The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “Luncheon doesn’t look anything like ready,” observed Cyril, “so I don’t know what you’re making such a to-do about? I’ll go and seek out the Pater, probably sitting in the drawing-room with a book.”

  This prediction proved accurate. The drawing-room itself was a large, comfortable, battered-looking room with threadbare patches in both carpets and curtains, and two more children—to be precise the Houghs’ youngest-to-date, Grantley, and their youngest nephew, Stephen Woodison. They were playing with Edmund’s slippers much as the two Cairns might do. On seeing us Edmund put down his book.

  “Up here already?” he said. “Welcome to Furzebank. Hans, vilkommen.” Hans gave another of his charming bows and broad happy smiles.

  “However many children,” Cyril asked his father, “did my Aunt Woodison see fit to deposit on us today? The place is positively infested with infants! And where is Lou?”

  Edmund said: “Your sister is being her usual thoughtful kind-hearted self and is entertaining two little Woodisons and one little Hough in the garden; she has a magical way with children. Perhaps we should go and find her. Let us proceed through the French windows”—these were, in fact, already open—“and enter the Hough estate.”

  “Life in England,” said Hans, watching the two infants move across the lawn to find their kin with newfound ability and zest, “is so cheerful.” He could not, of course, have hit upon a word to please Edmund more.

  Edmund said: “Thank you, my friend. We do make rather a virtue of cheerfulness here. And just smell our marvellous gorse! Another name for gorse is ‘furze,’ you know, hence the name of our house, a very ancient name too.”

  “Here it comes,” Cyril whispered to me, “just as I told you it would.”

  “Our greatest living writer composed some very fine lines about gorse,” Edmund told us, “in his poem ‘Juggling Jerry’:

  ‘Yonder came smell of the gorse, so nutty,

  Gold-like and warm; it’s the prime of May.

  Better than mortar, brick and putty,

  Is God’s house on a blowing day.

  Lean me more up on the mound; now I feel it;

  All the old heath-smells! Ain’t it strange?

  There’s the world laughing, as if to conceal it,

  But he’s by us, juggling the change.’”

  “The Pater feels as pleased with that poem as if he’d written it himself, and not George Meredith,” observed Cyril, but with more affection than malice. “I shall venture forth and hoick out Lou from the mess of nippers.”

  “Mr. Lyngstrand, I’m sure you have a beautiful home of your own in Norway,” Edmund said.

  “Bergen, the city I come from, is very beautiful,” said Hans, “and my patron, Herr Strømme, has a fine house there, an old merchant’s house with Hanseatic connections. But it is nothing like this. Nor was my childhood home.”

  Edmund didn’t quite know how to take this. He had met Hans only once before, when as editor of The Advertiser he had visited the Royal Hospital. “That childhood home has gone now, I take it?” he asked awkwardly.

  “Yes, completely. My father lives now with his second wife on the French Riviera. Near Mentone.” If Hans had told me this fact before, I had forgotten it. “On my return to Norway, it is in my godfather’s house that I shall be staying,” he went on.

  On my return . . . But of course! In the not distant future Hans would be leaving Dengate and going back to Norway. And how would that leave my life here?

  “Here they come!” announced Edmund proudly. “Now you both can meet my eldest daughter, Lucinda.”

  Cyril preceded his sister, with the boy infant in one hand and the girl infant in the other. And then, ducking the boughs of the crabapple tree and with three pinafore-clad, long-haired children of, at first glance, indeterminate gender clinging to her, followed an agile-limbed girl in navy blue linen skirt and blue-and-white-striped cotton blouse, the two fetching garments united by a brass-buckled leather belt around her slim waist.

  Not till she raised her head after successfully avoiding contact with the lower apple-branches was I able to see the burnished chestnut of her tresses. My pulse raced, my whole body tingled. She was yesterday afternoon’s girl of the Royal Gardens, she who had kept the assembled street-urchins spellbound.

  “Lucinda, my dear,” said Edmund, “I want you to meet Mr. Lyngstrand from Norway, staying now at Beatrice Fuller’s as I have told you.”

