Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 15

by George Warwick Deeping

XV

1

ETHEL FROBISHER and Duncan Scott were peculiarly wise young people, and not in the least like the "Duck and Ethel" of the shop-boy's world, wonderful creatures who lived in an atmosphere of champagne and motor-cars, yachts and fur coats, Monte Carlo and mystery. The common man dreams of a heaven paved with gold; the wise man would be well content with a heaven of flowers. Nor is it unnatural that the poor, envious industrial crowd should clutch at material things. And, no doubt, the shopgirl viewed Ethel Frobisher as a sort of super-courtezan, loaded with sensual love and diamonds, a gorgeous butterfly, the symbol of all the garish and sensational life that exists only in the mind of the poor little materialist.

Scott was a Balliol man; and had been a schoolmaster, and Ethel Frobisher had come from a Somersetshire parsonage. Both had a sense of humour, and an ironical appreciation of "fame" as it had befallen themselves. They laughed over it. There was nothing American in their mental make-up.

To "Ethel and Duck" Mr. Roland brought other refreshments than the Pelican could offer, and they accepted him with delight and a sense of happy relief. Escaping from a world of cads and of bounders it was pleasant to meet this placid and humorous person to whom it was not necessary to explain the fact that a bowl of roses, or a piece of music, or a rolling puppy might be utterly satisfying things.

They spent the evenings in Roland's den, talking and making music, and laughing at life and each other.

"Guess my wife's ambition, Roland?"

It was to have a garden and a paddock and a small car and two dogs, and to grow Darwin tulips and Hybrid Teas and Phlox, and to go up to town three days in every month, and never to enter a picture-house.

"That dream ought to be realized—rather easily."

"We are giving ourselves another three years,—and then we shall retire."

"And break the great public's heart!"

"Before it breaks ours," said the wife.

Duncan was going to grow fruit. In some ways they Were most amazingly unsophisticated. Fame had disagreed with them, as too many sweets disagree with a healthy child, or too much wine with a work-loving man. Both were the happy victims of an incurable simplicity. They had had a surfeit of sensation, of notoriety, of cheap splendour; they had come to resent being regarded as the spoilt darlings of Demos. It was their very simplicity, their vital sense of fun that made them beloved.

Roland pointed this out, when their child-like intimacies included him in their philosophy of life.

"But—ought you to retire!"

They gave him to understand that it was not "the job" that bored them, but the whole atmosphere in which they were expected to work and play and breathe. It was too horribly artificial, and tainted, and commercialized. They had made up their minds to leave it before the taint spread to their souls.

"For—it does—you know," said the wife; "you may say to yourself, 'It shan't'—but it does. Imperceptibly. Like autumn in a garden——. Before you know where you are everything is rotten."

Scott had his own peculiarities. He hated what he called "Being messed about." He had a passion for doing the small things of life for himself, tinkering at his car, making his own early cup of tea. To him a "valeted world" was his idea of Hades. He hated crowds, he—the crowd's filmhero. He liked old clothes and old books, and an old nipe.

"And they expect me to smoke a pipe studded with diamonds—and to dress like their idea of a Bond Street lord! A sort of bastard creature, a mixture of a duke—an actor and a jockey."

They made Roland feel very fatherly towards them, as towards two fortunate but unspoilt children. He bequeathed to the wife his piano and all the flowers in his garden, and to the husband his own little lock-up garage where Duncan could play about in private with the works of the blue two-seater. He provided them with a luncheon basket when they went picnicking. The vases in room No. 1 were full of his flowers.

Bowden complained.

"That there young woman's bin at my toolips."

"I gave her permission."

"Why can't she let 'em grow where they was meant to grow?"

"Because she wants to paint them, Bowden."

"Paint 'em? Paint Clara Butt and William Pitt? Ain't they good enough?"

"Portraits, Bowden."

"Yar,—why can't she let 'em alone. Treadin' on the beds—too."

Roland, laughing, told the little lady that she was in diserace.

"My gardener doesn't approve of your painting the lily."

"I'm so sorry. I only took a flower here and there. The next time—I'll ask him. What's his name?"

"He goes by the name of Bowden."

She did dare to ask "His Surliness" for tulips.

"Please, Mr. Bowden,—Mr. Roland says that I may have three or four tulips. Would you cut them for'me? I don't want to spoil your beds."

Bowden cut her a dozen, which was rank treachery to all the grumpy ideals of his gardener's soul. For when Ethel smiled, the whole world smiled with her, and her smile went all over the world.

