The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “Gently—gently.”

  A figure drew into the light, squat and square; she recognized Campbell—the company’s doctor.

  “Mrs. Ramsden——”

  He stood there wet and ominous, a man bringing some solemn news out of the night.

  “There has been an accident,” she said.

  She saw his glistening sun-helmet move.

  “Yes; your husband. A piece of timber hit him. No—not that. Rather bad—but not that.”

  Her calmness did not astonish him, for in his life he had met the courage of women.

  “He is there?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood back.

  “Will you bring him in. I—can help you.”

  In the night a man’s moanings and the doctor’s careful words made her understand that the Saaba River had given her husband back to her. It had broken him and thrown him at her feet. She had gone out for a moment with Dr. Campbell into the dining-room, and he had told her the truth.

  “A fractured spine, low down—luckily. Yes—he ought to get over it. Too early to say yet—you know—how much will remain.”

  He had been puzzled by her full, clear eyes.

  “Will he be the same?”

  “Impossible to say just yet. A long time. Probably not. Much will depend on the nursing.”

  And then she heard her husband’s voice from the inner room.

  “Gracie—Gracie—I want you.”

  She stayed with him all that night, and when the morphia had put him to sleep she sat holding his hand, for he had fallen asleep holding firmly to her hand. A strange happiness possessed her, and mingled with it a profound and gentle compassion. She did not want to sleep—and when the dawn came, she was still there with her hand in his.

  About an hour after dawn he woke, looked at her and sighed. His lips moved; she bent her head to his.

  “Gracie—dear—don’t leave me——”

  A slight frown creased his forehead; his eyes grew suddenly anxious.

  “The bridge——?”

  She laid his hand on the bed, pressed it with hers, and getting up went out to find the sun shining. The Saaba River was a great swirling yellow flood, but Ramsden’s bridge stood over it like a master.

  She smiled, and behind her smile tears quivered. Her exultation was a double one. She went back to the dim room, and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Your bridge stands—dear, safe and sure.”

  He looked at her and muttered something that sounded:

  “Like a woman’s love.”

  THE BLUE TULIP

  To thousands of garden enthusiasts the name of Horatio Best must be pressingly familiar.

  “Best’s Bulbs are the Best Bulbs.”

  A great advertiser, with a fine declamatory style, he had caught some of the Dutch spirit, and his genial greetings were there upon thousands of breakfast tables with the porridge and the toast. That he had no modesty goes without saying. He was modern and enterprising and sentimental, shouting succulent slush at the great public, crying up the beauties of his tulips and his hyacinths and his lilies as though he were selling Circassian beauties to hot-blooded pashas.

  He had a great fondness for pretty pictures in which he cultivated the “child idea.”

  “No Garden is Complete Without a Child—or Best’s Bulbs.”

  And having no young children of his own, but only one daughter—Miss Flora Irene Best—aged three-and-twenty, he imported young maidens from Kings Barton, presented them with their tea and a shilling a-piece, and had them photographed among his flowers. For his catalogues he would label the pictures “Innocence”—or “Beautiful Children grow in Beautiful gardens like Best’s Beautiful Bulbs.”

  Now in Mr. Best’s nurseries at Kings Barton there was a certain foreman named Robert Maskray, a quiet, reticent, flaxen-haired creature whom Mr. Best always considered a bit of a fool.

  As the world wags these days there is no doubt that Robert Maskray had no tail. He was religious, with a dreamy and a visionary other-worldliness that moved gently among the flowers, contentedly loving them for themselves and not as children of commerce. He read a great deal. He had an austere mouth, and blue eyes that always seemed to be looking beyond the Best scheme of things; but he was reliable and very intelligent—if a little slow.

  In his brisk moods, when business was booming, Mr. Best would sometimes show a teasing playfulness in his attitude to Bob Maskray. He was a facetious little man; the sort who, in the old days, wore a hard felt hat and side whiskers and shaved his long and keen and cunning upper lip.

  “How’s Clara Butt this year, Bob?”

  Maskray would look at his employer with those slow and serene blue eyes of his, and answer with vague solemnity:

  “Very well, Mr. Best, thank you.”

