Читать книгу The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping - Warwick Deeping - Страница 23

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It happened in the days before short skirts, and it happened to three people who were considered rather eccentric by the conventionalists of that epoch.

Sanchia painted pictures and rented a bungalow on Chudleigh Moor. Her pictures were approaching the pose of the purple and orange school, and she was one of the first persons to indulge in black ceilings and white floors. Sanchia’s attitude to life was such that if she saw a vase or a convention standing right way up, she was impelled to turn it upside down. Incidentally, a bungalow on Chudleigh Moor in January was a reversal of the seasons in their sanity, more especially so when a little flat in Chelsea offered her a hot bath that was neither of the hip-bath order nor filled by the aid of cans.

Oscar wrote poetry. He was fat and flaccid and sallow, and wore his very black hair plastered like a Dutch doll’s, a sort of art-cretonne of a man, and of an amazing and drawling insolence. He wore flame-coloured dressing-gowns, and cultivated an odour of decadence. Also, he cultivated Sanchia, because he thought her thin and fierce, and farouche, a sort of beggar wench who could scratch like a cat. Oscar liked to write poems—he called them “pomes”—about gutter-ladies and cocottes and amateur Madame Bovaries, and be-drugged French artists, and he had added Sanchia to the collection, which—of course—was an insult to Sanchia; but Oscar posed and prospered upon his impertinences.

John neither posed nor painted. He was a rather shaggy, large, blue-eyed creature who strode through the world in rough tweeds. He had a cottage on the Moor; he had had cottages and shacks all over the world. He was a tramping naturalist of the Hudson school, with a passion for birds, a private income of a few hundreds a year, and a public that purchased his books by the dozen. He was a somewhat silent person, perhaps because he had spent so much of his life in open spaces, listening and watching and lying under hedges and bushes and in heather and long grass. Sanchia described him as “having hay in his hair.”

Early in the January of that year Oscar came down to stay with the Careys of Lee Manor. It was a strange thing of Oscar to do in January, for the Careys were dull people; but the weather was mild, and Lee Manor was only four miles from Sanchia’s bungalow. Also, the Careys had a car, and to Oscar—who never walked more than a mile—a car was a necessity. He borrowed it, as he borrowed everything, with the air of conferring a favour.

“You had better keep that car, Carey. You can tell people that Oscar Flack once sat in it.”

He was a flaneur, but he took his poetry very seriously, and John, arriving at Sanchia’s bungalow about tea-time, and dreaming himself into a tête-à-tête with Sanchia before the fire, completed the new triangle.

Martha, Sanchia’s indispensable, met him and took his hat. She approved of John.

“There’s another gentleman here, sir.”

John’s blue eyes stared.

“Oh, well, that’s all right.”

He was ushered in, and his arrival interrupted Oscar’s reading of a little thing of his on “Orange Pulp in Covent Garden.”

They had not met before. Sanchia introduced them, and it occurred to her to think that they might be rather amusing together. Oscar, remaining seated on the tuffet, presented John with a first finger to shake.

“How de do.”

John, holding the finger, and looking surprised and not knowing what to do with it, was suddenly moved to give that fat finger a twist, but he refrained. He was mute. He sat down in a chair and displayed his big boots and thick grey stockings. He seemed to smell of the heather.

There should have been the silence of embarrassment, but silence and Oscar never cohabited. As a conversationalist he was what they called in those days “utterly utter.” He did utter. He talked while tea was coming in, and while it was being poured out, and while it was being consumed. He got hold of bits of buttered toast with his fat white fingers, and managed to talk and toast himself simultaneously. He talked about Debussy, and “poor old Tom Hardy and his poetical pomposities,” and the last thing in Grand Guignol. He knew that he was annoying John, and he went on annoying him. He was like a griffon yapping at a St. Bernard.

John sat malevolently still, and ate buttered toast, or as much of it as Oscar chose to leave him. And Sanchia, at her ease on the hearthrug, with her arms clasping her knees, thought John’s solemn face infinitely funny. Almost he looked as though Oscar was a bad cheese.

But she did try to drag John into the conversation. She liked John. She told him to light his pipe, and she mentioned to Oscar that John was interested in birds.

