“Then you should take some pains to understand them,” observed Dr. Gurnet. “Not to understand the language of an enemy is the first step toward defeat. Why, it is even necessary sometimes to understand one’s friends.”
Winn said that he had a friend he understood perfectly; his name was Lionel Drummond.
“I know him through and through,” he explained; “that’s why I trust him.” Dr. Gurnet looked interested, but not convinced.
“Ah,” he said, “personally I shouldn’t trust any man till he was dead. You know where you are then, you know. Before that one prophesies. By the by, are you married?” Dr. Gurnet did not raise his eyes at this question, but before Winn’s leaden “Yes” had answered him he had written on the case paper, “Unhappy domestic life.”
“And – er – your wife’s not here with you?” Dr. Gurnet suavely continued. Winn thought himself non-committal when he confined himself to saying:
“No; she’s in England with my boy.” He was as non-committal for Dr. Gurnet as if he had been a wild elephant. He admitted Peter with a change of voice, and asked eagerly if things with lungs were hereditary or catching?
“Not at present in your case,” Dr. Gurnet informed him. “By the by, you’ll get better, you know. You’re a little too old to cure, but you’ll patch up.”
“What does that mean?” Winn demanded. “Shall I be a broken-winded, cats’-meat hack?”
Dr. Gurnet shook his head.
“You can go back to your regiment,” he said, “and do anything you like bar pig-sticking and polo in a year’s time. That is to say, if you do as you are told for that year and will have the kindness to remember that, if you do not, I am not responsible, nor shall I be in any great degree inconsolable. I am here like a sign-post; my part of the business is to point the road. I really don’t care if you follow it or not; but I should be desolated, of course, if you followed it and didn’t arrive. This, however, has not yet occurred to me.
“You will be out of doors nine hours a day, and kindly fill in this card for me. You may skate, but not ski or toboggan, nor take more than four hours’ active exercise out of the twenty-four. In a month’s time I shall be pleased to see you. Remember about the German and – er – do you ever flirt?”
Winn stared ominously.
“Flirt? No,” he said. “Why the devil should I?”
Dr. Gurnet gave a peculiar little smile, half quizzical and half kindly.
“Well,” he said, “I sometimes recommend it to my patients in order that they may avoid the intenser application known as falling in love. Or in cases like your own, for instance, when a considerable amount of beneficial cheerfulness may be arrived at by a careful juxtaposition of the sexes. You follow me?”
“No, hanged if I do,” said Winn. “I’ve told you I’m married, haven’t I? Besides, I dislike women.”
“Ah, there perhaps we may be more in agreement than you imagine,” said Dr. Gurnet, increasing his kindly smile. “But I must continue to assure you that this avoidance of what you dislike is a hazardous operation. The study of women at a distance is both amusing and instructive. I grant you that too close personal relations are less so. I have avoided family life most carefully from this consideration, but much may be obtained from women without going to extremes. In fact, if I may say so, women impart their most favorable attributes solely under these conditions. Good morning.”
Winn left the small brown house with a heart that was strangely light. Of course he didn’t believe in doctors any more than Sir Peter did, but he found himself believing that he was going to get well.
All the morning he had been moving his mind in slow waves that did not seem like thoughts against the rock of death; but he came away from the tiger-skins and the flickering laughter of Dr. Gurnet’s eyes with a comfortable sense of having left all such questions on the doorstep. He thought instead of whether it was worth while to go down to the rink before lunch or not.
It was while he was still undecided as to this question that he heard a little shriek of laughter. It ran up a scale like three notes on a flute; he knew in a moment that it was the same laughter he had listened to the night before.
He turned aside and found himself at the bend of a long ice run leading down to the lake. A group of men were standing there, and with one foot on a toboggan, her head flung back, her eyes full of sparkling mischief, was the child. He forgot that he had ever thought her a boy, though she looked on the whole as if she would like to be thought one. Her curly auburn hair was short and very thick, and perched upon it was a round scarlet cap; her mouth was scarlet; her eyes were like Scotch braes, brown and laughing; the curves of her long, delicate lips ran upward; her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles; a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been sixteen, though she was, as a matter of fact, three years older; but she was not so much an age as a sensation – the sensation of youth, incredibly arrogant and unharmed. The men were trying to dissuade her from the run. It had just been freshly iced; the long blue line of it curved as hard as iron in and out under banks of ice far down into the valley. A tall boy beside her, singularly like her in features and coloring, but weaker in fiber and expression, said querulously:
“Don’t go and make a fool of yourself, Claire. It’s a man’s run, not a girl’s. I won’t have you do it.” It was the fatal voice of authority without power.
Across the group her eyes met Winn’s; wicked and gay they ran over him and into him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and stared back at her grimly, like a Staines. He wasn’t going to say anything; only if she had belonged to him he would have stopped her. His eyes said he could have stopped her; but she didn’t belong to him, so he set his square jaw, and gave her his unflinching, indifferent disapproval.
She appeared after this to be unaware of him, and turned to her brother.
“Won’t have it?” she said, with a little gurgle of laughter. “Why, how do you suppose you can stop me? There’s only one way of keeping a man’s run for men, and that’s for girls not to be able to use it – see!”
She slipped her teasing foot off the toboggan and with an agile twist of her small body sprang face downward on the board. In an instant she was off, lying along it light as a feather, but holding the runners in a grip of steel. In a moment more she was nothing but a traveling black dot far down the valley, lifting to the banks, swirling lightning swift back into the straight in a series of curves and flashes, till at the end the toboggan, girl and all, swung high into the air, and subsided safely into a snow-drift.
Winn turned and walked away; he wasn’t going to applaud her. Something burned in his heart, grave and angry, stubborn and very strong. It was as if a strange substance had got into him, and he couldn’t in the least have said what it was. It voiced itself for him in his saying to himself, “That girl wants looking after.” The men on the bank admired her; there were too many of them, and no woman. He wondered if he should ever see her again. She was curiously vivid to him – brown shoes and stockings, tossed hair, clear eyes. He remembered once going to an opera and being awfully bored because there was such a lot of stiff music and people bawling about; only on the stage there had been a girl lying in the middle of a ring of flames. She’d showed up uncommonly well, rather like this one did in the hot sunshine.
Walking back to the hotel he met a string of bounders, people he had seen and loathed at breakfast. Some of them had tried to talk to him; one beggar had had the cheek to ask Winn what he was up there for, and when Winn had said, “Not to answer impertinent questions,” things at the breakfast-table – there was one confounded long one for breakfast – had fallen rather flat.