Such was their honeymoon, the simplest of affairs, a kind of rustic reaction from the glare of the studio and the searchlights of the Press. They had played pathos to the public, and it so happened that they were to play pathos to each other, and to touch the great heart of the world—in reality, as well as in romance.

Sorrell saw them start out on that sunny May morning, with a luncheon basket in the dicky. A dilapidated looking lorry was rumbling Londonwards, and the blue car overtook it, just where the broad straight road began to curve, and a row of Lombardy poplars raised their spires against the blue of the distant hills. In fact, Sorrell saw the thing happen not two hundred yards from the hotel. He heard the note of Scott's horn and saw the grey bulk of the lorry swerve suddenly across the road. It caught the blue car amid-ships, and drove it against one of the poplars.

Scott was slightly cut about the face with broken glass, but with his little wife things were different. The lorry had smashed the side of the car, and the radiator had struck her.

Sorrell ran.

But before he reached the place Scott had got his wife out of the wrecked car and was carrying her towards the hotel.

He looked as he had never looked on the films, with his partner lying like a wounded bird in his arms.

"Man,—get a doctor, 'phone,—hurry."

And the driver of the lorry, a man with a face like "Old Bill's," was standing in the middle of the road, staring at the wreckage, and repeating the same words over and over again, though there was no one there to hear them.

"The bloomin' link-rod dropped. I can't think 'ow it came to 'appen. Just when they was passin' me—too. The bloomin' link-rod——"

2

This accident on the London road within half a mile of Winstonbury was to give the Pelican an advertisement such as Sorrell had never dreamed of.

He had mounted a bicycle and ridden into the town for a doctor,—two doctors. The whole place was in a flurry, and when the Winstonbury doctors had seen the little lady and taken counsel with her husband there were 'phone messages and telegrams to London. For half an hour Sorrell was standing by the telephone with Duncan Scott fidgeting and smoking cigarettes beside him.

"Through yet?"

"No; sir."

"O,—damn it——! Offer the girl a five-pound note, anything——."

"Through now, sir."

Scott grabbed the receiver from him.

"Hallo,—hallo, is that Sir Magnus?—It is? Thank God——. We have had a smash. The doctors—here,—pretty gloomy. Could you come down at once? Me? No, my wife—Ethel.—What? You will come! O,—that's great——. At once. They're afraid——"

With all these comings and goings, of alarms and anguishes, the inevitable truth filtered out. No one thought of concealing it, and two hours after the accident had happened Sorrell was caught by a local reporter.

"I say—it is a fact?"

"What?"

"The injured lady is Ethel Frobisher?"

"It is a fact. They were here on their honeymoon."

"Great Scott——! If I'd known——. Here's a scoop!"

The reporter dashed out to examine the site of the accident, and to interview the lorry driver who was still moping at the side of the road, and Sorrell thought no more of him for the moment. His self and its affairs were obscured by his human involvement in the morning's tragedy. He had seen the little lady carried in and up the stairs by a man with a face whose whiteness was streaked with red.

Sir Magnus Ord came down by car. It seemed that the case was as serious as it could be, and Ord wished to move the little lady to the quietest room in the hotel, away from the road and overlooking the garden. It was arranged. People moved out to give place to her. Two nurses arrived from Winstonbury. A little crowd of interested humans began to move out from Winstonbury, to gather round the wrecked car and to stare at the Pelican windows. Hulks came to tell Sorrell that he had found three men taking photographs in the garden, and what was he to do about it?

By eight o'clock, when the Winstonbury shops had closed, a considerable crow stippled the white road and the broad grass verges. Sorrell found his son sitting on one of the black chains, a little figure by itself, youthfully interested.

"Is she going to die, pater?"

"How did you hear about it, Kit?"

"Oh, everybody's talking about it. I saw her in The Great Love—you know. Only two weeks ago, pater. Fanny Garland took me."

"I suppose it depends on the doctors."

"I think—it must be rather fine to be a doctor," said the boy, reflectively.

The Winstonbury Evening Argus began the great game of "headlines."

"Duck and Ethel in grave motor smash at Winstonbury."

But the Evening Argus' hoot was a mere rustic bleat when the London press took up the cry; Sorrell became a student of "headlines":

Terrible accident to Ether Frobisher.
Tragic ending to the great honeymoon.
The whole world grieves with the world's lover.

By mid-day Sorrell was able to count some forty cars strung along the side of the road between the Lombard poplars and the Pelican. The number steadily increased, and so did the noise they made when the later arrivals had to find room somewhere and began to use the space beside the inn as a field of manœuvre. People crowded into the hotel,—and asked to be given lunch. Knots of them stood staring at the piece of grass where the accident had happened, and from which the crumpled car had been removed. The bark of one of the poplars had been torn, and from the gash curious people pulled fragments of splintered wood. Even the hotel garden was invaded. Roland found a lot of women staring up at the bedroom windows and talking in loud voices.

