The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “Rather awkward again for Mathers.”

  “Oh—I don’t know. We showed him where he was. Sarto was to be re-engaged, or about a hundred and twenty people had decided to pack their boxes and depart on the morrow. There happened to be plenty of room at the ‘Mont Fleur,’ and the ‘Britannique,’ and Mathers knew it. He tried to look pathetic.”

  “ ‘You are putting very embarrassing pressure upon me, gentlemen. It seems that I have got to offend somebody——’

  “ ‘Obviously,’ said I; ‘but we are not going to fry poor little Sarto in Lady Pork’s angry fat. Leave it with her.’

  “He explained that my lady meant to be nasty, and had threatened to write to the board of directors.

  “ ‘Let her,’ said old Sandeman. ‘I happen to know Porter-Brown who is on the board. I’ll take care that she does not get at them behind your back.’ ”

  “That settled Mathers. We told him that he had better go himself and see Sarto, and at first he refused and talked about his dignity, until old Sandeman began to fidget with his eye-glass.

  “ ‘My dear sir, what about Sarto’s dignity? Isn’t a musician——?’

  “And Mathers went.

  “I saw him when he came back, and the man actually had a soft look in his cynical, suave eyes.

  “ ‘That little chap’s a gentleman, Mr. Carfax.’

  “ ‘So I thought,’ said I.

  “ ‘I apologized, had to. Didn’t quite realize his position, you know. He is coming back to-night.’

  “I can tell you we were all sitting on our heels that evening to see what happened to my lady’s face when she saw that Sarto had revived. Yes, it was rather stimulating. She turned the colour of vin ordinaire when the orchestra struck up and she saw Sarto cuddling his violin. She called up the maître d’hôtel, and sent him for Mathers.

  “Mathers arrived. We watched. I think Mathers rather enjoyed it after the way she had trampled on him.

  “She got up, and walked out of the room just as the orchestra finished a selection.

  “My dear chap, you should have heard the applause! We might have been a lot of children. It was rather ridiculous and rather touching. We clapped, we drummed on the tables, we shouted encore. Even the waiters joined in. I had a last glimpse of the red back of my lady’s neck.

  “Then someone got up, an old lady, and presented Sarto with a bouquet.

  “And Sarto—Sarto burst into tears, and had his head held on the pianist’s shoulder!

  “A comedy! Oh, yes, a little comedy, with a lot of the real human stuff at the back of it. Lady Pork finished her dinner en suite, and went off next day, leaving a frizzle of furious fat behind her.

  “But there’s the little man, Sarto, on his perch.”

  Mr. Spargood stared at the sea.

  “His wife got well, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes; they have another baby. These Italians are irrepressible. And I’m——”

  He chuckled.

  “I’m its godfather.”

  RESTITUTION

  The man and his trunk looked equally solitary on the asphalt of the La Marondou platform. The sun had touched the hills, and the sudden chill of the sunset was emphasized by the quivering pines and the falling blue of the sea.

  An unshaven and broad-backed porter got hold of the man’s trunk.

  “Hôtel Minerva, monsieur?”

  “No, Hôtel Hesperides.”

  “Bien, monsieur.”

  There were but two hotels at La Marondou, the Minerva and the Hesperides, both insignificant and obscure, and patronized by people whose insignificance equalled their obscurity. The stout porter, having little to do, and being like all Latins a lover of a lottery, would bet with himself as to the destination of the visitors to La Marondou. “Voilà, a Minervan!” or “That goes to the Hesperides,” and having guessed wrongly in this particular case he looked hard at the stranger.

  The man had turned up the collar of his overcoat. He had narrow and high shoulders, and a grey and narrow face, a face of infinite melancholy. He looked cold.

  “A sick man,” thought the porter; “come in search of the sun. Poor devil! These English look as though they were made of two boards nailed together.”

  A shabby concierge with “Hesperides” in frayed gold upon his cap was waiting at the door of the booking-office.

  “Hôtel Hesperides,” shouted the porter.

  The concierge took off his cap to the stranger.

