The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “Toodle-oo, old bean,” Will said. “I’ll pop down to Dengate one of these days for a spot of the old sea air if I’ve nothing better to do!”

  In Dengate, not least at The Advertiser itself, I found—as so often happens after a disaster—that one particular incident had gripped the public mind above all others: the foundering of a Norwegian ship, Dronning Margrete, and the attempts, far from all successful, to rescue all members of her crew. Again and again I would be given details, as if the town felt not just some collective responsibility for these men, but a deeper relationship with them bestowed by the lashing waves they had witnessed themselves in horror and even disbelief.

  My entire knowledge of Norwegian shipping was at that time confined to my having met, on a Saturday night excursion with Will to the Port of London, two Norwegian sailors thoroughly and unashamedly drunk. We’d helped them back to their lodgings, ironically the Scandinavian Sailors’ Temperance Home, down by West India Dock. Their mates were awaiting them there, strong, blonde, taciturn men with piercingly blue eyes. Norway and Norwegians were becoming decidedly popular in England. Mr. Gladstone himself had recently declared his fondness for the country and had taken a holiday there, in the west coast resort of Molde. And every year of my life ships had been plying between Bergen/Christiania and Halifax/NewYork, navigating the English Channel en route.

  This particular vessel, a sailing-ship, was returning from Halifax to Christiania, due to call at Antwerp on the evening of the day she came to grief. Her casualties had been high, though the final count wasn’t yet established. Her captain and six of his men had successfully escaped the sinking ship in one longboat, but the sailors who had got into the others had died (or were assumed to have done so, so difficult was the process of recovery). But those seven surviving seamen were sure that, as they climbed down into their longboat, they saw at least three other crew members getting into the dinghy alongside. Impossible for them to make out, in all the obstructive flying spray and with wall-like waves advancing toward them, how these others were coping. Or if they’d coped at all! Nor had any news of these men come through. More likely than not they should, regrettably, be added to the wreck’s terrible death toll. The photos of those eventually rescued stumbling ashore in England, hardly able to comprehend that their ordeal was (in a literal, physical sense anyway) over, were much cherished by The Advertiser staff, not for printing on the newspaper’s pages—in 1885 we were not yet up to that tricky process—but for helping us visualize more clearly the grim events we were presenting to the public.

  Childishly, I could not altogether keep back my jealousy of those asked to write up the aftermath of this tragic disaster. Why could not the gale have waited another week-and-a-bit? Fate, which had decided to bring me to Dengate, had then unkindly denied me a presence there at the most important occurrence in the place’s history for an entire century.

  The strangeness of the workings of Fate did not lie in that, of course, I hastened inwardly to add here—to appease The Great Listener, the ever-attentive Judge of Mankind. It lay in the behavior of the sea itself, for such long spells restrained, even manageable, and so often serene and beautiful of aspect, then all of a sudden turning implacably defiant and aggressive. Those first two weeks in Dengate I would look out over the Channel in incredulous wonder, for the weather was calm and mild, if showery.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the Mercy of the Mercy Room

  I come to Monday, April 27, one calendar month after the storm, another day of gentle, watery sunshine and light breeze. I was now taking pleasure in my morning walk to the newspaper offices. Below me Dengate harbor sparkled, full of fishing-smacks; as many as two hundred can be moored together here, making it easy to step from one vessel to another. Nearer to hand, gardens displayed many splendid blooms: red tulips, cream tulips, tulips combining red and cream, boldly yellow broom, and wall-flowers of terracotta shades.

  Said two or three voices as I came into The Advertiser, “Edmund wants to see you, Bridges!” Mr. Hough was always called “Edmund” by everybody, if not to his face.

  He was standing by the window when I entered his Editor’s office, and when he swung ’round his face broke into a smile. “Just the man!” he exclaimed. “I have news you’ll welcome.”

  “Good news for good weather, sir!” (See how eager I was to sound “cheerful.”)

  “Yes, and don’t we Dengaters deserve it after what we went through? Bridges, when we first met, you told me of your admiration for the use of interview.”

  “It’s an A-1 way of making events and people come to life.”

