Two in a Train

by Warwick Deeping

  “Yes, I am a bit of a problem, doc.”

  “What am I to do with you? As mere man I felt like killing you. Even in cold blood and as a sociologist I should say that death would be the best solution. But I can’t solve it that way. My business is to save life. Yes, you’re a problem.”

  Carthew fawned on him.

  “Give me some of the stuff and I’ll cease to be a problem.”

  “Ah, would you!”

  “I’ve got you puzzled, doc.”

  “Yes and no. I’m considering the alternatives. Shall I hand you over to the police and have you charged with blackmail. Probably they would give you seven years.”

  “You daren’t do it.”

  “O, yes—I could. In these blackmailing charges it is becoming the custom to shield the victim. Why should a foul thing like you be allowed to spew dirt about in public? And in prison there would be no dope.”

  Carthew whimpered.

  “O, cut it out. Just give me a dose.”

  Morrow rose and stood over him.

  “Get up. You will never get another dose. You are not going to leave this room as a free agent.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I’ve got the mad dog by the collar. I’m not going to let it loose again on society.”

  Carthew’s flaccid face became distorted. He began to mouth like an hysterical woman. He tried to clasp Morrow’s knees.

  “You can’t do it. I’ll raise hell. I’ll jump out of the window. Give me a dose, just one dose.”

  Morrow repulsed him.

  “Get up. Listen.”

  Carthew, squatting, watched Morrow’s face.

  “This is the other alternative. I’m regarding you from the doctor’s point of view. I might try to cure you. But to what ends? You are a social pest.”

  Carthew’s face grew sullen.

  “I don’t want to be cured. I want a dose.”

  “The decision is with me. I might put you in a home under rigid supervision. We should have a devil of a time with you. And to what ends?”

  “O, I’m sick of all this jabbering.”

  “If one could make you sick of your self!”

  “O, cut it out. I’m done. The floor’s going round. Things are black. Damn you, why don’t you make up your mind? Fetch in the police.”

  Morrow stood looking at him for some seconds, and then went to the door. He opened it, and called his wife. She had been sitting on the stairs. She glanced at Morrow who smiled at her reassuringly, and then her eyes rested on Carthew crouching on the floor, supporting himself on one arm. His face was ghastly.

  “He looks very ill, Arnold.”

  Morrow stood over Carthew.

  “I have been trying to make up my mind about him, whether to hand him over to the police or to treat him as a sick man and give him a chance.”

  Her eyes met her husband’s.

  “Shall we give him a chance?”

  There was a moment’s silence between them, and then Carthew raised his face.

  “I’m thirsty. Could I have a little water?”

  Morrow bent down.

  “By the way, when did you last have a meal?”

  “Meal? I’ve almost forgotten. My stomach won’t stand much.”

  “No. I suppose not. Hallo, he’s going to faint.”

  And suddenly he bent low, and picking up Carthew like a child, he laid him on the sofa. He felt his pulse, and looked meaningly at Kitty.

  “Dope and no food.”

  “Poor wretch!”

  “Yes, poor—white trash.”

  Morrow crossed to the window and threw up the lower sash. He turned to his wife.

  “He wants something inside him. Is there any milk in the house?”

  “Of course.”

  “Milk with a raw egg beaten up in it, and half an ounce of brandy.”

  “I’ll go and get it.”

  She hurried out, while Carthew lay with his eyes closed, and his face strangely tranquil, and some of the smirch and the shadow of life gone from it. Morrow, taking an ear between thumb and finger, pinched it, and saw that the pressure made little difference in the pallor of the skin. And as he stood looking at Carthew it occurred to him that thirty years or so ago this rotten thing had been a child lying in a cot exulted over by some woman.

  Carthew stirred.

  “It’s not so black as it was. I can feel something thumping.”

  “Your patient heart. Stay where you are.”

  Morrow walked to the window, and as he looked up at the backs of other houses his eyes seemed to fix themselves on a particular window. It was like an eye meeting his understandingly, significantly, and his glance fell suddenly to the flowers in the window-box. He put out a hand and touched them just as his wife reappeared.

