The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  He returned, and sat in the dim light beside his wife. She was leaning forward slightly, absorbed, unconscious of his presence, and Carr kept glancing at her with secret curiosity. Was it possible that they were strangers to each other—utter strangers?

  The curtain descended for the last time; the lights were up, lights that seemed particularly brilliant. Lucy was still sitting beside him with an expression of rapt and mysterious serenity, as though the beautiful and human suggestiveness of the play held her happily enthralled.

  And then Wilton Carr saw something that was new to him, something that he had never noticed before, just—a faint wrinkle—the first wrinkle on his wife’s face. She was smiling at her own thoughts, and this faint line showed where her cheek and lower eye-lid met. Carr felt a sudden thickness in his throat. The whole human truth flashed on him. This woman was happy with a happiness that was in his keeping, and he had been about to push this happiness of his over the cliff and on to the rocks below. For years she had been his mate, this woman who loved him. Even that little wrinkle was part of their comradeship. It was time’s seal upon his love for her.

  “Good God!” he thought, “what have I been doing?”

  An immense and penitent tenderness rushed over him. He was helping his wife into her fur coat. Purposely, caressingly he touched her cheek, and she turned with a quick smile, her eyes meeting his. And what dear eyes they were, so trustful, so deep with those sacred memories that he had almost sacrificed to a little vampire of five-and-twenty!

  “What a fool!” he said to himself; “please God she’ll never guess.”

  It was late when they reached home, but a bright fire was still burning in the drawing-room. Carr helped Lucy off with her furs, and then—impulsively—he caught her and held her close.

  “Dear, I want to kiss you—just there.”

  He kissed the place where he had seen the wrinkle, and she smiled happily, tenderly.

  “Why—just there?”

  “Oh, a whim of mine. I’ve never seen you looking so young.”

  He led her to the sofa, and they sat down before the fire.

  “Lucy, I have been thinking over what you said the other day.”

  “What was that?”

  “That we are in such a hurry these days that we forget the things that matter, and sometimes it’s too late to go back and find them. My life has been just business—and more business. Oh, damn the business!”

  He kissed her with sudden contrite playfulness.

  “Hang it, I’m going to be a boy again. Can you be ready in three days?”

  “Ready? What for?”

  “A holiday. You will have to come up to town and have your passport photo taken to-morrow morning. I’m seeing about tickets and an hotel. We’ll stop a day or two in Paris. Can you manage it?”

  “Will!”

  She snuggled up to him like a surprised and delighted child.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The South of France, Italy. I’ll leave Parsons in charge. The business can rip for six months.”

  “What a dear you are,” she said.

  Carr stared at the fire.

  “I was letting my life dry up, Lucy. We’ll buy your Christmas present somewhere down in the sunshine.”

  SHIPWRECK AND A SHREW

  Like a piece of white pulp, and yet a live thing that still had the will to live, Bob Gretton floundered through the surf and dug his fingers and toes into the sand. Three times he was caught by the wash of a wave and sucked back like a cat sliding down a roof. The last crawl took him clear of the claws of the sea, and he lay on his face on the sand and was sick.

  “My God——!”

  It had all happened with such catastrophic suddenness. A little more than an hour ago they had been sitting at dinner under the Sappho’s awning—Gretton, Enderby, Hanson, Helen Glaber, Mildred, and Captain Dick. The day had been rather sultry and very still, too oppressive even for that irrepressible egoist, Helen Glaber, who had talked of exploring this derelict little island with its mountain, its palm groves, and its scrub. Gretton could remember Dick’s silence, his restlessness, his worried watching of the horizon. They had been ready to laugh at him when he had ordered the engineer to get up steam.

  “Have another peg, Dick!”

  Half an hour later the cyclone had caught them, and the Sappho had turned turtle. Gretton could still hear Mildred Arkell’s cry when she had been swept away from him in that struggle on the top of the companion-way. She had been tossed into that black hell of boiling water, and in that moment Gretton had realized that he loved her.

