Shabby Summer

by Warwick Deeping

  But placid and eventless days had eluded her. She had become a secretary, only to find hat her looks did not allow such a relationship to remain unemotional. Then, she had met Max, a man who went about complaining that his wife did not understand him, and who had been comforted by half a dozen successive sympathetic women. That she had come somewhere about the seventh in the list had not been revealed to her, for, in spite of her experience, life had left her surprisingly innocent. She wanted to give. She wanted to sit down in a comfortable chair and stay put, and not to have to play the amateur pretty lady to the promiscuous male. Max had talked sententiously of divorce. He had dangled the apple of divorce before a number of women. She had not suspected it. But now, she was beginning to understand that when the sense magic pales, and a man becomes petulant and rude—— Yes, her stretch of tranquil water had proved elusive. She was sliding inevitably towards one of those wet crises from which she might again emerge breathless and dishevelled. A poor, pretty jade’s progress!

  Max was asleep in the hammock. She heard him snoring. No man is impressive when he snores, and Max Broster, brilliant worldling though he was, was ceasing to be impressive. Was this flaccid-mouthed, stertorous male one of the city Olympians who set companies afloat, and backed plays, and was a golden noise in the cinematograph world? She left her chair and went to stand beside the hammock, and realizing that she could look upon this sleeping babe without compassion, was shocked and nauseated. If you loved a man adequately and completely, you could love him when he snored, and when he had a boil on his poor neck, and when his ridiculous trouser-buttons were being temperamental. You loved him in any sort of trouble. He whimpered, and you ran to comfort him as you rushed to console your own small child that had fallen down and bloodied its little knees.

  She hated herself, despised herself.

  She accused herself of bearing with Max Broster, not because she loved him, but for the material things he represented. Yes, she was just a kept woman who sold her smiles and a suborned sympathy for frocks and a house and servants and a bank account. Hers was a business concern, a sex-shop, a relationship that was as old as time, and yet, somehow, strangely and flagrantly new to her. She, who had always been so fastidious about her hair and her face and her finger-nails, felt soiled.

  * * *

  Ghent, who was watching her instead of going to sleep, and who, being a creature of sentiment, was misconstruing her hoverings about the sleeping figure in the hammock, saw her wander away towards the boat-house. The punt emerged from its kennel of shadow and slid out into the sunlight. She poled it into mid-stream, and then stood with the pole trailing in the water. She looked about her, and saw a green and empty world, nor was she aware of the man concealed under the drooping elm. She had left the paddles in the boat-house. Three hundred yards or so away the weir maintained a rolling underchant. The stream was flowing sluggishly but with inevitableness towards that curve of water and the turbulent weir pool above the bridge.

  She could not swim. Strange but true in these days when the whole world takes to the water.

  Ghent sat up sharply in his chair.

  She had dropped the punt-pole into the river.

  He stood up. Surely there were paddles in the boat?

  He saw her kneel down, and fold her hands, almost like a figure surrendering to fate.

  He was up and running. He reached the bank.

  “I say, the weir. Haven’t you a paddle?”

  He was aware of her face turned towards him. It had a kind of vacancy. She did not move or answer.

  He had his shoes off in five seconds. He was in shorts and shirt. He waded in and swam to where the pole was floating, and recovering it, turned downstream in pursuit of the punt. It was drifting broadside across the river. She was kneeling there, facing him as though paralysed by life’s interventions.

  She saw his head drawing nearer. It seemed to her that his face had a young fierceness, and she wanted to weep.

  He reached the punt, gripped the gunwale with his free hand, stared.

  “I say, you know, the weir’s only just down there.”

  She stared back at him.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Can you manage? I might climb in, but I’m rather wet.”

  “Yes, I can manage. Thank you, so much.”

  She leaned over and took the pole from him, and again their eyes met.

  “How did you manage to drop it?”

  Her eyes fell.

  “Oh, I just dropped it. Thank you so much.”

