The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  Now, Malton was a rapidly growing town. It had shed its village smock. Houses were springing up everywhere, and new building estates eating into the green fields and causing the death of old trees. Motor cars multiplied. And Malton and its responsible citizens began to visualize the expanding needs of the community.

  Malton had its cottage hospital and its local fire brigade, its district nurses, and its various clubs, but its hospital was proving itself inadequate. Also, Malton had taken to itself a bright and brisk new doctor, “Young Smith,” as Malton called him. Young Smith was a very live person, and a very capable surgeon. He began to be felt in the place.

  One morning Mr. Green came down to the workshop where Tom was fitting new pistons in an engine.

  “Heard the news, Tom?”

  Tom had heard some news.

  “The town’s to have a motor-ambulance, and they have asked me to run it.”

  Tom straightened his long back. His eyes had grown dreamy.

  “Going to do it, sir?”

  “Well, yes; but it isn’t the job for any ordinary chap. Dr. Smith’s been talking to me. Naturally the man who drives the ambulance has got to know how to handle a case.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Obviously. It’s not an amateur job. I could take it on.”

  Old Green stared at him.

  “You may be a damned fine mechanic, Tom, but what do you know about first aid?”

  “I’ve been studying. I guess I’m as good as any St. John’s Ambulance man, any day. I’m not gassing.”

  Mr. Green knew that Tom Silver did not gas, but his curiosity was piqued.

  “You’ve been studying? What for?”

  Tom wiped his hands on a wad of cotton waste.

  “Just felt I had to, that’s all. I’ve seen one bad smash, and it got me cold. No more use than a bloody kid. After that I felt I’d learn something in case I saw another.”

  Mr. Green—who was a shrewd old John Bull of a man, and who knew just what a fellow like Silver was worth—grunted and looked thoughtful.

  “Well, you’d better go up and see Dr. Smith. He’s one of those thorough chaps. He doesn’t take things on tick.”

  Tom knocked off work a little earlier than usual, and when Mary heard him coming in the back door she glanced at the clock and wondered why her man was half an hour before his time, but when she saw Tom’s face she knew that something had happened, and something that he found good. Also, she allowed him the pleasure of giving her a surprise, because if a man has no one to whom he can say: “Well, what do you think of that!” life is no better than an old clothes shop.

  He assumed a casualness.

  “Can you put on tea, mother?”

  “The kettle’s just on the boil.”

  “Then I’ll have a little shaving-water.”

  She allowed him his mystery. But what was the great occasion which demanded that Tom should shave himself a second time in one day? In any other man she would have postulated woman. She heard him rummaging about upstairs, and when he came down to her he was wearing a clean collar and shirt and his dark blue Sunday suit. His eyes had a deep, challenging smile.

  She looked him over.

  “Well, what’s on, my lad?”

  “Going up to see Dr. Smith.”

  “That’s the new doctor. Is he wanting a chauffeur?”

  “No; it’s like this, mother. The town’s getting a motor-ambulance. Our people are going to run it. I told the boss I was for the job.”

  “Whole time?”

  “No; part time job. But Dr. Smith’s hot stuff. Naturally they don’t want a chap on the car who can’t handle a case.”

  Mary poured out his tea.

  “I’m glad, Tom,” she said. “I know it’s what you’ve been hankering after. I’m glad.”

  So Tom Silver went up to see Dr. Smith, who was a brisk, stout fellow with the cut of a naval man, and Dr. Smith looked at Silver and liked him. He liked him very well.

  Dr. Smith had a bright eye and a mischievous tongue. As a student he had been a slogging boxer, and even now he liked to give a man a punch and see how he reacted.

  He questioned Tom.

  “Look here, supposing you found a chap in the road with his throat cut, broken glass, and bleeding like hell, what would you do?”

  Tom stood like a man on parade.

  “Put my fingers to the wound, sir, and try to get hold of the bleeding point.”

  “You would. And supposing you found a fellow lying beside the road, after an accident, what would you do first?”

