Kitty could not help being reminded of her own father; that almost mythical figure relegated to the underworld to which good women consign bad men. Her father was never mentioned; there was no photograph of him in the flat. But on one formal occasion—the day after Kitty had been confirmed—Mrs. Saumarez had enlightened her daughter as to her father’s history.
“I thought it best that you should know. Now, if you please, we will never refer to the subject again. I was determined that I would forget. I—have—forgotten.”
Kitty could remember the way her mother had crimped up her mouth, and as she had grown older the daughter had cherished a secret and unconfessed sympathy for that father who had disappeared in search of an adventurous freedom.
The Jobsons teased her about her friend with the red tie. Who was he? Where was he staying? She had to confess that she did not know his name.
“But—that’s absurd.”
“But why should it be? We just meet in the gardens, and talk.”
“Highly irregular,” said Clara’s husband. “Why don’t you ask him in to tea, a villa tea with real bread and butter.”
“Perhaps I will. I think he’s rather lonely.”
Which was true, though how lonely he was she did not know. He appeared to keep to himself, much as she did, though he struck her as a man whom people would take to. Those shrewd, merry eyes of his enjoyed life.
“Do you ever walk to the cape?”
They had met in the gardens as usual, but he appeared to be in a restless mood.
“Yes; nearly every day. Not many people go there.”
“Is that why you go?”
“Yes.”
“Supposing we go there now?”
“I’d love to.”
As they were wandering along above the rocks and the sea, and under the occasional shadows of the pines she felt this restlessness in him, a reaching out towards something that he lacked and desired.
“It’s a queer business growing old.”
“Is it?”
He smiled down at her.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
He was silent a moment, as though reflecting.
“Never mind how old I am. The strange thing is that you don’t feel any older. It shows in other ways. You begin to look back instead of looking forward.”
“I think I can understand,” she said.
They paused to watch a yacht putting out from the harbour of St. Jean.
“Yes,” said he; “you put out just like that yacht, but there comes a time when you begin to yearn for the harbour, somewhere to anchor.”
They strolled on.
“So—you are going to England to anchor?”
“That’s the pity of it. I have no harbour.”
And suddenly she was sorry for him, sorry in a most strange way, sorry as she had never been for anyone else in her life before. There was something in his eyes—and his voice.
“But how sad——”
“My own fault,” he said.
They came suddenly to that little cape where a wood of pines raises a blackness against the blue of the sky and the sea. It was very still here; no wind moved; as they followed the path she became conscious of another kind of stillness linking them together.
“I suppose you wouldn’t tell me——?”
He did not answer her for a moment.
“I might. But, my dear, would youth understand? Yes, perhaps it would understand.”
“Perhaps I should.”
“Let’s sit in the sun,” said he; “the sun’s so clean.”
They went down close to the sea and sat down on two rocks.
“Ever heard of boys running away to sea?”
“Did you?”
He smiled queerly.
“I was a grown boy—a man, a selfish, restless sort of beggar. In fact—I was—what the world calls a bad lot.”
She watched his face.
“What is bad——?”
“Ah, that’s the question. I wanted my own way; I was unhappy; I wanted my own way so much—that I did not care what happened. I was very much in love with someone else. She’s dead now. Oh, years ago. And then—slowly—I began to realize that I was old. I was beginning to look back. I wanted to look——”
She felt a kind of breathlessness.
“At those others——?”
She had startled him.
“What others——?”
“The people—those you had left.”
His eyes were on her face.
“How do you know, child?”
“I guessed.”
“It’s true. Two women; one may be dead; I don’t think she would have cared. But—the other——”
“Your daughter——”
Again there was silence. He turned away and looked at the sea. It seemed to her that he was deeply moved.
“Yes, just that. I want to see the child I left behind. I don’t suppose I shall ever speak to her. I don’t suppose she would want to meet the sort of blackguard her father must have seemed to her. She would have been told——”
“Yes——”
“The mother’s story. It’s probable that she’s her mother’s child—not my child. She wouldn’t understand——”
“She might.”
“Oh, hardly. You see—we were incompatibles. It was my fault and it wasn’t my fault. But now—I want to go back and look at her.”
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Is she alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“How strange!”
“It’s more than strange; it’s wicked.”
She felt the sunlight on her hands and face; it had a warmth, a stillness.
“Would you tell me—her name?”
“Why not? Saumarez—Kitty Saumarez.”
Almost she had divined it. Somehow she had felt it coming to her, spreading like a light over the sea, and yet though its very strangeness was ceasing to be strange, she was amazed at the chance that had brought them together.
Her father, sitting there and not knowing himself as her father, the father whom she must have looked upon with baby eyes! She was conscious of a sudden and impulsive tenderness towards him. She trembled. Should she tell him now—or wait?
And he seemed lost in thought. He was gazing over the sea, and his eyes had a sadness. And her impulse was to touch him and to say:
“Look, here is your child. I—too—have suffered, and I understand.”
She felt that she could laugh, and that her laughter would brim with tears.