"That's it,—that's her window. I saw the nurse——."

They walked over the flower beds.

Roland lost his temper. He went out to them.

"Haven't you ladies any sense of decency?"

He cleared them out, and had the garden doors locked and the gate chained,—but when the garden had achieved silence the lounge became like Babel. People were standing there as though it were the deck of a channel steamer, and the passage leading to the dining-room the gangway to the quay.

Roland stood on the stairs.

"Ladies and gentlemen——"

No one paid the least attention, and he had to shout.

"Ladies and gentlemen—may I be permitted to remind you that a woman is—dying. A little silence, please——. If you will go out by that door——."

With Sorrell and Hulks to help him he got the lounge cleared, and he ordered the hotel doors to be locked.

"Hulks, get a chair and sit down by that door. The only people you will allow in or out are the people staying here."

The noise and the hustle then concentrated themselves outside the hotel. Cars were drawn up two deep, with a central passage between them through which the passing traflic sorted itself out slowly. Roland rang up the Police Inspector at Winstonbury.

"Will you come out and clear this road. We have a mob of cars and people here. And what we want is—silence."

The Inspector came out in person, with a couple of constables, and the road was cleared—and the traffic kept on the move. And yet though persuasion was used, human and reasonable persuasion, people stood backed at a little distance like cattle turning stupidly to stare, and passing cars would slow up and attempt to stop outside the hotel.

Roland stood inside the locked front door with his hands in his pockets.

"Here's your nice—sensational—civilization," he said to Sorrell. "Cattle——!"

"Cattle can read, sir."

"Damn it,—let us give them something to read."

During the afternoon a ladder was reared against the great cross-beam supporting the sign of the Pelican, and Albert Hulks ascended the ladder and hung up two boards so that travellers from west and east could read what was printed upon them.

  "Silence—please.
  Illness—here.
 This hotel is closed.
Please pass—quietly."

The appeal had considerable effect.

3

The Press of the country had resumed control of the lives of "Ethel and Duck," and the autocrat of the Daily Sun, having heard of the crowds and of Mr. Roland's noticeboards, dared to admonish his readers.

"Give Ethel a chance."

The illustrated pages of the various papers reproduced photographs of the wrecked car, and of the poplar tree with the wound on its trunk indicated by a black cross. There were pictures of the Pelican Inn, and of the crowded road, and of Sir Magnus Ord leaving his car. Sorrell read what the driver of the motor lorry had to say about the accident, and what a local garage proprietor thought about it, and what he himself was supposed to have said about it. One paper produced a photograph of Thomas Roland—"The Man who asked for Silence." Gentlemen of the press were discovered entering the hotel by back doors, and even by a passage window, and one adventurer was found outside the door of Ethel's room, waiting to question one—of the nurses.

Scott, slipping out noiselessly with that tense, stiff, patched face of his, walked into the gatherer of news.

"Excuse me, sir, but how——?"

"What do you want——?"

"I'm a journalist, sir."

"O,—hell!" said the husband softly, "can't you people let us alone?"

For there was just a little flicker of hope fluttering like a bird in that silent room. The flame still lived, and poor Scott seemed to stand watching the flame, and holding his breath. If his wife rallied sufficiently there was to be an operation, and to Scott every noise or sound of movement of the hotel was like a gust of wind troubling that feeble flame. When he was not sitting in his wife's room he had a chair in the corridor, and he spent the whole of the first night in that chair.

It is almost impossible to silence an hotel, however considerate people may be, and Sir Magnus Ord's pet fad was a professional detestation of all noise. Discords impinging upon the brain, and helping to exhaust it. His prejudice against all noise added itself to Scott's suppressed anguish of restlessness. He appealed to Roland.

"I say, how many people have you in the hotel?"

"About twenty. I have turned away all new-comers."

"Look here, my dear chap,—I'll rent the whole of your hotel for three weeks—if you can persuade everyone to clear out. It's not a question of money."

"It isn't. I'll do it."

"I say—, Roland, you——."

"That's all right. There is only one thing that matters. I'll go and interview all the people staying here and get them to move."

"And you'll charge me——."

"For your two rooms, and your board, and for the two nurses——."

"No, no,—that's nonsense."

"Well, it's my nonsense. I like to do a thing thoroughly."

"But—my dear man—I'm rolling——"

"That doesn't make any difference."

"But I can't let you shut up the whole place for three weeks——"

"That is what I am going to do."

