The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “If you wish me to accept that money, dear, you must marry me.”

  But here he spoke of other terms; not for his own sake, but for hers.

  “Why—marriage? I don’t expect. Does one go into partnership with a ghost? For that’s what I am—a ghost.”

  She would not have it.

  “No, a spirit, the very soul of a man, dear one. I ask for marriage, not as a kind of insurance. I’ve no business instincts towards you.”

  He smiled at her.

  “No; I don’t think you have. But—if I marry you—I shan’t expect——”

  She touched his hand.

  “What’s in your mind—exactly? Are you humouring a child? Because—I’m not a child, you know.”

  “Just this: I’m not buying your love, or the kindness of a woman who consents to nurse a wreck—till the wreckage goes to pieces. Let us have our month together and then I’ll go away and get through the last chapter. I don’t want you to have to read it.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed.

  “You mean—I should have—what you call the pleasant part—and be spared—if you think of it as being spared?”

  “Exactly. I want to keep the beauty. Is it vanity, or something better? I shall wither up in some nursing home among people who are politely kind and mercifully indifferent. One can pay to die in decent privacy and get the ugliness—put away.”

  But his sentimental cynicism failed to deceive her. He was neither a sentimentalist nor a cynic, nor was she a middle-class opportunist, but a girl who knew the shabby side of life and the number of stitches you had to give for a shilling. She might be a little governess at the mercy of a dozen vulgar mischances, but she would give value for value. She would carry through her part of the job. And she put it to him bluntly, with a kind of pragmatical tenderness. If his little governess was to be granted a pension—well—she would earn it—to the limits of her capacity.

  “I’m not that sort of woman. I’m not afraid of what you call—the ugliness. Besides—I won’t allow that it need be ugly.”

  “But—think——”

  She put out a hand.

  “Hold it. If what we call loving—is worth anything—doesn’t it—make things possible? If I had to die, would you want to run away and leave me to die alone with your politely kind and mercifully indifferent people? I know better. And so do you.”

  He could not move her from her decision and it is probable that in his heart of hearts he was infinitely glad of her decision and grateful to her for it. He had found no shrinking in her and he was both touched and astonished. She had not avoided his lips, but had sought them. For a few kisses she might have won five hundred a year, with no unpleasant restrictions attached to the contract, but she had elected to choose otherwise.

  “You are thorough,” he said to her.

  “Oh, my dear, don’t you realize? I care. And for the little while—we shall have. . . . Oh, somehow, I can’t believe it. Are you sure?”

  “The doctors were very sure.”

  “But surely—something—can be done?”

  “Not in my case. Besides—six weeks ago I accepted the alternative—and in six weeks—such a thing spreads. It’s final.”

  She sat holding his hand.

  “I wish you would see someone in Rome.”

  “I will—if you wish it.”

  “I do. It seems so cruel and ironical.”

  He pointed to a mass of broken brickwork.

  “So it was in their day. Death sits in the sun beside every man and woman. But life goes on.”

  She made a little shivering movement and drew closer to him.

  “Let’s feel the sun—while we have it. Oh, if only one could will things.”

  “So we can, certain things. We can will beauty and good memories and courage. Let’s will them together, Una, while we can.”

  XII

  At the end of the day Mrs. Pym intervened.

  They had forgotten the very existence of that bright little woman and forgotten it so thoroughly that they drove up to the Eliseo without fear or favour. Callendar handed out his betrothed and, at this very moment of homage, Mrs. Pym happened upon them. Miss Summerhayes’s official holiday closed at five o’clock and the hour was half-past five.

  Callendar was paying the chauffeur and Una was intercepted in the vestibule. The catechizing, vicious and abrupt, developed in the presence of the two page-boys.

  “Where have you been?”

  “To Hadrian’s villa and Tivoli.”

  “With Mr. Callendar?”

  “Yes, with Mr. Callendar.”

  Mrs. Pym glistened.

  “An affair—I suppose. I don’t encourage affairs. They are rather superfluous—in a governess.”

  Callendar caught those last words. He came into the vestibule with a kind of dry and serene smile; he was both the lawyer and the lover.

  “I think I ought to explain. Miss Summerhayes and I are engaged to be married. Yes, in Rome, at the earliest opportunity. So, obviously—in the absence of any proper agreement—Miss Summerhayes’s responsibilities lapse.”

  Mrs. Pym behaved like a vulgar woman.

  “Oh, indeed! But I engaged Miss Summerhayes for six months, on trial. She has been with me just four. I shall insist——”

  Callendar had had to deal, professionally, with many such women, but more impartially so; and, to him, Mrs. Pym was just a gadfly. He turned to the girl. No longer need she be stung by these humiliations.

  “I don’t think we need argue the matter. Though, for the sake of the children——?”

  “I am quite ready to stay on for a week with Eileen and Pam, until Mrs. Pym has had time——”

  But Mrs. Pym rushed in the opposite direction, as Callendar had expected that she would. He had piqued her into the inevitable contradiction.

  “No favours—thank you. I can look after my own children. But Miss Summerhayes will be responsible for her week’s bill.”

