The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “Really—your ladyship, I did not want to presume——”

  “Presume! I owe you—ten thousand pounds—Mr. Mascot. And tell me—you were going into that place to gamble. Oh, yes, I saw it in your eyes. What we call retrieving our fortunes. Now, my dear Fido, sit down and tell me all about it.”

  “Why do you call me ‘Fido’?”

  “Oh, I always call people by the first name that comes into my head. Don’t be offended, my dear man. Sit down and tell me all about it.”

  Mr. Fothergill was amazed at himself, but he did sit down, and he did tell her all about his tottering business, and about his wife and his two daughters.

  Having listened with the sympathetic shrewdness of the woman of the world she asked him what exactly his business was.

  “I’m a manufacturer.”

  “Yes; but what—exactly——?”

  “I make stockings and socks.”

  “Now—that’s really very interesting. Can you manufacture silk stockings?”

  “Most of my stockings are silk.”

  “My dear man, I must think this over. Come and lunch with me to-morrow. And don’t go inside the Casino.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  How Lady Minerva’s cerebrations were to help his business Mr. Fothergill could not imagine; but she was a young woman of such supreme confidence—and her confidence in herself had been so triumphant—that he became infected with a vague cheerfulness. At lunch next day she made him talk to her about the stocking trade, and after lunch, in a quiet corner of the lounge, she produced a sheet of notepaper from her bag.

  “Look at that.”

  Mr. Fothergill sat examining the drawing of a very graceful leg encased in stocking of black and of gold, the gold being in the shape of curved lance-shaped leaves winding delicately upwards.

  “Ever seen anything like that—Fido?”

  Mr. Fothergill had not.

  “Could you manufacture stockings like that?”

  Yes; he had no doubt that he could.

  “Well—it’s a novelty. Consider a moment. Supposing you rush home, could you turn out a pair of stockings like that in three weeks?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “I could—at a pinch.”

  “Right-o. Now listen. My doctor says that I ought not to walk for three weeks—if my ankle is to be like its fellow.”

  She laughed and gave a twitch of the skirts.

  “Her ladyship has very——”

  “So everybody says, Mr. Fothergill. Now, listen; supposing when I make my first appearance on the Terrace—I am wearing a very original and taking pair of silk stockings? Your stockings. It’s a silly world—but half the women in London appear to take an interest in what I wear. The Press knows it. The Press has an eye for my—audacities. So you see, very discreetly, I push my novelty in the way of stockings. Probably, you might read:

  “ ‘Lady Mandeville was seen out for the first time. She was wearing—etc.—etc.—but the sensation was something very new and chic in silk stockings. We understand that these stockings were specially made for her by the well-known firm of Fothergill’s of Shacklesfield.’ D’you see?”

  Mr. Fothergill did see.

  “You really mean it?” he asked.

  “Of course I do.”

  “You think you can launch a new rage?”

  “Well, can’t I? What about the Minerva scarf, and the Minerva corsets?”

  “Your ladyship, I wasn’t questioning you——”

  “Right, Fido; call the stocking the Minerva. Rush home and get busy. Be ready to turn out the new idea by the thousand, and in other colours. I think there might be something in it.”

  Mr. Fothergill’s dog-like eyes had grown bright.

  “By Jove! yes. A possible boom. With me weeks ahead. And what——?”

  “And what——?”

  “Your ladyship—naturally. I’m a business man——”

  “Fudge,” said she; “I owe you a good turn. Do you think I shan’t enjoy it? Why—as the Yanks say—if the game comes off, I shall be tickled to death.”

  The very next day Molly Fothergill received a telegram:

  “Returning at once.—John.”

  And Mr. Fothergill was only a few hours behind the telegram. The holiday appeared to have done him an amazing amount of good. He kissed his wife like a lover.

  “I’ve got an idea—a great idea. There’s hope.”

  But he was mysteriously reticent as to the nature of the idea. He was concealing a possible triumph.

  In three weeks Lady Mandeville had her stockings. She tried them on in front of her long mirror, and certainly—on her legs—the effect was delightful.

