The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  The day being Wednesday I decided to walk the long way home for the obvious reason. The turquoise stretches of the sea to my left rippled in the breeze, down on the beach two boys were trying to push out a rowing-boat. Then before me the Royal Gardens presented themselves, the Bandstand glinting in the sun, that edifice which Will before so very long would be honoring with his artistry. I passed through their gilded wrought-iron gates, keeping myself hidden from full view by the avenue trees.

  And see them I did, as I thought I would, from behind the larger horse-chestnut—saw first, rather as if they were further growths of the full-flowered magnolia, their two straw hats first, in such proximity as to resemble a single statue of a happy pair on a grassy plinth. The children from Farthing Lane and its like had scattered rather diffusely on the lawns; clearly their demands could not compete with Will’s panache. As so little could.

  Lucinda was wearing purple gingham that afternoon, and when she removed her straw bonnet, the sun made her copper hair shine in a hundred different tints of gold and red.

  I pass now to Friday, the last complete day of Will Postgate’s present Dengate stay.

  That day, back from work earlier than usual, I had no sooner entered Castelaniene than I heard a loud rat-tat-tat on the front door which, no immediate response to it coming from any quarter of the house (Sarah, down in the basement, was anyway, I now realized, a little deaf) it surely fell to me to answer. Rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat again!—this was someone with a sense of his or her own urgency and even importance. But there on the doorstep I discovered a boy, thirteen at the very most, whose eager, happy, polished-looking face announced no kind of calamity. I took one look at his grinning rosebud mouth, at his brown eyes and the little snub nose on a face as freckled as my own, and even before he’d told me his purpose, heard in my head that idiotic music-hall song:

  “Mary Ellen at the church turned up,

  Her mother turned up, and her dad turned up,

  Her auntie Gert and her rich uncle Bert,

  And the parson with his long white shirt turned up,

  But no bridegroom with the ring turned up,

  But a telegraph boy with his nose turned up

  Brought a telegram which said he didn’t want to wed,

  And they’d find him in the river with his toes turned up.”

  I’d always felt sorry for the boy in these lines who brought such dreadful news to Mary Ellen who would be hurt, offended, and shamed by it. I hope she treated him decently, but who could blame her if she didn’t? Shooting the messenger is an ancient tradition after all.

  This Friday afternoon’s little telegraph boy said with perky pride: “Got two telegrams, sir. One’s for the lady of the house, and other one for someone with ever such a funny name! Never had to deliver two ’grams to the one place before, and both to different persons, and I been doing this job ever since Jem Hackston gave up.” (Clearly, in his estimation a long time ago!)

  “I’ll take ’em both,” I said, a little apprehensively because I was far from sure that the persons being addressed would want me to see the contents. But there was the boy waiting to see whether there was any answer, and nobody had come into the hall, so I had no alternative to taking the matter into my own hands and reading the ’grams, now did I?

  The one for Beatrice Fuller herself read: “ACCEPT THE DISAPPEARED’S OFFER FORTHWITH. YOUR TRUSTY ADVISER.” The provenance was Canterbury, where I knew Mrs. Fuller’s lawyer to live.

  I felt a trembling throughout my body at the word “disappeared” with its associations with the Gateway. But giving a direct answer to the telegraph boy was easy enough.

  “No reply!” I told him, “Mrs. Fuller will be dealing with it herself in her own time.” (And this despite the word “forthwith”!)

  “My boss,” said the boy, “says the other ’gram’s not English. Thinks it must be to do with that Norwegian ship what capsized in the Channel.”

  And indeed MR. HANS LYNGSTRAND was the addressee of the other telegram. My pulse quickened to the point of discomfort. I unfolded it with a sense that I might be trespassing on territory as foreign to me as that revealed in Hans’s stories of life on Dronning Margrete.

