If Winter Comes Part 55

He dropped his right arm and swung it by his side; to and fro; over the fender--over the fire; over the hearth--over the flames.

"My Harold. Never to see his face again! My Harold."

He stopped his swinging arm, holding his hand above the flames. "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in G.o.d and G.o.d in him; for G.o.d is love." He opened his fingers, and the crumpled letter fell and was consumed. He pushed himself up from the mantlepiece and turned and went over to Twyning and stood over him again. He patted Twyning's heaving shoulders.

"There, there, Twyning. Bad luck. Bad luck. Hard. Hard. Bear up, Twyning. Soldier's death.... Finest death.... Died for his country....

Fine boy.... Soldier's death.... Bad luck. Bad luck, Twyning...."

Twyning, inarticulate, pushed up his hand and felt for Sabre's hand and clutched it and squeezed it convulsively.

Sabre said again, "There, there, Twyning. Hard. Hard. Fine death....

Brave boy...." He disengaged his hand and turned and walked very slowly from the room.

He went along the pa.s.sage, past Mr. Fortune's door towards that which had been his own, still walking very slowly and with his hand against the wall to steady himself. He felt deathly ill....

He went into his own room, unentered by him for many months, now his own room no more, and dropped heavily into the familiar chair at the familiar desk. He put his arms out along the desk and laid his head upon them. Oh, c.u.mulative touch! He began to be shaken with onsets of emotion, as with sobs. Oh, c.u.mulative touch!

The communicating door opened and Mr. Fortune appeared. He stared at Sabre in astounded indignation. "Sabre! You here! I must say--I must admit--"

Sabre clutched up his dry and terrible sobbing. He turned swiftly to Mr.

Fortune and put his hands on the arms of the chair to rise.

A curious look came upon his face. He said, "I say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I--I can't get up."

Mr. Fortune boomed, "Can't get up!"

"I say--No. I say, I think something's happened to me. I can't get up."

The door opened. Hapgood came in, and Nona.

Sabre said, "I say, Hapgood--Nona--Nona! I say, Nona, I think something's happened to me. I can't get up."

A change came over his face. He collapsed back in the chair.

"Marko! Marko!"

She who thus cried ran forward and threw herself on her knees beside him, her hands stretched up to him. Hapgood turned furiously on Mr.

Fortune. "Go for a doctor! Go like h.e.l.l! Sabre! Sabre, old man!"

"Hemorrhage on the brain," said the doctor. "...Well, if there's no more effusion of blood. You quite understand me. I say _if_ there isn't....

Has he been through any trouble, any kind of strain?

"Trouble," said Hapgood. "Strain. He's been in h.e.l.l--right in."

When he was removed and they had left him, Nona said to Hapgood as they came down the steps of the County Hospital, "There was a thing he was so fond of, Mr. Hapgood:

"...O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

"It comes to me now. There must be a turning now. If he dies ... still, a turning."

CHAPTER VIII

I

Hapgood across the coffee cups, the liqueur gla.s.ses and the cigarettes, wagged a solemn head at that friend of his, newly returned from a long visit to America. He wagged a solemn head:

"She's got her divorce, that wife of his....

"Eh?... Well, man alive, where do you expect me to begin? You insinuate yourself into a Government commission to go to America to lecture with your 'Sketchbook on the Western Front', and I write you about six letters to every one I get out of you, and you come back and expect me to give you a complete social and political and military record of everything that's happened in your absence. Can't you _read_?...

"Well, have it your own way. I've told you in my letters how he went on after that collapse, that brain hemorrhage. I told you we got Ormond Clive on to him. I told you we got him up here eventually to Clive's own nursing home in Welbeck Place. Clive was a friend of that Lady Tybar.

She was with Sabre all the time he was in Queer Street--and it _was_ queer, I give you my word. Pretty well every day I'd look in. Every day she'd be there. Every day Ormond Clive would come. Time and again we'd stand around the bed, we three,--watching. Impenetrable and extraordinary business! There was his body, alive, breathing. His mind, his consciousness, his ego, his self, his whatever you like to call it--not there. Away. Absent. Not in that place. Departed into, and occupied in that mysterious valley where those cases go. What was he doing there? What was he seeing there? What was he thinking there? Was he in touch with this that belonged to him here? Was he sitting in some fastness, dark and infinitely remote, and trying to rid himself of this that belonged to him here? Was he trying to get back to it, to resume habitation and possession and command? It was rummy. It was eerie. It was creepy. It was like staring down into a dark pit and hearing little tinkling sounds of some one moving there, and wondering what the devil he was up to. Yes, it was creepy....

"Process of time he began to come back. He'd struck a light down there, as you might say, and you could see the dim, mysterious glimmer of it, moving about, imperceptibly coming up the side. Now brighter, now fainter; now here, now there. Rummy, I can tell you. But he was _coming up_. He was climbing up out of that place where he had been. What would he remember? Yes, and what was he coming up to?

