The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  The door in the wall behind the table now opened, and in came—

  Why, Mary.

  I could not, as they say, believe my eyes.

  Should I have guessed?

  Very young, very short, and very pale she looked, but her simple dress of black wool transformed her, displaying becomingly that low-hung bosom and those wide hips of which I had become already only too aware. All the eyes that had played so eagerly on Colonel Walton now focused avidly on this skivvy of Castelaniene, though surely few as amazedly as mine or Hans’s. And, on seeing Mary, Mrs. Noah, who after all knew her intimately, got up on all fours and gave vent to a brief peal of loud purrs. Mary was pleased to extend a soothing hand for the cat to rub her head against, before taking up an aloof position about a foot behind the table, her head lowered in the servile attitude of one waiting to be spoken to, even commanded—as always in her life, not least in the naughty tableaux vivants inside my head!

  “You are most welcome here tonight!” Colonel Walton told her.

  “I will be glad to be of use,” answered Mary demurely.

  “You are a good and trusted vehicle,” affirmed Colonel Walton. “We are truly privileged to have you with us again.”

  General murmur of agreement; Mrs. Noah returned to her former posture. I looked sideways to identify the expression on Hans Lyngstrand’s face. He, being at home in Castelaniene all day, had far more dealings with its housemaid than I myself had had, but I could see perfectly well that until this minute he had no idea of any abilities she possessed other than those needed for cleaning a room or changing bed-linen.

  For a full minute I thought nobody would ever disturb the silence, so thick was it. Then—

  “Mary,” the voice was soft and frankly anxious, and emanated from a stout woman in black two seats to my left, “have you tonight any glimpse to give me, from beyond the Gate, of my son Walter. Walter Castle.”

  Without raising her head and speaking against the throes of her usual bad cold, Mary replied as readily as if she’d been asked about the weather. “Walter is so well and happy, Mrs. Castle. I saw him only a short while ago.” Her voice was almost exaggeratedly sing-song, like a sweet little street-urchin who might any moment break out into nursery rhyme. “He was exercising two horses—Arab steeds they were—beautiful dark creatures running through the fields. And Walter, he was running after them, and then jumping on the back of the bigger of the two, and there was a fresh breeze blowing behind them—and all three were enjoying theirselves no end. Ooh,” and she gave a rapturous little smile, “ooh, they were having such merry romps!”

  “Mmm!” went the audience in appreciation. “That could only be Walter Castle.”

  “That’s the boy to a T!”

  “Oh, how dear Walter loved horses!” His stout mother gazed upon Mary for a few moments, as at some heavenly messenger, but then, as the description of her late boy struck home—for had she not been hearing about the pleasures of a once flesh-and-blood being now gone from this world?—her face crumpled. She cupped in her hands her large, gentle, face with its folds of fat, and began to sob.

  I hope to goodness it’s not all going to be like this, I said to myself. Still I couldn’t pretend Mary hadn’t impressed me; she had completely convinced Walter’s nearest and dearest, more indeed than was surely good for the woman.

  And Mrs. Castle was followed by one seeker after another, five to be precise, five anguished voices wanting the consolation of hope, no matter in what fragmented form. Mary did not deal with them all alike. “Oh, that’s a difficult one, that is,” she told an elderly man begging for news of someone to whom he’d once been affianced, and who had died shortly after their troth. “Can you please remind me, kind sir, of where you yourself are living?”

  “Hollybrook House, Dover Road; I’m Major Henryson,” came the imploring reply, as though this man with the husk of a Scottish accent in his antique voice would be unable to bear any inability on Mary’s part to bring him news of his beloved of long ago.

  “Oh, Hollybrook House, I know the place—with them two holly trees, one on each side of the gate.” A nod confirmed that she had identified his home correctly. “Yes, I think the picture is a-coming now. The lady you was inquiring about has never forgotten those days of beauty and love you shared up in the old country, with all that wonderful heather and pine around you, and the whizz of the birds flying overhead. And she says now—oh, I have to strain to catch it, kind sir, I really do . . .” Mary gave her head a shaking rather as if she were trying to rid her ears of tiresome lumps of wax. Then, “Now I can hear what that sweet young woman is wanting me to tell you. Look after your pigeons, she says, see that they are well-fed and maybe pay a lad from the town to help you do so now you is getting on—forgive me, kind sir, but those are her words. It’s helpful to me, says she, for many years now on the Great Way, to know that my dear one from Scotland tends his birds so lovingly.”

