Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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Sauntering out early with a pipe between his teeth, Skelton crossed the footbridge into the meadow, strolled along past the wire-netted chicken-runs, and watched the sun climbing above the black tops of the firs. White clouds swam in a dense blue sky. The masses of ragwort and willow-herb were all purple and gold along the hawthorn hedge. It was to be a day for colour, for cloud shadows upon distant woods and pastures, and miraculous silvery lights upon sleepy hills.

But Skelton was in an irritable mood that morning. He could always gauge his own temper by the way the hens in the wire runs affected him when he came out to give them their early meal.

“Oh, you confounded fools!”

They would crowd up in the corners nearest to the cottage, waiting for him to appear, and then run along the wire with fatuous, scuffling eagerness towards the door where he would enter. They repeated the same manœuvre every morning, and showed the same ridiculous haste in racing to and fro, only to end up at the place where any sane creature would have waited. They never learnt by experience, and were never an oat grain the wiser.

“You confounded fools!”

That was the judgment he passed upon them when he was not in the best of tempers. As a rule he was more playful, and treated them to badinage.

“Hallo, you modern democrats! Scuffling up and down to get the first peck at State pickings! There is always the man with the tin!”

Or——

“Now, my dear ladies, this is breakfast—not a panful of votes! Don’t mob me off the earth!”

But this morning he was irritable, and their diligent greed and the tapping of their beaks on the tins annoyed him.

It was Huxley who said in his caustic, smiling way, when discussing the question of the elimination of “the unfit,” that there are times when the best of us would doubt our right to be included among the “fit.” On the one side the heights, on the other gulfs of gloom. Only the healthily stupid people know nothing of the deeps of depression, of self-discontent, and the days of dust and ashes. Perhaps the devil of depression is the devil of the modern world. The balance swings more widely. The scheme of chiaroscuro is more subtle and more sensitive. Periods of creation and of sorrowful sterility alternate, and it is an age of wonderful creation and therefore of sorrow. No man is more miserable than the creator on those days when his brain is a mere skinful of lard.

Skelton had still to fight this devil of depression. It had triumphed over him after his nerve had given way after the long strain of overwork, and now that he was growing strong again this devil of a sick self still struggled to regain its power. But it had become a more insidious spirit, an old man of the sea, taking on some disquieting shape, and changing when grappled with. Sometimes it was like an importunate woman, whispering, ogling, plucking him by the sleeve.

This morning in the meadow below the fir woods it came as a restless voice, questioning him like the voice of a friend.

“Is this the right life for you?”

He answered the voice as though it came from someone who was walking beside him.

“It’s about the best sort of life a man can ask for when he can count only on one hundred and fifty pounds a year. I’m a free man. I can concentrate on the particular work that fascinates me.”

The voice proceeded to argue.

“I consider that you are buried here. Why, you are bored now—this very moment!”

“Confound you, I’m not!”

“Oh, very well, then! But just think of the men who are doing big things—building new bridges, making reputations and a lot of money. And you go on pottering along here, working at this precious engine of yours, and trying to pretend——”

Skelton had a way of throwing back his head and turning on this devil of depression, cowardice and discontent.

“Look here, Satan, get out!”

He uttered the words aloud and with such fierceness that Josh’s round face appeared over the garden hedge.

“Did you call?”

“Call you? No, I think not.”

Skelton shoved his hands into his trousers pockets and marched up and down the edge of the wood. He made himself a curt, characteristic and inward speech.

“Now, listen. It is a grand day. Just look at the blue shadows on the woods over yonder. See them? Well, be grateful.

“At nine o’clock you will enter your workshop and you will work there till twelve. From twelve to one you will do some hoeing. You will be allowed an hour for dinner and the daily paper. At two o’clock you will return to the workshop. At four you will have tea. After tea you will walk up to see Bobby Dent at the ‘Three Firs,’ and take him the parts of that model engine. You will be back by seven. You will have supper, and then sit down and hammer out some of those calculations. At ten you will go to bed. Understand? Well, don’t let me have to mention it again.”

