Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

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Those who had known Dora Brent twenty years ago would never have recognised her in the woman who lived in the white house on the edge of Roymer Heath.

It was an inordinate selfishness that had created an unsavoury tragedy, and lost her her husband and her friends. She had been a devourer, one who had demanded to be fed on other people’s emotions, and who had grasped fiercely at sympathy and compassion, only to discover that people had refused to be devoured. She had asked for everything and offered nothing. Bitter experiences, that had taught other women to accept the sacrament of suffering, had left her hard, incensed, and resentful.

With the crisis of her womanhood passed, a curious degeneration had set in. She had been an unusually handsome woman, and as the external beauty faded so the inner fire of her egoism seemed to flicker and to fail. The apathy of disillusionment settled upon her, dulling all the finer appetites of the cultured woman of the world, and compelling her to seek cruder sensations in order to be stimulated. As in some mental diseases, so the brain appeared to have lost its finer texture, its delicacy, the more subtle ramifications of intellect. She developed a liking for coarse perfumes, coarse books, coarse colours, and even coarse foods. Vulgarity overtook her on the downward slope of life. This woman, who once had boasted a very perfect taste in dress, now wore loud colours, overscented herself, and dyed her hair. The hardness that comes with selfishness seemed to have softened suddenly, and to have become flabby, garish, and smeared.

That she had chosen to come and live in such a place as Roymer betrayed the curious change in a vain woman who had clung desperately to the skirts of the gay world. A day of routine seemed to satisfy her. She breakfasted in bed, “Gussie,” her pet Pekinese, lying beside the tray and sharing the meal. She allowed the dog a license that showed a certain slovenly foolishness, in that she was absurdly soft to this little beast of a dog and hard towards her own child. She rose at ten, and spent two hours at her dressing-table with messes of grease and powder, and the like. From twelve till one Constance was expected to read to her mother, and the sentimental and erotic stuff swept a smear over the morning. They lunched at one o’clock. At half-past two the little governess cart was brought round by the boy who did duty as groom and gardener, and Dora Brent went for her daily drive, with her little consequential cur of a dog on the seat beside her. She drove the pony herself, and never let Constance take the reins. People had grown accustomed to seeing this saffron-haired woman with the dead white face driving the brown pony up and down hill, Gussie jumping up to yap at everything, and the girl, her daughter, sitting mute and dark-eyed on the opposite seat. It would be difficult to say how Roymer had discovered Dora Brent’s history, but she was conspicuous in such a neighbourhood, nor had she been able to bury the past.

At four o’clock the governess cart reappeared at the white gate in the laurel hedge, and Constance would climb out and open the gate, with its “Furze Cottage” painted in black letters on the face of the top bar. In warm weather tea was brought out on the green-roofed veranda, Gussie having his particular cushion, or a place in his mistress’s lap. From tea-time to dinner Dora Brent read the paper or played patience. They dined at seven, by candlelight, even at midsummer, and the courses were limited by the fact that they kept only one servant. Dora Brent drank stout, and took a glass of Kümmel with her dessert. After dinner Constance had to read to her mother for two clear hours, cheap tales from cheap magazines, novels that dealt mainly with sexual problems, or the more sentimental sorts of romance. On some nights she was suffered to sing or play, but as often as not Gussie objected, and the dog’s whims were always considered. At ten Dora Brent went to bed. She slept badly, and had drifted into the habit of taking chloral. The dog slept on a light blue satin cushion at Dora Brent’s side.

Three days after the party at “Vernors” Skelton came out of the village shop where he had been buying tobacco and a daily paper. Roymer Green, with its brick and half-timbered houses, lay in the full golden glare of a perfect summer day. Skelton had his grey slouch hat pulled well down over his eyes, and the ends of the belt of his Norfolk jacket were tucked into the side pockets. Shading the road and the little forecourt of Mr. Dutton’s shop stood a huge chestnut, throwing a circle of shadow. A pony cart had just drawn up under the tree, and the rich green half-light under the chestnut seemed to accentuate the colour notes beneath it. The brown pony looked a fine bronze. A yellow head, shining like a mass of copper wire, and a sapphire blue blouse, were reminiscent of Rossetti. Still deeper in the shadow, and seen against the trunk of the chestnut, a mute face floated upon a slender white throat that rose from the low-cut collar of a plain white blouse.

Gussie, the Pekinese, had his forepaws on the edge of the cart, his insufferable little nose in the air, his eyes bleary and overfed. The dog began to yap at Skelton as he came out of the shop.

“You wicked—icked—ittle thing, you! Does it like to hear its own voice?”

Her tone changed when she spoke to the girl, who sat staring listlessly down the white road skirting the Green.

“Go and tell Dutton to come out.”

Constance was leaning over to turn the door handle when she caught sight of Skelton. He raised his hat, his eyes smiling out suddenly in his brown face.

“Don’t bother to get out. I’ll tell Dutton for you.”

Dora Brent turned her head at the sound of a man’s voice. She missed seeing the momentary flush of colour in Constance’s cheeks—a tinting of sensitive shame.

“Mother—Mr. Skelton.”