  Maskray had no sense of humour, being one of those men born with a great capacity for reverence and wonder and a feeling for the beautiful. He would have made an ideal gardener in heaven, scattering grape hyacinths over the Elysian fields and spreading over the blessed valleys legions of fragrant narcissi.

  “Writing any more poetry, Bob?”

  The man’s slow and solemn blush was curious.

  “No, sir; not exactly.”

  “Better do me some verses for the adverts, or the catalogue. Nice and pink and juicy, Bob.”

  Maskray took people seriously.

  “Might try, sir.”

  He did not tell Mr. Best that he had written sonnets to the black hair and eyes and cottage-maid cheeks of Flora Irene, Mr. Best’s daughter.

  Now a wonderful thing happened to Robert Maskray in the spring of 1924. He had a cottage and a small parcel of ground beyond Kings Barton Bridge, at the back of the Mordaunt almshouses, where he lived alone, with a woman coming in occasionally to cook and wash and scrub. Even during his moments of leisure he was a gardener, experimenting with sweet peas and tulips and narcissi, and trying for new strains in violas and delphiniums.

  A small greenhouse—a tenant’s fixture—stood at the back of his cottage, and in this spring of 1924 it sheltered, among other things, some pots of Darwin tulips raised from some crossed seed three or four seasons back. These young bulbs had never bloomed. Maskray’s interest in them was less fervent than it might have been, simply because his unsophisticated soul had sprouted the wings of a hopeless and romantic love.

  These tulip bulbs were sending up their flower stalks, with the fat, green, spear-shaped buds rising a foot or more in the air, and after a day or two’s sunlight the greenness began to blush—red, rose and purple.

  Maskray had returned after the day’s work and had had his tea. He was sad, sad as only an obscure lover can be when the great lady who was not quite so great as to be utterly beyond him, had passed mercilessly through her father’s nurseries in search of flowers. Poor Robert had put himself in the way, and had been removed from it with indifferent frankness.

  “I haven’t come here to waste your time.”

  Yes, of course he was employed to help in the production of Best’s bulbs, and not to select flowers for the daughter.

  Egregious Bob! With pocketed hands he wandered out into the garden and into his greenhouse, looking at nothing in particular, for the snub was sore in him. Flowers! What were flowers—after all—when the one particular and heavenly flower——?

  And then his head gave a little attentive jerk. He was looking at one of the pots of tulips, the last pot in the row.

  “It can’t be,” said the voice of the gardener in him. “It can’t be. I’m dreaming.”

  But he wasn’t. He frowned, blinked his blue eyes—and went nearer. His face expressed extreme astonishment, for one of the tulip’s buds was showing a clear gentian blue.

  “Someone’s been fooling,” was his thought.

  But how could anyone fool him with a flower and turn a pot upside down and dip one bloom of the three in a pot of dye? The other flowers were a rich red, and they seemed to enhance the miraculous blue
ness of that other blossom.

  He felt weak at the knees. He picked up the pot and scrutinized the amazing flower, while a voice prattled in him of primary colours and of the impossibility of his having produced a blue tulip by any trick of hybridization. To put it genteelly—“The thing wasn’t done.” But the blueness of that flower was supremely undeniable. He was not colour-blind.

  And then the man’s mystic bent betrayed itself. He put the pot back on the staging with a reverent carefulness and went down on his knees.

  “God’s given it me. Didn’t I pray for something? God’s sent an answer.”

  Now, somehow, from that very wonderful moment his blue tulip became mixed up in Robert Maskray’s soul with the image of Flora Irene Best. He christened it “Irene,” but no one knew. Oh, yes, no one knew. The only blue tulip bulb in the world, and it belonged to him!

  Meanwhile there could be no penny press sensation. That precious bulb had to be watched and cherished like something sacred, and another year would elapse before it could bloom a second time. Yes—that would be the proof of its sincerity, a second blueness to prove that it had not played on Robert Maskray some Puckish trick. And then—its progeny, those tiny bulbils, and another two or three years of waiting till the children bloomed and assured him of their likeness to their parent.

