The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  I told Hans about how I taxed this man that selfsame evening with what had happened to me in the afternoon.

  “Father, you have lost me my education!” I cried, more impassioned and full-throated than I usually was with my sire. I could already smell the gin on his breath. He tumbled unsteadily sideways and had to prop himself by leaning on the mantelpiece against the mirror, to keep on his feet at all. And then . . . and then he began to laugh—such laughter as I never wish to hear again in my life.

  “Excuse me, Martin,” he said, “I just cannot help finding the whole thing so exceedingly comical. I am, you see, a man born out of his time, who would have thriven in the Regency with its glorious opportunities for amusement, with its golden frivolity. I was not born, you see, for our present age of canting ushers and the cash nexus.”

  That was all I wanted to tell for now.

  Hans’s reaction? He lifted his left arm and slid the hand underneath my neck. He had proved himself, prone on his back, turning his head from time to time to play the beams of his eyes feelingly on my speaking face, the best audience, the best confessor, I could ever have asked for. If I’d been then the sculptor he himself had determined to become, then this is how I would have commemorated him, in repose, his face, which only minutes back had been suffused with amorous feeling for me, showing that he was absorbing my revelations not just into his head but into his heart.

  He left the bedroom that morning only ten minutes or so before it was time for me to get up for breakfast.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I Visit the Old Hole

  For all the raptures and intimate revelations of the night, my spirits rose that morning in something not unlike relief the moment I turned the corner of St. Ethelberga’s Road. Think of it—this was the first time I’d left Dengate since my arrival here, and it felt really good to be doing so even if only for a few hours—and on such a lovely flowering morning too. Away from Mrs. Fuller, away from The Advertiser (even though bound on a commission from it), away from Hans and both his tribulations and his emotional gifts. I arrived at the town’s handsome station in as cheerful a mood as Edmund could have wished for me. I purchased my ticket, then walked over to the platform for the Canterbury train which stopped at Kingsbarrow.

  Here I found gathered a band of twenty to thirty boys all in uniform: dark blue crested blazer, white shirt, charcoal-gray trousers, and straw boaters with blue-and-black striped hat-bands. The boys were not scuffling and shoving each other like so many schoolboys off-premises, nor did the platform echo with raucous laughter or shouts. Almost arbitrarily selecting two older boys with amiable facial expressions, I asked them: “This is the right platform for Kingsbarrow?”

  The taller of the pair gave me a little well-bred nod. “It is indeed, sir. Kingsbarrow is where St. Stephen’s College is situated, and that is where we ourselves are bound.”

  His friend, a fair, curly-headed boy with small bright eyes like currants in pastry, added: “This train, sir, is the famous ‘Eight O’clock,’ or ‘Swots’ Express,’ as it’s generally known.”

  Initiative rewarded, inside information about the establishment ahead coming my way already, what a journalist I was showing myself! “Oh?” I said. “And why’s it called that?”

  The crinkle-top boy’s eyes glinted with humor: “Why? Because we day-bugs are so much cleverer than the boarders they feel obliged to put our successes down to us swotting and not to our natural genius. Anyway, if they want to call this the Swots’ Express, it’s only fair of us to christen the boardinghouses the Slowcoaches’ Stables, n’est-ce pas?”

  His graver taller friend gave me another courteous nod. “Dayboys comprise a mere twenty percent of the college,” he explained, “so you can call us an egregious and distinguished minority.” I doubt I’d want to call you any such thing, I thought, while recalling the coarser-grained, coarser-mannered creature I’d been at this boy’s age. “But the train also has its name because in truth we do all use the journey-time for conning our texts, and often arrive at classes better prepared than any boarder can hope to be.”