  Lucinda Hough was all charming welcome, and Hans all grateful delight, and while this exchange—how appallingly long it lasted!—my ridiculous, childish habit of blushing got the better of me, and the fire in my cheeks speedily fanned itself to an uncomfortable heat.

  Eventually her father guided his daughter on from Hans to myself. “And this is my promising new reporter of whom you have heard me talk such a lot.” Promising reporter, eh? “Mr. Martin Bridges.”

  Miss Hough did just what I was dreading, looked me unflinchingly in the eyes to say: “Oh, but Mr. Bridges and I met yesterday, without exchanging any words. I was busy telling a few children in the Royal Gardens about flowers and trees. But I do wish, Mr. Bridges, you’d been bold enough to join us. Often I have the most unlikely taggers-on to my nature study groups. Last Wednesday, I had a nice old man almost blind but with a heightened sense of smell. And after him came a young woman on crutches with her nurse; she put her lameness to good advantage by studying insects.”

  I was hardly flattered by the company into which she’d straightaway put me, but this was better than having incurred her anger.

  “I didn’t think you’d want any further additions to your pupils,” I managed. “You seemed to have rather more than ‘a few’ as it was.”

  “But the more the better,” said Lucinda. My eyes were now absorbing her clearness of skin, her freshness of complexion, and her hazel eyes. “I believe, you see, that so many of the less well-off—even in a small and prosperous town like Dengate, barely eight thousand souls—live their lives in total ignorance of nature. They don’t realize its pleasures cost them nothing and make them incomparably the richer.”

  Edmund looked on and listened to this homily with a look of such pride that he revealed a major, probably the major, aspect of his whole existence: he considered his eldest daughter united all the virtues plus some special ones of her very own.

  A compliment was surely now called for from myself so, my face still clownishly a-flame, I stumbled through the following sentence: “I’m sure that with a teacher like yourself the kids from Farthing Lane,” I was pleased with myself for getting the name right, “will learn all the better.”

  If my blushes were clownish, so was this attempt at chivalry which didn’t suit a contemporary, probably “advanced” girl like Lucinda or, for that matter, a lively-minded, cynical reporter such as myself. I knew this as soon as I’d spoken, possibly even before.

  But Cyril Hough came to my rescue: “I’d warn you to tread a bit carefully if you go on one of Lou’s nature-walks. She’s apt to carry with her a supply of pencils and paper, and then set little tests. That’s not any man’s idea of fun.”

  Everybody laughed now, and my gaucherie evaporated into the fragrant noonday air. A few decidedly pleasant minutes later our little band was broken into by Elsie tripping girlishly despite her age and weight out onto the lawn with an announcement that we could all go into luncheon now, grown-ups in the dining-room, children in the kitchen. This prompted a noise of protest from the last category. Elsie put out a hand to touch Hans Lyngstrand’s head.

  “I had a beau once with hair like yours,” she said in a soft, sad, musical voice, “and he died. But your hair is more golden-like than his, and even lovelier.”

  Hans too proved himself capable of gallantry, though with happier consequence than mine. “Your beau must have been a very fortunate man,” he said, “to have you as his girl.” And endeared himself to everybody forthwith; I would never have said anything so gracefully complimentary—nor so soppy.

&nb
sp; The long table in the dining-room made a—that word again!—cheerful sight, and an impressively orderly one considering the chaos out of which it had been, really quite quickly, created. Three lustre-jugs of cowslips and cow-parsley had been placed so their sweet scents could drift over us as we ate and drank. To eat, two substantial courses—roast lamb with new potatoes and peas and a mint-sauce from freshly picked leaves, and afterwards apple-pie with custard. To drink, cider in flagons for the males, an elder-flower concoction for the women.

