Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Mr. Blagden took off his pince-nez, pushed back his chair, and rose.

He was surprised by the quietness with which the man had come into the room. The figure was there where nothing had been before, just as though it had passed through the wall. It stood and waited, and Stuart Blagden, after one glance at Vane’s face, felt strangely moved.

His hand went out.

“Hallo, old man.”

And Vane hesitated. His eyelids flickered. He was like a muffled presence in the room. He seemed so unsure.

“Afraid I’m a few minutes late.”

Blagden noticed the limpness of the hand. It had lost its grip. Well, naturally. He felt himself responsible for the other man’s acute self-consciousness. Some situations need a smooth and delicate touch.

“Sit down, old man.”

Vane sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk, and his very movements had a deliberate docility as though the physical part of him had become accustomed to waiting upon an order. He nursed his new hat on his knees, and his eyes fixed themselves on Blagden’s inkstand. He was being looked at, observed, and though the eyes were friendly his face seemed too sensitive for such scrutiny. Blagden moved to his own chair. He had seen life—or a fragment of life—as a man sees it at times in an intuitive and comprehending flash. That still, tense face with its grizzled temples and the bitter sensitiveness of its eyes. He was conscious of profound compassion.

Blagden sat down, and he seemed to sit down carefully as though some very fragile surface had to be considered. He was conscious of the silence, and he felt that it was his business to break it without making the affair like a shattering of glass. He opened a drawer, extracted a box of cigarettes and pushed them across the desk to Vane.

“Smoke?”

Vane looked at him. It was a strange, dark glance, like that of a man peering from behind a curtain. His hand reached out towards the box, and holding a cigarette between finger and thumb, he seemed to reflect upon it.

“First time for fifteen years.”

“Is it? I should have thought—Old habits.”

Blagden frowned at himself and struck a match, and as he held it across the desk, the tiny flame lit two other little flames in the circles of Vane’s eyes.

“Thanks.”

“Well, how do you find things?”

Vane’s glance grew vague. He was watching the smoke.

“I notice the noise. In the streets, I mean. A prison’s a rather quiet place, you know.”

Again the silence threatened to settle. Vane was smoking as though doing it for the first time in his life; also, he had the air of trying to say something and the words would not come, for the inward and secret self had been silent for so many years. He had moved his lips and tongue and satisfied the conventions of prison life, but the inner man had been mute. He had conversed with himself in the cell of his own cloistered consciousness, and now he found himself like a shy man thrust suddenly upon a platform to address a strange and staring crowd.

His lips moved.

“One gets rusted up—you know. I suppose—we ought to talk business.”

Blagden nodded and lit himself a cigarette. He had ceased from looking too closely at Vane’s face, for it was too sensitive to be stared at.

“Oh, a few details. It’s all quite simple. Your mother’s estate?”

He saw Vane’s eyelids flicker.

“Funny to think she’s dead. Oh, yes—I’ve had these things living with me in my cell for years, Blaggy. One can’t say much. Not much to be said. I’ve had my medicine.”

The door opened and Soames, the clerk, came in with a sheaf of papers. He placed them on Mr. Blagden’s desk, waited self-effacingly and silently for one discreet moment, and realizing that his chief was in no mood to require him, he backed to the door.

But before closing the door he looked curiously at Vane, for the humanist in Mr. Soames was not so dusty a document. He remembered well the case of Henry Vane, a man who had come back from the trenches and shot his wife’s lover. Yes, it had been a sensational case. It had provoked public opinion. There had been people who had declared that Vane should have been acquitted, or have been given a nominal sentence, instead of twenty years! And there he was sitting in that chair, the same and yet different, and as Soames closed the door he was saying to himself that it might be like the case of a dead man resurrected.

Blagden was unfolding a sheet of foolscap. He admonished his own compassion. Yes, you couldn’t expect a man like Vane to indulge in a confessional. Some things were best left covered. He was repeating Vane’s words: “I’ve had my medicine.”

He became the lawyer, deliberate and almost fatherly. He had a pleasant-speaking voice, and Mr. Soames stood in the passage for a moment and listened to it. He stroked his longish nose with a finger that had a little inkstain on it.

“How old was the fellow then? Let me see, thirty-one or so. That makes him forty-six. But I suppose he must be older inside. Fifteen years. I’ve heard it said that some of them come out like living corpses. Extraordinary!”

Blagden was speaking.

