The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  She let him have the sacred place, seating herself a little to one side of it.

  “The trouble was the manuscript, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. You see—it was my first book. In a way she had inspired it. We were rather—devoted. She said the book held the blood of both of us. Kate Horn typed it; she acted as Eleanor’s secretary. My publishers never saw the manuscript, only the typescript. Eleanor wanted the original. She had queer whims; she set herself to copy the whole of my manuscript; she said that when we died I should have her manuscript, and she mine. And then she was killed, just three months before the book was published.”

  He paused, pulling at the short grass.

  “When the book had been out a week my publishers had a most amazing letter.”

  “From Miss Horn?”

  “Exactly. It asserted that Eleanor had written the book—and that I was exploiting the work of a dead woman. My publishers wired to me. I went to see them. I said the whole thing was absurd. They asked for the manuscript. Well, I hadn’t got it. I came down here and had a most ghastly row with Kate. She swore there was only one manuscript, Eleanor’s.

  “Well—what could I do? I had to go through with it. I was bewildered by the woman’s vindictiveness. She wrote to the papers. Oh, well, perhaps you know what happened. She produced Eleanor’s manuscript, she swore that she had seen Eleanor writing the book, and that she herself had typed it. My tale did look a little lame.”

  “But then—your previous work?”

  “That was just part of the trouble. You see ‘Mary Wilberforce,’ was different from anything I had done before. It was a thing by itself, an inspiration. The literary experts who were called had to admit this. Even the style was different. So Kate Horn had me in the mud.”

  Pauline stroked her cheek.

  “But couldn’t you have written another book—a masterpiece—to prove——?”

  He shrugged.

  “I did—at least, I tried to. But things wouldn’t come. I was too jarred. I had lost her. And all my thoughts were of trying to find the original manuscript.”

  “The woman burnt it?”

  “But did she? I have a feeling that Kate never had it, that it is hidden away somewhere.”

  He sat and gloomed. She felt that he was sorry in a way that he had told her, and that he was suffering from an exaggerated sense of humiliation. His attitude towards her became vaguely defiant. Of course she did not believe him.

  “What a tragedy,” she said.

  He remained mute.

  “To lose—two such things. And what had you done to the woman Horn that she was so much your enemy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That was just the reason. Well—I haven’t told you how it was I happened to come here.”

  She could see that he was too absorbed in his own tragedy to care to listen to her gossip, but she thought that it would be good for him to be dragged for a moment out of his slough of despond, so she jumped up and went down to where her things were lying, and returned with her sketch-book.

  “I am staying at Yew Tree Farm.”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely.

  “The night before last I woke about dawn and saw a picture on my window blind. I had had a feeling that someone had called me by name. ‘Pauline Marsac.’ The experience was so vivid that I got up and drew what I had seen on the blind, and next morning I showed the sketch to Mrs. Hathaway at the farm, and asked her if she knew any place near here that was like it.”

  She passed him the original sketch, and watched his face as he examined it.

  “But this is The Mount.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you say you saw this on your blind, and drew it from memory, though you had never seen it before?”

  “It’s a fact.”

  “Extraordinary! So—yesterday——?”

  “I was looking for the original. That’s how we met. And early this morning I saw The Mount a second time on my blind.”

  “Just the same?”

  “Not quite. There was a figure.”

  “Hers?”

  “No; yours.”

  He studied the two sketches, and then, handing them back to her, sat and looked towards the sea.

  “Do you believe in this sort of thing?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “All the psychic stuff?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “But you must have seen these trees before.”

  “I hadn’t; at least, not consciously.”

  “Ah—that’s it.”

  “Yes; but why should I see them, as I did, projected upon my window blind? That’s the point, isn’t it? There must be a reason.”

  “Oh, I suppose so. Possibly.”

  He appeared sceptical, wilfully so, and she felt that his wilfulness was part of the reaction caused by his suffering. He would not let himself feel or believe that there could be any significance in the incident.

  “You have never had any such experience?” she asked him.

  “No; nothing definite.”

  “You are sceptical. But supposing someone who was dead, wanted to get a message to you, a message of vital importance?”

  “Well, supposing there was such a message, why should it come through you.”

  “Obviously, because you are not receptive.”

  “That’s nonsense,” he said rather rudely.

  And then he apologized.

  “I’m sorry. But I’m all on edge. I wish to God I could get some such message.”

  “With regard to the manuscript of ‘Mary Wilberforce’?”

  “Ah—if it were possible!”

  Pauline spent the day painting The Mount while Stephen Hangard lay on the grass and gloomed. She was conscious of his presence, but it did not distract her, for he kept quiet and did not talk, and about noon he got up and left her. She gathered that he was staying at a farmhouse somewhere between Mount Hill and Beechhurst village.

  “That woman comes back to-morrow,” he said. “I shall clear out as soon as she returns.”

  “Isn’t that doing what she wants?”

  “I can’t help it. The thought of her being about here makes me ill.”

  That night Pauline Marsac’s experience was repeated.

  She saw The Mount upon her blind, but instead of there being three trees there were four.