This was the way he fought these moods, disciplining himself, compelling himself to use the scourge of a strong purpose. He had learnt to dread and to avoid those pits of gloom into which weaker men fall periodically. Work, a passionate interest in everything about him, the building up of sympathy and understanding! Bitter experience had taught him that a man must “live out” if he desires to live at all, and that humanity heals itself by being human.

Skelton left the cottage about half-past four, locking Josh out of it, lest he should get to the larder or go to sleep on the couch, and started through the fir woods for Roymer Heath. The little white-faced inn of the “Three Firs” blinked at him from the northern sky line when he left the tall shadows of the woods. Set upon the blue ridge where the high road crossed the heath, it was rarely free from wind, and its signboard was nearly always swinging and creaking on its hinges.

Skelton walked up the dusty road, smiling at the three fir trees, whose attitudes always amused him. Two of them grew rather close together, their outlines suggestive of two people kissing. The third stood a little apart, a tree with a lopsided top and one great benedictory bough stretched out towards the two that kissed. “Bless you, my children.” The conceit had struck Skelton the very first time he had seen the trees, and to-day the benedictory hand of the “heavy father” was woggling up and down, while the lovers swayed and thrilled.

“If I were the ‘heavy father,’ I think I should have got tired of it by now! Besides, they must be rather bored with him!”

Turning into the bar of the inn, he found a short, squarish woman reading Chatty Bits behind the bar.

“Well, Mrs. Dent——”

The woman whisked the paper aside and stood up. She was so short and square that her shoulders only just managed to overtop the bar. She wore her black hair plastered down so smoothly that it looked like the painted hair on the head of a china doll.

“Good-afternoon, Mr. Skelton, sir.”

She spoke with a brisk chirrup, and her snub nose, blue eyes, and brick-red cheeks gave her a cheeky air. That she had a tongue went without saying. It was almost impossible to walk round her loquacity, for it was as square and as full-hipped as her person.

“By Jove, you have got some dust blowing up here.”

“What may I ’ave the pleasure, sir, of——”

“Oh, ginger beer.”

“Mr. Skelton, you make me feel mean, you do, reely. Just because it’s a pleasure for me and my man——”

“Not a bit of it. I drink to please myself, you know!”

A cork popped, and Skelton’s drink bubbled into a glass.

“Just a drop of gin, sir?”

“Well, just a drop. Where’s my friend Bobby?”

“In the garden, sir.”

“May I go through?”

“You’re welcome to, sir. The boy’s been wondering whether you would be coming up this week.”

There was a patch of grass behind the inn shut in by a thorn hedge and shaded by three starved apple trees. Here, lying on a folding bed, Skelton found Bobby Dent with a book under his chin. The boy had a remarkable resemblance to his mother, save that he was white where she was red. A tuberculous hip joint had kept him on his back for months.

“Hallo! What is it to-day?”

He sat down on an upturned wooden bucket that sometimes served Bobby Dent as a table, and tweaked the book away from under his chin.

“Algebra again! And quadratics, too! You are getting on.”

The boy coloured with pleasure.

“It goes down easy.”

“You’re a marvel! When you get that leg of yours well you’ll be putting on seven-league boots.”

Skelton did not speak in jest. The lad had one of those delicate and acute intelligences shining in a frail body. Garside, the doctor, had first told Skelton about him, and Skelton had walked up to the “Three Firs” and made friends. And from the friend he had developed into the fellow enthusiast and the coach. He had brought young Dent books on algebra, trigonometry, physics, and applied mechanics, coached him, worked out problems with him, and been astonished by the boy’s genius. For Bobby Dent of the chair-bed, lying under the apple trees at the back of the “Three Firs” inn, had very definite ambitions.

“I’m going to be an engineer, and build motors and steam engines,” he had told Skelton.

And Skelton had said: “By Jove! you shall.”

He laid the text-book back on the bed.

“Comes easy to you, Bobkin?”

“I seem to see them all working out, sir, just like sheep going through a gap in a hedge.”

“Mathematical imagination! I believe you’ve got it.”

The boy looked up at him eagerly. And for once genius appeared willing to clothe itself intelligently in the flesh, and not to hide behind muddy eyes, or a weak chin with thin, silly, unvirile hair, or the face of a learned boor.

“But I do want to get up off this bed. You know you said, sir, you’d let me come down to your workshop.”

