His voice was casual, but I knew that he was afraid. And so was I. That night in my tent I rubbed myself with carbolic oil. If the smell of it would keep the particular, deadly fly at a distance—well—I might live to see——
Three tense days followed. Mainprice was worried about the bite of that fly, and he grew more irritable and suspicious; I felt him watching me; at night he was restless, and I could hear him moving in his tent. We took turns at keeping the fire burning, and as though he grudged me my sleep he would make a great noise over throwing on fresh wood, but it may have been that noise soothed the fear in him.
On the fourth day I thought he looked flushed; and his eyes were infected; but he said nothing and carried on with the work.
At tea that day I happened to slop some boiling water from the kettle on to my trousers. It hurt me and I swore, and Mainprice began to laugh. It seemed a silly sort of joke to me, but it amused him.
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
But Mainprice went on laughing. I stared at him; I felt like throwing the kettle at his head, and then—suddenly—I understood. Mainprice could not stop making that absurd noise; “Laughing Sickness” had him.
Presently, the spasm passed. He sat gasping, looking at me with turgid eyes that were full of indescribable things.
“I’ve got it. It must have been that damned fly. Well—that’s that.”
He grinned.
“Suppose you will be making tracks for home. That was the understanding—eh?”
I felt grim. For I had begun to realize that whatever my hatred of Mainprice might be I could not leave the fellow alone to die.
“I’m staying,” I said.
And then he cursed me.
“You silly, schoolboy storybook hero. Do you think I want your slobbering magnanimity. Get out. I’m not afraid of dying.”
“I am,” I said; “but I am going to stay.”
With the horror of the thing on me I went down to the village where the silence had deepened day by day. Only an occasional strange and feeble chuckle came from the place, for the disease had done its work; an old man and a young girl still lived—but they were dying.
I sat down on a tree stump near the gate.
What was I going to do?
Run away or stick by the man I hated?
Mainprice would despise me if I ran away, and if Mary Hill were to know she too would think me a despicable cur.
No; I had got to stay and see it through.
The sun was setting when I began to re-climb the hill towards the two white tents and the fire. An intense melancholy had attacked me, and I was trying to fight it off. I was not thinking of Mainprice for the moment, but of Table Keep——
Crack!
My hat flew in the air, and something scorched my scalp. My arms went up; and then, instinctively, I threw myself forward and lay still. Up there I had had a vision of Mainprice lying prone, a smirk on his face, the rifle to his shoulder.
I did not move. I was wondering whether he would feel sure that he had got me, or whether he would come down the hill. I had my revolver, and if he came I meant to use it.
I heard a second report, but no bullet came my way. The sound had seemed duller, muffled.
But I lay still. The sun went down, and presently I began to crawl up towards the fire. I should have Mainprice at a disadvantage, for if he stayed by the fire when the darkness fell I should be able to see him, while he would not see me.
Again I waited.
It was very dark now, and I crawled on. There was no sound, and raising my head and holding my revolver ready, I took a steady look.
Something lay near the fire, a shape, and a moment later I understood. That second shot had not been for me.
* * *
I buried Mainprice that night, and when the dawn came I fled, leaving the tents and the equipment, and taking food and the two ponies. I wandered for a month, and it was a month of horror, for every moment of the day I was listening for the sound of my own laughter.
Sometimes I made myself laugh, just to see whether I could control it.
It was on the morning of the thirty-second day that I met the first native. I could not speak his lingo, and he had no English.
“Kirodi.”
I kept repeating the name of the place and making signs to him. I showed him money and he understood. I was within thirty miles of Kirodi and did not know it. The black took me there.
There was an English doctor at Kirodi. I stayed outside the place and sent for him, and when he came I told him the whole tale.
“I don’t know the incubation period of this damned disease, but I have been free for over a month. But you had better quarantine me.”
He did. For a month I lived in a tent on a hill above Kirodi, with a couple of black police patrolling the neighbourhood. At the end of the month the doctor brought up the Local Commissioner, and I had to make a statement. I showed him the hole in my sun hat.
“If you send out a search party,” I said, “you will find Mainprice buried, with the top of his head blown off. He must have put the muzzle of his gun into his mouth. But is it necessary? Can’t the dead be left—to sleep—untroubled?”
The Commissioner was a white man.
“My dear chap, I’ll think it over.”
The doctor had wired to the Hills. I was wondering when I should see them, and what I should say to Mary.
But it was Mary who came to me.
THE MAN WITH THE RED TIE
Kitty Saumarez had been ill.
A London flat in Vandyke Place may be all very well when there is a tinge of blue in the sky and the plane trees are in leaf; but in November, with the rain coming down in a grey sheet, or fog stagnant like a solution of dirty cotton-wool outside your window, the situation is less encouraging. Kitty lay and looked at the wet chimney-pots and the swaying and groping plane branches, and listened to the wind. She felt that getting up was not worth while.
Her mother understood more of these things.
“My dear, you will feel better for getting up. You must make an effort.”
“I feel so weak still.”
“Of course, you will feel weak. You will continue to feel weak until you make an effort.”
