The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  Sybil came to a decision—for the making of a decision was being forced upon her by some mysterious movement of life’s emanations. What were words? Was she not passing beyond the world of words and of the five senses? She had to confess that the coming of this man who was Lyall’s friend had stirred something in her as the wind stirs the trees. She had not spoken to him or looked into his eyes, and yet she had a feeling that he was for her a creature of destiny.

  She did not go direct to the terrace by way of the paved walk between the statues, but crossing the great lawn she reached the vine-covered belvedere behind the garden house. Her approach was studied. She wanted to see without being seen, to feel how he affected her, whether there was anything of the Jeremy in him.

  She was afraid of the Jeremy in men.

  Strange had posted himself at the end of the bridge with the grey sweep of the terrace before him, and the great cedar sunning itself against the blue of the sky. He had borrowed one of the chairs from the garden house. Pedro was curled up beside the chair.

  “My dog has surrendered,” she thought.

  Her light feet carried her to the balustrading of the terrace, and perched there within ten yards of him she sat at gaze. Her eyes were wide open and questioning, and to those who came to know her in after years her eyes were more than eyes. They suggested an extraordinary depth, with a mysterious luminosity in the depths of them, as of a very gentle and wonderful intelligence that was not of the world of the senses. She was looking at Strange’s long back, and his rather narrow and shapely head poised attentively above the canvas.

  She saw him as he saw the cedar, suffused with a soft and golden light, a tranquil spirit, extending to life a whimsical yet reverent tenderness. The light played upon his greyish, tawny hair. The line of his cheek and jaw formed a brown curve. The hand holding the brush had very long and sensitive fingers.

  She gazed, drawing a deep breath now and again, for in this fellow human she divined a sensitiveness that almost equalled her own. He was male and yet not male; he was her opposite and yet her like; he looked at beauty as she looked at it, into it and beyond it. He saw the spirit of things.

  Suddenly he turned about, brush in one hand, palette in the other. There was no surprise in his eyes. It was as though he had known that she was there.

  For some seconds they looked at each other. Then, he rose. He came forward a few steps; his face was infinitely grave. But his eyes were the centre for the holding of her consciousness, for into them she saw rising a light of wonder, astonishment and half incredulous comprehension.

  “Thank you—for coming,” he said.

  He seemed to be speaking to himself as well as to her. She stood up. She was aware of a soft blaze of emotion, a kind of exultant glow within herself.

  “I think I had to come,” she answered.

  They stood, and looked at each other. He smiled very faintly, while she felt on the edge of tears, tears born of a strange ecstasy. She was experiencing the incredible, that which a woman in her spirit dreams might yearn to feel and yet find the spell of it eluding her.

  For he was looking at her as a lover who does not realize that he loves, or rather—he saw the beauty of her as he might see the beauty of a sunset or a cloud, impersonally and yet with a deep and personal wonder. She amazed him. She—the woman—the spirit—the symbol. And the light of his homage was a clear, white light, the coarser rays of it lost in the merging of a complete understanding.

  Pedro, waddling in between them, with a smirk on his face, and looking from one to the other, suggested the genial person undertaking a formal introduction.

  “Mr. Strange—Miss Carberry. Friends of mine, both of you, you know.”

  She bent down and pulled the spaniel’s ears.

  “My dear, how very fat you are getting.”

  Strange’s downward glance lost some of its seriousness.

  “That’s a most tactless thing to say, even to a dog.”

  For the first time since her father’s death she reacted to a spirit of playfulness. She had been waiting for a playfellow—one who had not the soul of a lout, and whose idea of a jest would be something more subtle than the throwing of bread pellets or the pulling of her spiritual hair.

  “Pedro,” she said solemnly, with a finger held in front of his nose, “you will have to have your portrait painted before you grow too much like a city father.”

  “May I have the commission?”

  “I should have thought,” she said, “that the painting of city fathers——”

  “I have done it—once or twice. Besides, Pedro can be forbidden in the kitchen.”

  She rose in one quick movement.

  “I’m stopping your work——”

  “Oh, it does not matter. And yet it does matter. The sunlight is just where I want it.”

  “Please go on. I’m not an interfering spirit.”

  “Yes and no,” he said with that faint, elvish smile of his; “but please, don’t go away.”

  He brought a second chair from the garden-house, and placed it where she was wishing him to place it, close to the balustrade so that she could see the water.

  “Thank you. I won’t talk.”

  She sat down, and he resumed his place, with his back towards her.

  “That’s it. Need one talk? There comes a time when one loses the gabbling instinct. Strange thing—the beginnings and growth of speech. Eloquence! Eloquent people are very exhausting.”

  He dabbed his brush on his palette, and sat gazing at the cedar.

  “There you are,” he said.

  “That is the kind of eloquence that does not exhaust you.”

  “Surely—yes. And you?”

  Her eyes were on the cedar, with its green ledges separating the sunlight from the shadow.

  “I—sometimes—feel that I am forgetting how to talk. The spoken word seems less and less necessary.”

