The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “How she must hate me!” he thought.

  His own helplessness exasperated him. His glance lighted again on the two Samian bowls standing on the patch of grass in the morning sunlight. He remembered that he had not eaten, and realized that his fast could not last for ever.

  “God helps those . . .” he thought, and sat considering his splinted leg and how best he could crawl to fetch his food. He was in the very act of moving himself from the mattress that was laid upon the floor when he saw Ariadne reascending the steps that led from the garden. She came forward, bent down, picked up one of the Samian bowls and carried it towards the portico.

  THE HARMLESS SATYR

  I saw him first in the Kursaal at Clareux.

  He arrived at the moment when Herr Muller, the first violin and director of the orchestra, had paused to give his head a toss before attacking Wienawski’s sonata. The place was crowded. Very tall and very pale, and wearing a black plush hat that was rather too small for him, he searched shyly for a vacant chair. In one hand he clutched a pair of black kid gloves; the other held a white paper bag that might have contained half a dozen very fragile eggs. He was both deprecating and dignified. Obviously he did not desire to disturb either the orchestra or the audience, but he did wish to get seated and to submerge himself in the crowd.

  The head waitress insinuated herself between the tables. She managed to attract his attention. She was a very capable young woman with a nose and a forehead and a chin that shone as though she polished them with one of those velvet pads that are used for adding gloss to a glacé shoe.

  “You will find a chair here, monsieur.”

  He appeared immensely relieved. He gave her a little stiff bow, and a gentle smile. She disposed of him in a chair by one of the pillars. He placed his gloves and the paper bag on a table, removed his black plush hat, and held it to his chest for a moment before tucking it away under the table. His pallor was remarkable; it was a kind of gentle, dim greyness as though he had lived for years in a sort of twilight world.

  Herr Muller was tossing his head and acknowledging the applause when Major Jeremy caught my eye.

  “See that fellow?”

  “The gentleman with the paper bag?”

  “That’s it. Anything strike you?”

  Quite a number of things had struck me. At five-and-fifty one is either very dead or very alive. Being a woman—and quite undomesticated—I continued to find the world absurdly interesting. Moreover, I had just come from Rome, and my Rome is always the Rome of the ancients. I go back to the marble nymphs and fauns, the naked girls and gods and satyrs. They refresh one. They belong to the years when life was very much younger. And in the cloisters of the Baths of Diocletian I had been amused and intrigued by a particular piece of statuary.

  “It’s quite absurd,” I said.

  Major Jeremy cocked an eye at me from under a bushy white eyebrow.

  “German, or Austrian?”

  “Oh, that’s too modern and superfluous. A living satyr.”

  He tapped a cigarette on the table.

  “That’s it! I was groping. Pan in a plush hat.”

  “But a very gentle Pan.”

  Why the ancients should have assigned that particular type of face to Pan and his creatures I do not know. Its expression may be brutal and sensual, but it can also express gentleness and humour and a kind of naïve sympathy with birds and beasts. Yet it seemed to me that the man disturbed the very conventional people who were seated near him, just as the odour of a white man is unpleasing to a negro or an Arab. I saw a woman edge her chair away. And I think he must have been aware of the curious repugnance he inspired, that he was familiar with it, and pained by it, and unable to understand it. It explained both his dignity and his air of gentle and sad shyness. He was the cause of an unhappy physical flinching among his fellows, just because puckish Nature had endowed him with a particular cast of countenance.

  Even old Jeremy was susceptible to it.

  “Sinister looking beggar.”

  I did not agree with him.

  “It’s a mask,” I said. “Try and look a bit deeper.”

  “I don’t know that I want to.”

  Even the much polished head waitress appeared moved to treat the man with severity. He had ordered a cup of chocolate. The white paper bag reposed upon the table, and the woman objected to the bag and its probable contents. There happened to be a lull in the conversation, and I heard what passed.