  He turned and took the glass from her, and crossed to the sofa.

  “Now, Carthew, drink some of this.”

  “I can’t swallow.”

  “O yes, you can.”

  He put an arm round Carthew, raised him and held the glass to his lips.

  “Now then, just a little to begin with.”

  “What is it?”

  “Egg and milk and a little brandy.”

  Carthew whimpered like a child.

  “Must I drink it? What’s the use?”

  “Yes, come along.”

  Carthew sipped slowly, and then raised his eyes to Morrow’s with a look of whimsical surprise.

  “Rum world, isn’t it? Why are you troubling about me?”

  “Force of habit, perhaps.”

  “Yes habit gets one, doesn’t it. I don’t think I can manage any more.”

  “Yes, you can. It’s what you want.”

  In a little while Carthew had emptied the glass, and Morrow let him lie back on the cushion. He passed the glass to his wife, who stood holding it with an air of surprised compassion. There was a moment’s silence, and then one of Carthew’s hands that was resting on the back of the sofa made a little fluttering movement. He spoke.

  “Well, better send for the police now. I’m so sleepy.”

  He seemed to doze, and Morrow, watching him, spoke softly to his wife.

  “What are we to do with him? Give him a last chance?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes. We’ve got to, Noll, somehow. And yet, an hour or two ago I was feeling so—secure.”

  He touched her hand.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be hurt. I’ll see to that.”

  He laid a hand on Carthew’s shoulder and shook him gently, and Carthew opened his eyes.

  “Hallo—I’d dropped off. What d’you want?”

  “Carthew, I’m going to send you into a nursing-home for a day or two while I make arrangements for a course of treatment. If you will help you can be cured. You’ll have a devil of a fight in front of you. Will you fight?”

  Carthew’s eyes closed.

  “What’s the use? I’m finished.”

  “Nonsense. Make a fight for it, man. Life’s good.”

  “But I haven’t a bean.”

  “I’ll arrange that.”

  “Why the devil should you? I tell you I’m finished.”

  “No, you’re not, if you fight.”

  Carthew seemed to give a shrug of dull consent.

  “O, all right. But what’s the use? Send me along to the dogs’ home.”

  “That’s something to begin with.”

  He patted Carthew’s shoulder, and going to the telephone rang up a nursing-home. He spoke to the matron, explained the case, asked for a special nurse to be engaged, warned her that the patient would arrive at once. He added that in a few days he would have Mr. Carthew transferred to an institution that dealt with such cases. He hung up the receiver, and crossed over to the sofa.

  “They’ll take you. You won’t be a hundred yards from this house.”

  Carthew’s voice was toneless.

  “O, all right.”

  “They are good people. They will try to help yo
u. Now, come along, sit up.”

  Carthew struggled up, and looked wildly about him.

  “Good people! Damned funny, isn’t it? I’m in a sort of cage, and can’t get out.”

  “There’s a door to every cage, man. Come and sit by the window and get some air.”

  Carthew fingered his throat. “Air!” Supported by Morrow he walked to the window, and Kitty placed a chair for him. He looked strangely into her face.

  “Well—let’s call it quits.”

  He sat heavily in the chair, and Morrow, standing beside him, pointed upwards.

  “There’s a door to any cage. You’ll have a good window, high up. Perhaps that one with the rose-coloured curtains.”

  Carthew mumbled:

  “Rose-coloured curtains! Fancy rose-coloured curtains! How very boring! I want to sleep.”

  XII

  About eight o’clock on that same June day Morrow and his wife were at dinner. It was their custom to have the table close to the big window, and on this evening a clear, summer sky showed above the tops of the houses. The roses on the table had come from the cottage garden at Pit Hill.

  Kitty spoke to the maid who was standing beside the butler’s tray.

  “You need not wait, Ann.”

  “Very well, madam.”