  “Meester Massing-ham.”

  The stranger nodded.

  “How far?”

  “But a leetle way, monsieur.”

  The trunk was placed on a barrow in charge of an old pirate in striped shirt and blue breeches, and Mr. Massingham and the concierge walked down the dusty road that ended in four sad-looking palm trees and the sea. La Marondou reposed on the half-moon of a bay, with a few fishing-boats drawn up on the sand, and an old grey tower straddling a rock in the centre. The Hôtel Minerva stood on one horn of the bay, the Hôtel Hesperides on the other. Between them a loop of shabby yellow-and-white villas and fly-blown shops confronted the austere cleanliness of the sea.

  Mr. Massingham entered the Hôtel Hesperides, to stare with a kind of tired voicelessness at the voluble face of madame. Yes, he would like to go straight to his room. Tea? Yes, he would be glad of some tea.

  “Marie, numero dix.”

  Mr. Massingham ascended the narrow stairs and was shown into No. 10. He stood quite still in the middle of the room until the door was closed upon him, and he continued to stand there for the best part of a minute, like a prisoner who has been pushed into a cell, and feels the chill of it and a shivering that is the shivering of his own soul.

  Massingham walked to the window and leaning against the iron rail looked down at the sea, and the sweep of sand turning to orange in the sunset, but in spite of the colour in the sky a chilly sadness was falling like dew upon this little third-rate pleasure resort. It looked shabby. It made the man’s impressions of it and of himself seem shabbier than they had any right to be.

  He sighed.

  “I wonder if there are any English here?”

  He had come to La Marondou to avoid his own country-people, also to be alone, terribly yet deliciously alone in a world of emptiness and silence, and to escape from all that confusion of thought and those inconstant impulses that had made for bewilderment.

  “I wonder if I shall sleep here?”

  For to Mr. Massingham sleep was the only heaven.

  At half-past seven the patrons of the Hôtel Hesperides gathered in the salle à manger, some twenty persons scattered at the little tables under the white glare of the unshaded lights. The room had a bluish tinge which extended to the tablecloths and the napkins, and the shirt fronts and faces of the two sickly-looking waiters. Half the room was French, and the rest of it a smattering of English, Belgian and Dutch. In one corner sat a little, brown-haired woman with tired, blue eyes and a mouth that flickered between a smile and a sneer. At the table in front of her, a very square old man with the face of a dyspeptic parrot, and a shirt and collar that bulged under a leathery double chin, pulled his bread to pieces and read some interminable novel. He read it as though it angered him, and caused him to emit scowlings of angry protest. “What rot!” Further on his right, a chinless and vague lady drooped pale and protruding eyes over her soup, looking as though she had committed some fatal social solecism and would never outlive the shame of it.

  Mr. Massingham walked into the room. He moved like a figure of wood, feeling that everyone was looking at him, which was true, for in such a place as the Hôtel Hesperides the appearance even of a starved cat was an interesting event. André, the smaller of the two waiters, indicated a table next to the one occupied by the brown-haired woman with the tired eyes. Massingham sat down, spread his table napkin, and fixed his eyes on the square back of the morose and indignant reader of novels. He noticed that a fly was going through its ablutions on the crown of the squ
are grey head.

  Someone spoke to him in English, and he turned a slow eye and head as though compelling himself to look at a ghost.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  The woman with the brown hair had asked him for the salt.

  “Would you mind——? They are so short of things here.”

  Massingham passed it to her.

  “Thank you so much.”

  She had a pleasant voice, more like her smile than her sneer, but the man was frightened by an English voice, and he submerged himself in his soup. The woman at the next table, her name was Farren, examined his irresponsive profile, and finding that Massingham showed no sign of wishing to follow up the opportunity she had given him, she left him alone. But between the courses the man with the novel threw disjointed remarks at her over a square shoulder.

  “How’s Elsie? What? Splendid! That’s right. Vile trash this chap writes.”

  “Well—I warned you, Mr. Crossby. It sold fifty thousand——”

  “Ha—did it! I should think so. What, veal again!”

