“Excuse me, Garland.”
“Well?”
“I’m rather put to it this week. You couldn’t let me have a fiver, could you?”
Carefully and deliberately Garland took silver from his trousers’ pocket, selected two half-crowns, and offered them to Costello. Neither man spoke. They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment with scorn and hatred. Mutely they said to each other terrible things.
Then Costello’s claw of a hand came out and took the five shillings. It made Garland think of the pecking beak of a hungry, cold-eyed bird.
They glared and went their ways, and Garland knew that he had planted the steel of his scorn deep in the other man’s body. He saw Costello as a body, not as a soul. Such a fellow had no soul. And Garland went on to his day’s work and enjoyed it, and lunched well at his city club, and entered his first-class compartment on the five-thirty-four train, and felt warm. He lit a pipe. It was a raw evening, and the London night was blue and blurred, and the lights looked huge. Garland watched them, and the glare of an occasional street, and the dreary and dead faces of the strange houses. Dim back-yards, and little squalid gardens, and chimney-pots, and slimy roofs. Probably Costello slunk home to some such kennel; and Garland was glad. All the bad things were good things when they happened to Costello.
Three days passed. It snowed; and then a raw, drizzling thaw set in, and people hurried in the streets. Breath steamed. Garland was strong and healthy, but even he enjoyed rubbing his hands in front of the office fire. His room was comfortable: it had a Turkey carpet and well-padded chairs; and a thick Harris-tweed overcoat hung behind the screen. He remembered that on the last occasion when he had seen Costello the fellow had had no overcoat.
Splendid; let the beast freeze!
Yes, he had not run up against Costello during the last few days. Probably Costello was feeling a bit pinched, and wished himself back in India. Garland sat down to read his morning’s letters.
A clerk opened the door.
“Someone wanting to see you, sir.”
“Who?”
“A man. He wouldn’t give his name. Looks rather a seedy customer.”
“What’s his business? . . . Shut that door, Spicer—there’s a deuce of a draught.”
“He said he would tell you his business, sir.”
“You can tell him I don’t see strangers who refuse their names and won’t state their business.”
The clerk vanished, to reappear half a minute later. He closed the door.
“The fellow looks funny, sir.”
“Funny! What d’you mean?”
“Well, he looks almost as though he had been fished out of the water, frozen stiff. He wouldn’t give me his name.”
“Did you tell him——?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, tell him again. It’s perfectly absurd!”
The door closed on the clerk, and Garland heard voices. He could not help hearing them, for one of the voices was like a hoarse and rusty hinge, and both voices were raised. The hoarse voice was saying: “I don’t care a damn! I’m going to stay here till Garland comes out. You had better tell him to come out. My name’s Costello.”
Garland’s hands gripped the arms of his desk chair. He got up and went quickly to the door and opened it. The clerk was holding open the glass door leading into the vestibule, and in the open doorway stood Costello, with the grey steps and the grey street behind him. Almost he stood there like a man who was intoxicated and making a great effort to keep his balance. His feet were wide apart; he swayed.
Garland was angry. What the devil did the fellow mean by coming to his office and making a scene? He advanced upon Costello.
“Look here—clear out!”
A little, thin smile trickled down Costello’s face, but his eyes were smileless; they stared.
“I always licked you at tennis!”
Then something happened to him. He seemed both to crumple at the knees and to stagger backwards. He went down the steps like a man forcibly ejected, and lay there with his legs pointing up the steps and his head on the pavement. His deplorable felt hat had fallen off; he looked skull-headed and bald.
A man who was passing and the clerk hurried and bent over him. They got him by the shoulders.
“He’s fainted.”
Garland stood at the top of the steps.
“Better carry him in. Bring him into my office.”
So Costello was carried into Garland’s office, and they laid him on the hearth-rug before the fire and put a cushion under his head. The clerk, happening to touch one of his hands, found it as cold as stone.
“He looks pretty bad, sir.”
“Undo his collar.”