“So you will before long. I don’t think there is much in the way of toolcraft I can’t teach you.”

He felt in the bulgy side-pockets of his Norfolk and brought out two brown paper parcels.

“A friend of mine sent these down from London. Have a look at them, Bobkin. It will make you a fine puzzle.”

He passed them over, and the boy’s quick fingers picked at the knots.

“Wait a moment; we ought to have a table or something.”

“There’s the mangle-board in the scullery. Ask mother.”

Mrs. Dent was serving a carter, the beer frothing up superbly in the mug.

“Mangle-board? I’ll get it, sir. Bless me! Talking of mangles, that puts me in mind of how he took the mangle to pieces afore he was ill. Always was taking things to pieces. Took the kitchen clock to pieces, and spent three blessed weeks getting it right again. ‘I’ll send it over to Smith at Reading,’ says I. ‘Mother,’ says he, flushing up like, ‘do you think I’m a fool? Smith be blowed!’ ”

When Skelton returned with the mangle-board he found Bobby Dent in a fever of delight. The brown parcels had contained the parts of a model motor-car all complete and to scale, even to the tiny cogged wheels of the differential. The little brass pieces glinted in the sunlight, and the boy’s fingers touched them as though they were far more precious than gold.

“I say, Mr. Skelton——”

“I thought that would fetch you. When you have fitted all those parts together you will know just a little about motor-cars.”

“You’re going to leave ’em here?”

“Of course.”

Skelton knew now where life kept some of its purest pleasures.

They played together for the best part of an hour, children and wise old men, talking of crank shafts and timing gears and universal joints, all of them represented in the exquisite model. John Cuthbertson had sent it down from his works in town. “I must have a look at that youngster of yours,” he wrote, “next time I run down. As for you, old man, you seem to be finding what you wanted.”

Skelton started home by Briar Lane, an old Roman grass road that cut the heath like a green dyke. The lane ran within a hundred yards of Furze Cottage, and the white house with its green shutters and green veranda roof lured him aside. He had a good view of it over the furze bushes and between the scattered firs, and he could see over the laurel hedge into the garden, with its small lawns and geometrical flower-beds filled with geranium and lobelia, its gravel paths and galvanised-wire arches covered with clematis and roses. The stable was on the east of the house, and a few fantail pigeons sat on the ridge tiles of the roof. The place looked stupidly neat, not with the sleekness of art, but with a kind of suburban front-garden neatness. Skelton imagined that no one was particularly interested in the garden. It was scrubbed and ironed, and starched, just like linen sent to the wash.

As he came nearer he heard a piano being played, and then a voice began to sing. A path led off from Briar Lane to Furze Cottage, and joined the by-road there. Skelton turned into the path, and, reaching the shelter of the laurel hedge, stopped to listen.

Skelton knew little about music. He remembered that in his most strenuous days he had had a barbaric love of street organs, rampant marches, and songs from musical comedy, liking the cheerful clang and rhythm that seemed to speak of the clatter of hammers or the whirl of dancers’ feet. It was only when his first strength had failed him that he had found himself in the humour to listen to the more subtle utterances, recognising in them something essentially modern, a wounded self-consciousness, a sentimental and tired decadence. So that music had come to be too intimately expressive, moaning with him, and making him long for those strong, barbaric days when ordered sound was as the clangour of swords.

As he listened to Constance Brent singing, he had a strange feeling that Fate was at work, weaving some tragic maze about him—

“Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.

Where are you now—where are you now?”

Skelton felt stricken. It was like the cry of the soul of the age, awed yet rebellious, conscious of faintness under the stars that shine in the blackness of an immense mystery.

“Drink deep, drink deep of the water, Melisande.”

Why should he feel as though the blood of his soul was flowing out upon the grass? He walked on slowly, letting the singing voice sink deep into his consciousness. It seemed to him that he had listened to one who was unhappy, and on the edge of revolting for the sake of self-expression. The scene on the terrace at “Vernors” rose up before him, the pale face and the frightened eyes.

He wanted to see more of this girl. She interested him, interested him very greatly.

Ah, yes, he was a fatherly person. But interest? He caught up the word and held it before him, as a man might hold something he wished to examine. Interest! Was it just that—and no more?