  “Monsieur will excuse me, but visitors are not permitted to bring food with them.”

  His pale eyelashes flickered.

  “It is not for myself, madame. Biscuits—biscuits for the birds.”

  He went so far as to open the bag and show her the contents, and she gazed down at it and at him a little scornfully. She was a full-blooded young woman, and this pale creature with his bag of biscuits and his shy and wayward eyes must have seemed to her both uninteresting and futile.

  I glanced at old Jeremy. He was a very quick person who resented unnecessary questions.

  “A bag of biscuits for the little birds! A St. Francis disguised as Pan.”

  “Why not? A bag of shot is your ideal.”

  He smiled at me.

  “Used to be. I’m not so fond of killing things—as I was.”

  Life may be little more than a series of glimpses, and I had my glimpses of the man in the black plush hat. He came daily to the Kursaal, but he refrained from introducing his paper bag. No one ever spoke to him, save the waitress who brought him his tea or his chocolate. It was both obvious that he was a lover of music and that he understood it, but it seemed to me that music did not satisfy him. I would catch him looking wistfully at his fellow humans, as though he felt his isolation, and was hungry for human sympathy. So eager did he appear to exchange a few words with someone that I saw him pause and try to talk to the very dry and polite person in a blue coat who sat at the bureau just inside the door.

  Obviously, he was a very lonely creature, though he looked no more than forty. His height—he was six feet or more—made him all the more noticeable, and he held himself very straight like a Prussian prisoner refusing to bend. He was very fair. His pale blue eyes looked at the world as though they asked for everything and nothing, and concealed their yearning behind a mute and deprecating mildness.

  I christened him the Harmless Satyr.

  Once or twice I found him standing by the edge of the lake, a solitary and very black figure surrounded by seagulls. He was feeding them with broken biscuits from a paper bag, throwing the pieces up in the air, and smiling as the birds swooped to catch them. I felt very much tempted to stop and speak to him, but he appeared so absorbed in feeding the creatures that I left him alone with them. Moreover, the gull is a bird I fail to appreciate. I mislike the coldness of its eye.

  Major Jeremy had missed three afternoons at the Kursaal. I supposed that he had had one of his attacks of asthma, and was fuming and wheezing and re-reading the old magazines in the hotel lounge, but on the Saturday he turned up at the Kursaal wearing a new suit.

  Does a man ever cease to be susceptible? I believe old Jeremy had three love affairs per year, and bought a new suit whenever the divine occasion had arrived. He looked at me with his brazen blue eyes, just like a guilty and self-pleased boy, and sat down, and beckoned to the waitress.

  “You’ll tea with me to-day.”

  I said that I would, provided he would allow me to eat nothing but brown bread and butter.

  “You’re so Spartan, dear lady. Do you really like it?”

  “Of course I do.”

  He gave the waitress his order as though he were paying her a compliment.

  “Oh, by the way, remember that German chap?”

  “My Harmless Satyr?”

  “I say, that’s a good name. The fellow is staying at my hotel.”

  The coincidence would have lacked either significance or interest had not Jeremy gone on to comment upon the H.S.’s isolation.

&
nbsp; “Not a soul will speak to him. If he goes and sits in a corner—he has that corner to himself.”

  “But why?”

  “Well, he’s a German—you see, and it isn’t so very long since the war.”

  “But—in Switzerland——?”

  “Clareux is a sort of little England. Ninety per cent. of the “Grand” is English, the rest French or Belgian. And then—you know—the fellow has a rather queer physiognomy. The English like things just so.”

  “I know we do. But a poor lonely creature with the eyes of a lost dog, a man who feeds the birds, and wears a pathetic hat——!”

  “Dear lady, it may be the hat——”

  “Oh, I know, the heinousness of hats!”

  The tea arrived, and when I had poured out Jeremy’s cup he gave me one of his droll, kind glances.

  “Well—anyway—I spoke to the chap.”

  “Good for you.”