  Kitty turned her head to watch the door close as though the closing of the door reminded her of Carthew’s expulsion and of the sudden resurrecting of the past. She sat with her elbows on the table, gazing at the flowers, and the stillness of the room seemed to wait upon her silence. She had been made to fear, to suffer humiliation. She was aware of her husband’s big hands, and of his eyes, eyes that avoided looking at her too intently as though he knew that she was feeling sensitive and raw.

  “I can’t bear her standing behind me to-night, Noll.”

  He understood.

  “A very old complex, one’s back to the cave wall.”

  His voice, deep, gentle and deliberate, soothed her. A sudden impulse made her reach out a hand to him.

  “I shall never forget—— That I should have been so blind, so mad. You do understand, Noll?”

  He nodded.

  “I think so. You and I stand together against the wall. Your cave is my cave. I’m ready for my enemies with club and torch.”

  With head carried rather proudly she looked at him.

  “Have you any enemies? I should not have thought so.” He smiled at her.

  “O, plenty. There are poisoned knives even in my profession. I’m too successful.”

  “Are men as jealous as women?”

  “Perhaps more so—in the big scramble. Venom, attempts at social assassination. Take any profession, the stage, literature. When a man seems obscure and harmless he is lauded, but let him get his head well up above the crowd and there will be a dozen cultured gentlemen ready to club him.”

  “It’s rather horrible, Noll. It makes me afraid.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  His smile was a little grim.

  “No need to worry about me. I have a pretty thick head. There are times when I have given the gentlemen with clubs more than they bargained for.”

  “And yet—you teach compassion?”

  “My job does. It tries to give life a chance.”

  She brooded for a moment, and her eyes were dark.

  “I’ve something horrible to confess, Noll.”

  “Have you?”

  “To-day there was something in me that wanted the old age back. It cried out in me to you: ‘Kill—kill!’ ”

  He nodded.

  “Thousands of women must have felt like that in the darkness of a cave with some wild beast snuffling at the entrance. Security.”

  She drew a deep breath.

  “Yes, security, faith in something.”

  “Don’t worry. A man fights better with a woman at his back.”

  She reached for a dish of fruit that was on the table.

  “I think a woman asks for security. At least—I do, and to-day I have been frightened. Tell me, don’t try to shield me, will he try to spoil—all this?”

  “I think not. Though when a man becomes a crave—he may be nothing but the crave. I can get him cured. It’s the afterwards that will count.”

  She was sitting half turned towards the window and looking up at those other windows, and suddenly she seemed to grow rigid. Her lips moved, but at first no sound came.

  “Arnold, look, that window!”

  He pushed back his chair.

  “What?”

  “He’s at that window. He’s struggling with someone. O, horrible——!”

  She closed her eyes. Morrow was leaning out, his hands on the edge of the window-box. He shouted:

  “Carthew, Carthew, are you mad?”

  And suddenly there was silence, and then a sound as of some object falling and striking a hard surface. Morrow turned sharply, and saw his wife’s face covered with her hands. She was trembling, and with a deliberate hand he drew the curtains.

  “It’s all over, Kitty.”

  She shuddered.

  “O, Noll, how horrible! And I—— I wished it. I——”

  He stood by her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Perhaps he wished it too, my dear.”

  Suddenly the telephone bell rang with a suggestion of agitation, and Morrow went to the bureau and took down the receiver.

  “Yes. What! He’s—dead. Good God! The nurse tried to stop him. Yes, I’ll come round at once. No, you mustn’t blame yourself, matron. I’ll take any responsibility. Yes, I’ll come at once.”

  He hung up the receiver and stood looking at his wife. Then he went and stood by her, and she turned to him like a frightened child.

  “O, Noll, it’s horrible of me, horrible, but the shadow’s gone.”

  He bent and kissed her.

  “He had his chance.”

  COCKTAILS FOR TWO

  Redmayne was bored.

  He was not bored because it was raining, and the sea the colour of lead. The inwardness of his ennui was more subtle and delicate; it transcended a mere mood; it shaded towards the twilight of lost illusions.