  “Absolutely. And now you can conduct your own interview for The Advertiser. We’ll be up there with Stead’s Pall Mall before you can say Jack Robinson, with a truly thrilling affair, jam-packed with adventure and heroism.” Who had he in mind for me? An explorer? A general? An audacious criminal? “And the marvellous thing about it, Bridges—from an editor’s point of view—is that you can conduct it in your very own home.”

  This was a mite disappointing, but I endeavoured to keep a bright anticipatory smile on my face. Nor did Edmund Hough’s next words improve things, spoken as he moved toward me from the window, bringing sunshine with him on pomaded patches of his boyishly thick dark brown hair.

  “Beatrice Fuller, your revered landlady, is of the company of saints, I do believe.” Hard to know what to say back; nothing these last two-and-a-bit weeks inclined me to think her in the least saintly. “If there is good to be done, Bridges, Beatrice Fuller will be there doing it!”

  Really? Like asking an inordinately large sum as deposit from an obviously hard-up young man awaiting his pay-packet? Like charging him for a Sunday lunch he’d never eaten with the excuse that he’d given her insufficient notice he’d be out that day?

  “You know about her Mercy Room?”

  “Yes, sir, I live right opposite the door to it!” Kept perpetually locked against my possible intrusion, I could have truthfully added.

  “Only Beatrice Fuller could have conceived such a beautiful idea, only she would have the integrity to convert it into reality.” Crikey! Perhaps there really was some hanky-panky going on between the two of them. “Well, the Mercy Room is to have a new occupant. And he will be the subject of your interview.”

  “Tell me more, sir!”

  “Do you remember, Bridges, the names and fates of the individual survivors of the ill-fated Norwegian ship, Dronning Margrete? And if you do, can you recall one called Hans Lyngstrand?”

  Though I’d recently sub-edited a piece keeping readers up-to-date with the fortunes of the ship’s crew, I had not kept their names in my head, in which all foreign words tended to run into one like water-colors on a clumsy boy’s art-paper.

  “Was he the chap who—?” I bluffed.

  “Yes, Hans Lyngstrand was the boy of nineteen,” said Edmund, as if I’d made a correct identification, “who paid dearly for his long time in the freezing-cold sea. Developed acute pneumonia, poor lad. For two weeks the doctors at the hospital here doubted he could pull through. But thanks to them, and doubtless to some inner strength of his own, he did. But now, before he goes home to Norway—where he has a generous guardian—he must rest awhile somewhere comfortable and pleasant, somewhere different from a hospital but just as solicitous. Otherwise the journey back might prove too much of a strain. And what better place for recuperation than—”

  “The Mercy Room at Castelaniene!”

  “Exactly! Dr. Davies at the hospital is a keen supporter of the plan and will visit him regularly. And I’m looking to you, Bridges, to talk to Hans on behalf of The Advertiser. And you’ll be doing him good in the process. After his ghastly ordeal he surely needs a sympathetic as well as a medical ear. He’s clearly a likeable youth, they became very fond of him at the hospital. And he’s totally fluent in English, the common language on the ship, it seems, so you’ll have no problem in communication. I have every confidence, Bridges, you can produce for our readers just the kind
of piece Mr. Stead and ourselves so admire.”

  “It’s good of you to have such faith in me!” I said, a-tremble with delight. The task flared up before me like a bright beacon on a hill. Of course, I couldn’t help noting that Edmund Hough, though doubtless sincerely sorry for the nineteen-year-old Norwegian, was principally interested in him for the sake of column-inches to attract even greater droves of readers to The Advertiser. But might not the same go for myself?

  “Good! That’s settled then!” said Edmund Hough. “And perhaps as a result of this project, we may at last see something of that cheerfulness to which you once laid claim.”

  I’d no reply to make. I hadn’t fooled my editor after all. I was not showing cheerfulness because I was feeling none.

