The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  He caressed the cat whose amber eyes gazed into his luminous old face with a kind of grave ecstasy.

  “Mrs. Soutar been?”

  “No,” said the girl, straightening herself with one quick graceful movement; “I’m rather glad.”

  “One’s neighbours, my dear!”

  “Yes, I know. But on a day like this——”

  “Pedro and Thomas, and the falling leaves, and the smell of Boggis’s autumn fire! Matter is alive to-day.”

  She seated herself on the stone coping of the balustrade above the moat and looked down at the still water. They had a language of their own, these two, and silences that were lucid. For to both of them beauty was but a mysterious veil, a shimmering mystery hanging like a moonlit mist over the realities divined behind the veil.

  Carberry looked at his daughter.

  “You,” he thought, “you beautiful, ethereal thing! How did you arrive? How did you grow up? And what will life give you when I am gone? Jeremy? Good Lord, that hot and molten young man! And yet——”

  She turned suddenly, and looked at him with a kind of steady shyness as though she knew what was in his mind.

  “I suppose we are eccentric people?”

  “Oh, very,” he answered, with that little droll smile of his; “in fact we are not quite real. I have given you a most shameful education, my dear.”

  Her voice trailed a deliberate note.

  “Real. We! Yes. As real as those leaves. But then—how unreal—most people are. Why are some things so convincing—music and a beautiful tree, and a tulip, and Pedro’s eyes? They are right in me—and I in them. But people are all—words.”

  Carberry was stroking the cat’s back.

  “I think some of us are getting beyond words,” he said; “we shall know things without naming them. We shall not need the common coin of language. Thomas and I understand each other, and Thomas has no words.”

  II

  The morrow brought Jeremy. He arrived with suddenness from somewhere in Asia where he had been climbing mountains, and Sybil had read all about his climbings in The Times. There was nothing secret about Jeremy, for when anything spectacular happened in Jeremy’s life it always got into the papers, and Mrs. Soutar would cluck over it.

  The sun had gone. A wind was blowing October to tatters, and the leaves were racing each other over the grass or piling themselves in bronze gold reefs. There was a touch of north in the wind, and old Carberry was St. Ignatius-sit-by-the-Fire with his two tables of books and papers about him, and the hearthrug littered. Sybil had gone forth to gather flowers. She was working her way through the long border among the asters and the chrysanthemums when she felt an alien presence.

  Yes, Jeremy was there on the grass, with his hands in his pockets. He looked sandier and ruddier and stronger than ever, all high cheek-bones and audacious blue eyes. For cheekiness and self assurance his school had known no boy like him. “Cocky Soutar,” they had called him, and Cocky Soutar he had remained.

  “Gratters,” said he.

  She should have blushed, for the heat of him was obvious, but Sybil’s mental flushes showed themselves more in her eyes than in her skin.

  “Amber—by Jove! The Lady of the ’Mums!”

  She came out of the border, looking at him slantwise, and not smiling. His self-assurance was so immense that she was afraid of it. That sandy hair, those high cheek-bones, and dominating blue eyes! Always, he made her feel that his blood was one degree hotter than the blood of ordinary men.

  “How sudden you are.”

  “Oh, I flew half the way home, you know.”

  “One day you are on Ararat or somewhere——”

  “Quite so.”

  She smiled a little with her lips but not with her eyes, for she was on her defence with Jeremy. He had proposed to her three times, and each time with more assurance, an assurance that suggested the inevitable. That was the trouble with Jeremy. His vitality was so immense that it mesmerised people; she knew that he was going to do great things, not because he was great or original, but because he stamped himself upon the duller crowd like a glowing steel die upon lead. He would take the crowd by the collar and it would grovel and lick his boots. It would shout “yes” to him when it meant “no.”

  “You look fitter than ever.”

  Her eyes were without lustre. She had a moment of panic. Never before had she felt his presence to be so fiercely disturbing. He emitted fumes, physical vibrations. She, too, heard herself saying “Yes” to him when she meant “no.” In two months there would be that inevitable photograph in the papers, a church porch and fragments of a crowd, and Jeremy with his head of brass—and she—linked to him.

