“They got her,” he observed suddenly to Mary.
“Got what?” Mary asked.
“Her as did the slitting,” he said. “The saucy piece.”
Mrs Maggs looked up dreamily. “It’s a pity they don’t hang them open nowadays. It was an example like. I seen a hanging just before Henry there was born. They was selling the story of it in the street, and the murderer asked if he could have one to look over. He didn’t seem satisfied with it, by his looks. Maybe they left something out or maybe he was just thinking of his end. Afterwards, we went to see a play they was giving, with dolls on wires. Like a Punch and Judy, but the dolls was nearly lifesize, and they acted the murder. It was a sight. You saw him come into the room and put his hands under the clothes. Some jump-up Janes laughed at that and my husband spoke very sharply to them, being not a man to put up with lightness. And then you saw him do her in, and the blood running over the floor. Out of a Bladder, they say. Very full it must have been. After that we went home and had a supper of stewed eels my husband bought off a stall near the hanging. Excessively fond of stewed eels, my husband was. I’ve sometimes thought that’s why Henry here turned out so thin.”
“Husband alive?” the cabman asked.
“Dead,” said Mrs Maggs. “He was a sporting gentleman. He caught cold in the rain shuffling the cards for gentlemen to pick the Queen at Kempton. His feet soaked up the wet and it got into his stomach and he went off like a roast chestnut, breathing hot and sizzling.”
“Oh,” said Mary, “I thought that was your husband with the red hair.” She felt a delicacy about associating Mrs Maggs with warts.
“Brothers,” Mrs Maggs said. “They have their own ways of spending the evening. How old are you, my dear?”
Mary told her. “Short for your age,” was Mrs Maggs’s comment.
“What d’you expect,” said the cabman. “Rushing about the streets all night.”
Mary felt that her dignity and her mother’s dignity was assailed. She got up from the table and said politely: “Thank you for my supper. It tasted nicer than it looked. I’m afraid I must be going now. Good night, Mrs Maggs.”
“No offence meant,” the cabman said earnestly. “Fair’s fair and you an’t one to bear malice. I had a sister once of the name of Mary. Kind she was, too kind, you might say. She done herself in by kindness and wanting every one to enjoy themselves. Leads to multiplication and gossip.”
“You’d better stay here,” Mrs Maggs urged her. “Henry’s going out for a walk, aren’t you, Henry? There won’t be anyone here but me.”
The cabman, taking the remark as a hint, rose to go. He shook Mary’s hand with something as near fervour as his temperament permitted. “Everything forgotten and forgiven?” he asked urgently. Mary assured him that she would remember him kindly, but she felt less friendless now in the company of Mrs. Maggs and saw him depart without regret. The thin little boy made himself ready to go out and Mary looked wistfully at Mrs Maggs. Presently he asked her to come with him. She accepted joyfully, and they set off down Kennington Road, the thin little boy sniffing like Miss Flora, and with the air of a person regretting a generous impulse. At the end of the road they overtook the cabman, sitting in a silent fit on his box. He offered to drive them anywhere in reason, and the thin boy said he wanted to go to London Bridge. The cabman made no bones about that: he opened the door, and the children climbed inside.
“Give my compliments to your mother,” he admonished Henry, as he was helping them out again. “I an’t a marrying man, but if I was she would have first pick. I never tasted better fish.”
Standing on London Bridge Mary suffered the worst homesickness she had known. The Pool was crowded with sailing ships, moored almost stem to stern in two lines of two or three ships abreast. A channel kept open in mid-river was alive wth paddle-steamers, and between the sailing ships and the banks of the river skiffs and wherries splashed and darted between barges that lay like, shadows on the tainted water. Henry gazed on the scene with glistening eyes and a cataract of sniffs.
“How you can do that, I don’t know,” Mary observed. “The smell is awful.”
In the warm evening air, the river, being little better than an open sewer, gave off a symphony of smells.
“I’m going to be a shipmaker,” Henry said obliviously.
“I don’t suppose,” Mary murmured, “that you ever heard of cylinders and pressure in your life.”