  “TIRSDAG KOMMER JEG TIL MAJESTIC HOTEL, DENGATE. VI SES! KARSTEN STRØMME,” it read. Karsten Strømme, Hans’s patron, that man of influence and power, was surely announcing his arrival in Dengate, to escort back to Norway a Hans now judged suitably rested and restored.

  Aloud I said: “Yes, your boss was right, it is to do with the ship that sank. One of the survivors is at present living in this house, you see.”

  “Coo!” said the boy, and his eyes widened in appreciative interest, as if I’d been telling him I had personally rescued this particular survivor. “Coo, you don’t say!”

  “The words here are Norwegian, of course!” I told him further. “There’s nothing to say in return.” Then, remembering the question of payment, I fumbled in my pocket to find a coin or two. In fact I pulled out more than I’d intended but felt I could hardly put them back. “Here, take these, soldier,” I said, feeling it was good for my own self-respect to use Will’s big-brotherly term for me to somebody unmistakably younger than myself. “I bet you were wanting to knock off for the day rather than traipse up here to St. Ethelberga’s Road.”

  “Oh, I never mind when I have work to do,” the boy told me, his eyes shining with patent sincerity. “A deliverer of telegrams is indispensable to the whole community is what Mr. Pritchett always says.”

  “Mr. Pritchett?”

  “He’s my boss in the telegraph room, isn’t he? I’m his favorite ’gramboy, the one what he can always trust to do a job properly. Anyway, thanks you for the tin, sir, it’ll come in handy. I’m saving up for a dictionary for my very own personal use. I’ve got ambitions, you see.” He gave me a salute and stepped neatly backwards off the doorstep. “I trust what I brought was good news.”

  I didn’t in truth think either telegram could be so described. There was an ominous quality emanating from the one sent by the “trusty adviser,” with its implication that time was of the very essence. As for the other, well, Tuesday, May 19, lay not at all far ahead. It might well be the date when I parted from Hans forever.

  And yet hadn’t we parted already? There was something within myself that did find the second telegram “good news”: it would be a relief to have Hans removed from the daily scene. The breach between us was unbearable, each passing day made it worse. And yet did I want to mend it?

  But I must be a man and take Hans what after all was his.

  I took his telegram upstairs to Hans himself, after placing that for Mrs. Fuller prominently on the hall table. It seems to me now that I knocked on the Mercy Room door like a somnambulist.

  After his muffled “come in!” I entered to see him sitting in his chair which he’d now arranged directly below the gap between the two dangling Spanish galleons, perhaps thinking doing so was the best way of coping with the strong aura imparted by all the room’s cluster of objects. On his knees I saw what else but that book on Thorvaldsen—he must know the text as well as the images off by heart by now! When he saw me standing before him, no smile lightened his face as it would have done any day before Monday, May 11, but he did not scowl or turn his head aside or tell me to go away. I suppose he must have realized that I had come up on some serious errand independent of the issues between us, and of course it’s possible that from the very first moment of my appearance he saw that it was a telegram I was holding in my hand.

  “Hullo, Martin,” he spoke with a disconcerting formality, but then he often did. “It’s a beautiful afternoon and I have been spending a good part of it outside in the garden. So lovely. But then I felt a bit tired, a bit of the old trouble though not too much,” and he patted his chest, “so I came to my room for a rest. But I am feeling all right now.”

  “I am pleased to hear that, Hans. I’ve come to bring you this—it just arrived for you!” and I waved the ’gram, for which
, after all, I had paid out of my own money. “I had to read it, I’m afraid, because the boy who brought it needed to know if there was an answer. It’s in Norwegian, but I think I understood its import.”

  It goes without saying it took him but a few seconds to read. Nor did its contents in any degree surprise him! “So Karsten is arriving just as he said.”

  “As he said—” I repeated wretchedly for I had known nothing of his patron’s imminence, a fact surely of the greatest significance to our friendship, that is if I had not prevented its development.

