He wondered. A kind of astonishment stirred in him. He cast about for something to say.
“I’ll see that no more snares are set. You are Miss Farren, aren’t you?”
Her large eyes looked at him. They were gentle and friendly.
“Yes. But will you?”
“Of course. I never use a gun here. As I said before—when you have been shot at and made to feel——”
She gave the slightest of shudders.
“It must have—it must have—hurt—so terribly. I’m so sorry. But it has made you kind, hasn’t it?”
He looked at the dead thing in her arms.
“Sometimes—it has made me wish that I was like that.”
She was shocked, but not as he would have expected her to be shocked. A kind of little cry escaped her.
“Oh, poor, poor——” She had heard the cry of a live thing in pain.
IV
Mrs. Tregennis, Farren’s housekeeper, gaunt, grave, and with religion in her flat cheeks and thin lips, was sometimes moved to protest. It was her duty. She was a good woman who took life as she took her Sundays, very much in black. Seeing this long-legged girl of eighteen running wild, with her hair still blowing, or romping with a puppy on the plot of grass where the flagstaff stood, Mrs. Tregennis felt responsible.
“Miss Iris, it is time you grew up.”
“I am grown up, Nanny.”
“Romping like that, and you eighteen!”
“But I must play with a puppy. He wouldn’t understand my being eighteen.”
Mrs. Tregennis felt it to be her duty to speak to Farren. He, too, seemed such a big boy of a man, so irresponsible, so haphazard. She tackled him one evening in the long, low, untidy room, where he smoked his pipes and threw books and cushions about and lounged on the sofa in the window. He was the sort of gentleman who threw everything on the floor. If a cushion fell on the floor, either he would leave it there or kick it back into a chair with the toe of a white canvas shoe.
“It’s about Miss Iris, sir.”
Farren looked at her with wilful unseriousness.
“What about Miss Iris?”
“She’s eighteen, Mr. Farren; she ought to grow up.”
“Why should she grow up?”
“It isn’t proper, sir—in a manner of speaking.”
And suddenly Farren looked fierce. He had a way of ruffling up his red hair.
“Proper! And what is growing up? Becoming a humbug! Trying to look like Sunday when you feel like Monday. I prefer my daughter as she is.”
Mrs. Tregennis was obstinately good.
“But there are other people in the world.”
“Damn the other people! Besides, Mrs. Tregennis, Iris isn’t quite like other people. She has the eternal child in her—or whatever you call it. Something worth keeping.”
“She’s childish, sir. That’s what worries me.”
“It shouldn’t do. We ought to begin to worry when the starch begins to set in us and we wear our aprons for the benefit of the people next door. We haven’t any people next door.”
“There’s St. Gilians, sir.”
“St. Gilians can go to blazes! I like the child as she is.”
For St. Gilians and Mrs. Tregennis knew as little about the real Michael Farren as they knew about the life of the Sea Horse or the journeys of Farren’s car. No one in St. Gilians would have supposed him to be a man with a grievance against society—and a very fierce and unforgettable grievance; or that he was a man who waged a secret war against the world. St. Gilians saw only the man with the loose collar and old clothes, and the laughing, ironic eyes, a man who scattered pennies and would stand and talk to anybody, and take his drink. It knew nothing of Farren the artist of fifteen years ago, painting pictures and yet more pictures which the world would neither look at nor buy; Farren, the husband of the French woman with the eyes of Iris and hair of a superlative blackness. It did not know how Farren had loved his wife, or how they had suffered the hunger and the humiliations of proud and clever people lost in the crowd. A top-floor room in Bloomsbury, an attic in Paris, struggles, shabbinesses, the birth of a child.
