Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 10

by George Warwick Deeping

X

1

SORRELL'S second persecution had lasted for two months.

The year gave an unusually beautiful spring, the spring that a gardener prepares for and so rarely enjoys, but to Sorrell the green budding of the year was a—season of strife and of humiliation. George Buck, flourishing like an elm tree, sucked all the sustenance and the moisture from his weaker rival.

"Saul,—luggage for number twenty-seven."

Sorrell was enduring blindly, but not so blindly as he believed. The work was now incessant, for the majority of the visitors stayed only one night, and their baggage had to be carried up one day and brought down the next. A strong lad would have thought nothing of the work, but to Sorrell it was travail and anguish and bitter sweat. There were times when his heart and lungs laboured so heavily that he imagined his old wounds to be bursting, and the healed tissues tearing themselves apart. At night he would look ghastly, and crawl up to his bed with shadows under his eyes. The old pain was coming back; he was afraid of food; he would lie awake with his heart labouring under his ribs.

But he would not surrender. Buck's trumpeting voice was an eternal challenge, and Sorrell felt that the struggle between them was physical, though their bodies never came into contact. The man meant to wear him out, to drive him to some outburst, to so vex and madden Sorrell that he would fly at him like a tormented animal. The rest would be so easy. One punch of the big fist on that sallow face, and a solemn report made to Mr. Roland. "Saul's assaulted me, sir. I had to hit him——. I think he is a bit touched in the head. Queer. He won't do the place any good, sir."

Certainly, Sorrell was growing quick-tempered. There were times when he was so intensely irritable that he had to hold himself in, grip something. It was the irritability of over-tiredness and dyspepsia. His impulses could be murderous. He would find himself looking at the back of Buck's head and neck; Buck had one of those round flat heads with the pink skin showing at the crown, and a great broad neck that bulged slightly over his collar. An axe, a hammer,—and one smashing blow on that pink, bald patch——!

Sorrell had to suppress these murderous rages. He reasoned with himself.

"Hang on. Violence won't help you. The only way to balk the beast is to refuse to be broken."

But these rages tired him, for intense self-suppression is exhausting. He had an air of bored calmness. But he was beginning to feel bitter against Thomas Roland. He had imagined a possible friendship only to discover that he was of so little importance that Roland remained blind to his martyrdom. Self-absorbed, like most other humans!

Well,—why not complain?

There was a morning when Sorrell paused with his hand on the handle of Roland's door. Buck had been teasing him before the women, making a mock of him, and Sorrell was raging.

"I'll give notice."

He stood there for nearly half a minute, fighting his anger, and trying to convince himself that this anger was a wound that should be hidden. He was about to do the very thing that George Buck intended him to do.

He overcame the impulse. He was moving away when the door opened, and Roland came out. He looked inquiringly at Sorrell.

"Oh,—Stephen,—you might get that grey suit of mine pressed."

"Yes, sir."

"How's the boy?"

"Very well, sir."

Sorrell's answers were tense and abrupt, like sentences snapped out by an automaton. His face had a pale rigidity.

"You haven't borrowed any books lately."

"Not much time, sir."

He was aloof, haughty, but Roland did not appear to notice Sorrell's attitude, or if he noticed it he hid his awareness. Sorrell's melancholy eyes reproached him, for Roland looked so strong and fresh and unhurried, a man who had time to play and read, but who did not trouble to observe.

"No,—I suppose not" was all he said; "but things change, Stephen."

"And people" Sorrell added to himself.

2

The rush of visitors quickened, and the crowd was increased by a number of Americans who came to visit the birthplace of one of their great men.

To Sorrell it seemed that he had reached the crisis of his struggle. He toiled like Sisyphus, but unlike the man of myth, he pushed and heaved his rock to its objective. He panted and sweated; sometimes his shirt was so wet that he had to go and change it. And the luggage became alive; malignantly alive; it played tricks with him, it resisted, it hurt him, jammed his fingers or bruised his shoulder. Once or twice he fell, and lay clutching some gloating burden, rolling with it on the floor, or in some dark corner on the stairs. He tried dragging the things up by the handles, till Buck caught him at it, and hectored him.

"Here, nice for the new carpets. That ain't the way to handle baggage, my lad. Hump it."

Sorrell flared.

"Why don't you give me a hand,—you——"

"Now,—no sauce. If you can't do the job, my lad,—you say so."

And he stood and watched Sorrell shoulder a trunk and stagger with it up the stairs.

