The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “She was happy enough helping me with all these concert programs,” I could not forebear observing, “and she was amused by one of my jokes for our new Entertainments page.” (“New Entertainments page” indeed!—it was still two or three months off!—besides, had she really found it amusing? I was not convinced.) “Though not nearly as much so as your brother George. He was beside himself.”

  “Oh, my brother George!” said Cyril, and I could hear the real affection in his lazy voice. “He’s a huge one for laughing when something appeals to him. Tell me the joke that got him going this morning.”

  We were now clopping along slowly past the row of houses in which Castelaniene stands. Somewhat shamefacedly I told him the story of the man and the dish of spinach prefacing it with the rider that it was intended for the unsophisticated. But Cyril laughed fully and genuinely.

  “Well, that had better be the lead in your new page. I doubt the Pater will chuckle, the poor man’s got no sense of humor at all as you must have realized. Too busy finding divine laughter in the Cosmos and merriment in Nature to have time for foolish human antics and incongruities . . . Well, here you are at ‘Castle Aneen,’ as I delight in calling it. Don’t give any superfluous regards to Mrs. Fuller; she wouldn’t want ’em. And since you seem to have had such a benign effect on some of my nearest and dearest, why don’t you start coming ’round to Furzebank Ho more often?”

  It was one of the more happily prescient statements of the day which had more misery in store for me than, even at that advanced point (not far off one o’clock), I could have supposed.

  Even if I had not known that Will was expected—even if I hadn’t been told, nervously, defensively, by Beatrice Fuller herself—I’d have learned as much from the obsessive way she fussed about the house on Friday evening, arranging vases of fresh roses here and little bowls of potpourri there, when I could have told her that Will was largely oblivious to pretty objects.

  But there on the hall table was a letter for me. From Hans. (Well, who else wrote me letters?) Considering the lively vernacular he had listened to and employed every working day on board ship, and his familiarity, as I knew from first-hand, with a wide range of English intimate terms not used in polite company, his epistolary style was one of unalloyed formality, not to say stiffness, matching the immaculate copper-plate which served it. It was three pages long, and a good part of it surprisingly (for me) uninteresting and therefore not worth quoting, about living arrangements made on his behalf by—well, of course—Herr Strømme, and involving details of prices which I was surprised to find interested him. Though “my patron believes it’s important to live on a small budget. Only that way can you appreciate the big and important things in life.” I wonder, I felt like saying here, in my experience some of thrift’s most ardent advocates have never known a day’s financial worry in their lives, and exercising it is a kind of vicarious satisfaction for them. (After all, someone who believed very much in small budgets would not have put himself up at the Majestic.) The letter continued:

  I have now been accepted for, and indeed registered at, Bergen’s Vestlandetskunstakademi, a fine institution founded in the last century. (The name means “The West Country Art Academy,” as you’ve probably worked out.) However, for certain sculpture classes it may be necessary to go to the capital, if only for a few days every now and again, and my patron has written to the celebrated sculptor, Julius Middelthun at the Christiania School of Design to see whether he can be of help to me. You may wonder why—personal ties to Bergen apart—Karsten does not want me to be actually enrolled in that school. Well, he is fearful of certain influences from the bohemian circles in the capital who are powerful in the art world, and becoming more so with each passing month. Karsten, though in no sense an artist or even like one, is very open to the arts, as you will have realized from your meeting at the Majestic Hotel. (Had I realized this? I was not at all sure that I had. In fact, I’d thought him quite the opposite.) He thinks that Christian Krohg and Erik Werenskiold, perhaps the two most celebrated members of the younger generation, are men of the most enormous gifts, who will put Norway well and truly on the map artistically. Nevertheless, he is a little anxious about the values that are promoted by the suite of studios known as Pultosten (the Cream Cheese) where they work and spend much of their leisure. Their radicalism extends to every aspect of living, overthrowing what a great many people—as Karsten puts it—think essential to keep a decent society going. There have been certain rather dreadful scenes and incidents, scandals in other words—most of them happening whilst I was away from Norway and on the high seas—which have made some people suffer and distressed many, many more, and it may be that an impressionable young man (Karsten’s words about myself) needing to come to grips with disciplines to which he is still a stranger, is better at a distance from them, though, from the point of view of his work, he should certainly acquaint himself with both their ideas and their practice.

