The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “Anything that you can recommend?”

  He gave me a little, deprecating and humorous smile, and when he smiled his eyes rolled upwards and disappeared behind closed eyelids. He had a queer, porcine profile, and half a lemon stuck in his mouth would have completed the picture. He wore his brown hair en brosse. A gold watch-chain looped itself across the bulge of a white waistcoat.

  “Every wine in the list is recommended, sir.”

  I caught his droll little eye reappearing.

  “That’s rather embarrassing.”

  “But some are more recommended than others, sir; and we have English whisky.”

  That settled it: Wine, French, Italian or Spanish, red or white, liked me less than I liked its flavour. I ordered a bottle of whisky and a syphon, and watched the maître d’hôtel waddle briskly away. His black trousers were very baggy, his dress coat well cut. He had an air, a certain presence; he looked meticulously clean and well polished, a man of substance. That he was to become for me a figure of human and naïve dignity was for the moment beyond my foreseeing. I regarded him as a polite and capable person who was about to provide me with a drink.

  Half of the tables of the Telamone were unoccupied, for it was early in the season, and when the maître d’hôtel returned with my whisky and a syphon he remained for a moment beside my table. But his little, intelligent eyes watched everything. He had a way of turning on his heels, his stout body revolving as though his feet were pivoted.

  “If you would prefer a table by one of the windows, sir.”

  I supposed that there was a view when the windows were unshuttered. He raised his hands, palms turned towards me.

  “Magnificent, sir.”

  “Then—I would like a window.”

  He said that he would arrange it to-morrow.

  My friend had not exaggerated the beauty of the view from the windows of the Hôtel Telamone. It stood on the edge of a cliff, with the rocks below it grey-green with agave, aloe and prickly pear, and the foot of the cliff seemed washed by the Ionian sea. Across the sheeted blueness the Calabrian coast loomed dimly like a cloud bank, with here and there a white town glimmering. North and south—the Sicilian coast—thrusting out into blue-black headlands or creased with the green of lemon groves and olives—had the same exquisite texture as sky and sea. The almonds and the fruit trees were beginning to whiten. Cypresses threw long shadows. Under my window a golden mimosa sent up its perfume.

  Of Tindaro itself many people have written. I would describe it as a conglomeration of goats, mangy donkeys, swarthy dogs with moles and moustaches, chickens, curio shops, vociferous motors, smells, garbage, and very dirty children. It has a picturesqueness: old houses, old walls, the red and grey ruins of a fine Greco-Roman theatre. It has one passably clean street—the Corso—where you met everybody—from the waiter who attends to you, to some novelist or other spending royalties. I am not concerned with Tindaro. It is a place where people with money can strike attitudes and buy old rugs and gilded furniture and Roman pottery and velvets and damasks—and blue amber, and smell some superlative smells. I am concerned with Gustave—a Swiss—with a protuding white waistcoat, and two intelligent little eyes, and an air of benignly bearing some secret and human burden. He interested me more than Tindaro. He appeared like a sagacious and patient elephant going solidly about his particular business in a land of melancholy monkeys.

  For Gustave did the unexpected. He began straight-away to pique my curiosity. I had a favourite chair in the hotel garden at the edge of a terrace, and every morning at twelve o’clock Gustave would appear in his black clothes and white waistcoat, toddle down a flight of narrow steps to a ledge where a few olive trees grew, seat himself on a garden chair, produce a pair of field-glasses, and observe something going on below. The railway line and Tindaro station lay between the cliff and the sea. The station was visible, with its rank of waiting cars and buses, and at about twelve o’clock the train from the north arrived. It seemed obvious to me that Gustave watched the train and the arrivals. It was part of his thoroughness, his foresight; he was one of the most thorough persons I have ever met.

  “Counting the people who get into the Telamone bus,” I thought; “the number of the new arrivals for lunch. How Swiss!”

  But I was wrong. I found that out later.

