He gave me a grateful look.
“Thank you, monsieur. But the child——? And the management might object—— Such scenes——”
“Why not tell the Swiss woman to keep the child in the house. If you can trust her.”
“She is a good woman, sir.”
“Well—why not try it. Make a stand. If you allow yourself to be hunted from place to place—you give her the advantage.”
“It is true,” he said. “Perhaps I have been too much a coward for the sake of the child.”
It is possible that my sympathy and advice helped to harden his over-soft heart, for that evening at dinner he came and stood beside my table with an air of reinflated confidence. His white waistcoat had more of its natural civic dignity.
“I have decided to stay, sir.”
“Good.”
“The management has been very sympathetic. It seems, sir, that they appreciate my work here.”
“We all do that, Gustave.”
“And Madame Bozio is a tower of strength. Rosalie is not to leave the house or garden. Madame Bozio is a very determined and kind-hearted woman, sir. She says that she will be quite able to keep—her—out of the house.”
I was glad. It seemed to me that Gustave had only to show a determined front to this fury, and she would soon tire of persecuting him. Obviously the thing for him to do was to refuse to send her money unless she promised to keep her distance. But Gustave was a sentimental creature. It may be that he still thought of Hortense as the girl he had known her when the moon shone on Lake Leman, and the lime trees were in bloom. He would rather run away than be brutally and firmly final.
But this domestic drama was to end in a manner beyond the most fantastic imaginings. The climax was both shocking and tragic and grotesque. Gustave’s wife remained in Tindaro; she lodged at some cheap little hotel; she appeared upon the Corso very flashily dressed; she frequented a certain café and a dancing cabaret that were more than a little dubious. It appeared that she made one or two attempts upon Madame Bozio’s defences, and was stoutly repulsed.
I met the woman once or twice in the Corso. She was a bold, handsome creature, but if ever a woman had evil painted upon her face Gustave’s wife had it. She was the sort of woman to make any decent man feel wholesomely afraid, and to run from her as from a devouring pestilence. The angry and lascivious eyes of her, and that red and greedy mouth were only too suggestive. I understood why poor Gustave was afraid of her, and especially so when he looked into the eyes of his child.
Every day she would walk to the gates of the Telamone. She would enter with an air of defiance, and parade up and down the private road between the hotel and the low stone wall that guarded the miniature precipice at the road’s edge. She was waiting for the eternal chance of humiliating poor Gustave; and no doubt she enjoyed it.
But Gustave was shy. Only once again did she catch him in public, and that when he emerged for a moment to feed the grey goat with a handful of green stuff. I happened to witness the interview, for I was writing a letter at my bedroom window.
She came suddenly upon Gustave. I imagine she had been sitting upon one of the hotel seats that were screened by low hedges of Banksia rose. Apparently she objected to the goat, as she would have objected to anything for which Gustave had a liking; anyway, she rapped the creature over the head with her red sunshade, and the goat withdrew. But I saw the creature’s light eyes fixed on the woman as she stood and abused her husband. She had a particularly unpleasant voice. I heard her asking Gustave for money.
But he stood his ground. In fact he ordered her out of the place, and having shown so much boldness, he retreated with dignity and deliberation. He disappeared from my view. His wife stood and watched him enter the hotel, and her handsome face expressed vindictive surprise, for I suppose this was the first time that he had defied her. She looked up at the hotel windows as though the Telamone was Jericho, ready to fall flat when she sounded her trumpet.
She put up her red parasol. Gustave had ordered her to leave the hotel grounds, and like a defiant and malicious child she walked to the low wall and stood looking over. She was in no hurry; she would remain there just as long as she pleased, and depart at her leisure.
I had resumed the writing of my letter when I heard a pattering sound in the road below. I glanced up just in time to see the grey goat scampering with head down towards the woman standing by the parapet. She did not seem to hear the creature, and until the thing had happened I did not foresee that such a thing could happen. The creature’s charge flung her headlong over the low wall.