  My fears that Mrs. Fuller might prove an obtrusive landlady with sentimental designs on myself had proved ludicrously wide of the mark. I saw remarkably little of her, which was clearly how she wanted it. Whenever, following her earlier suggestion, I entered the downstairs sitting-room after a day’s work with a book or periodical and found her already ensconced there, she immediately got up and left, making me feel so uncomfortable that after a quarter of an hour at most I, too, made an exit. And I didn’t dare to smoke. So after less than a week I kept to my attic-room. As for mealtimes, she always had her breakfast up in her bedroom while I, at an earlier hour, had mine provided by Sarah in the basement, generous portions (kippers, bacon, eggs fried or lightly boiled with “soldiers” of toast) served with something like reluctance, the taciturn, wall-eyed woman with the West-of-Ireland accent banging plates before me as though I were a greedy schoolboy she’d been ordered, against her judgment, to oblige.

  Three times a week Mrs. Fuller took her evening meal at a different hour from myself, so dinner on such days was a repetition of the solitude of breakfast. But that was preferable to when Beatrice Fuller condescended to share the same table as her over-charged lodger. She clearly found conversation an effort she would rather not make. Admire Edmund she might, but she took no interest in those doings at his paper which I chose to relay and often illustrate with mimicry.

  “Shouldn’t such matters stay in the office where they belong?” she said at the end of one of my narratives. After which I decided I’d relay no more. A subject Mrs. Fuller did introduce, off her own bat, was the need to be useful to others, speaking loftily of various commitments of her own: sewing-bees for her “fallen sisters,” afternoon classes where women less educationally fortunate than herself were shown the rich rewards of reading. (She could hardly expect me to join those!)

  “But I also frequent other circles possibly more appropriate for you, Mr. Bridges, where the interest is, shall we say, metaphysical.”

  MB: Metaphysical? My goodness!

  MRS. F.: Have you never felt inclined to explore the metaphysical, Mr. Bridges? Have you never heard of groups like our Gateway here in Dengate?

  MB: I don’t believe I’ve had that pleasure.

  MRS. F.: Pleasure? Well, I suppose, at an exalted level, the Gateway could be said to constitute pleasure, though I doubt if either Colonel Walton or Lady Kershaw would take kindly to that word.

  MB: I meant it only loosely. Not of course, Mrs. Fuller, that your pleasures could ever be loose, ha-ha-ha!

  MRS. F.: I’d already presumed you didn’t mean that, Mr. Bridges. Perhaps if you got to know the Gateway, it might make you more aware of that large gap in your life which certainly requires filling. Only through attention to the spiritual dimension can one meaningfully cope with existence even on its humdrum level. That’s how the Gateway helped me, you see, after the . . . after the Disappearance.

  MB: Disappearance?

  MRS. F.: I have already informed you of that tragic event, Mr. Bridges. My husband, George Fuller disappeared three years ago. . . . I really must have a word later with Sarah about cabbage. She will overcook it unless one is firm and vigilant with her. I’ve told her repeatedly to steam the vegetable, or else boil it very lightly, so that one can truly experience all the sweet juice that lies in the green leaves.

  Yet there were aspects of my life at Castelaniene that pleased me: above all, my room. Here I’d arranged those books I’d elected to retain from London, my Bulwer-Lyttons and Harrison Ainsworths, my novels by the incomparable Jules Verne. I also put upon my dressing table some photographs of myself and friends on various jaunts we’d made (though not the one to Limehouse), and a merry bunch we looked. Folk were, I’d decided, far harder to get to know outside The Smoke, so much more constrained by family and caste.

  As much as the room itself did I relish its view. France was every day now an enticing green line on the other side of which life went on probably not merely paralleling but replicating our own. Somewhere, across the Strait, there must be, I thought, some young reporter like myself who’d exchanged one job for another, and was far from convinced he’d done the right thing. Who didn’t know what to do with himself most evenings, and who longed for a friend to talk to. Sometimes, especially weekends at dusk, I’d stand by the window imagining myself back in an earlier period, in, say, the time of the Napoleonic wars when that green line denoted enemy territory.

  The cats, too, were a daily source of delight. Mrs. Noah—the last of the house trio I met—kept a certain aloofness from everybody except Sarah. She’d been given her name, I was told, by Mr. Fuller himself, who, out for a stroll one evening, had spotted her, alone and bewildered, on a small abandoned boat right in the middle of Dengate harbor. He’d made his way easily enough from one boat to another—despite the choppy water between them—and scooped her up off her Ark into his arms, to her everlasting gratitude. Probably the cat still missed him, still regretted his “disappearance.” Her coat was a deep lavender color. Though a prodigious catcher of mice, shrews, voles, and little birds, she liked to be present at human mealtimes. During my solitary breakfasts she would rub herself against the legs of my chair, and if there were a bit of kipper going, she was happy enough to accept it from my hand. And if it were a kipper morning, her two sons would be close by.

