The Dangerous Years (24 page)

“You
could
be my mother, couldn't you, Joan?” he demanded with a touch of passion. This query was followed by an embrace that touched Joan to the heart. She drew the child to her, and kissed the top of his head.

“Oh, my dear,” she whispered, and a tear fell into the silky hair. “What makes you say that?”

But he was not prepared to answer. Perhaps he could not. They clung together, happy and miserable, and both bewildered.

“Come, we must find John. He has gone out to look for
you. We were afraid you had run out without your gloves.”

“Why, Joan; that would be silly. My hands would freeze, wouldn't they, and I should get frostbite. Does that mean …?”

“Oh, don't, don't, Adrian! I can't bear the thought of it. Not
your
hands!”

She muffled him up in his outdoor garments, tying his gloves with exaggerated care, and then putting on her own things, went out with him to look for John.

The frost had returned with the fall of the wind. Everything looked virginal under the new mantle of snow. Few people had yet ventured out, though the morning was advanced. The drop in the temperature had come suddenly, and the holiday-makers in Suvretta House had settled down for a session of indoor games. Only John Boys, and half a dozen other men who had volunteered to help him find the missing child, were moving among the out-buildings, and over the dazzling whiteness.

The southern sky was a furnace of cold light. The mountains stood almost conscious of their stillness, outlined against the blue heavens. Occasionally a tiny scarf of snow blew up with a tired gesture, spreading and falling again, mocked by its shadow.

Joan, carefree by comparison with her recent anxiety about the boy, stood with him, his hand in hers, and stared spellbound at the mountains. She moved on only when Adrian tugged at her hand, urging her to adventure through the now pathless approaches to the skating-rink and the sleigh-run. Adrian shouted with glee as his boots left the small, crunched spoor in the snow.

“Look! Look, Joan!” he cried, “those are John's marks. I know because he turns his foot in when he walks. And that always gives him a heavy beat wherever he moves. Oh, I know his tune; it goes like this …” And he began to sing, in an unmusical soprano voice, a lop-sided march
tune, which he accentuated by loping along, dragging still at Joan's hand, while he advanced crab-fashion.

“John doesn't walk like that,” cried Joan, hurrying along with him, sharing the intoxication of light and the universal whiteness. Adrian collapsed into the snow, with laughter, that complete and possessive laughter which so frequently seized upon his sober little temperament, making him abandon his reflective habits, and the shyness that usually held him in restraint.

At that moment, they saw John returning from the sleigh track, and to her astonishment, Joan noticed that he was moving much as Adrian had caricatured. She had been married to him for over four years, without remarking that one of his feet turned slightly inward when he walked. She watched him, outlined against the snow, until he saw them and waved his arms. Adrian was running to meet him, picking up his feet like a pony and plunging forward, shouting with excitement. Joan looked at the back view of the diminutive figure, puzzled once again by the evidences of his powers. They could be frightening, especially by contrast with her husband's lack of ‘nous', his plodding reasonableness that had to go step by step, with no aid from the vaulting pole of imagination, that anterior intuition which can make a person
know
, and how correctly, without a basis of experiment or known fact. Joan realised again that this child was æons older than her husband.

With this observation in mind, she joined the two, who had met and snowballed each other with shouts of triumph.

“You young devil!” cried John. “Where have you been? You've had Joan stewing over you, my lad. That won't do. Can't upset the women, you know. What? Left your skates indoors? Never mind, they're not much use to-day. I'll tell you what, Joan. We'll do as I suggested. We'll celebrate in a big way. We'll do the toboggan run! What d'you say, youngster? Are you game for that?”

Indeed Adrian was game. He seized Joan again, and urged her forward, giving her not a moment to consider the matter, and the risks involved. John picked the boy up and slung him round to his back; a flying angel. Thus they made their way to the head of the run, followed by a crowd of other people from the hotel.

“What, you taking the child down?” asked a fellow-guest, with a party of women who had urged him to protest. John glared without replying; but he muttered to Joan, “Damn cheek. Do they think I don't know what I'm about?”

