Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 29

by George Warwick Deeping

XXIX

1

SORRELL was fifty years old when he became a gardener, and began to think less of pound notes and more of flowers. The material struggle had passed, and in passing had left him standing like a man made aware of an English Spring after the chill and the greyness of a Channel crossing, those greenly cushioned hills, the woods purple and gold with the swelling of the buds, the innocent faces of the primroses looking up. "Why fret?" And when a thrush sang to him—"Why worry, why worry?" his heart answered,—"Ah,—why?"

The phase came suddenly, and yet no phase is sudden, for a man is what he has been, and there is no growth without roots. To Sorrell it came like the opening of a door in a high, old wall, and within he beheld the ultimate inwardness of his very self, a self that had been growing through all the years.

He had been sitting at his desk in the cottage window with his private ledger open before him, the practical part of his consciousness reflecting the figures on the ruled page. His income! Nine hundred pounds from the Pelican. Two hundred pounds from his shares in the Roland Hotels. Seven hundred and sixty pounds from "William of Winstonbury." He had sat reflecting upon the material foundations of his life, the money that Roland had lent him refunded; the antique business his; a solid share in the four hotels just as surely his; money waiting to be invested.

Suddenly, he had smiled. He was thinking of Christopher, now Surgical Registrar at St. Martha's, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, a young man well thought of by his elders and instinctively liked by them, which is the most potent form of liking. Kit was well on his way up the ladder, and below the ladder Kit's father had laid those careful foundations.

Sorrell closed the ledger, put it away in a drawer and locked it. He pocketed the key. His fingers played with a pen, a favourite pen that he had used for the last nine years. It was almost a part of his hand, a graving tool with which he had scored in the lines of an indelible success. But his eyes were looking through the window between the folds of the green and white curtains, and in those eyes of his shone an inward vision, something personal that was suddenly awake to a world that was intensely and poignantly impersonal.

He found himself in the garden, standing under the very old pear tree that grew close to the thorn hedge, its grey and twisted trunk rising in a spiral to the spreading of the boughs. The fruit buds were swelling, and their colour was a wonderful pale gold. A blue tit, hunting for insects, flew away towards the orchard, and Sorrell heard its quaint creaking note contrasting with the flute song of a blackbird.

Spring! The silver-gold buds of the pear tree entranced him. How delicate and beautiful they were, almost more beautiful than the flowers that would open from them! Buds of promise ending in the fruit of fulfilment, but not every bud would mature into a fruit. His eyes wandered towards other trees, and to the eyes of his new awareness the whole world was a lacework of buds; lilacs and chestnuts tinted green, but the lilacs more green than the chestnuts; the elm boughs purple against the April blue; beeches bronze to gold; the oaks still dim and unburnished. A thrush was singing on the top of a beech tree.

What a world of buds and of song!

He looked over the hedge into the inn garden, and saw golden daffodils and white crocus in bloom together in a wild patch of grass under the old trees. Never had he felt so conscious of colour, of all that mystery of life which man the money-maker has no time to see. Nor had he realized, somehow, that the sone of a thrush can be translated into so many human variants. "Why worry,—why worry? Will you do it, will you do it? Joy,—joy! I'm a spirit; I'm a spirit." Sorrell felt awed.

"How one forgets to look at things! Scuffling in the mud—most of us. Makes one marvel."

Reborn in him was the-dim appreciation of the fact that it is good for man that he should marvel, yes, and marvel more at the flowers and the trees and the grasses of the field, and less at his own cleverness. To let himself go out among the golden buds shaken by the wind, into the pine pollen, into the white clouds or the cups of the daffodils. Better than the marvels of science, than "wireless" or the latest aeroplane, or the bending of light, or the quantum theory. Flowers came to your feet. You could take the little quaint face of a pansy between your two fingers, and see the soul of it, the soul of all gentle, living things.

Thomas Roland, coming down about this time to spend a week-end at the old Pelican, and bringing Cherry with him in a blue car, found Sorrell at the beginnings of this most final phase.

"Come and see the violas. We have massed Royal Scott and Bullion together, with a few Bronze Purples here and there."

