The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “Cocaine, sir? I knowa not’ing at all-a—not’ing.”

  But he was persuaded to blab something of what he knew, under the assurance that life might be made more easy for him if he gave the gang away. They got him in a room by himself, away from his truculent and defiant wife, and gave him cigarettes to smoke, and treated him like a pet monkey. Inevitably he was persuaded to talk, and to declare that he was the most innocent of men, that he had been a waiter at Gagliani’s for three years, and that he had not known that the stuff was in the house.

  Yes, his wife had friends, certainly. All sorts of people. Name them? Well, he couldn’t put names to all of them. There was a little old lady who called on them once a month and saw his wife, a most harmless old lady. Yes, his wife dealt occasionally in cheap jewellery and old clothes.

  The house in Elgin Street was ordered to carry on as though nothing had occurred. The Italian woman, sitting stubbornly and fatly in her chair, glared and knew herself to be caged. The house would be watched. Antonio would be watched; even at Gagliani’s a detective would be assisting in serving the restaurant’s clients. So the police left the trap baited, with a cat in the house, and other cats in observation-posts. The little old lady in black, venturing unsuspecting from Gatherall Gardens, was observed, listened to, and followed home. An hour later the search-warrant was produced and the house in Gatherall Gardens turned upside down.

  The police found things and among them a book lying on a table in the drawing-room. It was a perfectly harmless book on fifteenth-century Italian art; but on the fly-leaf was written the name of the owner—one “Michael Farren.” The little old lady was a stout soul. She sat on the sofa and smiled and shook her head, and kept her loyalties, while the Peke stared with glassy and scornful eyes at an eminent police-inspector and his assistant.

  “I see you borrow books, madam.”

  “Oh, no; that book belongs to me.”

  “Left you by a relation?”

  “I bought it second-hand at a shop in Oxford Street.”

  “Recently, I suppose?”

  “No, some years ago. I quite forget the name of the shop.”

  But the police took the book away. The inspector had noticed passages marked and notes scribbled on the margins. Obviously the book had belonged to an artist or to someone interested in pictures and in the history of art; and all clues are worthy of attention. Michael Farren. Now who was Michael Farren and where did he live and what did he do, and had the old lady been telling the truth? The inspector had no illusions.

  Nor did Farren receive the whisper of a warning, for the old lady of Gatherall Gardens was the only person on this side of the Channel who knew just how the drug came into England, and she was unable to warn him, being gently in durance. And yet about that very time Farren began to suffer from strange restlessness and depression. It was as though he was fey, and had some super-normal feeling of what was in the air.

  Also, he was sleeping badly, and waking one morning before dawn and knowing that there was no more sleep for him that night, he got up and went out. The sea was streaked with a faint greyness, and going to the edge of the cliff he could look down upon St. Gilians and its bay, and the little harbour where the Sea Horse lay moored.

  Rows and rows of gulls were perched on the boats, and upon the iron railings of the breakwater, and to Farren the whole scene would have lacked any personal significance had he not seen a dinghy lying beside the Sea Horse.

  For a moment he stood staring, and then threw himself down on the dew-wet grass. He wanted to watch without being seen. Someone had boarded the Sea Horse, and presently he saw a man emerge from the fore cabin of the motor-boat and get into the dinghy and row away. The man did not make for St. Gilians. The sea was a flat calm, and the man in the dinghy pulled out past the sea-wall and away towards Gurnard’s Head. Another boat was lying there.

  Farren rose to his knees, and then slowly got to his feet. He knew that there had been nothing on the Sea Horse to incriminate him, and that the fellow in the dinghy might be nothing but a sneak-thief.

  He went back to the bungalow, as daylight was spreading. Putting off his shoes, and silently turning a handle, he entered his daughter’s room. Iris was asleep; she did not stir; and for half a minute he stood beside her bed, looking down at her.

  “Innocent. Let her stay like that.”