  “Maeterlinck said something like that!”

  “Did he?”

  “And I heard a bright old lady scoffing at the idea. You see, parrots can’t be expected——As one gets older—those long-seeming silences. No obvious tick-tack, no clockwork phrases. Instead, you see and hear and feel life moving.”

  “Like that tree,” she said, as a light breeze caused the branches of the cedar slightly to sway.

  He made a movement of the head, and went on with his work, while she sat there in silence, the silence of a wonderful new comradeship. She felt peace about her, the peace of a tranquil understanding. She felt his consciousness there close to her like some complete flower, or a lamp burning steadily, or a clear sky into which you gazed without the need of saying:

  “Oh, sky—why are you blue?”

  Her hands lay in her lap. She watched the play of the sunlight on the water and the trees, and the gradual growth of the picture under his brush. He painted steadily, as though her presence were part of the beauty about him, and as though his consciousness was undisturbed by it.

  And for two hours they remained thus without a spoken word.

  XII

  On the third day Strange asked her if he might paint her portrait, though she knew that he had been going to ask her.

  “If you wish to——”

  “Not for exhibition. Unless you wish it to be exhibited?”

  “I am a solitary. Perhaps you understand.”

  She noticed that he did not look at her for a moment, as though he were so vividly aware of her mysterious insight that it was like the glare of an unaccustomed light.

  “Lyall told me——”

  She stood very still.

  “Ah, he did——”

  “That he doubted whether I could paint you, the real, miraculous you——I’ll try.”

  “Will it be so very difficult?” she asked.

  He compelled himself to a steady meeting of the eyes.

  “The most difficult thing I have attempted—ever. And yet—it may be quite easy, if you help me. The venture is so big—beyond m
ere line and colour.”

  She looked at the sunlit water.

  “Why?”

  “But you know.”

  “Do I? Of course. I do know.”

  “It was natural that I should be afraid.”

  “Of me?”

  “Those inward eyes of yours. I made myself come here. And then—that second morning—I felt you behind me, and I ceased to be afraid.”

  She was smiling at some inward fancy.

  “Yes, if we are not afraid of our own thoughts! Then, fear ceases—utterly.”

  “Or the thoughts of others?”

  “Ah, yes. But then—you.”

  “I?”

  “To you, beauty is something sacred. You stand before it—awed and happy. You do not rush to tear the rose from the bush, or to crush the grape and turn it into a little heat for your body. And I—I am the same. And how weak and absurd and unreal we must seem to the plain, practical world, the world that makes machines and money, and whose soul may be a butcher’s shop.”

  He laughed softly.

  “John Bull has no use for us. But how could he? Or the Punch world, or the hard, practical people? We are all moonlight and nonsense. There is nothing real outside the ‘High Street.’ Cranks! A couple of white-blooded cranks—you and I.”

  “But—sometimes—don’t the other people have glimmerings?”

  “Horrid, uncomfortable things—glimmerings.

  “When you get them, you go and see a medical man, or walk out into the High Street and look at the strings of sausages, or the nice solid stuff in the ironmonger’s window. But we—we live.”

  His painting of her portrait was a subtle experience for them both. He made her sit in the garden house, between the two white classic pillars, and in the shadow, so that she looked out at him from a background of shadows. He worked with an inspired swiftness, and with an insight that surpassed the most vivid of any of his previous portraits. It was as though she—the woman with all her mystery and uniqueness—flowed on to the canvas through his brush.

  He worked in silence, absorbed, nor had she any wish to break the spell. She sat there, feeling the clean and eager touch of his glances and the rich and mellow consciousness behind them. She was at peace with herself and with him. She was as absorbed in his contemplation of her as he was in contemplating her, and it was a double soul that merged into his interpretation of Sybil Carberry.

  She sat for an hour at a time, nor would he let her see the work in its makings.

  “No, not till you are complete.”

  Old Boggis, who considered that he had every right to be interested in his mistress’s romance, was the first of the public to view that portrait. There it was, set upon its easel in the garden house between the two white pillars, and looking like an altar piece. The sun was in old Boggis’s eyes, shining from under the edge of a black rain cloud, for it was a day of showers.

  “Lordie!” said he, staring hard at the picture; “bless me if I have ever seen her look like that. And yet—I dunno——She don’t look quite human—sometimes. Them eyes——!”

  In turning away he cast his gaze across the park, and under a beech tree he saw two figures.

  “Lovers,” thought he.

  But had old Boggis been able to hear what they were saying to each other he would have thought it the strangest sort of talk for lovers.

  “It is a pretty fierce ordeal for a man to have to face——”

  “But need you fear? If the you that I feel is the whole you——”

  “Queer,” said he with that little smile of his; “think of life’s details. A man may smoke too much, and his tie may prove fractious, and you—you will be knowing all the things that he is saying to his tie. Think of it!”

  Her hands were on his shoulders.

  “Well, why not? I should know when to come and tie your tie for you. That’s comradeship.”