  VII

  Max Broster was still snoring, when, having put the punt away, she sneaked back to her chair. Yes, sneak was the word. She was conscious of an inward numbness, as though she had been beaten, yet with no physical ache to assure her of its reality. She could not say why, but she felt profoundly humiliated, as though the last shred of virtue had gone out of her. Virtue! Detestable word! Her poor, silly tussle with fate had ended in frustration and futility.

  “How did you manage to drop the pole?”

  “Oh, I just dropped it.”

  What did he think? That she was just the complete and fumbling fool? But what did it matter what he thought? The sun had moved in the heavens, and her chair was in the full shade. She shivered slightly, and moved it into the sunlight. The essential, throbbing I in her seemed to flinch at the thought of its narrow escape from that damp and smothering darkness. By now, she would have been on the weir pool or drifting beyond it, pale and submerged, or floating under the willows. She put a finger to her mouth and bit it as a protest against picturesque self-pity. And Max was snoring like the last trump blown by some anthropomorphic angel whose baby face had never been scorched by the terrors that afflict poor mortals.

  Ghent, trotting back to the cottage to change, had been barked at protestingly by Bunter, a Bunter who, for strange canine, ethical reasons, gave his afternoons to Mrs. Maintenance. “What’s this, my master?”—and Mrs. Maintenance, bobbing out to see what the pother was about, caught Ghent at the foot of the stairs.

  “Lorks, Mr. Peter, what have you been doing?”

  Ghent had a strange face upon him, the face of a young man who could not tell whether he had looked upon the mask of Tragedy or Comedy.

  “Oh, just been in the river.”

  “And in those clothes!”

  “Yes, someone lost a punt-pole, and I had to swim for it.”

  Mrs. Maintenance took that piece of news back with her into the kitchen, knowing somehow that it would spoil the nap she indulged in after her washing-up. She would pull down the blind, settle herself in the armchair, put her feet up on another, fold her red comfortable hands over her tummy, and feel that all was well with the world. But, a punt-pole dropped into the river! Only some silly wench would do such a thing. Besides, Mr. Peter would not be likely to take a ducking to recover a male pole. Moreover, the wench, whoever she was, might not be so silly. Mrs. Maintenance suspected all young women of having designs upon her Mr. Peter, especially young women who wore trousers or practically nothing at all, those bits who bathed down at The Blue Lagoon. Bold-faced gigs, that’s what they were, and Mr. Peter was in Mrs. Maintenance’s eyes the brave, lovely and defenceless hero. Hadn’t she caught young women ringing the bell and asking to see the nursery? Nursery indeed! They were after her handsome lad, and adventures that did not end in christenings. Which goes to prove that Mrs. Maintenance had no high opinion of the modern young woman. Bits, that’s what they were, with powder and paint and other useful etceteras concealed like serpents in their vanity-bags.

  Peter was in the bathroom, towelling himself, after dropping his wet clothes on the floor. Bunter, sniffing at them inquisitively, cocked an eye and one ear at his master. Why this thusness? He watched his master knot the towel round him like a loin-cloth and march into his bedroom. Bunter followed, and sat down in the middle of the floor with his long nose drooping and his hairy forehead black with profound, doggy thought. His master opened a drawer and took out a clean shirt, a
nd slipping it over his head, walked to the window. Bunter’s head cocked itself with a characteristic and interested obliqueness. Peter’s fingers were doing up shirt-buttons, but his eyes were looking across the river at the group under the lime trees. The man was still asleep in the hammock. The girl was sitting in the sunlight, with her throat showing, and her face turned towards the sky.

  Ghent’s fingers fastened the last shirt-button.

  Had she dropped that pole on purpose?

  If so——

  But why?

  And if she had chosen to go drifting to the weir while the man was asleep in the hammock, then assuredly he, Peter Ghent, had misread the whole meaning of the sentimental scene. Problem people! Yes, and the first impression she had made upon him, that of a sensitive creature with frightened eyes?

