Читать книгу The Secret Sanctuary (Historical Novel) - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Stow House, Esher, was very much what Rollin Beal might have expected it to be, save that it was white instead of red. Its chimneys and slate roofs were visible from the road, but you won no complete view of the house until you had passed through the blue gates hung on white pillars, and rounded a bank of rhododendrons and conifers. Then the house burst upon you suddenly, smiling its broad white smile at the end of a lawn which had the colour and the flatness of a billiard table. It was an obvious house and it said the obvious thing. "Here I am! Yes, I am feeling very well, thank you." It had the appearance of being polished, for it had been repainted that spring. The polish extended to the drive and the garden, where everything was patted and raked and rolled into superlative neatness, and no errant autumn leaf was suffered to skip and whirl to the music of the wind.

Beal had one glimpse of old Stretton's house standing there in its white waistcoat before the slowly rolling car carried him up the long drive and showed him the figure of a young man moving slowly along the front of the herbaceous border on the far side of the lawn. The attitude of the figure was curious. The man carried a stick. He kept pausing and hitting at something with the stick just as though he were knocking off the heads of flowers. He did not appear to hear the car, or if he did he took no notice of it.

Beal was dropped into the porch, a classic thing with two solid white pillars. A maid stood at the door, ready to receive him and his suit-case from the chauffeur. The large hall had a Turkey carpet, a soft and very comfortable carpet like everything else in the house of Bartholomew Stretton.

The maid, setting down the suit-case, took Beal's hat, scarf and coat. She said nothing. She was all detachment, thoroughly impersonal. She opened the door of the drawing-room and for the first time Beal heard her voice.

"Dr. Rollin Beal."

A woman rose to meet him, giving him the impression that she had been sitting on the edge of a chair for the last half-hour, waiting to get up and make a speech.

"I am so very glad to see you, Dr. Beal; I am so grateful to you for coming."

Old Stretton's wife had blue eyes and grey hair, a weak mouth, the lips rather pouched out over prominent teeth. She was thin, tallish, long in the waist, with a back which seemed to bend easily, too easily. Her attitude was one of amiability, an amiability that was without insight or discretion, and smiled the same smile at coalheavers or kings. She was a woman who made a mystery of things without having any grasp of the essential mystery of everything. She had a pathetic little trick of trying to appear very shy and sweetly knowing, just as though she were trying to mystify and hoodwink some eternal child.

"I must apologise for my husband. He has gone to golf, but he went on purpose. Of course, you understand."

She sat down, uneasily, looking at him with a conspirator's smile. Beal sat down opposite her in this pink room of hers, pink in its cretonnes, its carpet, its light shades, its roses on the wall, like the artificial pinkness of her pleasant and unmysterious life. She was a good woman, a very limited woman, but Beal had a feeling that she would be saved by her good nature.

"John is in the garden. It is such a relief to feel that you are here, Dr. Beal. It has been a terrible time."

Beal very gently assured her that it must have been, and then he tried to find out whether the mother had any intuitive knowledge of what was passing in the mind of her son. She was ready to talk, eager to talk; unlike her husband, she had not been irritated by having so painful a problem forced upon her affections at a time of life when people expect to be able to relax. She was an affectionate woman; John had always been her favourite, but the affair had bewildered her. She could make nothing of it save that it seemed part of "that terrible and wicked war."

It was obvious to Beal that she had been hurt by her son's fierce reticence. She did not understand it; she said so.

"He's so funny, doctor. We have done all that we can think of to make him feel that we are just the same as ever, that we know that he couldn't help what happened, and that the old home is home. He won't talk to us."

She shed a few tears.

"I had his old room ready for him—just as it used to be. I did everything. There were all the old books he used to love, and the picture of Dante and Beatrice. He never said a word! He hardly speaks to us at all. Oh, it has hurt me."

Beal's kind eyes glanced towards one of the windows.

"You must not think too much of this silence. Some men, Mrs. Stretton, hate showing any emotion. They hide it."

"But why from me? Isn't a mother a man's best friend?"

He could not answer, "Sometimes, but not often," and so he turned the conversation towards the object of his visit.

"I want to see as much of John as I can. Men sometimes talk to doctors. That mustn't make you jealous. We are fellow conspirators, Mrs. Stretton."

She rallied to that, and getting up with her air of sweet knowingness, tiptoed to the window and peeped out. She made a mystery of it, as she made a mystery of everything.

"Yes, he is still there. Now what on earth is he doing with that stick?"

The stoop showed in her figure. She drooped over the eternal child idea, blindly sentimental even when a grown man raged.

"Perhaps you would like to go out to John?"

Beal welcomed the suggestion, and he went.

Autumn has a way of coming into a garden with a broad sweep of the hand, a gesture of liberation, of a queen claiming her own. A wild beauty returns, and with it a touch of sadness; the last flowers hang heavy with dew; the leaves are yellowing on the stems; man's ordered neatness becomes a tangle, a mystery. But in this garden of the Strettons man still held his own, defying autumn with a forest of green stakes and a spider-work of bass, with scissors and hoe, lawn-sweeper and broom. In it Beal heard the voice of the conventional soul, the soul which has a horror of mystery and of the uncomfortable and changeful, things it cannot understand.

"Security—security! Let us have chrysanthemums in pots. Let us stake the dahlias, and parade the begonias like bits of coloured tin in rows. Let us have our bacon and eggs at nine o'clock each morning, and our bridge at nine each night. Security—comfortable security. Great goddess, we love thee."

