The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Waggling his chin so his wispy beard so like a painted Chinaman’s wriggled in the air, he said: “It’s a real pleasure hearing a man as young as yourself say that.”

  With the man who was as young as himself, to whit Barton Cunningham, Will was markedly less friendly; indeed without being rude he was not friendly at all. Despite the fact that they had been on the same (winning) side in the croquet game, no bond had been forged between them, and Will, whenever, between sketching bouts, he was hanging about the offices, did not once go over to Barton’s corner. But though he did not overdo it, he made himself very much at home with Edmund himself. In fact, to hear the laughter that punctured their talk, and the names of the amazing number of chaps they knew in common, you would have fancied that here were two old friends, and that Will, though youthful in mien and manner, was essentially of Edmund’s ilk, rather than Barton’s or mine.

  When his drawings appeared in Wednesday’s edition of our paper, they were universally commended. In fact the whole issue (which contained some advance notices for Founder’s Day at St. Stephen’s College) gave general satisfaction. Edmund had really gone to town in his piece on the Church Steps, which was not only given pride of place but took up the best part of two pages. Nobody reading it could possibly attribute the Deputy Editor’s accident to his having been tight; on the contrary it made it clear that proper civic action had not been taken over a spot that had spelled danger for Dengaters for a long while. Will’s drawings—which had come out well, our printers had excelled themselves—emphasized all Edmund’s points in easily assimilable form.

  Talented though I had long believed Will, causing me to treat him at times with something like awe, I now realized I was capable also of underestimating him. Amusing caricatures passed around in an office or a Soho restaurant were one thing, helpful but intrinsically satisfying illustrations to a serious article that nevertheless could stand up for themselves, quite another, and I had not appreciated that he had either the gifts and the know-how to achieve them. He would, it was generally agreed, be the perfect choice to illustrate the grand opening of the Bandstand itself. What could be higher praise then that?

  • • •

  The weather was both fresh and pleasantly warm, a combination that distinguishes May at its best. Windows in offices were open to admit the day’s light breeze, indoors men and boys took off their jackets and rolled up sleeves. But the temperature was energizing rather than enervating; one’s thoughts went to lambs bounding about in fields outside the town boundaries, or to birds with twigs in their beaks finding new trees for nests, and you felt you could easily match such liveliness with activities of your own. Were Hans Lyngstrand in the good health he deserved, then he and I would be setting off late afternoon/early evening for some long cliff-top ramble—or else we’d go down together to the nets of the local cricket club, where we’d find Peter Frobisher and sometimes Barton Cunningham practicing. As it was the two of us could express our needs, our yearnings, our increase of spirits only in the quiet of night, in the confines of a bed, and this communication I had now jettisoned. Forever!

  “Does us all good, doesn’t it?” Philip Goodenough was pleased drawlingly to remark, sticking a pencil behind his ear and preparing to give what he’d been working on a good read-through, “to be free from Him-with-the-Gold-Watch-and-Chain.”

  No doubt who he was referring to, no doubt too that his sentiment was shared by everybody within earshot, and probably (thinking of Edmund in his office) by those out of it as well.

  “There’s loyal, there’s respectful,” grinned Archie Penry, while even the virtuous Arthur Forrester couldn’t quite find it in himself to disagree, though the hour of the morning was upon him when he liked to exchange advertisements for the Good Book. But we were later to think it unfortunate that Philip had said what he had; sailors are not the only men who are superstitious. For which of us could not feel when we heard the unmistakable sounds from the stairwell of a stick being thudded purposefully on step after step, and a middle-aged man’s heavy breathing and equally heavy gait coming closer and closer to our open door that this unwisely slighting reference to him, this articulation of continuing pleasure at his absence had conjured the Dep Ed out of the fragrance of the May air, and brought him into the premises, there to shatter our calm?

  “Thomas,” Edmund, who also had heard these betokening sounds, stepped vigorously (but a little apprehensively too, I thought), “how good to see you! And how brave of you, when you’re still merely on the mend, to venture forth to visit us on publication-day!”