Then Désirée had fallen sick and had died. She had died in a miserable room somewhere in Islington, and Farren had sat by the bed; and in him had been born a cold rage against life and against society. Something had died within him with his wife. He had tried to give the world beauty, and it had thrown back at him dirt and stones. Very well, then, to hell with the social compact! Anarchy! He would do what he pleased. He would play the rebel; not stupidly and crudely, but with a kind of ironic cunning. He, too, would be as cunning as society, and just as pitiless. And there was the child. He would see to it that the child had not to bear what the mother had borne. He would use teeth and claws; he would play the tiger game while appearing among the crowd as an irresponsible dauber, a harmless fellow who did nothing but paint.
So, for some years, while appearing the most irresponsible and open of creatures he had been a man of mystery, but only to those few others and himself. Who would suspect a painter of pictures living in a bungalow on the Cornish coast of being at war with society and living upon that secret war?
V
Up at Orchards Wilding’s solitude had been disturbed as the cold sleep of the young year is broken by the first singing of a bird. A girl’s eyes and mouth grown poignant over a dead rabbit! How absurd and yet how exquisite was that pity!
Also, he had felt himself a part of that pity, included in it, but not shamefully so, for, when between them they had buried that little brown creature at the foot of a stone wall, he had felt her presence to be most strangely real and childlike. She had lingered, looking at him with darkly serious eyes, seeing him not as he saw himself, as a sort of defaced outcast, but as man wounded and still wounded. He had felt a strange tremor of incredulity and exultation. How was it that she could look at him like that, unflinchingly, just as a child looks at you, but with more than a child’s understanding? For the solace of it he could have gone down and kissed her little feet.
But would he see her again? He both yearned and was afraid to see her again. She had come to him like one of those rare and perfect days in the midst of March, exquisite and unexpected; but he doubted whether there could be a second such day. If he saw her again he might discover the sensitive surface of her clouded and overcast, inevitably reflecting that which he felt to be smirched and tragic. She had been kind to him just as she had felt pity for a dead rabbit.
Meanwhile he fell upon Pengelly.
“If I find another snare set on this place, you’ll go.”
Pengelly glowered at him. What was the use of arguing with a man who was supposed to be a farmer and who kept a sort of home for rabbits?
“Then you had better put them fields down to grass. And there won’t be a bit of green in your kitchen garden.”
“We can wire it.”
“Wire it and waste good money. Besides, there be neighbours. They won’t thank you, Mr. Wilding, for starting a little Australia in these parts.”
“We’ll wait till they complain. We have wild land all round us.”
“There won’t be much else but wild land, I reckon.”
But Pengelly, observing men and things, became aware of a change in the ex-soldier. An old army tunic was discarded; khaki collars ceased to be worn; boots and leggings received more polish. Pengelly was able to go home to his wife and announce the fact that “he” had had his hair cut, fair and proper, by an accredited barber. Yes, Wilding had been to Penzance, and had walked the streets of Penzance in broad daylight. And was it due to the eyes of Iris Farren that it seemed to him that his disfigured face was less noticeable to the eyes of the crowd?
A restlessness possessed him. Every evening he would go down by way of the lane to the wild hillside overlooking St. Gilians. Farren’s white bungalow appeared to him across the valley like a little white temple. Even the gulls seemed more restless and more plaintive. He watched for the distant f
igure of a girl.
Would she come Orchards-way again? What could bring her across the valley? He could not say. What would any modern girl see in a disfigured man who “pigged it” on a lonely farm, and who had nothing to offer her that modernity covets? He felt rather hopeless, like a watcher waiting for a ship that would never sail. And yet he hoped. He could not forget that something about her, an exquisite and sensitive compassion, an unspoilt virginity. Might there not be something in his loneliness that would draw her to him—their common love of wild things and of wild places? But might not Farren demur? And what sort of man was Farren? Wilding wondered.
And then one evening she appeared, and with the most unexpected of companions: Sally, the spaniel, who had been lost all day. She came up the path through the bracken, which she touched with her hands. She was hatless, bare-legged, her feet in white canvas shoes.