The crowsfeet about Tom Roland's eyes became more marked as he looked at Sorrell. Little crinkles of affection. So, Stephen had taken to gardening,—and when an Englishman of fifty develops a passion for flowers, one may infer that the leaves of the other passions have fallen.

Roland stood at gaze.

"Paradise regained, old man."

"Like it?"

"You pretty creatures! That's how I feel to pretty flappers—now—Stephen. We are growing old."

"If this is growing old——"

"You don't mind?"

"Why should one?"

"Oh,—I don't know. To go under the grass when you are still full of music,—and the woman you love has no need to dye her hair. I'm always telling Cherry it is time that she began to find grey hairs."

"Is there any need?"

"Seems not. Why,—I don't know. Fellows, young fellows, round her like flies, damn them! Yet, she's one of those absurd creatures who seem to prefer the permanent adventure. We got married last month."

Sorrell was looking at his garden with the eyes of a lover.

"I'm glad. You two have had time to find out. Besides,—there's your music—and her voice."

"Yes—her voice," said Roland musingly.

But Sorrell's garden was there to be enjoyed, wide-eyed and ready to smile, a mute-lipped garden, fortuitously beautiful, unselfconscious, and not crying—"Come and look at me." Nor did Sorrell's self stand in the middle of it, smirking, "Ha, ha, my dear chap, see what—I—have done." The happy amateur in him had not done too much. He had taken the vegetable garden and the little orchard behind the cottage, and leaving many of the old fruit trees standing, he had run a broad turf path down the centre to meet the orchard grass. He had curbed Bowden's inclination to cut down and to tidy up, and to make flower beds of geometrical exactness and to edge them with blue tiles. "Them trees be'nt no use. Better have 'em down." Certainly many of the trees were old, and poor bearers, but Sorrell had left them there, and planted clematis and honeysuckle against the trunks of some of them. His flower beds looked like coloured tapestries flung down casually upon the grass. He had not meddled too much, and the result had come to him as a piece of irresponsible and blessed magic, a cottage garden idealized, with flowers and trees and roses, and bits of yew hedge, and fruit and lilies, and here and there a flowering shrub in disorderly and delightful freedom, so that there seemed no end to it and no beginning, and no fixed boundaries.

Roland, after wandering over this quarter of an acre of charming confusion, and losing himself among violas and pzonies and sweet-smelling stocks, came to rest against the trunk of an apple tree with the air of a man to whom life never ceased to be surprising.

"What incalculable creatures we are, Stephen. And this is your idea of a garden?"

"It grew like this. Either it had to,—or I have a muddled mind."

"And you—an expert hotelier, the man of detail who must organize the very stair-rods and the bath taps——! You are a grandfather, old chap,—and this garden is your grandchild. One is supposed to be more easy with one's grandchildren."

"Things that grow are different—somehow. You have to let them have their way, unless—of course—you are out for profits."

"Ah, profits!" said Roland, and catching sight of his wife by the sundial set on the square of old brick paving close to the cottage, he hailed her. "Come and see Stephen's secret dissipations. Instead of taking to the bottle—in his old age——"

She came down the grass path with that air of eternal youthfulness that was so untheatrical. Once or twice she paused to touch or to smell something, and her face had the softness of secret satisfactions.

"My dear," said her man; "you'll never grow old. What a problem for a man whose tailor tells him——"

"Don't listen to your tailor. But Stephen, you are a genius——"

"I'm nothing. I just muddle about, and the flowers do the rest——"

"Arcadian anarchy! Cherry, do you think that if I had a dish of rose petals for breakfast each morning, or nibbled a blue delphinium, I should discover the secret of eternal youth?"

"Why worry?" she said, shyly and clearly smiling, her voice making Sorrell think of the voice of a thrush, "you will never grow old. People who make music and pictures and gardens——"

"Blessed philosophy," said her husband. "Now, if I manufactured tooth-brushes or printed hymn books——"

Sorrell had taken out a penknife and was cutting an early rose. He held it to his nostrils for a moment before offering it to Roland's wife.

"Just look at the curves of that bud! Wonderful! Makes you feel——"

She inhaled the scent of it and looked with wide eyes at the two men as though both of them were lovable children, but far more lovable than any child.

