The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping

by Warwick Deeping

  “It was very strange,” she thought. “I suppose it was premonition—and the shock of the moment. It does happen. We get beyond, or above, our normal selves. And I was afraid. Perhaps the veil of the flesh is merciful.”

  It seemed to her that it would not happen again. She had had six quiet, dreaming months; and, like the winter garden, she was sleeping till the Spring.

  V

  That year Sybil Carberry became more than ever absorbed in her world of flowers, for to her they were beautiful, sexless things—though she was wise as to their sex. The grass under the great trees had blazed with crocuses, and daffodils had swung their heads in the wind. The lilacs showed a powdering of green. Then, when the hyacinths in the long bed beside the great beamed pergola were calling to the first adventurous bees, the wind veered to the north and snow came.

  She stood beside old Boggis on the paved path and looked at the bent flowers draggling their colours on the soil. The snow had gone, and a round sun threw shadow patterns upon the stones.

  “I’ve given up cussin’ the weather,” said old Boggis philosophically; “if God likes to see flowers flattened out—I guess that’s His affair.”

  She told Boggis to bring her an armful of hazel twigs and a sack stuffed with straw, and kneeling on the stuffed sack she began her rescuing of the bowed heads, taking each flower and gently propping it with a forked twig. The flowers gave her their perfume as her ministering hands played among the whites and blues and crimsons, the soft pinks and ultramarines. She was happy in her work of rescue.

  So intent was she that she did not hear a man walk across the grass. He stood, leaning against one of the stone pillars of the pergola, watching her, and his eyes were hotter than he knew. She felt the heat of them, and turning quickly upon her knees, looked up.

  “I hope the flowers appreciate it——”

  He smiled down at her with the young male’s brazen beneficence, but very quickly his smile died away.

  For she was kneeling there, staring at him with wide and wondering eyes, eyes in which there was a kind of horror and astonishment.

  He had his back to the sun, and about him she saw a red glare, a fringe as of fire, and his whole body was coloured by it. Even his eyes had a redness. Her impulse was to shade her face with her hands.

  “Jeremy——!”

  Her face shocked him.

  “My dear girl——!”

  She rose slowly and drew back until her feet were among the flowers, crushing them. And some terror had returned, that most terrible lucidity like a glare of light playing upon the very inwardness of men and things. And this man was the colour of blood. She felt the vibrations of his sex, of lustful sex that waited to seize and crush the flavour of her beauty.

  “Please—go away——”

  He reddened, dumbfounded, crudely conscious of her horror.

  “What on earth’s the matter——?”

  She drooped before him, hands hanging limp.

  “Please—go away. You are all red.”

  He stood and stared. He was angry, because he understood so much and so little. Red. What the devil did she mean? Looking at him as though he had come to her after rolling in a muck heap! His hot and turgid egotism flared.

  “What’s the matter with you, Sybil? I have kept away all these months. I know what happened, after I had seen your father—but you wouldn’t let me——”

  She trembled.

  “Oh, it’s not that. You don’t understand. You couldn’t understand. I—myself—can hardly understand it. The shock. It makes me see things——”

  “See things!”

  “Yes; what ordinary eyes do not see.”

  He gave an angry laugh.

  “I might be a headless and gory ghost. Is that the sort of thing——?”

  “I see—you.”

  He felt that he had every right to take brutal offence.

  “I say, this is rather preposterous, isn’t it? You are a nice sort of young woman for a fellow—to——”

  Her voice broke in.

  “Jeremy—I can’t help it—I can’t help what I see. It’s some strange power in me——”

  “The person you ought to see—my dear—is a doctor. Look here——”

  She raised her eyes to his, eyes that both shrank and pleaded.

  “It must sound like madness—to you. I know. But please go away. You—you hurt me.”

  For a moment he was tempted to play the imperious and dominant male; but then, with a peculiar and tragic calmness, she looked him full in the face and spoke words that to him were amazing in their frankness——

  “No, Jeremy, you think I am to be overpowered, treated like an hysterical child. You were thinking—‘If I get her in my arms and kiss her—like a savage——’ Yes—you were thinking that. I can’t help it, but I can read you.”

  “Good Lord——!” was all that he could say to her.

  For the first time in her life she saw him nakedly confounded, and actively resenting the experience.

  “My dear, you must be a rather uncomfortable young woman.”

  “I tell you I can’t help it, Jeremy. Please go.”

  He took her at her word. He walked back to “Scarlets,” his brazen self still ringing with the blows that she had dealt it. All red, was he! And she could read his thoughts and divine his emotions, and she had accused them of hurting her.

  “Occult rot!” he declared. “The girl’s off her head. Old Carberry was to blame, with his Swedenborgian stunts and his dabblings in spiritism. Well, absolutely insulting—I call it—to a normal man. She’s not fit to be married.”

  His common sense was clamorous and angry. It was a preposterous situation; unwholesome; disconcerting. And all that he could say was: “The girl’s abnormal,” and he said it to himself with emphasis and solemnity, like a politician makes a grave statement in the face of a public meeting. He said it to his mother, standing all square with his back to the drawing-room fire.