Farther down the river and below the bridge scattered lights came out, and in the Pool itself the water broke them into a myriad pieces before flinging them back against the flanks of the ships. As far as Mary’s eye could see, masts pierced the yellow dusk, as if the whole world had poured its ships into the Thames, a lavish mother shaking gifts and more gifts into a lap already full. Mary clasped her hands and looked kindly at Henry. He was a vulgar little boy, but linked with her in a community of desire. For some reason, she did not feel inclined to tell him so. They made their way home through a black and odorous labyrinth. It was nearly midnight when they reached Endymion Road, and Mary’s mother was not there. Mrs Maggs’s brothers were at home, and Mrs Maggs gave Mary a mug of ale, which she found slightly acrid but comforting. The room was warm and the face of the red-haired man changed places with that of his warty brother until Mary supposed they were dolls in a puppet-show. After that she was not surprised at the abrupt appearance of a minute creature called Sylvia Maud, in a soiled ballet skirt, with the body of a child of eight and a mouth full of quips and fancies at which Mary laughed uproariously, slapping her thighs like Mark Henry. Sylvia Maud danced. Her shoulders were white china eggs: she stood on the toes of one foot, with the other leg stretched straight out from her body: she bent leg and head until the back of one met the back of the other. She began to turn so quickly that she became an incandescent globe, spinning on a quivering jet of light. The lamplit room was a background against which, for a fraction of time, essential grace postured and poised. After that Mary gave an imitation of Miss Flora and another of her father and the checked legs. These were received with generous applause, and the red-haired man invited Mary to sit on his knee. She was profoundly offended and her voice struck chill to his expansive heart: he sat down and looked apologetically into an empty glass. He did not know what he had done that called for apology but he felt uncomfortable.
After thus quelling Mrs Maggs’s brother, Mary withdrew to her room and began to long for Charlotte to come home. When Charlotte did come she had fallen asleep. Rousing as her mother moved about the room, she sat up. Charlotte, dishevelled and colourless, made no comment when Mary, who trusted Mrs Maggs but not Mrs Maggs’s brother, slipped out of bed and dragged the box across the door. Charlotte blew out the candle and got into bed. Coming close to her, Mary hugged her cold inert body, and fell asleep before Charlotte had given a sign that she felt the little girl’s anxious caresses. . . .
4
The next day began a fevered week. Charlotte took Mary all over London. They visited gardens, churchyards, theatres, shops, statues, churches, canals, railway stations, arcades and fortune-tellers. They did not return to Endymion Road before midnight. Mary had taken charge of the envelope full of notes, but Charlotte’s demands on it were so frequent, for hats, gowns, trinkets and sibyls, that it shrank with alarming rapidity.
Often Charlotte forgot meal-times, and Mary was hungry as well as tired. She became so tired that she cried, and having started to cry could not stop. She cried in shops, in omnibuses and as they walked through the streets. Charlotte remonstrated with her, and Mary made efforts to control the tears that poured from her eyes and splashed on the white collar of her jacket. She was so engaged one afternoon in the Green Park, when a familiar voice spoke in her ear and she looked up, her tears suddenly arrested, into a face she knew as well as her father’s.
It was Archie Roxby’s face, and more like a hake than his kindly nature warranted. He had been Richard Hansyke’s friend at Oxford, and remained his friend, in spite of his d
isapproval of Hansyke as an inveterate rake. His land touched Hansyke’s and was richer, of far greater extent, and more neglected, since there were five Roxby brothers, and all but the youngest of them lived on some part of it, and all detested agriculture. They claimed Hanoverian descent. Possibly they flattered themselves grossly, but Archie Roxby’s face was actually that of an attenuated and degutted George I. He stooped over Charlotte’s hand and asked how he could serve her. Charlotte poured out a Stygian flood of trouble, which he breasted gravely, glancing aside where, under the drooping brim of Mary’s hat, he could see a firm white chin and a trembling mouth. He was cautious and polite. He advised Charlotte to go back to Danesacre at once, offering to provide money for the journey.
“I go north,” he said, “myself. To-morrow, and I should be happy to accompany you.”