“You will have quite a comfortable income, Harry. The estate has appreciated in value since your mother’s death. Luckily, when rubber and some of the industrial concerns were at boom prices we got out, and put the money into gilt-edged stock. With your own estate and your mother’s you will have about two thousand a year.”

“As much as that?”

“Yes, even after the income-tax has been accounted for. The capital value works out roughly at fifty thousand pounds.”

Vane seemed unable to find a resting-place for the stump o£ his cigarette.

“You must have looked after things very thoroughly. I’m grateful.”

“My dear chap, of course—naturally. I’m a little more than a lawyer. Just glance through this statement of accounts. You will see certain sums charged against you. Shove the cigarette end in this pot.”

Vane put out a hand and took the paper, and Blagden noticed the texture of the skin. It was roughened on the inner side of the thumb and on the outer side of the first finger, and Blagden remembered that Vane had worked on the prison farm. He sat back in his chair, and lit another cigarette, and stole a glance at Vane’s face. It seemed to him that its characteristic expression was what he would have described as one of sardonic gentleness. Yes, the man had taken his medicine.

Vane’s lips moved, but he did not speak. During his first year in prison he had divorced his wife, and the costs of the case were set down upon the paper. His forehead showed a frown.

“Any news of—Irene?”

Blagden examined his finger nails.

“Married again. Husband died a year or two ago. Living in town somewhere.”

“Is she all right?”

“Oh, quite. He left her a good income, and one child.”

Vane nodded and laid the paper on the desk, and, to Blagden, Vane’s eyes were tragic.

“Strange old mess, Blaggy. My fault as much as hers. I’ve had plenty of time to think things out.”

His fingers picked a second cigarette from the box, and Blagden pushed the matches across to him.

“Then—some philosophy is possible?”

“Oh, yes; they’re very decent to you in those places, Blaggy, all of them, the warders, the chaplain, the doctor. No fault of theirs. If your soul gets bleached, or you turn into a balmy, it’s the system’s fault, not theirs.”

Blagden looked at this other man’s face.

“Any plans, Harry?”

There was silence, and Blagden could understand that such a question was not easy to answer, and if there was an answer it would depend upon the mental make-up of the man.

“No, nothing definite. It’s rather difficult to describe how one feels, yes, rather lost, and a little bewildered. One’s a sort of Rip Van Winkle. No illusions left. It’s rather difficult to make anything of life when you haven’t any illusions left.”

He paused, and seemed to watch a little thread of smoke drifting across the window.

“To begin with—in there—the caged animal in me used to rage. I saw red. But there was a decent chap, a warder; he kept his temper with me. He said: ‘Look here, my lad, that won’t help you, and it doesn’t help us. You’ve got to swallow the stuff. I don’t know whether I shouldn’t have shot the swine just as you did, but they’ve given you a life sentence. You’ll get five years off it if you behave.’”

He gave Blagden a little whimsical glance of infinite sadness.

“So—I behaved. I became a sort of mechanism. But I had some ways of escape. Sleeping and dreaming. Yes, and books, and thinking about life and the mystery of things. But, you see, all through these years one is working to a time-table. You lose all your initiative. You just obey orders, and when they push you out—you feel strange, naked—and helpless—”

Again he paused, rolling the cigarette between finger and thumb.

“Yes, one has—as it were—to grow a new skin. I can remember in those early days sitting on my bed, and feeling like a half-starved dog. What would I do when I got out? Paint the town red, have a hell of a time, food and drink and women.”

He smiled faintly.

“But that all passed. It’s as though one’s very appetites become standardized. I feel rather like an old man going back to potter round the old places. I’ve got to readjust, if readjustment is possible.”

He rested his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor.

“Yes, disappear in the crowd, probably. It’s not that I’m afraid of the old faces. One doesn’t care sufficiently for that. I don’t even want to change my name. I’m an old man, Blaggy.”

Blagden got up and went and stood by the window.

“Oh, you’ll adjust. You look younger and fitter than I thought you would. Life’s a good business, even—”

And then he turned suddenly to the man in the chair.

“Look here, come and dine with us to-night. Molly wants you to. She’s—”

But Vane looked strangely distressed.

“Thanks, Blaggy. Wonderfully good of you both, but I’d rather not. I’m not up to that sort of thing yet. Faces bother me. Yes, it’s funny. I’m afraid of faces—somehow. I can’t think and I can’t talk. I’ve got to be myself for a while.”

Blagden nodded.

“Yes; in a way—I understand, old man.”

“I want to wander about and get used to things. Everything’s so new.”