The clerk was kneeling beside Costello, and the other two were bending over him. The clerk unbuttoned Costello’s waistcoat and unfastened his tie and collar, and the thin shirt, lacking buttons, came open and disclosed Costello’s chest. He was wearing nothing but that thin shirt, and the ribs stood out under the yellow skin.
The clerk looked scared.
“Good Lord!—no wonder his hands felt cold! Regular skeleton!”
Garland had gone to his desk and had picked up the telephone. He spoke to the exchange.
“Put me on to the nearest doctor, please. Someone very ill here. You probably know a doctor and his number. . . . You do? Thanks very much. It’s urgent!”
Holding the receiver, he looked at the group before the fire. The clerk had risen and was standing staring at Costello, and over Costello’s grey and shrunken face, with its beak of a nose and bony forehead, the firelight flickered.
“He’s not breathing, sir.”
“Oh?”
“I believe he’s dead!”
When the doctor arrived, his problem was of the simplest. He looked at the grey face and the ashy lips. There was no need to listen for heart-beats. The stark stillness of the figure was sufficient.
“The man’s dead. . . . Starvation and cold—by the look of him.”
Garland travelled home by the usual train. He walked from the station and entered the house rather silently, nor did he rush upstairs to the nursery. His wife found him sitting and smoking before the drawing-room fire, with the lights switched off. She was a woman who noticed things, and especially things about her husband. She switched on the light over the sofa and sat down, and became busy with some piece of mending; but though she did not remark upon it, she was conscious of her husband’s silence.
“The Cuthberts have asked us to dine to-morrow. Shall we go?”
“Not very keen.”
She gave him a mother look.
“Not feeling seedy, old thing?”
“No. . . . Just thinking, that’s all.”
She allowed the silence to resettle itself. If her husband was preoccupied, it was probably a matter of business.
But suddenly, holding his pipe by the bowl, he spoke as though addressing the fire:
“One shouldn’t scorn some things—no, not in a particular sort of way.”
She was surprised. She let her hands rest in her lap.
“What . . . are . . . you talking about, Ronny?”
“Oh, nothing. Just meditating. Had rather hectic day.”
“Worries?”
“Oh, much as usual. Nothing to worry about—really. But sometimes one sits and thinks.”
THE POOL OF THE SATYR
I
The Englishman heard the sound of piping in the green gloom of the chestnut woods, a piping such as Pan might make after drinking Falernian wine on a very hot May morning.
The Englishman was piqued, and a little puzzled. He had been lying at the foot of a tree, making a meal of bread and olives, and reading Ariosto between the mouthfuls—a lean, brown, Milton of a man, dressed in rusty black, and with a knapsack over his shoulders. He wore his own fair hair, and had the chin and mouth of a Jesuit.
“Pan in Arcady! And Pan is merry!”
He turned on one elbow and had a glimpse of a
very tall old man tripping it down a woodland aisle, and playing sedulously and foolishly upon a flute. Now and again he would skip like a young ram, or take a few staid and solemn steps like a dancer dancing a minuet. He had a long nose, black eyebrows, white hair, a pair of mad and wandering eyes, a little tufted beard, and a black mole on one cheek.
The old man footed it under the trees, piping jerkily on that flute of his, till he set eyes on the Englishman lying at the foot of the tree. He drew up sharply, stared, and wiped his flute on the tail of his coat.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, sir,” said the Englishman.
“You will observe that spring is here, sir. Bacchus drinks wine in the heat of the morning. And Pan, the great god sleeps in the shade. My name is Cæsare, sir; Cæsare Lombardi.”
He bowed, and the Englishman got up and returned the bow.
“My name is Trevanion, Nigel Trevanion,” said he, speaking good Tuscan Italian.
“And you eat bread and olives?”
“And read Ariosto.”
The old gentleman grimaced.
“Ariosto! One of the Jew creatures. Nothing happened after Augustus and Ptolemy. Diocletian, sir! Diocletian was a fool. And have you tarried long in these parts?”
“Three days.”