  He turned about, and going to the hanging-cupboard in a corner of the room, took down a pair of grey flannel trousers, and stepped into them. More buttons demanded attention, but while his fingers functioned, his face was turned again to the window. He became aware of the strip of sunlight between the figure in the chair and the man asleep in the hammock. Did that little stretch of sunlit sward mean anything? He wondered.

  * * *

  Max Broster woke with a gulp and a grievance against life that had its origin in a disordered stomach. He lay and looked at the green canopy above him, and was confronted, as a man in his state often is on waking, by the recollection of certain exasperating and untoward circumstances that had happened in the City. Who would have expected a firm like Gunter & Rosentein to founder at the very moment when he was involved in a new flotation? It was most damnably awkward just when the particular picture company in which he was interested was undergoing what the financial euphemists describe as reconstruction. He had had a run of bad luck, and as he lay there very conscious of inward disharmonies, he was moved to reflect that his luck had changed since he had been associated with Renata Strangeways. Yes, Irene might be a bit of a bitch, but he had always managed to pull off his deals in her company. Rows, yes, but they had been stimulating rows. And Irene could be damned good fun when she was not in a temper, and even her temper was stimulating. It had a kick. She could mix a cocktail better than any woman he knew. Pah, why did everything taste of paraffin? Besides, Irene had two thousand a year of her own.

  He felt peevish. He wanted to be made much of, petted. If you put a pretty friend into a house and opened a banking account for her, surely she should exercise all her feminine functions in your favour? And where was Rena? He twisted over in the hammock, and craned his head round the cushions. He saw an empty chair, and a stretch of sunlit grass going down to the river, but no blonde angel waiting to minister to his moods. Confound it, she ought to be about when he was feeling seedy. Women were so damned selfish!

  He swung his legs out of the hammock and sat up.

  “Hallo, Rena.”

  But the swaying movement of the hammock seemed to exaggerate his feeling of squeamishness, and lying sideways, he put his head back on the cushions. Where was the woman? Attending to her face or something? And what was the time? He pulled out his watch. Nine and a half minutes past four. Perhaps she was getting tea ready. Tea! More butter that tasted of paraffin! He could manage a cup of tea with a slice of lemon in it.

  And then he saw her. She was coming from the direction of the Folly Farm orchard, and beyond the circle of shadow thrown by the limes. She moved with a kind of languor, and her face was turned towards the river. Sauntering about and dreaming when he was in pain! Yes, most certainly he was in pain. He could feel one of his sick headaches developing.

  He called to her sharply “Rena,” and saw her head turn with a little jerk. She stood still, staring. Her eyes looked big and strange.

  “Rena.”

  She moved slowly into the shadow of the limes.

  “What about some tea?”

  “Tea?”

  She repeated the word vaguely, and her vagueness annoyed him. Hang it all, he did expect some active sympathy!

  “Yes, I could manage a cup with some lemon in it, and no sugar.”

  She appeared strangely uninterested in his needs. She turned and stood looking over the river.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t any lemons.”

  “What! No lemons!”

  “No.”

  Well, really! How futile and inefficient of her! And she had not asked him whether he had slept, and whether his poor stomach felt less queasy. Almost he blurted: “What the devil do I pay you for?”

  He sat up, and clasped his forehead.

  “Got any aspirin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve a cracking head coming on. Get me a cup of tea, no milk or sugar, and a couple of aspirins, there’s a good girl.”

  She looked at him again with those strange, wide eyes of hers, and then, without one comforting word, walked past the hammock towards the house. He was annoyed. Sulky, was she! What the devil had she to be sulky about? Good lord, hadn’t he given her——? But women were all alike. Selfish, temperamental, unintelligible creatures. The he-man stuff was the only treatment that worked with most of them.