  Callendar made a movement in the direction of the lounge. He drew Una Summerhayes with him. He left a silence behind him as the most efficient of gags. He went down the steps into the lounge, holding the glass door open for his betrothed and drawing about her the cloak of their dear and intimate aloofness.

  “Supposing we go and make a few arrangements? Or are you tired?”

  No, she was not tired. But would he not like to rest? He let the glass door swing back upon the little, yellow-headed figure in the hall.

  “That’s finished. We’ll go and look up rooms elsewhere, though I shall always feel kindly towards this little place. Adieu to Mrs. Pym.”

  She gave him a deep, full glance.

  “Perhaps I had better pack. And would you settle my bill for me? I have some money.”

  She opened her bag and offered him her purse. He took it. He knew that she wished him to take it.

  “I’ll see to that. And my own. But—afterwards—it will be my affair, please. You will allow me that?”

  She answered with a little, silent movement of the head.

  XIII

  Callendar bought her betrothal ring in a shop on the Piazza de Spagna. They had descended the Spanish steps from their new hotel in the Via Sistina, where Una Summerhayes had a room on the second floor and Callendar one on the third. The ring he bought her was a very fine emerald set in an old Italian silver setting. She had tried on at least a dozen rings, but this was hers; the shape of it seemed to suit the sensitive slimness of her hand.

  “Yes, that’s yours,” he said. “There is something fine and fastidious—about that ring.”

  She smiled up at him and the shopman smiled at both of them. That ring was going to cost Callendar five thousand lire.

  “A week ago I couldn’t afford to be fastidious.”

  “Oh, yes, you could.”

  “No; I had to ration my visits to the hairdresser. But five thousand lire, dear man?”

  He was looking with a queer dreaminess at the ring on her finger. Would she have to
pay death-duty on that stone? And what a thing to think of!

  They left the shop and, crossing the crowded piazza, paused by the flower-stalls at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. Here were roses and carnations, violets and anemones, narcissi and tulips.

  “Which will you have?”

  “Oh, violets.”

  He bought her violets and they went up the steps and each of them glanced instinctively at the window of the room in which John Keats died.

  “I am luckier than poor Keats,” thought Callendar.

  And she, with a little spasm of heart pain, pressed the violets he had given her to her lips.

  Under the ilexes of the Villa Medici he asked her a question.

  “Shall it be before or afterwards?”

  She understood his meaning. They were standing by the big stone basin of the fountain and in the shadow of the trees, and she moved out into the sunlight and sat down on the low wall of the terrace. Rome was all sunset and noise, a pit in which beasts howled and bleated. The dome of St. Peter’s floated like a grey-blue bubble and, defying it, the Victor Emmanuel monument—flashed its white false teeth. But with the Janiculum a stage over which the sun poured its eloquence upon the narrow streets and the domes and the old brown roofs, she felt Rome as Rome, a city of symbolism, even though its modern note was the shout of the motor-car.

  “Our marriage—first, unless. . . .”

  She seemed to hesitate. Her decision fluttered like a hand over a case of rings, sacramental rings.

  “They said at the Consulate?”

  “We should have to wait some days.”

  She turned to look up at him.

  “Our marriage first. And yet——”

  He was thinking how she had changed in the course of a week. She looked so much more alive, so much more like a flower that had needed sunlight. Her aliveness tantalized him and yet he divined in it an exquisite mystery. It was of the spirit and not of the flesh.

  “And yet——?”

  Smiling down at her, he echoed the words.

  “What—exactly—is in your dear head?”

  “It’s in my heart—I think. I would like to feel that I was giving myself to you, as I gave myself on that wonderful day, believing——”

  “I think I understand,” he said.

  XIV

  They were married on the morning of a soft spring day. It was a social gesture—nothing more—an individual occasion. They walked out into the Piazza di Spagna and went to lunch in the little Italian restaurant in the Via Bocca Leone, where to be cosmopolitan was to be Roman. There were flowers on the table. Giuseppe, son of the house, served them as though it was he who conferred the favour, for Giuseppe was a notable black-shirt and young Italy is a little arrogant.

  They smiled together over Giuseppe’s condescension.

  “These—Imperialists! Well, do you feel very different?”

  She both felt and was different, for to a woman marriage is always more of a mystery than it is to a man. Also, this sacramental day was to have a double crisis, marriage in the morning, judgment in the afternoon. Quaint people! It was she who had proposed that he should arrange with Dr. Tellford for a consultation with an Italian specialist and their appointment was for three o’clock at Dr. Tellford’s flat. She had a wild, impulsive hope which she strove to chasten. Death seemed so incredible on such a day and as she sat at the table and drank her wine she stole little secret and fearful glances at this dear comrade. His face had a certain thin fragility and the skin a faint pallor, but he did not look ill. Not as a doomed man might be expected to look. His voice had not changed; it still had that slight huskiness. And she tried to believe that his illness was a dreadful illusion and that, somehow, it would be dispelled and vanish like an unhappy dream.