  She was conscious of a sense of struggle.

  “I must go in—Father——”

  “Wait a moment,” he said.

  He just stood in her way, and though the whole garden lay before her he seemed to fill it. She felt that there was no way round and past him. The sheaved flowers quivered in her arms.

  “While I count ten——”

  “Oh, longer than that. I have been away six months. Didn’t see a woman for three. Then, I fly half the way home. That’s suggestive.”

  He smiled, and she pressed her face against the flowers.

  “Always—you are in such a hurry.”

  “One has to be—these days. You have to be just five minutes ahead of the daily press. That means that you are going to get there.”

  “Where?”

  Her eyes were wide open but very dark.

  “To the top of Cotopaxi or Everest.”

  “But does it matter? I mean—one gets further—dreaming. Do come in.”

  He stood stock still, eyeing her confidently.

  “You will have to come with me some day, Sybil. That’s certain.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure of it. Fate. Now don’t look scared.”

  “Scared! I’m not.”

  “Splendid. No, I’m not coming in again; I’ve seen your father. I only got home in time for lunch, and the mater is a bit exacting—on the first day. Come riding to-morrow. I’ll call for you.”

  She made herself meet the challenge.

  “Perhaps. What time?”

  “I’ll call for you at ten. Come along; see me as far as the bridge. I’m going back across the park.”

  She humoured him as far as the bridge across the moat, and even stood awhile to watch him cross it and start across the park. He had disturbed her, and that was his lot in life, to so disturb people that they became weary and gave in to him. He was like a very strong and self-assertive child hammering a brass pot with a hoop-stick.

  “Is this—sex?” she thought.

  He turned by a big black sequoia and waved to her, but the gesture reminded her of the salute of an Italian fascist. A menace and a blessing mingled. She raised her sheaf of flowers.

  “I won’t marry you,” she thought; “no, no, no. What is there in you that so disturbs me? A queer feeling——”

  Soutar’s determined figure disappeared, and her thoughts returned in a circle. She stood staring at the dark water with the blown autumn leaves floating upon it, remembering that Jeremy had seen her father, and that after such interviews Ignatius’s white hair looked all blown about. Yes, like a spiritual aureole, disturbed by a physical storm. But what an absurd simile! And what was that in the water?

  She stared. There seemed to be a leaping, tawny redness down there under the wind-ruffled surface, like the flames of a fire burning at the bottom of the moat.

  Ridiculous!

  And then she grew conscious of fear, a strange appealing terror. Something was happening, someone calling. A blaze, a redness——

  She turned quickly and looked towards the house, and again there was that tawny redness. Through the opening in the yews she could see the window of the library, and the window was lit up as she had seen a window lit up by the sunset—but there was no sunset. Also, the mullions showed black. The glar
e came from within.

  Fire!

  She ran. She was not conscious of movement, but only of a something reaching out to her, calling, while the soul of her rushed to meet it. She was still clasping the sheaf of flowers, crushing them against her body, but all that she saw was that reddened window.

  III

  All that portion of the room in front of the great open fire-place was blazing, and as she rushed forward she saw all the strange and terrifying detail of it, Ignatius helpless in his chair, like a martyr tied to a stake. His white hair was a yellow aureole. He seemed to be brushing flames away with his hands. Both tables were ablaze, and all the litter on the hearthrug. A quill pen stood up in the inkpot with a little flame climbing its feathers. A magazine rising in a blazing curve twisted upon itself like a body in anguish. A rug was smoking, and one of the curtains had an edge of fire.

  She rushed in, grasped the chair, and drew it backwards—the burning rug following it, caught by the castors. She bent down and tore the rug away. She was not conscious of pain; neither she nor her father had uttered a word. His clothes were smouldering. She darted for a Bokhara rug, and smothered him with it, while before her the room still blazed.