  “Someone ought to write to Sybil’s relations. She ought not to be left there to stew in a lot of spiritualist slush. I assure you—it was—really quite beastly. No; I’d rather not explain.”

  Mrs. Soutar was not a woman who tarried in half-way houses. You were either nice or not nice, sane or a mental case, and all that was not nicely normal was embarrassing, a matter for the doctors.

  “I had better go and see her.”

  Her son frowned and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, if you ask me, mater, I’d think twice about it. She’ll tell you you are all blue or black or something, and that you cheat at Bridge——”

  “My dear Jeremy!”

  “It’s a fact. She told me—— Oh, well, let’s leave it at that. But a sort of village Cassandra! You might write to somebody. I might see Vinson and put him wise. She wants watching.”

  “I think I will write to the Gloucester Carberrys,” said his mother. “After all—one has responsibilities.”

  She looked up at him with her head on one side.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “I’m damned if I know what to think,” said the son.

  VI

  People may be damned for thinking or for not thinking, but Sybil Carberry, knowing that her case was a strange one, was at pains to share its strangeness with no one. To Vinson, who called as a friend, but with the look of the observer in his eyes, she was frank without being too frank, knowing that like most good men grown grey in a profession he would find this strange new thing incredible.

  Not that it was new, but in her case this super-normal window had opened more widely than it had for others. Her lucidity was exceptional, amazing. She saw the inner life of others as in a dream. She heard their thoughts as though they were spoken.

  She recalled a favourite theory of her father’s.

  “Life is consciousness, and more and more consciousness, and perhaps other kinds of consciousness. One might prophesy that a time will come when the uttered word will be unnecessary. Soul
will flash to soul. But, as yet, we are not ripe for so terrible and splendid a nakedness.”

  She had realized the terror of it: To have the souls of others naked and stripped before her consciousness; to be instantly aware of the unspoken thoughts, the physical impulses, the earthly passions.

  What a consciousness! To be surrounded by living flames!

  Yet, mercifully, this power of hers was only partial. To some people she did not react at all, and they remained the dumb and ordinary humans, unreadable save by the senses and her intuition. And the partial nature of her new consciousness astonished her; and yet, when she reasoned it out, the thing seemed less astonishing, for she found that as yet the new language was very simple and in its crude beginnings.

  She got the elemental things, the stronger glare of the simpler passions. She understood when a fellow human was jealous, or angry, or lustful, or greedy, especially when these emotions concerned herself. The more subtle moods, the finer inflexions she did not get, but what she did get was sufficient to scare her into solitude.

  For, obviously, certain presences would prove unbearable, and with them near it would be like living in a dust-storm or next to an erupting human volcano.

  Manifestly, solitude was to be her lot, and in considering the beauty of her home she could call herself fortunate. Almost it would seem as though Ignatius Carberry had foreseen the problem of his child’s clairvoyance and had prepared a sheltering world for her, for even in the house itself there was no offending presence. The servants were all old, with the exception of Elsie the under-maid; they were attached to Sybil and to Vine Court, and beauty refines and tranquillizes. There was no presence in the house to offend her. On the contrary, she was touched more than once by the simple goodness she divined. Nor was the situation without its humour, and Sybil had her pixie moods.

  She discovered that a spirit of happy emulation existed between the two old women, Kate and Ellen. To them she was their child; they shared her, and their devotion had become nicely balanced.

  If Ellen cooked her a dainty dish, it was Kate’s part to place it before her as though she were offering her heart.

  “There, Miss Sybil.”

  And Ellen had to be praised, though Ellen complained to her crony and fellow-devotee that Sybil’s passion for fruit and green things and milk and bread rather cramped her style.

  “I don’t get a chance to do what I might do. Entrées and kickshaws. And good roast meat.”

  There was happiness for Sybil in the tranquil affection of these two old women.

  “You two dear things,” she would say to herself.

  And sometimes she would play a pixie trick on one of them.

  “Ellen, you are thinking that I should like asparagus——”

  “Bless you, so I was! Now, how did you know that?”

  “Somehow, you had the asparagus look in your eye, Ellen.”

  But the question of asparagus raised a problem in the garden. Old Boggis, as honest a soul as ever lived, stood with his hat pushed back, and scratching a round and pensive forehead.

  “Someone’s bin at them beds.”

  Someone had.

  Lord and Santer—the two under-gardeners—were supposed to be unimpeachable men; but of the two Santer was the less unimpeachable. Lord was close on sixty, a quiet and inarticulate creature with a passion for cutting grass, and he tended the Vine Court lawns as though they were sacred carpets. Santer was thirty-three, a dark man with a voluble and dressy wife.

  “I’ve come round after dark, and I’ve bin up early,” said old Boggis, “but never a soul I’ve seen. Yet, last year some grapes was cut.”

  Theft in the Vine Court garden was sacrilege rather than an offence.

  “Don’t bother about it, Boggis.”

  “But I do bother, Miss.”

  That same afternoon Sybil came upon Santer putting out Phlox Drummondi and Nemesia in one of the borders. She was walking in the grass, and his back was towards her.