  Never had the contrast between the two men seemed greater, and obviously my own perception was heightened by what Barton had told me about his godfather earlier, his career in Bengal, his hopes for himself on The Advertiser, his bitterness that these had been disappointed. Mr. Betterton’s accident, and the walking-stick it had forced on him, made him look rather old, a bit older indeed than his fifty-five or fifty-six years. He was out of breath, in patent discomfort, and the whites of his eyes were heavily veined. His stomach, protected from the world though it was by garments of which the waistcoat was the uppermost, looked today more uncomfortably bulky than ever, by contrast with which Edmund’s portliness appeared merely the comfortable layers of a man who liked to live as well and easily as he could and believed so much in instinctual good health that he was prepared to leave questions of weight and diet to Nature herself. Mr. Betterton suggested in his movements and the suspicious play of his eyes discontent with life, a grudging conviction that he was being cheated of his rightful due, whereas Edmund gave off contentment, a (modestly proportioned) pleasure in himself and his place in the world, even if he were, as at this moment, worried or uncertain about something.

  Mr. Betterton by way of reply to his superior’s somewhat over-effusive greeting thumped his stick on the floorboards.

  “I have read today’s issue,” he said, in so ringing a voice that the whole newspaper team went silent. “I have read it from cover to cover.” Philip and Archie’s mouths dropped open, I swear, in unison; they could scarcely believe their luck that a scene (what else?) was to take place for which they had front seats.

  “I think—well, to tell the truth, I know already,” said Edmund, “that the powers-that-be will get their skates on where the Church Steps are concerned—and several comparable places, all pointed out in my article.”

  Mr. Betterton, to our united surprise, gave a sarcastic little half-bow here, an inclination of the head in mock-gratitude, unfortunately causing his dewlaps to shake. “I thank you, Edmund Hough,” he said, “as a result of your words that idler, our mayor, should be stirred into some civic-minded action at long last! In that sense, you can say—you will doubtless say, to satisfy your conscience—that the latest Advertiser has given a senior figure in the community, to whit myself, sadly brought low by physical mishap, some necessary consolation, some hope that justice will be dispensed and that in future others will go safely where, alas, I did not.”

  Philip stifled a snort of laughter here, which mercifully Mr. Betterton, intent on his duet with the Editor did not notice. For of course if Mr. Betterton had drunk less at his Masonic “do” that evening, then, for all the failings of the steps, he surely would not have fallen over and injured himself. And, all of a sudden, I appreciated that the Dep Ed was himself perfectly aware of this fact, and, neither fool nor innocent, knew that many other Dengaters would also be. Therefore, he would have preferred there to be no piece at all on the subject in his town’s one paper. Yes, of course, he was exonerated by what Edmund had said, the blame for his accident had been laid elsewhere sufficiently plainly and with enough documentation to quieten all malicious wagging tongues. But they might have quietened even faster had Edmund simply written nothing.

  “But there are other features of the issue with which I am rather less satisfied,” Mr. Betterton, resting his considerable weight on his stick, turned himself slowly around to see that we were all taking his words in. “
I am a journalist, a newspaperman of experience, Edmund Hough, with very many years’ hard, and—dare I say it?—distinguished experience behind me.”

  “Indeed you are, I would be the first to proclaim it,” said Edmund. “I don’t know what we would all do without you.”

  His was not the most judicious choice of words.

  “I can tell you what you would do without me; indeed, I will tell you.” Awkwardly, one might almost say precariously, Mr. Betterton moved his free arm so that he could point to the most recent copy of our paper. “That is how you would fare. A paper that sets at nought my plans and hard-earned practices as a thoroughgoing professional who has worked in offices from Dakar to Dengate.”

  It was at this moment, I now think, that I knew for sure that I myself would not be spared the Dep Ed’s spoken displeasure. I saw Barton Cunningham and myself truculently busying ourselves on the man’s portly Remington. How could we defend ourselves?

  “What, might I be so bold as to ask, happened to the account of the celebration of Judge Pettifer’s sixtieth birthday?”