  Afterwards they went and sat in the Pincian gardens and watched the children playing. They sat in the sun. They had an hour to kill before the appointment at the English doctor’s flat. And Rome seemed so alive, with its thronging girls and mothers and its children chasing each other under the trees. People basked and gossiped. These strong, buxom, southern women, who looked so much more solid than their children, displayed their black hair burnished by the sunlight.

  Callendar, watching his wife as her glances followed some particular child, wondered how deeply the urge towards motherhood penetrated the modern woman. He had been accustomed to think of himself as a conventional old fellow, a sentimental bachelor, a baby and rosebuds sort of idiot. He supposed that he had the usual illusions about children, because he had had nothing to do with them. But Una had lived with and known the child.

  “Rather charming—these Roman kiddies.”

  It seemed to him that her eyes were big and suffused with some inward tenderness.

  “Here is another sort of imperialism. Baby is King and Emperor—in Italy.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, look. What are nearly all these women here for? Either with children, or to look at children.”

  He smiled to himself and at her.

  “Yes, I suppose so. But what strikes me about these Roman children is their soft voices. So different from the northern children.”

  She agreed and he asked her to explain it and she sat beside him with an air of mystery and of sadness.

  “Perhaps—because children are wanted here. All children are little egotists, you know; and many of them are little savages.”

  “Barbarians? And Rome—the mother—civilizes the little savage. Is that it?”

  She nodded.

  “I think so. Every woman—who has the mother in her—is like Rome. I think you have to love a child very much and wisely.”

  Leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, he looked at the two rings she was wearing.

  “Some women—want children? Is it true?”

  “It might be very true,” she said, and saw that he was feeling for his watch.

  Climbing together the stone stairway leading to Dr. Tellford’s flat, they held hands and pretended to a calmness that was wholly on the surface. Dr. Tellford and a very insignificant-looking man were waiting for them, but the little Italian ceased to appear insignificant when he took Callendar in hand. Tellford, tall and austere, suggested that Mrs. Callendar should wait in the salon.

  She glanced at Callendar and he nodded.

  “Better, dear. I don’t suppose we shall be long.”

  She managed to smile at him and went out with a memory of her husband sitting in a chair and of the Italian with a shining bulb of light upon his forehead busy with little mirrors. She stood at one of the windows of Dr. Tellford’s room and looked down into the narrow Roman street, but without being aware of it as a street. She seemed to be counting her own heart-beats. How would these moments of suspense end? Would it be death or life.

  She heard the door open long before she had expected it to open. Callendar had come into the room; he closed the door. A moment ago he had been speaking to Dr. Tellford: “Yes, I thought so. If you don’t mind, I’ll go and tell my wife.” Yet his face told her nothing, save that he loved her very dearly. He was very calm.

  “They have given me a little longer, Una—that’s all.”

  She ran to him and hid her face.

  “Oh, my dear, my darling.”

  He held her fast.

  “There, there. They think it is not going to be so very hard for me. Slow, but sure. No—nothing to be done.”

  He kissed her wet face.

  “I’m making you suffer. It’s wrong. I want you to be happy. Let’s go back into the sunlight and watch the children playing.”

  XV

  Callendar lived another eleven months, long enough to see the child—a boy—that Una bore him. They had taken and furnished a little house in Berkshire in the pine-and-heather country south of Reading and not far from the ruins of Silchester, that relic of old Rome.

  Even towards the end it was difficult for those who saw him to realize that Callendar was a dying man. He was very thin
and his voice was little more than a whisper, but he managed to keep on his feet, as though the spirit that was in him compelled his body to serve him to the last. Moreover, his face did not express suffering; it was strangely serene and gentle, a lover’s face to the very end. The woman whom he loved had borne him a child. He had given a child to a woman who had asked for his child. That is the only survival that a man can be sure of.

  It is probable that the last year of his life was the happiest that he had known. Happiness is relative and those last months were full of deep self-expression. One can do no more than love and insure one’s love against calculable mischances. The incalculable is still with us, because we are still but children playing on the edge of the great deeps.

  Callendar passed over on a February afternoon. He seemed to fall into a little fluttering sleep and he never emerged from it. His wife, sitting beside him, suddenly realized that he had ceased breathing and, with a look at his still, calm face, fell—as by instinct—upon her knees.

  “Oh, my dear!”

  He had gone from her, her good comrade of a year; and yet, as she let her tears come and pressed that thin, right hand, she knew that both of them had had cause for pride. It had been a marriage without a shadow, perhaps because it had been lived under the edge of that great, impending shadow. Nothing but good memories remained behind.

  She looked at Callendar as he lay there with the February sunlight shining in upon his face. She did not draw down the blind. Why should one draw down blinds? He had loved the sunlight.

  Her eyes were poignant.

  “Beloved, how much you have given me. All that you could give. This was our sacred year.”

  She bent and kissed his forehead. She went and fetched her son and, carrying him into the room where the father lay dead, she knelt down and placed the child upon the bed. She looked from the dead man to that little piece of ruddy flesh and back again to the dead face.

  “Death and Life,” she thought. “But is there such a thing as death? Oh, my dear, I feel that you will still be looking down on me from the windows of some other and greater Rome.”