Charlotte’s voice shook. She wore an air of defeat. “I have written to my brother, Mark Henry Garton, for money. If it does not come to-morrow, we will join you.”
He left her, and Mary began a fervent silent prayer that Mark Henry would behave according to his nature. He did. The morning brought nothing, and Mary packed her own and Charlotte’s clothes with a joy she tried to conceal.
For Charlotte this return was a sort of death. On the journey north her spirits sank while Mary’s mounted higher. As the train drew between the hills, crossing and re-crossing the brown-flashing Danesbeck, the light died behind them like the slow shutting of a door. Even so, thought Charlotte, light and youth had withdrawn from her life, and the long journey she had made, marked by so many stages, of which one and a strange one was a weaver’s cottage, had entered on its last stretch.
At Danesacre, in Harbour Street, outside the walls of Mark Henry’s garden, Richard Hansyke had a carriage ready, with Miss Flora already inside. He took Mary from Charlotte’s arms, that clung to the little girl as if she had never before known what it was to lose her, and carried her, weeping and calling for her mother, to Hansyke Manor, without letting her set foot in her uncle’s house, and without speaking to her except to tell her to obey Miss Flora and keep out of his way as much as possible.
“You’re not a little girl now,” he said. “You’re a young lady.” He frowned, not unkindly, at the dejected girl. “You’ll be fourteen in two days. You need different clothes. My good woman, get the girl decently clad, and have her hair dressed. A savage. . . ” He paused, and spoke reassuringly. “You’ll forget your unfortunate adventure, Mary. You don’t want to tell me anything about it? No?” He sighed with relief. “I was afraid you might want to confess you’d been ruined or found your soul. Either would be tedious. It isn’t that I’m not temperately fond of you, Mary. I notice a good many signs of parental self-indulgence nowadays. I myself went to Eton in petticoats. I hardly knew my parents and they certainly did not trouble me with affection. I believe that’s the right method and ought to be extended to daughters. England will go to the devil if this softness spreads. . . .”
5
London remained with Mary as the memory of a sprawling confusion that was at first totally unrelated to the life of decent people. Endymion Road was a nightmare. She tried to forget it, but it returned to her again and again until the windy spaces of Roxborough moor were filled with a fermenting life that mocked her loneliness. Mary had changed. She fretted for her mother, but Charlotte could not have satisfied her daughter’s new impatience. The vision of the Pool, as she had seen it, cradling the trade of the world, worked like a fever on her brain. Her childish wish to build ships became something real, something almost grim, beating on her mind like a hammer, like the carpenters’ hammers that sent a shiver and a murmur through the whole still body of the ship. A shiver and a murmur ran through Mary’s body when she thought of the Pool.
She was changing. She was growing up. In a vague fashion, she knew it and resented it. Her world, her simple easily-compassed world, had been invaded by Mrs Maggs, by Mrs Maggs’s brother and the afflicted Henry, by Endymion Road, by the monstrous heaving swarming life of London. Living would never be a simple and easy process again. She made spasmodic fierce attempts to pretend that it was.
One morning, obeying an impulse compounded of longing for Charlotte, dislike of growing up and fear of the future, Mary took off her new frock, and dragged the clothes she had worn in London from the camphor chest where Miss Flora had hidden them. Then, making an asthmatic noise that she fondly thought was whistling, she set off for the moor. For a time she followed a narrow stony road, cooled by the trickle of a stream, and murmurous with bees. On either side the ditches frothed with meadow-sweet. She was wearing a flounced skirt that reached just below her knees, white stockings and a short jacket with a flat boyish collar. The soft skin of her cheeks was sun-warmed and lustrous with youth, and her lips were stained purple from the brambles she picked as she walked and ate off the palm of her hand. A thick plait of hair fell over her shoulder. She tossed her head to jerk it back, and the gesture was for the solitary watcher an act of grace. He had been lying on the short turf at the side of the road, trying to memorise the beauty of the place, the feel of the sun between his shoulder-blades and the smell of the moor. It was all so lovely, to a boy of sixteen, that he was aware of it as of an almost painful pressure on his mind, and he could have cried because the world was exquisite, and he alone. He longed, the vague tumultuous longing of youth, for some one with whom to share himself. The girl walking up the steep road walked straight into the heart of that longing.
