If Winter Comes Part 30

Twyning spoke his first words since his entry. "Well, there we are, old man." He smiled and breathed strongly through his nose, as if tensing himself against some emergency that might arise.

Sabre said, "Yes, well done, Twyning. Of course he promised you this long ago."

"Yes, didn't he? Glad you remember my telling you. Of course it won't make the least difference to you, old man. What I mean is, if anything I hope I shall be able to give you a leg up in all sorts of ways. I've been telling Harold what a frightfully smart man you are, haven't I, Harold?"

Harold smiled a.s.sent to this tribute, and Sabre said, "I suppose we shall go on much as before?"

"Oh, rather, old man."

"Harold be working in your room, eh?"

"Yes, that's the idea, for a start, anyway. They're just shoving up a desk for him. Come along in and see how we're fixing it, old man."

"I'll look in presently."

"Righto, old man. Come along, Harold." At the door he turned and said, "Oh, by the way. I want you to show Harold through the work of this side of the business a bit later on."

Sabre looked quickly at him. "You _want_ me to?"

Twyning flushed darkly. "Well, he may as well get the hang of the whole business, mayn't he? That's what I mean."

"Oh, certainly he should. I quite agree. Send him along any time you like."

"Thanks awfully, old man."

But outside the door Twyning added to himself: "You thought that was an order, my lord; and you didn't like it. Pretty soon you won't think.

You'll know."

V

Sabre remained standing at his desk. He had a tiny ball of paper in his hand and he rolled it round between his finger and thumb, round and round and round and round.... In his mind was a recollection: "You have struck your tents and are upon the march."

He thought, "This has been coming a long time.... It's my way of looking at things has done this. I'm getting so I've got nowhere to turn. It's no good pretending I don't feel this. I feel it most frightfully....

I've let down the books. They'll take a back place in the business now.

Twyning's always been jealous of them. Fortune's never really liked my success with them. They'll begin interfering with the books now.... My books.... It was rottenly done. Behind my back. Plotted against me, or they wouldn't have sprung it on me like that. That shows what it's going to be like.... It's all through my way of looking at things.... I've no one here I can take things to. This frightful feeling of being alone in the place. And it's going to be worse. And nowhere to get out of it.

More empty at home.... And now there's this. And I've got to go back to that.... 'You have struck your tents and are upon the march' ... Yes.

Yes...."

He suddenly recollected Nona's letter. He took it from his pocket and opened it; and the second event was discharged upon him.

She wrote from their town house:

"_Marko, take me away--Nona._"

His emotions leapt to her with most terrible violence. He felt his heart leap against his breast as though, engine of his tumult, it would burst its bonds and to her. He struck his hand upon the desk. He said aloud, "Yes! Yes!" He remembered his words, "If ever you feel you can't bear it, tell me.--Tell me."

VI

He began to write plans to her. He would come to London to-morrow....

She should come to the station if she could; if not, he would be at the Great Western Hotel. She would telephone to him there and they could arrange to meet and discuss what they should do.... He would like to go away with her directly they met, but there were certain things to see to. He wrote, "But I can only take you--"

His pen stopped. Familiar words! He repeated them to himself, and their conclusion and their circ.u.mstance appeared and stood, as with a sword, across the pa.s.sage of his thoughts. "But I can only lead you downwards.

I cannot lead you upwards ..."

As with a sword--

He sat back in his chair and gazed upon this armed intruder to give it battle.

VII

The morning pa.s.sed and the afternoon while still he sat, no more moving than to sink lower in his seat as the battle joined and as he most dreadfully suffered in its most dreadful onsets. Towards five o'clock he put out his hand without moving his position and drew towards him the letter he had begun. The action was as that of one utterly undone. He very slowly tore it across, and then across again, and so into tiniest fragments till his fingers could no more fasten upon them. He dropped his arm away and opened his hand, and the white pieces fluttered in a little cloud to the floor.