Oscar tried a quip.

“My dear sir, do you keep canaries? I once had a canary.”

“Indeed,” said John; “did you?”

“The most Victorian bird. It must have been a she. It used to tweet—‘Albert—Albert.’ ”

John plugged tobacco in his pipe.

“I see, quite lyrical. These things are catching.”

And then they looked at each other slantwise as men will, and knew that there could be murder between them, though in John’s hands Oscar would have been less than a sack of stale flour.

Now when Oscar was annoying anybody he felt his sleekest and his happiest, and if he could combine impertinencies towards Mrs. Grundy with a mild intrigue with some attractive woman, then the situation was flawless. For to Oscar, John symbolized the British Constitution, and the lions in Trafalgar Square, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a public that could go dotty over a novel like “Lorna Doone.” Oscar, being Irish, was always making terrible fun of the English, and John was so very English. It was easy to twist his tail.

At least, it appeared so, and Oscar sat him out at Sanchia’s on two successive afternoons, and treated John like an overgrown boy, and had the best of the fire, and apparently the best of Sanchia. He absorbed so much of the fire that Sanchia was moved towards playfulness.

“Martha tells me that we are down to the last hundredweight.”

“Of what, dear lady?”

“Coal.”

“A shortage of coal! But surely there are coal merchants in Devon, as well as Drakes and noble fellows.”

“My coal comes seven miles by road. I have two tons on order.”

Oscar spread his hands.

“Oh, God will provide.”

He looked at John.

“Besides, here we have Master Ridd who looks as though he could carry a sack of coal or a sheep.”

John brooded.

“Yes, I might manage to dispose of a sheep.”

Meanwhile a most strange conglomeration of circumstances combined to produce an unexpected situation. The weather changed suddenly; it grew cold; it banked up masses of blue-grey cloud; the dry bracken shivered in a north-east wind.

Martha’s mother fell sick in a distant village, and Martha begged a day off and disappeared to catch the carrier’s van which would take her into Boon Tracey.

Sanchia’s coal had not arrived, though it was supposed to be on the road.

The Careys’ car brought Oscar to Sanchia’s bungalow, but Oscar had been told that the car could not wait for him and that he would have to walk back. The Careys might be dull people, but they were growing a little tired of Oscar, and of being listed on life’s store-list under the heading of “Poets, people for the use of, Mark Three.”

The north-east wind set its teeth. The sky grew more and more ominous.

When John walked over the moor he knew what was coming, and Oscar should have known; but to Oscar snow was about as real as sugar icing on a cake, and when John arrived at Sanchia’s cottage he found the poet and Sanchia sitting in front of a very small fire. Oscar was not feeling poetical; he was feeling the cold, and that in spite of all the white blubber that he carried. Sanchia looked both a little worried and amused. She rose to make tea.

“Martha’s had to go to Tedworthy.”

“Oh,” said John, with an air of being profoundly wise about something.

“You did not see my coal-cart anywhere?”

“No. Nothing but one old crow.”

They had tea, they sat, they smoked, they talked, though Oscar did most of the talking, and from time to time, being next to the coal-box, he would extract a lump of coal with the tongs and place it on the fire. He kept most of the heat from John, just as he contrived to keep him out of the conversation. But the moment arrived when Oscar groped for the last time in the coal-box.

“Do be careful. That’s my last scuttle.”

Oscar looked blandly amused.

“Dear lady, is that so? For it seems that I have fished out the last lump.”

He chuckled faintly. Really, the joke was against Sanchia, for he was walking back to Lee Manor where there was plenty of coal.

“Subject for a picture. The last cartridge! Obviously, Sanchie, you will have to go to bed, and be Miss Moody till the coal comes.”

Almost he winked at John who was filling a second pipe and staring at the diminishing fire. And suddenly John asked him a question.

“Ever been down a mine?”

“Dear sir—I should get so dirty.”

And John smiled, a quiet sort of smile. It was as though he could hear the snow falling outside Sanchia’s bungalow, a veritable blizzard, banking up against walls and doors, clogging windows, effacing roads, and piling drifts on Chudleigh Moor. He smiled and lit his pipe. Yes, this fat and flabby ass could go on talking, while the snow came down, and turned Chudleigh Moor into a primitive wilderness.