  Between the veal and the caramel cream he turned slap round in his chair and gave Massingham a bushy stare. In fact he nearly said “Ha!” to him; seeing that the new arrival avoided a direct glance, he twitched his eyebrows and seemed amused.

  “Play Bridge, sir?”

  “No,” said Massingham curtly, “I don’t.”

  Mr. Crossby reverted to his novel.

  “Our turn to go to Minerva,” he flung over his shoulder when the waiter placed a basket of oranges before him. “Feel up to it?”

  “I shall have to look at Elsie——”

  “Oh, quite, quite. Elsie has first call. She’ll turn up trumps. Dash it—nothing but oranges again. Why no bananas?”

  “Because of that wretched song, I suppose.”

  Mr. Crossby closed his novel with a bang, got up, gave Massingham a fierce and half-contemptuous look, and turned towards the door.

  “Well—I’ll wait in the lounge. If Elsie is all right——”

  “Let’s say in half an hour,” said Elsie’s mother.

  Massingham went out and wandered on the sands, walking so close to the sea that an occasional gliding wavelet welled about his feet. The night was very calm and cold, but not as cold as the sea, or as the thoughts of him who wandered up and down and wondered why he had come here, why he was not dead, why people lived at all. And who was Elsie? Some poor, sickly thing hanging on to life like a frosted flower in the Spring. And bother these English! It seemed impossible to lose them; they would pop up in a corner of Patagonia and ask you to play “Bridge.”

  Yet, he slept well that night, and woke to the sun streaking in through the slits of the jalousies, and he heard the sea purring. He lay and listened to it, lying prone with the sudden anguish of a return to consciousness and of the rediscovery of his self. Oh, self-weariness, the weariness of shame and of failure! Why did one wake?

  Someone knocked.

  He had left his door unlocked, and he called “Entrez,” to behold the little waiter and a tray of coffee and rolls.

  “Il fait beau temps, monsieur.”

  Somewhere above him Massingham heard a child’s laughter, and the creaking of a shutter.

  “Oh—mummy—I can paddle to-day. Look.”

  “Yes, poppet, I think you can.”

  During the next two days Massingham spoke to nobody and nobody attempted to speak to him, for he looked like England in March, grey and shabby and morose, a solitary, drifting about the sands, and coming in to his meals with the air of seeing nothing but the table towards which he walked. On the second day a child took her place at Mrs. Farren’s table, and stared at Massingham with big, brown, serious eyes, eyes to be avoided by a man who asked to be allowed to forget the illusions of his own very distant youth. Yet Elsie continued to stare. She was not to be obliterated by the man’s wilful blindness. His apparent indifference to everything around him puzzled and interested the child.

  “He looks like a man in a photo, Mummy.”

  “What do you mean, poppet?”

  “As though someone had put him in a shop window and he didn’t want to be there.”

  Clairvoyant childishness! It caused Massingham to remark to himself that he wished that the child would not sit and stare so unsmilingly. Not that he wanted her to smile. No; that might provoke another process of self torture, and his bewilderment was still seeking a solution, an end—sleep, the escape from self. A child can be so poignant. Its eyes contain the “Might have been,” a selfishness that is still healthy and unslimed. He set out to avoid Mrs. Farren and Mrs. Farren’s small daughter, as he avoided all the loiterers who took sun-baths on the La Marondou sands, going carefully out of the front door of the hotel, and eschewing the dusty little garden with its round blue tables and austere chairs.

  But, like Balaam, he was to meet his angel. It happened on the sandhills, where he was lying against a bank with his eyes half-closed and seeing nothing but the blue marriage of sea and sky, when a child’s head came over a low dune in front of him. It approached. Two feet in white canvas shoes slithered down the loose bank, depositing in the trough below him a creature in a pink jumper. He was challenged by an upward stare.

  She smiled.

  Had Massingham had the heart of a murderer he could not have killed that smile. His face cracked in an uneasy response. He sat up, his hands on his knees, knowing that his silence was mere cat’s-ice that would not bear the weight of a child’s challenge.