  “Come on then, stop thinking about all those old facts and figures you been poring over all morning, and do the carving like a proper old head of the household,” Mrs. Hough called out to Edmund from her end of the table (nearest the kitchen door) to the other (nearest the garden window). Then turning to Hans on her right she said: “My father, Mr. Robert Woodison, he was a beautiful carver. All the other farmers here—from the Isle of Thanet to Romney Marshes—used to like to watch him carve the joint. Wonderful it was, he would just put the knife on the meat and away it’d come, like melted butter.” Her husband by contrast was hacking away inelegantly and noisily at the lamb. Yet almost the moment the meat arrived on my plate it gratified the senses, delicious in aroma and juicy and tender to the tongue. In the years that have passed since this repast I have become all too conscious of the animals who provide such fare; I am, in spirit and, when I have the courage, in practice, a vegetarian.

  In the next room the children made a noise like a menagerie granted the powers of speech, laughter, and tears. Elsie’s control had severe limitations. For a good portion of lunch-time the children kept up a progressive chant:

  “One and one is TWO,

  Two and two is FOUR,

  Four and four is NINETY,

  Ninety and two is a MILLION . . .”

  All this was periodically broken into by a scuffle, as when Annie Woodison hit Grantley Hough on the head with a spoon, and the terriers barked and snarled accordingly.

  Not that those at the grown-ups’ dining table were precisely inhibited. Edmund had no belief at all in that maxim “children should be seen and not heard.” Cyril—something of a hero, I noted, to his younger brother, George (who that afternoon, though barely fourteen, announced to me his intention of “going into Mincing Lane like him over there”)—thought nothing of bringing up subjects or opinions with which his father might at the very least be uneasy. And of crying: “You’re talking nonsense again, Pater!” when Edmund voiced even quite gentle opposition. For example:

  “How can a man like you, editor of the biggest newspaper in the region, be so blind, so deaf, to what’s happening now in Burma?”

  “Burma’s not the first thought in the heads of my readers, Cyril.”

  “I don’t know why not. It’s your readers’ neighbors, the lovable Froggies across the Strait who are causing this damned trouble,” Cyril waved a hand to indicate where they operated from, almost knocking over a flagon of cider from which he’d already drunk quite a bit. “Pater, do you realize there’s a French consul over in Mandalay right now doing his sinister little best to woo the poor deluded Burmans with concessions, in ordinary parlance ‘bribes’? And what territory borders Upper Burma?”

  “You’re going to tell us whether we know the answer or not,” chipped in Lucinda, sitting, to my pleasure, on my right.

  “Assam!” cried the flushed Cyril triumphantly. “From which Britain now takes more tea than from anywhere else! Do you imagine we in Mincing Lane want the French to encourage Burmans to make forays over the border? We most certainly do not, even if the old Advertiser is pleased to turn a blind eye. Stands should be taken by any principled government.”

  “I get tired of all this stand-taking against people so much worse-off and worse-equipped than ourselves,” sighed Edmund, as he did in the office whenever he heard of harsh measures being taken. The father and son, as they tossed their differing opinions toward each other, along an invisible diagonal of tabletop, looked, I thought, absurdly alike. If you closed one eye, and let the other filter what it saw through a stream of light from the window, you could see Edmund as the younger man, for all that he looked tired and put-upon today, and Cyril for all his boyish impetuousness as the older, drink-flushed man of the world.

  I swivelled myself to my right, to Lucinda. “May I ask,” I said, knowing that I sounded absurdly stiff but not minding so very terribly if I did, “whether natural history has been an interest of yours for a long time?”

  Lucinda seemed glad to leave the public affairs that animated her brother. “Since before I can properly remember,” she answered. “And how could it not be? My mother’s father was a farmer, like his son, my uncle, who now runs the farm, and I was always over there as a small child, often without my brothers and sisters. And though my father grew up in Dengate, it was a smaller town then and you could get out of the place in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, and his favorite pastime as a youth was to walk over the downs and along the cliff-tops, making close observations of everything around him. He became an excellent amateur botanist before he was twenty. It was at the end of a long day’s flower-collecting expedition that he called at Grandfather Woodison’s farm and there met my mother.”

  “That sounds quite romantic,” I said, swiftly entertaining a picture of a vigorous idealistic young man turning up at a Kent farmhouse and seeing a pretty country girl with russet hair like Lucinda’s own. “I like the idea of that.”

