Читать книгу Interference - Roland Pertwee - Страница 4

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One of the secrets of John Marlay’s success lay in the energy with which he attacked every branch of his work. He possessed a rare ability to disassociate his thoughts from all that had gone before and absorb them utterly in some new enterprise.

During working hours he never slacked off nor allowed his mentality to idle. If he found himself with a few moments to spare between a departing and an arriving patient he extracted from them the final second’s worth of value. His work over, he would plunge into recreation with equal enthusiasm. It was this gift of detachment that made him so loved by his wife, his niece Barbara, and his friends.

When alone with Faith, no other consideration but her happiness entered his mind. Because in her muddling, uncomprehending way she liked to be conversant with his activities, he sprinkled his talk with scraps of professional matter, gravely asking her advice, and gravely approving the manner in which she gave it. Her credulity was unbounded, and from time to time, he could not resist the temptation to invent absurd little leg-pulls, or cast gaudy and ridiculous flies at which she never failed to rise.

His love of Faith took precedence over every other consideration in his life. Work, Success, Ambition, all took a second place to the smooth, soft, violet-eyed girl chance had let him rescue from the wreckage of a disastrous early marriage.

At the end of the war, as a result of five years’ gruelling work in a variety of field-dressing and casualty clearing stations and base hospitals, John had gone, on his own advice, for a cruise to Australia, where, with the first sign of returning activity he had started to write a book on nervous ailments. He advertised, in a Sydney paper, for a stenographer, but the high-spirited, bobbed-haired, short-skirted non-stop talkers who responded to his enquiry did not belong to the type that was likely to prove a sympathetic recorder of the technical matter he proposed to dictate. He had determined to carry on as best he could by himself, when a page-boy entered his private sitting-room with a card bearing the name Faith Voaze. Marlay shook his head.

‘I have seen enough for one day, she had better come back in the morning.’ But the words were scarcely spoken when in the doorway he saw Faith for the first time.

The effect she produced on him was as remarkable as it was instantaneous.

She was slender, but exquisitely rounded. Her small face looked to him like a lily on a stalk. Under a shabby felt hat bunches of crisp brown curls clustered over and concealed her ears. Her eyes, like wet violets, had been smudged into their hollows by a finger dipped mummy brown. Her skin was the colour of ivory and John observed how her trembling lower lip was caught between her teeth. One hand rested on the lintel of the door—the other hung limp at her side.

There was about her something faun-like and defenceless. Her expression seemed to mirror the tale of a bruised soul. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. The limp hand rose, touched her throat, then, with an apologetic gesture, dropped to her side again. It was as a Doctor that John Marlay spoke his first words to her.

‘Come in and sit down, you have been frightened.’

The page-boy departed with a smile.

Faith moved to the small elbow chair by the window, and the rays of the evening sun slanting across the harbour waters reflected a pink glow upon her cheeks.

John Marlay knew human nature too well to risk startling her by a direct question. Returning to his writing table he made some pretence of addressing an envelope, looked up and smiled his crinkly smile at her.

Something in that smile gave her confidence. Rather pathetically, she tried to smile back and said, in a barely audible voice which had about it the soft suggestion of an Irish brogue—

‘It is silly to be nervous, but I have not been very lucky when I have tried to find work. My fault I expect.’

‘You needn’t be scared of me. Meeting strangers is always embarrassing,’ said John. ‘Is it the secretary’s job you came about?’

She nodded.

‘Not that I suppose I should be any good, really, only, you see, since my—for the last two years—I have been serving in the little restaurants by the Circular Quay—it was awfully hard work, and rather hateful. Sailors, and all sorts of people back from the sea—I suppose one can’t blame them——’ She closed her eyes and shuddered. ‘But it frightened me. You will think I am an awful fool, only when one has been frightened that way——’

Once more she broke off and stared through the open window, her smooth brow creased in an effort of concentration.

‘I ought to tell you that I can’t do shorthand, but I think, with practice, I could learn to use the typewriter.’ And then in a most ridiculous way, like a hurt child, she sniffed, bit her lip, pressed a hand over her mouth, and said, ‘I am wasting your time, I know I am wasting your time.’

Something in the tone and gesture convinced John Marlay that the girl was hungry. Crossing the room he took her hands and looked critically into her face.

‘When did you have a meal last; a square, honest-to-God meal?’

She tried to avoid his eyes, but they were too compelling to escape from.

‘Mid-day,’ she said.

John shook his head.

‘I am a doctor,’ he told her, ‘and if a doctor is any good at all, as I believe I am, he knows the truth when he hears it and knows an untruth when he hears it. Come on now. Cut this pride stuff—when?’

‘I don’t remember, honestly I don’t.’

‘You’re broke?’

‘No, that is, I am broke, but I need not be. I could get money if I cared to—to ask for it.’

‘How do you mean? From whom?’

‘A firm of solicitors, my—’ she hesitated—‘my husband’s solicitors.’

A wave of something only to be defined as jealousy went through John.

‘Your husband,’ he repeated.

‘Yes, he’s dead.’

The wave of jealousy ran up the sands of displeasure—ebbed and was gone.

‘He was killed just before the armistice.’

‘I am sorry,’ said John.

It was impossible to believe that soft small voice could become so hard.

‘Are you?’ she answered. ‘If it were not wicked and unforgivable, I could almost say, “thank God!” ’

‘Would it ease your mind to tell me about it?’ he asked. ‘Confidence is good for everyone. Besides, a doctor’s a privileged listener.’