  “For here is the funny thing, Martin, and it excites me because it suggests that Fate has played a kindly hand in my life. Christian Krohg and Erik Werenskiold are intimates of the most eminent Parisian artists and proponents of all the theories that make their work so impressive and challenging. Many of these they have brought into their own canvases. But more and more they are saying to themselves and the world; “If you are Norwegian, you should not neglect Norway. Do not give us French scenes in a French style, give us Norwegian scenes—and, if you are a portraitist or a sculptor, Norwegian individuals—and find the manner appropriate to your country, your weather, and your race. Only then will you make living art.” Well, that rings true, as I believe the expression is, does it not, Martin, and does it not suggest that I have come back to Norway from afar precisely when it is expected of the truthful artist that he does so? But I still feel, like many of my compatriots, those who make up the Scandinavian Colony in Rome, that sooner or later every artist should go to the Mediterranean countries which saw the birth of western art . . .

  There was, for a comparatively short letter, quite a bit more in this vein. I had an uneasy feeling that, essentially, Hans was repeating what Karsten and his fellow high-ups had said to him, their warnings about the dubious ways of certain apparently well-known artists. I could sadly only catch the very faintest echoes of all the confidences that had passed between the writer and myself, and I couldn’t be sure that even these weren’t an illusion.

  Anyway at that moment, down the stairs, into the hall, came Will Postgate, who obviously had not only arrived but changed for the great event ahead.

  “You have a curious aroma, Will?” I said. He did too; it was like new-mown hay.

  “‘Curious aroma,’ soldier! I have put on my body—‘splashed’ would be a more appropriate word—‘coumarin,’ a new and fashionable man’s fragrance from France, deriving from the tonka bean tree.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “Everybody who’s everybody uses it now.”

  “Not me! But I suppose you’re now going to make the obvious retort. I’m nobody.”

  “But I would never have dreamed of saying so,” smiled Will. He could hardly have appeared more of a summer season masher if he’d tried, as of course he very much had: bright-red-and-black-striped blazer, same-striped straw boater (at present in his hand) ribboned to match, and white trousers. In the hand that was not carrying the boater was a rolled-up paper.

  “Well, I suppose I have to say you do look a somebody,” I conceded. “I am surprised you are not sitting up on the Bandstand the way you’re togged up . . .”

  Will flushed slightly as, after a detectable little pause, he admitted: “Well, I was invited to do so, as it happens. Because of having done all the marvellous drawings for the program. But you know me, Modesty Personified. Similarly Edmund asked me to a dinner up at the Houghs, at Furzebank House, with other Bandstand grandees. But I felt—no, that wouldn’t be right either, that would be gate-crashing Dengate society, and if there’s anything I dislike,
it’s being a gate-crasher . . . Anyway Beatrice Fuller had already said she would prepare a delightful dinner for me tonight. So I shall shortly be just mingling with the happy throng in the Gardens, cheerfully receiving, needless to say, the compliments I am offered (and I daresay there will be many), but in the evening I shall be a positive sybarite behind the closed doors of Castelaniene.”

  What I was being told did not consort with the picture of Will that I had built up over the years, thanks to his general propensity to talk about himself. Indeed the whole announcement—which begged the tiresome question of whether or not I was expected to be present at Beatrice Fuller’s delicious dinner—did not ring quite true, to use the idiom Hans had so proudly employed in his letter. Why it did not, I could not define.

  And was Will aware that in all likelihood Mrs. Fuller was not a widow at all?

  “I’ve brought you a little present from The Smoke,” Will said.

  “Present?”

