“Someone has been at it again.”
“Oh—I don’t think so—really,” said her friend, who was not all leather.
Callendar was remembered and appealed to.
“I’m afraid I’m a bit of a disciplinarian.”
He met her eyes, and was silent for a moment.
“Is it—necessary—in public?”
His voice had a sharp gentleness, and she opened her blue eyes rather wide at him. And then she gave a little acid laugh.
“You men—are—so sentimental.”
Callendar made no reply, and for the rest of the meal there was silence between the two tables, but Callendar was not feeling silent. Did a woman like Mrs. Pym enjoy humiliating a girl in public? And why did certain women do that sort of thing? It was pretty beastly. And he was conscious of an urgent desire to tell that little fashionable virago exactly how beastly her behaviour had been. You might employ a young woman to look after your children and drag her about the continent with you and perhaps pay her a wretched salary, but when it came to scolding her in public. . . . Yet, after all, what business was it of his?
He hurried through the rest of the meal and went out into the lounge. Business—indeed! But he had not come to Rome on business. He was a man with death in his body. And yet he felt himself most strangely concerned about that girl. It was as though she appealed to him somehow in a way that was astonishing and sudden and unexpected. He stood looking at himself in a mirror, but he was not aware of his own reflection. He was thinking of a pair of frightened brown eyes and a sensitive face that flinched.
What a beast that woman was!
Turning to ascend the three steps that led to the vestibule, he became aware of the girl talking to the manageress, a little woman with kind, bright eyes. He paused at the bottom of the steps and saw Miss Summerhayes go towards the stairs.
“Thank you, signora, you are always very kind.”
Poor child! Her voice ended on an emotional note, and Callendar, watching her disappear up the stairs, wondered how many people—or how few—had been kind to her.
VI
Next morning he spoke to Mrs. Pym’s children. He found them in the lounge, sitting side by side on a settee, their heads close together over a month-old copy of the Graphic.
He asked them how they liked Rome and whether they had any wish to see Mussolini. Eileen, the elder, a beautiful and softened edition of her mother, showed him gentle eyes.
“We like Rome—very much—thank you. But we’d rather see the wolves at the Capitol.”
“Well—and why not?”
“We are waiting for Miss Summerhayes. Mother won’t let us go anywhere but into the gardens.”
“There’s the Zoo——”
“Oh, we’ve been there. It’s lovely. Summer—I mean Miss Summerhayes—is going to take us there again. Oh, here she is.”
Callendar turned with a smile and a slight bow to a girl who appeared loath to acknowledge either. He was just a strange man in a foreign hotel who had chosen to interest himself in Mrs. Pym’s children, and Una Summerhayes seemed to be in a great hurry to get the children away from him. Her eyes had that same anxious look. She shepherded the children out of the lounge, giving Callendar the impression that she was refusing to allow herself to be aware of him. It was not a deliberate rebuff, but an evasion, a flight and, being such, it failed in its essential purpose.
The two children gave him backward and friendly glances and, when they and their “Summer” had vanished, Callendar wandered out into the Roman sunlight and, passing through the Porta Pinciana, entered the Borghese. On the seats under the tall pines, old men and gaily-dressed nurses watched the children at play. Cars streamed in and out of the gates. Idle people were leaning on the wooden rails, watching Rome taking its saddle exercise. Here were officers and Roman dandies, and dogs, and smartly-dressed women, and dark-eyed girls, and children—the soft-voiced, piquant, Roman children.
Callendar found a place on one of the green seats. And suddenly this life of Rome—on horseback and on foot, with the voices of its children and the hooting of its cars—made him realize that he had ceased to be a live man in the sense that he could count on life. He was a potential corpse sitting on a seat, death among the children and the young girls and these proud-fleshed men and women. He was conscious of a chilliness, of an impulse to resist and to escape. He ceased to be the tired and consenting acceptor of his fate. A new awareness of life seemed born in him, a sensitiveness to colour, sounds, perfumes. And all this would pass. Or rather—it would continue; while he—and his consciousness of life—would vanish. Youth would still be youth and children would play under the trees, and red wine would be poured into glasses, and horses would gallop, and men would follow women and mate with them.
