perhaps you didn't."

"Good lord," said Sabre, "there's old Fortune at his window. I'll come down with you, Nona."

As they went down he asked her, "Who's that with him in the car?"

"One of his friends. Staying with us."

Something in her voice made it--afterwards--occur to him as odd that she spoke of one of "his", not one of "our" friends, and did not mention her name.

"Well, the whole of Tidborough knows where you've been, Nona," Lord Tybar greeted them. "And a good place too." He addressed the lady by his side. "Puggo, look at those pulpits and things in the window. You never go to church. It'll do you good. That's a pulpit, that tall thing. They preach from that."

The lady remarked, "Thanks. I can remember it. At least I was married in a church, you know."

"And, of course," said Nona, "you always remember you're married, don't you?"

Sabre glanced quickly at her. Her tone cut across the frivolous exchanges with an acid note. So utterly unlike Nona!

And the thing was real, not imagined; and went further. The uncommonly pretty woman addressed as Puggo replied, "Oh, always. And so do you, don't you, dear?" and her uncommonly pretty eyes went in a quick glance from Nona's face to Sabre's, where they hovered the fraction of a moment, and thence to Lord Tybar's where also they hovered, and smiled.

And Lord Tybar, his small, handsome head slightly on one side, looked from one to another with precisely that mock in his glance that Sabre had noticed, and transiently wondered at, on the day he had met them riding.

Funny!

"But, Puggo, you don't know Sabre, do you?" Lord Tybar said. "Sabre, this is Mrs. Winfred. A woman of mystery. One mystery is how she ever won Fred and the other why she is called Puggo. There must be something pretty dark in her past to have got her a name like Puggo."

The woman of mystery shrugged her shoulders. "Of course Tony's simply a fool," she observed. "You know that, don't you, Mr. Sabre?"

"It's not her face," Lord Tybar continued. "You might think it's her figure the way she hides it up under all those furs on a day like this.

But a pug's figure--"

Nona broke in. "I suppose we're going to start some time?"

"Will you come and sit here?" Puggo inquired, but without making any movement.

"No, I'll sit behind."

She got in. "Good-by, Marko." Her voice sounded tired. She gave Sabre her hand. "Jolly, the books," she said. "And our talk."

"Now throw yourself in front, any boy who wants to be killed," Lord Tybar called to the idlers. "No corpses to-day?" He let in the clutch.

"Good-by, Sabre. Good-by, good-by." He waved his hand airily. The big car slid importantly up the street.

Sabre watched them pa.s.s out of sight. As the car turned out of The Precincts into High Street--a nasty corner--Lord Tybar, alone of the three, one hand on the steering wheel, half turned in his seat and twirled the silver-grey bowler in gay farewell.

Or mockery?

X

Through the day Sabre's thoughts, as a man sorting through many doc.u.ments and coming upon and retaining one, fined down towards a picture of himself alone with Nona--alone with her, watching her beautiful face--and saying to her: "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona."

Fined down towards this picture, sifting the doc.u.ments.