Gustave must have been standing in the vestibule and watching his wife through the glass door, for as I started up from my chair I saw him rush out. Some fifty yards away a flight of steps led down to the lower terrace, and I saw him make for the steps. I, too, found myself in the roadway and running for the steps. A waiter and the concierge were following me.
But at the bottom of the flight of steps I turned and motioned them back. I had seen Gustave on his knees, raising the woman’s figure.
I loitered for a moment and then went slowly along the path under the flickering shadows of the olive trees. Gustave was still kneeling there; he was in tears. He looked up at me pathetically.
“She is dead, sir.”
He looked at the poor, painted face.
“After all—she was—the mother of my child, sir; and there was a time——”
SAND DUNES
Millard met me at the station with his car, and we drove over to Milford through the green freshness of a summer evening. We had seen very little of each other during the last two years, but Millard was a man to whom the lapse of time made no difference. Friendship with him was a thing of the country: robust, steadfast, of slow growth, not given to change like the mere fickle friendships of a city.
“Well, how’s life?” he asked.
I told him that I was tired, that the business world was like a pirate ship, and that I was taking a holiday.
“So you are beginning with us,” he said; “that’s good. Grace shall take you in hand. A long chair in the garden, eggs and milk, and a little mild tennis.”
He smiled at me in the old way with his quiet blue eyes. There was no need for me to ask how life was treating him, for his brown and healthy happiness was as obvious as the sunset.
“How long can we keep you?”
“A week, if that is not too long.”
“Of course not. And what are you going to do afterwards?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Waiting for an inspiration!”
“Yes, that’s about it.”
The Millards had an old white house at the end of an old green garden. The place had an atmosphere: it was mellow, meditative, and very quiet; it was a house that did not stand; it reclined on a green carpet, surrounded by flowers and trees. You felt yourself relax directly you entered it. The rooms were long and not too brightly lit, full of soft colours and old wood. You saw flowers everywhere, and smelt them. Grace Millard lived in a world of flowers.
My first thought was: “Ah—I am going to be happy here.”
And Grace Millard’s welcoming brown eyes seemed to smile a silent acquiescence.
The whole house charmed me with the exception of my bedroom. I do not know what it was about the room that troubled me, for there was everything in it that a thoughtful woman could think of to make a bachelor comfortable. I saw it first just when twilight was beginning to fall. The light was cold, and even a blackbird’s singing could not charm away the room’s impression of sadness, chilliness. The furniture was of lightish oak, the curtains and bedspread purple, the carpet a soft grey. Millard, who was with me, asked if I should like a fire.
“My dear chap, no,” I said; “I haven’t quite forgotten that I am an old soldier.”
The room depressed me. It filled me with a vague sense of unaccountable restlessness, which I explained by the sudden lost feeling that sometimes falls upon a h
ard-worked man when he has thrown off his harness, and finds himself with nothing to do.
I am a good sleeper, but I slept badly in that room.
“Well, had a good night?”
Millard was spooning out porridge.
“Oh, splendid,” I said, lying cheerfully; “you have no confounded taxis in this corner of Surrey.”
“Some people say the birds are rather noisy.”
“That reminds me of the huntsman who had a grievance against ‘them stinking violets’!”
* * *
We lounged, we motored, we played some not very strenuous tennis; I loafed in the hammock and smoked and read novels. I was out in the open air all day, and going in to my meals with immense zest, and yet my sleep in that purple and grey room was brittle and uncertain. The night would begin well—for I was healthily tired—but I woke each night about two, and from that time onwards I dozed between intervals of restless wakefulness. I could not understand this broken sleep, and the feeling of expectancy that would come upon me suddenly. I would lie still and listen just as though I expected to hear some movement.
“Nerves!” I thought; “sudden change of habit. You are more tired than you suspected. Two years of worry and work, without a proper holiday.”