Wilding stood rigid, almost like a sentry on a parapet waiting to be shot at. Sally ran to put her paws against his knees.
“So—it’s your dog! We made friends in the village. Isn’t she a dear!”
Her face was less serious, almost laughing, and the light of her went through and through him.
“Sally? She’s been away all day.”
“She seemed to want me to come back with her.”
“I don’t blame Sally.”
With a strange feeling of exultation he bent down and fondled the dog. For it seemed to him that Farren’s daughter had no more fear of him than had the spaniel; she looked at him with the eyes of a bird; she saw in him nothing hideous, nothing to be fled from.
He had a moment of marvelling. Was it that he had grown over-sensitive, too much afraid of his fellow-men, or was it that the eyes and the soul of her were different? He took the spaniel into his arms.
He said: “A dog keeps you from being too lonely. Funny—isn’t it—how a dog will stick by you and desert all the rest of the dog world?”
She seemed to stand and consider him as though she had found something new and strange in life.
“But you don’t live alone?”
“Yes; quite alone.”
“But who cooks and makes your bed?”
Her question seemed to amuse him and also to fill him with surprise.
“I’m my own cook and housemaid. Yes; plenty of work with a farm and a house on your hands.”
“But don’t you feel lonely?”
“Oh, sometimes. One gets used to things. Besides—I think I like birds and beasts better than people.”
Her face lit up suddenly.
“Now isn’t that strange! So do I. I love to be out—in wild places all by myself, watching and watching. You see so much when you are alone.”
He looked at her and wondered.
“Yes, that’s true; when you don’t want to catch or kill.”
VI
Iris stood on the running-board of her father’s car, for Farren was off upon one of his expeditions, with an old suitcase and his artist’s gear loaded in the dicky of the two-seater. In the old days Iris the child had perplexed him with the same question—“Can’t I come with you, Daddy?”—and always he had had to put her off. “Little girls must stay at home.” And perhaps that was one of the reasons why he wished her to remain a child, a creature whose questions could be answered with an air of Olympian mystery; for, had she asked these questions as a woman, the answering of them would have been difficult. Always he had given her to understand that he went away to paint in the Cotswold country, or in Wiltshire villages, and that sometimes he stayed with an eccentric friend, a country doctor. Farren had invented “Dr. Brough,” and had told the child tales of that gentleman’s whimsicalities until, to Iris Farren, “Dr. Brough,” had become a reality.
“Can’t I come and see Dr. Brough, Daddy?”
“Some day, Poppet. But Dr. Brough doesn’t like things in petticoats.”
“Then couldn’t I go without a petticoat?”
Now, at the age of eighteen, she did not perplex him with awkward questions, nor was there anything in her silence that suggested the reticence of sophistication. She did not make Farren feel that she wondered where he went and why, or that she doubted the existence of “Dr. Brough.” Her eyes and her brow remained clear at an age when most young things would have accepted with cynicism a pilgrimage to the shrine of a pretty lady. She just stood on the running-board of the car and was carried up the grassy lane as far as the main road, and there Farren would stop the car for a moment, and she would bend over and kiss him.
“Good-bye, Daddy!”
“Good-bye, Poppet. Take care of yourself. Back on Thursday.”
Always he was conscious of a pang when leaving her on the grass bank beside the road. She was so innocent, so unsmirched, so unsuspicious. She believed in his romancings, as her forbears had believed in the Bible; and Farren felt this pang on that serene morning in June when he waved a hand to her and set the nose of the grey car towards the notch in the blue sky where the road went over Hogback Hill. For he had come to the age when a man realizes that life is finite and that certain things do not go on for ever. He had loved this other secret life largely for the sake of Iris the child, but he was growing more and more aware of Iris the woman.