  “This, old bean,” grinned Will, and he released from his left hand the latest number of The Pall Mall Gazette, “this is really ‘something.’ An A1 issue.”

  Even at the quickest glance W. T. Stead’s now famous, not to say notorious bold, tantalizing, and carefully chosen words leaped out at me. I had the immediate sensation, before absorbing them, that, sooner or later, they were to have some personal significance for my life.

  “Notice to Our Readers: A Frank Warning”

  Who could fail to read on, after that? Standing in the hall, under my stylishly dressed old friend’s amused, knowing gaze, I now did so:

  Therefore we say quite frankly that all who are squeamish, and all who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool’s paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious to the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are passed in the London Inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the three following days.

  “Crikey-Moses, Will!” I exclaimed almost involuntarily. “Whatever can Monday—this coming Monday!—be going to bring us?”

  “Isn’t it for us merely to guess?” said Will. “We are being confronted here with one of the nation’s masters of publicity—and suspense.”

  “You must have heard some rumors,” I said. “I thought you were on nodding terms with old W. T. S.”

  “Even if I were—which is a bit less than the truth, though I have exchanged the odd sentence or two with our Great Man, it’s true—it would hardly make him tell me his carefully laid master-plan for his next four issues. But,” and he turned to face me full frontally, and his eyes were twinkling with fun as he said: “Limehouse.”

  Ever since my last night with Hans, the horror of the name had yielded to disgust pure and simple (to use a highly unsuitable phrase).

  “Oh, dear!” I said. “Well, I must get myself kitted up for the afternoon now; the ceremony will soon be upon us. I take it I can keep the PMG awhile?”

  “It’s a gift, soldier!”

  And even as I performed my ablutions and chose my attire I read further into W. T. Stead’s proclamation of the sensational contents to be found in the next few editions of his PMG:

  “The story of an actual pilgrimage,” he warned in preacher-like tones, “into a real hell is not pleasant reading, and is not meant to be. It is, however, an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, ‘abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived.’ But it is true, and its publication is necessary . . .”

  “Necessary”? Necessary for what? How or why was anything to do with “Limehouse” necessary?

  The ceremonies of the afternoon—my readers will probably have sat through a hundred, nay two hundred such, each unique in the minds of its organizers, and for a while, in the eyes and ears of those present, until, probably at halfway point, the tedious familiarity of them breaks through. And then one has to combat the feeling that the sooner they are over and done with, the happier one will be. Home beckons more alluringly than one can almost stand. So . . . Dengate, July 4, 1885.

  It was hard to know, either at the time or afterwards, which of the two men actually opened the “Bandstand,” Sir Greeley Donaldson of Harland Court or Mr. George Barley, the town mayor, an ambiguity already present in the wording of the poster, despite the “and” linking their distinguished names. Had it been a question of who was dressed the more impressively for the making of the great pronouncement, then the palm would undoubtedly be awarded to Mr. Barley, who gleamed and clanked with his copious mayoral chains, from which small metal porpoises and anchors hung down, with every step he took, nay, with every gesture he made. But Sir Greeley Donaldson delivered from a loftier eminence still, quite literally for he was extremely tall, like some great wading bird, a species of heron encountered only in remote parts but not so shy of humans that he refrained from exhibiting his natural powers. And truly the baronet did have a habit of suddenly lowering his head on its long neck as if he’d just spied a fish way below him and must gulp it up quickly. His height apart, he was very much his son’s father, clearly a sportsman, of a physique surpassing most middle-aged men’s, his complexion weathered enough to suggest that recently, his deals done and his estate running to his command, he had been relaxing on board some yacht to receive sunshine from the sea and reflections on the waves.