Mrs. Saumarez was a little, dried-up slip of a woman with a pale mouth and alert blue eyes. She wore rimless pince-nez. She had the kind of hand that is apt to resemble a claw: thin and sinewy, with the fingers curved inwards.
Kitty shed tears. They were perfectly absurd tears, such as are wept on dreary occasions when people feel weak and hopeless, and some little tragedy lies at the back of the mind.
“My dear, don’t be ridiculous. You are old enough——”
The tears still trickled.
“You must really pull yourself together. It isn’t as if you hadn’t everything—all the comforts——”
“Mother, please, I’m too tired to talk.”
Mrs. Saumarez went out of the room with the air of leaving a moody child to the persuasions of loneliness. It had sometimes occurred to Mrs. Saumarez that Kitty was unfortunately like her father, that husband whom Mrs. Saumarez had divorced twenty years ago, and never heard of since.
It was always supposed that Roger Saumarez had gone to Samoa or Hawaii or Borneo, anywhere that was queer and impossible and a little adventurous. Also, it was presumed that Roger Saumarez was dead.
It is possible to have everything and nothing, and Kitty was in that unhappy state. She had a home, a highly moral mother, no possible financial worries, an allowance of a hundred a year. Moreover, a little illness and the subsequent convalescence may be full of pleasant snugglings and spoilings if the people about you are comfortable and sympathetic. No one had ever called Mrs. Saumarez a sympathetic woman, and Kitty had had a rather disastrous little love affair.
The man had behaved very badly.
“But then, my dear Kitty, you must not expect too much from men.”
Mrs. Saumarez had helped to cure her daughter of a perfectly absurd romantici
sm. Her father had been romantic. It was impossible to do anything with romantic people. Romance was just male beastliness dressed up in Tennysonian verse. Mrs. Saumarez did not understand that her daughter had suffered humiliation; she should have understood it, because Roger Saumarez was supposed to have behaved very badly, but Blanche Saumarez had not felt humiliation. She had that sort of cold complacency that may be offended but is never ashamed.
Kitty’s doctor was more sympathetic.
“You want a little sunshine. What about a change?”
“I don’t feel that I can bother.”
“Oh, yes you can. I’ll speak to your mother——”
He had paused at the door, and looking back at her he gathered the impression that Kitty was trying to say something to him.
“Well——?”
“If—I—could go away alone.”
“Or with friends—the right kind of people?”
“Yes.”
He understood that Kitty did not want to go away with her mother.
Dr. Beal put it to Mrs. Saumarez that her daughter needed a change, and Mrs. Saumarez—being a changeless woman—suggested a fortnight at Eastbourne. Mrs. Saumarez liked Eastbourne, therefore it was quite the sort of place for her daughter to convalesce in.
Dr. Beal tactfully applauded the charms of Eastbourne, and then went on to explain that he would prefer to prescribe a month abroad, somewhere in the sunshine. Eastbourne was all very well in the summer, but those bleak, grey downs seemed to make England seem even greyer than it was.
“But I don’t go abroad,” said Mrs. Saumarez; “I don’t like going abroad.”
“Perhaps you have friends whom your daughter could join?”
“By herself?”
“Well, why not?”
“But—the expense?”
“Believe me—you may find it less expensive in the end than doctor’s bills.”
Dr. Beal was a humourist, but you had to be very careful how your humour comported itself in Mrs. Saumarez’s presence. You could not allow it to Charleston. It had to be correct and straight in the leg.
“I’ll think about it.”
But it so happened that Clare Jobson brought the necessary chance and powers of persuasion to tea at the Saumarez flat. Mrs. Jobson was all that Mrs. Saumarez was not; but Mrs. Saumarez allowed her a social relationship because the Jobsons were impeccably nice people. The Jobsons were going to Beaulieu for three months; they were renting a villa there.
“Do let Kitty come out for a month. It would be so nice for Jean.”
Kitty’s eyes were grateful and imploring.
“Oh—I’d love to go.”
Her mother looked all round and through the proposition. She did not quite approve of the Riviera. Never having been there she thought it decadent and nouveau riche. But then—the Jobsons were nice people, and if this was an invitation to stay, there would be no hotel bills.
“It is very kind of you——”
“Do let her come—— But of course—you will.”
And Mrs. Saumarez was persuaded.
Just what Beaulieu meant to Kitty Saumarez, would not be easily explained. She could not quite explain it to herself; she did not know what she wanted and what she did not want. Her attitude towards life was a shrinking from it rather than a going out to meet it, for she had gone out to meet it as it had appeared to her in the person of a very modern young cub who had not found the sex in her sufficiently accommodating. In these days it was necessary to be accommodating, to be able to look a man straight in the eyes with the boldness of the professional, and Kitty was most unbold.
But here were sunlight and blue sea. The Jobsons’ villa was on the way to Cap Ferrat. It had a garden. The Jobsons were kind people, and Kitty’s window had been kindly chosen, for it caught the morning sunlight, and showed her a blueness of sea and sky and all that mountainous coast stretching towards Italy. The Jobsons did not fuss her. Jean was a tall, fair-haired, serene young person who patronized the male, and was rather inclined to despise the youthful variety.