  “H’m,” she reflected, “in six months Kensington High Street and the Clapham Road may be full of this sort of thing. Such is fame!”

  Nor had she miscalculated either her own importance or the suggestibility of the great public. Granted that her skirts were a trifle brief on the day that she wore Mr. Fothergill’s stockings, and that her legs were—well—the legs of Lady Minerva Mandeville. Even a Scandinavian Prince fell to the flicker of the black and the gold. People asked questions.

  “Where—did she get those stockings?”

  Enterprising ladies connected with the Press came for interviews.

  “Oh—these stockings? Rather ducks, aren’t they. Yes; specially made for me by Fothergill’s of Shacklesfield. What? Haven’t heard of Fothergill’s? Most nutty firm in the north.”

  She sent a telegram to Mr. Fothergill:

  “Be ready. I think the disease is catching.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Fothergill was cautiously and secretly manufacturing stockings. It was a gamble, but a safer gamble than roulette. He was buying every sort of illustrated paper, and all those very feminine journals, beginning with the Bystander, and ending with Fashion Snippets. And one day he saw the first gleam of those black-and-gold inspirations.

  It spread. One paper produced a whole page photo of a leg sheathed in the new creation.

  All the feminine tittle-tattle began to be full of stockings—silk hose. They crept into the gossipy “pars.” Aunt Polly talked about them in Mignonette. A daily paper reproduced them on its woman’s page. The Minerva Stocking, made by Fothergill’s of Shacklesfield.

  It was a boom.

  Mr. Fothergill, in a state of strenuous hilarity, began to be smothered with inquiries, orders. He was turning out stockings, cataracts of stockings. He began to advertise on his own account.

  “Wear the Minerva Stocking. Made by Fothergill’s of Shacklesfield. Eve wore them in the Garden of Eden. That is why Adam——”

  He wrote letters of gratitude and exultation to Lady Minerva.

  “We are being flooded; we can’t make the things fast enough——”

  The only fly in the ointment was the rather enigmatic attitude of his wife.

  “John—did you really—meet Lady Minerva?”

  “Of course I did. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “And you made these stockings specially—to fit her leg——?”

  “Well—I should not have sent her out a misfit, my dear, should I?”

  “John, did she give you one of her stockings—for a pattern?”

  Mr. Fothergill held his breath. He was conscious of a moment of illumination.

  “Of course. Do you think I measured——?”

  But, by Jove, what a dog he was! He had never suspected it. And here was the devoted Molly accusing him of doggishness. Life was worth living—after all.

  Some time in the autumn Lady Minerva, piqued by curiosity, took a walk up Kensington High Street.

  Every other leg or so advertised her fame.

  SAPPHO

  The girl had come running from where the goats were feeding on the hillside, and at the gateway in the rude stone wall of the farm she paused and stood for a moment at gaze. She was out of breath, a long, dark, wild creature, bare-footed, her unstockinged legs showing red scratches where th
e scrub upon the hillside had left its marks upon her.

  “Mother, mother, a boat!”

  The slimness of her shadow fell projected upon the flattened boulders of the path, and here another shadow joined it, rotund, immense, the sun-shaped outline of Kyria Anna Zapta, lady of Leros. She, too, stood and stared with her coffee-coloured eyes, her red apron bulging, her feet well apart.

  Kyria Anna’s greeting of the unexpected took the sound of a grunt.

  “A boat.”

  It was passing between the grey and rocky horns of the inlet below them, a white bird of a boat, gliding under jib and mainsail, with a figure in a white sweater seated in the well behind the cabin. It forged into the blue-green circle of the little bay, and coming up into the wind, lay with sails flapping. The white figure became busy with the tackle. The white wings fell. The boat lay there in the calm blueness, with two portholes of its little cabin blinking.

  “The sea sends us a stranger,” said the big woman.

  Sappho—her daughter—was leaning a shoulder against the stone wall, one bare foot curved over the instep of the other.

  “Who will it be? A strange boat.”

