Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 3

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John Cuthbertson made his way down the harbour pier at Dover, looking like a big brown bear in his rough ulster. There was expectancy in the kind blue eyes set wide apart in the fresh-coloured face. Like many big men, John Cuthbertson had a shy and silent dignity. He moved slowly, spoke slowly, and smiled with his eyes when smaller people would have laughed.

A March sky hurried overhead, and the sea kept up a monotonous splashing on the other side of the great grey breakwater. Landwards, Dover Castle stood out dimly on a dim hill, the grass and the chalk looking sad and soiled under the grey sky. The Calais boat was in. John Cuthbertson could see her masts above the roofs of the shelters on the quay.

“I’m late, I suppose.”

The boat train came steaming towards him, and he stood to watch it pass. People were settling themselves there, reading books and papers, or looking with tired and apathetic faces at nothing in particular. Cuthbertson had a glimpse of a child holding a Teddy bear against a window, as though determined that the good beast should lose no chances.

The red train swept by. He smiled and passed on.

Most of the people had left by the boat train, and the long platform on the quay was left to the jerseyed figures of the harbour porters. Just beyond the small buffet Cuthbertson saw two people walking towards him—a tall man with a lean, alert face and a coal-black beard cut to a point and a little old woman in black. The man was carrying a brown basket. He had given an arm to the little old lady, and was looking down at her with an air of understanding and of sympathy.

A glimmer of surprise, humour, and affection shone in John Cuthbertson’s eyes. The two were coming along very slowly, the little figure in black rather tottery and forlorn. The yellow face under the black bonnet had sunken eyes and lines of pain.

“It’s so kind of you. I thought I was going to die. And I’m giving you such a lot of trouble. I’m afraid I can’t go any faster.”

The man with the short black beard looked down at her consolingly.

“There’s no hurry. Just take your time. Now, what do you say to a plate of soup?”

“I couldn’t touch it—I really couldn’t.”

“No? Well, just take your time. The fresh air will make you feel better.”

He glanced up suddenly, and his eyes met the eyes of the big man in the brown ulster. A flash of recognition leapt into them. The hearts of the two men seemed to come together in that look.

“Old man, this is good of you.”

“You knew I should come.”

“You see, I have a friend here who wants to get to the harbour station. You won’t mind going slowly?”

Cuthbertson took off his hat, swung into line, and offered to carry the basket.

“Let me take it, old man.”

“It’s all right; I can manage. My hand luggage has gone on by porter. They tell me I shall have to wait an hour to get my baggage through the Customs.”

So these two tall fellows went at a snail’s pace towards the town, sheltering the little black figure that shuffled between them. It was a patient and a kindly escort, and the exhausted face looked grateful.

“How do you feel now?”

They had reached the space before the “Lord Warden,” and the sea wind blew in strongly and lifted the old lady’s black bonnet.

“Better, thank you. It doesn’t go up and down so much. I can’t say how kind you’ve been. I don’t know what I should have done——”

“It was a very rough crossing, you know. Would you like to go to the waiting-room?”

“Yes, please.”

They took her there, still walking very slowly. The yellow face had lost some of its deathliness. Tears came into her eyes as she looked up at the man with the black beard.

“I’m so very grateful.”

He carried her basket into the waiting-room, and put it down on one of the seats.

“Good-bye. I hope you will soon feel all right. I shall be hanging about the station for an hour or so, so if you want anything send a porter to hunt me out—a man with a black beard.”

“I don’t know why people should be so kind.”

“Why? Oh, because we all need it. Good-bye.”

Cuthbertson was waiting for him on the platform. They smiled at each other, and by some common impulse shook hands.

“Old man, how are you?”

“Better—pounds better.”

“Are you going to leave your friend there?”

“Yes, poor old soul. I only picked her up on the quay; she could hardly stand, or ask anybody for anything. Whence—and whither? Let’s go in here and get something to eat.”

