A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) 📖
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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by the contemplation of a satisfactory banking account
begets peace in the heart of man.
It was about ten o’clock, and a few enthusiasts were
already quarrelling over croquet, when the hotel “buttons” came out with a telegram on a tray.
“No. 25, Dr. Steel?”
“Here.”
“Any reply, sir?”
The boy waited with the tray held over that portion of
his figure where his morning meal reposed, while Parker
Steel tore open the envelope and read the message.
“No answer.”
“Right, sir.”
“Wait; tell them at the office to get my bill made up.
I have to leave after lunch.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And bring me a time-table, and a whiskey and soda.”
Parker Steel glanced at his watch, thrust the investment list into the breastpocket of his coat, and lay back
again in his chair with the telegram across his knee.
Faces vary much in their expression when the mind behind the face labors with some thought that fills the whole
consciousness for the moment. The smooth indolence
had melted from the physician’s features. His face had
sharpened as faces sharpen in bitter weather, for a man
who is a coward betrays his cowardice even when he
thinks.
A much-grieved croquet-player in a blue-and-white
check dress was confiding her criticisms to a very sympathetic gentleman in one corner of the lawn.
“It is such a pity that Mrs. Sallow cheats so abominably. I hate playing with mean people. Every other
stroke is a spoon, and she is always walking over her ball,
and shifting it with her skirt when it is wired.”
“People give their characters away in games.”
“It is so contemptible. I can’t understand any selfrespecting person cheating.”
The continuous click of the balls appeared to irritate
Parker Steel, as he sat huddled up in his chair with the
telegram on his knee. He found himself listening without curiosity to the young lady in the blue-and-white
whose complaints suggested that the immoral Mrs. Sallow was the cleverer player of the two. Dishonesty is
only dishonest, to many people, when it comes within
the cognizance of the law, and how thoroughly symbolical those four balls were of the opportunities mortals
manipulate in life, Parker Steel might have realized had
not his mind been clogged with other things.
The boy returned with a time-table and the whiskey
and soda on a tray.
“A fast train leaves at 2.30, sir.”
“Thanks; get me a table. You can keep the change.”
“Much obliged, sir,” and he touched a carefully watered
forelock; “will you drive, sir, or walk?”
“Order me a cab.”
“Right, sir.”
And the boy noticed, as he turned away, that the hand
shook that reached for the glass, and that some of the
stuff was spilled before it came to the man’s lips.
No one met Parker Steel at Roxton station that June
evening. A porter piled his luggage on a cab, for the
physician’s own carriage was not forthcoming. A sense
of isolation and neglect took hold upon him as he drove
through the sleepy streets of the old town. Loneliness is
never comforting to a man who is cursed with an irrepressible conscience, and his own restless imaginings rose
like a cold fog into the June air. Parker Steel shivered
as he had often shivered when driving through moonlit
mists to answer a midnight message. The very elms about
St. Antonia’s spire had a shadowy strangeness for him, a
gloom that gave nothing of the glow of a return home.
Parker Steel stood in his own diningroom, waiting and
listening, as though he were in a stranger’s house. Symons,
the starched servant, had opened the door to him without a smile; his luggage had been carried up-stairs. He
had heard voices, faint, distant voices, that had tantalized
him with words that he could not understand. He had
been ready to ask the woman Symons a dozen questions,
but had faltered from a self-conscious fear of betraying
his own thoughts. The house seemed full of some indefinable dread as the dusk deepened towards night.
A door opened above. He heard footsteps descending
the stairs, so slowly in the silence of the darkening house,
that the sound reminded the man of the slow drip of
water into a well. Parker Steel found himself counting
them as they descended towards the hall. If it was
Betty, how was he to construe the message of the morning? The suffering of suspense drove him to action. He
turned sharply, crossed the room, and, opening the door,
looked out into the hall.
“Hallo, dear, is it you?”
She was in white, and her foot was on the last step of
the stairs.
“I am glad that you have come, Parker.”
“I had your wire early. I imagined—”
“That I was ill?”
“Yes, that you were ill.”
She halted with one hand on the carved foot-post of
the balustrading. The dusk of the hall showed nothing
but a white figure and a gray oval to mark her face.
Some mysterious psychic force seemed to hold husband
and wife apart. Their two personalities had become incompatible through some subtle ferment of distrust.
“Parker!”
He made a step forward.
“No, I want you to go into that room and light the
gas.”
The insistent note in her voice repulsed him. His
walk approached a self-conscious shuffle as he turned
and re-entered the darkening room. Betty heard him
groping for the matches. A sudden glare of light followed
the sharp purr of a flaring match. She drew a deep and
sighing breath, pressed her hands to her breast, and entered the room.
Parker Steel was drawing the blinds. His wife closed
the door, and waited for him to turn.
“When I had your wire, dear—”
“Yes.”