“You are sure it's safe then?” she asked.

For reply, he jockeyed her on to the sleigh, with the boy in front of her. Then he took his place at the head. They were off!

All went well. It went more than well, for that is but a comparative term. The three were translated, breaking through the law of inertia, into another measurement, or a life outside measurement. The hard run beneath the sleigh became a pulsing organism, with its veins swelling and receding. The hum of the runners, the flurry of snowdust, the occasional batting sound as the sleigh rose and slapped down again; the rush of things all out of focus to right and left; objects coming up the slope, magnifying as they approached, flashing past to be annihilated instantly; all these mad nudgings of her consciousness were felt by Joan as she flew, clinging to Adrian, whose body she could feel as the one substantial thing in a dissolving universe. So acute was her concern for the boy that John was practically invisible to her, although his bulk loomed up in front, stolid and secure. His shoulders rose and fell with the undulation of the sleigh. The air rushed over his shoulders and over her head, whistling like sword-blades. At one stage, as they rounded a bend, she heard herself cry out, but the sound was snatched from her mouth and meant nothing. She could feel that Adrian had shrunk
into himself, his breath held, and then being released in quick gasps of ecstasy. But all this awareness was instantaneous, for time was annihilated. And suddenly, just as she relaxed into enjoyment with the other two, she realised what had happened. Adrian had lost his gloves, or perhaps had left them behind.

The sleigh did not stop for Joan to consider fully. Fear darkened everything.

Light went out of the sky and the white world. She had the sensation of rushing into greyness, and increasing confusion of threats, menaces, disasters. She tried to cry out to John, expostulating, accusing him of his irresponsible folly. But it was useless. Her voice was overpowered by the death-cold slip-stream, snatched away and flung off behind, just as the wisdom and caution of normal-pacing life were discarded during this mad descent. And even if she were able to warn John, he might not regard her; he might not appreciate the consequences of anything happening to this child's hands.

She had to do something instantly. Leaning forward, she closed her arms round Adrian, forcing his hands together and clasping them between her gloved hands, trying to cover them completely. He turned his eyes up to hers, as though to enquire what she meant. She might have been able to whisper to him, but the movement made by her effort caused the sleigh to swerve on another bend. A moment later, they were over the seven-foot bank, skidding on one runner, and finally plunged into thick snow and overturned. A yell of wild laughter followed. It was John, who sat up, exultant in physical danger, triumphing over it, testing his manhood against it.

“O.K. you two?” he shouted, staggering up and shaking the snow from his head.

Joan lay buried, with the child somewhere beneath her. She felt John approach, for she could not see, because she was face downward in the snow. She felt the snow darken
round it. It was the coming of John's shadow as he bent over, seized her round the waist, and lugged her roughly out of the pit which her body and Adrian's had dug.

Joan opened her eyes after rubbing them clear of snow. She saw Adrian still half-covered, and a faint stain of crimson, hardened and let into the surface of the snow. She dared not look. Heart-sick, she stooped and gently, very gently lifted the boy in her arms, stumbling as she did so. She did not look again at her husband. She could not, and when he spoke his voice made her flinch.

“Cheer up, old girl; it's only a spill. No bones broken!”

He was right. The blood on the snow was her own, not Adrian's. She had scratched her forehead, perhaps on a buckle on Adrian's garment. John wanted to wipe the scratch with his handkerchief, but she motioned him away angrily.

“It's his hands,” she gasped. “No gloves. No gloves! Frostbite!”

The boy, meanwhile, was standing blinking solemnly, dazed by the suddenness of the spill. Then he began to laugh, and gradually the joy of this physical excitement, and a sharing of John's triumph in riding so buoyantly over the element of danger, took possession of him. He rocked with laughter, ignoring Joan's attempts to seize his hands and cover them with her own gloves. He waved his arms in the air, slapping at John who stood close behind Joan, slapping round her bulky figure and attempting to bring John into the conspiracy of mirth.