  “Look at him, sir.”

  “Look at him?”

  “See if I could spot anything before messing him about.”

  Dr. Smith laughed.

  “Who taught you that?”

  “Well, when an engine has chucked up, sir; you have a look round before getting out a spanner. Besides, I’m not raw to the job.”

  Dr. Smith’s glance said: “You’ll do. You’ll do damned well.”

  And Tom Silver went back to his wife and sat by the fire with her and looked happy.

  Tom Silver was very proud of the new ambulance. It had a cream-coloured body, black wings, and a red cross on the side panels, and he cherished it as a man cherishes his first car. But more so, for this ambulance symbolized to Silver his passion to serve; and, in serving, to express that something in himself which makes man imagine God. This was no mere handling of cold steel, but a task into which compassion entered, and in helping the sick and the injured the soul of Tom Silver was satisfied.

  There were other men who did not understand this. They said: “Old Tom’s got a nerve. No sort of bloody mess seems to put the wind up him. He’s a hard nut.”

  But Tom Silver was anything but hard; he was gentle. His urge to help was so strong that he did not flinch or hesitate. And as his confidence grew his pride in his job grew with it. He knew that he could help those who were helpless.

  One winter morning, when the wet pavements had been iced by a sudden frost, someone slipped and broke a leg. It happened just outside the post-office, and at an hour when all the doctors were out on their rounds. Tom was sent for, and with a police constable to help him he set the broken leg, and carried the patient off in the ambulance.

  Dr. Smith, intercepted somewhere on his round by a telephone message, drove down to the hospital, and seeing Silver afterwards, asked him a question.

  “Was that your job, Tom?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

  Silver went pink under his brown skin, and that flush remained with him all the morning. He carried the warmth of it back to Mary at the dinner hour, and it helped to add savour to Irish stew.

  “That sort of thing makes a job seem worth while, mother.”

  And Mary knew that her man was finding life good.

  Meanwhile Malton grew and flourished amazingly; and its citizens, confronted with the inadequacy of a ten-bed cottage hospital, decided that Malton must step into the line of progress. Dr. Smith blew hither and thither like a stout breeze. Money was promised, fêtes organized, beds endowed. And so it came about that a new hospital was planned and put into being, and Tom Silver watched it grow. He had given his guinea; but he felt that there was more of him than twenty-one shillings in that handsome, red brick building.

  It was to be so, for it had been decided by the committee that the new hospital should have a motor-ambulance, and a driver permanently attached to it, and Tom Silver was offered the post.

  Old Green was inclined to growl about it. He did not want to part with his prize mechanic. He tackled Tom.

  “I’ll make it worth your while to stay on.”

  Tom looked embarrassed.

  “It’s very good of you, sir, but I’ve got to go. It isn’t that I’m not well satisfied here.”

  “You’ll be dropping good money, and the chance of a share. I’ll give you a day to think it over.”

  Tom went home and put it to his
wife.

  “I shall be dropping fifteen bob a week, mother.”

  “Well, drop them, my dear.”

  He crossed over to where she was sitting and kissed her.

  “You always were a great little woman. My heart’s in the job.”

  Two more years passed, and Tom Silver was very much a person. He had a local reputation. Other men said: “There goes old Tom in his bloody old bus.” But it was said kindly, for Tom and his sanguinary vehicle were realities in the life of Malton and the neighbourhood. He was something of an autocrat: no one else was allowed to touch his ambulance; the blankets had to be just so, and the stretchers spotless. When Tom had to collect a case from a cottage he was addressed as “Mr. Silver,” and there is no doubt that Tom was considered to be as much a public institution as the local police inspector, or the clerk to the Urban District Council.

  Well-to-do cases sometimes offered Tom Silver tips. He accepted tips; he passed them on to Mary, so that there should be less chance of her missing those fifteen shillings.

  One foggy day in November, about two o clock in the afternoon, the ambulance was rung for. The hospital porter who took the message, dashed out to warn Tom.

  * * *

  Station bus had a smash on Tipsy Hill.—Urgent.