  “Been paddling?” he asked.

  “Yes—it was lovely. Don’t you paddle?”

  He managed to laugh, and she squatted down on the yellow sand, and continued to regard him as though he was—for that morning—the centre of the universe.

  “Why don’t you paddle?”

  “I’m too old.”

  “You don’t look too old.”

  “Perhaps I’m not strong enough.”

  “But Dr. Charcot lets me paddle, and I’ve been ill—terrible ill—months and months. Daddy sent Mummy and me out here because I was so ill.”

  “I expect your Daddy is very glad that you are better.”

  “Of course he is. I get weighed at the chemist’s every Monday.”

  Mrs. Farren found them there together. She had come along the sands calling “Elsie—Elsie,” and the child had scrambled up one of the low dunes and waved to her. Massingham, rising, and lifting his hat, looked unsmilingly at the mother as though he would have her to understand that the acquaintanceship had not been of his seeking, and that she could not accuse him of playing for the friendship of a child. His stiff pose suggested that he had no friends, and did not expect to have them.

  Mrs. Farren looked at him appraisingly. She thought that the child’s description of him fitted exactly—the man in the shop window who did not want to be stared at.

  “I hope Elsie hasn’t been boring you.”

  He protested that such a thing was impossible. It was Elsie who had conferred the favour.

  “Children do—you know.”

  “Oh—not always.”

  She disagreed, realizing how miserable his eyes were, and that there was a clouded and mortally wounded kindness behind their misery. Something had gone very wrong with his life—but so far as Mrs. Farren’s experience had a right to point a finger it indicated an almost universal disharmony, purblind confusion. Life was such a muddle.

  She buried a hand in her child’s hair.

  “Thank heaven—I have only one such problem.”

  Her smile and her sneer seemed present together, but the smile outlasted the sneer.

  “Why am I a problem, Mummy?”

  “Partly—because you are the only one, my dear. Now, come along; we shall be late for lunch.”

  Elsie glanced at Massingham.

  “Won’t he be late—too?”

  So the three of them walked back together to the white front and the blue railings of the Hôtel Hesperides, and Elsie had broken the ice of
the man’s silence. It could not be mended, and perhaps he did not want to mend it. After all, what harm could he and his exit do to a child?

  He was like old Winter warming his hands in the heart of the first Spring day, suffering because of it, for his cold hands ached with the young warmth, and yet he could not deny himself the delicate pain of a child’s friendship. He let himself slide into the inevitableness of it. He actually hung about on the sands, waiting for that little figure to appear. His heart hurried a little. They played games together. Massingham would set up his stick in the sand, put an old tin on the top of it and run a cockshy show, with a ten-centime piece for each striking of the tin. But Elsie was not a mercenary child; she exercised on his behalf a serious and confidential restraint.

  “That’s five. I must not have any more this morning.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll be ruinated.”

  He was that already, though she did not know it, and those ten-centime pieces were the last grains in his life’s hour-glass. He had enough money to pay Madame of the Hesperides for a three weeks’ sojourn.

  And then?

  He would find himself looking at the child, and wondering, not deeming her capable of reacting to his wonder, but when she did react he was astonished.

  “What makes you look so funny?”

  “Funny! What’s that?”

  “Don’t know. Like Daddy used to look when I was so ill.”

  “But you are not ill now.”

  “No—Elsie’s well. You needn’t look funny.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  Friendship with the child adumbrated a certain degree of friendliness with the mother, but Massingham was shy of Mrs. Farren for she was a grown-up, sophisticated, and he was conscious of that elusive sneer. Her smile never seemed to him to be complete; and yet, as the days went by he became less conscious of her sneer. He did not seem to be included in it; in fact he began to believe that he was part of the world upon which she smiled. With Elsie busy collecting plunder on the shore for the decorating of some sand-castle they would sit and talk, their eyes narrowed to the blue glare of the sea. It was the disjointed conversation of two people whose words were like intimate footsteps strolling idly on the seashore.