  Edmund did not look embarrassed, let alone guilty, as he answered: “Oh, we had to hold that over, I’m afraid.” And this, though I had with my own ears heard him say to Archie: “Oh, I think that can go the way of all flesh—if not the Judge’s just yet. But you’d better hold on to the article just in case.” So, I knew that I was not the only person who did not tell the entire truth when it suited him; the estimable, the virtuous Edmund did not.

  “Hold it over, pray? Until an issue even more unsuitably further away from the good Judge’s natal anniversary than this week’s?”

  “Well, always better late than never!” said Edmund cheerily, and I have to admit that he didn’t sound as if he meant what he was saying, nor that he cared that he didn’t.

  This was surely what Mr. Betterton himself thought. “As you say, Edmund, as you say,” he said, in a significant voice. “Always provided—this goes without saying—it is preceded by an editorial note to the effect that the paper humbly apologizes for its tardiness in its publication.”

  “I don’t know about humbly,” said Edmund, “but an apology of some sort might not come amiss, I do agree. It was all the Church Steps material that left us so cramped for space for other subjects.”

  Touché, I would have thought, and for a moment the wind did appear to be taken from Mr. Betterton’s full sails. Reprieve for Barton and me perhaps? But in fact the man was preparing to air his next grievance, and to air it so that it went home to the malefactors.

  “I have not finished. Not by any means. I next come to the Higginson and Busby affair.”

  Higginson and Busby? I had all but forgotten the names in the case that Barton and I had used as a means of showing the beauties of the W. T. Stead–like new journalism. This was the name of the firm that had gone bankrupt in circumstances that had led its directors to impugn other firms with whom they been dealing.

  “When I relate a history, sir,” said Mr. Betterton principally to Edmund, “I relate it in logical, not to say chronological stages, so that step by step the incidents, the events, call them what you will, are clear to our readers. I obey in short the laws of Cause and Effect. But when I turn to the account in this week’s Advertiser, what do I find?”

  Bang-bang went his stout stick on the floor, while wriggle-wriggle went my innards, like an invasion of worms. “I find, sir, a flouting of these laws, that it begins at the end and works backwards and then forwards again, a whole lot of modern nonsense that I ABHOR.” This time he really did shout—no two ways about it. “Yes, abhor. That method is here today but will be gone tomorrow, when the time-tested, indeed time-hallowed ones will return.”

  I looked across at Barton Cunningham as at a partner-in-crime who must be having the same uncomfortable sensations as myself. And saw him staring down at his shoes as if that were the only place he wanted to look.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Bridges, you could tell me the name of the process by which this time-hallowed structure is—shall we say—overthrown?”

  Yes, I was actually being addressed; this was not one of those moments of embarrassment that the imagination feels so often compelled to construct, but the real thing.

  “Name?” I idiotically stalled.

  “Yes, I believe this new, this Eighties way of doing things has a name.”

  Then it was that I knew Barton Cunningham and his godfather had had a conversation prior to the dramatic entrance and angry harangue by the latter, and that the younger man had, reluctantly, enforcedly, admitted what we had done, and in doing so was obliged to mention my name.

  “Come sir. I’m waiting for your answer,” continued the Dep Ed. “I’m all impatience, you see, to learn the correct, the London, the metropolitan, term for this wondrous journalistic innovation.”

  So many eyes burned their intent mocking gaze on me it’s a wonder the skin of my face wasn’t completely scorched off. And Barton Cunningham’s head was bowed so low I wondered it didn’t fall off his trunk and bump onto the floor. All I could see of him was his carrot-top.

  “Inverted pyramid,” I managed to say.

  “Come again, how much?” Very nearly toppling his heftiness over, Mr. Betterton was pleased comically to cock an ear forward to catch the low-spoken syllables of my answer.

  “Inverted pyramid.” The phrase sounded irredeemably pretentious spoken as it now was, by a self-conscious neophyte, into a deadly silent room of hostile ears.

