“What’s this, have you run away?” he asked when he was close enough not to shout. He had his key out to open the door.
“I didn’t want to bring it all upstairs,” she said.
Now that she’d come to the point, she did not know how to broach the subject.
He forestalled her. “Don’t worry, I’m in work again. I went cap in hand to Belliveau at the yards and he took me back, working nights. I’m on my feet again, you can count on that.”
She flushed. “Did you think— I was not critical of you, only a bit worried.”
“I know,” he said. “I was angry, in a slump, you know how that is. But I have pulled on my bootstraps and I am on my way up again.”
They stood there on the stoop, silent for a moment.
Putting his key into his pocket again, he said, as if it was no matter, “What have you got in those cases?”
Kay looked up and down the street. No helpful people, no stray dogs. Better come out with it. “I had an idea,” she said.
Aren cocked his head and looked blank, waiting.
“I thought we could go home.”
He waited. Giving her nothing.
“To your real home, I mean.”
He looked up to check her face then.
“I have berths for us on the Constellation, for New Zealand, sailing at seven.”
He laughed. “The Constellation! I’ve just been victualling her.”
Then he was silent.
She couldn’t breathe. She did not know what would work to persuade him.
“It’s the best thing—the only thing that makes sense!” she said in a rush. “I’ve been thinking and thinking—it’s no good for you here, there’s nothing—”
She stopped herself. She could not interpret his face. She could not translate it.
After a minute, she said, “Well, anyway, I thought we could just go back.”
He stood looking up Gottingen Street, grey and damp. Black ooze running down one gutter, rain beginning overhead. He was still the younger brother, she thought. He would be ruled by her.
“I don’t know what Belliveau will have to say about me running out on him again,” he said at last.
* * *
—
Leaving the big suitcase at the bottom of the stairs, Kay went up to help Aren pack. There was not much to stow in his sea-chest. When the little room was empty, Aren looked around it. “I did not like it here,” he said.
“I am glad to be back on our travels,” Kay said, voicing her inmost thought.
A voice came scrawling up the stairs, calling Aaaaaaaa-ren! in red ink. That girl, the one with the bruised mouth and the matted red hair.
Aren locked the door of the room. “Landlady has a skeleton key,” he said, and slid the key under the door. “Why don’t you wait here for a minute until I go talk to Merissa?”
She was glad to let him go down alone, although ashamed of her cowardice. He set the sea-chest on his shoulder and trotted down the stairs, very fit still, though still shadowed under the eyes from rough living.
In a minute Kay heard him talking down below. She could not make out the words. There was a pause, and a longer pause, and then a burst of indeterminate screaming and thumping. She peeped over the balustrade, careful not to be seen.
“You scum-bucket!” the girl shouted. That was the intelligible part; the rest was lost in a long wail and in the whirling of her hands pounding on every part of Aren she could reach. “You can’t go! You can’t!” Fury breaking outward in every direction, her hard shoes kicking at the stairs and the banisters, and from the sounds of it connecting with Aren’s legs once or twice. He held her off at arm’s length and tried to set the sea-chest on the step, but she windmilled in again, crying, “No! No! No! You are a pig! I hate you! You must not go! You can’t!”
Aren got the sea-chest down and put his arms around her, his dark hair mixing with her red locks, and held her, whispering in her ear, holding her tighter when she struggled to get free. Kay crept down one flight of stairs while they were occupied, and looked again over the railing.
The girl was crying now, her body sagging in Aren’s arms. Her face tilted upward in exaggerated mourning, eyes searching, brows arced up in the centre like a tragedy mask. Kay pulled her head back.
For the best, she thought.
* * *
—
Kay had let the cab go hours ago, and the suitcase, valise and sea-chest were too much to manage on foot. Aren stopped a kid running along the road and asked him to find them a cart. He gave the boy a dime and Kay said that was the last they’d see of that, but soon enough a dray cart turned up the street and the driver whistled down to ask if it was them that needed a lift. At the docks, Aren helped her jump down from the cart and snagged a porter to take the suitcase and the valise, showing him the tags: “For Ward, K. Ward!”
Kay expected him to follow the porter along with her, but he shouldered his sea-chest once again.
“You made a mistake there,” he said matter-of-factly. He was not scolding her. “I am not cabin material, even on a tramp. I’ll find Hilton and get that straightened out.”
“I meant to do it,” Kay said. “I won’t have you in steerage.”
“No such thing on a tramp, only first and second—and anyhow, that’s not what I mean. I’ll find myself a job and we’ll save the price.”
“No!”
“Yes!” he said, aping her tone. “This time, it is you who doesn’t know what is right.”
She wanted to stamp her foot, for all the good that would do. “Don’t you see? It’s important.”
“It might be important for you, but for my sake, this will be better.”
He would not change his mind when in that mood. She breathed out through her nose and said, “If you must, you must.”
“Indeed, I must.”
He kissed her cheek and went off through the crowd, back toward the Hilton office, and she was left to make her own way through the embarkation shed.