  “Yes, I received a letter from him on Monday saying that he would be in Dengate on Monday the eighteenth or Tuesday the nineteenth. He had some shipping business to attend to in London first. I suppose it must be taking slightly more time than he had thought. ‘Tirsdag’ is Norwegian for Tuesday, you know.”

  “That’s what I supposed,” I answered, “but why did you not tell me about all this, Hans?”

  “I was going to, but—I did not know that you wanted to hear things from me.”

  “But of course I want to—want to hear things from you, Hans.”

  “We are friends still?”

  The plea is his voice was unmistakable and tore at my heart.

  “How can you doubt that?” I told him.

  Hans looked up at me with brighter eyes than ever, and very deliberately laid his volume of Thorvaldsen on the floor.

  “No. I do not doubt it. Not now, not at all. But I have done. Doubted.”

  I was incapable of referring to the events of that night, to the appearance, if you like, of the Peregrine Falcon and the Sailor-Boy in my life. Perhaps he too was unable to talk about what had passed between us, what we had expressed to one another.

  “I will always be your friend,” I told him.

  He nodded with a glowing solemnity I never forgot. “And I will always be yours!”

  And on hearing that I made for the door. Then I asked him: “I think I understood your telegram, but what does ‘Vi ses’ mean?”

  “Just ‘We’ll be seeing each other!’ It’s a phrase I hope we can use to one another our lives long, Martin.”

  I had, believe it or not, completely forgotten about the first telegram that the snub-nosed boy had bought. I was now to be somewhat more than reminded of it. I descended the lower staircase to see Mrs. Fuller, very obviously waiting for me, at its base, with the missive in her hand. The set of her mouth, the icy glow in her eyes did not bode well for me. Nevertheless—

  “Oh, so you found it?” I remarked disingenuously.

  “Oh, so I found it!” Three other precedents in my life with landladies presented themselves in my mind to tell me that this sarcastically spoken sentence was the Start of a Real Row. “I did indeed find it—on the hall table for all the world to view.”

  I was my unfortunate schoolboy self again, or the youth I had been in my very first digs. “Well, you wouldn’t have wanted me to put it where you couldn’t have seen it, would you now?”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you to put it anywhere at all!”

  By this time I had reached the bottom of the stairs. “What should I have done with it then?”

  “Mr. Bridges.” It was hard to believe that I was actually taller than the woman addressing me so haughtily had she drawn herself up. “I do not intend to parry questions and answers with you when I have a point of the utmost seriousness to make. Who is the mistress of the house?”

  I was tempted to say that this sounded jolly like just such a parrying as she’d just derided, but luckily for my head at which she might possibly have aimed blows, I did not. “Yourself, obviously.”

  “Then when a telegram comes addressed to her what is the correct procedure for a third party?”

  “Receiving it is not the correct one, I take it?”

  “If the master or the mistress to whom the telegram is addressed is not available—and as it happens I was at the far end of the garden at the time of its arrival, and did not hear the door, while all other occupants of the house save yourself were out—then there is but one course: To ask the telegraph boy to return with it on another occasion. That is what the telegraph office itself would expect.”

  “But if a suitable member of the household is to hand,” I began, whereupon Mrs. Fuller stepped an inch or so nearer me to hiss out at me:

  “Suitable. You suitable? A nosy, manner-less, very limited young man”—and it would surely have been hard for her to come up with a more damning description of me—“suitable to receiving a private communication concerning affairs he has already shown himself perfectly incapable of understanding—what delusions about yourself are you suffering from? I wouldn’t trust you with a laundry list let alone a telegram from a distinguished legal figure.”

  Well, after all this I need never at least wonder again where I stand with Mrs. Fuller, I thought. Her long musical fingers were busy playing scales on the folds of her dress. “I’ll continue if I may. It truly amazes me, is almost beyond my powers of belief, that I should be standing here having to teach a young man of twenty-two—”

  “Twenty-three,” I said, almost automatically.