  The old man looked much moved. “Jeanie . . . Jeanie, my dearest!” he murmured to himself.

  And Hans Lyngstrand whispered to me: “How can Mary give these answers? She must be . . . a genius like Johnston.”

  But genius would not have been my own word. Remarkable, yes, but genius surely not! For her offerings about the “disappeared” were monotonous to the point of tedium, however emotional the reactions they obtained. Favorite dishes, pets doted-on, pipes fondly smoked, gardens and potted flowers once devotedly tended, these were what she plucked out of the ether after all the head-shakings, rubbings of the eyes, and scratchings of her lank, mouse-colored hair. But it did seem that a telepathic sense of some kind was at work in her. And this in itself disquieted me.

  How to account for what I did next? Six or seven years of constant self-questioning have brought me no truly satisfactory explanation for what I now consider the most unaccountable, the most significant action of my life, which refuses to submit to the command, “Just put yourself back in time!” However often I try, I simply cannot recapture just how I was immediately before—or even as—I got up onto my feet in the reception room at Banstead Lodge. But I know that, once on them, I could have done nothing else but ask the question I did.

  “Mary,” and I hardly knew whether the voice was my own or whether I was a ventriloquist’s dummy for some external agency. “Have you anything to tell us here about a sailor who has not been seen since Friday, March 27, the bo’sun of the Norwegian ship Dronning Margrete, which sank that very day. Two of us in this room would dearly love to know.”

  No sooner had I delivered myself of these sentences than I felt a curious and far from agreeable lightness in the head, and an almost instantaneous dryness of the mouth, the roof of which soon afterwards began to smart, even to burn. Tremulously and awkwardly I resumed my seat, trusting my movements didn’t look too odd to the outward eye, yet inwardly feeling strangely, unwarrantedly satisfied with myself. Hans, his head swiveled to his left, was now looking at me with astonishment in his sea-blue eyes, but also, surely, with some gratitude for what I’d just done.

  But what was it I had just done? Seen to it, that, for the first time this evening, maybe for the first time in her Gateway career, Mary the “vehicle” would be at a loss? That, after some frantic dithering, she’d be compelled to declare ignorance, and this in front of a group she’d just been dazzling and dumbfounding with her inexplicable gifts? “I’m sorry, sir,” she perhaps would say, “but I don’t know of no Norwegians!” She could even break down, her reputation in collapse.

  Meanwhile Hans had turned his head away from me and thrust it forward so his eye-beams could play on the girl he had, only three minutes back, pronounced a genius. Unpromisingly, she was dabbing her ever-runny nose with a sleeve of her black-wool dress. And then—breaking the hitherto unmitigated demureness of her performance—Mary raised her head. The shafts from her eyes did not meet those from Hans or mine, but rayed up toward the vaults of the high ceiling, so like the palate of a beast’s red mouth, as though up there help
in granting my request might be found.

  She’s not going to come up with anything, I told myself, with a stab of dark pleasure. But on that last silent word of mine, Mary’s voice broke:

  “Oh, I have quite a few things to tell you of him, Mr. Bridges, because that sea-faring gentleman has been a-coming to me all day. And a sad sight he is, I’m sorry to say, though there are them on the Great Way who are comforting him and trying to make him feel better now he’s arrived in Eternity. Hours in that freezing heaving water he was, after his dinghy turned over in the terrible wind in the Strait—and him splashing about, desperate-like against them fierce waves, before he went under, to drown to his death.”

  The assembly collectively gasped at these last words, and I can’t vow that I myself didn’t gasp along with the others. “To drown to his death,” eh?

  Hans Lyngstrand shuffled in his seat and leaned his head against mine, whispering: “Martin, I swear it, I have never breathed a word, not a single word, about the bo’sun to Mary,” a sentence which the “vehicle” must surely have caught. Her breathless rapidity of speech increased.