Scott's face twitched. He gave in, but he gave in with a passionate reservation. He was not going to quarrel with a beau geste,—but some day he would reply to it.

"I shan't forget this——, old chap."

"My dear lad,—I want her to have every chance. I'm not going to sell you her chance. That's all. I'll turn the staff out into the annexe."

And that was what he did, and that evening the little lady rallied. The flame grew bigger, and Scott, walking up and down the carpeted corridor on his bare feet, or sitting in his chair, blessed the silence and felt that there was some healing virtue in it. No gusts of noise causing that little flame to waver. Old Ord had smiled at him. "To-morrow,—if she goes on rallying through the night."

About dusk, Sorrell, moving quietly across the empty lounge, saw a dim white face behind the glass of the hotel door. He moved to wave the intruder away, and recognized his son. Softly he unlocked and opened the door.

"What do you want, Kit?"

They spoke in whispers.

"How is—she?"

"Better. There is to be an operation."

Kit looked immensely solemn.

"An operation——."

"Yes,—if she can bear it. And if—she can——."

Christopher's eyes had a far away look.

"I think I'd like to be a doctor, pater."

"Would you?"

"And mend things,—save people."

They gazed steadily into each other's eyes.

"It's good business, Kit,—an idea. Now, run along, old chap. Perhaps there will be good news to-morrow."

4

There was good news. The little lady had rallied re markably during the night and the very eminent surgeon who had been waiting on the threshold of her room for Nature's beckoning finger, went in and laid his succouring hands upon her. Scott, unable to keep still while the operation was in progress, wandered about the garden and in and out of Roland's room. When in the garden he was for ever looking up at the window of his wife's room, for one of the nurses had promised to wave a handkerchief if things seemed to be going well.

Roland, who was writing letters at his desk, found Scott leaning in at his window.

"She's waved——!"

"I'm glad."

"Isn't it great?"

He resumed his pacings up and down the grass, and round the flower beds and under the vivid green fringes of the beeches and the chestnuts. He had a peculiar, gliding walk of his own, the movement of a dancer, gay and debonair, and Roland noticed that his characteristic movements had come back to him. He had trailed; now he went like a winged Mercury. This was the vivid Duncan of romance, the world's happy hero.

Roland watched and smiled.

"Sorrell ought to be satisfied," he thought. "Fortune has sent us her favourite children."

Moreover, Fortuna appeared to have taken her place beside the Pious Pelican poised on the oak beam. The eminent surgeon was returning to town; he had the satisfied air of a man who had dined well, and Duncan walked at his elbow as though he wished to embrace him.

"So—you think—sir—really——?"

"We are not out of the wood yet, but everything has gone off most satisfactorily."

"Then—you really do think?"

"I think your wife will recover."

Duncan saw the great man into his car and at this happy moment a small, spry man waylaid him just as the car was moving off.

"Excuse me, sit——"

Scott turned on him with an excited laugh.

"What are you, the Mail, or the Express, or the Gracers' Journal?"

"The Daily Sun, sir."

"Right. Well,—they think she is going to live."

"I am very glad to hear it, sir."

"Good chap. Everybody's been most amazingly good. I wish I could thank everybody——."

The pressman was being given a priceless interview, and he knew it. He had arrived at a happy moment.

"We could do that for you, sir."

"Of course you can," and Duck looked at him with big eyes as though for the first time in his life he had discovered the virtues of the Press.

"Heard about Mr. Roland,—I suppose?"

"The proprietor. No,—but——."

"Shut up the whole hotel, turned everybody out, to give Ethel the best chance. I offered to hire the whole hotel for three weeks."

"Indeed, sir——!"

"But Mr. Roland wouldn't hear of it. Made us a present of three weeks silence. What do you think of that? I could tell you what I think—. He's a great man."

That Duck was over-excited, and exultant, and on the edge of laughter or tears was as obvious to the little pressman as was the unique personal atmosphere of the interview. He had got the real sob stuff. He could give the great public a picture of "Duck—the Live Man."

He did so, and he did more.

The Daily Sun came out with pictures of the Pelican and of Mr. Roland.

"The man who has given his hotel
to Duck and Ethel
for three whole weeks."

When Sorrell saw the Daily Sun he realized that—somehow—without thinking about it—Mr. Roland had done a great thing. And he had done it thoroughly and without meanness. A little journalist had sent the magic bread back across the waters.

Sorrell took the paper to Roland, and if anything Roland appeared annoyed.

"I suppose you are pleased, Stephen."

"I can't afford to grumble, sir. If this does not make us—nothing will."