  Someone rushed in, screaming.

  “Help! Thomson! Oh, Miss Sybil!”

  Sybil’s face was like ivory.

  “Help me; pull the chair——”

  They were dragging it towards the door when other helpers came pouring in. The under-maid, Elsie, a little, fragile thing, showed more wit than all the rest. A gardener was pulling at the blazing curtain. Elsie flashed out, to return with the red fire-extinguisher that stood under a table in a corner of the hall. What was more, she seemed to know how to use it. The hissing stream smothered the flames, and in a minute there was nothing left of the blaze but wisps of smoke and vapour, and an acid scent, the charred tables and the sheaves of blackened paper.

  Old Carberry’s chair had come to rest in the hall between the great black armoire and the refectory table. The Bokhara rug lay across his knees, brilliant with colours that were dimly reflected in the polished panels of the cupboard. He was in pain, but he was able to give his daughter that droll, long-lipped smile.

  “Seems that I am a new sort of Phœnix.”

  She had sent a man on a bicycle to Spellford for Vinson, their doctor.

  Solicitous and wild-eyed, she was bending over him.

  “Are you burnt—much?”

  “Oh, a little.”

  “I won’t touch you till Vinson comes. Something to drink—brandy? No? Thank God—I saw.”

  She stood back from him suddenly, with a movement of the hand across the eyes, a puzzled, bothered gesture.

  “Jeremy had been with you.”

  “He had.”

  “And when he had gone—you were angry. You had the paper on your knees. You threw it down; it was scorched, a brown patch, and then it blazed up.”

  Astonished, he looked up at her.

  “Yes; it happened like that. But how do you know——?”

  “I don’t know how I know. But it happened like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  She moved to the window and stood looking out into the dusk of the garden. She saw the black outlines of the trees, the grass ribbed with swathes of autumn leaves, the cold grey sky. Her eyes dilated, for another scene was superimposed upon the actual scene before her like a transparency, and as though her vision were double, focusing both the seen and the unseen.

  She passed a hand across her eyes.

  “What has happened to me?” she thought. “Carter on his bicycle in Spellford street. He gets off and leans his bicycle against the railings. He goes up to Dr. Vinson’s door. A maid—and then Dr. Vinson himself. Am I dreaming, or can I see what I wish to see—two miles away? Or is it just the burning suspense—lighting up some queer super-sense?”

  She turned quickly towards her father’s chair.

  “Yes, I’ll get it, a glass of water.”

  He looked at her queerly. He wanted water; he had been about to ask her for water. But how did she know——?

  IV

  In spite of an optimistic doctor, and burns that were less serious than had been feared, Ignatius Carberry died in the night, with his daughter sitting beside him and confronting a double mystery. He had slipped peacefully from life to death, without a struggle, one of his bandaged hands resting in hers.

  And she had known that he was going to die—though how she knew it she could not say—and now that he lay dead, she sat at the window listening to the breathing of the wind. She was stricken—and she was afraid. She had lost the one friend to whom she could speak, and to whom she could tell things without the fear of meeting a mechanical and superior smile.

  She had left her father’s face uncovered, and often during that tragic night she would turn in her chair and look at it, and it seemed to her that it was faintly luminous. The great riddle lay upon her heart, and interlocked with it was the fear of the strange thing that had happened. This flash of lucidity—that seeing without eyes, that hearing without ears! What did it mean?

  She wanted to speak of it to someone, and especially to the friend who lay dead. He would have listened and he would have understood, though he might not have been able to explain the workings of her super-consciousness, for both of them had known how much there is that is unexplainable.

  She could imagine that wise smile of his, and his gentle and slightly ironical manner.

  “When you can’t explain a thing you coin a word. Cryptesthesia, my dear. It happens, and you have had a rather bad attack of it.”

  She rose and went and stood by the bed.

  “Oh, I am alone,” was her cry. “Where are you? The you in you must be near. All this beauty—this subtle understanding? Was it nothing? No more than a filament that breaks—and the light goes out? We believed that there was more.”

