“Really, people are awfully decent, Pip.”
“Oh, not so bad.”
“The Pumpellys offered to take me out in their car.”
“Well, why not?”
“I don’t feel like it.”
In due course the great event happened, and Wilfred spent a miserable and restless night. People heard him walking up and down Oakwood Chase in the moonlight: a restless soul suffering because his mate was suffering. Mrs. Pumpelly, looking out of her bedroom window, exclaimed to her husband:
“Poor dear lad. Shall I call him in and give him a whisky.”
“Better let him alone.”
But never was there such a baby. What About It’s singularity and splendour was eclipsed, and What About It’s old home was occupied by a pram. Oakwood Chase somehow approved of the pram, and of the two young people and the small Wilfred who owned it. In fact, young Wilfred appeared to be a far more important person than his father.
As for Maisie, being a normal and healthy young woman she did not regret the passing of What About It. Wilfred had been given an increase in salary. In the future there would be other and more decorous What About Its.
Meanwhile, Oakwood Chase christened the pram the Smythes’ “Baby Bunting.”
CONTRABAND
Wilding sat with his back to a rock in a tangle of bramble and bracken. Sally, a spaniel, lay asleep at his feet, and between him and the blue of the sea and the sky gulls cruised to and fro, gliding up against the wind and turning to fly back above the cliff. Their cries were constant and complaining, and always the crying of the gulls above St. Gilians associated itself in Wilding’s consciousness with the voice of a woman.
“I can’t bear it; I can’t face it; I’m a coward.”
The voice remained with him with the complaining of the gulls above the Cornish cliffs, though the tragedy of his loneliness had begun three years ago when he had come back from the War like a defaced coin. “The man with half a face”: that was what they called him at St. Gilians: a crude stating of the case as it presented itself to those who loitered and gossiped. The return of the soldier! His wound had bled afresh.
Here, on the high cliff, there was a vastness of sunlight and of silence. No wind was blowing. He could see the grey houses of St. Gilians and its bay and harbour a black crescent filled with the blueness of the sea. His dog slept at his feet.
But sometimes his loneliness, and the solitude of his little farm, lay heavy upon him. He bent forward and woke the sleeping dog, and, taking the spaniel into his arms, laid the unscarred side of his face against the dog’s muzzle.
“It’s all the same to you, old woman.”
Sally’s answer was the protruding of an affectionate red tongue. She squirmed ecstatically, blinking amber eyes. And suddenly Wilding laughed as a man may laugh when he is feeling desperate.
“Life’s a rum business, Sally.”
It was; and up at “Orchards,” that little white house half hidden by cowering, wind-blown apple trees, life was very primitive. Wilding lived the life of a recluse, going out to work in garden and fields, and coming in to solitude and Sally. He saw no face but the rather grim and sour face of his farmhand, Pengelly. He avoided the faces of his fellow men, and especially the faces of women. In St. Gilians he was sometimes seen at dusk with an old haversack slung over one shoulder and his hat pulled down over his one eye. A little black shade covered the empty socket of the other. For his sensitiveness had increased. Solitude had emphasized it and tinged it with morbid melancholy. His aloofness had become the isolation of a man who thought of himself as an outcast, a creature ugly and defaced, shunning humanity and shunned by it.
But by the stone wall of the little garden Wilding paused and looked back towards the sea. A wind-blown thorn tree seemed to stretch compassionate hands above his head. The dog, lying in his arms, looked up devotedly into his scarred face. Sally saw no ugliness there. Her eyes were like the sea, save that they were the eyes of a dog.
Out beyond Shag Head a white motor-boat was making for St. Gilians, like a swift, grey needle eternally threading the foam at its prow. It was Farren’s boat—the Sea Horse. Farren was an artist. He owned the white bungalow with the flagstaff on the hill across the valley, a Viking of a man with a head of flaming hair.
Wilding watched the boat for a moment. It seemed so alive, so fortunate, tearing homewards towards the harbour.