At the counter, two nicely dressed girls laughed with each other, filling out their embarkation forms opposite Kay. One dark, one very fair, of the same height and slenderness, in the same elegant clothing. Under OCCUPATION, after some repartee, they put Spinster, so Kay did too. She had no occupation and it did not seem to her that she ever would.
Pride, she had that. So she did not simper at the girls or try to be friends with them. Besides, she had a friend, she had a brother. And she had Roddy too—she would write him a postcard now, before she forgot. In the waiting room, she chose one with the Citadel on it, he would like that.
We sail this evening. I will miss you and I promise to write each week.
Give Thea my love when it seems like good timing. don’t forget to write to me, too! always your loving Kay
Then, with more difficulty, she composed a telegram to Thea. It would not be delivered till the morning, when Jerry Melanson’s second cousin rode out on his bicycle from the telegraph office.
I AM SORRY BUT I HAVE GONE TO TAKE AREN BACK TO HIS HOME. HE IS TOO SAD HERE.
I WILL WRITE FROM NEW ZEALAND. WE SAIL THIS EVENING. LOVE FROM KAY.
Thirty-two words! It cost her almost a dollar to send.
Then, since she was being so practical, she sent a cable to Mr. Brimner—this one much shorter, since the fee to Tonga was formidable. As if it cost any more to beam around the seas—well, perhaps it did have to go from shore to shore more times, or whatever the cable wires did. She sent the cable to “English Church, Ha‘ano,” hoping that it would reach him. Knowing that it must be read by many other eyes than his, she was careful what she said. Ten words only:
COMING TONGA. WILL WRITE FROM NZ. SAILING TONIGHT. LOVE KAY.
That was all right. All her necessary tasks completed, she bent to pick up her— Oh! the
porter had taken the valise and the case. Well then. Off she was.
Going up the gangplank, she had the loveliest tremble in her middle, the subtle, excitable apprehension of a journey long desired.
* * *
—
Kay’s cabin suited her very well. It was on the promenade deck and had a proper window that opened, not a port, which she would have had to beg the steward to open for her, and which would most times be denied in case of heavy water. She opened the window at once, and let in the soft, faintly stinking harbour air.
It was a single, with one fixed bunk that functioned as a sofa during the day, but she needed no more. Built-in shelves with leather fittings to hold books and toiletries secure; there was a tiny washbasin closet, with a dinky little tap. Cold water only, but she was perfectly happy to wash her face in cold water. She unpacked her case and her valise while the ship’s engines changed their note and began to thrum, thrum, in a purposeful way, and by the time the big vessel eased away from the dock (to a very few cheers from dockside friends) she was finished, and sitting calmly on her sofa like an old hand when the steward knocked to inform her that she was down for the first seating, and would be at the captain’s table. That arrangement must be courtesy of Captain Hilton, and due to her long friendship with Marion. She would send Marion a card too, to let her know how kind her father had been.
The dining room was low-ceilinged but long, and ringed with mirrors. The radio played quiet music in one corner, where the carpet had been taken up to provide a tiny dance floor. One couple was already seated at the head table: a slight naval man and his companion, a middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-coloured woman in a serviceable navy satin dress, chosen to look well with a uniform beside it.
As Kay was finding her name card, the captain came to the table and introduced himself. “Captain Richard Bathurst—I sailed with your brother a time or two in our younger days.”
Kay said she knew Francis would be very happy to hear that, and the captain said he had already sent a message through “internal channels” (which she supposed to mean by way of Captain Hilton) that he was happy to have aboard any relative of Grant’s, and he heard that they had his son as well, down in the engine rooms, and that was a very good thing too. “A very good thing,” he repeated, glowering at Kay as if she had argued.
She nodded, not knowing what to say.
“Fellow down there is my first lieutenant, Mr. Johns, and that’s his wife, of course.”
Mr. and Mrs. Johns gave Kay a nod, and both would have spoken except that they were interrupted by the arrival of the two girls from the embarkation shed, who were introduced by Mr. Johns as Elizabeth Spiers and Julia Speedwell.
Elsie, as she said to call her, was writing an article about travelling by tramp steamer; Julia was sailing along as her companion and support. Julia was engaged to be married. Elsie said this was her last hurrah as a free woman. That was a joke, but they both looked very well off, and likely the rest of their lives would be taken up with clothes and children and ministering to their husbands, helping them in their careers by entertaining well in large, high-ceilinged rooms. Marion Hilton would be in their club. They were both very pretty and their shoes were simply beautiful.
Elsie and Julia pretended to be over-awed by Captain Bathurst, but Kay had met men of his ilk in various harbours, and did not find him such a stern example of the genus. He struck her as having a sense of humour—and if he knew anything about Aren’s origin, he had some kindness as well.
The first lieutenant, Mr. Johns, was an accommodating man who clearly liked the ladies; his wife was along on the voyage for the third time. Julia asked if Mr. Johns needed minding, and Mrs. Johns did not find that amusing. She told the girls many interesting things over supper. Kay recognized this desire to inform, and resolved to squelch it in herself.
