Читать книгу Seven Men Came Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 17

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It was March.

She looked out of the window and saw a few Lent lilies flattened by the wind, and the tragic desolate gestures of the old fruit trees. A scud of rain struck the window. The little valley looked grey, narrow and shabby with the deplorable shabbiness of an English March. There had been a month of drought and of bitter north-east wind, and the field below High Wood might have been a vast and frayed old sack which some giant tramp has tossed contemptuously aside. No greenness anywhere save a faint feathering on the elders. By the black fence of the farmyard you might find nettles sprouting blackly through rubbish, old wire, scrap iron, rusty machinery, the dumpings of years which in summer the nettles would conceal.

She laughed at the illusion of spring and at herself. She made herself laugh on occasion, for otherwise she would have been the victim of one of those storms of suppressed sex which cause mere man to blaspheme in perplexity and exasperation.

“What the devil’s the matter—now?”

Hysteria! She went back to the kitchen and with a gesture that was almost gay slapped a lump of pastry on to the pastry board. The Sunday tart! It occurred to her to gibe at the suggestion. “A tart? Yes—I should be quite ridiculous—in that profession. No. S.A.! And my vast face!” She became busy with the rolling-pin. She could suppose that people said—“O, yes, Una’s such a good sort. Always—so cheerful. Such common sense.” And that was just what people did say, for, after all, a plain and unattractive woman with no money might be expected to regard housework as her destiny. Lucky to have a home. What else could she expect?

Yes, what else? A hostel in town or a cheap boarding-house and a job as a typist or a clerk. To be just one of the multitude of anonymous, drab women whom men treat as card-indexes, or letter-books, or hat-stands. But why man—at all? If you had a temperament and a brain? Why not fly to Australia, or drive a car across the Sahara? Accomplishment, creation, adventure?

She rolled out her slabs of pastry and trimmed them with a knife.

The Sunday apple-tart.

In June it would be gooseberries.

In July, raspberries and red currants.

In the autumn—plum and apple, or apple and blackberry.

Sudden sunlight rushed into the kitchen. March was melting into April in the matter of its moods. The raindrops hung glistening on the window against a blue rent in the sky. The waving branches of an old pear tree flashed its swelling flower-buds at her.

She saw her brother’s figure pass across the window, an old army tunic thrown over its shoulders. He was coming in for his elevens, and being a considerate soul he would enter by the back door when the day was mucky. She heard him kicking the toes of his boots against the step.

She smiled.

“Poor old David.”

But—why—poor old David? There was nothing poor about her brother save his balance at the bank. He reminded her somehow of the English infantryman of history, the Waterloo redcoat repulsing interminable cavalry charges, blue eyed, stolid, cheerfully ironic. “Here come these fools again!” For, to her, a farmer’s life appeared to be a continuous battle against the cussedness of things animate and inanimate. If he was not fighting Nature, he was repulsing those bandits, the dealer or the butcher. A sow might fall to eating her progeny, or the weather play Old Harry with your hay. And yet, David——

He came in looking as though he and March had been laughing together round the corner. The wind was in his blue eyes, his breeches dark with the rain. He swung his old tunic over the back of a chair.

“Just a bit rough to-day.”

His glass of milk and slice of cake were ready. He sat down by the fire with the glass on the floor, and the plate balanced on one knee. She did not say: “You’re wet, Dave; you ought to change.” She knew now that she might just as well have used such words to a tree.

She went on with her work, and he, munching his cake, glanced with an air of approval at a sky that was darkening for another shower.

“Jolly good rain. We wanted it.”

She supposed so. She was in the habit of thinking of him as a simple soul, and yet he was no more simple than the seasons. The subtlety of the soil! His acceptance of all natural phenomena was—somehow—more profoundly subtle than her restlessness. There were moments when she could have wished to be like him, inevitable, blue eyed, silent, striding straight into the wind and loving it.

He was watching her hands.

“Going into Midworth this afternoon?”

She paused, looking out of the window.

“Yes, possibly.”