2

While Sorrell paused upon his autumnal hilltop to sit in the sun of a reminiscent maturity, Christopher had developed the restlessness of a young soldier spoiling for war, and finding no use for his weapons.

Once a month he came down for the week-end, and occupied his old room in the cottage, meeting many friendly faces, but none so wise in its friendliness as his father's. Kit witnessed his father's excursions into the world of flowers, and wondered at it. Sorrell seemed rooted in his garden. He no longer seemed to care for long country walks or early morning rides. Flowers fascinated him. He had taken to experimenting in hybridism, and under his gauze cages delphiniums and sweet peas and pansies lived like sacred virgins waiting upon their annunciation.

Christopher was a little troubled. He was alive to a subtle change in his father. Sorrell was gentler, slower in his movements, more bent, yet obviously happy. Kit's eyes were young. He observed the externals, the objective phenomena, for he had been trained to observe signs, and to attach more importance to them than to symptoms. He appraised life with his eyes and hands.

Sorrell was growing very grey. His temporal arteries stood out on little tortuous curves, and the son, watching the father stooping over some plant and growing flushed in the face, would remind himself that Sorrell had never spared himself. He had taken hard knocks; and he had never whimpered.

In the evenings Kit noticed that his father appeared very tired,—but he was far less tired than Kit imagined, for the pleasant, meditative languor of the older man was not quite understood by the younger one. In a certain way their positions became reversed. Kit did not advise his father upon his ties and trousers, or try to renovate the old boy, but he did feel responsible for Sorrell's health.

"Why don't you slack off a bit, pater?"

He was sitting askew on the window-sill, watching a sunset, while Sorrell lay in a long chair, puffing at a pipe.

"I am slacking," said his father.

Kit's silence was argumentative.

"You haven't had a decent holiday——"

"I could have had——"

"Well,—why not? The fact is—you have been carrying me on your back."

Sorrell, lying with ha't-closed eyes, let the sweet humour of his affection gleam under lowered eyelids.

"Life gets more automatic. The Pelican is a very obliging bird——"

"How?"

"People are rather good to me; Fanny and Mrs. Marks, and Hulks. The machinery runs as though it were in an oil bath. Sometimes I feel an absolute slacker."

Christopher was silent for a while, lips compressed, eyes at gaze.

"If I became a G.P.," he said, "would you mind?"

"Immensely."

"Pater——!"

He got off the window-sill and stood by Sorrell's chair, eagerly inarticulate.

"I'm twenty-seven. You have been responsible—I'm getting rather sick of hanging about, waiting. It may mean another two or three years, and when the chance comes it will only be a chance. Messing about with records and things—when I want to get at the real thing—and can't."

Sorrell watched the smoke from his pipe.

"It will come. The big chances are worth waiting for. I'm not worrying."

"Pater!" said the son, and stood mute.

His father held out a hand.

"You know me better than that. Things are pretty easy here now. As for the money, it has begun to roll in of itself. A trick money has—sometimes. If you have to wait five years for your chance it is all the same to me."

Kit stood silent in the dusk.

"Sometimes—I feel—like sucking your blood."

"My dear old chap, call it commercial transfusion. Do you think I regret it? I have never found life so good."

But Christopher was worried. It was a difficult period for a young man who had to stand by and watch other and older men doing the things he longed to do, and feeling the urge of those nine years of steady effort clamorous behind him. It was not that he lusted to use the knife. He wanted to try his skill and prove it, and yet he was no mere tool-man, a mender of watches. Always he remained aware of the mystery of the living tissues, of that marvellous and intricate nexus of arteries, nerves and muscles, that wonderful garment in which God has draped man's consciousness. Kit had a reverence for the human body, and when he saw it warped or diseased the soul of, his nascent skill yearned to lay hands upon it.

And these months of waiting, of trailing about wards and corridors, this pen and paper game, the clerkliness, while the real work went on about him, and he envied the men who did it, and sometimes came near hating them. He felt like a dog waiting for a bone, some little job to be thrown at him by a man who had more jobs than he needed. He looked back with regret to his house-surgeon days when he had dabbled his hands in the live blood of surgery, and had even been allowed to carry through occasional minor operations.