While she hesitated, uncertain how to reply, he moved to the house telephone and called through.

‘Send up some tea, will you? Boiled eggs and buttered toast, jam, honey, you know, a nice tea.’ Then in answer to the gratitude in her eyes, ‘Don’t know what you think, but, in my opinion, a high tea is the best meal in the world.’ She said nothing and he went on. ‘So your husband left you some money, but you prefer to go hungry?’

‘He didn’t leave it to me,’ said Faith, ‘not after he died, I mean. It was when he went away—deserted me three years ago. A thousand pounds with a firm of solicitors, for me to draw upon when I liked.’

‘You haven’t liked?’

She shook her head.

‘When you are trying to forget someone you don’t willingly do things to remind you.’

He nodded. There was pluck and character in the reason she had given.

‘What sort of a ruffian was this?’ he asked.

‘Philip?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know. It has all gone misty.’ She broke off, ‘Why am I telling you, I wonder?’

‘Because we are going to be friends, perhaps,’ he answered, ‘and there should be no secrets between friends.’

She raised her eyes and in them was a queer look of admiration.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Twenty.’

‘Your husband left you three years ago, you say. You can’t have been very old when you married him.’

‘Seventeen.’

He made a rapid calculation.

‘It didn’t last long?’

‘Three months, that’s all, as his wife.’ She stopped and added, ‘But before that——’

John Marlay could not help wishing that she would deny him the confidence that started ‘before that.’

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I was at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, in the Blue Mountains. My mother and father were dead. Philip came there to paint.’

‘An artist?’

‘Philip was everything,’ she replied. ‘He could do everything and he knew everything. We met and talked. I had hardly spoken to a man before that, and his voice—there was something about him. He knew everything,’ she repeated.

‘I never told the Sisters when I came back from my walk, and then day after day we met. At night he used to come just near enough to the wing of the convent, in which I slept, for me to be able to hear him whistle. It sounds silly, whistling, doesn’t it? But he whistled like a bird, not tunes—but bird songs in the night. I lay awake listening and dreaming and thrilling. No one knew, not even my special friends among the girls. It was my secret to lie there and hear him. Then one day when we met in the woods, he whistled a few different notes to me and laughed. “Do you know what they mean?” he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t know and he said, “Those are the notes with which a blackbird in the English lanes calls to his mate when spring has come.” He dropped his voice and his lips brushed my hair. “One of these nights,” he said, “I shall whistle that call to you. Of your charity, Faith, what would you do, if you heard it? Would you come?” ’

‘I told him I didn’t know, but it was a lie. I did know, I knew I should. After that, night after night. I listened for that call alone. I told you he was clever, he knew everything and how long waiting breaks one down. When at last I heard the call I did not stay to think but crept out of bed and into my clothes, and climbed down by the creeper to where he was waiting in the convent garden. There was a buggy in a lane near by and we drove miles and miles along a dusty white road in the moonlight.’

‘He said there would be a priest to marry us at the rest house where we were to stay that night, but when we arrived, nobody was there, not even the old woman who kept house. There was not a soul but our two selves and we waited for the priest who never came. I was afraid then, afraid to go on, afraid to go back and loving him and believing that nothing mattered but my love for him.’ She paused and rubbed her forehead helplessly.

‘I shall never forget that night, we two, one at each end of a long wooden table with a guttering candle which flickered out as the dawn came. Once he asked if he should take me back to the convent, and I could not answer, for there was a look in his eyes which made me feel that life would end for him if I said “Yes.” ’

She shuddered. ‘He knew—he knew everything.’

John Marlay had moved back into the shadows of the room listening to that soft trembling voice, telling the world-old tale of seduction. Here he stood with knit brows and hands shut and a smouldering anger and indignation against the dead man who had deflowered this child.

‘After that,’ he said, ‘he married you?’

She nodded.

‘Two months after. I think, in a way, he was happy with me until then. Marriage ended everything. He said I had chained him, cheated him of his freedom. Freedom was Philip’s God. Then for a frightful three months he destroyed every illusion I had. He drank—he boasted of the ugly life he had led and the ugly companions he had shared it with. Then one day a woman came, a woman who had been his—his friend before me. Somehow she found out about our marriage and where we lived. That was the most terrible day of my life. The shame of it haunts me always. I can still see Philip standing with his back against the wall drinking brandy and laughing at us. Then quite suddenly, as was his way, he became angry, bitterly, terribly angry. “You fool, Deborah,” he cried—that was her name, Deborah Kane—“You fool, do you think I am the kind of man to go back to you? Haven’t you learned that life is a pageant made up of things left behind?” I have never forgotten those words, they were so terribly true of Philip; he was a man with whom nothing lasted.

‘A little while after I was taken ill and went to a Sydney nursing home for a month. When I got back the house was empty and there was a note from Philip telling me where to get money if I needed it. “My dear Faith, you were too good to be true,” he wrote. I next heard of him with some girl from a travelling theatrical company in Melbourne, and after that, he went to France as a soldier. He was killed in the British retreat in 1918 and his body was never found.’

Three weeks later, Faith, widow of Philip Voaze, was married to John Marlay at a Registrar’s office in Sydney. As they drove away he said:

‘Our life begins from to-day. Everything that has gone before is forgotten.’

And the admiration in her eyes told him that the future held so much in store, that there was no room even for a flicker of memory of the past.