It is unusual for me to dream, but on the fourth night in that room I had a dream that was so vivid and so peculiar that I got up in the grey of the dawn and wrote down its strange details. I was most extraordinarily impressed by it. It made me feel as though I had been somewhere out of myself, and that my conscious self still felt a little bewildered and scared in the body to which it had returned.
I give the jottings as I scribbled them down:
It began with some war picture. I was lying with twenty or thirty men in more or less open ground. Germans rather above us and quite invisible.
Bombing. Rather crude and antiquated, more suggestive of one’s ideas of the XVIIIth Century grenades. Not very serious; no one hurt. Much red flare and smoke, and pieces of metal falling about. One big piece—red hot—fell near me as I lay, a little to my right side, and I made the remark that it would have been unpleasant if that piece had fallen in the middle of my back. Men laughing and joking. No terror.
An interlude.
Billets in some foreign hotel, rather vague. A garden with a group of middle-aged women, English—I think.
Again, the earlier scene. All quiet. I am suddenly alone, rather high up, on sandy ground covered with tussocks of coarse grass. Sand dunes stretch away like the dunes round Nieuport, country I had known during the war. Silence; desolation.
Observed in series:
1. A hole rather like a rabbit hole, and lying in it a leather case with a strap. I did not touch it. Some vague suggestion of a booby trap.
2. I have moved on. I see a man’s civilian overcoat, dark, neatly folded lengthwise with the lining outermost, laid on the sand.
3. I go further. On a rather terrace-like stretch of sand there are three or four hats scattered, Panama or canvas. One, a woman’s, with a faded purple band. I am conscious of surprise. (I have heard it said that one never feels surprise in dreams. I did.)
4. Further on I see things scattered about: rugs, overcoats, one or two tennis rackets in presses! This struck me as very queer.
5. Lower down, another slight, sandy terrace. On it—very vividly—two travelling trunks, bleached rather white, with black leather bindings. A black hand-camera. Next to the camera a white wooden box about nine inches by six, dovetailed, with a sliding lid, sealed at one end with a strip of paper or a big label.
Flashing through my mind the thought: “Fugitives, Belgians, early in war, luggage abandoned. How did they come? By car. How queer!”
6. I turn round and see behind me a low bank of sand and three figures, half sitting, half lying, muffled up, brown coloured and swollen, looking as though they are asleep. Instinctively I know them to be dead. One man wears a cap with ear-flaps. The faces make me think of the brown, flat faces of rag dolls. They are almost featureless, and mummified. I see the small black dot of an eye on one face which turns out to be a fly.
7. I find myself looking over the bank and down into a hollow beyond. More figures, two or three, lying there and seeming to melt into the sand.
8. I look over my left shoulder. About half a mile away over the dunes a white Flemish house flashes up in the grey light, a rather tall and narrow house with a high white gable. A few dark figures are moving about the house.
9. I realize that I have wandered into a place of peril, perhaps behind the German posts or into no-man’s-land close to their trenches. It is all strange. I seem to be standing on ground where no man has stood in open daylight since the beginning of the war. I am conscious of fear, terror, a desire to lie down and crawl somewhere.
10. I woke. The dawn is grey. I hear the sound of birds, and a cock pheasant calling.
I did not mention this dream to the Millards, for it seemed to me so morbid and so uncanny, that having put it on record, I thought it best to pigeon-hole it and to forget. Nor did I in any way connect it with the room or the house. I am not a psychic person. I am afraid my inclination would be to ask myself what I had had for dinner on the previous night. But I could not get away from the vividness of this dream; all its details were extraordinarily distinct; there seemed to be a sort of grim inevitableness running through it. I found myself wondering who those people were who lay dead among the dunes; how had they come there, how had they died? Had I seen something that had actually happened quite a number of years ago?
The dream haunted me all that day, but that night I slept without a break. I found the memory much less vivid; it had begun to fade like the proof of a photograph that has been exposed to the light.