“I met your daughter at the Powers’, Mrs. Brent.”

“Oh?”

She stared at Skelton, and forced a smile that was like the cracking of a plaster cast. The dog continued to yap and fuss up and down the seat.

“Be quiet, Gussie.”

Skelton noticed the sensitive loathing in the girl’s eyes. The dog irritated her almost beyond endurance.

“Be quiet, you little idiot!”

“A talkative scoundrel! You have found one of the few cool places here—under this tree. Shall I send Mr. Dutton out to you?”

“Oh, thanks; I shall be much obliged if you will.”

Dora Brent’s haggard white face betrayed no friendliness. She had ceased to be interested in people, nor was Skelton the kind of man who would have appealed to her in her prime. In fact, her intelligent selfishness would have warned him to keep his distance, and dared him to come too near with his devilish sense of humour. Her apathy offered the man no opening, nor did the girl appear at her ease. Her eyes looked at him watchfully, half furtively, as though the vulgar glare of that golden head scorched her self-consciousness.

Skelton walked back into the shop, emerged again, lifted his hat, and went upon his way. Mr. Dutton appeared under the shade of the chestnut tree, to stand with brisk affability beside the trap, wiping his hands on his white apron and managing not to notice the Pekinese, who stood yapping within two feet of his face.

The homeward drive up the hill to Roymer Heath had no thrilling incidents, though life appeared to move Gussie to one eternal protest. Dora Brent hardly opened her mouth, and when she spoke it was usually to the dog.

“Ittle silly thing, you! How you do like talking, dear!”

The dog’s perpetual barking, and her mother’s metallic voice, uttering endearments, brought lines of tired scorn to the girl’s face.

“I wonder you can bear the noise.”

“Noise! Poor ittle sing! Why shouldn’t Gussie-wussie have his talky-talky? It is absurd that Dutton doesn’t keep that brand of sardines. Mary didn’t spice the curry enough for lunch.”

“I didn’t notice it.”

The square, grey tower of Roymer Church rose up among the pines and yews. The gold wind-vane glittered in the sunlight, and Constance Brent’s eyes fixed themselves upon it with the look of a soul seeking escape.

“There! we forgot Gussie’s Brazil nuts! Poor ittle sing, you! You can go down after tea, Connie, and bring them up.”

“Yes.”

She was still wondering what Richard Skelton had thought of her mother.

When we are ashamed of the people who belong to us, they seem to swell in public, and to take on a more glaring prominence, till we come to believe that the whole world must inevitably see our shame. That is how Constance Brent had felt, and Skelton had guessed that she had felt it. The thing touched her sore inexperience too closely for her to reason out the fact that she could not be held responsible. In her proud way she guessed that she herself must appear smirched by her mother’s idiosyncrasies. She could not be so sharply ashamed for her mother’s sake as she was for her own. That was Dora Brent’s fault, not the daughter’s.

Skelton took the woodland way down to Roymer Thorn, and the path through the fir woods was a “monks’ walk,” a magnificent cloister where a man’s thoughts went undisturbed. His face had its “creative expression,” as Cuthbertson had called it, strenuous absorption sacred to an inventive struggle with cogwheels, or power transmission, or some cussed piece of mechanism that worked in theory but would not work in practice. Sometimes the “creative expression” had denoted the accumulation of wrath in the course of a meditation upon fools.

Skelton was struggling towards tolerance, but there are times when tolerance is treachery, a surrender to the selfishness of egoists. He had the whole picture before his eyes—the yellow-headed woman, with her hard and haggard face, the yapping, self-important Pekinese, the girl whose sensitive eyes dreaded to see her own disgust reflected in the eyes of strangers. She was not one of those who contrive to get used to ugliness, and learn to protect themselves by creating a shell. The stab of the thorn went deep down to the quick.

“Good heavens! what a lot of us need rescuing! I think I know that sort of woman; her foot comes down on the child’s toes a good many times a day. And that damned dog! I shouldn’t mind wringing its neck.”

Skelton came out of the fir woods into the sloping meadow at the back of his cottage—a meadow that had been made beautiful by previous bad farming. A great hawthorn hedge ran down one side of it, its boughs arching over the ditch and turning it into a tunnel. Masses of ragwort, fleabane, and thistles grew along the hedge and stretched out into the field, the gold and purple of the flowers glowing against the darker background of the thorns. Nearer the fir woods, where the hedge gave place to some posts and rails, and the ditch ended in a patch of boggy ground, willow-herb flowered like pink flame against the gloom of the woods. An idler could sit under a fir tree and gaze across blue ridges and valleys to the grey of the distant chalk hills.

In the lower part of the meadow were half a dozen neat wire chicken-runs, each with its brown weather-board house. The thatched roof and central red brick chimney-stack of the cottage showed above a thorn hedge. This cottage of Skelton’s, long and low, with its soft-tinted old red brick walls, was watched over by a couple of gigantic yews. The lattice windows looked out on the garden, with its brick paths, fruit trees, rough, rich-coloured borders, patches of scythed grass, and plots of vegetable ground. A holly hedge shut the garden off from the lane, and on the other side of the lane ran the palings of Thorn Park. Standing in his thatched porch, Skelton could see the hollow shells of the primeval oaks, the wastes of bracken, the great thorn trees, the rush-grown, boggy bottoms, and sometimes a browsing herd of deer. At one end of the garden, under a lilac, and half-hidden by sheaves of sweet peas, were three bee-hives. Behind the cottage was a little brick-paved yard, a black and moss-grown well-winch, and several rough sheds.