“Just let her sit in the sun. Let her get her breath back. She’s been frightened.”
So said Clara Jobson.
“I’d like to have a word with young Darcy.”
So said the daughter.
“The young Darcys are not worth while. When a girl is old-fashioned and romantic——”
“Romantic! Romantic about the modern lad! Great snakes——! And then—of course—the old woman——”
“Jean, my dear, I appreciate the modern touch, but isn’t it a little unsubtle, a frenzy of feet—like your new dance?”
Jean smiled.
“Oh, we are not—all of us—quite so crude as that. But Mrs. Saumarez——! I’m not surprised old Saumarez ran away—— Jolly sensible of him—I should say.”
But they allowed Kitty to sit in the sun, and to wander along the path to St. Jean, and to go as far as the cape where the Virgin holds the Child beside the old grey tower. Kitty liked to sit by the sea. The sea was impersonal. It did not ask her for anything, or clutch at her, or expect her to behave like a young animal. There was nothing of the male in it. She shrank from the young male; she was not accommodating. She felt drawn towards older people. Beaulieu might be full of artifice, but also it was full of older people. Young men were scarce. And just at present young men made her shudder.
Jean played tennis at the Bristol club. Kitty preferred to sit in the gardens of the Aux des Fourmis and listen to the Bristol orchestra playing on the terrace. She had a favourite seat there; sheltered, yet in the sun, with the perfume of the wallflowers and the stocks floating to her. There was no need to shrink from music and from flowers.
Also, it appeared to be the favourite seat of a picturesque old man who wore a white flannel suit, and a red tie and a panama hat with a biggish brim to it.
Kitty had observed him in and about Beaulieu. He was observable. He had white hair, and a high colour, and an aquiline nose, and jocund eyes that seemed to see everything without staring. In spite of his white hair he had an air of youthfulness. He looked at life with a large and mischievous tolerance, and with an enjoyment that enjoyed things all the more because it had ceased to be greedy.
Kitty sat at one end of the seat—he at the other. Sometimes there was someone between them, sometimes nothing separated them but three feet of green painted timber. Kitty was not conscious of being noticed by him. He read a book, or watched the people and the sea.
She allowed herself to wonder about his red tie. Was he a socialist—or did he like that particular colour? She had heard that Bernard Shaw wore a red tie, and she discovered resemblances between her picturesque person and the photographs of Bernard Shaw. Supposing it should be the great G. B. S.?
She was caught scrutinizing his red tie, and she had to retreat in confusion. She dropped her vanity-bag. The old fellow picked it up for her.
“Allow me.”
He stood hat in hand. He was very tall, and as slim as a young man.
“Oh, thank you so much.”
She was thinking that he had fine manners, and that his blue eyes had a humorous and ironical kindness.
“So stupid of me——”
He was smiling.
“Supposing we blame my tie?”
She was shocked. She must have been staring at him so very rudely, and he had noticed it.
“Your tie! Oh—please, no—I’m sure——”
“Supposing we sit down again?”
She sat down. She felt absurdly confused, and yet the feeling was not unpleasant. He interested her.
“I’m not a socialist. It’s a piece of symbolism.”
“Oh, a piece of symbolism.”
Was he laughing at her? And even if he was laughing at her she thought that she did not mind his laughter. There was something about him that made her want to laugh back.
“I’m afraid I was very rude.”
“You were looking rather hard at my tie.”
&nb
sp; She nodded.
“I was wondering—— You see, you are rather like the pictures of—a celebrity.”
“Good heavens!”
“Please don’t think me awfully rude, but are you Mr. Bernard Shaw?”
He looked at her, and then quietly exploded.
“No; I wish you were right! Really, my dear young lady, I must take off my hat to you. You will see—that I have not the Shavian forehead.”
She shared his amusement.
“And your nose——”
“Too hooky—I think. Though, my hair once did boast a ruddiness——”
He glanced at her shingled head.
“You have a touch of it. It’s becoming—very.”
This most irregular of introductions in which neither knew the name of the other, was the beginning of a friendship that was both informal and delightful. His red tie had introduced them. They met each morning on the same seat, and listened to the music and to each others voices.
She had found a name of her own for him—“Mr. White Man,” and to him she was youth—youth as he desired to see it. Her gentleness was refreshing; woman ceases to be woman when she grows hard.
There was a curious and quick sympathy between them. Kitty, who had not known a father, saw in him the father of a wonderful month spent by the southern sea. It was as though they both enjoyed the impersonal atmosphere, the air of mystery, their namelessness to each other. They met like an old man and a child on the shore of time, and talked as an old man and a child can talk.
Sometimes she asked him questions.
“Do you live in England?”
No; he did not live in England. He had not visited England for more than twenty-five years. His life had been spent in the East, but in the end he had grown weary of the East, and the green island had called to him. He was going to England in April.
“Have you friends?”
“Not a soul.”
“No one?”
He looked out over the sea.
“I have been a wanderer. That means loneliness—I think I was just beginning to realize how lonely an old man can be.”
“Haven’t you any people?”
“I had; but something happened in my life, my dear, very long ago, when I was fierce and impatient. That—was the beginning of Ishmael.”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 78