Mary saw him five minutes later than he had seen her, and halted to look at him, her hand full of the ripe berries, half-way to her mouth. She saw a boy in shabby summer clothes, grey eyes under arched brows, grave shapely face, short lips parted in a faint smile. Shy, struck so with new shyness that she lost the power of motion, she looked at him in silence, while the miracle of transubstantiation was completed, from the raising of the Host to the blessing of the worshippers, and the boy-girl, short for her fourteen years, not even dressed as befitted them, became young Mary Hansyke looking at her first lover.
She murmured some commonplace about the morning and glanced at the dripping purple fruit in the palm of her hand. A thick drop oozed between her fingers. She said: “Oh, bother,” and let the crushed berries fall to the ground. The boy would have liked to kiss the stained palm. He would have liked to say: “You’re lovely, I love you.” Instead of that, he told her his name, Gerry Hardman, that he was going up to Oxford next year, that he was walking for amusement and had come to Roxborough by a most fortunate accident.
“Fortunate because I met you,” he said. Mary accepted this declaration with a crow of mirth, which made him blush.
“Because you never saw me until this moment,” she explained, pleading with him to see that it was comic. “Forgive me.” The curves of her mouth drew him to irresistible imitation, and they both laughed. After that, they strolled up the road, filled with a tranquil happiness, and emerging on the open moor, sat down there, with backs turned to Roxborough. Mary took off her wide drooping hat to fan her cheeks. She told him about Danesacre and Charlotte and Miss Flora, and discovered that she had lived her life only in order to tell him about it. He frowned over the story of Mrs Maggs’s brother and she stopped on a pang of dismay.
“You don’t like that?” she asked him, anxiously, waiting for him to speak and dreading what he would say.
He was silent for a moment, with dark brows drawn together in sensitive displeasure. Then, turning his head, he smiled at her very sweetly.
“Everything you do is right,” he said. “Promise always to tell me about it.”
Mary promised with relief, and repeated Mrs Maggs’s story of the hanging. Gerry shouted with mirth, nursing his head in his hands. “You dear,” he said. “You dear sweet girl. To know how comic that is. Weren’t you frightened? Weren’t you frightened in that dreadful bedroom?”
“I was afraid of Mrs Maggs’s brother. Not much. Just a little.” She recalled the childish fear of another girl with wonder.
“Poor baby,” he said, and touched her hand. The touch sent a delicious unexpected shudder through him, and through her. Mary’s bramble-stained mouth, warm, and ripened in an hour of sun, quivered between laughter and constraint. Gerry trembled and swung towards her, but not to touch her again, only to know that she trembled too and to savour exquisite joy in his knowledge. Not in his life again would he know so bright a joy, unmixed with any of the fears, greeds and remembered hurts that mar all moments except this one of first enchantment. It was for him one of those moments of exaltation when body and mind know a delight born of neither, pure delight, the merging of the senses in an emotion transcending sense. The balance of his soul was suspended between grief and ecstasy: a word would plunge him into either.
“I must go,” Mary said, suddenly afraid of interruption.
“Oh, don’t go. Suppose I lose you, after finding you like this.”
“I must. I must.” She stood up and unconsciously they drew closer. Neither of them realised that they had been making love to each other with the headlong inconsequent quality of a dream, but both were dismayed at the prospect of parting.
“Listen,” Gerry murmured, “I must be in Danesacre to-day to meet my father. We stay the night there. I’ll come back to-night.”
“You can’t,” Mary faltered. “It’s nearly twenty miles as the crow flies.”
“I’ll ride. I’ll be here as soon after eleven as I can. You’ll see me? Say you will.”
Mary’s eyes met his with steadfast candour. “I’ll come to the lane below the house. Look, I’ll show you. That is our house. Below it, where the hill road turns off to the village, the lane begins. There’s a gate. I’ll come.”
The Lovely Ship Page 6