  “Your pert little correction only emphasizes the sadness of your situation, Mr. Bridges. Having not done the appropriate thing, that is, inform the bringer of the telegram that the lady of the house was not in to receive it, I have no doubt whatsoever that you did the equally inappropriate one of reading it—with the hypocritical excuse that you needed to know whether it required an answer or not. Though why you should feel yourself equipped in any way to give one on my behalf is beyond my comprehension? Might I make my disapproval of your management of the whole thing clear enough by insisting you tell nobody else—nobody at all—what my telegram said, a point I clearly need to establish because you had left it on the hall table so for everybody to read.”

  I did not offer an apology, did not feel I had anything in the least to apologize for. On the other hand, even in the face of her declared lack of trust of me, I did feel virtually obliged to propose: “I will take your reply to the telegraph office if it is still open, and you can put your reply in a sealed envelope so I can’t read it.”

  This offer, my readers will immediately perceive for themselves, was as impertinent, if not more so, as anything else I’d done or said (though I do not think I quite understood this). Turkey-cock red in the face, Mrs. Fuller looked as if she were about to strike me.

  “You will do no such thing, and anyway the office is bound to be shut by now. Just for your information, I have no reply to make the telegram. I had already dealt with the matter it referred to.”

  Had accepted the offer of the Disappeared, I could have rejoined here, but did not.

  “Well, if you’re content to leave it like that . . .” I hardly knew what I was saying anymore. I’d only come downstairs anyway because, in all the fuss of the telegrams, I had left two folders from work behind in the hall. All I wanted to do now was to get away from Mrs. Fuller and her wrath as speedily as I could, and now I knew that the Mercy Room door was no longer shut against me, I could at least relax in my own bedroom, and amuse myself with a book. At this notion a pleasant possibility occurred to me: “Perhaps in light of our conversation just now, when I seem to have offended you without meaning to, it would be best if I stayed upstairs during our evening meal.”

  Mrs. Fuller’s eyes blazed anew, and if she didn’t literally stamp her foot, she so much metaphorically did so that she might as well have done. “It would not be best, Mr. Bridges. You will come down. I am tired of all this playing fast-and-loose with mealtimes, which is not at all fair on my poor dear Sarah.” At this point I could have told her that—unlike herself, unlike Will Postgate, unlike Hans Lyngstrand—I had sat down at the supper table every single day that week. But I judged it best not do so. “And anyway, have you forgotten it is your friend’s last evening in Dengate. Surely even you would not be so impolite as to skip it because you feel like sulking after being told a few home-truths.�
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  My readers are probably expecting to be now told what a tense, unpleasant affair supper was that night, and certainly I descended to the basement with trepidation and a resentment only made endurable by Hans’s returned and friendly presence. But what curious tricks life plays on us—or rather what curious ones we play on ourselves. Will, who arrived back at Castelaniene soon after the disagreeable colloquy I’ve just recorded, was in a state of such high self-satisfaction (more drawings by him praised, yet more commissioned) that he spilled it over on all of us seated at the table with him (or close to him, for his mood affected the three cats also). We rejoiced (and knew ourselves to be doing so) in his evident pleasure in the way he was going about his life, and he rejoiced in our rejoicing. Being Friday, we ate fish, delicious Dover sole with new potatoes. Beatrice Fuller asked interested questions about what duties Will’s new post would demand, Hans appeared impressively and maybe surprisingly well-up in the affairs of Bergens Arbeiderbladet, of whose “left” political stance and appeal to the workers Will at once smilingly approved (his smile seemed to guarantee it eternal prosperity and readership), and I myself had some little stories to tell which nobody else there knew about those south-coast newspapers with whom The Advertiser as a member of the same group enjoyed a certain (mildly competitive) relationship. Everybody appeared interested in what everyone else had to say, while relishing every mouthful of the food, and really can you ask (particularly in those circumstances) for anything much better than that?