  These two cats, whom I’d met on my first visit to Castelaniene, were from the same litter, fifteen months old, and far friendlier than their mother, if jealous and watchful with regard to each other. They had inherited from Mrs. Noah a pointedness of face, but what distinguished them immediately were the long-tufted ears I had first noticed between the banisters. Japheth was less conservative in his habits than his brother, and soon was following me upstairs, exploring the contents of my room (he seemed especially fond of my leather-bound Bulwer-Lytton, along the line of which he ran his purring head), or sitting close to the dormer window (though of course it may have been the swooping gulls visible through its glass which interested him). Ham, on the other hand, preferred to save his high spirits and affection for the ground floor and basement, settling himself, directly after his brother had left the kitchen, possessively in a large orange cushion on a basket-chair by the window. But after any separation the two would greet each other with what looked, to the human eye, very like kisses.

  Mrs. Fuller noted with approval my good relations with the cats, but inferred that even here I showed weakness of judgment. Mrs. Noah, not either of her sons, was the noteworthy member of the trio, the one with the highly esteemed “properties”—whatever that might mean.

  What about work? My very first morning at the paper I had the definite feeling the staff thought I had been foisted on them, and this feeling hadn’t gone away as I hoped it would. Always there seemed to be inquisitive, almost inquisitorial, eyes on me, measuring me up and then coming to unflattering conclusions. I spent as much time as I could with Edmund in his Editor’s office and—this will make my readers laugh—it came as a positive relief when he asked if I could kindly go down to the printers for him, there’s a good chap.

  “Seasoned pressmen” my colleagues certainly all appeared, even Peter Frobisher, two or three years my junior, as composed and competent as some kid at Sunday school i
ntent on impressing his teachers. But Peter wasn’t somebody you could object to for long. The team’s most senior member, Thomas Betterton, Deputy Editor and Edmund’s stand-in when need be, was another matter entirely, fifty-five, big-bearded, an inveterate pipe-smoker, and, I soon learned, a Mason prominent in the Dengate Lodge. His manner was as ponderous, as rhetorical as his stomach was vast and his neck bull-like, and though in literal fact he spoke no louder than the next man, he gave you the impression he was delivering his long convoluted sentences from a great distance, his over-large dew-lapped face turning puce as he expressed his frequent indignation over police and crime, taxes and tariffs, and whippersnappers who thought they knew everything about a newspaper when they patently did not.

  Philip Goodenough and Archie Penry were more amiable, I thought, but a club of two. They exchanged knowing grins as they watched me settle to my first task—writing a few sentences about a tedious book by some local historian on the Romans in Thanet.

  Terence Hathaway’s province was the layout of the paper, though he, too, mucked in with other tasks when needed. He was in his late thirties, had a large family, seven children already. He had a kitchen garden he was proud of and would bring in produce from it for his colleagues, rhubarb being the first sample I saw, the long red stalks glistening with lumps of rich soil and drops of dew. He had the thickest beard of any in the office, and the quietest voice too; indeed, he was mild of manner altogether which, in addition to his expertise, made him the ideal person to deal with the printers. He worked unremittingly. Illustrations were sparse in The Advertiser, though Edmund wanted ever more articles accompanied by drawings—photographs we couldn’t publish until two years ago at the time of writing—while advertisements improved all the time in appearance and size, brightening up the pages hugely.

  Advertisements lead me to name Arthur Forrester, at the time of my arrival mid-forties and unmarried, a Primitive Baptist, who surprised me by bringing in his Bible to read between his many calculations, even sometimes reading passages aloud. If Terence Hathaway’s was the thickest beard, Mr. Forrester’s was the thinnest, like some mandarin Chinaman’s on a vase, and I soon was chuckling to myself when I saw the two talking to each other, two nice men, I early realized, with good hearts.