  “But when he came to, and saw where he was, beyond the Gate, he began to talk. All about some sweetheart of his it was, some woman who’d done him wrong because she’d gone and got married to another man. ‘I shall go after her!’ he cried, even though he should have been attending to the beautiful shining roadway stretching beyond the Gate—with all them lovely green fields on either side—and orchards too, full of every kind of fruit: apples, pears, plums, peaches, cherries—ooh, just so many kinds. But he isn’t enjoying them delicious things, not yet, and doesn’t want to, no, not this old foreign seaman. ’Cos his mind is on the dreadful time he’s had in this wicked old world down here. And he isn’t just thinking of the mighty waves that finished him off neither.”

  Hans removed his head from my right cheek against which it was temporarily resting, and put his hands firmly on his thighs, gripping them to control the trembling that came over him and made all the seats in our tight-packed row vibrate. “No, no!” he muttered, “this cannot be!”

  Whatever would happen next? I fixed my attention on Mary herself, who, after casting her eyes up to the heavens a second time (or rather to that vaulted roof), brought their light to bear, as she had not done once before, directly on her supplicant—in other words, on myself. Horrible, truly horrible. Talk about blushing, I had never experienced quite so fierce a fire in my face before.

  She had yet more to say.

  “Please, Mr. Bridges, be kind to me for this is very difficult, and I am doing the best I can for ’ee. ’Cos you see I don’t rightly know what this sea-faring gentleman is called, he changed his name that many times in his sojourn on earth. But one thing I am sure of, he had a message of friendship he wanted to give to someone down below. ‘That boy I shared my cabin when the storm blew up in the Atlantic, he’s a good ’un,’ he says, ‘and I give him my blessing wherever he is. But her, she was bad to me, right cruel, and I’ll go after and fetch her to where she belongs, by my side! Whether I’m alive or whether I’m dead, that’s what I will do! Even as a drowned man!’ And that’s how he goes on, and not an apple nor a cherry nor even a delicious sweet damson can they tempt him with.”

  Hans, hectically a-quiver with excitement, managed now to raise himself into a standing position by putting his whole weight on his hands palm-downwards on the tabletop: “Mary, you must give my blessing to him. I would never have imagined him so kind. Kind enough to . . .”

  But what the dead man had been kind enough to do, the Gateway never heard. For the boy about to impart a secret to the Gathering toppled over, falling backwards and knocking his chair onto the floor, with a speed that momentarily perplexed the eyes. My cheeks still burning, I instantly knew that odious softening in the loins which invariably accompanies guilt. This is all my doing, I thought, and who could, or would, say I was wrong here? All my wretched fault, and yet I meant it for the best.

  Really? Had I? The best? If I’d not been a young male in this nineteenth-century England of ours, a member of a genus to whom such conduct is abhorrent, I honestly believe I would have gone on now to scream, to yell out in protest, at the sight of Hans lifeless at my feet. As it was, it fell to Beatrice Fuller to do the screaming, the yelling. Never would I have believed so refined a lady could give vent to such eldritch and ear-piercing screeches.

  And Mary? Who knows what temptations to do the same were fighting within her, or whether she was still in a trance-like state, still more “vehicle” than ordinary human being. She did not move even a few inches from the sibylline, statuesque attitude she’d adopted on the other side of the velvet-draped table, though, once more, she wiped her running nose with her sleeve.

  I had not bargained for Mrs. Noah, however. That lavender-colored cat, with the little white stripe on her head and the white tip to her tail, now leaped from the tabletop onto the body on the flags of the floor below. With anxious determination she rubbed her thin sharp-eared head against the Norwegian boy’s pale cheek, pressing her bones hard against his at least half-a-dozen times, until, bemused, he lifted his head up and thereby proclaimed to the whole tense room that he was still to be counted among the living.

  “Yet again,” Colonel Walton pronounced a little later, “we are beholden to Mrs. Noah. Yet again a seeker has been restored by the intelligent offices of this virtuous and thoughtful cat.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  What Hath Night to Do with Sleep?