  And on the terrace another figure had arrived, the figure of a tall, white-headed man with still, blue eyes. He stood by the garden house and looked at the picture and a sudden shower pattered upon the stones and blurred the glassy surface of the moat.

  “Wonderful,” he said to himself. “Strange has seen her—as she is. He had the cleanness and the courage.”

  He—too—walking bare-headed in the rain, saw the two figures standing under the great green canopy of the distant beech tree. He stood and smiled.

  “Blessed are the pure in heart,” he thought, “for they shall see their God.”

  THE CAVE

  Doctor Z. wrote to Doctor X.

  “My Friend,

  “Once again I am able to place at your disposal a case that should enable you to examine the effect of a sudden change of environment upon a depressed mentality. My patient, Monsieur Lugard will arrive at your villa one evening this week. Ostensibly he will be travelling by car to play golf at St. Jean. He will be wise as to the situation, but only so far as it concerns his choice between now and to-morrow. Salutations.

  “Z.”

  On the very day that the letter was written and posted, a very tired man left Paris in his car, with golf clubs and a couple of suitcases in the dickey, and the prospect of a month’s golf before him. Lugard was the English manager of the French branch of “The International Oil Co.” The financial affairs of the company had been suffering a process of expansion and redistribution, and though Lugard had overworked himself for the last three months he was not a medical case, though his face was the face of a man who needed the open air. His eyes looked strained.

  His car was a new two-seater “Mercury.” He was alone, and he drove her hard the first day, stopped at Pons for the night, and slept like a log. The second day’s run should have landed him at St. Jean in time for dinner, but in the pinewoods of Remy he lost both his way and his temper, and his car—piqued by his handling of her—lost hers. Just about sunset she stuck in one of the forest roads in the thick of a gloom of pines, and refused to budge; and nothing that Lugard could do would persuade the engine to function.

  He was hot and he was angry. He could see the setting sun as a yellow blur beyond the trunks of the trees, but the forest of Remy stretched for miles and was practically uninhabited. Not a garage, not a telephone; and Lugard, exasperated, wiped oily hands on a silk handkerchief, and supposed that the car had the laugh of him.

  He left her there. He went on to explore the road which was little better than a forest track. The pines hemmed him in with their multitudinous dark trunks. The evening was strangely still, and the canopy of foliage overhead made the night seem more imminent; and as Lugard followed the track he felt a restlessness possess him. The adventure was not all to his liking. He was thinking of the dinner and the bed that were waiting for him at the Golf Hotel at St. Jean. He had no desire to play at being a tramp or gipsy.

  But suddenly, at a point where the track turned towards the sea, the pinewoods broke and drew apart. The dense dark green of the rolling tops edged a narrow valley, and in the distance Lugard saw a light—a little silver point piercing the blue dusk. It seemed to him to be about half a mile away. Feeling relieved and hopeful, he walked towards it.

  But he had not gone far before the light ceased to be a single point. There were other lights, and Lugard’s hypothetical cottage expanded into a house. He was surprised. All those lighted windows promised a building of some size, and in this very solitary spot he had expected to find nothing larger than the lodge of a garde-champêtre. He came to a wire fence and a hedge and a pair of gates, and soon afterwards the garden began. He was astonished at the size of the garden. He could see the house on some rising ground nearer the sea, a big, dim, white place, and rather mysterious in spite of its lighted windows. Passing a bed of white flowers he caught the scent of them—a strange sweet scent in the summer darkness.

  The road brought him to a loggia, and at one end of it steps went up to a glazed door. It appeared to be the main entrance to the house, and after a moment’s hesitation Lugard ascended the steps and l
ooked for the bell. He had to light a match before he found it. He rang.

  A figure appeared almost immediately, crossing the big lounge hall beyond the glass door. Lugard found himself addressing a manservant in dark livery.

  “Excuse me, my car has broken down. I saw your lights.”

  The manservant stood back.

  “Enter, monsieur.”

  “If I may be allowed to use your telephone. You have a telephone?”

  “Yes, monsieur. Everything shall be arranged.”

  Lugard stepped in. Almost it seemed to him that he had been expected, which, of course, was absurd. But someone else might have been expected to arrive, and he felt vaguely piqued by the coincidence. Meanwhile the manservant took his hat, and moving across the hall, opened a door, and bowed him in.

  “If monsieur will wait, I will inform my master.”

  Lugard walked in and the door was closed on him. He looked round the room. It was lit by sconces in the walls; it was large and spacious and furnished with a pleasant richness. There were pictures, flowers, a piano, Persian rugs, but the feature of it that attracted his attention was the large window opposite the door. It was shaped like a classic portico with three white pylons, and partially screened by dark blue curtains. It had dignity, beauty, and he walked towards it, and finding one of the glass panels open, he stepped out—for the window opened on a white marble balcony, which was like a ledge jutting out into the summer night. Some perfume drifted up. There were stars, and over yonder a glimmering vastness that Lugard realized was the sea.

  He savoured the perfume and the strangeness. He thought:

  “This fellow must have spent francs by the hundred thousand. Taste, yes. I wonder——”