The man in him—the man of twenty years ago—cried out: “Bless me—too—even me—oh—my Father.” It was a bitter cry, and he sat and felt afraid because of the strength of the yearning in him. No longer did he seem able to fold his arms and sink resignedly into the deep waters. His impulse was to struggle, to fight for the sunlight and for air and all that beautiful life.
For—life was beautiful. He seemed to realize it suddenly, the colour and the galliard emotions, the desiring, the possessing. And what had he done with life? Sat in a chair and pushed papers about a table, and been dustily and meticulously efficient over other people’s affairs. He had not lived. He was going to lose all this beautiful consciousness of things without having enjoyed that consciousness. The love in the eyes of a woman, great music, the climbing of peaks, the flush and the scent of the rose, the clinging together of lovers. . . .
He trembled.
He felt—somehow—that he had to escape from this yearning and so tire himself by walking that life’s urge would become exhausted and the spirit in him limp and resigned. He got up. He walked rapidly along the path until he came to a place where four roads met. Across the way he saw a grey wall, an open gate, old trees spreading a sense of green shadowiness and gloom. He felt a desire to cool his sudden fever under the shadows of the trees.
He crossed the road and, entering the gateway, had beauty flung at him like an intoxicating and subtle perfume. He was in a place that was half park, half garden, and looking along a walk shaded by high trees. At the end of the vista the arch of a stone gateway framed the soft blueness of distant trees and hills. It was like looking through a window into some other world that floated beyond your reach in mysterious and Elysian distances.
Callendar stood and gazed. He thought: “What a strange thing is consciousness—my consciousness. Thousands of eyes have looked at the landscape through that arch and felt it theirs—in consciousness. But the heart stops beating—and the eyes shrivel—and, for me, all the world will be dead.”
He walked on under the trees. The shade was very deep and yet he was conscious of the sunlight striking the upper foliage. Ahead of him, between the tree trunks, he saw water shining, with water-birds paddling in the sunlight; and on the edge of it a scattering of children and nursemaids and men and women who had come out to bask and to stare. He turned towards the lake. Close by, under an ilex, a girl was sitting on a seat with a book on her knees and two children were throwing pieces of bread to the birds.
Callendar came to an abrupt pause. The children were Mrs. Pym’s children, and the girl, Una Summerhayes. And, standing there in the shade of the high trees, he allowed himself to suppose that this was her particular seat and that she came here regularly with the children. He thought, too, that she looked almost as lonely as he felt and his impulse was to go and sit down on that seat beside her.
He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to see those brown eyes lose their look of anxiety and of fear. He knew that he would like to hear her telling him things.
He was on the edge of a love affair and did not realize it—he, a man who had some twenty-odd weeks to live.
VII
The two children had scampered off to the other side of the lake when Cal
lendar, coming from behind the seat, stood so that his shadow fell across her book. But for the moment she did not look up. She may have judged him to be some casual person pausing to look at the lake and its life, but when his shadow remained there she raised her head.
“I’m sorry,” he said; “I’m afraid I’m disturbing you.”
The shadow of him lay across her face as well as across the book. Yes, he still could cast a shadow. And he seemed to see her covered by other shadows and looking up at him with resentment and a kind of alarm.
“Yes—I’m reading. . . .”
Her glance hardened. She lowered her eyes and appeared to resume her reading and Callendar’s impression was that of a blind being lowered, shutting him out. His nearness embarrassed her and, feeling towards her as he did, he was hurt by her attempt to repulse him. His natural shyness stood there, busy with its conjectures. Was it that she mistrusted him or did not wish to be bothered by a casual man; or was there something about him that repelled her?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not mean. . . .”