  When the train drew into the station with ear-splitting hisses and roars, I decided not to let this obliging, potentially useful duo disappear. With studied casualness, I followed them into an empty compartment, followed by four younger boys, of whom, for the entire journey, the first pair were to take no notice whatever. When the guard blew his whistle, its shrill loudness penetrated my head like a reveille, reminding me that I had a task to perform this morning, and a double-task at that (for I absolutely must come away with some information about the Fullers!). Nevertheless, I let myself sink back into the deep, dusty, plum-colored upholstery. Before long orchards, rather than the terraced houses belonging to Advertiser readers, were stretching away on either side of me, dressed in the white or pale pink of apple blossom, while on the banks above the railway track the broom showed a yellow whose early morning brilliance I now would never mistake for Juggling Jerry’s gorse.

  Four stations between Dengate and my destination—Monksley, Plumcroft Halt, Little Amchurch, from which a branch line opened northward to Faversham, and Stodbourne. While through the walls of our compartment on both sides came sounds of laughter and lively talk, the occupants of mine maintained a self-conscious sobriety. Three of the four junior boys were living up to their train’s tradition by going through an exercise demanding correct “quantities” in Latin verse, while the fourth, a chubby boy, who had pushed his boater so far forward it shadowed his eyes, was engrossed in some calculation causing him to speak figures aloud: “No, three hundred and twenty . . . Four hundred—four hundred and twenty-seven!”

  As for my duo, sixteen years of age, I would say, and both fair-haired and somewhat spotty-complexioned, they were surreptitiously intrigued by my presence. For all their pride in the train’s sobriquet, they were not swotting themselves, but relaxing before the day proper began, though the one on my immediate right, the more solemn one with the formal vocabulary, had taken an edition of Horace’s Odes out of his schoolbag, resting it on his left knee.

  I decided that I should take advantage of their presence—and apparent leisure:

  “And are you looking forward to the First of June?” I asked.

  They turned amazed, impressed faces on me. “But of course!” they answered in seeming unison. “It’s the greatest event of the year.” (Not “our year,” I noted.)

  “I am interviewing the Headmaster about the events for that day,” I said, his name suddenly escaping me except for the monosyllabic nickname “Dick.” “On behalf of the local newspaper, The Advertiser.”

  Had I announced I was covering Russian events for The Times the expressions on their faces could hardly have expressed more awe. “The Latin and Greek verses you will hear recited that day!—you’ll never have heard the like, Mr. Whittington is a genius for picking out the best quotes and getting the best fellows to deliver them to our public. You won’t forget it in a hurry!”

  Perhaps it wasn’t so hard to imagine someone as dedicated to the Classics as George Fuller having been a “beak” here.

  I could think of little else to say, not wishing to reveal my ignorance of both the Reverend Whittington and his taste in verse. Before too long the train was puffing into Plumcroft Halt, on the left-hand wooden platform of which I could spy more boys in the St. Stephen’s uniform. And as some of these climbed into our very compartment, “my” pair of older boys decided to engage themselves in a bit of swotting after all and to live up to the image they’d given me of a college of classicists. Crinkle-top got his own edition of Horace out of his satchel and put it on his left knee, whereupon his taller friend bent forward so that soon the two friends’ engrossed heads appeared virtually a single physical entity.

  “Book 3, Ode 5, it’s a positive demon,” my neighbor opined. “Regulus was a real Roman, but I haven’t found it easy—minus crib—to work out from this quite what he did. But Dick”—so they too called the Rev Alfred Whittington th
is!—“will doubtless explain all that for us. I value so much his explanations.”

  I certainly couldn’t have said that about my frightful Headmaster whose essentially unkind character I had revealed to Hans last night . . . Meanwhile a conversation about cricket was in progress between two of the recent entrants.

  “Bennett is useless as a bowler, bally useless; he never should have been considered for the team at all, and as for Eardley-Kinnaston . . .!”

  “Eardley-Kinnaston, my God!” exclaimed his friend, “if a blooming mouse was at the wicket, I doubt he could bowl him out!”

  “My” pair, however, had other matters to preoccupy them. (NB, I have checked the relevant texts for writing this chapter!)

  “Caelo tonantem credidimus Iovem regnare,” the boy on my right was intently muttering, “that’s clear enough: ‘We used to believe in thundering Jove in heaven.’”