Sanchia was looking a little anxious. Also, the room was growing very cold, and Martha had not returned.

“I think it must be snowing.”

John got up slowly and went to the window and drew back the edge of a curtain.

“Oh, just a few flakes, nothing much.”

He wanted Oscar to go on talking, for when Oscar’s interior warned him that dinner at Lee Manor was at seven-thirty, and that he had an hour’s walk before him, the snow might have some surprises for this conceited ass; so John listened with an air of interest to Oscar’s views upon the poetical genius of Yeats. Meanwhile the fire grew less and less, and Sanchia began to hunch her shoulders and to indulge in little suggestive shivers. Really, the situation was growing serious, for the log-box was as empty as the scuttle, and on Chudleigh Moor gas stoves and electric heaters did not exist. Certainly there was a small oil stove in the kitchen, but Sanchia did not know how much oil might be left in the five gallon drum that stood in the scullery. Yes, the situation was ominous. Supposing it snowed hard during the night and the roads became blocked? Oscar’s dissertation upon the poetic genius of Mr. Yeats became impertinent and superfluous.

She looked at the clock.

“My lad, it’s five minutes past six.”

“Five past six! The minstrel and the winter wind. They are most disgustingly punctual at the Manor.”

Sanchia rose. She was not worrying about Oscar’s winter walk; she was wondering why Martha had not arrived, and what would happen to the evening meal. Oscar was putting on his overcoat, and John lighting a third pipe. He had the air of a man who was waiting for the fun to begin.

Sanchia went to the door. John heard her open it, utter a sudden exclamation, and close the door hurriedly.

“Good heavens! It’s an absolute blizzard.”

She came back into the light. A snowflake had settled on her hair, and others on her dress.

“It’s an absolute blizzard. How utterly surreptitious of it.”

She looked at John as though she expected him to do something, but John sat smoking his pipe.

“Yes, it happens rather suddenly up here, at times.”

He glanced at Oscar.

“You had better push off before it gets too thick. I’ll see you as far as the lane.”

He got up and put on his cap, took his ash stick, and opened the door. A whirl of white flakes drifted in, and Oscar, who was thinking of his dinner and the fires at Lee Manor, stood and stared at the unexpectedness of the winter night.

“By Jove—I can’t go out in that. It’s too——”

John turned and looked at him.

“Oh, yes, you can. You have only got to follow the road. No use hanging about. Good night, Sanchia.”

He edged Oscar out into the snow, and closed the door, and found Oscar’s black shape blocking the path.

“I say—I can’t see——”

“Come on. I’ll put you in the lane. You have only to follow the lane.”

He took Oscar by the arm and shepherded him down the path and out of the gate. He was most unsympathetic.

“You turn left—I turn right. I should make tracks if I were you. It’s getting rather thick. Good night.”

John stood there until he had convinced himself that Oscar was making a sincere attempt to walk to Lee Manor, and then he turned to the right, and made for his cottage. It was less than a quarter of a mile away, but when he reached it he was like a snow man. He stamped his feet and shook himself in the porch. He gave way to inward laughter. It was a nice situation. Possibly it might teach Sanchia a thing or two, and prove to the poet that a winter night on Chudleigh Moor was not a mere cream meringue.

Though, as a matter of fact, the situation was developing on lines that were unforeseen by John. He had supposed that Oscar would get about as far as The Green Yaffle down by Stone Bridge, and take refuge there for the night. It would not be a very comfortable night, and John was glad.

But Oscar did not get as far as the inn. He fell into a young snowdrift and was considerably frightened. He was not made of the stuff which goes to the creating of Arctic explorers.

Sanchia was investigating the contents of the paraffin drum in the scullery. It contained a little less than a pint of oil, and in transferring it to the stove’s container she spilt quite a lot of it over one foot.

“Oh, damn!”

She did not like paraffin or paraffin stoves. Messy things! But she might be able to warm up something on the stove. Also, the bungalow was beginning to feel like a flimsy cricket pavilion on the top of a mountain. No coal, no Martha, and John had gone and left her in the lurch. She felt very much peeved.