Skelton entered the garden from the meadow, looked up and down between the fruit trees, and began to smile.

“I wonder what the young devil is up to this time?”

Skelton employed a boy to help in the garden and with the chickens, and Josh was the boy’s name. He arrived most mornings bellowing like a bull-frog, and the effort appeared to exhaust him for the rest of the day. An extraordinary languor descended upon him directly he got inside the garden gate. Lanky, loose-limbed, with a face that suggested the face of a sly, sleepy, yellow Buddha, he always gave Skelton the impression that he was about to fall to pieces, and that he only decided to hang together because it would be such a bother to collect the fragments.

Josh had no garment that could be called “manners.” In this respect he was offensively naked. Skelton had discovered that the lad had a genius for falling into trances, and he had once seen him spend a quarter of an hour in watching a feather being blown to and fro on the water in one of the hens’ drinking troughs.

Curiosity piqued Skelton. He went silently to the tool shed, looked in through the doorway, and saw Josh sitting on a sugar-box with his back half turned. He was staring at himself in a broken bit of looking-glass held in one palm. The fingers of the other hand were feeling his chin.

“Hallo!”

Josh remained utterly unabashed.

“What are you supposed to be doing, my friend?”

A confidential eye fixed itself on Skelton.

“They be sayin’ as I ought t’ shave.”

“Are they, now!”

“I was just countin’ ’em.”

“What, the shavers?”

“These ’ere ’airs on m’ chin.”

“By George!”

“And I can’t find no more than seven as I can tweak between m’ fingers.”

“The Seven Sacred Hairs! The Seven Sacred Hairs of Roymer! Don’t sacrifice them on any account. And, by the way—excuse me mentioning such a vulgar matter—but I should be rather grateful if you would go on cutting the grass under the hedge.”

“I just came in for a fresh rubber; t’other’s broke.”

“That explains everything.”

Skelton’s irony was purely playful. He burst out laughing as soon as he could save his dignity by getting the cottage between him and young Josh.

“Exquisite infant! Such works of art must have their price.”

An old lady from up the lane came in and did Skelton’s cooking and cleaning. She was fat, bland, and not too talkative, and was known as Mrs. Gingham. The name had a sheltering sound, and also suggested that she could be opened out and shut up at will. Skelton had studied and elaborated the process, and he could control Mrs. Gingham to a nicety.

Her admiration for him was quite voluble when she forgathered with her neighbours. “I never see such a gentleman! Reg’lar conjuring, I call it—in that there workroom of ’is, ’im just a-twiddling ’is long fingers, and turning you out a toasting-fork or a mousetrap, just pat. ’E’s a wonder! ‘Mr. Skelton,’ says I, ‘ ’Ere’s the spout come off of the kettle.’ ‘Bring the old blackguard ’ere,’ says ’e in ’is comical way, and, bless me, ’e’ll ’ave the ol’ spout on again in no time, better than a tinker.”

The interior of Skelton’s cottage was a cool, comfortable shadowy affair. Pipes, books, cushions, boots lay about contentedly, as though all wild life were at peace, and the place preserved against feminine fussing. The fat brown tobacco jar had an air of swaggering contentment. “I’m boss here,” it said, “and old Gingham knows it!” Wistful slippers were allowed to come out and browse upon the carpet. No one came and hustled them away into cupboards. Nor were the cushions seized, shaken and punched, and made to sit up with their little figures in order.

An additional window had been put into the room at the east end of the cottage. In Skelton’s workroom order reigned, severe fanatical efficiency. Plans, diagrams, and papers of calculations were pinned up on the walls. The tool racks were like the rifle stands in an armoury. A big bench stood under one window, a lathe under the other. The furnace was in a detached shed at the back. A number of models were ranged on shelves behind the door. In the centre of the room stood a stout deal table, and upon it the creature of steel that Skelton was bringing into life.

The whole cottage told of a busy world—a man’s world, full of ideas and of endeavour. The books on the shelves in the living-room evidenced a breadth of culture. William James, Shaw, Swinburne, Wells. There were volumes upon art, the painters of Florence, the Renaissance, old French clocks, Limoges enamels, the Pre-Raphaelites, Leonardo da Vinci. You found none of the half-baked books beloved of the British matron, little chocolate éclairs of history and biography, compounded by some dilettante gentleman, and sent forth in pretty little dishes for people who believe that, in consuming such stuff, they are accumulating culture.

As Mrs. Gingham said, “ ’E do read something furious. I dursn’t speak to ’im when ’e’s got ’is nose inside a book. A body might think as ’e meant to know everything as ever was. And yet ’e ain’t one of those there book-ticks. What, ‘worms,’ is it? Oh, well, I ain’t a-going to quarrel about a word.”