  He slipped silently out of her room feeling that he would have to slip just as silently out of her life and leave her dreaming and alone. But not quite alone. For there was Wilding to be remembered, and Farren had come to know Wilding and Orchards Farm. Both the place and the man had changed; Pengelly’s wife came in each day to clean and scrub; the garden was ceasing to look like a wilderness; new curtains had appeared at the windows.

  Farren went out again and watched the sun rise out of the sea. It seemed so strange that he—a man who loved beauty—should be standing there as one whom society would regard as an enemy. But how final the thing was! Always had he made himself confront the possible disaster and its implications; long ago he had made up his mind that he would vanish, that he would not be taken and caged. He would disappear before the net could be pulled tight.

  But how strange it was!

  A restlessness possessed him; he wanted to know, to feel sure; and he could not be sure unless he went to see for himself how things were at Gatherall Gardens. Had anything happened to the little old lady and to Peter the Peke? And again he was oppressed by the strangeness of it all, the anomalous and ambiguous life he had been living all these years. But he had had his reasons; he still had his reason.

  The decision came to him suddenly. He would go to town that very day; he would get the car out at once. He would slip away before Iris and Mrs. Tregennis were awake. And that was what he did.

  Iris, knocking at her father’s door, called to him to come and bathe.

  “Daddy, the sea’s like glass. Come along.”

  But Farren’s room was empty, and the open doors of the wooden garage offered other explanations. She went in to Mrs. Tregennis, who was laying the table for breakfast.

  “Daddy’s gone with the car.”

  Mrs. Tregennis was accustomed to such whimsical disappearances.

  “Just one of his moods, my dear.”

  “I wish he would take me with him sometimes.”

  Mrs. Tregennis was wondering whether she would have to prepare lunch for two. Irresponsible people who painted pictures could be rather perplexing.

  So Iris had to bathe alone, and afterwards she climbed the hill to Orchards Farm. She came and went as she pleased, and even Pengelly had ceased to smirk and to sneer. She would address him as “Mr. Pengelly.” “Oh, Mr. Pengelly, what lovely pigs you’ve got!” Wilding might be out with hoe or scythe, and suddenly he would hear her voice.

  “Wildie—Wildie! Where are you?”

  Perhaps he would see her perched on a stone wall among the golden rod and the blue scabious, or waving to him from one of the field gates. She would leap down, run to him, and touch him; and to be touched by her was an exquisite, sweet pain. There was so much of the Rima in her, the bird creature, and he was afraid lest some rough gesture of his should scare her away.

  “Wildie, do let me try and scythe!”

  He showed her how to hold the scythe, and tried to teach her the swing of body and shoulders; but her mowing was not very successful.

  “Wildie, why do I always dig the point into the ground?”

  “One does, to begin with. You are not made to be Father Time.”

  “I’m better at hoeing.”

  “You are.”

  “We’re just like Adam and Eve, aren’t we?”

  “You are.”

  She was to him a kind of exquisite Persephone. He could understand Farren’s summing up of life. “Grow apples, my lad, and turnips. What a lot of paint I have wasted! Look at that child, the only decent picture I have helped to paint. Thank God it can’t be hung in a gallery!”

  XI

 
; Farren followed the usual routine, yet with the strange feeling of a man performing some useless yet inevitable ceremony. He put up at the Bland’s Hotel. The night had turned out wet, and after dinner he strolled out towards Chelsea. He was tired after all those miles on the road, and the tenseness of his speeding; and London had a muffled yet grotesque unreality. Its noise was no more than the buzzing of a fly in a bottle. The wet streets had an oily sheen, and the drizzle seemed to break up the rays of the lamps and to scatter them.

  Crossing King’s Road, he passed a constable on point-duty, his wet cape glistening. He seemed to loom big and sententious, a symbolical figure; and for the first time in his life Farren felt moved to edge away from this fellow-man dressed up in society’s uniform. His impulse was to slink; and the meanness of it angered him. No; surely he would not suffer himself to be taken by the collar like the absurd enemy of an absurd tyranny in which beauty was banned and beer raised to the peerage.