  * * *

  Tom knew those station buses, clattering, ramshackle, go-as-you-please crates of glass and tin that careered up and down to and from Malton station. Often he had cursed those buses and their drivers, but the strangest thing of all was that he did not remember that Mary was going over to Telford market to shop, and that she had taken one of those buses to the station. He just forgot, or his job and its urgency left a blind spot in his mind. He had his ambulance out and on the road in less than a minute after the porter had warned him.

  He got to the place before the doctors. In the fog he saw a row of fir trees, and one of those tin-pot buses with its silly wheels in the air half in and half out of a clump of furze, and round it a little group of people. He sprang down; he elbowed through.

  “Anybody hurt?”

  Someone stared him in the face. And then he heard a voice, a little, moaning voice: “I want my Tom. Will someone fetch my Tom.”

  Silver saw her lying there on the grass; two men were kneeling, and one of them was fumbling with a handkerchief. The handkerchief was all red, so were the man’s hands, and he had the flurried, helpless air of a fellow who was frightened.

  “She’s bleeding like—— I can’t—— Where are the doctors?”

  Silver was down on his knees. He had edged the other man aside.

  “It’s all right, mother; I’m here.”

  But within him there was terror, such fear as he had never known. He remembered afterwards that his hands had felt paralysed until the warm blood had touched them, and they had seemed to become alive. They were him: the man, Tom Silver. Afterwards, his lower lip showed red where he had bitten it.

  The doctor came. It was Smith.

  “What, Tom? Good lord, man! It’s——”

  Silver’s teeth showed in a kind of smile.

  “All right, sir; I’ve got my fingers in it. Artery—broken glass.”

  “Good. Can you hang on?”

  “What do you think.”

  “Right, you stick to it while we lift.”

  That night Tom Silver was sitting in front of the fire in the hospital porter’s room. He had been home once to the cottage in Paradise Row to fetch some things for his wife, and to feed the cat, but he had not wanted to stay there. The cottage was too empty and strange. So he sat and waited and wondered; and the hospital seemed a silent place, and this silence was like a door that presently would open.

  It did open. A face looked in—the waggish, kindly, mischievous face of Dr. Smith.

  “All right, Tom. She’ll do.”

  That was all. He closed the door, and Tom sat and stared at the fire. He thought: “Seems strange somehow how things happen. Just as though they were meant to happen. Maybe God means ’em to happen.”

  POET AND PEASANT

  It happened in the days before short skirts, and it happened to three people who were considered rather eccentric by the conventionalists of that epoch.

  Sanchia painted pictures and rented a bungalow on Chudleigh Moor. Her pictures were approaching the pose of the purple and orange school, and she was one of the first persons to indulge in black ceilings and white floors. Sanchia’s attitude to life was such that if she saw a vase or a convention standing right way up, she was impelled to turn it upside down. Incidentally, a bungalow on Chudleigh Moor in January was a reversal of the seasons in their sanity, more especially so when a little flat in Chelsea offered her a hot bath that was neither of the hip-bath order nor filled by the aid of cans.

  Oscar wrote poetry. He was fat and flaccid and sallow, and wore his very black hair plastered like a Dutch doll’s, a sort of art-cretonne of a man, and of an amazing and drawling insolence. He wore flame-coloured dressing-gowns, and cultivated an odour of decadence. Also, he cultivated Sanchia, because he thought her thin and fierce, and farouche, a sort of beggar wench who could scratch like a cat. Oscar liked to write poems—he called them “pomes”—about gutter-ladies and cocottes and amateur Madame Bovaries, and be-drugged French artists, and he had added Sanchia to the collection, which—of course—was an insult to Sanchia; but Oscar posed and prospered upon his impertinences.