“You have never asked me my name?”
He seemed to come back from a world of recollection.
“No; I rather liked the anonymous charm——”
“And so did I. But won’t you ask me my name?”
“What is your name?”
“Kitty Saumarez.”
His face had the stillness of astonishment. He had not suspected, or leapt to the revelation as she had done.
“My dear!” he said; “my dear!” and was silent.
His eyes had a kind of appealing, questioning doubt. The inspiration was to be hers. He was a man chained to the past as to a rock in an empty sea.
“Father——”
She knelt down with her hands on his knees. She put up her face to be kissed.
“Isn’t it strange! I have never been able to use that word; but now—I can. I want to.”
“Kitty,” he said; “my Kitty”—and kissed her.
They walked back with linked arms. There was a kind of sacred silence between them, but when they came to the place where the lane ran up to the Villa Violetta, she looked up with a kind of radiant shyness into his face.
“My friends—they are such dears—— I want to tell them. Won’t you come with me?”
He touched her cheek.
“Dear child—to-morrow—— To-day—is too sacred. Do you understand?”
“Yes; I u
nderstand.”
She went in between the white gate pillars and up the path under the orange trees, and turning once to wave to him, was lost to sight behind a hedge of Banksia rose. He stood for a moment with his hat in his hand, like a man giving thanks. He turned away, and went slowly back down the steep lane towards the sea. He was half-way down the lane when he heard her voice behind him.
“Father——”
He faced about. She seemed to come to him with a kind of stifled swiftness; she had a piece of paper in her hands.
“Father—— This—— It came an hour ago——”
She gave him the telegram to read. It was from her doctor.
“Return at once. Your mother very ill.”
His eyes met her eyes.
“My dear, when do you start?”
“To-night.”
“I’m coming with you,” was all that he said.
So Roger Saumarez returned to his wife—but to a wife who was dying. Blanche Saumarez was in that state between waking and sleeping when the eyes see nothing or everything. When Kitty brought her father into the room, Blanche Saumarez looked at him, and continued to look as though behind the dim, blue coldness of those eyes, memory was searching. She did not speak; for she was beyond speech. Saumarez had taken a chair beside the bed. He laid a hand on the quilt. And presently Blanche Saumarez’s right hand made a little groping movement towards it.
His hand went to meet hers, and closed on it—and thus they remained, silently looking at each other.
ESCAPE
Richard Jermyn was bored.
He made his way down the very stately stairs of the Camois Court Hotel five minutes after the dinner-gong had sounded. The hotel gong had the largeness and the thunder of an African war-drum. Like everything else in the Camois Court Hotel it was stately and huge and sumptuous.
“Playing bridge to-night?”
Mrs. Guadalla ambushed him at the foot of the stairs. She was feverish and forty, and always carried a little gold bag dangling from her wrist to match her bobbed head of tinted gold. She wore jade green.
“No; letters to write.”
Jermyn was bored with Mrs. Guadalla. He got past her and made for the dining-room where Thomson the head-waiter met him with a gelatinous bow, conducted him to his table, and spread his table napkin for him. Jermyn bristled. All this fuss! For his boredom was the revolt of the man of sensitive appetites against the whole scheme of the Camois Court world, and against having nothing to do—nothing upon which to try the teeth of his soul.
For what, after all, was the Camois Court Hotel but a refuge for the rich who ran away from life, and who, in trying to escape from the various domestic problems, afflicted and irritated each other?
Jermyn was sick of it; he had been sick of it for weeks. It gave you too much food, too many spoilt children, too many gramophones squawking in private suites. It was full of cigarette ends, and little drinks, and chatter. People banged doors. They appeared to have nothing else to do but to bang doors. Old gentlemen arose in the morning with wet chests and irritable throats after too much alcohol and cigar, and proceeded to make moist and unpleasant noises. Jermyn had one such neighbour who cleared for action each morning with spittings and gurglings.
On the other side of him people quarrelled through a communicating door, until Jermyn had in a moment of exasperation, raised his voice in sarcasm:
“You’ll excuse me, but I wish you would have your row out in the garden. It is not my fault if there are buttons off somebody’s dress trousers.”
After that there had been silence, a kind of ogreish, sinister stillness. But nothing could silence the old gentleman on the other side who had to get years of overfeeding and oversmoking off his chest.
Jermyn was an irritable person, but only when he was caged up in such civilization as that of the Camois Court Hotel. Away in the wilds of Africa taking photos of the wild creatures he was a different man.
After dinner he prowled down the corridor to the lounge, and stood on the edge of it, glaring. What a place! Full of smoke and chatter, and coffee cups, and liqueur glasses, and old women of both sexes. Big game! There were moments when he felt like turning an elephant gun on all that crowd. But he did not shoot elephants these days. Noble and wise beasts. It was pleasanter to make moving pictures of them. But the Camois Court lounge!