  Also, Gustave had a friend, a huge grey goat belonging to one of the flocks that grazed on the stony hillsides, an enterprising creature, carrying mythology to the very door of the hotel. It shared with a one-legged player upon the Sicilian pipe the privilege of loitering upon the roadway leading to the hotel. It seemed a very tractable creature, nibbling the herbage growing on the low stone parapet above the deep drop to the olive groves below. Occasionally when the piper was piping the goat would get up on its hind legs or buck. I never saw it threaten anybody with its horns. Had it done so the management of the Telamone would have intervened.

  Gustave would feed this thing daily with a little bunch of green food. Whenever he appeared at the doorway of the hotel the goat—if it happened to be in sight—would trot up to him. It would offer its head to be rubbed, now and again giving a little playful tap at Gustave’s hand with its horns.

  Being present one morning, I shared the attentions of the goat, and words of wisdom with Gustave.

  “Pan and his pipes?” I asked; “is that it?”

  No, it was not; though Gustave knew all about Pan, and the old ruffian of a one-legged piper who had a ready cap and Sicilian blessings, and curses—which no tourist understood.

  “I prefer the goat, sir,” said Gustave; “animals don’t mutter foul words if you don’t throw five centimes.”

  I was inclined to agree with Gustave.

  “You ought to keep a dog,” I said.

  He gave me one of his droll and blessed smiles.

  “Sir—I keep a daughter.”

  I was interested. His heavy face had grown suddenly tender.

  “Here, in Tindaro?”

  “Yes. She is just as high as that.”

  He extended a hand, palm downwards.

  “Seven years. She lodges with the Swiss woman who keeps the tea-shop. A very good woman. Rosalie is quite happy there.”

  “Of course—you see her every day?”

  “Of course, sir. I have two hours each afternoon. We go out together. That is why I work so hard.”

  I liked the man, and I suppose he felt my liking, for he began to tell me of some of his early experiences. As a lad of nineteen he had gone to London to learn the language; he had obtained a post as waiter at the Cosmopolis Hotel. “They allowed you three drops there, sir. I was a nervous boy. I had two drops. And then—one evening—a gentleman getting up suddenly knocked a sauce-boat with his shoulder. I was discharged next day. I had six weeks walking the streets, with nothing in my pocket.”

  “How did you live?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “How does one? I was young then. I could not do it now. But I have never forgotten. Nor the good Samaritan——”

  “There are such people, Gustave.”

  He smiled.

  “Oh, yes; people who have eyes and hearts.”

  He was not in the least bitter, but somehow I divined in him a sadness, a vague fear. Perhaps it was the fear that those six weeks of hunger and homelessness had planted in him—fear, too, for his child.

  “I save money, sir. I do not smoke; I do not drink. There shall be no such six weeks for my daughter.”

  I liked the man. He was a good fellow. The Swiss staff in the dining-room worked under him with admirable and contented briskness. I never saw him bullying any of them, nor heard him raise his voice; apparently it was not necessary; they respected him. And my whisky remained my whisky; no surreptitious nips were taken from the bottle.

  One afternoon, when I was idling away an hour in the sun amid the ruins of the classic theatre, I came upon Gustave and a child sitting on the grass. The child had the father’s soft felt hat in her lap, and
Gustave’s cropped head was profiting by the sunlight.

  She was a pretty, dark little thing with bright eyes, very red lips, and a mop of crisp black hair, as unlike her father as a child could be. She looked sensitive and rather fragile, and in her brown eyes something seemed to lurk.

  “This is Rosalie, Mr. Stephens.”

  Gustave was for getting up, but I told him to stay where he was, and after taking the child’s shyly-offered hand, I sat down on the grass with them. About us rose the old red walls, their crevices and broken arches filled with the intense blue of the sea. Behind us rose a little rocky hill covered with prickly pear, and rosemary and asphodel. Away south Ætna loomed in the distance.

  The child seemed shy of me, so I talked to Gustave, and found myself wondering about the child’s mother. Gustave had never mentioned his wife; one might presume that she was dead, and that the good fellow kept the sorrow locked away with himself. Yet the child was so different from the father; she was graceful and aery, and quick with her glances and her colour. She looked out at you from her shyness like a little woodland sprite peeping from a thicket.