Rounding a bank of Michaelmas daisies, sheaves of green starred white and rose and purple, Beal came upon a living protest against the Stretton worship of security. Old Bartholomew loved labels; if he could read the name of a thing he felt that he knew all about it, and there were times in the year when the Stretton garden grew labels and no flowers. Neat white pegs stuck in everywhere, or little zinc lockets dangling from the throats of the bushes and the trees. And here was Jack Stretton with his stick swiping deliberately at every label within reach, sending them flying out of the ground.

Beal felt relieved. It was as though a black panther had got into a suburban back garden and was making things interesting.

"Hallo, doctor!"

Beal saw the other man's eyes light up. Often it had been Beal's experience to be met with suspicion, for those who are sick in mind may see in the physician the judge and arbiter, the man who can deny to them the precious privilege of sanity. Beal knew that look, the animal's fear of the cage, but Stretton's eyes met his without distrust.

"I'm glad you've come."

He gave a last swipe at a label.

"Look at these fool things!"

And then he faced Beal, smiling slightly, the lovable rebel, a man whose eyes had a deadly sincerity. He was not asking anybody to perpetuate illusions. He knew his own danger, and it was probable that he realized his own immediate helplessness.

"The pater's at golf."

"I know," said Beal.

"You have seen my mother."

"She suggested I should come out here."

He looked at John Stretton. He felt that he had never seen him so vividly, so much himself, the slim, tallish, whipcord figure, the brittle blue-grey eyes, the head held rather high with its intelligent and slightly sloping forehead and pointed chin suggesting movement and the forward urge and uplift of the prow of a ship. The figure was a little defiant. It confronted things that were calculable and incalculable. There was something about it too that suggested helplessness, appeal, a look that touched Beal very deeply. It was like youth, wounded, suffering, proud, crying with its dumb eyes: "Doctor, get me out of this!"

Stretton glanced at the house with its flat, white smile.

"Everything is dead here, you know, dead as—"

And then he swung round again and faced Beal. "Look here, I have got to talk. If I don't—"

"Of course," said Beal, "that's what I have come for. I'm glad."

They began to wander up and down together, and Beal noticed that Stretton kept as far away from the house as possible, favouring the stretch of grass beyond the cedar. He was restless, extremely restless. He kept prodding the ground with his stick. Now that he could talk and had the very man to whom he could talk unconstrainedly, he found himself inarticulate. He just blurted things with a half brutal boyish sincerity.

"I feel I want to get out of the whole damned show. But I'm tied up in it. Just like this garden with all those infernal labels."

He swung about and looked almost fiercely at Beal.

"Don't try and gloze things over, doctor. I'm sick of this 'hush camp.' I'm a case. I'm not afraid of facing it; one got used to that out there."

He smacked with his stick at a branch of the decorous cedar.

"But, after all those years, to come back as a potential murderer, a sort of live shell which everybody is afraid of! It sounds absurd, doesn't it?"

Beal said quietly that nothing is absurd except ignorance and conceit, and the vulgarity which does not know that it is vulgar.

"You are going to get well, Jack."

And then Stretton blazed.

"But not here. Don't think me a beast, but look at that damned house! Just look at it, like a fat, respectable stomach! I tell you what it is, Beal, I see things too clearly. The pater is the kindest-hearted old soul, but there are times when he hates me. I'm a thing which every decent middle-class person hates, a problem, like the unemployed, you know, or the ex-soldier. We are always in such a hurry to forget uncomfortable things, and I'm an uncomfortable thing. Poor old dad; he gets me at breakfast; he gets me in the morning paper. He has reached the age when he wants to potter, and he can't forget that he has a live shell in the house."

He laughed, a laugh which made Beal wince.

"And then there's the mater! Poor old mater! She goes about on tiptoe; she's always watching me and pretending she's not watching me; I believe she would like to have everything padded with feather beds. All the while she has been wanting me to do the goody book thing, get down on my knees and put my head in her lap and blub. And I can't, Beal. And I know it hurts her. She doesn't understand. I don't want to be sentimental about myself; I want to fight, man, fight."

"So you shall, my dear chap."

Stretton calmed down a little after that.

"After all, it's not their fault. They are only part of the scheme of things. They are kind; most people are kind, but the bother is they don't know how to be kind in the right way. And there is no getting away from the fact that I'm a nuisance, an infernal problem. There is only one person who has made me really mad."

"And who's that?"

"That blessed brother of mine, Reginald. He's a selfish swine, Beal. Excuse my language; I'm not quite nice and civilized again yet. I call a spade a spade."

"Don't worry about Reginald. Carlyon understands."

"Oh, Car's a sport," and he gave a flourish of the stick.

His voice lost its note of resentment. He had exploded; he had said things which he had been spoiling to say, and he felt better for it; he had said them to a man who understood the psychological virtue of a good curse or a grumble. "Blessed are those who curse, for they shall be eased with words." A gentler mood descended upon him. He was still the rebel who retained his sense of honour. He paused by the cedar, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his old brown Norfolk jacket, his stick cocked under one arm and protruding behind his shoulder, an old war attitude unconsciously assumed. His face and eyes softened. He looked at the white house almost with a glimmer of tenderness.

"Well, that's got rid of the daily hate. What surprises me most, doctor, is how we change. Five years ago I was quite fond of this place. I accepted it then; I hadn't begun the clash with people. But now—I feel I can't think here or get a grip on anything."

He glanced at his wrist-watch.

"I say, would you care for a walk? Or, what's better, I might get Smith to run us out to Wisley in the car. He can drop us and go back to fetch the pater, and we can idle about in the woods and walk home?"

"Excellent idea."

"It won't bore you? We shall miss tea, and we shall not be back till after dark."

"I'm not often bored," said Beal, "if that is any comfort to you. Go and fix up with Smith for the car."