  “I am come among you,” he told us, “as one who, while he rarely has time for music himself, greatly values its importance in the lives of others.” On this last word he made another of his strange pouncing movements of the head as if he’d seen, somewhere in the very row in which I was sitting, a fleetly moving salmon-trout. “Those who have more hours to spare than I, alas, have,” he went on, somewhat belaboring his point, “will doubtless find much enjoyment in years to come listening here to sweet strains from the incomparable Invicta Orchestra. But never let us forget the purpose of music.” I had not known music had a purpose and shuffled in my hard, uncomfortable seat to find out what it was. I was soon to be left in no doubt. “Its purpose is, I will venture to say, a simple one. To strengthen the spirit. To oversee the banishment from the common mind of all its usual dross, of all that is base and demeaning, all that is impure and ignoble, sybaritic and idle, or even”—and here I was quite sure that Barton Cunningham and I were the targets of the arrows of his eyes—“downright foolish! Music can, and should, lift you up, so that you can discard what is worst and weakest in you, and, thus cleansed, become nobler subjects of Her Britannic Majesty, and more diligent servants of the Lord our God.”

  Heavens, I thought, a bit taken aback, while Barton whispered to me: “He says ‘you,’ doesn’t he? Doesn’t put himself in the category of the lowly rest of us.”

  “Therefore,” continued Sir Greeley, “it is positively the discharging of a duty”—and he briefly surveyed us all as if defying us to deny that it was this—“to declare the bandstand in Dengate’s Royal Gardens . . . open!”

  The sycophantic and, to my mind, disproportionate applause that followed was broken into by the mayor stepping into the stand’s gap between the pillars from which Sir Greeley had been addressing us, and indicating that he now desired to mount the extemporized dais and address the crowd himself. Clearly the opening of the Bandstand had not been yet made. The sound of chains rattling thus preceded the mayor’s own speech, which, unlike the baronet’s, demanded the regular consultation of notes. Mr. Barley’s Kentish vowels, mild as they were, contrasted only too obviously, as far as most members of the audience were concerned, with Sir Greeley’s patrician sounds, high-pitched yet virile, slow yet energetic.

  The mayor—as befitted his position—was pleased to give us a history of Dengate from the Celtic tribes who apparently had made it a most delightful and thriving port “even before the Romans were so bold as to cross the Channel,” through the Dark Ages—“but who can say they were dark? I have no doubt Dengaters then were as full of light as they are now!”—right through to our own times, stopping once he’d reached these only
too frequently at the various mayoralties he had known before his own.

  “Who can forget dear John Bannerman?” he apostrophized, “with his three bull-terriers and his meerschaum pipe and his habit of whistling ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ whenever bothersome arithmetical details were mentioned. Or Samuel Etherington-Burgess.”

  “Not Samuel Etherington-Burgess!” groaned Barton but still maintaining his whisper. “If ever there was a crashing bore, it was him!”

  “Samuel, bless him, could match any event, be it ever so humble, with a quotation from Shakespeare. And so, in declaring as I officially do, our bandstand well and truly open”—and he turned clinkingly ’round to Sir Greeley to give him a look that was at once reproachful and gloating—“and seeing the Invicta players ready to perform for us”—and here he smiled as he delivered the orchestra’s name as one, who unlike Somebody Present, had got it right first time—“I will emulate old Samuel and remind you of the Bard’s immortal words: ‘If music be the food of love play on!’”

  And while these overfamiliar words were being uttered, I turned my head to observe Mrs. Fuller, looking her most Grecian, seated beside Will several rows in front of me. There was an odd but unmistakable air of pride about her.

  But perhaps it was pride in Dengate itself. Its girls and women looked lovely in their dresses, and their men-folk so pleased to be with them.

  And Barton said to me: “I have told you myself, and I know Lucinda Hough has told you, too, Martin, how often I get longings for a more adventurous life—to go to Bengal as my old man did—but when something as damned nice as this afternoon happens, then I want to stay put.”

  Tragically, as it turned out, he did not. Barton Cunningham died of fever, holding down a petty post in Bengal, without any of his nearest to hand to offer him the last comforts. I hate, deeply hate, thinking about this. For I have to record that, by the time he left Dengate, we had drawn very close, for reasons that will be apparent at the end of this chapter.