She was reading the same line over and over again, without absorbing the sense of it. His voice disturbed her. Like many a lone girl who has had to struggle for life’s little decencies, she had grown shy of men, though it might not be the man who had to be feared but some other woman.
“I have to look after the children.”
He seemed to detect in her a quivering, a trembling of the drawn curtain.
“I know. They are rather dear kiddies. I know I’m just a casual——”
Suddenly she looked up.
“Please—don’t sit down here. They are dear children, but they’ll come back. If you have—any——”
She grew inarticulate. She flushed.
“Chivalry,” he said. “Is that the word?”
He moved back a step and glanced over his shoulder, but the children were not to be seen.
“Yes.”
She seemed to breathe out surprise and relief.
“It’s a very old word. Rather obsolete——”
“Is it?”
He was observing the lowered lashes under the brim of her hat.
“Would you mind telling me, does it offend you—my talking to you? You see, I’m——”
She interrupted him with a suggestion of emotional haste.
“No. I feel—you are not the kind of man. But then, perhaps, you noticed—yesterday.”
He stood very still.
“Yes. You mean at lunch?”
She nodded.
“It made me—angry.”
He saw her look anxiously beyond him for the children.
“Thank you. Perhaps—now—if you think—you will understand. One tries to avoid—humiliation, especially when—one’s bread has to be buttered with it. Life can be so beastly.”
She was aware of him raising his hat.
“I understand. I’ll say good-bye for this morning. But life needn’t be like that—not always, I mean. I’ll go and find the children.”
She gave him an appealing look.
“She’s jealous, even of them.”
“Good heavens!” said he, and found himself meeting her eyes and finding no fear in them.
“So—you see——”
He made a movement of the head.
“I’ll wander off somewhere, Miss Summerhayes. But—you’ll forgive me—if I may have something more to say. I’m rather a lonely man.”
He left her and, making for the arched gateway through which he had seen the distant landscape, he found himself leaning upon the stone balustrading of a formal garden. He had been most strangely moved by that fumbling exchange of confidences with Una Summerhayes. He had felt so very inarticulate, such an awkward creature, yet, somehow, he seemed to have stumbled into an intimate relationship with her. It was as though their hands had touched without their meaning them to touch. And he had been conscious of a deep and poignant exultation. She had suffered him to understand the why and wherefore. She had drawn the curtain aside.
His first feeling had been one of compassion, but as he realized her pride, the sensitive self-negations of her dependence upon that yellow-headed little woman, his compassion merged itself into homage. There was something about her that made him feel towards her as he had never felt to any other woman. Was it her eyes? Or her gentle and expressive voice? Or was it everything about her?
And then he knew.
Good heavens, he was on the edge of loving this woman—he, a doomed man! The great thing had happened just when life was closing, slipping over the final precipice. He had come to look death in the eyes and, instead, he was looking into the eyes of a woman.
He tried to laugh. His hands gripped the outer edge of the stone coping. Madman, sentimental fool! He was letting life trick him, allowing sex to flare up in one last blaze after all these years of dusty tranquillity. He was like an old man putting a match to a pile of useless papers in an office grate.
But was he? He tried to laugh at himself and failed. Was this sudden surge in him an idiotic anti-climax? Might it not be something else, something essentially fine and beautiful, a sort of spiritual sunset before the fall of night, a beautiful experience, a conception and a fulfilment of life and love as it might be? Why grovel and kiss the feet of Death? Had he no manhood left in him? Had he not still the right to look into a woman’s eyes and say: “Beloved, I am nothing; and yet—for your sake—I am everything?” Could he not set her free, strike off the sordid shackles, dispel life’s fearfulness?
He straightened.
“Why not? I matter to no one. I need not matter very much to her. And yet—I should like a woman to think of me sometimes and to say: ‘He loved me—and he made no bargain.’ Doomed men should make no bargains.”
Callendar felt the warm sun on his face.