  “Don’t ‘we’ believe in him anymore, then?” came Crinkle-Top’s voice from under the as-good-as-locked heads, “I thought Horace accepted Jove. Went and poured libations in his honor.”

  “He did. But I suppose there were times when he doubted. And then he’d hear the thunder and know that he still held power. In the same way—well, do you see—

  ‘. . . praesens divus habebitur,

  Augustus adiectis Britannis

  Imperio gravibusque Persis.’

  . . . Augustus Caesar’s recent conquest of the Britons and the Persians makes the poet believe in him and his power.”

  “Wouldn’t Jove mind that? Feel Augustus had stolen a march on him?”

  “Of course not!” the boy sounded gently reproving of his friend’s facetiousness. “Horace knew full well that Jove approved of Augustus Caesar just as our God approves of our Empire.”

  Strange that I should be visiting a school the very day after I had confessed to somebody—to Hans, as I could to nobody else!—the humiliating end to my own school days? If Father had managed to pay the bills and the Thomas Middleton School, Camberwell, had kept me on, would I have developed into a boy who could read Horace along with these friends? Would I then have gone on to try for Oxford or Cambridge? But perhaps I wasn’t brainy enough to do so! Or not brainy in the right way!

  The boys went on tearing at the lines like dogs with heads lowered over a bone, discussing what words agreed with what others, however far separated from one another in any line they might be. Leaning back again in the dusty upholstery, I let my eyes absorb the passing view, all the delicate colors of the orchards of apple, cherry, plum, and the increasingly numerous farm buildings and oast-houses. These, with their round towers and conical roofs culminating in narrow tilted cowls, made me think of the many South Londoners I’d known—at the stationer’s, at the printers’, around and about the various lodgings I’d ended up at—who’d come down to Kent for the hop-picking. Where would I rather be, among those Cockney lads whose tasks, however bucolic the setting, were back-breaking and ill-paid, but more often than not included a certain camaraderie, or among my present fellow-passengers on the Swots’ Express, racking my brains over Horace?

  But such speculations came to an abrupt stop with a loud burst of unanimous activity both inside the compartment, and, as I could hear only too well, on either side of it. As if obeying the call of some regimental cornet, these hitherto exemplarily composed boys bounced up from their seats and made for the door as though their very lives depended on making a quick exit some enemy might try to prevent.

  We were pulling into Kingsbarrow.

  I don’t know how many passengers remained on the train to be borne further down the line toward Canterbury, but the general disgorging onto the platform seemed so prodigious it amounted to an emptying of the carriages. The modest little station with its geranium tubs was all but obscured by the arrival of so many boys, with here and there a grown man whose very gait and attitude told of a relationship to them at once deferential and resentful. Twice a day in term-time it would have to endure this overflow, that’s to say for nine months of the year. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the station-master and porter, the men who looked after the adjacent allotment garden where KINGSBARROW was picked out in white pebbles, were as glad as any St. Stephen’s pupils when the holidays began.

  But as I mingled with these, a trifle self-consciously, what I had confided in Hans last night came back to me yet again, including details I had not lingered on. I could all but hear again my heavy footsteps ringing through the empty hallway of my school’s central building, as pathetically holding on to my satchel, I walked toward its main gateway and so out into Camberwell Green, knowing that I had said farewell forever to higher education, to taking my place among those I’d surely been born to associate with, and was now obliged to lift myself up effortfully from the army of the ignorant and indigent. But who might become the W. T. Stead of his particular generation.

  Northeast from the station, for just under a mile, across almost disconcertingly flat land, the main street of Kingsbarrow marches toward the tall, red buildings of St. Stephen’s, which dominate everything else whether natural or manmade, and are overwhelmingly incongruous with the rest of this unremarkable, unpretentious Kent village: two opposing rows of half-timbered or clapboarded cottages and houses, a small, squat parish church, a tiny Primitive Methodist chapel, a public house (“The Red Lion”) and one gentleman’s residence (which a well-polished brass plaque proclaims to be the doctor’s). And down this relentlessly straight line the released train-travelers in their summer uniforms advanced like a regiment.