  He arrived at the end of Gatherall Gardens. No. 7 was on the left, and Farren proceeded along the opposite pavement with the air of a man passing through to other streets. The windows of No. 7 were dark, but he noticed that the blinds were up. Someone had lacked imagination. Farren walked on, crossed the road and came back. It had seemed to him that No. 7 had winked a sinister and warning eye. Moreover, coincidence was in his favour, for as he was about to pass the door, a constable in uniform emerged from the house.

  Farren walked past with his hands in his pockets and his head in the air. The indication was sufficient. But why a constable in uniform? Why not some ordinary-looking individual in a ready-made suit? Possibly police mentality was ready-made.

  He laughed. He felt like a gladiator in the arena. He saluted society.

  “Hail, Cæsar! One who is not respectable is about to die!”

  But a sudden weariness fell upon him. It was a part of the feeling of fatalism that had been deepening in him during the last days. The adventure of life was near its end, and its finale would be abrupt and silent; but on this wet London night he felt the clogging of his tired body. He wanted to sleep, to forget; and going back to Bland’s Hotel, he slept as some soldiers can sleep with the inevitable to-morrow and its battle before them.

  Next day, speeding through all that English country, he understood that he was saying farewell to the green world that slipped past him, the downland and the beech woods, and all those smooth fields, the gardens and the orchards. He was like a man travelling in a swift train to some port to take ship for a strange land. He felt both resigned and restless. It was growing dark when he reached the moorland road above St. Gilians, and he stopped the car on the grass, switched off the lights, and went down to the bungalow on foot. He was suspicious.

  There were lights in the bungalow windows. He slipped over the fence and crossing the grass to the studio window, looked in. Iris was curled up on the sofa, reading a book. Farren tapped on the glass.

  Her startled eyes looked straight into his, for Farren’s face was close to the window.

  “Daddy!”

  She rushed to meet him, and opening the glazed door leading into the garden, threw her arms about him.

  “Why didn’t you tell us you were going?”

  He kissed her. He was his old whimsical, jocular self.

  “What a memory I have! Thought I’d left a note. Didn’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone been?”

  “Yes; two strange men called this afternoon. I told them you were away. They were funny. I saw them looking into the garage.”

  “What sort of men?”

  “Oh, just strangers in ordinary clothes.”

  “Called for a subscription, perhaps. Did they say they would come again?”

  “No; but when I was on the cliff this evening, I saw one of them lying in the bracken.”

  Farren laughed.

  “Cadgers of some sort. I expect they have sheered off. But you can’t guess what I have done?”

  “What have you done?”

  “Run out of petrol, Poppet. I had to leave the car up the road. I’m going to carry a can up and bring her down. Stay here and get me some supper.”

  He stroked her hair.

  “Seen Wildie to-day?”

  “No; I was waiting for you.”

  “Bless you!”

  He left her, and, walking on the grass, he made towards the garage, and stopped to listen. Iris’s two strangers might be watching the place, but there was no sound save the faint and distant surge of the sea. Farren took a can of petrol from the garage, and walked up the hill to the car. He did not turn on the lights or start the engine, but let the car run slowly down the hill, and on to the cinder track leading to the garage. He left the car there, and entered the bungalow.

  “Wonderful night, Poppet. It was raining in Wiltshire yesterday, but to-night there is going to be a moon. Ah, supper! Good! Where’s Mrs. Tregennis?”

  “It’s her night out, Daddy. She’s down at St. Gilians.”

  “One good gossip a week. Had supper?”

  “Yes.”

  He was hungry; he sat down to cold meat and a salad, and one of Mrs. Tregennis’s fruit-tarts; and though he reflected, as he ate the food, that it promised to be his last supper, he could smile at his daughter. That, indeed, was his last sacrament—to go out smiling and in secret, leaving her to that other man. He looked at her from under the grizzle of his eyebrows with a kind of fierce and ironic tenderness. She sat in her chair at the other end of the table, just as her mother had sat; she had the same way of looking round-eyed and serious, and of holding her head slightly on one side.