“Perhaps you are a Patagonian, sir?”
“No; merely an Englishman.”
“Ah, indeed, the oyster island. And are your people still painted blue?”
“No, we wear red coats and powder our heads white.”
“Red and white,” and he blew a shrill note on his flute. “Venus and Adonis. Dear me! But we must not talk too loud, sir, for Pan and the Satyrs are sleeping.”
He was mad, quite mad; but this Englishman understood some sorts of madness, being something of a vagabond and a visionary, half-soldier, half-poet, not a mere Beefeater in a black bonnet and a red tabard. The old man was a courtier, despite his madness. His linen was clean, and he had the head of an aristocrat.
“These are very fine woods, sir. I started out this morning from Monte Verde to find a certain famous spot called the Pool of the Satyr; but, as you see, I have not found it.”
“Very droll, very droll indeed. Let me see, what o’clock is it? About an hour after noon. I can show you the pool, sir, because the Pool of the Satyr belongs to me.”
“There is some tale, is there not, about this pool?”
Cæsare tucked his flute under one arm and took Trevanion by the elbow.
“This way, my friend. Perhaps you are a scholar; perhaps you have read even the effeminate and luxurious Ovid?”
“I have. But about this pool?”
The old man sniggered.
“Did you ever see Pan bathing by moonlight? No, young man, for you have not lived long enough. Thirty years in Arcady before the true vision comes! But I shall see the great god bathing there before I die, and I shall hear the satyrs squealing and making love in the woods.”
“Certainly you are quite mad,” thought Trevanion; “but no doubt it is a harmless sort of madness.”
They went on through the sun-splashed gloom of the chestnut woods, the old gentleman chattering, and sometimes blowing on his flute.
The ground fell away suddenly, the woods opened, and a little valley caught and filled itself with sunlight. A grove of stately chestnuts carried the woodland shade into the yellow lap of the valley. The drooping boughs of the outer trees reached nearly to the ground and shut out the view like heavy green curtains.
Cæsare drew up with a sort of goat’s leap, and stood pointing with his flute.
“Belphœbe bathes! O daughter of Helen! And Pan is asleep! Yonder you see my daughter, sir.”
Trevanion stood amazed. Below him, and not a hundred paces away, lay a blue pool set in a hollow of grey rocks and rich green grass. Beyond it, and skirting it on the north, ran a stone wall all yellow in the sunlight, and behind the wall were piled masses of green foliage, great ilexes and stone pines, with tall cypresses intermingled, like spires in a city. A yellow villa showed among the trees on the hillside.
Trevanion saw all this, and more. It was a wonder world of blue, green and yellow, with one white figure burning like a little flame in the midst of it. A young girl had just stepped up out of the pool, and was standing on a flat rock, drying herself in the sunlight. A great mass of red-gold hair tossed and flowed about her naked shoulders and bosom as she moved, and when she stooped it poured down like liquid metal and touched the grey rock on which she stood. That wonderful hair of hers and her white body showed up against the blue of the still water like a cameo of ivory and amber set in lapis lazuli.
“A naiad, sir, a beautiful creature, or the Spirit of the Pool, if it pleases you. We are before time was, in this valley, before the Jews brought their slaves’ hymns into the land. Some day the great god Pan——”
Trevanion’s blue eyes had a strangely serious look.
“It is your daughter, signor?”
“My daughter, sir? What is my daughter? Why nothing but a pagan child, sir, a naiad, a Bacchic girl, a beautiful slip of nature, such a girl as Leda was.”
The Englishman studied him narrowly. The old gentleman was mad, his brain full of mythological nonsense, and yet there was a queer ferocity about him, a jubilant and savage paganism that suggested the tusks of a boar. The beauty of the scene was incontestable, the bathing girl a picture of Artemis, and yet this old man breathed the spirit of a wise and cynical faun.
Before Trevanion could stop him he had skipped out into the sunlight and was piping away on that flute of his. The girl had drawn up her white underwear, and was fastening the laces, while a gown of flowered blue lay at her feet. She raised her head and looked toward the chestnut trees, and Trevanion, hesitating, troubled, held back.