  Gustave sat and beamed. It was easy to see that the child was everything to him. He held out a hand, and she snuggled over to him; she had been tucking flowers into the band of her father’s hat.

  “You are being decorated, Gustave.”

  He rolled his eyes at me.

  “To-morrow is Rosalie’s birthday. We were planning——”

  I smiled at the child.

  “Felicitations, Rosalie. And what is the age to be?”

  “Eight, monsieur.”

  Gustave cuddled her.

  “We are going for a drive in an autocar: Rosalie, papa, and Mademoiselle Lulu. Lulu is a doll, sir; the principal doll in Tindaro. We shall buy her on the way home.”

  Rosalie threw me an elf’s glance.

  “Her eyes move, monsieur, and she has a shingled head.”

  “An up-to-date young lady. Even dolls, Gustave——”

  “Even dolls, sir, have to move with the times.”

  They were so happy together that I took myself off and had tea at the English tea-shop, and on the way back to Telamone I came upon Gustave and his daughter walking up the Corso. He had the child by the hand. He looked huge and clumsy beside her, a grotesque parading with a fairy, but I knew by now that the soul of a Swiss waiter can walk with God.

  I think it was two days later when I saw Gustave go down to his look-out on the terrace where the olives grew, and turn his glasses on to Tindaro station. The twelve o’clock train had arrived, but I had grown accustomed to the mid-day train and Gustave’s binoculars, and I turned over the pages of my paper. A breeze made the paper play tricks with me, and I was struggling with a mischievous sheet when I happened to catch sight of Gustave’s face as he came up the narrow steps. The man had a scared, breathless look. He paid no attention to me, but went trotting up the garden, still holding his binoculars in his right hand.

  “Heavens!” I thought, “a whole trainload has arrived for the Telamone, and Gustave is short of hors d’œuvres.”

  I saw him pass through the arched gate of the garden, and ascend the steps to the hotel. But he did not enter the hotel. I saw him go hurrying along the raised roadway. He had been joined by that absurd grey goat, who appeared to regard Gustave’s haste as part of a game and went frisking beside him. They disappeared together into Tindaro, a hatless and stout head-waiter in evening dress and that prancing, horned creature.

  Something was in the air. The memory of Gustave’s scared and hurrying face began to suggest happenings more serious than a shortage or an omission. He had not entered Tindaro in search of a few tins of sardines, or a bottle of olives, and somehow his fat and anxious face seemed to connect itself with my mind-picture of his child. For some reason or other he had dashed off to his Rosalie, to the pâtissèrie shop kept by Madame Bozio. But why? And what had the arrival of the twelve o’clock train to do with it, if it had anything to do with it?

  I went into lunch feeling interested. Gustave was there, but not the Gustave of normal and attentive blandness. The man had a worried face, and eyes that expressed secret apprehension. He was restless; he kept fussing up and down among the tables; he bumped against one and upset a vase of flowers. He apologized. His forehead had a moist look. When he came to my table with a menu card in his hand I noticed that his fingers were conveying a fine tremor to the card.

  I felt that I wanted to say something to the man, something friendly and reassuring.

  “How’s Rosalie to-day——? Quite well——?”

  He did not seem to hear me. He was staring at the glass door of the salle-à-manger. New arrivals were entering.

  “Excuse me, monsieur.”

  He disappeared behind my back, and I heard him being polite to the newcomers, but the voice was not the placid, debonair voice of the Gustave whom I knew. It was the voice of a man speaking empty words while his inward self remained inarticulate in the presence of some torturing emotion.

  It was my habit to indulge in a little siesta after lunch. The window of my room looked south towards Ætna. I had closed the jalousies and dozed off, when the voice woke me. It was a woman’s voice, loud and resonant and angry; it seemed to be tearing a temper to tatters; it scolded and threatened and declaimed. Also, it tore my sense of peace to tatters; it was the sort of voice that throws grit into the eyes of a man’s soul.