  He squirmed on the sand in an anguish of physical exhaustion. The great waves had knocked the breath out of his body, bruised him, trodden him into the sand. He was one great wet ache—dazed, half-drowned—and yet at the back of the mere physical anguish was that other anguish, the face of a drowned girl and her floating hair.

  Presently he got up on his hands and knees and looked about him like a wounded animal. A patch of tawny light still showed in the west, the glare of a furnace seen through smoke. A furious wind was blowing, and scud flew over him as he crawled up the beach. He was conscious of the vast, black movement of the sea behind him, and ahead a huge swaying cloud that seemed mysteriously anchored to the ground. As Gretton neared it, pushing his way in through the quaking bushes, he realized that this swaying cloud was a palm grove, a shrieking mass of frightened trees, their foliage blown all one way—like hair.

  The sound of the sea and of the wind in the palms were so overwhelming that he lay down under the bushes with a feeling of helplessness. It seemed like the end of the world, and he a wet, bruised, half-naked thing caught in the cataclysm, a mere bit of white slime spilt on a rock. The uproar bewildered him. He curled himself up under the bushes, and shivered, like the last man left alive in a doomed world.

  Presently the wind died away almost as suddenly as it had come. The palms ceased to shriek; they stood still—astonished, conscious of mockery. The stars came out, soft and ironical. There was still the labouring of the sea—a sense of savage distress down yonder—but the face of the night was the calm face of an uncaring god.

  Gretton sat up. Something revived in him. The conscious man in him felt challenged.

  And then he began to curse. The passionate and frightened child that is in all of us sent Gretton running wild through the scrub and down to the pale sands. He was in a panic of loneliness. He limped along the sands, shouting and waving his arms like a man gone mad.

  “Hanson, Dick, Mildred! Is anyone alive? Am I all alone on this damned island?”

  He called them by name, throwing his puny voice against the surge of the sea, vaguely conscious of the absurdity of this raving.

  “You’re not dead, all of you! Can’t you hear me shouting? It’s Gretton, Bob Gretton.”

  Presently calmness came to him as it had come to the island. He stood very still on the sands, watching the waves rolling in and out of the darkness.

  “I’m all alone here,” said an inward voice; “they are dead, all of them. What’s the use; what’s the use?”

  He went back to the palm grove and sat down in the darkness at the foot of a tree. His brain seemed to grow clear like the sky. It was full of pictures, the memories of the last few days. He saw the Sappho’s deck under the awning, the comfortable chairs, the flat sea, the blue sky. He saw Helen Glaber’s hard, sunburnt face, with its beaked nose, its ruff of sandy hair, its flashing smile that came and went like the flash of a lighthouse. He saw the men: Hanson, big and easy; Enderby, droll and thin. He saw Mildred Arkell—shy, gentle, always a little afraid—watching the Glaber woman, whose slave she was.

  He seemed to hear Helen Glaber giving the girl her orders in that serene and insolent voice of hers: “Fetch me that book”; “I want a cushion.”

  Something raged in Gretton. He shouted aloud: “Damn her, damn her! Only yesterday she made Mildred cry.”

  He was absurdly moved by the thought of it, and
by the recollection of what had happened. He had been talking to Mildred by the “gig”; he realized now that he had been making love to her; and suddenly Helen Glaber had sailed in. He could see her hard, blue eyes and the flash of her teeth in her sunburnt face.

  “Mildred, I pay you to darn my stockings.”

  Yes, just that; just those silly, brutal words. His cabin was next to the Glaber woman’s. He had sat on his bunk before dinner and listened to that metallic voice uttering venomous things that only a woman can say to another. Mildred had wept.

  “But I can’t help it! If he——”

  “I do not choose that you should cheapen yourself with any fool who wants to be amused.”

  And again—Gretton raged. For weeks he had been incensed by the vast egotism of the woman, her cruelty, her cleverness, her determination to be first. Someone had nicknamed her “Mrs. One-better.” She could not endure competition. If you differed from her she was insulted. If you agreed with her she thought you a fool.

  “Curse her,” he thought; “I wish I had her alone on this island! She made that girl’s life a hell.”