"What was he coming up to? That was what began to worry me. This divorce suit of his wife's was climbing up its place in the list. He was climbing up out of the place where he had been and this case was climbing up towards hearing. Do you get me? Do you get my trouble? Soon as his head emerged up out of the pit, was he going to be bludgeoned down into it again by going through in the Divorce Court precisely that which had bludgeoned him down at the inquest? Was I going to get the case held up so as to keep him for that? Or what was I going to do? I hadn't been instructed to prepare his defence. At Brighton, when I'd suggested it, he'd told me, politely, to go to h.e.l.l. I hadn't been instructed; no one had been instructed. And there was no defence to prepare. There was only his bare word, only his flat denial--denial flat, unprofitable, and totally unsupported. The only person who could support it was the girl, and she was dead: she was much worse than dead: she had died in atrocious circ.u.mstances, his part in which had earned him the severe censure of the coroner's jury. His defence couldn't have been worse. He'd tied himself in d.a.m.ning knots ever since he'd first set eyes on the girl, and all he could bring to untie them was simply to say, 'It wasn't so.' His defence was as bad as if he were to stand up before the Divorce Court and say, 'Before she died the girl wrote and signed a statement exonerating me and fixing the paternity on so-and-so.

He's dead, too, that so-and-so, and as for her signed statement, I'm sorry to say I destroyed it, forgetting I should need it in this suit. I was worried about something else at the time, and I quite forgot this and I destroyed it.'

"I don't say his defence would be quite so crudely insulting to the intelligence of the court as that; but I say the whole unsupported twisting and turning and writhing and wriggling of it was not far short of it.

"Well, that was how I figured it out to myself in those days, as the case came along for hearing; and I said to myself: Was I going to put in affidavits for a stay of hearing for the pleasure of seeing him nursed back to life to go through that agony and ordeal of the inquest again and come out with the same result as if he hadn't been there at all? And I decided--no; no, thanks; not me. It was too much like patching up a dying man in a civilised country for the pleasure of hanging him, or like fatting up a starving man in a cannibal country for the satisfaction of eating him.

"And I had this. In further support of my position I had this. My friend, the Divorce Court is a cynical inst.i.tution. If a respondent and a corespondent have been in places and in circ.u.mstances where they might have incriminated themselves, the Divorce Court cynically a.s.sumes that, being human, they would have incriminated themselves. 'But,' it says to the pet.i.tioner, 'I want proof, definite and satisfactory proof of those places and of those circ.u.mstances. That's what I want. That's what you've got to give me.'

"Very well. Listen to me attentively. Lend me your ears. The onus of that proof rests on the pet.i.tioner. Because a case is undefended, it doesn't for one single shadow of a chance follow that the pet.i.tioner's plea is therefore going to be granted. No. The Divorce Court may be cynical, but it's a stickler for proof. The Divorce Court says to the pet.i.tioner, 'It's up to you. Prove it. Never mind what the other side isn't here to deny. What you've got to do is to satisfy me, to prove to me that these places and these circ.u.mstances were so. Go ahead. Satisfy me if you can.'

"So I said to myself: now the places and the circ.u.mstances of this pet.i.tion unquestionably were so. All the Sabres in the world couldn't deny that. Let his wife go ahead and prove them to the satisfaction of the Court, if she can. If she can't; good; no harm done that he wasn't there to be bludgeoned anew. If she can satisfy the court, well, I say to you, my friend, as I said then to myself, and I say it deliberately: 'If she _can_ satisfy the court--good again, better, excellent. He's free: he's free from a bond intolerable to both of them.'

"Right. The hearing came on and his wife did satisfy the Court. She got her decree. He's free.... That's that....

"Yesterday I took my courage in both hands and told him. Yesterday Ormond Clive said Sabre might be cautiously approached about things. For three weeks past Clive's not let us--me or that Lady Tybar--see him.

Yesterday we were permitted again; and I took steps to be there first. I told him. There was one thing I'd rather prayed for to help me in the telling, and it came off--he didn't remember! He'd come out of that place where he had been with only a confused recollection of all that had happened to him before he went in. Like a fearful nightmare that in the morning one remembers only vaguely and in bits. Vaguely and in bits he remembered the inquest horror, and vaguely and in bits he remembered the divorce matter--and he thought the one was as much over as the other. He thought he had been divorced. I said to him, taking it as the easiest way of breaking my news, I said to him, 'You know your wife's divorced you, old man?' He said painfully, 'Yes, I know. I remember that.'

"I could have stood on my head and waved my heels with relief and joy.

Of course it will come back to him in time that the business hadn't happened before his illness. In time he'll begin to grope after detailed recollection, and he'll begin to realise that he never did go through it and that it must have happened while he was ill. Well, I don't funk that. That won't happen yet awhile; and when it does happen I'm confident enough that something else will have happened meanwhile and that he'll see, and thank G.o.d for it, that what is is best. There'll be another thing too. He'll find his wife has married again. Yes, fact! I heard in a roundabout way that she's going to marry an old neighbour of theirs, chap called Major Millett, Hopscotch Millett, old Sabre used to call him. However, that's not the thing--though it would be a complication--that I mean will have happened and will make him see, and thank G.o.d for, that what is is best. What do I mean? What will have happened meanwhile? Well, that's telling; and I don't feel it's quite mine to tell. Tell you what, you come around and have a look at the old chap to-morrow. I dare bet he'll be on the road towards it by then and perhaps tell us himself. As I was coming away yesterday I pa.s.sed that Lady Tybar going in, and I told her what I'd been saying to him and what he remembered and what he didn't remember.... What's that got to do with it? Well, you wait and see, my boy. You wait and see. I'll tell you this--come on, let's be getting off to this play or we'll be late--I tell you this, it's my belief of old Sabre that, after all he's been through,

"Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter home from the hill.

Or jolly soon will be. And good luck to him. He's won out."

II