  Her mother, swarthy and laconic, with two deep grooves framing her broad nose, and her large eyes ominously shrewd, watched the boat and its solitary occupant. He had stowed the sails, and was standing up and looking towards the green cleft of the valley in which the Zapta farm stood solitary and white. It was the only inhabited building on the island, and the Zaptas were its only inhabitants, the mother, the daughter and the three sons. Once a month or so a caique would come across from Zante, to unload and to load what Leros had to give and to take.

  “He is going to land,” said the girl.

  Her dark eyes showed a flickering excitement. The man in the boat had got out two sculls, and standing up like an Italian, was propelling the little yacht towards the rocky jetty where Yannie Zapta’s boat lay moored.

  “He has fair hair,” said the girl, with a sudden suggestion of breathlessness.

  Kyria Anna drew a broad hand across her mouth.

  “A Frank. I saw them in the old days. English.”

  Her swelling, yellow eyelids seemed to close over her coffee-coloured eyes until the irises were no more than two brown slits. She had a watchful, calculating air. In her the hard cunning of the eternal peasant stood at gaze. Life was a shrewd business; the hoarding of gold coins in a hole under Mother Zapta’s immense bed.

  The stranger had moored his boat to the jetty. They saw him standing there, looking boyish and tall, his eyes taking in all that part of Leros that was visible to him, the grassy valley, the patches of corn, the scattered olive trees, the grey hills streaked with yellow lichen, the farm with its three cypresses, the outline of the old Venetian tower rising on a ridge against the blue of the sky. He began to stroll up towards the farm, his hands in his trouser pockets, his eyes at gaze, searching the valley like the eyes of a lover.

  “He has come ashore for water,” said the mother.

  “We can give him water.”

  “We can sell him water. Water is scarce in the islands.”

  They stood and waited. The three sons of Anna Zapta were at work in the vineyard beyond the hill, and the stranger was greeted by the two women, the laconic and massive mother and the quick-eyed girl. He had fair hair, a smooth chin, and blue eyes that smiled and looked into the distance and smiled again, and he stood there easily, his hands resting on his hips.

  “Many days to you, lady. I am a traveller—a sailor; I came in a boat—as you see. I visit the islands—your island.”

  He smiled at the girl who was watching him, all eyes for his newness, his strangeness. She looked at his clothes, his hair, his skin, his string-soled shoes. He had spoken to them in the pure Greek, and to the Zapta women the pureness of the tongue sounded strange, for in Leros they spoke the demotic.

  “English?”

  Kyria Anna’s deep voice was like the grasp of a hand drawing his attention from her daughter to herself.

  “English—yes. I visit the islands in my boat. I wish to stay in Leros a few days. I ask your permission.”

  The Greek woman nodded.

  “I have a tent—you understand? If I may put it up under the shade of one of the poplars beside the stream? Greek earth under one’s feet! A change from the sea. And the lady will perhaps let me buy vegetables—and eggs?”

  Again Anna Zapta nodded.

  “As you wish,” she said.

  An hour later they saw him pitching a little tent by one of the poplars beside the stream. Demetrios, the eldest of the three Zapta brothers, happening to return to the farmhouse, found the girl and the woman watching something over the top of the yard wall. The white tent and its owner had been hidden from the Greek by the buildings of the farm. He, too, called upon to gaze and to listen, hung a morose black beard over the stones, and contemplated this stranger. Demetrios resembled his mother; he had the same huge frame, and the same coffee-coloured eyes, and in the son the mother’s harshness had repeated itself in the form of a fanged truculence.

  Anna Zapta sent the girl away to cut up vegetables for the evening meal. There are some things that are better kept away from a girl’s ears, and Kyria Anna’s interest lay in knowing why the man had come here. She was not one who believed in motiveless pilgrimages.

  “These English may be strange fools.”

  “But it will be easy,” said her son, “to go down and ask him.”

  His mother emitted one of those expressive grunts.

  “Easy. Yes; and if he has a reason, he is less likely to tell it to you. A man does not sail to Leros without a reason.”

  Demetrios meditated.

