THE CHILD
They met abroad.
It was at Rome, in a little hotel on the Quirinal, where their tables happened to be side by side. Both of them were lonely and somewhat shy, and they talked “Rome and the marvels of Rome” with the formal seriousness of two people who shrank from displaying their inner selves in public. Each had come by a very sudden and vivid picture of the other.
She saw him as a rather silent and sorrowful man who had a queer way of looking at you as though he were asking himself questions about you. He struck her as being strangely mistrustful of life, unsure of things. They had hurt him and he was cautious.
To him she appeared as a girl of great sensitiveness, quiet, slightly aloof, taking the world and herself very seriously. He fell in love with her seriousness. It was of the gentle type, not declamatory nor urging a cause.
At the end of a week Sybil Grant knew a good deal about Walter Burford. His age was thirty-seven. He was a lawyer, a member of an old firm of solicitors in the city. He had overworked himself and had been advised to take two months’ rest and change. Two years ago he had divorced his wife; he had one child—a girl.
His gradual and shy frankness drew from her answering confidences, and he discovered beneath her seriousness an elusive and delightful sense of the values of life. Her mother had died a year ago, and she had cut herself adrift, and being alone in the world she had decided to allow herself six months of vagabondage before settling down to work.
“One must have a job,” she told him; “something for which one feels responsible.”
He agreed. His sad eyes appeared to be asking questions, and knowing that he was in love with her, she preferred his troubled intensity to the slangy ease of a younger and more modern man. Some men were supposed to appeal to the mother in a woman, and she felt motherly towards Burford, though he appealed to her in other ways, as a virile man should.
When she decided to go to Florence he followed her there. Her flitting from Rome had been something of a lure and a challenge, and love answered it in the days of the spring. No cold wind blew from the Apennines; the sun lay rich and full upon marble of white and of rose; the fruit blossom, was out; the Arno caught the blue of the sky.
It was in the Boboli gardens that he asked her to marry him.
“I am so much in love with you, dear, that I am almost afraid of my love. This—will matter so much.”
She let herself touch his arm.
“I want it to matter. And perhaps—I understand.”
“One shipwreck. It is your happiness and mine.”
“I feel that neither you nor I can scuttle the ship.”
“Ah—that’s it,” he said; “I wanted to feel sure. I—do—feel sure. If both shipmates have a sense of honour. My darling—we are going to be happy.”
He held her arm.
“Of course. And Walter, I want to be a mother to Janet.”
“Oh, you’ll get on splendidly,” he said, with what struck her at the time as being eager cheerfulness; “she’s rather a queer kid, but she won’t be able to resist you.”
“Tell me about her. Why do you call her queer?”
“Mischief, that’s all. She wants a mother.”
“Walter—you are not marrying me—for the sake——?”
“Good God! dear, no.”
His voice had such intensity that the dear conviction thrilled in her.
“You don’t think that?”
“No; I don’t think it.”
“Because—it would not be true. It is you and I, Sybil. That’s what I want it to be.”
They were married in Paris, and they spent their honeymoon there, and from the Hôtel du Louvre Burford wrote a letter to his child.
“Dear Jam,
“We are coming home next week, and I am bringing a dear woman to be a mother to my little girl. Her name is Sybil, and she is so looking forward to seeing you. I have told her that you call yourself “Jam,” and she says she’s sure that you must be strawberry. I have seen a lovely doll here, and she is coming with us to live with you.
“Your loving Daddie.”
Burford had a house at Weyfleet, new and red, with imitation oak work in the gables, a thatched roof, little tricksy windows, and a loggia towards the garden. It was a June evening when these two arrived at the gate with a taxi piled high with their mutual luggage. Burford had explained the house, and had apologized for it.
“The place was good enough until I met you. We must look about, Sybil, and find something a little less modern.”
“Does it matter?” she had asked him, with the happy look of a woman who is loved. “Does anything matter so long as we want the same things.”