  “So you haven’t seen Wildie to-day?”

  “No.”

  “There are men and men, Poppet. We are all of us patchwork creatures, but there is good stuff in Wildie. Not afraid of him, are you?”

  “Afraid! Why should I be afraid?”

  “That’s all right then. He’s been hurt. He doesn’t want to kill things or hurt them. That’s religion, my dear. Well, the fact is, I’m rather sleepy, and so are you.”

  “A little, Daddy.”

  “Run along, then. Ten whiffs at a pipe and I shall turn in. I suppose Mrs. Tregennis has the back-door key.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, kiss the old fellow good night.”

  He held her for a moment, and it seemed to Iris that he was holding her differently. He kissed her hair and her forehead. For her face was also her mother’s face, and Farren’s good night was farewell to a memory.

  “My little girl is going to dream. Don’t wake up. Only the too wise people wake up. Good night, blessed one.”

  When she had gone, he bit hard at the stem of his pipe, and his face had a twisted look. An old oak bureau stood in a corner; he went to it, took a sheet of notepaper and wrote a few words. It was his last message, a pretence, a saving gesture.

  “Gone out in the boat. Woke early. Back to late breakfast. Love to Poppet.—M. F.”

  He heard Mrs. Tregennis come in, potter about in the kitchen and then go to her room. In a little while the bungalow was silent, and Farren tucked the note under a glass on the table. Someone would find it there in the morning.

  XII

  Like most men who lead an open-air life or who work hard on the land, Wilding turned in early; but on such a night as this, when Orion and the Great Bear were blazing and not a leaf moved, and the sound of the sea was like the murmur heard in the hollow of a shell, he went out and wandered a while before going to his bed. The starlight was sufficient, and he had gone down the lane to look at the lights of Farren’s bungalow across the valley. He was returning and had reached the gate in the garden wall when he heard footsteps.

  They were a man’s steps, and at first he thought it might be Pengelly. But Pengelly was a clumsy walker, and this man’s steps had solidity and swiftness. Wilding, head up, sent out a challenge:

  “Hallo! Who’s that?”

  A voice answered him.

  “That you, Wildi
ng? Good! I was afraid you might have locked up.”

  “Mr. Farren!”

  “Yes; can I come in? You and I have things to say to each other.”

  He loomed up out of the darkness; he was bare-headed; he seemed part of the big, loose-limbed, star-spread night. And Wilding’s surprise waited upon this unexpected coming. He opened the gate and stood aside.

  “Nothing wrong, sir?”

  Farren did not answer that question. He walked up the path and stood in silence outside the farmhouse door; and his silence had some of the profoundness of the night. Wilding had left the lamp burning in his sitting-room. In passing Farren to lead the way in, he heard a sound come from the other man—a deep-drawn breath and a sigh.

  “Soon be lights out, Wildie.”

  He called him by the name Iris used, and in the darkness of the passage Wilding felt himself suddenly and intimately near to this other man.

  “When you can sleep, turning out a light is not a bad thing.”

  “Ah, when you can sleep. Mind if I smoke? Last pipe or two, you know, my lad.”

  Wilding did not know, and yet Farren’s voice was so strangely and inexplicably ominous that he looked at him in astonishment.

  “Many more pipes for you, sir. Why not?”

  “No.”

  “Something wrong? You’re ill?”

  “No; my number is up, Wildie. I’ll sit here. Don’t let’s have too much light. I have a confession to make. And then I want you to promise me something.”

  He sat down on the sofa by the window and filled his pipe, and Wilding, before turning down the lamp, noticed that Farren’s hands were deliberate and steady.

  “How’s that?”

  “Splendid! Let’s start straight away. When I leave you, I’m going out in the Sea Horse, and I am not coming back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not coming back. I shall sink her out in the Channel and go down with her. It will appear an accident. That’s all.”

  Wilding stood and stared.