  And then he burst out laughing, ironical laughter that laughed at itself.

  “But what am I shouting about? The sea has washed the tears out of that child’s eyes.”

  Emotion exhausts itself, and Gretton fell asleep, lying curled up in a little sandy hollow at the foot of the tree. Creeping things crawled over him, and he did not feel them. The stars grew pale and the sea flattened itself towards a tropical calm.

  * * *

  The dawn was coming up when Gretton woke. He sat up, stiff and bewildered, staring at the ragged fringe of white “duck” where one trouser leg had been torn off below the knee. He looked at the tops of the palms still black against a green-blue sky, at the sun domed on the horizon, at the shadowy scrub and the amber sand. It was very beautiful; but its beauty seemed evil, for he was alone.

  Almost before Gretton was aware of it, the physical part of him had taken control, pushing his spiritual nausea aside. He was hungry, almost savagely hungry. He scrambled up. His clothes had dried on him in the night, and he was naïvely surprised to find that he was still wearing his light canvas shoes. But food! Something with which to stuff that emptiness inside him! He knew that there was water on the island. And then he stood astonished, leaning against the palm tree under which he had slept, and looking seawards in the broadening light.

  Less than a quarter of a mile away a flat reef jutted out into the sea, and hanging upon the reef and doubled over it like a half-filled sack thrown across a wall lay the wreck of the Sappho gleaming white in the dawn. She lay high and dry, her funnel and masts gone, her back broken and a black chasm showing amidships. But it was the Sappho, a bit of yesterday, a thing of human meaning.

  Gretton ran. He forgot his stiffness and his hunger as he cut through the scrub and along the sands.

  “Somebody may be alive there! Somebody may be alive!”

  His heart beat like a bell. Even the tallow-grease face of Brough, the “trimmer,” would be more humanly welcome than any angel face looking down out of heaven, but as he ran the hope drizzled out of Gretton’s eyes. The Sappho stood out in all her battered nakedness. The sea had capsized her, played with her awhile, and then thrown her broken but deck uppermost upon the reef. She hung there smashed, ridiculous, dead. No live thing could have survived in that squash of timber and steel.

  But there might be other things left in the Sappho—clothing, food. The savage man elbowed the civilized man aside and made a rush for the wreck. Gretton picked his way along the reef, the vitals of the Sappho visible to his eyes, the sections of a model cut in half. He saw cabin doors, strips of deck, machinery, dark crevices, twisted plates, a sort of pigeon-hole effect. The reef was littered with wreckage. He saw a body wedged in a crevice, glanced at it, recognized Jennings, the engineer, and went on with a sense of chilliness at the pit of his stomach.

  An axe lay in a pool of water. It came to Gretton’s hand as a rude tool leaps to the hand of a primitive man. He climbed in and up through the V-shaped chasm in the Sappho’s hulk, and there were things here that made him set his teeth, glimpses of the live men who had been trapped, suffocated, crushed. The soul in him cried out “Thank God she was drowned!”

  But he was alive and he was hungry. He scrambled and burrowed into the wreck, to be astonished by the tricks the storm had played. He found the little saloon almost intact, save for the smashed fittings and an ooze of sand and water everywhere. He had remembered seeing a door marked “Stores,” and he found it, down below, not five yards from the place where the yacht had broken in half. The door was jammed. He attacked it with his axe.

  Gretton broke in, and through a porthole saw the yellow sun hanging over the sea. This store-room made him gloat, even though it resembled a grocery shop into which some giant had scooped a hand. Tins everywhere, tinned fruit, fish, meat and vegetables, bottles broken and unbroken, bags, sacks, cases, canisters. And all these tins and cases were intact! The wild man in him yelped exultantly.

  Gretton operated with the axe, and squatting on a sack of wet flour, ate corn-beef from the jagged and rudely-opened tin. Two blows from the hammer end of the axe knocked in the top of a canister of biscuits. He was in the act of leaning over to help himself when he heard the voice:

  “Who’s there?”