The house bore its name on the oak gate in letters of stamped copper: “Beech Lodge.” Sybil had a glimpse of a stone-paved path advancing between clipped yews to a neo-Gothic porch, and standing in the porch was a child. She was very long in the leg and short in the skirt. She wore spectacles, and behind them a pair of hard blue eyes stared in the little red apple of her face. Her hair was the colour of tow.
If there had been any cloud-shadow across Sybil’s horizon it had been the thought of this other woman’s child, and she had tried to put the little shadow of dread away from her. Poor little Janet—Walter’s child. She had made a warmth of heart ready for this meeting. She rushed at it, as though some crisis had to be met and conquered in the winning of Walter’s child.
“Janet, my dear——”
“Hallo—Jam. Here we are.”
It was the woman who advanced, the child who waited. Her blue eyes stared. She was decorous and self-composed and quite risky; she made no effort to meet the woman’s advances, but she did not repulse them.
“How d’you do?”
“May I kiss you?”
The blue eyes were hard and steady.
“If you want to.”
“Of course I do.”
She kissed the child, and as her lips touched the red cheek she was shocked by a curious association of impressions. Jam! Red currant jam, both acid and glutinous; a little red face, a certain sticky cunning, a tart smugness. There was something about the child that was infinitely repellent, something that she feared.
Sybil straightened, making herself laugh, and feeling breathless. She had an idea that her husband was watching her.
“What a lovely home you have got, Jam. We are going to be such friends.”
The woman of seven outstared the woman of twenty-nine. She committed herself to nothing. She stood in the middle of the porch, with her red knees and her red face, neither friendly nor hostile, but malevolently watchful. That was the horror of it, for Sybil sensed this watchful cunning though the child did not betray it. She felt that she was confronting something evil and old and cynical dressed up to look like a child.
“Now, Jam, old thing, are you going to keep us out of the house?”
Burford was uneasily boisterous, but the thing that frightened Sybil was the behaviour of the child. She saw the hard little face grow suddenly animated like the face of a woman of the world. She flung her arms round Burford’s neck, hugged him, crooned.
“Oh—Daddy—I’m so glad you’ve come back. I do love you so!”
“Why—that’s real strawberry! Isn’t it, Sybil?”
“Real strawberry,” she echoed, conscious of a curious sense of nausea.
From that moment Sybil Burford set herself to fight and subdue her intuitive dismay. She made herself consider the naturalness of Janet’s prejudices, the jealousy of a young thing, the selfishnesses of most young things. It was only to be expected that a strange woman, a woman who might exert authority, should be met with mistrust. After all, it had been the child’s home before it had become hers.
A sister of Burford’s had been looking after Janet and the house, and she left Weyfleet at the end of the week. Colourless and inarticulate she had accepted Sybil without betraying liking or dislike. Jam and her aunt had appeared to be excellent friends, perhaps bec
ause the strong child dominated the weak woman. Jam loved to dominate, and when Kitty Burford left she shed salt tears, tyrannical tears, with the obvious inference offered to Sybil.
During those first days Burford watched them both.
“You and Jam seem to be shaking down very well.”
“Oh—I think so. I feel terribly responsible, Walter.”
“You dear serious thing.”
For the fact was that Jam was on her best behaviour before her father. She held butter unmelted in her mouth. She demonstrated on Sybil. She went to bed like a lamb with a “Mummy, will you come and hear me say my prayers?”
Sybil went to hear them said, while Burford wandered about his garden, smoking his pipe, and allowing himself to believe that his new world was the best of all possible worlds, and that his sordid memories could be forgotten. Man-like he wanted to escape from worry—home worries—and to be able to come back from his work to the smoothness of a happy and sensitive love, and to a child who had ceased to be a problem.
“Sybil has won her. I knew she would.”
From the nursery window a voice was asking God to bless Daddy and Mummy and Bonzo the dog. Burford smiled. He wanted to be able to smile.