“Phœnician, Tin Man, come hither.”
Cæsare had pirouetted round, and was beckoning with his flute.
“Come hither, brother scholar. You shall see your own face in the pool.”
Trevanion obeyed one of those impulses that are more potent than all the meditations of a philosopher. He walked out from under the shade of the trees, and accompanied Master Cæsare down to the pool. The girl was fastening the laces of her dress, her little bare feet showing, and her wet hair all glossy in the sunlight. She smiled at Cæsare, and turned the clearest of clear eyes on the Englishman.
“The water was not so cold to-day. Maria is cross, father; you went without dinner.”
Cæsare kissed her.
“What are broken meats to a scholar? And here, my child, is a strange fellow, an Englishman, who set out to find the Satyr’s Pool, and ended by setting his teeth on edge by eating olives.”
The girl looked straight at Trevanion and smiled at him. She was utterly unembarrassed, more clean and natural than any child that he had ever met, and so lovely that his heart felt strangely moved. Her youth was just at its blossoming, smooth, dewy, glowing with the bloom of ripening fruit. La Bionda they called her, and La Bionda she was, with her red-gold hair, and her warm skin slightly tanned by the sun. Her vivid blue eyes were like the water in the pool; her little red mouth and sensitive nose made Trevanion think of an exquisite child.
“So you have come to see the Pool of the Satyr? And it is very beautiful, is it not?”
Her hands were still busy with her dress, and Trevanion noticed that it was such a dress as her mother might have worn, quaint, flowing, yet quite simple, the dress of fifty years ago.
“It is all very beautiful,” he said, glancing across the pool and up at the ilexes and stone pines.
The girl shook her hair, and slipped her feet into a pair of old red leather shoes.
“So you are an Englishman,” she said. “England is an island, is it not?”
“Yes, far away in the north.”
For the moment he found himself wondering whether the old man’s madness had lighted on her, or whether she was merely a strangely innocent and untaught child.
&n
bsp; “And what is your name?”
“Nigel Trevanion.”
She repeated the words after him with great seriousness.
“Now I shall never forget it. My name is Rosamunda; it was my mother’s name. I do not remember my mother.”
“You live here?”
She pointed to the yellow villa.
“Yes”
“Always?”
“Always. Where else would one live? It is very beautiful, and father is happy here.”
“And you have never travelled, signorina?”
“No.”
“Not even to Monte Verde?”
“Never.”
He was amazed. What sort of wild woodland girl was this, this exquisite creature who had never wandered even so far as Monte Verde, who had heard of England as some sort of vague island in the northern seas, who wore the simple dresses of fifty years ago, and to whom this sunny, lonely life seemed most natural and good.
“I have travelled much,” he told her, as she led the way to the wooden gate in the yellow wall.
“Ah, is that so?”
She was as alive and as inquisitive as a bird.
“America, France, Spain, Austria, Greece, Italy.”
“You speak almost like an Italian. And which country do you love best?”
His manhood answered the spell of her naiveté.
“Which? England is green and soft, but it rains too much. Italy, well, Italy is the country of the gods.”
“The gods? Why, to be sure: Jove and Juno, Venus and Apollo, and Pan, whom father says is the greatest of all. I have not chosen a god or a goddess.”
He was still more amazed.
“But surely there is another god,” he said. “Our Father, and Christ, and the Holy Virgin. At Monte Verde you will see the churches—the churches of God and the saints.”
She looked round at him with frank eyes.
“Yes, Maria prays to the Holy Virgin, but father laughs at these new gods and goddesses, and I have never read of them in any of his books.”
“I understand,” he said. “Signor Cæsare is a classic. But you have never seen a priest?”
“A priest? Oh—yes. Father Tolomeo comes to see Maria; but father says he is very ignorant, and I do not like Father Tolomeo; he has eyes like an ox, and his beard is always dirty.”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 4