Millard came in from the garden as I wandered downstairs.
“Hallo, Toby; slept well?”
“Splendidly.”
“There is a batch of letters for you somewhere. Where’s that girl put them? Oh, there, on the side-board.”
Grace had not yet appeared, and Millard picked up the morning paper and glanced at the news while I went through my letters. The envelope of the last one carried a very familiar scrawl—Jamie Hamilton’s big, virile hand. There was a foreign postage stamp in the right, upper corner, a Belgian stamp, and I stared at it for a moment with a feeling of surprise.
I opened the letter. The Hamiltons were staying at Ostend, Jamie, Norah, and the two children. Their hotel was the Leopold, very comfortable and all cleaned up, as he had put it. His suggestion was that I should run over and spend part of my holiday with them, and he promised me quite a pleasant time. “It is not half bad here, and not a little amusing. We bathe and play tennis, and I have been teaching the kids to swim. I have had one or two jaunts with Norah to some of the old places. Do you remember Nieuport, and that damned footbridge over the Yser? If family life won’t bore you, come along and join us. Bring your clubs if you care to. We dance a bit. There are one or two quite nice girls here, and Norah is always hinting that you ought to get married.”
All the time I was reading Jamie’s letter I heard a voice inside me saying “You will go.” And yet there was a part of me which did not want to go, for my queer dream had thrown a blight of fear and of horror over all that dune country.
“Do you remember Hamilton?” I asked Millard.
He glanced up from the cricket news.
“Rather. Awful good chap.”
“He and his people are over at Ostend; they want me to join them. I think I shall go.”
I did go. I wired to Hamilton, asking him to book me a room at the Leopold, and I took the Dover-Ostend boat on a still and rather misty day when the sea was like a sheet of ground glass. I leant over the rail and watched the Belgian coast slide by, dim and rather strange with its pale dunes and little watering-places crouching at the edge of the sea. How familiar they were, St. Idesbald, Coxyde, Nieuport Bains, Westende! They had come to life again; but for me they were full of the strange, sad
smell of the War, and as for the dunes, they were dominated by my dream. It insinuated itself into my consciousness, permeated it, coloured my impression of things, threw a ghostly blight over all that pale coast. I fought against the absurdity of this curious obsession.
“What rot! You are out for a holiday. Get rid of all this dyspeptic nonsense.”
Hamilton and two very vital young people met me as I came off the boat, Pauline and Phœbe, one dark, the other red, both with long, slim, active legs and dancing eyes. Jamie was his lean, old, quizzical self. The haze had cleared, and Ostend warmed itself in the sunlight at the edge of the yellow sands and the blue of the sea. The atmosphere of my dream dispersed itself. Pauline held on to my left hand and asked me what I had done with my moustache. Phœbe, mischievous yet enigmatical, eddied along between me and Jamie and studied me with friendly intentness. When I smiled she smiled. There was no gloom here, no mystery, save the delightful mystery of childhood, eager and unspoilt.
“I hope you have brought your plus fours, old chap?”
“I have.”
“Daddy—what are plus fours?”
“A certain form of knickerbocker, my dear.”
“Mr. Mayne—I’ve got knickers on. What would they be?”
“Minus tens—I should say!” said her father.
Norah Hamilton was waiting for us on the terrace in front of the hotel. She always smiled at you as though you were some delightful yet whimsical sort of joke. She had been bathing, and her red hair looked massively rebellious.
“So glad you’ve come. I think Jamie was getting a little bored with the family.”
“I have not seen any signs of it,” I said.
My first impression of the Hôtel Leopold was a pleasant one. It was clean and sunny, and not too large; it overlooked the sea; the concierge spoke English, and had a smile that would not be included in the bill. I found that Hamilton had engaged me a really excellent room on the second floor, and I realized that when lying in that comfortable bed with its deep mattress I should be sung to by the sea.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 19