Sybil had heard Jam’s “Amen,” had kissed her and moved to the door, when some instinct made her turn and glance quickly over her shoulder, to see a sharp red tongue protruding.
“Jam!”
Her voice had a note of pain in it, and Jam, with a perfectly solemn face, withdrew the tongue and smirked at her.
“I always do that.”
“To me?”
“No—to God.”
“Jam!”
“Then God knows that I don’t expect to get all I pray for.”
So the battle began between the woman and this child, a battle of which Burford knew nothing, for neither of the combatants wished him to know of it. Sybil’s pride had been challenged, and it kept its lips closed, and put its faith in patience and kindness. All her sensitive seriousness was involved in the affair, for she felt that she had her duty to Janet and her duty to Janet’s father. How could she confess herself unfit to handle a child of seven years old?
There were many incidents, moments of defiance, of bold aggression, of pretended penitence. The child had a devil in her, and an amazingly sophisticated devil. She seemed to know things that no child should know.
There was the incident of Sybil’s hat, a new and rather charming hat, in which Jam appeared, marching round the garden, mimicking her stepmother’s walk.
“Jam, dear, you must not do that. Where did you find——?”
Jam struck an attitude in front of the window.
“Oh! Walter dear, isn’t it sweet!”
“That is not funny. It’s rude and silly. Give me the hat.”
She stood at the window, trying to exert control, and not to lose her temper with the child. But Jam made a defiant face at her.
“Shan’t.”
“Jam, come here—at once, and give me that hat.”
“Shan’t. Silly old hat!”
She threw it on the grass, and proceeded to kick it across the lawn, and was joined by Bonzo who conceived the worrying of hats to be a game.
Sybil ran out and rescued it.
“I shall have to tell your father.”
Instantly came the flash of the blue eyes and the stab of the retort.
“Sneak!”
There was insolence in the child’s stare. She had scored a hit and she knew it. “I’m too much for you,” said the eyes; “so you must needs go and sneak about it.” And Sybil understood much that was at the back of the child’s mind.
“Jam, why is it you don’t like me? Perhaps if I smacked you hard you would like me better.”
“I won’t be smacked by you. I’ll bite.”
For weeks this secret war went on, hidden away from Burford, who came home to find a smiling woman and a mellifluous child, yet there were times when he was made to ask himself whether his wife was happy. He sensed in her a secret and nameless fear, for Sybil was afraid. She had begun to realize that her battle was more than a mere scuffle with a self-willed and vigorous child. It was a fight for her happiness with an extraordinarily malevolent and determined hatred, with a spirit of evil that amazed her, a cunning that caught her at every sort of disadvantage. She was a woman of sensitive ideals contending with a malicious imp. Moreover, she began to appreciate the fact that there was a horrible consistency in Jam’s attack. In her little sly and savage way the child was out to wreck the woman’s happiness. She was inexorable; nothing softened her, she despised softness, and the blue eyes were mocking and watchful.
Jam was developing a cult—the cult of the dear, impulsive child.
She would fly out of the gate with Burford in the morning. She would meet him in the evening at the corner of the road, full of affectionate histrionics. It was “Daddy, dear!” and “Daddy, darling!” She was all over him. She would climb on his knees and hang on to his hand, and coo at Sybil with insolent sweetness. And the tragic part of it was that the man was fooled; he made himself respond to the music; Jam was budding wings, and Sybil had brought about the transformation.
She could not tell him. She could not bring herself to play the sneak, and confess her ignominious personal failure. It would sound so absurd to admit that a child of seven was poisoning her happiness and filling her life with little petty anguishes. She had begun to hate Jam with terrible yet suppressed bitterness, and hatred is an evil ferment in the life of a home.
She guessed that Jam was working to make her lose her temper, and to betray herself before Burford as a scolding, angry and ineffectual woman. She countered the attack by refusing to lose her temper, or to suffer the ideal of herself to be eroded by the child’s evil atmosphere.