  The discrepancy astonished her, and she lay awake puzzling over it.

  At breakfast she put a question to Mrs. Hathaway.

  “By the way, I am painting The Mount. I suppose there were never more than three trees there?”

  “There used to be four, Miss.”

  “Four! You are quite sure?”

  “Certain. One of the four died, and was cut down. That must have been about ten years ago.”

  Her climb to the mound that morning was a flutter of excitement. She had left all her paraphernalia behind, for the artist had been lost in the woman, and she wanted to reach the tumulus before Hangard should arrive if he intended paying the place a last visit. Her curiosity centred itself about that fourth tree; she wondered whether there was any vestige of it remaining.

  The Mount was deserted, and she had no trouble in discovering the position of the fourth tree. A slight swelling of the turf on the very summit of the mound partly concealed the old stump, and a portion of the old butt protruded. One or two of the twisted roots were visible, and she noticed that a rabbit had been scratching in the grassy hollow between two of the roots.

  “That ought to satisfy him,” she thought.

  Glancing seawards she discovered him far below her on the green slope toiling slowly upwards. She waved. Her excitement stood unconcealed.

  “I have found something.”

  He heard her, and came hurrying with eager and upturned face.

  “What is it?”

  “Last night I saw a fourth tree. There was a fourth tree. I have found the stump of it.”

  He looked vastly disappointed, and he made
no attempt to conceal it.

  “I’m afraid the discovery leaves me cold.”

  “Heavens!” she said, “with your imagination, too! Lend me your stick.”

  She seized it from him, and running to the top of the mound she began to poke at the turf about the butt of the vanished tree, while Hangard stood and watched her with ironic gloom. What did she expect to find there, this absurd but rather charming creature with the bright eyes. And suddenly he saw the stick disappear for half its length into the green turf, like a stage dagger that slides into its hilt.

  Her eyes were all lit up. He heard her cry out.

  “Oh—come, feel this.”

  He put his hand to the crook of the stick.

  “Tap—tap gently.”

  He obeyed her, and felt the jarring of the ferrule upon a metallic surface.

  “There’s a hollow there, and something in it. Don’t you realize——?”

  It took them less than twenty minutes—working with stick and hands—to grub the thing from the hollow under the tree stump. They knelt and stared at it in silence, a black deed-box, sealed, and with E. Orchardson painted in white upon the top. The box was locked.

  “Well—your scepticism——”

  “Scepticism! What’s in it? If——”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “One moment, had it not better be opened officially—before witnesses?”

  He nodded.

  “There’s old Carfax, her lawyer, down in the village.”

  “Yes; and what about Kate Horn? Wouldn’t it be as well——?”

  “My God,” he said, “if it should prove——!”

  At six o’clock that evening the strange affair was carried to its crisis. They had had to wait till six for Kate Horn’s arrival. She came in with those cold and defiant eyes of hers set hard in her thin pale face. Old Carfax waggled his pince-nez at her.

  “This box, Miss Horn, do you know anything of it?”

  She stared at the thing on the table, and her face twitched slightly.

  “No; nothing.”

  “It has been found. We thought it fair that you should be present. Smith, you can get to work.”

  When the local locksmith bent over the box Miss Horn gave Hangard one look of hatred and defiance. But Hangard’s eyes were watching the man. It seemed to him a long while before the lid was raised, and old Carfax—bending over the box—took out a parcel and a letter.

  He read the writing on the envelope and then looked over the tops of his glasses at Hangard.

  “It is addressed to you in Miss Orchardson’s writing. And this parcel.”

  Hangard, white as the paper, broke the pink tapes that bound the parcel. He turned back the wrappings.

  “My manuscript! The manuscript of ‘Mary Wilberforce’! The letter—her letter. It explains. Eleanor had buried it—there.”

  THE RED VAN

  Against the black bulk of the cathedral and facing the “Panier d’Or,” a red van diffused a half circle of light over the heads and shoulders of a small crowd. Not only was the van painted red, but the open side of it displayed a row of electric lights brilliant behind screens of red glass. The thing was both a shop and a stage, and beneath the glare of the lights a little figure in a top hat, black dinner-jacket and white shirt gesticulated and declaimed.

  It was Monsieur François, or just François, proclaiming the virtues of his Electric Pills.

  Nearly everyone in the Pas de Calais or Nord knew François and his red motor-van. He would arrive on market day in St. Omer, or Hazebrouk, Amiens, Abbeville or St. Venant, let down the side of his travelling show and display to the provincial mind all that electrical gear from which he extracted buzzings and chatterings and flashes of light. He made a great noise, but even so his noise was less silly and more pragmatical than the noise made by the children of the silly rich who turn on gramophones in hotels at nine o’clock on a summer morning.

  François was both an artist and a wag. He had a little, white, fat, cheeky face, bright black eyes, immense self-assurance, and a manner. He could shout and declaim for hours through all the bravura of market day, and his voice never failed him. Once or twice during the performance he would swallow one of his own pills.

  “There, you see. I never tire; I am never ill. I can talk all day and work half the night. I have a voice. You hear it. The cock on the church steeple hears it. And muscle—too. Look.”