  “Do you now?” and she gave me a slightly but detectably sarcastic smile. “Well, a lot of things have happened since. Babies and children, in a word. Perhaps ‘romantic’ would not be the best choice of word for the present day.” Nor—looking down the table at petulant, pregnant Mrs. Hough—was it.

  A fresh burst of chanting broke in from the kitchen as if to prove Lucinda right.

  “George Hough,” said his mother loudly, momentarily stopping all table-talk, “will you be so good as to get up from your chair—and by the way you shouldn’t of taken a second glass of cider; I saw you!—and go into the kitchen and tell those stupid children there to stop that dratted nonsense. Your father’s not up to dealing with it seemingly, and Cyril’s talking his head off as usual, so it’s left to you.”

  George, with notably bad grace, did as he was bidden.

  “You see what I mean,” said Lucinda. “But to go back to what you asked me—though I have always loved the natural world, it’s only this last year I’ve come to see just how important knowledge of it is for us all. For the sake of our humanity,” she added, with a suitably expansive movement of her noticeably charming hands.

  “I’d like to have such knowledge too,” I told her, “though until March this year—that was when I moved down here from London—I hardly took in the very existence of flowers. Trees a bit more maybe. The good old London planes!”

  Lucinda fastened the gaze of her brown eyes on me. She began to speak of the need for children not just in Dengate but in overwhelmingly urban London to be educated in the ways of animals and the “behavior” (“for it’s nothing less than that”) of plants, “and so restored to the wonderful fullness of existence.”

  What could I do but agree, especially as I feasted my eyes on the copper tints of her hair, the crisp white of her blouse and the strong dark blue of her linen skirt?

  Eventually but abruptly, she switched from her vision, her hopes, to a purely personal subject touching on myself. “And are you happy here in Dengate, Mr. Bridges?”

  “Martin, if you please!”

  “Are you happy here?” She did not insert my name into my repetition. “The Pater has given us such a glowing account of . . .”—it seemed to me she had to spend a brief moment or so deciding how much to let me know of that account—“of your capacity for work, your interest in many subjects. But—” Well, there would have to be a “but,” wouldn’t there? She lowered her voice to a husky whisper so that her father could not hear her break confidence easily, “He’s not sure you’re happy in Dengate. He
doesn’t think you’re cheerful enough, though having the nice Norwegian living at Mrs. Fuller’s has changed things for the better a little, in his view.”

  I was impressed, and a bit taken aback too, by Edmund’s power of understanding. “Having the nice Norwegian living at Mrs. Fuller’s has changed things,” I assented. Well, that was a truth. Then—“Your father’s a good man to work for,” I said, meaning it.

  “You don’t deny you’re not cheerful, I notice,” commented Lucinda fixing her brown gaze on me. “And you haven’t said you’re happy either. Is it Castelaniene that you don’t like? When the Pater told us his newest recruit might board there, Cyril and I protested. But then we didn’t know you, and we thought, well, it’ll be a comfortable enough house, nice views of the sea and so on.”

  My pause, which might have continued for far longer, brought a knowing light into Lucinda’s eyes, before she came up with: “I see. Silence speaks louder than words. Well, Beatrice Fuller has had more than her share of problems, and I do not suppose that makes her an easy landlady.”

  Why not say something of the truth? “There’s too often,” I ventured awkwardly, “an ‘atmosphere’ between us. If you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, I know all right. My mother doesn’t find her easy to get on with but the Pater feels sorry for her and in his usual way—he props up half the Channel Ports, I sometimes think—he performs all sorts of kindly offices for her. Like finding her a lodger because he knows sometimes money is a bit tight.”

  “I see!”

  “The Pater was an old school chum of George Fuller’s,” said Lucinda, obviously realizing that I did not know this major fact. “George Fuller (my brother George is named after him) was even as a boy an enthusiast for the classics, for the beauties of Latin poets.”

  “And,” I added artfully, “the Fullers named their son after a Latin poet, didn’t they?” My mind’s eye held again that forlorn expression I’d seen on Beatrice Fuller’s face when I caught her alone in the Mercy Room. “Horace!”