It happened that a gentlewoman arrived one day in a car like a "Cunarder." It kad a super-trunk strapped behind it. The lady came into the lounge and was met by the head-porter.

The lady wanted a "suite."

But she took the room, and ordered her luggage to be sent up at once.

Sorrell was unstrapping the super-trunk, a vast black thing, bound with iron and plastered with labels, when Buck came out.

"What number?"

"Thirty-five."

"Third floor——!"

The two men looked at each other. Sorrell knew that it would be absurd for him to try and handle that trunk alone, but he was not going to ask his enemy to help him.

"All right."

There was a smirk on Buck's face. He took one end of the trunk and helped Sorrell to carry it as far as the foot of the stairs, but here he dropped his end.

"Looks heavier than it is. Get it up quick; she's one of the puss-in-boots sort."

Sorrell said nothing. He felt that he was on the eve of his Waterloo.

He tried to get the thing on his back, and as though to make certain of Sorrell's overwhelming, Buck helped to load him. "That's it; up you go."

Sorrell managed the first flight, though by the time he reached the first landing his heart was racing. He felt that he would burst asunder. He tried to let the trunk down gently, but it swayed down, twisting his wrist and striking his ankle with one of its metal capped corners.

And suddenly, Sorrell saw red. This beastly bit of opulent inertia seemed to typify life, George Buck and all the damnable and cruel cussedness of the tormenting forces that seemed eager to break him. He fell upon the trunk. He fought it half-way up the second flight, tearing and pushing the thing up with a mad fury, heaving it over and over. Half-way up it jammed, and in trying to force it farther he slipped and struck his head against it.

"Damn you——!"

He held his head, and burst into sudden, wild sobbing. He did not see a face looking down over the railing of the second landing, a shocked and compassionate face. A moment later someone was on the stairs.

"Anyone would think some of the people travelled with their coffins."

Sorrell glanced up furiously. He choked.

"What's that? Coffins——. I slipped——. I'll get the damned thing——"

"Wait. I'll help——"

"You shan't. By God,—get out of the way,—Mrs. Marks."

He tore at the trunk, heaved it up, leaving a great scar upon the wall, and the woman, retreating, watched his wildness with scared eyes. For he looked like a man storming a breach, mouth awry, eyes protruding; panting, cursing. But he did not curse; he had no breath for it. He banged the thing over and over, and thrust it up on to the landing, and there his knees gave way and he had to sit down hurriedly on the vanquished trunk.

"Oh,—my God——!"

"Put your head down, Steve," said she.

Sorrell put his head between his knees, and the housekeeper, running into one of the bedrooms, returned with a glass of water. She stood over Sorrell, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder.

"Drink this, Stephen. This has got to stop, you know. I am going down to tell that mountain of laziness——"

Sorrell's face, still ghastly but slightly smiling, appeared from between his knees.

"No,—please don't. I lost my temper, that's all. I am going to get this thing up. I shall be all right in a minute."

"Drink some water. If you must try and kill yourself——"

His hand shook as he held the glass.

"It's better to be killed—than to give in—to him."

"Oh, is it! I'm going to help you with that trunk, Stephen. What's the number of the room?"

"Thirty-five."

And help him she did, for she was a little woman of great determination, and between them they manœuvred the "black coffin"—as she called it—up the last flight and along the passage to No. 35. Sorrell knocked. The lady told him to enter; she had been waiting.

"I thought you had gone to sleep with it," she said.

Sorrell hauled the thing into the room.

"It is rather heavy, madam."

She presented him with a sixpence, an ironical sixpence so it seemed to Sorrell, and he went forth with the coin shut up in his fist to show it to Mrs. Marks, but the housekeeper had disappeared. On his way downstairs he paused to look at the scar on the wall where a corner of the trunk had bitten into the plaster. The wallpaper was a dull red, and Sorrell, pondering the problem, bethought him of a little plaster of Paris and some red ink. The rent in the wall was a wound, but an honourable wound.

Returning to the lounge hall he came upon George Buck leaning through the office window, talking to Miss Murdoch the hotel clerk. The pink, baldish patch on the crown of his head showed between his two red and prominent ears.

Sorrell began tidying up the papers and magazines. He was waiting for Buck to discover him and to ask the obvious question, and Sorrell was ready with the answer.

Presently, Buck withdrew his blue bulk from the narrow window. His eyes saw Sorrell indefatigably busy, and the gallant glimmer melted out of them. They seemed to stare.

