Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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To some people Roymer seemed in sympathy with that school of fiction that scorns anything dramatic and prefers to regard life as one long flux of dreary detail. Blessed is the man who is supremely interested in details, and who knows how to treat them as tesseræ in the fascinating mosaic of life. Brain makes for the difference between blessedness and boredom.

“Hallo! That you, Skelton? Coming my way?”

“As far as the lane.”

“Good. I say, I have got a beautiful little bit of Mendelism with those birds of mine.”

Skelton had come up with a wiry, energetic figure in a rough pepper-and-salt tweed suit, with an Irish terrier trotting at his heels. Captain Strange, R.N., was sixty-five and had the active figure of a boy. You could tell him a hundred yards away by the brisk activity of his legs, the keen and interested cock of the head, and the swing of the broad shoulders. This sturdy little old gentleman had all that delightful courtesy that a sea life seems to give. He was shrewd, capable, sharp as a needle, and clean with the cleanliness of fifty years of self-discipline. His iron-brown profile cut through all pomposity and affectation like the merciless ram of a ship.

“Just been up to O’Connor’s. The man’s bored to death.”

“Too much money—and too much food.”

“That’s it. I have been prescribing. I shall have Garside falling foul of me for poaching.”

“Oh, Garside’s a sportsman. I know what I should give O’Connor—three years on a desert island where he would have to knock his daily dinner down with a stick.”

“By George, it’s pathetic! I found him going over his lawn with a pot of acid and a stick. He was in a towering rage because there were so many dandelions.”

“Now, if they had been sovereigns——”

“Yes! I said, ‘All right, my dear man, they don’t bite; be thankful for that.’ I have persuaded him to get an electric lighting plant and to run it himself. The man’s so pathetically ignorant. He knew how to make money, that’s all; and now he has retired he hasn’t the intelligence to amuse himself.”

“It seems to me, sir, you are one of us.”

“One of what?”

“Garside and I have started a new sort of Freemasonry. We call ourselves ‘The Healers.’ ”

“Healers! That’s good—quite good. Though I think I’m a bit of a blister. Look here, come in and have tea, and I’ll show you these birds of mine.”

“I should like nothing better.”

They talked Mendelism and such matters as “pure dominants” and the “segregation of gametes” till they hauled up outside a red-brick, red-tiled house, with white window frames that looked at them over the top of a square clipped yew hedge set on a green bank. The place was compact, neat, admirably kept, and yet boasted a breadth of colour and of atmosphere that saved it from primness. It suggested cosmopolitanism both outside and in. The rain gauge on the lawn, the maximum and the minimum thermometers, the glass sphere up above on the balcony for registering the day’s sunlight by a burnt pattern upon a scale, the barometers in the hall, the telescope, microscope, and theodolite in the library—all these seemed to belong by right to the keen and alert figure in pepper-and-salt. Travel had left its broad finger-prints everywhere—on the Japanese carvings, the Spanish paintings on glass, the Indian ivories, the Syrian pottery, the antique furniture, the fragments of French tapestry.

A tall woman wearing gardening gloves came from behind one of the herbaceous borders. She looked hot and toil-stained, and quite happy.

“Kate, I have brought Skelton back to tea.”

“I was just waiting to see who was with you. I never mind being caught in a pickle by people who know what work is.”

Her husband looked at her affectionately.

“Thorough—that’s the word. It’s a prejudice of ours, Skelton, but we can’t stand the dilettante people who talk about ‘my roses,’ and who never did anything but pay for the bushes and boast about the flowers.”

Mrs. Strange drew off one of her old gloves and held out a hand to Skelton. Her tall, stiff figure, narrow at the hips and shoulders, and an air of kindly austerity would have made many people take her for an old maid. She wore her hair drawn back neatly from her forehead, and her brown eyes had a shy reserve behind their glasses. Her voice was quiet, level, and unhurried. She did not rush to meet the world, but stood a little aloof, watching.

Tea was brought out under the shade of a Himalayan cedar. It was an informal affair, with basket chairs drawn up round a wicker table, and the Irish terrier lying at Captain Strange’s feet.

“I found O’Connor trying to kill dandelions, and almost weeping with rage because the birth-rate among them happens to be so high.”

“It is a pity to let one’s life be spoilt by dandelions!”

“My dear, I have known you so worried by weeds——”

“There are not many to worry me now.”

“That’s it! Believe me, Skelton, my wife’s a born administrator. If only they would make her a sort of female dictator. Here you are, now, the very woman to listen to your new philosophy.”

The brown eyes behind the glasses were turned interestedly towards Skelton. He remembered his surprise when he had first discovered that this shyly austere woman was extraordinarily human, that she had touched the many sides of life, and that her experience was as delicately shaded as a landscape on a warm April day. Her insight and her understanding were remarkable. The brown eyes would light up, the kindly quiet voice become animated, and the surface impression of primness be swept away.