II
Michael Farren ran the Sea Horse to her moorings where the dinghy lay ready to take him ashore. He was a very tall man with blue eyes and a flamboyant head of hair. St. Gilians had known him for some years, and his erratic comings and goings, and the inconsequential free and easiness of his manners and his clothes. He was bluff; he could laugh; he handled the Sea Horse like a master. St. Gilians was used to his old grey flannels and his hatless head, and his powerful red throat rising from the tieless, flopping collar. In that rather grim little Cornish town he exhaled an adventurousness, something easy and big and picturesque. All the fisherman knew him. The coastguards at the signal station had dipped often into his tobacco pouch.
He painted St. Gilians, and his pictures were like himself, rather flamboyant and gaillard. Often he would have a half-circle of spectators round him when he was painting, and he seemed to enjoy being watched. Children would gather. He had a way with children; he would tell them absurd stories, or, having started a scramble for pennies, he would throw up his flaming head and laugh.
Farren in his dinghy looked rather like a giant in a little white tub. He rowed to the stone steps, fastened the painter to a rusty iron ring, and smiled up at two old fellows who were leaning over the wall.
“Good weather.”
“Aye, good weather.”
“How’s the lady, John?”
“Can’t sleep o’ nights, sir, spite of mustard and red flannel.”
Farren brought out his pouch.
“Fill! May God take me, John, before I get stiff in the back.”
They watched him walk away, a big and gaillard man still in the force of his years and carrying his big shoulders smoothly. He went up the narrow street with its grey cobbles. He disappeared. But presently they saw him reappear on the green of the hill above the church, climbing the path to where the white bungalow stood alone behind a white fence and hedge of shabby tamarisk. He climbed as though the steepness of the hill did not trouble him.
But there were matters that troubled Michael Farren, though St. Gilians might think the artist as casual and careless a man as the world could show. St. Gilians supposed that Farren sold his pictures, and that he sold them well, for the bungalow paid its debts, and a man could not keep a motor-boat and a car on air. Farren was so obviously the gentleman: neither caring what he said nor what he did, nor what he wore and how he wore it. His very eccentricities were colourful and unexpected.
He would take the Sea Horse out by moonlight, even when a sea was running, and disappear into silvery distances. He would pile an assortment of luggage into the dicky of his two-seater and disappear over the hills. He might be away three days; and St. Gilians understood that he had gone away to paint.
On the other side of the white fence and behind the tamarisk bushes the most precious of Farren’s problems sprawled on the grass. He stood to watch her: unseen by her as yet, a long-legged, dark, slim thing of eighteen with her very black hair a living contrast to her father’s flaming head. Her hair had been given her by her mother, a Frenchwoman from the Basque country. She was lying there on the grass and playing with a sheepdog pup enticed in from somewhere.
For Iris Farren had refused to grow up. She had remained a child, long-legged, impulsive, solitary. Her mop of black hair stood out like a nimbus, and the pupils of her eyes would grow so big that the eyes looked black, though the iris was blue-grey. She had one of those long, poignant mouths, and when she smiled the upper lip seemed to curl like a petal.
Somehow she scandalized these Cornish people, being so unlike the unimaginative, hard-faced
fishermen and farmers who had no use for birds or flowers. St. Gilians considered her a little weak in the head, a childish creature, remaining irresponsible and immature. She ran wild on the cliffs. She was strange.
But St. Gilians had seen her throw herself furiously upon a group of boys who were stoning a stray kitten.
“Beasts!”
She had used her fists on the louts, and had then gone to pick up the kitten—a thing with its head all bloody. She had made a little compassionate moaning over it.
“Poor—poor!”
She had uttered the word over and over again, and had gone off carrying the kitten. She had a passion for collecting waifs and strays: birds, dogs, cats—any live thing. She had owned a tame tortoise, and a jackdaw that had sat on the end of her bed in the morning and made conversation. Suffering, especially suffering among the dumb things, roused in her an infinite and instant compassion. Only then did she appear to become woman; at other times she was just a long-legged child.
