A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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with me, come with me, lie in my arms and rest.”
He turned and buried his face in the warmth of her
bosom.
“Thank God you were awake,” he said.
ROXTON, that little red town under a June sKy,
looked like a ruby strung upon the silver thread of
a river and set in a green hollow of the hills. As yet
the enterprising builder had not stamped the mark of the
beast glaringly upon the place, and the quaint outreachings of the town were suffered to dwindle through its
orchards into the June meadows, where the deep grass
was slashed and webbed with gold. The hills above
were black with pine thickets that took fire with many
a dawn and sunset, and to the north great beech-woods
hung like purple clouds across the blue.
The most miserly of mortals might have warmed with
the ridge view from Marley Down. Southward a violet
haze of hills, larch-woods golden spired in glimmering
green valleys, bluff knolls massive with many oaks, waving fields, blue smoke from a few scattered cottages.
From Marley Down with its purple heather billowing between the pine woods like some Tyrian sea, the road
curled to the red town sleeping amid its meadows.
Mrs. Betty Steel was at least an aesthetician, and her
eyes roved pleasurably over the woods and valleys as she
drove in her smart dog-cart over Marley Down. She had
been ridding her conscience of a number of belated country “calls ” with a friend, Miss Gerratty, beside her, a
plump little person in a pink frock. There was a certain
cottage on Marley Down that Betty Steel had coveted
for months, an antique gem, oak panelled, brick floored,
with great brown beams across the ceilings. Betty Steel
had the woman’s greed for the possession of pretty things.
The house in St. Antonia’s Square seemed too large and
cumbersome for her at times. Perhaps it was something
of a mausoleum, holding the ashes of a dead desire.
Often she wearied of it and the endless domestic details,
and longed for some nook where her restless individualism could live in its own atmosphere.
A glazier was tinkering at one of the cottage casements
when Mrs. Betty drove up the grass track between sheets
of glowing gorse. A pine wood backed the cottage on
the west; in front, before the little lawn, a white fence
linked up two banks of towering cypresses. Mrs. Betty
drew rein before the gate, and called to the man who was
releading the casement frames.
“I hear the cottage is to let. Can you tell me where
Mr. Pilgrim, the owner, lives. Somewhere on the Down,
is it not?”
The man, an unpretentious, wet-nosed creature, crossed
the grass plot, wiping his hands on a dirty apron.
“Mr. Pilgrim’s just ‘ad an offer, miss.”
“Has he?”
“Well, we’re doin’ the repairs. I ‘ave ‘card that Mrs.
Murchison of Roxton ‘ave taken it.”
“Dr. Murchison’s wife?”
The man nodded.
“How utterly vexatious. I suppose Mr. Pilgrim would
not sell?”
“Don’t know, miss, I ‘ain’t the authority to say.”
Parker Steel’s wife flicked her horse up with the whip
and turned back to the main road, a woman with a
grievance. Her companion in pink offered sympathy
with a twitter. Being of the Steel faction, she was wise
as to the friction between the households, and a friend’s
grievance has always an element of wickedness for a
woman.
“How very annoying, dear!”
Mrs. Betty waved her whip.
“I have had that cottage in mind for over a year.
Some one must have told the selfish wretch that I was
after it.”
“Strangely like spite, dear,” cooed the dove in pink.
“I wonder what the Murchisons want with the place?
To make a summer beer-garden for their brats, perhaps.”
“Marley Down’s so bracing. I hear Jim Murchison
has been overworking himself. Probably he intends
spending his week-ends here.”
“Rather curious.”
Miss Gerratty’s blue eyes were too shallow for the holding of a mystery.
“I can’t see anything strange in it, Betty. Jim Murchison has that assistant of his, a finnicking little fellow
in glasses, with a neck like a giraffe’s. Strange that they
should have snapped up your particular cottage.”
“Oh, that’s just like Kate Murchison,” and Mrs.
Betty’s brown eyes sparkled.
Hatred, like love, is a transfiguration of trifles, and
nothing is too paltry to be registered against a foe. Parker Steel’s wife drove home in the most unenviable of
tempers, untouched by the scent of the bean-fields in
bloom, or by the flash of the river through the green of
June. She rattled down the steep hill into Roxton town
at H ; % ace that made Miss Gerratty wince. Metaphorically, Betty Steel would have given much to have had her
bit in Catherine Murchison’s mouth, and to have treated
her to a taste of her nimble whip.
Leaving Miss Gerratty at the end of Queen’s Walk by
the old Jacobean Market-House, Mrs. Steel drove home
alone, to find some half-dozen letters waiting for her,
the mid-day post that she had missed by lunching with
Mrs. Feveril, of The Cedars. She shuffled the letters irritably through her hands like a pack of cards, her eyes
sparkling into sudden vivacity as a foreign envelope
showed among the rest. The letter bore the Egyptian
Sphinx and pyramids, and the familiar writing of a friend.
The letter lay unopened in her lap awhile, as she sat
by the open window of the drawingroom and looked out
over the beds that were gorgeous with the flare of Oriental
poppies. The lawn, studded with standard roses, swept
to the trailing branches of an Indian cedar. Rhododendrons were still in bloom in the little shrubbery under
the rich green shade shed by two great oaks.