Meanwhile, his father wrote monthly cheques, and Kit had come both to love and to hate those cheques. He had fancied that he had seen a significant frailness in his father, a wilting of that thin figure.

At Chelsea, after one of those Sunday suppers, he walked up and down the red and black music-room like a young lion in a cage. He had Tom Roland to himself for half an hour while Cherry played music to her marvellous new baby.

"Haven't you noticed——? You must have noticed."

It behoved Thomas Roland to say that Kit's father was not so young as he used to be. But did that matter? Age has a phase of its own, compensations, happinesses. You slackened your stroke, or you took to a punt instead of an eight-oar.

"But it matters to me," said Kit.

"It would—my lad. I'm not quarrelling with you minding,—but it is not easy for us to see the insides of our elders. Oh,—I'm not preaching. Look on it as physiological."

"You mean—he is growing old?"

"About as pleasantly as a man could."

Kit stood by the piano, staring at the keyboard where Cherry's ands used to flutter. He looked extraordinarily grave the realization of the fact that his father was growing old had produced in him a feeling of shock.

"Of course," he said.

And then he resumed his walking up and down.

"Here am I tied up like a dog, waiting for somebody to let me off the chain. I want results."

"They'll come."

"Nine years, Roland, and he is still keeping me."

"Do you think he minds?"

"I know he doesn't. But it gets me. It's like a flame inside me. I want to give him something back, pride for pride. I want—to—to justify him."

"Well,—you will."

"Oh,—it's nice of you to say that."

"It's not nice; it's backing a big probability. You couldn't have done more, my lad, than you have done. Hang on."

"I'm hanging,—but I'd like to bite the rope through."

"The young man in a hurry! Forgive me. Softlee walkee catchee monkey. Your chance will come."

"Think so?"

"Sure of it."

Before switching off the light that night Roland told Cherry of Kit's impatience.

"Worrying about his chance. Why,—the young beggar, it's there in his face. One of the gods is bound to fall to him."

"Ah," she said, "you always will let yourself be caught by appearances. Mere looks."

"Now that's not fair. I could reduce it to a personal question. Looks do matter. 'I do not like you, Dr. Fell——!' Kit's likeable, tremendously likeable. Those eyes and mouth,—and the smile. Character. Now,—I'll bet you——"

"Do be quiet. I think I hear baby——"

"Explicit," said Roland, hunching up his pillow.

3

There were times when Christopher felt so restless about the future that he became a tramper of streets, one of those unsatisfied young Titans to whom London at night is like every other man's wife. His youth was strong in him, urgent, ambitious, and when doors are locked youth's inclination flies to a crowbar rather than to a key. Moreover, London is provocative to the fiercely obscure, like some splendid courtezan laughing derisively in their pinched and hungry faces, giving herself to the old men and to the rich. To have no flower of fame to offer is to be infamous, and worse than infamous—unknown. Kit was less greedy than most young men, and his vision of fame was both human and fine, but he felt the hustling and contemptuous shoulders of the great city, saw its placards and its sky-signs, read its names, heard its trumpet cries. There were nights when he felt fierce.

There were other nights when he knew melancholy. He would wander round Brunswick Square and recall those seemingly more romantic days. He thought of Pentreath, Dr. Pentreath, solidly established at Milchester as third partner in an old practice. Pentreath—the sensitive Pentreath—was earning his own living. He thought of Mary Jewett; he felt her, and there were nights when he yearned—— Poor, sensuous, dark-eyed Mary! He would go wandering over the ground, gathering memories, memories of arms and lips, and clouding hair in the midst of the warm darkness.

"If she were here," he thought, "I might feel less restless."

Sometimes he faced the thought of failure, comparative failure. He saw himself hanging on and at St. Martha's watching other men snapping up the hospital appointments, while he would end by drifting into some provincial sideshow where as a junior partner his adventurous excursions into surgery would be carefully curtailed. Competition was so fierce.