  “His name’s Halberg—Heinrich Halberg. My German is as formless as a haggis, but he has plenty of English. I thought he was going to kiss me.”

  “That’s an exaggeration.”

  “Granted. But—do you know—I rather took to the chap. He’s got a sort of natural niceness. He doesn’t splurge. He has dignity.”

  A somewhat creamy cake occupied his attention for the moment, and I thought what a pet he was, with his brick-red face, and his air of fierceness, and his very generous heart. He had the old English phlegm.

  His blue eyes stared under their white eyebrows.

  “That fellow has had a very bad time—dear lady. That’s my feeling about him. He gives you the impression of having been bled white. I never thought that a German would offer me a cigar, and that I should take it.”

  “And the cigar——?”

  “Minx!” he said. “Oh—perfect. But—hallo——”

  He glanced up and I saw the Harmless Satyr not two yards from our table. He bowed to Jeremy, and he bowed with a kind of grave shyness to me. I saw Jeremy’s moustache twitch, a sign that mischief was in the air. He got up and introduced us.

  “Herr Halberg—Miss Fraser.”

  I found myself suggesting that Herr Halberg should take the third chair.

  His grey face lit up. The pallor of it was actually suffused with pink. He gave me a second little bow, holding his plush hat to his chest. His pale blue eyes had a kind of Northern innocence.

  “You are very kind. I accept.”

  His English was good, and later I was to learn that his French was almost as good as his English. He sat down, and he gave me a proof of his sensitive restraint, for the orchestra began to play “Madame Butterfly,” and with one courteous little explanatory smile, he sat silent and still, enjoying the music. His very stillness was a thing of breeding. He did not fidget or attempt to be self-consciously appreciative. He just sat there and listened.

  With Muller distributing his acknowledging bows Jeremy thought it time to make a remark. For an Englishman he was very patient when an orchestra was attacking.

  “That fellow’s an artist. Always looks rather ill—though——”

  I saw Herr Halberg press his pale lips together, and I suddenly remembered that Muller had been a prisoner in Russia during the war, and that the conversation might verge upon the painful, so I asked Halberg whether he would take tea or chocolate.

  He blushed.

  “Oh, no—you must not give me tea. Though I have the honour of your kindness——”

  He made a sign to the waitress, and ordered himself a cup of chocolate, and turning to me began to talk music until he realized that Jeremy knew nothing about music save that he liked it tuneful. His divergence was instant. Were we fond of flowers? And had we seen the crocus fields? Jeremy had the Englishman’s passion for flowers, so all was well.

  Like many sensitive people I follow my intuitions, and my intuition told me that my Harmless Satyr was the gentlest of creatures. Being old enough to be his mother I could observe and study him without the prejudices of a mother or the merciless severity of a young girl. His Nature God was of the North. He had the Northerner’s blue-eyed and dreamy romanticism. Tear an illusion from him and he would instantly possess himself of another. Besides, you cannot deprive a man of music and birds and mountains unless you shut him up in a prison, and even in prison his Northern imagination will find the grey mists and the sea.

  But that was what had happened to Halberg. He had been a prisoner, and a Russian prisoner, a white man in a land of red slime. I did not know it then, but he was to tell me about it later, though he did not tell me the whole of it. He told that to Jeremy, as man to man, for Russia was a red rag to Jeremy. “Better at butchery than soldiering.” He said that he did not understand the Russian and did not want to understand him.

  But I was to be brought to see my Harmless Satyr in a different situation, and to get my glimpse of the man as God may have seen him. I love poking about in the picturesque back streets of the continental towns, and the old parts of Clareux had to be searched for up steep lanes and along grey passages, and I was exploring what was a mere donkey track on the hillside below Guyon when I chanced upon Halberg in a singular situation.

  He was standing outside a little stone cottage, holding his plush hat in one hand and some money in the other. He was being harangued with emphasis by a very square and confident Swiss woman. On the front of the cottage hung a bird’s cage, the wire door of which was open.

