PAGE 11
A Round of Visits
by
Newton Winch, before the fireplace, his hands deep in his pockets, where his guest could see his long fingers beat a tattoo on his thighs, Newton Winch dangled and swung himself, and threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I must say you take it amazingly!–all the more that to see you again this way is to feel that if, all along, there was a man whose delicacy and confidence and general attitude might have marked him for a particular consideration, you’d have been the man.” And they were more directly face to face again; with Newton smiling and smiling so appreciatively; making our friend in fact almost ask himself when before a man had ever grinned from ear to ear to the effect of its so becoming him. What he replied, however, was that Newton described in those flattering terms a client temptingly fatuous; after which, and the exchange of another protest or two in the interest of justice and decency, and another plea or two in that of the still finer contention that even the basest misdeeds had always somewhere or other, could one get at it, their propitiatory side, our hero found himself on his feet again, under the influence of a sudden failure of everything but horror–a horror determined by some turn of their talk and indeed by the very fact of the freedom of it. It was as if a far-borne sound of the hue and cry, a vision of his old friend hunted and at bay, had suddenly broken in–this other friend’s, this irresistibly intelligent other companion’s, practically vivid projection of that making the worst ugliness real. “Oh, it’s just making my wry face to somebody, and your letting me and caring and wanting to know: that,” Mark said, “is what does me good; not any other hideous question. I mean I don’t take any interest in my case–what one wonders about, you see, is what can be done for him. I mean, that is”–for he floundered a little, not knowing at last quite what he did mean, a great rush of mere memories, a great humming sound as of thick, thick echoes, rising now to an assault that he met with his face indeed contorted. If he didn’t take care he should howl; so he more or less successfully took care–yet with his host vividly watching him while he shook the danger temporarily off. “I don’t mind–though it’s rather that; my having felt this morning, after three dismal dumb bad days, that one’s friends perhaps would be thinking of one. All I’m conscious of now–I give you my word–is that I’d like to see him.”
“You’d like to see him?”
“Oh, I don’t say,” Mark ruefully smiled, “that I should like him to see me–!”
Newton Winch, from where he stood–and they were together now, on the great hearth-rug that was a triumph of modern orientalism–put out one of the noted fine hands and, with an expressive headshake, laid it on his shoulder. “Don’t wish him that, Monteith–don’t wish him that!”
“Well, but,”–and Mark raised his eyebrows still higher–“he’d see I bear up; pretty well!”
“God forbid he should see, my dear fellow!” Newton cried as for the pang of it.
Mark had for his idea, at any rate, the oddest sense of an exaltation that grew by this use of frankness. “I’d go to him. Hanged if I wouldn’t–anywhere!”
His companion’s hand still rested on him. “You’d go to him?”
Mark stood up to it–though trying to sink solemnity as pretentious. “I’d go like a shot.” And then he added: “And it’s probably what–when we’ve turned round–I shall do.”
“When ‘we’ have turned round?”
“Well”–he was a trifle disconcerted at the tone–“I say that because you’ll have helped me.”
“Oh, I do nothing but want to help you!” Winch replied–which made it right again; especially as our friend still felt himself reassuringly and sustainingly grasped. But Winch went on: “You would go to him–in kindness?”