Also, he was becoming more and more oppressed by the dread of disaster, by the mischance of a betrayal. His nerve was not what it had been, his audacity and his adventurousness were less youthful. He was feeling less bitter against the world, because life had been more kind to him in the flowering of an exquisite childhood, and the poison was thinning in his blood. More and more he had begun to dread the possibility of being found out: and not so much for his own sake, but for Iris’s sake. Society, enraged and merciless, might turn and rend him before he had set out to accomplish that which he had in his mind.
Farren drove fast. He had need of speed, for his goal was London and not the solitudes of the Wiltshire hills. Even a year ago he could remember enjoying the speed of the road, the rush to the great city; but now he was less a lover of speed. He would find himself flinching, or imagining a smash, and perhaps the inevitable discovery of that package stowed away inside what pretended to be an innocent looking tool-box. He had not yet saved enough money to make his child independent of all sensationalism.
After driving hard all day he reached the outskirts of London as the June dusk fell. His inconspicuous grey car inserted itself into the multitudinous traffic, threading its way along one of the strands of the great web.
Keeping to a series of obscure streets, he turned at last into a Kensington mews and ran the car into a coach-house that was always at his service. He transferred something to his suitcase. With a portfolio under his arm and the suitcase in his right hand he made his way to a certain quiet, private hotel—“Bland’s,” in March Street. Bland’s and its porter had known him for years as Farren the artist, up in Town with his portfolio and on business of his own—a quiet gentleman in spite of his red hair.
Next morning he strolled. He carried a book and a daily paper. He made his way into Kensington Gardens and sat down to watch the children sailing boats on the Round Pond. He had the appearance of an idle man amusing himself. He got up and strolled over the grass and among the trees and the scattered chairs. With an air of detachment he sat down on a chair under a tree near to an old lady in black who was occupying another chair. The old lady had a Pekinese dog in her lap. She looked as decorous and respectable as the Gardens.
Farren observed the dog. He snapped his fingers at it playfully. Conversation was opened.
“The Gardens are looking very well this year.”
“Yes; I have never seen them look better. Did you see the tulips when they were out?”
“Yes—gorgeous!”
They grew friendly. Farren moved his chair next to the old lady’s. She had a bag with a book in it. Farren played with the dog. The old lady noticed the book he was carrying: yes, she read a great deal. She held out her hand for Farren’s book, and looked at the title.
“Fascinating.”
She produced the book from her bag.
“You should read that. Most interesting.”
“I’ll get it from the library.”
Yet few close observers, had there been anyone to observe an old lady and a middle-aged man chatting together under an isolated tree, would have noticed that Farren and the owner of the Pekinese exchanged volumes, and that Farren’s book went into the old lady’s bag.
They parted, the old lady—leading off the Pekinese—to take a taxi in Queen’s Gate, which carried her to No. 7 Gatherall Gardens, in Chelsea. The house, one of a row, high, narrow, with a blue door and white windows, looked as innocent and conventional as the old lady. She rang the bell and was admitted by a sallow and insignificant little man-servant whom she addressed as “John.”
“Lunch nearly ready, John?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Take Peter and put him on his cushion. I shall be down in a minute.”
Carrying her bag, she ascended briskly to her bedroom and, opening a big cupboard, disclosed a small safe. She unlocked the safe, but before placing Farren’s book inside she examined the volume. It was more than a mere book, for a cavity had been cut in its pages, and in this cavity lay concealed a neat white package.
Meanwhile Farren had remained under the tree, reading the daily paper, the book that the old lady had left him tucked between his knees. Presently he glanced at his watch, yawned, slipped the book between the folds of the paper, got up, and strolled out of Kensington Gardens. He lunched at Bland’s Hotel. After lunch he went out with his portfolio under his arm, and he was away till six o’clock. Bland’s Hotel understood that he visited editors and publishers and submitted sketches, and that he did a good deal in the way of designing book-wrappers.
At dinner he was invariably cheerful, and had the air of a man whose affairs had prospered. He would joke with old Hammond, the head-waiter, who had been at Bland’s for more than twenty years. “Well, Hammond, how’s the world going?”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 51