  In three years’ time Robert Maskray would be thirty-seven, and Flora Irene twenty-six. A multitude of things can happen in three years. Husband, children——

  Grievously was he tempted to go to Mr. Horatio Best and to whisper to him:

  “I—Robert Maskray—have raised a blue tulip!”

  But there was a Quakerish thoroughness in the man that held him back from seeking the immediate effect. He was cautious, conscientious; he wanted to be sure. If he had to wait for his Rachel until he could show to an astonished world a young family of blue-flowered tulips, well—that was nature and the Bible. Maskray had some of the qualities of a fanatic.

  Yet the secret dominated him. He went about carrying with him the thought of that precious tulip—dried and dormant and locked away in his old oak desk. He smiled secret smiles; he had the air of a man conscious of divine favour, of being one of the chosen. Even Mr. Horatio Best noticed a change in him; the shy, reticent creature exhaled a puzzling perfume of mingled humility and arrogance.

  It was so evident that Mr. Best remarked on it to his daughter.

  “Bob Maskray’s going soft in the head.”

  Miss Best was not interested in Robert Maskray. She bloomed like a rose and was as cold as a winter hellebore. Her romance—when admitted—was to be of a suitable dignity. Kings Barton was Kings Barton simply because Mr. Best’s bulbs had made it a household word.

  “He’s a silly creature,” she observed. “What has he been doing?”

  “Nothing extraordinary.”

  Mr. Best had a second helping of roast mutton.

  “Love or religious mania or something. He has got a queer smile these days, and talks like the Bible. Why, he couldn’t let me by the common white lilies without quoting scripture.”

  “ ‘Solomon in all his glory?’ ”

  “Precisely so,” said her father. “Begins to make you wonder when one of your foremen starts quoting scripture.”

  Miss Best thought it a bad sign.

  “I’d sack him. Remember Bates—who used to preach on Sundays?”

  “Yes,” said her father grimly; “and I caught him on the Saturday going forth with his pockets full of lilium auratum.”

  But Robert Maskray was not sacked. There was nothing that he could be reproached with, and a queer, seraphic, secret smile cannot be charged as a sin. He continued to worship from afar, as though he had planted Flora Irene in a pot in his greenhouse and was waiting for the great consummation. But the dear fool had some worldly wisdom.

  He fitted a second and more complex lock to the door of his greenhouse, and two weeks before the miraculous bulb’s annunciation was due he tacked a white calico screen round the lower part of the glazed walls. No prying eyes were to peep. But Robert Maskray and his greenhouse were of no interest to Kings Barton.

  That year the blue tulip flowered true. And when the gentian blue cup had opened, Maskray carried the pot up to the little attic in his cottage, and placed it on a stool by the window. He kept the attic door locked.

  Later his joy grew exultant, for the blue tulip bulb gave him two tiny bulbils.

  Three years passed. Miss Best was still Miss Best, though no less than five possible partners had tried to persuade her to attempt matrimony. Meanwhile Best’s Bulbs were not booming like the May-bugs; an unexplainable dullness had descended upon Mr. Best’s business; and thin lipped—he pointed an accusing finger at Holland.

  “Those Dutchmen!”

  It occurred to him on occasions that his daughter should be thinking of getting married. Some comfortable young fellow with money to put into the business; but Flora Irene’s fastidiousness seemed to increase as her father’s appeals to the bulb-buying public grew more urgent and flamboyant.

  No—the man she married was to be able to build a nice, new arty house on Monk’s Hill, and provide her with a solid, four-seater touring car. None of your hip baths for two with a dicky not fit for a dog to ride in.

  Robert Maskray, exercising a Biblical patience, became more and more obsessed by his dream, developing—simple soul though he was—a divinely inspired slyness. Flora Irene was still Flora Irene, and Best’s Bulbs were not as marketable as they had been.

  But he—Robert Maskray—was the possessor of a blue tulip, a miraculous flower, a living talisman with which to conjure love and fortune. He would sit in his little garden and dream. He would see himself unveiling this blue prodigy before the eyes of the amazed father, and the daughter—grown suddenly and exquisitely melting—throwing her arms about his neck. “Oh, wonderful Robert!”