Presently he drew himself up to the table and began to write, writing very slowly because his hand trembled so. In half an hour he blotted the few lines on the last sheet:

"...So, simply what I want to do is to let our step--if we take it--be mine, not yours. We shall forget absolutely that you ever wrote. It's as though it had never been written. On Tuesday I will write and ask you, 'Shall I come up to you?' So if you say 'Yes' the action will have been entirely mine. It will start from there. This hasn't happened. And during these days in between, just think like anything over what I've said. Honour can't have any degree, Nona, any more than truth can have any degree: whatever else the world can quibble to bits it can't part.i.tion those: truth is just truth and honour is just honour. And a marriage vow is a pledge of honour like any other pledge of honour, and if one breaks it one breaks one's honour, never mind what the excuse is.

There's no conceivable way of arguing out of that. That's what I shall ask you to do on Tuesday and I'm just warning you so you shall have time to think beforehand."

He took his pen, and steadied his hand, and wrote:

"And your reply, when I ask you, whichever it is, shall bring me light into darkness, unutterable darkness.--M."

He could hear the homeward movements about the office. It was time to go. He wheeled his bicycle to the letter box at the corner of The Precincts. As he dropped in his letter, the evening edition of Pike's paper came bawling around the corner.

AUSTRIA DECLARES WAR ON SERVIA

He shook his head at the paper the boy held out to him and rode away.

What had that kind of thing to do with him?

VIII

Unutterable darkness! He lived within it during the days that followed while he awaited the day appointed to write to Nona again. He had put away that for which, with a longing that was almost physical in its pain, his spirit craved; and craved the more terribly for his denial of it. Whatever she said when he asked, whichever way she answered him, he would be brought relief from his intolerable stress. If she maintained honour above love, his weakness, he knew, would be welded into strength, as the presence of another brings enormous support to timidity; if she declared for love,--his mind surged within him at the imagination of bursting away once and for ever the squeamish principles which for years, hedging about his conduct on this side and on that, had profited nothing those on whose behalf they had been erected and his own life had desolated into barrenness.

He was little disposed, in these dismays and in this darkness, to divert attention to the international disturbances which now were rumbling across the newspapers in portentous and enormous headlines. Ireland was pressed away. It was all Europe now--thrones, chancelleries, councils, armies. He tried to say, "What of it?" Many in Great Britain tried to say, "What of it?" Crises and deadlocks again! Meaningless and empty words, for months and years past worked to death and rendered hollow as empty vessels. Some one would climb down. Some one always climbed down.

n.o.body climbed down.

The cauldron whose seething and bubbling had entertained some, fidgeted some, some nothing at all concerned, suddenly boiled over, and poured in boiling fat upon the flames, and poured in flames upon the hearth of every man's concerns.

On Friday the Stock Exchange closed. On Sat.u.r.day Germany declared war on Russia. In Sunday's papers Sabre read of the panic run on the banks, people fighting to convert their notes into gold. One London bank had suspended payment. Many had shut out failure only by minutes when midday permitted them to close their doors. People were besieging the provision shops to lay in stores of food.

And poured in flames upon the hearth of every man's concerns....

All his concerns, the crisis with Nona, with his honour and his love, that awaited determination, were disputed their place in his mind by the incredible and enormous events that each new hour discharged upon the world. He watched them as one might be watching a burning building and feeling at every moment that the roof will crash in, yet somehow feeling that it cannot and will not fall in. The thing was gone beyond possibility of recovery, there terribly arose now the urgency for Great Britain to declare for honour, yet somehow he felt that it could not and would not fail to be averted. It could not happen.

It did happen. On Tuesday the mounting amazements burst amain. On Tuesday the roof that could not fall in fell in. On Tuesday, the day appointed for his letter to Nona, he uttered in realisation that which, uttered in speculation, had been meaningless as an unknown word spoken in a foreign tongue: "War!"