He turned back, and with a kind of panther-like glide, escaped through the writing-room into the garden. The hotel had a very fine garden and a park. It provided six hard-courts, an eighteen-hole golf course, and garage accommodation for a hundred cars. Often Jeremy had damned those cars. He did not mind an elephant trumpeting or the roar of a lion. That was life, not noise.
He wandered out into the garden. It was very beautiful and still. A full moon was showing above the old trees. Through the lighted windows of the dining-room he saw the waiters tidying up after the Camois Court had grumbled and fed. Decent fellows—those waiters. They had work to do, and better tempers than the guests. But it was all so damned material, fleshpots and big bellies.
Jermyn made for the moonlight and the old trees. A sudden strange sadness fell upon him, a yearning, a curious unrest. Oh, for Africa and the moon! But was that all? It was as though he had shed a fleshy skin, and walked like a naked spirit through the stillness of the English night, longing for some strange thing to happen. He wanted something to happen. But what?
He stood under a century-old beech tree, and felt the moonlight splashing down through the great leafy dome. His lips moved.
“If only something would happen, something strange, something unphysical, something other-worldish.”
He listened and watched. He was in one of those questioning moods when a man rebels against the limitations of his senses, and yearns for the space of some other dimension. Ghosts, fairies! Something that would convince him that life was not all guzzling and drinking, and puffing smoke and inanities across card tables. Almost his yearning was a prayer:
“O God, send me a vision of something, let me catch a glimpse of the beyond. I want to escape, just for five minutes. Are we nothing but stomachs upon legs?”
Nothing happened. He wandered on. Between the trees the grass and bracken were splashed with silver. What mystery! And it occurred to him to think how strange it was that Camois Court never came out here in the moonlight, but remained in that fat fug. No lovers even! Did not the young things of the day ever fall in love and wander and dream?
Hallo! What was that?
He had strolled on, and was standing above a grassy hollow in which the moonlight lay like water. In fact, at the first glance Jeremy had fancied himself looking down at a little pool, but there was something more startling and unexpected than the effect of the moonlight. He saw a white figure move out from under the shade of the trees, and descend into the grassy hollow.
Someone from the hotel, no doubt. But a moment later he knew that the white figure did not belong to Camois Court. A ghost? He was aware of a little, chilly tremor along his spine, for the figure was approaching him; it seemed to glide up out of the hollow straight for the place where he was standing. No; it was no ghost, but something even more unexpected and perplexing, a woman walking in a pair of white silk pyjamas.
Jermyn stood very still, and with the stillness of a man who knew the jungle and wild life. For this figure was unusual. It approached; he was aware of its little, dark, bobbed head, and its set and motionless eyes, and an air of dreaming rigidity.
The explanation flashed upon him.
“Good Lord, she’s walking in her sleep.”
Almost he held his breath. A somnambulist, pale and distraught! She passed quite close, and her gaze seemed to go through and beyond him. He turned and watched, and then followed, wondering whence she had come and whither she was going. He remembered the river at the foot of the hotel grounds, and instantly his curiosity was tinged with a feeling of responsibility.
She walked among the trees as though sensing them as the trees of ano
ther world. The ground descended, and between the dark foliage of a cedar and an oak Jermyn saw the gleam of water. Yes, she was heading for the river.
What was he to do? Wake her? But as the moonlit vista broadened he saw a white shape lying by the bank, a house-boat moored close in, with a gangway leading to it. The sleep-walker descended towards the boat, and Jermyn, quickening his pace so that he should be near at hand should she walk blindly into the river, saw her go straight towards the gangway. Marvelling, he stood still to watch. He saw her walk unhesitatingly across the gangway, and disappear into the house-boat.
“Well—I’m—damned! Was she asleep?”
He walked silently to the edge of the river, and standing close to the white boat, listened. The stillness of the night was broken by a familiar sound, the stridor of a man snoring.
Jermyn was piqued. The next day happened to be a Sunday, though the Sabbath made no difference to the Camois Court Hotel, save that there were ices for dinner. Jermyn was an early riser. He went out to have a look at that house-boat as though to assure himself of its existence.
It existed. In fact it was very much awake, and Jermyn surprised a fat little man towelling himself in the early sunlight on the boat’s poop. He had been bathing, and rotund and glistening he seemed to salute the dawn. The crown of his head was bald; the calves of his legs very round and solid.
Jermyn saw nothing of the girl, but he observed the name of the house-boat painted in black below the row of pink-curtained windows—Ain’t She Sweet.
So that was the atmosphere! The rotund little person with the bath towel looked like it. Pirouetting he discovered Jermyn on the bank, and with no sign of being disconcerted, greeted him.
“Good morning, sir.”
Jermyn retaliated.
“Good morning.”
“Bit fresh for a plunge, but—bootiful.”
His lips rounded themselves to the adjective. Obviously he was one of those very cheerful, childlike persons with a perfect digestion, fat legs, and no spiritual qualms. He radiated the obese and the obvious. He was the sort of man who snored exultantly. Had not Jermyn heard him?
“You take things early.”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 79