Mrs. Johns had never been squelched—her mild colouring was deceptive. “You’d be astonished to know, Miss Spiers, Miss Speedwell, how much has crept into our language from the seafaring man! For instance, you know that by means into the wind, while large means with the wind—therefore, by and large includes all possible situations—as in, the Constellation handles well both by and large. Is that not just fascinating?” Mrs. Johns waved her vichyssoise spoon to indicate that she had more bons mots to impart and would continue.
Her husband leapt in before her: “Or groggy—that’s referring to having drunk too much grog, you know!”
The captain suddenly commanded his first lieutenant to splice the main brace! Kay laughed, knowing what that meant: it was the order to send out an extra issue of grog. Mr. Johns passed the wine bottle down the table, but Captain Bathurst had already hailed a waiter.
Mrs. Johns did not pause in her lecture. “When we say hand over fist, you know, that’s as a sailor climbs the shrouds, hand over hand, steadily upwards.”
Elsie had taken out a notebook and was scribbling on the narrow pages.
“And here’s another: when you do a thing handsomely, although we don’t use that as we once did, that’s slowly, you know, as if you was hauling in a line. Hand by hand, do you see? Steady and even.”
Dinner was four courses. With Mrs. Johns, it was not unlike an evening with the Krito-sophians.
* * *
—
Aren came to her cabin door at midnight and gave their secret knock: pompholugo paphlasma. She had not yet settled for the night—she had only reorganized her clothes in the locker and the fitted drawers, and rearranged her books on the shelf, and plumped the cushion on the bunk two or three times. Then she sat at peace in the loved sensation of smooth motion over yielding, buoying, deep, eternally swaying ocean. How did anyone ever live on land?
Aren was black with oil already and would not sit on the bed—he’d brought a scrap of matting that he set on the carpet and sat upon cross-legged. “I’m a freezer-greaser,” he told her, boasting. “Oiling the engines for the refrigerators, not a bad gig.”
“I will feed you extras from the dining room.” She drew out her dinner haul, shanghaied in a napkin: a soft bun filled with chicken salad and two lemon cakes.
“I’ve got the run of the refrigerators—I’ll be living on ice cream,” he said, but he ate the bun and one of the cakes, to please her. He left the other on her bedside table. “Save this one for your night lunch.”
She told him about Elsie and Julia from the embarkation shed, and what the captain had said, and the first lieutenant’s prosy wife’s pronouncements; he told her nothing at all, except that he had a comfortable bunk and trim arrangements. “The crew’s all right, so far,” he said. “Nobody we know, but many who knew the Morning Light, and Francis. I’m in solid on the strength of my connexions.”
“Do you have anything to read down there?”
He laughed at that. “Whenever there’s light, I’ll be working, and when it’s dark, I’ll sleep, and if the engineer ever gives me a moment off, I’ll find a lifeboat, like Seaton.”
Kay felt sick that she was in this cozy room and he stuck below in the black heat of the engines.
Seeing her frown, he laughed again. “I don’t like to laze about,” he said. “Anyway, it’s no more than most people do every day all over the world, and I can think, can’t I?”
“Does the engineer know—” No, she could not ask that, whether he’d mentioned that he had a weak chest.
Aren frowned. “You’re not going to be boring, are you?”
She shook her head.
He jumped to his feet. “All right, let me wash my face and I’ll find my bunk, and see you when I can,” he said. He splashed some water into the steel bowl from the little tap. “All the modern conveniences!”
She had a towel ready, but he wiped his sleeve across his face.
“Mustn’t be too dainty down below, or the fellows will rag me,” he said, like Roddy would, and was out the door and gone.
The engine noise was audible, here in the cabin, a constant burr to rest your mind against. And Aren would be down there keeping the long screw going through the swell. Or at least, keeping the refrigerators cool. She had never been on a ship with a refrigeration room. Maybe sometime he could take her down to see. She’d been awake for such a long time, it seemed like a very great effort to take off her dress and hang it up and find her nightdress, and she did not even bother to wash her face but lay down and wept for her dear dog Pilot, who had died so short a time ago and whom she missed especially here at sea. Then she ate her midnight cake.
* * *
—
At first light, Aren found her at the railing of the promenade deck, and motioned her to follow. He led her up a narrow stair to the weather deck, and gave a quick yank on one of the ropes holding the canvas cover on the second starboard lifeboat, so that it folded back halfway. He handed her up and jumped in after, and there they sat, playing Seaton, enjoying the salt wind and the air.
“Passenger boats are strange,” Aren said. “The work is all done hole-and-corner, in the hope that no one will see how hard they work, below.”
“It makes me uncomfortable,” Kay said. “Though I know that is absurd—I’ve been a passenger all my life.”
“Now you have reached the acme of your profession.” He settled into the curve of the prow and bit into one of the apples she’d brought from her cabin, stored up from dinner.
She wondered if he was glad to be going on this journey, but did not want to ask. “I am glad to be here,” she said instead.
“I am sorry for Merissa Peck,” he said.
Kay had almost managed to forget her. Hungry again, she took a bite of the other apple.
“But it would not have been kind to take her so far away, in uncertain circumstances,” Aren said, when he was halfway through his apple.
“I did not see her at her best.”
“If you’d met her in Tonga or in Fiji, you would think her very fine and strong-minded. She’s like you, except poor.”
The Difference Page 29