“I wondered what I should find here. The wording Good Heavens, Betty—”
She stood back from him and leaned against the sideboard, the glare from the gas falling full upon her face.
It was red, repulsive, tinged with an ooze that had hardened
here and there into yellow scabs.
“You see, Parker, why I sent for you.”
He looked for the moment like a man shocked into
immobility by a sudden storm of wind and sleet beating
on his face.
“When did this appear?”
He moved towards her, the shallow gleam of sympathy
in his eyes darkened by something more terrible than
mere fear. Betty stood her ground. It was the man
who betrayed the incoherency of panic.
“Come, tell me.”
His eyes were fixed upon her face, upon her mouth.
“It is I, Parker, who want to know
“Yes, yes, of course, dear, I can understand. You
should have sent for me sooner.”
Intuition is a gift of the gods to women, a power almost unholy in its brilliant reading of the hearts of others.
Betty’s eyes were searching her husband’s face as though
it were some delicately finished miniature in which every
piece of shading had significance. Her breath came and
went more deeply than when life had a normal flow. For
all else she was cold, very quiet, the mistress even of her
own repulsive face.
“I want you to tell me, Parker—”
She saw the muscles about his mouth quiver.
“Have you seen any one?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Little, and Dr. Brimley.”
“Well? What?”
“They would tell me nothing.”
“Nothing?”
She saw him breathe out deeply like a man who has seen
a child escape the wheels of a heavy cart.
“They gave me mere phrases, Parker. A woman can
tell when men are hiding the truth.”
“What had they to hide, dear? Come closer here
to the light.”
She did not stir.
“I must know, Parker.”
“Yes, of course.”
“The whole truth. Listen I happened to go yesterday morning into your consulting-room. Dr. Little
had been reading; he had left the book open at a certain
page. You know, Parker, that many men only read the
big text-books when they are puzzled by a particular
case.”
Steel’s face seemed nothing but a gray and frightened
mask to her.
“Betty, you are imagining things—”
“Well, tell me the truth.”
“A form of eczema.”
“Parker!”
Her voice had the ring of iron in it.
“That was not the word I read.”
“Good God, Betty!”
“It was this.”
She spoke the word without flinching, with a distinctness that had that cold and terrible conciseness that
science loves. Her eyes did not leave her husband’s face.
Even as he answered her, hotly, haltingly, she knew him
to be a liar.
“Impossible! You are seizing on a mad coincidence,
a mere ridiculous conclusion. I can swear
“Yes, swear—”
“That it is nothing, nothing of what you have said.”
His eyes had the furtive fierceness of eyes searching
her soul for unbelief.
“Come, Betty, wife”
She remained unmoved.
“What? You think that I”
“No, don’t touch me. I don’t believe that you have
told me the truth.”
“Not believe that I!”
“No, God help me, I cannot!”
Her body had hardly changed the pose that it had
taken from the first moment. It was as though it had
stiffened with the slow, pitiless hardening of her heart.
Parker Steel looked at her like the moral coward that he
was, too crushed by his own keen consciousness of shame
to pretend to the courage that he could not boast.
“Betty, am I?”
She flung aside from him with an indescribable gesture
of passionate repulsion.
“Don’t. I can’t look at you, or be looked at. Madge
is waiting for me. They will bring you your dinner.
Goodnight.”
She moved towards the door.
“Betty”
He would have hindered her, but the manhood in him
had neither the power nor the pride. She swept out and
left him. He heard the sound of sobbing as she climbed
the stairs.
“Good God!”
Parker Steel stood listening, staring at the door, a man
who could neither think nor act.
ON two successive days the society of loafers that
lounged outside the gates of Roxton station for the
ostensible purpose of carrying handbags and parcels, had
noticed Major Murray’s red-wheeled dog-cart meet the
afternoon express from town. The society of luggage
loafers boasted a membership of four. It was not an
energetic brotherhood, and had put up a living protest
against the unseemly scurry and bustle of twentieth-century methods. The society’s loafing ground ran along
the white fence that closed in the “goods” yard, a fence
that carried, from four distinct patches of discoloration,
the marks left by the brothers’ bodies in their postures
of dignified and independent ease.
All the comings and goings of Roxton seemed known
to these four gentlemen, whose eyes were ever on the alert,
though their hands remained in their trousers -pockets.
A fly basking on the sidewalk within six feet would be seen
and dislodged by a brisk discharge of saliva from between
one of the member’s lips. Like Diogenes, they “had
reduced impertinence to a fine art”; and the major portion
of the society’s funds was patriotically disbursed to swell
the state’s revenue on beer.
“Psst ‘Ere ‘e is ag’in.”
“‘oo?”
A mouth was wiped by the back of a hand.
“Murray’s man.”
“Sameun?”
“Yas. Little feller with the twirly mustache. What
d’yer guess ‘e be, Jack?”
“Looks as though ‘e might have come t’wind the clocks.”
“You bet!
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