"Get that up to number thirty-five, Saul?"

"I did."

Sorrell gave him a queer and twisted smile, glancing round over his shoulder, and he saw that his enemy was puzzled.

3

Mary Marks knocked at the door of Mr. Roland's sitting-room.

"Come in."

Roland was sitting on the music-stool, his hands resting on the keyboard. They were very brown hands. Beyond him was the open window between curtains of old gold; the window framed a stretch of grass, two beds full of purple Darwin tulips, and the trunks of two old trees. The atmosphere of room and garden seemed to merge, save that the old gold of the room was of a deeper quality than the yellow downpour of the spring sunlight.

"May I speak to you, sir?"

"Why certainly; come in."

The Chinese carpet made Mary Marks think of a bed of flowers. A shame to tread on it! She was sensitive to all beautiful things, and her hard exterior was a wall that had been built to protect and to hide what was left to her of her love of beauty. She closed the door. Her eyes looked across the room at Thomas Roland, and in them was a vague and questioning censure, unwilling censure. There were times when she wished to believe that certain people were better than the common crowd; she asked to be convinced, to be allowed moments of secret romanticism. She had thought Roland a romantic figure, one of those men upon whom women lavish an instinctive devotion. She had thought him strong, just, wise, deliberate, generous.

"Well,—Mrs. Marks?"

His eyes interrogated hers. His glance, falling upon the severity of her face, questioned it. She stood there with her back to the door, and it seemed to her that he was being reproached.

"It's not my business, sir; not like that other affair."

Roland turned on the music-stool.

"Yet it must be, or you would not have come."

"Perhaps——"

"Tell me. You have something to tell me."

"It's about Sorrell."

She saw at once that he was not indifferent.

"You don't mean——?"

"O, nothing of that kind, sir. But that other man——"

"Buck?"

"Yes. It's unfair,—a shame, all the heavy luggage; the man's not strong,—physically I mean."

It seemed to her that Roland smiled and yet did not smile.

"I know," he said.

She gave a quick lift of the head, an intelligent and birdlike movement.

"About—his being delicate?"

"No. Buck's share of the work. I do see things, Mrs. Marks; I'm not asleep."

"I wondered."

Her eyes were still questioning. Since he knew what was happening her impulse was to ask him why he had not interfered, for his partiality seemed to her a very foolish blindness. Not to be able to see which was the better man! But, perhaps he did see? She looked across at him eagerly, tempted to venture farther, yet half afraid of what he might infer.

"It has made me angry," she said.

Roland stood up, and half turning towards the window, he spoke to her as though he were speaking to himself.

"No, it is not favouritism. I'm a deliberate person, Mrs. Marks. I like to test people, to be sure. And now—I think—I'm very nearly sure."

Her face softened.

"He's killing himself. He won't give in."

"As bad as that?"

"It's pride."

"I am glad you have told me. I like to trust people. Do you think that unwise?"

She met his steady eyes, and began to wonder why she had doubted.

"No, not in his case. You see, he has got an object, sir, something outside himself that matters."

"The boy. Exactly. I loathe distrusting people. I wanted to be sure. Now,—listen."

He came and stood near to her, his hands in his pockets, and with an intimate, wise air.

"I wanted that other man to have his chance. I had my reasons. Naturally—I want very good reasons for taking his chance away. The very strongest reason——"

"You mean—that other affair, sir?"

"I do."

She knew that he was asking her to help him, not ungenerously, but rather to take sides against his own too human kindness. It meant a kicking into the street of a memory, an obligation, and the man to whom he owed it. He had always confessed to a fondness for "the old blackguard." But not for a mean and bullying blackguard.

"So you see—I want my reason, my justification. I suppose it is weak of me."

She stood with a hand along one cheek, looking down at the pattern of the carpet, but her eyes did not see the carpet.

"I'm sitting up to-night, Mr. Roland."

"You think it—necessary?"

"Oh,—I heard something. The girl——. Besides, in a way—l feel myself responsible."

"To whom?"

"To my job. I'm not a prude, sir——. Oh,—I know they have every right—if a man and a girl are made that way——. But there—there is what I am here for. It's not fair——"

"To whom?"

"To me,—to you."

"And the girl?"

"I'm not thinking of her. She is only trying to get what she wants,—but she shall not get it—here. That's where my job would suffer."

Roland nodded his strong, square head.

"All right. I'll sit up too."