And then she heard a knocking, and gave inward thanks. It would be Martha or the coal, and she hurried to the bungalow’s door and opened it and let in a swirl of snow, and discovered Oscar.

“You!”

There was no joy in her voice, and there was no joy in Oscar. He wore a white plaster all over him. He was not quoting poetry.

“Sanchie. Quite impossible. Awful night. I should have got lost.”

She said:

“But you can’t come in here.”

He stared. What a shock to be met on such a night by the creature of convention in the person of his Isoult of the Moor.

“Can’t?”

“Of course not. You must go on to John’s.”

Almost he whimpered.

“But I don’t know where John lives. Besides——”

The snow was drifting in and she let him into the passage, and half-closed the door, and when she had done it she realized that probably he would stay in. Also, she had a feeling that Oscar was rather a mean creature. He was like a fat and selfish boy who would snivel, and then burst into nasty giggles when the crisis had passed.

She said:

“Why haven’t we a telephone! It’s perfectly—— I’d better take you up to John’s.”

But he was removing his coat. He gave way to an incipient shiver.

“Can’t be done, Sanchie. You’ve no idea what the night’s like.”

She began to have new ideas of Oscar as a man.

“Oh—very well. Do you mean to stay the night?”

“Well—really! Do you expect me to——?”

“There’s no bed for you.”

“No bed?”

“Of course not. I’m not going to give you Martha’s.”

With characteristic casualness he hung his caked coat over a chair which was covered by a beloved piece of Japanese embroidery, and Sanchia exclaimed:

“Take that thing off. It will ruin——”

He stared, and removed it. Yes, certainly Sanchia was rather touchy.

“I can sleep on the sofa.”

He suggested it with an air of magnanimity, and she turned to go back to the kitchen.

“Perhaps. I’ll see.”

About eight o’clock in the morning, John, having had his early cup of tea, lit a pipe, and went out upon the day’s adventure. Sanchia might need rescuing; though, cunning watcher of birds that he was, he had found wisdom in leaving her to discover what Chudleigh Moor was like when the snow came down. He ploughed through it. The day was gorgeous, but bitterly cold, with the sun shining on a white world, and a little crisp, icy breeze blowing from the north.

John approached the bungalow, and avoiding the door, went round to the sitting-room window. He flattened himself against the wall and looked in. He was presented with the most unexpected of tableaux. Sanchia was on her knees in front of the grate, trying to make some sort of fire out of the remains of a sugar-box and last night’s cinders. Oscar sat huddled on the sofa with his back to the window, wrapped up in a blue eiderdown, and looking as blue as the quilt.

John’s eyebrows bristled.

“So you sneaked back, did you!”

He drew away towards the bungalow’s porch. He stood and considered the situation. Now, how exactly should it be handled? He had left a hearty fire leaping up the cottage chimney, and a frying-pan ready for bacon and eggs. He smiled. He knocked at Sanchia’s door.

She opened it. Her hands were black, her little nose pinched, and John met her breezily.

“Well, how’s life?”

She was in a temper near to tears. Things had been sufficiently exasperating without having a helpless mass of fat like Oscar sitting shivering on the sofa.

“John, it’s simply too awful.”

“What—the weather?”

“Oh, yes, that. But we’re simply frozen, and the oil stove has given out.”

“We? Has Martha come back?”

She lowered her voice. She glanced malevolently over her shoulder, and then went and shut the inner door.

“He—sneaked back!”

“What, Oscar?”

“He’s about as useless as—— I let him sleep on the sofa. He expects me—somehow—to produce a breakfast. There’s not going to be any breakfast.”

John wanted to laugh, but he appeared immensely grave.

“I say, Sanchia, you don’t mean to say that fellow spent the night——”

“Oh, don’t be silly. Do you think I wanted him?”

She rubbed her hands together; her little nose was like ivory, and John noticed that she had buttoned herself up in a Scotch tweed coat. His inspiration was upon him.

“Look here, I’ve got a fire up at my place, and plenty of coal, and bacon and eggs, my dear, and hot tea.”