They turned into the refreshment room, and sat down at the table that was farthest from the bar. But talking rather than eating seemed to be the importunate need of the moment. They gave casual orders to the casual young woman behind the counter, and then forgot everything in being with each other. For these two men had loved with the rare, rich love of comrades in arms.

“Yes, you look more like your old self.”

Cuthbertson leant back in his chair and examined Skelton with shrewd and affectionate eyes. He had spoken of the old self, and the Richard Skelton of two years ago stood out like some magnificent portrait hung in a great room where the evening sunlight entered. The lean, alert, sensitive face, with the deep blue eyes that looked black in certain lights. The straightness of the mobile mouth. The proud holding of the head. He had loved this man, loved him for his forcefulness, his fine flashes of anger, his moments of tenderness, his sparkles of half-devilish humour. That rarest of rare things—a personality, an aliveness so brilliant that it had made weaker men seem but half awake.

Then that tragedy of overwork, when he, John Cuthbertson, had spent half his days with a dying wife, and his comrade in arms had done the fighting. That breakup of a man whose creed had been to spend all of himself—or nothing! Skelton’s face still showed the lines of strain, and his eyes had not wholly lost their restlessness. Cuthbertson noticed these things. He knew how the man had suffered.

“I had your last letter. You did not say anything about the beard.”

Their eyes met across the table.

“Old man, I was afraid of my razors.”

“Nonsense! You?”

“It’s the truth. No one understands this sort of thing until they have been through it.”

A fierce light came into his eyes and his nostrils quivered.

“It sounds preposterous, hysterical, to those who haven’t been down into the depths. Three years ago I should have had something like a sneer for people whose nerve gave out. Now—I know. Everything wrong, inside and out, and your soul like an empty wine-skin. And the nights! Good God! Old man, I used to lie awake in my cabin and say over and over again, ‘You are not going to do it—you are not going to play the coward.’ Well, that’s passed.”

Cuthbertson drummed on the table with his fingers. His eyes were very soft for a man’s.

“What are you going to do? I have kept everything open. Things are going well.”

“That’s like you. But I am not coming back yet; it wouldn’t be fair to you if I did. I don’t think I could stand London. It would put me in a fever. You know, I can’t lounge and watch other people doing things. I must be fighting if I am in the thick of it.”

“Have you made any plans?”

“I am going to have a year in the country—perhaps more. Cockney or peasant, I couldn’t stand a provincial town. I shall work. There was that thing I was rummaging at before I crocked. And I want to think; to make sure of one or two lessons I’ve been learning.”

He was silent a moment. Then his eyes flashed up suddenly, and his whole face seemed to radiate inward light.

“Old man, I was a hard beggar. I thought I was strong enough for anything, equal to anything. I despised the people I used to call weaklings, and the poor devils who got stuck on stools. I hadn’t any patience, and not much pity, and I thought myself so confoundedly clever. Then the crash came. Fate had been smiling and waiting. Well, I’ve been through hell.”

Cuthbertson stared hard at the opposite wall.

“You always would work too hard. And it was my fault—in a way.”

“Not a bit of it. But, do you know, I have relearnt something I had managed to forget? I have had the egotism burnt out of me; I have rediscovered the other side of life. When you are a hard, clever devil you want breaking, just to be made to understand. I do understand now. At least, I hope so.”

Cuthbertson’s eyes glimmered in his big, round face.

“I have been hurt in my time.”

“That’s it. The sequence of things that we call Fate, or God, or the Great Cause, had to hurt me most damnably in order to teach me to feel. I had a bit of steel for a brain then. I have had my purgatory; I have come out softened.”

He smiled reflectively.

“Sympathy—a sensitive surface. What one misses by being in such a heartless hurry! I tell you what I swore to do, Jack, to tear the skin off my old self and to go about feeling—life. Men, women and children. We have all got to help each other to live.”

The big man nodded.

“There’s a monstrous lot of good in the world,” he said. “Why, you have only to keep a dog to learn that.”