  John neither posed nor painted. He was a rather shaggy, large, blue-eyed creature who strode through the world in rough tweeds. He had a cottage on the Moor; he had had cottages and shacks all over the world. He was a tramping naturalist of the Hudson school, with a passion for birds, a private income of a few hundreds a year, and a public that purchased his books by the dozen. He was a somewhat silent person, perhaps because he had spent so much of his life in open spaces, listening and watching and lying under hedges and bushes and in heather and long grass. Sanchia described him as “having hay in his hair.”

  Early in the January of that year Oscar came down to stay with the Careys of Lee Manor. It was a strange thing of Oscar to do in January, for the Careys were dull people; but the weather was mild, and Lee Manor was only four miles from Sanchia’s bungalow. Also, the Careys had a car, and to Oscar—who never walked more than a mile—a car was a necessity. He borrowed it, as he borrowed everything, with the air of conferring a favour.

  “You had better keep that car, Carey. You can tell people that Oscar Flack once sat in it.”

  He was a flaneur, but he took his poetry very seriously, and John, arriving at Sanchia’s bungalow about tea-time, and dreaming himself into a tête-à-tête with Sanchia before the fire, completed the new triangle.

  Martha, Sanchia’s indispensable, met him and took his hat. She approved of John.

  “There’s another gentleman here, sir.”

  John’s blue eyes stared.

  “Oh, well, that’s all right.”

  He was ushered in, and his arrival interrupted Oscar’s reading of a little thing of his on “Orange Pulp in Covent Garden.”

  They had not met before. Sanchia introduced them, and it occurred to her to think that they might be rather amusing together. Oscar, remaining seated on the tuffet, presented John with a first finger to shake.

  “How de do.”

  John, holding the finger, and looking surprised and not knowing what to do with it, was suddenly moved to give that fat finger a twist, but he refrained. He was mute. He sat down in a chair and displayed his big boots and thick grey stockings. He seemed to smell of the heather.

  There should have been the silence of embarrassment, but silence and Oscar never cohabited. As a conversationalist he was what they called in those days “utterly utter.” He did utter. He talked while tea was coming in, and while it was being poured out, and while it was being consumed. He got hold of bits of buttered toast with his fat white fingers, and managed to talk and toast himself simultaneously. He talked about Debussy, and “poor old Tom Hardy and his p
oetical pomposities,” and the last thing in Grand Guignol. He knew that he was annoying John, and he went on annoying him. He was like a griffon yapping at a St. Bernard.

  John sat malevolently still, and ate buttered toast, or as much of it as Oscar chose to leave him. And Sanchia, at her ease on the hearthrug, with her arms clasping her knees, thought John’s solemn face infinitely funny. Almost he looked as though Oscar was a bad cheese.

  But she did try to drag John into the conversation. She liked John. She told him to light his pipe, and she mentioned to Oscar that John was interested in birds.

  Oscar tried a quip.

  “My dear sir, do you keep canaries? I once had a canary.”

  “Indeed,” said John; “did you?”

  “The most Victorian bird. It must have been a she. It used to tweet—‘Albert—Albert.’ ”

  John plugged tobacco in his pipe.

  “I see, quite lyrical. These things are catching.”

  And then they looked at each other slantwise as men will, and knew that there could be murder between them, though in John’s hands Oscar would have been less than a sack of stale flour.

  Now when Oscar was annoying anybody he felt his sleekest and his happiest, and if he could combine impertinencies towards Mrs. Grundy with a mild intrigue with some attractive woman, then the situation was flawless. For to Oscar, John symbolized the British Constitution, and the lions in Trafalgar Square, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a public that could go dotty over a novel like “Lorna Doone.” Oscar, being Irish, was always making terrible fun of the English, and John was so very English. It was easy to twist his tail.

  At least, it appeared so, and Oscar sat him out at Sanchia’s on two successive afternoons, and treated John like an overgrown boy, and had the best of the fire, and apparently the best of Sanchia. He absorbed so much of the fire that Sanchia was moved towards playfulness.

  “Martha tells me that we are down to the last hundredweight.”

  “Of what, dear lady?”

  “Coal.”

  “A shortage of coal! But surely there are coal merchants in Devon, as well as Drakes and noble fellows.”