Almost she moistened her cold lips with her tongue. She looked at the snow.

“Could I walk? And what about Oscar?”

“Oh, damn Oscar! Besides——”

And suddenly he caught her up and held her like a baby.

“No need to walk. Rather deep in places. You leave it to me.”

Her astonishment hesitated between anger and delight.

“Bacon and eggs, John?”

“Yes.”

“How lovely.”

He carried her down the path into the lane, the deep snow muffling the sound of his footsteps; and Oscar, who had gone down on his knees and was puffing at a little wad of paper that he had lit under Sanchia’s pile of box wood, remained in ignorance of this act of brigandage. He blew sedulously at the timid flames.

And Sanchia was laughing, and looking strangely into John’s face.

“You—are—strong. I wonder what Oscar will do?”

John smiled.

“That’s his problem. Let him solve it.”

But for the moment Oscar was absorbed in making that small fire burn, even if it should not burn for very long. He wanted to impress Sanchia; he had more than a suspicion that he had lacked impressiveness, and that an unshaven chin did not suit him. Confound the snow! It was a barbarous business, and he had neither razor nor hair brushes, and his hands felt like two lumps of cold fat. Just like a couple of women to leave ordering in fresh coal until there was none left in the house. But what was Sanchia doing? He had fancied that he had heard John’s voice, but he was not going to show himself to that bucolic person. He wanted Sanchia to come in so that he could say: “Look at the fire I’ve made,” and no Sanchia reappeared.

He grew suspicious. He called to her:

“Sanchie! Hallo, come and look at the fire.”

No one answered. He grew anxious, anxious about all sorts of things, his breakfast, his dignity, but when he discovered those footmarks in the snow he forgot his dignity. Actually he blundered out into the lane and saw those deep impressions full of shadow stippling the white surface and disappearing over the hill. They puzzled him, for there appeared to be only one set of tracks, and Sanchia could not have made those huge hoofmarks.

Angry and depressed, he went in to forage some sort of breakfast. He found half a cold tongue in the larder, and the remains of yesterday’s milk, and bread and butter. Hopefully he tried to warm up the kettle on that decrepit fire, and the fire gave up the ghost under that chilly weight of metal and cold water.

Oscar sat down and ate cold tongue and bread and butter, but the food did not seem to warm him. The room grew more and more of an ice-house. He gloomed; he wrapped the quilt round him. He had a feeling that somehow Sanchia had played him a dirty trick. Oh, damn the cold! His pride began to shiver.

Up at John’s cottage things were otherwise. A fire blazed, and Sanchia, on two cushions, unfolded herself like a flower. A kettle steamed on the hob, and that practical person of a John was cracking eggs and dropping them neatly into the frying pan.

“Here you are, Sanchia, you fry while I lay the table.”

“What a joke!”

“Rather, isn’t it.”

“Just lovely. I wonder what Oscar’s doing?”

She laughed so that the eggs shook.

“Did you see him?”

“I did. Rolled up in a quilt.”

“A blue quilt. And his hair! Oscar doesn’t look nice in the morning, especially with a beard.”

John was laying the table.

“Be careful with that pan, young woman. I don’t like my eggs broken.”

“You—are—a tyrant.”

“Perhaps.”

Cold tongue and bread and butter lay heavy on Oscar’s stomach. Oh, for a warm drink! And that flimsy bungalow seemed to grow colder and colder. He worked up a rage, a humiliated heat, he put on his coat and dared the snow. He floundered up hill in the direction of John’s cottage, following those huge depressions. He came to John’s cottage, and saw smoke ascending from the chimney. So there was a fire.

His pride oozed out of his boots. Hot tea! And perhaps that fellow would lend him a razor, and allow him a jug of hot water. But he, too, went to peer through a window, and there in front of the fire he saw two people seated upon cushions. John was smoking a pipe, and had an arm round Sanchia, and in Sanchia’s mouth there was a cigarette. On the table lay the tantalizing relics of a hot breakfast.

And Oscar felt grieved, disillusioned. He despaired of the world.

“Selfish beggars.”

But he tapped at the window.

“Hallo, you two.”

Incredible selfishness! John got up and deliberately pulled down the blind!