  She looked awhile at the still face, and then went back to her chair by the window. There was a great stillness everywhere save for the sounds made by the wind, and as the hours passed a kind of langour descended upon her. She felt calmed, as though a healing hand had touched her brain. The shock of that disturbing blaze of other vision passed. A gentle sadness followed—peace, a tender looking backwards.

  “He was very happy here,” she thought.

  She understood too that he had wished her to be happy, and that he had created all this sheltering beauty for her as well as for himself.

  “I—too—will be happy here,” she declared; “the beauty that he created shall be my beauty.”

  She met the grey autumnal dawn with calm eyes, and with an equal calmness she went to meet all the day’s necessities. The servants were surprised at her calmness. Her dignity was a thing of quiet movements, and of a voice that was deliberate and sad.

  Dr. Vinson had come and gone. He was a kind soul, quiet, practical.

  “I will see to things for you.”

  She had letters to write, and she sat down and wrote them at the oak bureau in her bedroom. Pedro the dog was lying upon his master’s bed. The house was very quiet.

  A maid knocked at her door.

  “Mr. Soutar, Miss Sybil. He wishes——”

  She turned her head and answered calmly.

  “I am seeing no one, Kate. Thank him——”

  The woman went away and returned.

  “Mr. Soutar wishes to know, Miss, whether he can do anything for you?”

  “Nothing, Kate—thank you.”

  She resumed the writing of her letters. She felt tranquil, undisturbed by any supernormal vision. Even the vital figure of Jeremy was blurred and indistinct, passing out of her consciousness like the shadow of some unimportant thing. She wrote steadily, pausing at times to look out into the garden, that world where she and Ignatius Carberry had lived so much of their lives together. The trees and the grass and the rustling, scudding leaves soothed her, for this beauty was more comforting to her than any human presence. It remained; it was alive;
she felt that she would be able to feel him in it.

  All through the following days this soft, sad calmness remained with her. Ignatius Carberry lay in Spellford churchyard; people had come and gone, and one kind voice had said to her:

  “My dear, you cannot live on here alone.”

  She had answered quickly:

  “Of course I can. It is what I want and need.”

  She felt weary, and unwilling to listen to human voices, and for some time after her father’s death she felt that life was dim—like a landscape blurred by rain. A merciful apathy lay upon her.

  People, too, were somewhat dim, shadows, unreal, but the trees and the two animals and the garden sleeping its winter sleep were very real. The dimness of other humans vaguely surprised her; even Jeremy had remained mercifully dim, a molten figure hidden from her by a haze. She had been aware of him at the funeral, and of something challenging in his blue eyes, but she had refused to see him when he had called at Vine Court.

  “Please tell Mr. Soutar that I am seeing no one.”

  Jeremy had gone away. He was lecturing in London to the Geographers and the Travellers, with much “I” in his discourse—a man who for once had taken his mother’s advice.

  “Let her alone for a while, Jerry.”

  Mrs. Soutar clucked wisely, though her wisdom did not travel to the top of the mountain. She had no subtlety. Sex did not express itself to her as a raw thing, horribly meddlesome and disturbing, a muddy ditch in which most people wallow and in which even the feet of the angels are apt to stick.

  The winter passed gently, and the life at Vine Court went on much as before, with Sybil busy in the garden as she had been in her father’s day. Old Boggis and the two under-gardeners ventured on some innovations and were reproved. She had a great love for a weed fire, and an old blue paint pot out of which she daubed the seats and timber a soft—ethereal blue. She weeded the lawns, and kept her solitude with Pedro and the cat, sitting down at night to her piano, or staring at the fire and feeling for that other presence.

  She was sad, but sad with tranquillity. She had had no more shocks of lucidity, of spiritual vision, and she had begun to believe that her normality had settled like calm water after that one strange uprush of the unexplainable subconscious. She saw only what her eyes meant her to see, and heard all that her ears could catch of the day’s sound vibrations.