  For five years he had been farming in Rhodesia, and a lonely sort of life such as this is apt to breed illusions. Out there he would turn on the gramophone at night and grow quite sentimental, even as in the war he had sometimes grown sentimental about women and dogs and children.

  “O, to be in England now that April’s here!”

  He had landed in England in April, a dolorous, gusty April, with the spring in cold storage and the Nymph’s nose looking blue. Ye gods, and that London hotel, an hotel that considered itself so exclusive that it even scorned gas-stoves in the bedrooms, and made the discovering of a bathroom a sort of adventure in no man’s land! A week in that hotel feeling liverish! He had escaped into the country to visit a girl who had assisted in the preservation of an illusion. He could afford to marry now, but when he had seen Norah Cairns he had lost all appetite for marriage. He had found her shrill and energetic; blue-eyed and pragmatical, and somehow suggesting those formidable women who have made England great and virtuous. He had sojourned for three days at a country pub, living on much cold meat and boiled potatoes, and fruit salad, and finding Norah as indigestible as the food. He had had to make some sort of mumbling apology.

  “Good to see old friends.”

  And suddenly he had packed his suit-case and fled. The situation was like an English April, the product of poetic license. There was no license about Norah. But if she had expected him to ask her to marry him——! O, well, you had to allow that five years might make a devil of a difference.

  Redmayne had spent three weeks with his people, and then experimented for a second time with London theatres, cinemas, an occasional night-club, lonely loafings about old familiar streets. A flashy gentleman had tried to work the confidence trick on him and been balked. He had been accosted by pretty ladies. Then suddenly May had produced a w
eek of sunshine and a suggestion of lilac-time. Someone or something had spoken to him of Sussex, and the downlands and the sea.

  He had remembered a little place that had delighted him as a lad. Pannage. Queer name, Pannage! It had reminded him of a shingle bank, a strip of sandy turf, an old cliff, a row of white coastguards’ cottages. He had taken the train to St. Martin’s and put up at the Queen’s Hotel. He had made inquiries about Pannage at a local house-agent’s.

  They had offered to let him a furnished bungalow at Pannage, and in one of those moments of hope and resignation he had accepted the suggestion.

  “All right, I’ll take it.”

  He was not afraid of picnicking at Pannage. He could cook. He would prefer to be alone in the Sussex of a memory. He could loaf and walk and bathe. The plunge off the steep shingle bank at Pannage had been epic. Just the gulls, the sea, the sky, and the wind in the grasses.

  But when a motor-bus had deposited Redmayne and his luggage at the new and transfigured Pannage he had regretted his impetuosity. He should have distrusted that motor-bus. It had unloaded him outside a flaring, tin tea-house, that was also a grocer’s shop and a post office, and which led the procession of shacks and bungalows and old army huts that mottled the spit of land between the old cliff and the sea. The first human beings whom Redmayne had met in the new Pannage had been two young things parading in brilliant pyjamas, and a fat man wearing dirty grey flannel shorts and a shirt that was rather too small for him.

  He had accosted the fat man.

  “Excuse me, can you tell me where ‘Eglantine’ is? It’s a bungalow.”

  The fat man had been matey.

  “Straight ahead, old chap. Right at the end of the village. Stands a bit by itself.”

  Redmayne had thanked him and fled from the friendliness of those naked and nobbly knees.

  The name of “Eglantine” chapleted the owner’s inverted sense of humour. The bungalow belonged to a rather celebrated person, Mr. Stephen Branker, the novelist. Mr. Branker had left Pannage less than a month ago and had put “Eglantine” in the hands of all the local agents. Nor was there any honeysuckle growing over the little white box of a bungalow with its roof like a red lid. Mr. Branker had purchased “Eglantine” for the purpose of “copy”; he had been engaged upon a novel in which a little world of the “Pannage” type was portrayed, and a week or so before the publication of the novel Mr. Branker had abandoned Pannage. It was as well.