  “I will go down and speak to him.”

  “Ask him to sup with us,” said his mother. “And do not forget to smile.”

  But the Englishman was better at smiling than were the Zaptas, for at this season of his life he was doing just that which his heart had always yearned to do, and the man who accomplishes his desire smiles easily. Demetrios found him erecting a camp-bed. They exchanged courtesies, and Demetrios accepted a cigarette. He stood in the opening of the little tent, in his baggy white breeches and red sash, smiling whenever the Englishman looked at him, but in the intervals between his smiles the Greek’s face seemed covered by a swarthy shadow.

  All Greeks are inquisitive, and Rupert Merrow had nothing to hide. He talked to Demetrios as though Demetrios had a right to know why he had come to Leros.

  “I am a sailor’s son, and a scholar.”

  “Ah—a scholar.”

  “A Greek scholar. It had always been my dream to come and sail among the islands, Delos, Naxos, to visit the homes of your ancestors, Kyr Zapta. Sometimes a man’s dreams come true.”

  Demetrios smiled.

  “That’s so.”

  “For five years I was a schoolmaster.”

  “A schoolmaster.”

  “And then—someone—left me a little money.”

  “Money is very useful.”

  “And here I am.”

  Just when the sky had begun to grow yellow above the hills of Leros and the sea had turned to violet, Rupert Merrow strolled up to the farm. The Zaptas greeted him with swarthy ceremony. In the kitchen where strings of dried vegetables hung from the beams, and ikons glimmered dimly on the walls, Kyria Zapta sat at the end of a table of Spanish mahogany. Yannie and Christobulos, her two other sons, stood behind her and smiled. Sappho, the girl, perched on a stool, watched the Englishman with Delphic eyes.

  Merrow felt at home with these people, for were they not Greeks, his Greeks, the beloved children of his beloved ancients. He saw in them a stateliness, a dignity, much that he wished to see. He talked like an eager boy; he had no guile, and he sensed no guile in the eyes of these tall islanders. To him Anna Zapta was the lady of Leros, a swarthy Penelope, a little vast in her majesty, no doubt, but the mother of Greek children.

  Merrow told them why he had come to Leros. />
  “To see the place where your great temple stood, the temple of the Lady of the Myrtles.”

  They did not understand him. He had to explain that he was speaking of the temple of the Lerine Venus, that famous, white-pillared shrine that had glimmered in the green valley above the sea.

  “The books tell me that some of the stones are still to be seen.”

  Demetrios, at the end of the table, exchanged a stare with his mother.

  “Yes, there are stones,” he said guardedly.

  His mother was peeling an orange.

  “Some of the stones were built into this house.”

  Sappho, on her stool, her feet thrust into a pair of red Turkish slippers, ate her supper, and fed upon the stranger’s words. It was evident that he puzzled her, as all new maleness must puzzle the incipient woman, and her wide eyes envisaged the fairness of him, something glowing both of spirit and of face. He was so different from these brothers of hers, and from the dark-chinned men who came from Zante, men who looked as though their thoughts had to be hidden. She contrasted their obscure, dark, inward faces with the face of this northerner, the face of the eternal dreamer, of the immortal and questioning boy. She was too young to understand the upward winging of her wonder, though she was very conscious of this wonder.

  Merrow had risen and was wishing them good night.

  “My tent is very small,” he was saying, “but if the Lady of Leros will lend me her kitchen I will return her her welcome.”

  He went out into the night where a full moon hung poised over the sea. The girl had made a quick movement and from the doorway she had watched him cross the little courtyard. The room was silent behind her, and feeling its silence she turned to see her three brothers standing by the table looking at their mother, for it was from Anna Zapta that the silence had spread. She was the core and the cause of it, sitting there huge and thoughtful in her chair, like some doom figure brooding upon its own inevitableness.

  Sappho shrank against the wall. She felt a sudden fear of her mother; why, she did not know.

  Anna Zapta’s eyes rose slowly to the face of her firstborn. She made a pointing movement with her hand, and Demetrios understood her. They had the same thoughts.