  She noticed that Santer was rough with the plants; he did not handle them with love, but resentfully, as though they were someone else’s plants.

  Moreover, as she stood very still, watching him, she knew of a sudden that Santer was a thief, and no ordinary thief. Waves of evil-feeling and -thinking seemed to spread from him as he crouched there, jabbing the plants into the soil, the suggestion of a snarl on his thin, dark face.

  Sybil was shocked. It was as though she had discovered an ulcer in the smooth soft skin of the garden.

  “Santer!”

  She had moral courage. She might hate exposing the meannesses of mean people, but she did it.

  “Why did you take the asparagus?”

  He swung round on his heels, still crouching, and his face was malevolent, for Santer was a village politician, one of those who preach brotherly love with certain envious limitations.

  “What d’yer mean?”

  She knew that he was going to be insolent.

  “You took it. I know. If you had asked me you could have had it as a gift.”

  And then he stood up with a black flare on his face, his right hand clutching the trowel.

  “I’m not ashamed. I’ve a right to it. You and your money—I’ll tell you a thing or two——”

  She was not afraid, for knowing so well when a thing was mean and evil, and being able to look in the unmasked face of it, she knew her enemy and despised him.

  “There is no need for you to tell me, Santer. I know.”

  Her calmness was an offence to his baser soul. He had been caught, and the one thing in his favour was that he did not cringe.

  “You know, do you! What do the likes of you know of the likes of us? Why should you—parasites—have all the strawberries and cream? Yes, I took the damned stuff. Why shouldn’t my woman have something of what you—ladies——”

  She turned away, and he extended a clawing hand.

  “Now—you can have the law on me—you—as never did a day’s work——”

  Her voice came back over her shoulder.

  “You can go, Santer. Of course, I shall not prosecute you.”

  “Yah,” he snarled, “you can afford to be magnam’mous, you can.”

  She sought out old Boggis and told him, and old Boggis was angry.

  “I always did think that chap was slimy, Miss. But did you catch him——?”

  “I challenged him, Boggis, and he boasted about it.”

  “We’ll boast him.”

  “No, no,” she said; “this is a garden. He shall have a month’s money and go.”

  So Santer departed, and an aged but stout old man took his place, and peace reigned; and Sybil felt these kindly and human spirits round her. Human they were; they had their little piques and prides and frailties, but they were very harmless frailties, and in feeling them Sybil realized that she loved to have them so. Likeable old children in whom the shimmering heat of life had been tempered to a gentle afterglow.

  A year passed, and her strange and lucid peace continued, and during the whole of that year Sybil Carberry never went beyond the park gates. Sundry relatives, stimulated by Mrs. Soutar’s pen, had come and seen and been serenely baffled. Sybil was the child of her father, only more so. Spellford and its purlieus had given her up. At the age of three-and-twenty she had chosen to live the life of an eccentric old maid, with a dog and a cat and a gardening apron. It was preposterous but it was true.

  Of course she was queer. What could you expect from old Ignatius Carberry’s daughter?

  As Jeremy’s mother put it:

  “She makes me think of a wood spirit—you know, a sort of Dryad, all eyes and a white face looking at you for a moment from between green branches. She’s uncanny. I’m sorry, but I can’t get on with uncanny people. I like to know where I am.”

  VII

  Possibly the happiest people are those who know how to live alone, and that all our prattle about social responsibilities is so much fudge. The crowd kills. Even a disciplined crowd does it
s killing most efficiently when directed by the brain of some more solitary man, and in these days of futile haste and of swarming primitives solitude grows less and less.

  Old Carberry had believed in solitude. His theory of the coming of a super-consciousness had demanded for the evolution of this consciousness an atmosphere of solitude. He had argued, too, that if you granted the materialists all that they claimed, the last word would be with the solitary man, some chemist perhaps or physicist who would be able to blow the earth to smithereens or poison whole continents.

  But he had not thought sufficiently upon reaction, upon the eternal dualism, and it may be that he had not realized its necessity. He had gone his way, and had left his child and comrade in a little world of beautiful solitude that was permeated for a while by a sense of his presence.

  Sybil had her garden, her old people and her animals, and books—books both good and evil—and she found that evil books disturbed her like evil humans. She had to black-list many of the clever people, the self-conscious cynics, the criers of stinking fish. Carberry had loved few books, but he had loved them with understanding, but rarely had he deigned to touch the book of a man who lived and wrote in a city. He had said that too often such a man’s work was tainted with Tottenham Court Road cleverness.

  Wise and lovable old tyrant! Yet, for Sybil, a crisis was foreshadowed when the awareness of her father’s presence began to grow dim. How the change came about she did not know, or whether the change was in herself or in the atmosphere surrounding her consciousness. She felt that a something had gone, melting away slowly like a wraith or mist in a valley.

  She discovered loneliness. It came upon her gradually as the other presence grew dim, but its very gradualness made her afraid, for there was stealth in it, inevitableness; it seemed to approach her like a grey and sinuous beast.

  “I am alone,” she thought; “there is not a soul to whom I can tell things.”