  Gretton stiffened, doubting his own ears.

  “Hallo! Who’s there?”

  The voice was real enough, a woman’s voice, flat and metallic, and disastrously familiar. Gretton stood up, the tin of corned beef in one hand, a biscuit in the other. There had been a momentary flicker of joy in his eyes at the sound of a human voice, but it was replaced by an expression of ironical and amazed disgust.

  “Helen Glaber!”

  Then others might be alive! There was compensation in the thought, but when he heard her climbing through the wreckage he felt shot through by a thrill of anger. This woman of all women! This piece of sun-baked brick and leather!

  He turned out of the storeroom and, walking along the alley-way, saw her face rising above the edge of the broken deck. He stood still, the creature of nameless repulsions, instincts.

  “It’s you, Gretton.”

  He nodded and bit off a piece of biscuit. She was lifting herself up by a twisted stanchion, dressed in nothing but a petticoat and a torn white blouse. Her short, sandy hair hung about her neck, and her blue eyes were fierce with hunger. She looked at his tin of meat and his biscuit.

  “Thanks; I’ll have some of that.”

  She had taken the tin out of his hand even before he had realized her hunger, and he stared and said nothing, though the savage in him had uttered a whimper of resentment. She leant against the plating, eating the meat and using her fingers. Gretton’s face had grown watchful, almost sinister.

  “Have you seen any of the others?”

  It cost him an effort to speak to her.

  She went on eating.

  “Hanson is lying dead on the sand over there. After all, it was his fault.”

  Something generous glowed in Gretton. It was like her—to condemn the dead.

  “What do you mean—his fault?”

  “He upset Captain Dick’s judgment by quizzing him. We ought to have been under full steam and head on. Where did you find those biscuits? Get me one.”

  The silent part of him was in instant rebellion, and aloud he said: “You’ll find them in the storeroom, down there.”

  She gave him a look that he had so often seen her give Mildred Arkell, a sort of crushing stare, but Gretton turned his back on her, and scrambled to the sunlight on the reef. He wanted to be alone—he, a lone animal who had been ready to howl for a human mate!

  “Great Saints!” he found himself thinking, “I believe if she were dropped down a volcano she’d be blown up again the same bit of heartless, hell-cat brass!”

  She was just the same. That was the amazing and ominous fact. Her hard “I lead the fie
ld” egotism had always astonished him, until he had learnt to hate her for it when he had seen her cruelty to Mildred Arkell. She did things well. She was a fine horsewoman and a crack shot, a woman whose complacency it seemed impossible to hurt. If she corrected you, which she often did, you would generally find that she was right. As Enderby had put it, “If you hit her on the head with a hammer, the thing would bounce off her and leave no mark.”

  But the irony of this coincidence, that he should be marooned on this derelict island with this very woman as his mate! Even in those first few moments he had felt himself up against her immense and unchastened egotism. But to live with it? In five minutes she would be running the island—and him.

  He heard her voice crying from the wreck:

  “Bob Gretton, I want some of these stores carried ashore.”

  She flashed into his vision, munching a biscuit, her white teeth gleaming in her fierce brown face.

  Her eyes looked angry. There are eyes that are always like that.

  “I’ll tell you the first thing you have got to do. Get a spar up—and a flag. I’ll show you the place.”

  And then something very strange happened suddenly to this civilized man. He seemed to go back ten thousand years. All the smooth and conventional compromises fell from him. He became man, the dominant male.

  Climbing back into the wreck with a swift and swinging aggressiveness, he swarmed up to the broken deck where the woman stood watching him, the woman who had not changed. Now Gretton was a big man, with a big face and a big jaw; he had a leonine largeness of head and eyes. And he looked wild, wilder than he knew, with his unshaven chin, his torn clothes and his bare chest showing hair.

  He said nothing, but began to haul in the slack of a length of rope that dangled over the crust-edge of the upper deck. Then he went into the storeroom and carried out a case of biscuits. Roping it, he lowered it, and with a swing of the arms and body swung it through the gap in the yacht’s side and on to the reef.