There were other eager young men shrewdly watching for future niches at St. Martha's, men who went purring softly about the place and rubbing themselves ingratiatingly against the legs of their seniors.

Roland had advised him to hang on, and Christopher,—being older than his years, supposed that his seniors had a wisdom of their own, and a way of looking at things that might differ from the young man's view. Older men were less in a hurry; they had not the same need to hurry; they could afford to be deliberate.

One morning Sorrell was walking along the main corridor with one of his registrar's books under his arm when he saw Simon Orange come limping out of the board-room and stand there looking to and fro like a saturnine ape. Orange was an oddity. Irreverently known as the "Orang" and "Septic Simon," he held the appointment of surgeon to the out-patient department of the hospital. He was e swarthy and misshapen and laconic; he had a cleft palate, and his thick yet squeaky voice emitted occasional, bitter sarcasms. His sunken head bulged a big forehead over black and bushy eyebrows, and the eyes beneath them seemed enigmatic to the ordinary male.

For years this man had been the butt of the irresponsibly callow. All sorts of tales were told of him. It was said that as a student he had lived in a slum attic and had helped himself to exist by twanging a banjo and singing comic songs in various pubs. His very swarthiness had made him look unclean, and there had been an occasion when certain bright lads had set out to wash him, but had been surprised and discouraged by the creature's fierceness and its extraordinary simian strength. Persecuted, ridiculed, cold-shouldered, this misshapen little man had pushed on indomitably, showing to the sick and the broken a peculiar, abrupt tenderness, and to the rest of the world a sardonic disdain. The students feared and disliked him. He could bite and did so. To the incompetent and to the cheerfully casual he showed no mercy.

Christopher saw Mr. Orange's deep eyes fixed upon him. The little, thick, simian figure waited, its black coat wrinkled between the shoulders, its big head hanging forward. Its trousers bulged at the knees.

"Sorrell——"

The squeaky gruffness of Mr. Orange brought the eyes of the younger man to attention. Kit waited.

"I have one of my headaches coming on."

Kit did not say that he was sorry. He wasn't sorry, nor did Orange expect him to feel so. Orange's headaches were well known, and they had earned him a queer and additional dislike. Everything about the grotesque little surgeon was transmitted into hostility. Even these attacks of migraine were an offence, for they served to bring out the man's venomous tenacity. He would go aside and vomit, and lie down for half an hour, and take powders of aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. He would get up looking ghastly, and go on with his work—if work there was. He clung with both hands, and with feet and teeth, causing the younger men who hungered to get their hands into the blood of precious practical experience to grumble savagely:

"Why doesn't the little beast let us in?"

Or

"Garret,—you remember Garret,—he was a good chap. Used to let each Surgical Registrar have half a day with him."

Christopher was conscious of a sharp and expectant thrill. He said nothing, but just stood still, feeling a little puzzled by the way the shrewd brown eyes of Orange were looking up at him.

"Do you think you could carry on for me?"

Kit took a moment to answer.

"I should love to, sir. It depends——"

He noticed a queer twitching of Mr. Orange's eyelids. Love to, would he? Of course. But the word love was not a mere conventional exaggeration.

"What's worrying you, Sorrell?"

"I think I am up to tackling any ordinary job,—but supposing——"

"Don't funk it. No,—you won't."

"You mean to allow me to be responsible, sir?"

"Of course. Going to lie down. Send for me if you are not sure about anything."

He scrutinized Kit's suddenly flushed face.

"You'll do."

"It's very good of you, sir."

Orange nodded at him, gave him something like a grim smile, and took his misshapen body back into the board-room.

4

Kit passed a dramatic and an historic day. He performed three minor operations, with the hard-bitten, kinky-haired casualty-sister assisting him with critical and voiceless composure. About three o'clock he had to tackle a rather bad casualty, a compound fracture of the thigh with a pumping artery and a mass of lacerated tissue.

"Better let Mr. Orange know," said the nurse.

Kit was frowning.

"Don't want to worry him; unless it's necessary."