Such was Farren’s problem—to keep her as she was, free from the smirching of the thing called love. She was so uncarnal, so like a Rima of the cliffs and sea.
He passed through the gate.
“Hallo—hallo!”
She was up instantly, leaving the pup lying on his furry back with his paws in the air.
“Daddy!”
She still used the word she had learnt as a toddler, nor had she come to discover the stranger in her father.
“What—another dog!”
“Oh, he just came in to play. He belongs to Zion Farm. No one plays at Zion Farm.”
Farren caught her and kissed her.
“Zion, no. They sing hymns through their noses. O paradise, O paradise, where no one plays a game!”
III
Ostensibly Tom Wilding farmed Orchards Farm, but his life in that little, lonely, wind-blown place was more like the life of a squatter. The farm consisted of two grass fields and eleven acres of arable: poor land at that; but when a man lives alone and will allow no woman in the house, all the details of living become a burden. There is the business of washing-up, of making beds, of cooking, of heating water, of keeping clean. And there were times when Wilding’s soul revolted at tea-leaves and greasy plates, and the debris of dead meals, and dust and unwashed socks.
Pengelly of the sour face, who had a nasty and bitter sense of humour, would poke his head round the corner of the stone barn and observe Wilding hanging up his washing on a line stretched between two of the stunted apple trees. As if that was work for a man! And why all this fuss about a disfigured face? There were no women about who cared the price of a carrot whether the man up at Orchards had two faces or none. And what did a face matter much, anyway?
Pengelly had the face of a horse. It was very full of teeth that were long and yellow, and Pengelly’s wife may have had views upon faces. When the farm and its owner were under discussion, she might dare to differ from her man. Also, she was not a Cornish woman.
“Doing his own washing? Why don’t ’e get someone in, poor lad?”
Poor lad indeed!
“Because he’s mean. And because he’s as soft as a girl about that face of his. He can’t even abear the sound of a gun. And with the rabbits getting like fleas!”
Mrs. Pengelly would turn her chair a little to one side and grow silent. For on one occasion she had given way to curiosity and had sneaked up to Orchards to try and see what manner of man this Wilding was. And looking over the orchard wall she had seen him leaning against the trunk of an apple tree, just staring and staring towards the sea like a lost man looking for something beyond the horizon. While she had been watching him he had turned his head, and she had understood why St. Gilians called him the man with two faces, for the left side of his face was unmarked and as Nature had made it, the right side of ruin.
She had crouched down behind the wall, feeling shocked and pitying.
She could say to her husband: “Well, half of him is as good as a woman could want”; and Pengelly had answered her with one of his sour, cackling laughs.
“Half a man! And maybe the right half’s missing.”
He had an uncouth and a soiled mind.
But there were days when the soul of Tom Wilding revolted from the house and the farm and all that loneliness and drudgery, the hoeing of turnips and the washing of dishes, for a man cannot live by work alone.
He would go out and wander along the cliffs where miles of bracken and gorse and rock made a wilderness, and he saw no faces but the faces of sheep and of cattle. He would watch the wild life of those cliffs, the life of the birds, the ever-sailing and ever-complaining gulls. Sometimes he took Sally with him, but at other times he left her to watch the house.
But the soul of him was not satisfied. He was both afraid of life and hungry for it. He would sit and watch the fishing-boats of St. Gilians putting out or coming in, and he would envy those other men. He even envied the sour and swarthy Pengelly who trudged back to a cottage where a mate waited for him. While at Orchards nothing waited for Wilding save his dog, and perhaps a pile of unwashed plates and a bed that needed making, and a fire that had gone out.
In his loneliness he found no other companionship than that of the birds and the beasts. He would have nothing shot on the farm, or upon that part of the cliff that went with the freehold of Orchards. He had had words with Pengelly.