“Why not? I came here to find the sun. And isn’t the sunlight symbolical?”
VIII
Mrs. Pym was going to the opera. They were giving Otello and Mrs. Pym had reserved a box. She came down to dinner in a wonderful saffron-coloured frock and stockings of gold and smiled obliquely at Callendar, who was reading the New York Herald.
“Ruffi’s singing to-night. I’ve got a box. If you have nothing to do—come along.”
She looked like a woman of forty dressed in a nursery frock. In fact, one gold garter was visible, though the nudity of her shoulders was not of the nursery. Callendar put down his paper and stood up.
“Delighted. It’s very kind of you.”
He went. Otello would have bored him had he been concerned with the music, but he was not. He sat between the two women and made it his business to be gallant to Mrs. Pym; not for his own sake, but for someone else’s. For an hour or two he was both the man of the world and the lawyer. And this vain, little creature wriggled her shoulders at him and gave him those oblique, blue smiles and assumed that he was growing interested. She became playful.
“You know—I’m so terribly critical. I always see the skeleton at the feast.”
He asked her whether she regarded Desdemona as a skeleton and she tapped his sleeve with her programme.
“Bad man! She’s enormous—and fifty—and makes me think of a boarding-house lady shouting for the plumber—after a bad frost.”
Callendar laughed. He was wondering how she would behave were he to tell her that she had a skeleton sitting beside her, a living figure of death. He could imagine her giving a little scream and drawing away with a look of fear and disgust. Death is terrifying to such a woman.
He wondered whether it would appear terrifying to Una Summerhayes.
“All this—is so horribly artificial.”
“Tin swords and paper roses.”
“Yes; I prefer your children. They are charming.”
He emphasized the “your” and she gave him a little hard simper.
“They are rather dears.”
“I wish you would let me take them out to a show of some kind.”
Cleverly he managed to convey to her the impression that he was interested in the children because they were her children. He was not ashamed of his finesse. And she fell to it. Her thin, high-pitched voice expressed an accepted intimacy.
“It’s sweet of you. I always find other people’s children so boring.”
“It so happens—that I don’t.”
“Nice man. I’ll sign your passport form for you. What’s it to be?”
“Oh, the Zoo perhaps, and tea at the Russian tea-rooms—perhaps.”
“The Zoo is beyond me. But you can ask me to join you at tea.”
“Splendid. What about to-morrow—at half-past four?”
“Right you are. You’d better take the governess girl to the Zoo. She’s rather a dull creature. She need not come to tea—of course.”
“No, of course not,” said Callendar; “she would be an odd number.”
At ten o’clock next morning Una Summerhayes had her orders. Mrs. Pym was breakfasting in bed, wearing a white lace cap with a blue ribbon threaded through it. Her nose had an added sharpness in the morning.
“Oh, Mr. Callendar is taking the kids to the Zoo this afternoon. You’d better go with them and see they don’t make little nuisances of themselves. We are all going to the Russian tea-rooms afterwards. You needn’t bother about that.”
Miss Summerhayes maintained a consenting face. But, inwardly, she had a moment of indecision. Had he done this purposely and, if so, why? Also he must have handled the matter very delicately and she was pleased and reassured, for a delicate touch is precious to a sensitive plant. And at half-past two she came downstairs with Eileen and Pam and found him waiting in the hall. Her face expressed a kind of gentle austerity, though she allowed him a slight comprehending smile.
“Shall we walk or taxi?”
“Oh, walk.”
He observed her for an instant with a protecting carefulness.
“I think we’ll drive. These places make you stand a lot.”
She was not as strong as her years and gave him a look of thanks.
The Roman Zoo is much like other zoos. It has its stage effects and its rocks and its posed lions, but the two children lost instant hearts to two tiger cubs caged with their mother near the gate. For a quarter of an hour the party got no further than that cage and, so absorbed were Mrs. Pym’s children in watching the ways of these two young creatures, that Callendar and the girl were left to talk.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 29