  “Confound it! Who the devil——?”

  I got up and opened the shutters, and the little drama displayed itself in the hotel roadway below me. There was poor Gustave making expostulating and placating gestures to a tall woman who had come there determined to make an abominable scene. She was a handsome creature, very smartly dressed. She seemed to be clawing the air in front of his face. Obviously she was his wife, for she was announcing the fact to my window. She was calling poor Gustave a pig, and a dog and a villain. He had deserted her. He had taken her child away, her dear little Rosalie, her angel. But she was a woman and a mother. She would have her rights.

  Poor Gustave flapped his arms rather helplessly.

  “Be quiet, Hortense. If you will be quiet——”

  “Where is the child—you——”

  His stout figure seemed to solidify.

  “She is not here——”

  “Liar——”

  It was a deplorable scene. I could see the heads of the concierge and the two porters protruding from the hotel doorway, and suddenly it occurred to me that I ought to go down and rescue poor Gustave. I might be able to put an end to the scene. I did go down. I found the woman walking to and fro like a fury in a cage, her handsome face suffused and venomous. Gustave was standing obdurately still, a hulk of a man splashed by her invective.

  I spoke to him.

  “Gustave——”

  He turned with a kind of dead stare.

  “Gustave—I’m giving a lunch to-morrow. Can you spare me a minute?”

  I think he saw the rescue in my eyes. He absconded from the fight. He followed me into the lounge, fumbling pathetically with a little notebook. But with a nod at him I made for the garden door and he followed me like a dog following someone with a sympathetic voice.

  I got him away to a little quiet corner in the garden where three stiff chairs and an iron table stood under the thin shade of two pepper trees. I sat on the edge of the iron table, while he fumbled with his notebook, and could not look at me for shame.

  “Monsieur’s luncheon party——?”

  Together we concocted some sort of imaginary menu, he scribbling in his little notebook, while I felt my compassion for him growing more articulate. I had my cigar case in my pocket, and I offered it to Gustave.

  “Smoke——?”

  “Monsieur is very kind——”

  I saw his little eyes filmed with moisture. He lit one of my cigars, and handed me back the case with a little bow, and drew in a deep breath.

  “Such is life, sir! Nine years ag
o, and moonlight on Lake Leman, and the lime trees smelling sweet——”

  He hunched his shoulders, and puffed silently for some seconds.

  “One should never marry a handsome girl with a temper. But I thought—that as I was a placid sort of fellow—— But then—I did not know that she had such a devil of a temper. It was unsupportable; it seemed to grow worse and worse. I do believe, sir, that some people are possessed. Even the child was terrified, and used to run away and hide, or wake up at night—screaming——”

  He gave me a pleading, deprecating glance.

  “I tried everything, sir. And then—she took to drinking. The storms became abominable. At last—for the sake of the child—I ran away, and took a place in Hungary. I used to send her money, while concealing my address. I promised to send her money regularly—if she would keep away. For she had become a bad woman—sir——”

  He gulped smoke and emotion.

  “But she found me out. She always does find me out. Six months of peace—and then. It’s just the devil in her, fury for fury’s sake. She comes and makes a scene. She tries to get hold of the child——”

  I was sorry for the man, and yet—what could one say? I asked him why he had not divorced her, and he spread his hands and besought me to consider the life of a head-waiter.

  “I go from place to place. I have to earn money. I have had no time to collect evidence. And some women are very cunning, sir. Always she contrives to put me in the wrong.”

  “But surely,” I said, “it would save you money—in the end—if you divorced her.”

  He agreed.

  “But she has taken so much money from me. I gave her money to try and keep her away from the child. Imagine, sir, how such a woman can poison the innocence of a child. And now—I shall have to disappear, give her the slip somehow. And everything was very pleasant here and the season is just beginning, and I shall lose much money, and forfeit my contract.”

  He looked very miserable, and when he tucked the cigar between his lips it added an ironic touch to his unhappy face.

  “Why go? Let her make a scene or two. She will get tired of it. And we respect you here—Gustave.”