  Where had my attic-bedroom gone to, why was there no sound from the English Channel beyond the dormer window? Surely I was in Dengate no longer, and now I looked about me I knew I wasn’t, was instead back in Camberwell, in the Fourth Form at the Thomas Middleton School, enduring a “Divinity” lesson from the local vicar. The Reverend Samuel Arkwright was a tired, tetchy, doughy-faced man in early middle age, resentful of the burdens of large family and sprawling parish—which included such schoolboys as myself. Here we all were sitting with our ink-stained Bibles in front of us, apathetically turning over their thin-papered, close-printed pages whenever told to with equally ink-stained hands.

  “You see, boys,” our teacher told us, “the answers to any question you might want to ask are there in the Greatest of Books.”

  “I’ll bet there are some questions it won’t answer,” said the facetious voice of Robert (Bob) Fairbank from the desk behind me. “Like whether Mary Richardson of Denmark Hill is in love with me. Whether she’ll let me give her a kiss. That’s something the Book of Deuteronomy won’t tell me, I bet.”

  “Sir, I have a question!” It was myself speaking, and with that uncharacteristic boldness I had just shown at the Gateway. Indeed, now as then, I was rising to my feet. “Why did God make the sea the way it is?”

  “He made the waters before He made anything else,” said Mr. Arkwright, who sounded as much interested in the subject as in, say, the current price of calico. “And since Bridges has kindly brought the matter up, why don’t all you boys take a look at Genesis, Chapter One, Verse Two. After all, some of you may want to join the Navy later, and spend the best part of your years at sea.”

  “Not on your bleeding life I won’t!” said Bob Fairbank.

  The noise of the bored turning of pages all the way back to the front of the Good Book sounded, I thought, like the sea itself, breaking on a hull or a pebbly shore.

  “Read what it says there, boys,” commanded Mr. Arkwright (insofar as somebody so unanimated could be said to command anybody or anything): “‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’”

  “There was sea everywhere then at that time?” I asked, confused.

  “Waters, Bridges, not sea, waters!” said the Reverend Arkwright, “they were what was ‘everywhere,’ as you put it. God did not separate those of heaven from those of earth until the end of His second day. And not till His third day did He divide
what He now chose to call Seas from Land. Which He now called Earth.”

  “But He’d called something-or-other ‘earth’ already!” I objected, pointing with the inkiest of all my fingers to that second verse with which we’d started our re-reading. “‘And the earth was without form, and void . . .’”

  My point, surely a valid one, was lost on poor Mr. Arkwright.

  “God liked the sea so much,” that put-upon man went on, “as some of you boys will after you’ve signed on to Her Majesty’s ships”—he seemed determined to shove his class into the Navy, though none of us London boys had ever expressed any inclination to serve in it—“that when, on the fourth day, He decided to create the creatures, starting with the great whales, it was not to the land that He turned (that was for plants) but to the sea: ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.’”

  Well, it had certainly been out of the sea that Hans Lyngstrand had come to Dengate, and out of it too that Bo’sun Johnston had passed into the realm of the dead. Onto the Great Highway Beyond the Gate, if you were to believe what Mary the “vehicle” had imparted to us a few hours ago.

  And it was hard not to believe it when her account was so rich in detail I knew to be wholly accurate. And yet something inside me protested at doing so . . .

  Heavy with the odd dream of my school I’d just had, and still spent in body and mind after our visit to the Gateway, I opened blurry eyes onto my bedroom, and felt, as I did so, as if I were dislodging weights from my eyelids—like those coins placed on the eyes of a new dead body. I was not dead myself; on the contrary I was very much awake again. But it did seem to me I had been altered in some strange, maybe indefinable way. Something was not the same about the entire condition of “me.” But what? Through the dormer window moonlight was streaming from between the clouds, but the room it illuminated looked (and surely was) exactly the same as when I’d gone to bed: the chair on the back of which I’d arranged my Norfolk jacket and on the seat of which I’d piled my clothes, the bookcase with the long row of Bulwer Lyttons, which the cat Japheth so liked to caress with his head, the desk with its self-importantly neat stacked papers, still including indeed those latest sheets of shorthand-notes taken from Hans’s last narrative, all about Johnston. No, nothing had changed in all these. And yet I had a definite intimation that something had happened here while I was asleep and dreaming myself back into Camberwell and the bible study class. It was as though—yes, as though I were no longer alone in this private attic-chamber of mine. As though I had somebody at my side.