Part 22 (1/2)

Winn dragged himself on to the toboggan and wondered how his collar came to be undone. When he did it up, he found his hands were shaking, which amazed him very much. He looked a little suspiciously at his companion.

”Of course,” Miss Marley continued pleasantly, ”I ought to have that watchman discharged. I am a member of the Cresta committee, and he behaved scandalously; but I dare say you forced him into it, so I shall just walk up the hill and give him a few straight words. Probably you don't know the dialect. I've made a point of studying it. If I were you, I should stay where you are until I come back. I want you to come to tea with me at Cresta. There's a particularly good kind of bun in the village, and I think I can give you some rather useful tobogganing tips.

It isn't worth while your climbing up the hill just to climb down again, is it? Besides, you'd probably frighten the man.”

”Thanks,” said Winn. ”All right; I'll stay.” He didn't want the Cresta bun, and he thought that he resented Miss Marley's invitation; but, on the other hand, he was intensely glad she was going off and leaving him alone.

He felt uncommonly queer. Perhaps he could think of some excuse to avoid the tea when she came back.

All the muscles of his chest seemed to have gone wrong; it hurt him to breathe. He sat with his head down, like a man climbing a hill against a strong wind. It was rather funny to feel ill again when he had really forgotten he was up there for his health. That was what he felt--ill.

It was not nearly as painful a feeling as remembering Claire.

Unfortunately, it was very quickly followed by the more painful feeling.

When Miss Marley came back, he had the eyes of a creature caught in a trap.

She took him to Cresta to tea, and it did not occur to Winn to wonder why a woman who at forty-five habitually rode the Cresta should find it necessary to walk at the pace of a deliberating snail. It was a pace which at the moment suited Winn precisely.

On the whole he enjoyed his tea. Miss Marley's manners, though abrupt, had certain fine scruples of their own. She showed no personal curiosity and she gave Winn some really valuable tips. He began to understand why she had so deeply resented his trifling with the Cresta.

Miss Marley was one of the few genuine workers at St. Moritz, a member of the old band who had worked devotedly to produce the Monster which had afterward as promptly devoured them. This fate, however, had not as yet overtaken Miss Marley. She was too tough and too rich to be very easily devoured. The Cresta was at once her child and her banner; she had helped to make it, and she wound its folds around her as a screen for her invisible kindnesses.

Menaced boys could have told how she had averted their ruin with large checks and sharp reproofs. She had saved many homes and covered many scandals. For girls she had a special tenderness. She had never been a beautiful young girl, and she had a pathetic reverence for what was frail and fair. For them she had no reproofs, only vast mercy, and patient skill in releasing them from the traps which had caught their flurried young senses; but for those who had set the traps she had no mercy.

Miss Marley was not known for any of these things. She was celebrated for fights with chaplains and sanitary inspectors, and for an inability to give in to authority unless authority knew what it was about. She had never once tried to please, which is the foundation of charm. Perhaps it would have been a useless effort, for she was not born to please. She was born to get things done.

After Miss Marley had talked to Winn for an hour, she decided to get him to join the Bandy Club. He was the kind of man who must do something, and it was obviously better that he should not again tempt fate by riding the Cresta from Church Leap without practice. This course became clearer to Miss Marley when she discovered that Winn had come up for his health.

”Of course a fellow who wasn't seedy wouldn't have made an a.s.s of himself over riding the Cresta,” Winn explained, eyeing her thoughtfully.

He must have got somehow off his toboggan on to the snow, and he had no recollection at all of getting there. Miss Marley said nothing to enlighten him further. She merely suggested bandy. After dinner she introduced Winn to the captain of the St. Moritz team, and at three o'clock the next afternoon she watched him play in a practice-match.

Winn played with a concentrated viciousness which a.s.sured her of two things: he would be an acquisition to the team, and if he felt as badly as all that, it was just as well to get some of it worked off on anything as unresponsive as a ball.

After this Miss Marley let him alone. She considered this the chief factor in a.s.sisting the lives of others; and for nearly two hours a day, while he was playing bandy, Winn succeeded in not remembering Claire.

CHAPTER XXII

Winn's way of playing bandy was to play as if there wasn't any ice. In the first few practices it had the disadvantage of a constant series of falls, generally upon the back of his head; but he soon developed an increasing capacity of balance and an intensity of speed. He became the quickest forward the St. Moritz team had ever possessed.

When he was following the ball he took up his feet and ran. The hard clash of the skates, the determined onrush of the broad-built, implacable figure, were terrible to withstand. What was to be done against a man who didn't skate, but tore, who fell upon a ball as a terrier plunges, eyeless and intent, into a rat-hole? The personal safety of himself or others never occurred to Winn. He remembered nothing but the rules of the game. These he held in the back of his mind, with the ball in front of it.

All St. Moritz came to watch the great match between itself and Davos.

It was a still, cold day; there was no blue in the sky; the mountains were a hard black and white and the valley very colorless and clear.

There was a hush of coming snow in the air, and the sky was covered by a toneless, impending cloud.

The game, after a brief interval, became a duel between two men: Winn, with his headlong, thirsty method of attack, and the champion player of Davos, Mavorovitch, who was known as the most finished skater of the season.