She tore open the envelope at last, having lingered like
one who shirks the reading of news long waited for.
The familiar squirl of the man’s handwriting made her
smile, bringing back memories of a first serious affaire de
cceur with the quaint grotesqueness of the foolish past.
She remembered the thin, raw-boned youth with the red
mouth and the strenuous eyes who had kissed her one
night after a river-party. H’e was still vivid to her, even
to the recollection how his boating-shirt had slipped a
button and given her a glimpse of a hairy chest. What
a little fool she had been in those days! Mrs. Betty was
not the slave of sentiment, and Surgeon-Major Shackleton had slipped with his somewhat strenuous love-making
into the past. She still had occasional letters from him,
and from other sundry friends, letters that she always
showed her husband. Parker Steel was not a jealous
being. He was mildly pleased by the conviction that he
was still envied in secret by a bevy of old rivals.
“Dear Betty,”
Mrs. Steel made a little grimace as she pictured the
number of “dear Betties” who had probably drifted within
the sphere of Charlie Shackleton’s passion for romance.
She skipped through the letter with watchful eyes, ignoring the surgeon-major’s bantering persiflage, the familiar
gibes of an old friend. It was on the fourth page that
she unearthed the news she delved for, tangled beneath
the splutterings of an execrable pen.
“I think you asked me in your last letter whether I
knew a fellow named Murchison at St. Peter’s. Haven’t
you mentioned ‘the creature’ to me before? I remember
Jim Murchison just as you describe him, a solid, brownfaced six-footer, one of those happy-go-lucky beggars
who seem ready to punch creation. I left the place two
years before he qualified; he had brains, but if my pate
serves me, he was the sworn slave of a drug we catalogue
as C 2 H 5 OH. Not a bad sort of fool, but bibulous as
blotting-paper. Funny he should have turned up your
way, and married Kate of the golden hair. Mark this
private, and let my friend Parker deal with the above
formula. Glad to hear that he is raking in the guineas—”
The letter ended with a few personal paragraphs that
Mrs. Betty hardly troubled to read. She crossed the hall
to her husband’s study, hunted out a text-book on chemistry from the shelves, and proceeded with much patience
and deliberation to unearth the scientific hieroglyph the
surgeon-major’s letter contained. She found it at last,
and smiled maliciously at its vulgar triteness.
“C 2 H S OH, ethyl alcohol; commonly known as alcohol;
a generic term for certain compounds which are the
hydroxides of hydrocarbon radicals. The active principle of intoxicating liquors.”
Mrs. Betty put the book back on the shelf, and buttoned Mr. Shackleton’s letter into her blouse. There was
a queer glitter in her eyes, a spiteful sparkle of satisfaction.
She went back to the drawingroom, and seating herself
at the piano, played Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” with
fine verve and feeling.
Her husband found her in a brilliant mood that night
at dinner. She looked sleek and handsome, blood in her
cheeks and mischief in her eyes. Mrs. Betty at her
best could be a very inflammatory and sensuous creature,
like a Greek nymph taken from some Bacchic vase.
“The latest news, Parker theMurchisons have snapped
up my cottage on Marley Down.”
“The dickens they have! You don’t appear jealous.”
“No, I have a forgiving heart. The place is like a
hermitage. What can the Murchisons want with such a
cottage?”
Her husband, cold intellectualist, warmed to her beauty
as to true Falernian.
“Am I a crystal gazer?”
“Read me the riddle.”
Parker Steel laughed, and looked at her with a slight
loosening of the mouth.
“Riddle -de -dee! You women are always analyzing
imaginary motives. Murchison has been looking run to
death, lean as an overdriven horse. I don’t blame him
for wishing to munch his oats in rustic seclusion.”
Mrs. Betty bubbled over with sparkles of intuition.
“What does C 2 H 6 OH stand for, Parker?”
“C 2 H fi OH! What on earth have you to do with chemical formulas?”
“Answer my question.”
“Gin, if you like; the stuff the blue-ribbonites battle
with.”
PORTEUS CARMAGEE, the lawyer, and his sister lived in Lombard Street, in a grim, blind -eyed,
stuccoed house with laurels in tubs before it, and chains
and posts defending an arid stretch of shingle. There
was something about the house that suggested law, a
dry and close-mouthed look that was wholly on the surface. Porteus Carmagee was a little man, who forever
seemed spluttering and fuming under some grievance.
He was hardly to be met without an irritable explosion
against his own physical afflictions, the delinquencies of
tradesmen and Radicals, or the sins of the boy who
brought the morning paper. The lawyer’s almost truculent attitude towards the world was largely the result
of “liver”; his sourness was on the surface; one glimpse
of him cutting capers with Kate Murchison’s children
would dissipate the notion that he was a cadaverous and
crusty hater of mankind.
Miss Phyllis Carmagee was remarkable for the utter
unfitness of her Christian name, and for the divine placidity that contrasted with her brother’s waspishness. A
big, moon-faced, ponderous woman, she was a rock of
composure, a species of human banyan-tree under whose
blessed branches a hundred fretful mortals might rest
in the shade. Her detractors, and they were few, asserted
that she was a mere mass of amiable and phlegmatic fat.
Miss Carmagee was blessed with a very happy sense of
humor; she had a will of her own, a will that was formidable by reason of its stubborn
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