There was no sound in the house except the faint sound behind the green baize doors, which never wholly ceased. Winn had always listened to it before with an impatient distaste; he had hated to hear these echoes of dissolution. This morning, for the first time, he felt curious.
Suppose things had gone differently; that he’d been too late, and known his fate? He could have stayed on then; he could have accepted Claire’s beautiful young friendliness. He could have left her free; and yet he could have seen her every day; then he would have died.
Weakness has privileges. It escapes responsibility; allowances are made for it. It hasn’t got to get up and go, tearing itself to pieces from the roots. He could have told her about Peter and Estelle and what a fool he had been; and at the end, he supposed, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had just mentioned that he loved her.
Now there wasn’t going to be any end. Life would stretch out narrow, interminable, and dark, like the passage with the windows at each end, which were only a kind of blur without any light.
However, of course there was no use bothering about it; since the servants weren’t up and he couldn’t get any coffee, he must just turn in. It suddenly occurred to Winn that what he was feeling now was unhappiness, a funny thing; he had never really felt before. It was the kind of feeling the man had had, under the lamp-post at the station, carrying his dying wife. The idea of a broken heart had always seemed to Winn namby-pamby. You broke if you were weak; you didn’t break if you were strong. What was happening now was that he was strong and he was being broken. It was a painful process, because there was a good deal of him to break, and it had only just begun. However, this was mercifully hidden from him. He said to himself: “I dare say I’m run down and fidgety with having had to sit up with Bouncing. I shall feel all right to-morrow.” Then the door behind him opened, and Lionel joined him. He was still dressed as he had been when he came back from the ball some hours earlier.
“Hullo!” he said. “I wondered if that was you; I thought I heard something stirring outside. You weren’t in your room when I came in. Been with Bouncing?”
“Yes,” said Winn; “he’s dead. I’m looking for some coffee. These confounded, tow-headed Swiss mules never get up at any decent hour. Why are you still dressed? Nothing wrong, is there?”
“Well, I didn’t feel particularly sleepy, somehow,” Lionel acknowledged. “Are you going to stand outside in this moth-eaten passage the rest of the night, or will you come in with me and have a whisky and soda? You must be fagged out.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” Winn agreed. “We may as well make a night of it.”
For a few minutes neither of them spoke, then Winn said: “Had a jolly dance?”