“I won’t be dragged down,” she said to herself; “the little wretch shan’t drag me down.”
But the nastiness of the affair was beginning to have its effect on her, for Jam was sucking the vital goodness out of Sybil’s soul. She had moods, she grew irritable and depressed; nor could she hide the change from a man who continued to be her lover.
He remarked on it.
“You look a bit run down, dear one.”
“Oh, I am quite all right.”
“Sure?”
She guessed what was in his mind, and it confused her.
“No, Walter; nothing of that kind—not yet.”
Burford was troubled. He remembered the beginnings of that other tragedy, how it had betrayed itself by a countenance of moodiness and of boredom, and he was assailed by the thought that Sybil might be bored. He was accused by it. Was he one of those impossible men who cloyed women into ennui and revolt? Could it be possible that Sybil was ceasing to care?
He hid the thought in his heart, tried to suppress it.
Meanwhile the child cajoled him. She was so innocent, a breath of the Golden Age!
“Why is Mummy so funny, Daddy?”
“Funny! What d’you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just funny.”
It happened one September—on a Saturday—that Jam put the tongue of poison into her father’s heart. Sybil had a headache, and Burford and the child went off for a ramble through the pine woods, Jam full of leaps and skips and seemingly irresponsible chatter.
“Daddy, why does that man come to see mother?” Burford smothered a start of astonishment.
“What man?”
“The young man in the baggy knickerbockers, with the pretty curly hair. He always comes when you are away.”
Burford pretended to laugh.
“Oh, that man, Mr. Dawner?”
“Yes; I believe that is his name, Daddy. And Mumsie goes and plays golf with him. It is rather nice for Mumsie to have such a pretty young man to play with.”
“Of course it is.”
“But you must not say I told you, Daddy. Mumsie might not be pleased.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t kno
w. But I feel she wouldn’t. Oh, look at this lovely great fir cone!”
It did not occur to Burford that the child could be lying, and like a sensitive fool he did not go home and tell Sybil what he had heard. He brooded. He shut himself up in himself, an unhappy hater of his own suspicions, a man dominated by the memories of a previous tragedy, and beholding the vague figure of a dreadful ghost. He grew watchful, and detested himself for this watchfulness. He would look furtively at his wife, and wonder whether it could be possible that she was deceiving him. The very suspicion was like a poisoned wound.
One night he had to dine in town at some city function, and he came back late to find Sybil strangely tired and silent. She had had an exasperating day with Jam. She hid it, and Burford, acutely sensitive, felt the hiding of something. He was appalled.
Next morning Jam flaunted with him to the station.
“Mr. Dawner was here last night, Daddy.”
“What!”
“I’d gone to bed, and I peeped out and saw him in the garden. Isn’t it a joke?”
“An immense joke, Jam.”
“We must keep up the joke, mustn’t we? And some day we’ll jump out and say ‘Boo.’ And won’t we all laugh—Mumsie and Mr. Dawner, and you and me!”
Burford went to town with hell in his heart.
Some days later he descended to dissimulation. He was going to dine at his London club with an old friend, and he let the fact be known some days ahead. He left Sybil sitting by the fire, and walked through the October twilight to the station, feeling like the murderer of his own happiness. He took his train to town, bought an evening paper at the bookstall and entered the next train that stopped at Weyfleet. He hated himself during all that journey, and hated the motive that prompted it.
Arrived at his own gate he hesitated, facing the crisis. Was he going to find young Dawner lounging in there before his fire?
He let himself in with his latch-key, and went straight to the drawing-room.
Sybil was alone there before the fire engaged in darning his socks.
Her surprise was as genuine as her gladness.
“Why, dear man——!”
Her eyes were clear and gentle, beloved eyes, and as Burford looked into them Burford’s lie died in his heart.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 64