  I effaced myself in a deep doorway.

  “It is not a question of money, monsieur,” the Swiss woman was saying. “You have interfered with our property——”

  I listened. I gathered that there had been a goldfinch in that cage, and that Halberg—deliberately—had opened the door of the cage and let the bird out. Afterwards he had knocked up the woman, told her what he had done, and had offered her the price of the bird.

  But she would have none of his money. She protested that the bird had been a great pet, and Halberg put his money away, but still stood with his hat in his hand.

  “Madame—I—too—have been a prisoner. Until one has been shut up behind wire—one does not understand. You will forgive me—but I cannot bear now to see a bird in a cage.”

  “But it was not your bird, monsieur.”

  “Are the birds and the beasts our slaves, madame?” he asked.

  I came out of my doorway. Halberg had produced a fountain pen and an envelope, and was writing down the woman’s name and her address.

  “I hope you will permit me to make some little recompense, madame. I wish to.”

  Then he saw me and blushed. He had put on his hat. He raised it to me, and including the Swiss woman in the salute, paused for a moment to hand her his card.

  “If you wish to take proceedings, madame——”

  Obviously she did not. You could not be angry with the man, and she shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and Halberg came down the path to join me, still carrying his hat, and looking shy.

  “Is it not strange,” he said, “that good people who feed wild birds in winter will yet shut up a wild bird in a cage.”

  I supposed that it was due to our childish egotism, and he adjusted his plush hat, and for a moment looked as fierce as it was possible for him to look.

  “Yes, our egotism. I suppose it is egotism—even when I cannot bear to see a bird in a cage, and must let the creature out. Do I do it to please myself? No—I think not—not wholly. I do feel for the bird.”

  “I’m sure you do. Have you opened many cages in Clareux?”

  “Three: A blackbird, a linnet, and a goldfinch. They will not miss this spring.”

  There was emotion in his voice. He walked beside me, erect, courteous, serious, yet his eyes seemed to be watching the happy flutterings of some liberated bird.

  “I agree with you,” I said, “but what an inconvenient person you would be in a Zoo. Would you let out the lions and the tigers?”

  He answered me with a kind of stark gravity.

  “I never go to Z
oos. The cages smell. They are unhappy places, very unhappy, and full of children. And children can be so cruel——”

  So it appeared that he wandered about Clareux looking for bird-cages that could be opened, though he admitted that his liberating passion did not spend itself upon canaries. Mercifully he excluded the little yellow birds from his endeavours. His gentle, droll smile showed me that he was not one of your brass-bound reformers who cannot let life alone.

  “A canary is a canary. Canaries and cages go together.”

  “Yes—Herr Halberg—there are human canaries who appear to ask for cages, and a sunny window.”

  I saw that I hurt him. He winced. His pale lips matched his pale eyes. I could only wonder whether I had touched a sore memory—if I had hurt him, or whether he was the sort of man who was always hurting himself. Possibly he had been the possessor of a pet canary, and it had died.

  But the explanation came to me through Jeremy some days later. Men make queer friendships, and yet there was nothing queer in the friendship that appeared to spring up between the red Englishman and the pale German. They were such contrasts, pepper and salt, red wine and white.

  I ran into Jeremy in the English library where he was pulling books from the shelves and putting them back again with an air of bored impatience.

  “What a lot of stuff! You only get a live book once in a blue moon.”

  Jeremy’s “live books” dealt mostly with the shooting of elephants and tigers, or with descriptions of very greasy and very primitive peoples of a horrible degree of ugliness. He would never allow them their ugliness, and would accuse me of being suburban and prejudiced because I looked at a black man with the eyes of a white woman.

  “Here’s just the thing for you,” I said. “How I explored the Amazon in a Wash Tub.”

  He grinned and took the book.

  “Canoe—to be correct—dear lady. Got ten minutes to spare?”