He was too supremely interested to be nervous, too full of a quiet exultation in the presence of the live crisis and his contact with it. He had taken one look at the muddied and clay-coloured face of the man, felt his pulse, and sent for one of the house-physicians to give him an anæsthetic. Then, with the patient safely under the anæsthetic Kit seemed conscious of nothing but that smashed and torn limb waiting for his purposeful and methodical hands.

He had ligatured the artery and was cleaning up the pulped muscles when he was aware of a quick turn of the sister's head. She seemed about to speak, but something or someone restrained her. And Kit was taking dressings from the sterilized boxes before he discovered Mr. Orange standing there, his face like a ghastly, pallid mask.

Kit's eyes asked a question.

"No,—carry on."

"I did not want to worry you, sir."

"No need—at all."

At the end of it all there came a sort of pregnant silence. Kit was peeling off his rubber gloves; the anæsthetist was feeling the patient's pulse, and watching Mr. Orange's face as though he expected a sardonic explosion. Rather cheeky of Sorrell tackling a case like this without a word to the "Orang."

Mr. Orange was looking thoughtfully at the splinted limb, his big head tilted forward. He said nothing, did not make a sound until Christopher was getting out of his white smock.

"All right. Nothing else, is there?"

"No, sir."

He turned abruptly and walked to the door, and Christopher did not see him for the next two days.

5

Three nights later Kit was called up on the telephone and was sent for to the porter's room.

"What is it, Hodges?"

"Mr. Orange, sir."

Kit put the receiver to his ear.

"Hallo."

He heard a rumbling and a squeakiness that was Simon Orange's voice.

"That you, Sorrell? Yes. Come round to my place, will you, if you can spare an hour? No. 11, St. Mary's Street. Coming? Good."

That was all.

Yet, when seated in one of Simon Orange's shabby armchairs in a room that suggested that each article of furniture had been acquired separately at various second-hand shops, it came upon Christopher Sorrell that this Quasimodo of a man liked him, and with a liking that was eager and inexplicable. He was aware of a bright and awkward shyness in the other man's eyes. Orange brought out a box of cigars, and was gruff yet apologetic in offering them to Sorrell.

"Try one. Not bad."

"Thanks very much, sir."

Orange placed the box very carefully upon the table, selected a cigar, and stripped off the band.

"No need to 'sir' me."

He searched the mantelpiece for matches.

"Got a light? Fact is—it has occurred to me that you might be willing to give me a hand sometimes. I am getting a good deal to do, consultant work, and a certain amount of outside surgery. If you could take over the out-patient work for me—now and again. Care to?"

He did not look at Christopher, but appeared busy with the lighting of his cigar, and yet Kit had the impression that Orange was asking a favour instead of conferring one. This shabby room somehow suggested loneliness, the uncouth and rather pathetic loneliness of a man who had no friends. And Orange was trying to be friendly, like a manape who had been made to suffer many indignities, and behind whose scornful ferocity shone two lonely, ape-like eyes.

"You must know what you are offering me, Mr. Orange."

"Know? What?"

"The chance to use my hands.—I have felt——"

The ape-like eyes were on him for a moment, questioning, human, eagerly intelligent.

"Starving?"

"Yes."

"I know what starving means. Several varieties of starvation, Sorrell. Soul and body. You'll take it on?"

"Only too gladly,—if you think——"

"Fit,—quite. I'm not a fool. I'll mention it at the next board-meeting."

With the cigar between his lips, and with knees slightly bent he stood square to the fire, staring into it with a queer and half-malicious smile on his face.

"Don't sublet any of the work."

"You mean——"

"Those other fellows, Messrs. Starkey, and Blane, and Templeman. Do you think I don't know——?"

He twisted slightly on his curved thighs and looked fixedly down over his shoulder at Christopher.

"You—know, Sorrell."

Kit did know, and he stared at the fender. He knew what his brother surgical-registrars said of Simon Orange.

"That's it. Fawning young Agags. Think me a pretty fool. I have had to learn to hate,—sometimes. Sneer at and use. No,—that's not my motto. Power's good, Sorrell. Don't forget it."

Christopher felt curiously humbled, for he—in his time had laughed thoughtlessly at Simon Orange.

"Loyalty," he said; "there is one man who has taught me loyalty."

"Pretty rare."

"It was my father."