  “Oh, that explains everything, and I thank you kindly for your invaluable assistance in bringing me up to date.” And Mr. Betterton made me the same parodic bow he’d proffered Edmund. “As I now understand it, the process entails beginning with the rear and ending with the prick—oh yes, it’s all so clear now.” Coarse language I had heard from schoolboys, soldiers, and East End stevedores, and neither I nor anybody else could be completely sure whether the Dep Ed had made a deliberate anatomical double entendre or not; Archie winked at Philip who winked back, Peter Frobisher, amazed at hearing the word “prick” spoken by a man he regarded as a veritable ancient, giggled into the hand he hastily put over his mouth.

  Edmund, who (as I now know) had so elevated and Meredithean a view of natural functions that he thought verbal obscenities little short of blasphemous, and who was clearly anxious to get his staff back to their duties, now stepped in—literally at that; he advanced toward us—to bring to a close the scene his Number Two had decided to stage.

  “Well, well, well, this is not the end of the world, we’re talking about,” he said, and then seeing the frown he’d brought to Mr. Betterton’s red-eyed, red-flushed face, went on: “All the same we do owe you an apology. Since the article in question does not bear your name, no one, Thomas, will ever ascribe its stylistic peculiarities to yourself.” It then occurred to me what I’d best keep to myself: that Edmund, knowing Barton and me to have worked on the piece, had himself read and approved it, for likely his view of his senior employee’s work was pretty much the same as my own, stoked by (I saw more clearly than ever) a strong personal antipathy. “But I do remember, Bridges, your employing the term ‘inverted’ . . .”—he couldn’t bring himself to go on, possibly, it later occurred to me, because it tickled him, made him want to laugh aloud—“whatever-it-is and maybe you should bear in mind that however interesting a method of presentation it is you should reserve it only for those pieces you yourself have been commissioned to write.”

  If Mr. Betterton thought over these words from his chief, as I’m sure he did, he would have realized that there was precious little of rebuke to me in them, or of support of himself. But Edmund’s tone was suitably emollient, and besides he added: “Bridges, I think perhaps you could express your regrets to Mr. Betterton—and forthwith. And then we can bring the whole wretched business to a close.”

  With blazing face and awkward tongue I said, in a voice that all had to strain to hear: “No offense was intended, Mr. Betterton, and I am sorry if it were taken.”
>
  Mr. Betterton nodded his huge head once again, as if in receipt of this, and I have to say right here that he never referred to the matter again, at least not to my face, though he did not trouble to disguise that he did not much like me. In his position I might myself, I now think, have been angrier, even more vindictive. While he was not (for me anyway) a sympathetic or appealing man, or even a tolerably admirable one, he had principles, and it was these that guided him to working hard for an editor younger than himself, promoted above him, and representing uncongenial political and social views as well as being temperamentally incompatible.

  Why, my readers may be asking, did I not get up on the spot, and cry out: “This is unfair, this is intolerable! I’d never so much as heard of ‘inverted pyramids’ before Barton Cunningham told me about them, and started applying the principle, quite off his own bat but urging that I assist him, to his godfather’s uncompleted article.” Surely readers can supply the answer themselves. “Thou shalt not sneak” is the schoolboy’s first commandment, and woe betide him who breaks it; he will find it hard to live with himself afterwards, and, perhaps more importantly, others will find it hard, and probably impossible, to live with him.

  And Barton Cunningham, for his part, who was sitting near me, now shuffled himself along, and, raising his head so that I saw his pale face as well as his red hair, and speaking according to our code, said: “You were a brick just now not to say more than you did. About—about the I.P., you know. It’s made me decide—when we’re alone together, to let you into my confidence.”

  And this he did, out in the sun-drenched Dengate street: “The thing is, Bridges, I have this damned wanderlust thing I just can’t cure myself of—however hard I try. I want to go back to Bengal—no matter how much it rains there, no matter how terrible the climate is and how far away from everything. You never know—I might even make a little pile out there, like Godfather Betterton, and come back home to England to live in style. There’s only one other person I’ve confided this to—and, this won’t surprise you, I think, that’s Lucinda Hough. She was very understanding; I think she knows what it’s like to feel cooped up. And that, by the bye, is the only understanding we do have.”