  I took quick steps—a half-run really—to get further to the vanguard and found myself more or less alongside a tall man in late middle-age—plainly, from the comportment of the boys nearest him, a St. Stephen’s beak. I was reminded at once of the White Knight in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, a book I still never tire of reading: high forehead from which untidy white hair streamed backwards, shaggy eyebrows and walrus moustache, and an attaché case so bulging with exercise books that its clasp had given way and an accident seemed not just inevitable but imminent. He had an imperturbable gentleness of aura which emboldened me to step still closer to him and say: “A very good morning to you, sir! I’d like to introduce myself. I am Martin Bridges and your Headmaster has asked me as a reporter on The Channel Ports Advertiser to come and learn what you are all planning to celebrate Founder’s Day on June 1.”

  Startled out of his own thoughts, the man turned weak bespectacled eyes on me with difficulty in focusing them. “And I am sure,” he said in a voice suggesting a habitual undiscriminating charity, “he will be most pleased to tell you about them.”

  Well, pleasing Mr. Whittington was not really my intention in coming to Kingsbarrow. Or was it? Edmund undoubtedly wanted him pleased, in fact had probably privately agreed with Barton Cunningham that he wasn’t quite up to the job of doing so, Victor Ludorum or no. I have to confess to a rush of timidity at this White Knight’s words. Here was I, a new recruit to my paper, a resident in Kent for a mere six weeks, and a young man with only the scantiest of educations being dispatched to a prestigious college completely unfamiliar to me and where everyone seemed of a superior caste to myself. Yet Edmund had thought me worthy of coming here—and actually confronting its eminent head whose explanations his pupils so liked listening to.

  The White Knight’s next comment made me feel, if anything, worse still: “I probably should not say so, but after chapel yesterday evening, Mr. Whittington told me of the intended visit here from a representative of The Channel Ports Advertiser, and the prospect delighted him for he believes so strongly in cultivating good relationships with the whole vicinity. Of course he has had many dealings with Mr. Hough over the years, and thinks extremely highly of him.”

  An interior queasiness—attributable to a number of causes, not least the activities of the past night—was now making for the pit of my stomach, and I raised my head toward the near distance as if seeking help there. The spire of St. Stephen’s Chapel w
as shining in gilded metal against the blue of the clear sky, the large brick buildings, as red as meat or congealed blood, loomed, with every step we took, ever more bulkily and intimidatingly at the end of the long grass-verged street, yet there were several hundred yards to go, and having gone out of my way to join the White Knight, it might be impolite—as well as unresourceful—not to talk to him a bit longer.

  “Might I,” I ventured, “have the pleasure of knowing whom I am now speaking to, sir?”

  After a jerk of his limbs, such as a marionette gives when the strings are pulled, he moved his plain, walrus-mustached, benevolent face to meet mine, and said: “Indeed you might, young man. I am Azariah Welbeck, and I teach mathematics at the college you are paying us the compliment of visiting.”

  For a moment I could not place the name, a distinctive enough one in all truth, but then I had learned so many new ones in the short time I’d been in Dengate. Almost every day presented two or three more with which it was assumed I ought to be familiar. Then it came to me. Azariah Welbeck had been the “beak” from whom the hapless Horace Fuller had stolen money. Indeed Barton Cunningham’s very words, as, rather too gleefully he’d delivered them while we walked up the Esplanade, returned to me: “He stole from one of Old Fulsome’s fellow-beaks—a distinguished chap, writer of a famous mathematics textbook, Mr. Azariah Welbeck. As Azzy is the very nicest of men, he tried to hush it up . . .”

  “Honored to meet you, Mr. Welbeck. My colleague on the newspaper, Barton Cunningham has said such warm things about you,” said I, “that I feel I know you already.” This was rather more than the truth, but never mind!