  The blue tulip—the only blue tulip in the world, with the whole horticultural community speechless, and nurserymen and bulb growers scrambling for one small child of it! How much would each bulb be worth? Hundreds of pounds—perhaps. And the blue Irene would be the cynosure, his peerless queen.

  He sat and exulted.

  For now he had three bulbs all ripe to flower, and a dozen or so bulbils of different sizes, and he could think of seed.

  Yes, the great day of revelation was near. He would wait until all three flowering bulbs had proved their purity, and then he would go to Mr. Horatio Best and invite him to come and look at a novelty that waited in his greenhouse. Yes, he meant to be a little mysterious about it—dramatic. Why should he not ask Mr. Best to bring his daughter?

  The wonderful day arrived. It was sunny, as it should be, and Robert Maskray, making a sedate entry into the nursery office, asked for Mr. Horatio. Shown in by a girl clerk, he found Mr. Best looking rather thin and pinched about the upper lip.

  His glance was irritable.

  “What d’you want, Bob?”

  Maskray seethed with the delicious secret.

  “I have a flower I should like you to see.”

  “Oh—what sort?”

  “Tulip. Might interest you, sir.”

  “Busy. Bring a bloom in.”

  “Too precious to cut, sir.”

  “Oh, all right——”

  He gave a push to his chair, but the foreman checked such useless haste.

  “Not in the nursery, sir; but in my greenhouse. Perhaps you will come down and drink a cup of tea with me, sir, and look at the flower. It’s worth looking at, though I did raise it.”

  Mr. Best stared. He seemed suspicious.

  “Rather busy, Bob. But might manage it.”

  He was aware of a seraphic smile.

  “And perhaps Miss Best would come too. I would be honoured. I have christened the flower Irene, sir. No impertinence intended.”

  Mr. Best stared still harder, and on going home to lunch informed his daughter of Robert Maskray’s apparent madness.

  “Balmy, my dear! R
aised some sort of tulip, and called it ‘Irene.’ Wants me to go and have tea and look at it. You too.”

  “Me!” said Miss Best sharply.

  “Yes—you.”

  “I have something better to do,” said the lady. “Silly fool! A fool like that—with calf’s eyes.”

  About five o’clock Mr. Best strolled down over Kings Barton Bridge and, turning past the almshouses, came to Robert Maskray’s cottage. The dreamer had arrived there half-an-hour before him, having stopped to buy a bag of fancy cakes at Bowdens just above the bridge.

  The tea-table had been laid in the morning, with a pink-and-white check cloth and Robert’s best china, and there were flowers—white narcissi in an old blue vase. The queen should have her cakes and flowers. Mr. Best came to the cottage door and knocked, and Maskray, peering through the window, saw that Mr. Horatio was alone. His dream face fell a little.

  “Come in, sir. Sorry Miss Irene——”

  “Got a bun-party or something,” said the father, who seemed gruff and worried.

  He was fidgety and absent all through the meal. A silly business this, sitting down with a foreman at a tea-table. And flowers and fancy cakes! Not for him obviously! Now what had this fool of a fellow got in his bonnet?

  “What about this thing of yours, Bob?”

  Maskray rose with the air of a high priest about to unveil sacred mysteries.

  “In the greenhouse, sir. If you will come through into the garden.”

  When Mr. Best saw those three tulips with their gentian blue cups open to the sunlight he did not believe them to be what they appeared to be. It was impossible. This fool Maskray was playing some silly trick on him. The flowers could not be real.

  “Nice imitation, Bob. Never tried dyeing flowers before. Or they’re not paper, are they?”

  Maskray flushed.

  “Do you think I’m that sort of man, Mr. Best? I’m showing you a blue tulip, the first blue tulip——”

  Mr. Best put out a sudden hand towards one of the pots; but Maskray, with a quick eagerness that was almost mistrustful, interposed, and taking a pot in his hands, held the flower within a foot of Mr. Horatio’s face.