“There are so many new philosophies.”

“Mine is simple enough. The art of helping other people to live.”

“By being a sort of modern Mark Tapley?”

“Don’t tease, Peter.”

“Skelton suggested I should become one of the brotherhood. Garside does the electric battery part of it. I might do for a bottle of iodine. And Skelton himself——”

“He’s too subtle for you, Peter. You know we all have such raw surfaces at times, and——”

She looked smilingly at Skelton.

“Some soothing cataplasm——”

“Or a vital tonic when we feel empty of life. It is really amazing how many of us make life unbearable for each other.”

“I don’t know, Kate; I have managed to stand you, somehow.”

“Thank you. I’m a believer in the kindness of self-restraint. It is a sort of quiet courage that helps us and others over the rough places.”

Skelton sat watching her, thinking what an admirable woman she was with her shyness and her subtle sympathy.

“Self-restraint—yes, that’s one-half of the picture. But I believe, too, in active healing.”

“It suits you.”

“Me?”

“I did not say you, Peter. You are stimulating enough——”

“Thanks. I’m not part of the picture! Look here, Skelton, who do you practise on in these realms. On us?”

“I have come here for a little spiritual morphia sometimes. We all practise on each other. I have a case I might recommend to Mrs. Strange.”

“Oh, come, this is interesting! Let me get at my pipe. It sounds like being a real good gossip. Won’t you smoke?”

“May I? I was thinking of that little Brent girl up on the heath. I imagine she has a pretty time of it. And it’s just the rebellious age.”

He tapped the bowl of his pipe against his palm, and glanced across the lawn at the phloxes in one of Mrs. Strange’s herbaceous borders.

“I say, what colour! We all of us seem to hunger for colour of some kind in life.”

“Most of us get more of the blues than we want.”

Catharine Strange gave her husband a look of appeal, a look that said, “Now, you incorrigible old tease, we want to be serious.”

He smiled at her affectionately and understandingly.

“Don’t mind my patter. As for colour of a kind, by Jove, the child must see enough of it!”

He caught Skelton’s eye, and nodded reassuringly.

“It’s a horrid habit of mine, I know, this facetiosity. Why haven’t we called, Kate?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t think it occurred to me. Do you think the girl——”

She seemed to be waiting for Skelton to speak.

“I think she must be very lonely and pretty miserable, and when we are miserable——”

“We take to drink!”

“Peter, what a bore you are sometimes.”

“Thank you, my dear. No more squibs.”

Skelton was biting his pipe rather hard, and staring at the dog who lay asleep at Strange’s feet.

“I’ll tell you something. When I was a youngster in town I was lonely at first, most accursedly lonely. I used to rage along the streets at night. No one spoke, except—yes, just that. Poor beggars! But it used to put me in a fever, just to have them looking me in the face. I wanted something human, something that seemed to care ever so little. Just before it became too bad I got to know the man who has been the very best friend I have ever had.”

A quiet light came into Catharine Strange’s eyes.

“I will go and call in a day or two. We could ask the girl here.”

“And all your dear friends?”

“You know very well, Peter, that none of my friends are prigs or prudes.”

“Of course not. Say acquaintances, then.”

“Acquaintances do not count.”

Skelton’s eyes flashed her his homage.

“You will do her good,” he said.

When he rose to go, Catharine Strange went with him towards the gate and lured him aside to look at some of her treasures. She loved her garden, and slaved for it with a tenderness that was made happy by some exclamation drawn from an acquaintance or a friend. As for the captain, he remained stuck to his chair, perfectly conscious of the fact that he had intended to show Skelton an example of Mendelism that he had worked out with his fowls.

“Confound the chickens! Kate does love to get hold of someone and show off her garden. And she deserves it, by George!”

Catharine Strange was walking slowly along the borders, happy in the knowledge that the man beside her saw everything and saw it well.

“That’s Iris. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Perfect.”

“And don’t you like that little bit there—the big yellow achillea and the steel-blue echinops?”

“That’s a touch of genius.”

“As we were saying, some of us simply thirst for colour. It is a passion when we are young. Is Constance Brent a sensitive?”

“That’s the tragic part of it. I had a talk with her one day at ‘Vernors.’ ”

“Yes, I remember seeing you. I am interested in sensitives. I don’t think I care for cows and calves.”

“I think just a touch from an understanding hand. You see, it’s a woman’s affair.”

“Is it—always?”

The question was a frank one, and he answered it frankly.

“One does not want to see a girl like that left alone to talk to some young cad. I’m interested. I don’t like to see such a child suffer.”

“No, not when one has suffered,” she said very gently.