“No, Adrian! No, you must not. You must keep your hands covered! Your hands, Adrian!” She was losing control, and her anger broke out. “You fool! You idiot!” she cried, turning upon her husband, her voice breaking. “Look at his hands. Cover them up!”

But John had already done so. He drew a spare pair of woollen gloves from the pocket of his windjacket, and pulled them up Adrian's arms to the elbow, saying,
“Gently now, gently, old lady. No need to get into a flap. The boy's right enough. Enjoying himself, aren't you, Adrian? It's you who need first aid, Joan. Let me tie my hankie round your forehead. Though it's not bleeding now. This cold air will cure any wound in five minutes. Come on, we'll get down the rest of the way on foot, and call it a day.”

One calm night, during a lull in the procession of winter gales that had been sweeping over Paris and dishevelling its beauty, Mary Winterbourne woke in the small hours, disturbed by the distant ringing of a telephone. At first she thought it was in the room, deceived by the magnifying power of half-consciousness. She turned in her lover's arms, and raised herself on one elbow, listening.

Beams from the street-lamp in the boulevard, filling the room with horizontal slats of light and shadow, reminded her that before getting into bed, Tom had opened the Venetian blind, saying that he wanted to be able to see her beauty through all the sweet processes of love. She had replied that he was most un-English, and that she did not know whether she approved. They had laughed together, and he had his way, in this and in what followed.

“I want to make the most of you,” said Tom, just before they fell asleep. “I'm the sort who dreads the bill coming in, Mary. I don't seem to have the means of footing it.”

“Oh, you're ridiculous, my darling,” she murmured, her lips touching his face in her eagerness to clasp him close to her, to bring him some reassurance, some new access of hope for the future. “You've not been fairly treated. You must not lose heart. I am with you now. I love you, Tom. I could not have given myself to you like this if I did not love you. We shall prove it together. Why
feel guilty? I feel nothing but pride and gratitude. I am willing to face whatever comes, so long as I have you for myself.” She coiled herself round him under the bedclothes, to illustrate her tenacity. But he was not easily reassured.

“I know, Mary. This is something I had not dared to dream of. But what about my getting free? She will never relent. I know her. She isn't likely to want freedom for herself, and being a convert, she will have all the fanaticism without the charity of Catholicism.”

“You are being superstitious, Tom. Let us wait. Time will be our friend. It
must
be. I don't believe people can love as we do without finding a way out of the difficulties. No, I'm more worried about Joan than I am about us.”

“Why? It looks as though they are likely to patch things up again. After all, they are fond of each other. It's written all over them. They would not be so irritable if they were indifferent.”

Their whispered conversation dwindled away into sleep; the sleep of satisfaction and mutual joy. But this waking in the night, to the sound of a bell, when the nerves are reduced and courage has ebbed from the blood, made Mary shrink with a sudden tremor of fear. ‘Joan,' she thought, ‘something has happened!' The reaction was so violent that she began to weep.

Tom stirred, murmuring something she could not distinguish. She fumbled under the pillow for her handkerchief, and this woke him. He drew her to him, prepared to fall asleep again, assured of her in his arms, when he realised that she was in distress. He put his lips to her cheeks, and found them wet. His compassion made him struggle back into full consciousness.

“What is it, Mary? Tell me, what are you worrying about?” The tenderness in his voice, and in the touch of his hands as he caressed her body, roused her to a physical gratitude that made her long to abandon herself again and
again to him, to drown the distant admonition of that telephone bell.

“It's coming from my room, Tom. I am sure it is. It's directly beneath us.”

They both listened, their raptures suspended.

“Nonsense, my dear. It might be anywhere in the building. These modern places made of girders and concrete carry sounds as widely as a hollow tooth carries pain.”

But Mary was convinced the summons came from her room on the floor below. So acutely did it touch her nerves, that she fancied she could feel the vibration as well as the sound, rattling in the empty room, rousing the whole hotel to broadcast the fact that she was not there, but lying in the arms of the English colonel.