“Do you good.”

Her eyes and mouth were momentarily poignant. Could Midworth save her soul with its sleepy shops, its cinema, its one circulating library? Tea at the local tea-shop! She strove against a little inward bitter tempest as more rain splashed upon the window.

“What about tobacco?”

“Yes—I’m nearly out. I’ve got a pair of boots that need seeing to.”

She would catch the red bus at the end of the lane, carrying his boots and her books in a shiny black shopping bag. What high adventure! Saturday afternoon in Midworth!

Her brother had emptied his glass. He placed it on the table, and she was aware of his tanned and hairy forearm. It was very much a man’s arm. He got up and reached for the tobacco tin. Tobacco was his only luxury.

“I wrote to old Sherring last night. You might post it, Una.”

She was shaping the sheet of pastry over the sliced fruit in the pie-dish. Her face had a kind of haggard cheerfulness. Why did men always refer to their friends as Old This or Old That? She had never seen Captain Sherring. He was an almost mythical person like some hero out of a saga, one of her brother’s war relics. She could suppose that those war friendships had been rather elemental affairs, boyish and uncritical.

“I’ve asked old Sherring down for a week-end in May. Can you manage it?”

She was wiping her hands.

“Won’t it be rather primitive for him?”

Her brother looked amused.

“No need to worry. I don’t suppose Sherring’s lost his war-sense. I think you would like Sherring, Sis.”

She looked at the streaming window.

“What does he do for a living?”

Crabtree sucked at his pipe.

“Some job in town. I believe it’s an agency. Sherring’s not a man who talks much about himself.”

“Like you.”

“O, no, he’s not the clod I am. Fact is—there’s something a little mysterious about Sherring. Most lovable chap I ever met, a bit aloof and silent. You had to see him in a tight corner. It used to make me smile—somehow.”

She was interested. She could imagine men twisting themselves into a variety of emotional knots in tight corners.

“Just—how?”

He was smiling.

“O, Sherring was always the gentleman—yes—I mean the real thing. When things were really bloody—he seemed to get as smooth and as calm and as—benignant—as a bishop confirming a lot of kids. Polite—almost gentle. No shouting, no frightfulness. It used to make me smile.”

“Rather helpful, wasn’t it?”

“I should say so. It had a most wonderful effect on the men. Imagine a chap walking coolly down a perfectly bloody trench and remarking to a sergeant: ‘Things seem a little upset to-night, Sergeant Smith. I expect it will soon blow over.’ You would see him strolling about with a whimsical look when everybody was wanting to grovel.”

“Was he afraid?”

“Of course he was afraid—we were all afraid.”

“He did not show it.”

Her brother laughed.

“Yes—by behaving like a kind of super-gentleman, a fellow who was utterly at his ease.”

The shower had passed, and sunlight poured in.

“Rather an intriguing person.”

Instantly, she despised herself for those words. How cheap and modern they were! But then, she too was tied into spiritual and emotional knots, and was afraid of betraying agitated fingers.

She allowed herself to be more human.

“He sounds rather a dear. I’ll try to efface myself while you two yarn.”

Her brother glanced at her as he sometimes looked at a beast that was ailing. There were moments when he was troubled about his sister.

“Well—I’ll be getting back to the job. I wish you would get out a bit more, Sis. Are you going to play tennis this year?”

She coloured up.

“My tennis isn’t—exactly—it.”

She would have said that she was one of those clumsy and unconvincing people whose hands fumble at life, while the rich world of an inner consciousness glows like a wounded and unheeded sunset.

She laughed.

“But—I’m not a bad cook.”

Her brother went out with the air of a man who had found something to perplex him. What sort of life was this for a woman—unless——? But what was the alternative? Una was not the sort who seemed to marry. Men were not interested in her. But was she——?

He put on his coat in the porch.

After all, life was a matter of compromise. You could not help people to transcend their faces.

Poor old Una! She ought to have been a man. The Crabtree stock was successfully male, all sinew and leather. Poor old Una!