“They rabbits will be eating us up.”
But Wilding’s gun was rusting in a cupboard. He would not have the rabbits shot, and Pengelly grumbled. What sort of farming was this? And were the rats to be considered sacred? Wilding had replied that the rats could be left to the farmyard cats, and that Pengelly need not worry his head about profit and loss. The growing of turnips was not the end of everything, and Wilding had a hundred-or-two pounds a year as well as his pension.
Pengelly shut his mouth and bought some snaring wire down at Penzance, and went about the business in his own way.
So it happened that the snaring of a rabbit brought a man and a girl together, though the girl had no right where she happened to be—in the grassy track leading up from the high road to Orchards Farm. It was shut in between high stone walls overgrown with foxgloves and ferns and scabious and golden rod, and the wind swept over it and left it secret.
About sunset Wilding had idled down the lane, and was leaning over the gate of the “five-acre,” smoking a pipe. He was unconscious of any other living presence near him until he heard a voice, poignant and angry.
“How can you do such things?”
He stiffened and turned his head to look. He saw a tall, dark child with a dead rabbit in her arms. The noose of the wire snare was still round its neck. He was aware of a pair of large accusing eyes.
He said: “You’re trespassing.”
She stood and gazed, for he had turned again to the gate and was leaning upon it with an air of surliness. She saw only the undisfigured half of his face. She did not and could not know that his apparent surliness was the outward sign of a sudden sensitive shrinking, a concealing of his own ugliness from the eyes of her youth. He had looked at her for a moment and felt the sudden shock of her beauty, the poignancy and youth of her, and he was afraid.
She said: “It was still struggling a little when I found it. I pulled the wire away. Did you set it?”
His arms pressed hard on the gate.
“No. My man did. Against my orders.”
She looked at him, and stroked the dead creature’s fur.
“I’m glad; I don’t like things killed.”
“Nor I.”
“They look so happy—don’t they?—with their funny little white tails.” He turned his head slightly and glanced at her over his left shoulder. What a face she had! And his own scarred face seemed to be smarting.
“Yes; when you’ve been shot at and hit, you don’t like things mauled or blown to pieces.”
Her eyes seemed to open more widely. The pupils were big black circles.
“Wer
e you ever shot at?”
“I? Oh, yes; in the War. It’s not—pleasant, especially——”
He hesitated, oppressed by that too vivid sense of his disfigurement. He had seen people shrink, look at him and shrink, though perhaps he was over-sensitive. He saw that scarred face of his each morning when he shaved; he made himself look at it, though the ugliness of it hurt him. Meanwhile he stood leaning against the gate, realizing the silence, and wondering whether she would go. Almost he wanted her to go without seeing what the War had done to him. She was so young, so unscathed, so pleasant to behold, and the very April of her hurt him.
She was still standing there. He could see the edge of her short skirt, a plain, green linen thing. Her mouth and her eyes were poignant.
“Are you Mr. Wilding?”
“Yes.”
She was silent, and he understood. So she had heard. Probably she had heard him spoken of as the man with half a face, and suddenly a kind of cold rage rose in him. Was she curious? Had she come up here to look, like a prying, inquisitive child? Oh, well, he would let her look. Did any damned thing matter? Was he afraid of the eyes of a slip of a girl?
Deliberately, and with a kind of fierceness, he turned sideways against the gate and faced her. He made himself watch her face. He expected some sign of shrinking, the betrayal of an instant repulsion, or perhaps just curiosity, a crude and youthful stare.
He made himself smile.
“Yes, a piece of shell, you know. We used to live in holes like rabbits, and I had just come up out of my hole——”
But his mocking voice died away. She was looking at him strangely; the light of the sunset was on her face and in her eyes. He saw her lips move. She just looked, but she said nothing. There was no tremor, no flinching, no polite exclaiming. Gently she stroked the fur of the dead rabbit.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 50