  Headache and heartache! It did not occur to him that a woman might be feeling desperate after her failure to give expression to her despair, that something in her was crying out for comradeship and comfort. She wanted to be loved, not for her finger-nails and her frocks, but for that which was in her, that which was so desperately lonely.

  * * *

  Ghent felt restless, for the aspirin and that ducking in the river seemed to have cured his headache, and being a man of his hands, was moved to use them when the spirit vexed the flesh. There were jobs ready to his hand, though he did not belong to a generation that spoke of the deed being the better for the day. Life on the land allows you no interludes save those you impose upon yourself. Propagation, soft wood cuttings, why not? He had meant to check for himself some of the latest experiments that had been conducted at Wisley on the effects of certain chemicals in solution upon root production. He had the stuff ready in his little lab, which was no more than an old kitchen table under one of the windows in his office. He collected his vasculum and a knife, and going out wandered about among the young shrubs, taking the green wood slips from them. He selected specimens of cistus, ceanothus, daphne, caryopteris, lycesteria, and a succulent salvia with a pink flower that was only half hardy. In a shady place by an old tree trunk grew the Alpine clematis, Atragene Alpina, though its exquisite pale blue flowers had become balls of white fluff. He took some slips from it, and carried his collection to the old red brick building beyond the weeping elm.

  Sitting down at the table with an assortment of little glass jars, cuttings, labels and his bottle of solution, he got to work, but though his fingers were busy, his thoughts were elsewhere. Even the texture of the young leaves which he stripped from the twigs provoked in him other sense impressions. Being what he was, he was sensitive to the varying textures of the live things among which he lived. The cistus leaves in particular, with their soft downiness, were more than leaves. Epidermis, skin, the delicate, creamy bloom of a particular skin, a woman’s skin, neither velvet nor vellum, for both were dead surfaces. Yes, she had one of those perfect skins that seem to light up from within, and are associated with certain types of fairness, very delicately coloured with a tinge of gold in it, warm and blemishless. And her hair! It waved back from forehead and temples with a liquid gentleness. It had for him a strange, innocent chastity. Even that little honey-coloured bob over the nape of her neck seemed virginal.

  Chastity!

  He upset one of his bottles and frowned over it. Clumsy ass! What was the matter with his hands? Chastity indeed, with that fellow loafing in the hammock under the lime trees! But why had she dropped the punt-pole into the river? Frightened eyes. Oh, damn, he was getting sloppy.

  Science describes, but does not explain, and having sacrificed to science and planted his little cuttings in their bottles, he suffered nature to
have her way. He took his gun and the dog, and following the river bank, saw that the man had left the hammock for a chair, and was smoking a cigarette. Did the fellow never use his legs, but only sit or lie? His partner in the problem play was not to be seen. Ghent strolled on past Folly Island, and on this summer evening the river seemed to swell exultantly between its green banks. Here were the lushness and the wetness that he coveted for his trees. God, for one of those glittering days when drenching showers poured from the passing clouds, and the sun shone out between the showers, and the dry and thirsty land steamed! He walked on as far as the wire fence to discover whether Temple Towers had made another attack upon his wire netting.

  On the other side of the boundary fence Mr. Roger Crabtree’s park was producing a magnificent weed-crop, docks, thistles and ragwort. They would be left uncut to go to seed, and birds and the wind would carry the seeds to Peter’s land. But then, old Crabtree and the commercialists catered for the urban crowd. Foul land did not matter to the city. Mr. Crabtree was a successful person who developed estates, and made much money out of his hideous little houses. What were a few weeds, after all, especially if they were a nuisance to a hostile neighbour? And was Lady Melissa right about the Crabtree world? Did nature prefer the competitive people, the ruthless exploiters of every opportunity? Yes, Ghent could suppose that humanitarianism was a disease of the hypersensitive moderns, a form of senility, and that England had been made by its Crabtrees and might be saved by them, Iron men, who kept sentiment like a tame beast in a back garden.