  He seized a cavalry sabre and brandished it, and the red light from above ran along it and seemed to drop from it like blood.

  “I am strong; I am healthy. And why? Because of my great discovery. A drug may be just a drug, my friends, but charge it with electricity—and voilà! Life is electricity. Oh, yes, the doctors, the doctors, the Faculty of Medicine! Poof! They will not believe; they are jealous. But you want the right drug, and the right charge of electricity. That is my discovery.”

  He raised his top hat impressively. He was an actor. He had all the tricks and the emotional suggestiveness of a priest in a pulpit.

  “I salute Science. I salute all the eminent and noble searchers. I salute Galvani and Volta, Pasteur and Koch. I am jealous of no man. I, too, have made my discovery.”

  He spread his arms as though preparing to embrace humanity, and babbled his fat cheeks at the crowd.

  “Come, I will show you how these wonderful pills are charged with the life force. It looks very simple. All great things look simple. But it takes the great man to discover them. Ha! Someone laughs! I love laughter. I, too, can laugh.”

  And he went off into a burst of buoyant, irresponsible laughter, and took a long glass tube, and closed one end of it with red wool, and dropped in half a dozen of his pills, and closed the other end of the tube with more red wool.

  “Voilà! We are ready. Now watch. I place the tube between these powerful batteries. Gr-r-r—t-t-ch!”

  He turned a handle and there were splutterings and flashings, and he raised his hat and gazed reverently upon the glass tube.

  “There. You see. The wonderful thing has now happened. Swallow those pills and you swallow life, health, happiness.”

  François had a wife, rather small and solid like himself, and very much the Dea Mater behind the scenes. Madame François had fair hair, a squarish head and chin, eyes of greyish-green suggesting the eyes of a determined child. In fact there was something child-like about her, and while François lived on his loquacity, this little woman in miniature was silent and somewhat inscrutable.

  She had a soft squareness, an air of sturdy wisdom, and François adored her. It is still possible for a man to adore his wife, and François might marvel, for Madame Claire somehow managed to believe in him. She liked to speak of him as The Professor, and it is possible that Monsieur François after years of fervid declaiming, and encouraged by his wife’s admiration, had come to believe that he had made a discovery, that he had fumbled his way into some mystery like a child playing with a bunch of keys. The Electric Pills did possess some potent virtue. They were more than nux-vomica and aloes.

  At Bethune the show was over. Madame Claire had ceased to pass little boxes of pills to her husband through a slit in the red curtain behind the lamps and batteries. Beasts, human and otherwise, had been sold. The great tower of the church—with its two round windows which gave it the look of an owl—was lost in obscurity. François removed his hat and carefully laid it aside. His forehead glistened. A few children still stood and stared.

  François threw them two five-centime pieces for a scramble. He was feeling rich; the day had been good.

  “Run away, my dears. Pills—at your age—are not necessary.”

  From behind the red curtain came sounds of tidying up.

  “What was that, François?”

  “Two small pieces of money, chérie, to the children.”

  Madame sighed. Such a life as theirs did not permit of children, and both of them had a liking for children. She said:

  “We have sold thirty-seven boxes.
”

  François made a clicking noise with his tongue.

  “This is an intelligent town. My dear, I’m hungry.”

  “Shall we have supper here?”

  “No; I prefer to be at my ease. We will run the old bus into the yard of the ‘Three Stars.’ ”

  He was detaching wires and making things shipshape for the night. With the click of a switch all the red lights went out. He said, with a voice of fat contentment:

  “To-morrow we will go to Paradis.”

  The voice behind the curtain protested.

  “Not Paradis.”

  “Why not? It is a good place.”

  “But the doctor is méchant there.”

  François laughed.

  “The doctor! Poof, a jealous fellow. I will run him through with my sabre.”

  “But you remember the last occasion.”

  “Yes; that was a joke, certainly. The fellow should not come and stand on the edge of the crowd and glare. And he had jaundice, and I offered to present him with a box of pills. Ta-ra-ra! And he called me a dirty quack.”

  “It does not do you any good, François.”

  “Why, I’m not afraid of the fellow. It was a good advertisement. And I had the best of the small talk. We did well there. Come along, my dear, let’s get the old ship under way.”

  Madame Francois joined him, and together they raised the side of the van, and bolted it, shutting away all that mystery. François lit the lamps; they were oil lamps to save electricity for the pills. He raised the bonnet flap and tickled the carburettor.

  “Is she in a good temper? I wonder?”

  She was. The engine started at the third pull of the handle, making a chattering roar which François rushed to control with a tweak at the throttle lever. He climbed into the driving-seat and his wife placed herself beside him. The red van and the magnetic pills rolled away to the yard of the “Three Stars.”

  Parked there, Monsieur and Madame François were at home in the apartment behind the red curtains which was salon, kitchen, and bedchamber. They supped. Claire could produce excellent little dishes over the oil stove; she ceased to be mute. But on this particular night she had an air of depression. Her round eyes looked at the omelette as though she saw poison in it.