Constance Brent came out of her mother’s room with dull and bewildered eyes.

As she closed the door behind her a woman appeared at the end of the short passage leading from the hall. She had been waiting for the opening of the door, and the brown eyes in the broad face were full of pity and of anger.

“Miss Connie——”

But the girl fled towards the stairs, her face quivering as her self-control gave way. She wanted to keep back tears until she was alone in her own room.

“I can’t, Mary.”

The woman watched her run up the stairs and disappear. She stood twisting her hands into her apron and staring at a patch of sunlight on the red carpet. Anger and compassion were big in her. She nodded her head emphatically, and gazed at the door of the room from which Constance Brent had come.

“She’s told her.”

The woman had a broad face, with steadiness and strength in the mouth and forehead. Her brown eyes could be very kind. She was not one who acted quickly, but when once set upon a purpose she was not easily rebuffed.

Crossing the hall, she opened the door of the room and went in.

Dora Brent lay on a Chesterfield sofa by the open French window, with a bowl of red and white roses on a little Sheraton table beside her. She might have been about fifty, though her hair was the colour of saffron. Her face had a curious waxy pallor; the only live things in it were the eyes, large, of a lightish hazel, and very hard and restless. Deep furrows ran from the nose to the angles of the mouth. It was a face that betrayed nothing so much as discontented apathy, though the selfishness that lived in the eyes seemed to have sucked all the blood and substance from the surrounding flesh and left it sapped and shrunken.

She was dressed—or overdressed—in some pink gauzy stuff that would have suited a girl of twenty. The left hand had three rings on the third finger, a large emerald, a hoop of opals, and a circle of plain gold. In repose she kept her fingers pressed together, the tips curved inwards so that the hands appeared to run to a point and to take the shape of hooks.

The servant closed the door and stood with her back to it. Dora Brent had turned her head. Her eyes looked at the other woman with cynical steadiness.

“You’ve told her——”

“I beg your pardon.”

The servant’s broad face flushed hotly.

“You think I’ve no cause——”

“If you must choose to regard yourself as one of the family—I have told her. She had to be told some day, or other people would have remedied the omission. I made up my mind to tell her when she was eighteen.”

The woman by the door drew in a deep breath and held it. Her face looked astonished, angry and compassionate.

“And on her birthday——”

“Well, on her birthday——”

“Yes; and how did you tell her? You don’t care how you hurt people. She’s not like you or me. She feels things different; she’s all heart and nerves. Oh, you don’t care or understand.”

Dora Brent’s eyes were ironically imperturbable.

“If I tell you to mind your own business, Mary——”

The servant threw up her head.

“I wonder why I stay here!”

“I wonder——”

“It’s not because of you.”

“You can go the moment you please.”

“I would. I wouldn’t have stayed with you all these years but for her. Poor little soul.”

Dora Brent’s eyes grew harder, more cynical. It was easy to read some of the past from this woman’s face. She had been something of a vampire, ever ready to suck the vitality of those who were weaker than herself. Mary, the big woman with the broad bosom and the square forehead, had had strength enough to stand against her. With the child it was different. The mother’s selfishness was ready to devour the soul of the daughter.

“I don’t think there is any more to be said. You can bring in tea at four.”

She reached out for a rose, chose a white one, smelt it, and put it in her dress.

The servant’s lips opened, faltered, and then closed again. She opened the door slowly and went out.

For some seconds she stood hesitating in the hall before she climbed the stairs to listen at the door of Constance’s bedroom. Mary’s hand went to her cheek and stroked it, as though she were unconsciously projecting a stream of sympathy into the girl’s room. She could hear the sound of bitter weeping.

“Miss Connie——”

The weeping ceased abruptly.

“Miss Connie, shall I bring you up some tea?”

“I am lying down, Mary. I would rather be quiet.”

The woman nodded her head, sighed, and went slowly down the stairs.