“So soft and young and so mercenary,” Charles murmured.
“It’s the Garton stock,” James said.
Mary bit back her impatient anger and began again. In the end, because her will and her desires were fiercer and even less scrupulous than theirs, she got her way. She knew that she was behaving as no Roxby or Hansyke would have behaved, and the thought pleased her. “I’ll be all Garton,” she said to herself. “I’ll fight over a ha’penny if it’s mine.” Mild Sarah turned against her and her reproaches hurt Mary. “I’m not heartless,” she said. “I forgave Archie long ago for what he did to me, and I loved George. It’s strange how every person I’ve accepted as part of my life has been taken from me in a few months, just as though I were meant to start now afresh, without help or hindrance. I dare say it’s a good thing they went before I’d grown to depend on them.” She remembered Wagener and tears filled her eyes because he had died alone in the middle of the night and because she could no longer go to him with her wild chatter and be comforted and helped by his whimsical melancholy wit. She tried to appease George’s wife, but gathering her bereaved animals round her, the poor lady withdrew, deeply offended, to a cottage in a distant corner of the estate. Mary let her go. She saw the settlement to its lingering conclusion and then took the two-year-old Richard and went to Danesacre, driving there in the Roxby barouche, all her possessions and his in one small box of red leather studded with nails.
2
As she entered the house above the Yard, looking very small, very thin and young, with Richard walking manfully beside her in his short petticoats, she thought: “I’m coming home.” Mark Henry’s house, as large as any ship-owner’s house in Danesacre, was yet less than a quarter the size of Roxby. It was grey and square, and it had seen so many fine ships sail away from under its very walls that something of the dignity and mystery of the sea invested it. The life of the harbour came up to its windows. Every room had its models of full-rigged sailing ships, eternally gliding over a green plaster sea. The walls of Mark Henry’s own office, between the dining-room and the front door, were covered with prints, plans, specifications and a huge painting of the Garton Iron Works, which the artist had seen fantastically dark and solid under a menacing sky. A boy ran continually between this room and the offices of the Garton Line on the pier. He was running out as Mary approached, and held the door open for her.
Mark Henry, looking up to curse the boy for loitering, was pleased to see her. He reduced Richard to tears of mirth by antics that wrought havoc among the papers on the table, and asked Mary if she had come to stay, and hoped she had. Mary picked Richard up and seated him firmly in a chair.
“I’ve come to stay if you’ll let me work for you,” she said bluntly. “I asked you that before and you laughed at me. I’m eighteen now, but that’s not too old to begin. I’m your nearest living relative except my mother, and if I’d been a boy you wouldn’t have hesitated. I’m as strong as any boy. I’m quick at learning—I got that from you—and I’ll work like a slave.” Mary broke off and crossed the room quickly to lean on Mark Henry’s breast and put her arms round his neck with unconscious coquetry. “Please, please listen to me. Try me for a year and if I’m no good turn me out. No, don’t say no. I swear I’ll not make a fool of myself. You don’t care what people think. Please have me.”
She kissed him eagerly, pressing her smooth young mouth against his cheeks. “You will.”
Mark Henry gave a grunt of laughter.
“Damned if I won’t,” he said. “I’ll show those Lings. Had the impudence to tell me I’m not the man I was. As near as be damned said I was a fool to talk of building iron wool ships. To tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about! I’ll tell you, Mary, it’s iron or nothing nowadays. Wood’s doomed. We’ve built our last wooden boat. We’ve almost built our last sailing ship, whatever that doddering old fool Smithson likes to do. Ay, it’s a pity. There’s nowt so bonny as the Mary Gray will ever go out from here again, Mary. She’s badly strained this trip and her repair bill goes up and up. I know what I’m talking about, and I never did a better day’s work than when I bought young Gossop’s engine works, poor green fool. We’ll show ’em, Mary, eh? I always disliked those Lings. You behave yourself and we’ll play such a trick on them.”
There was a knock on the door and Rupert Ling stood on the threshold. He had become a dark handsome youngster: his eyes examined Mary with amusement and a glint of mockery.
“Here’s your Cousin Mary come to work in the firm with you,” Mark Henry said gleefully. “Don’t you come bothering me this morning. She’s starting at once and I’m training her.”
Richard set up a resentful yell.
“Is the brat coming in, too?” Rupert asked ironically, and Mary swept up the crying child and carried him away. She handed him to a girl to look after, and his protesting wails followed her until she shut the door of Mark Henry’s room on them. When, at the end of her first day’s work, she went to put him to bed, he suffered her in a reproachful silence. . . .
3
The story of the next ten years of Mary Roxby’s life is amazingly difficult to tell. It was not only troubled in itself but set in years so heavy with change and presage that inevitably Mary’s decade of struggle becomes at times nothing but a shadow of greater events, the faint echo of a thunder that was rolling across the world. When it begins, the country is alternately thrilling and shivering at the prospect of the third Napoleon’s landing. Mark Henry Garton, buttoned into a tunic that horribly constrains him, is marching his Volunteers out of the town to manoeuvres on the moor. The Secretary for War is a school comrade of Mark Henry’s and he comes down to speak to the raw bands and to sit up until breakfast time discussing Mark Henry’s French brandy and the immediacy of the French invasion, on which he pledges his head. In the same year, a scientist entirely unknown to Mark Henry and Mary deals such a blow at the old tree of the Established Church that every hollowness and rottenness in it is gradully exposed, and the trunk begins the imperceptible crumbling that Mary sees accomplished. The Americans quarrel murderously and one of Mark Henry’s last acts is to seize himself a fat profit out of their brotherly hate. The Prince Consort dies, thus putting off the Teutonising of England for nearly another half century. So does the last of the great Englishmen, since whom the rest are all Jews or Scotsmen. The first Atlantic cable is laid, and the year of its laying is celebrated by mob riots in Hyde Park. Mary was curiously blind to the social signs. She never saw anything in the workers’ uprisings but a shameful manifestation of human wickedness. During her third year at Danesacre, bands of haggard men, tramping over the country from Lancashire, came round the town, singing for money to send to their starving families. They sang a song of which the words, so profoundly sad and hopeless, were yet more ominous than any of the hundred clamorous cries of those fermenting years. They were the stones speaking, the walls of weavers’ hovels lent tongues, the inarticulate mutter of a misery older than the splendid industrial century, older than the old old merry England. They were the most significant sounds Mary ever heard and she was so absorbed in helping Mark Henry Garton to evade England’s official neutrality in the Civil War that she could not be said to have heard them at all. The gaunt shivering band sang in Garton’s Yard and the men took up a subscription in their caps. Mempes added a guinea and Mark Henry nothing. He cursed the starving men vehemently and shut his window against their voices. Late the same night, when the harbour was silvered over with a borrowed radiance and the lights that the little town had hung round her dark shoulders were reflected in the waters at her feet, Mary stood in the empty Yard and heard the singing. The words went to a poignant minor air, sweet and indescribably mournful:
“Oh, hard times, come again no more.
Many days have ye lingered
Around my cottage door.
Oh, hard times, come again no more.”
The thin sound was carried off by a wandering wind and Mary crept down to look at the frigate b
uilding for the Confederate Government. . . .
She worked during this time as she never worked again, in all her long life. She knew that Mark Henry Garton would turn her ruthlessly out of the firm if she proved useless. She had against her an incalculable hostility made up of the Lings’ jealousy, the shipwrights’ distrust of a woman, and the depths of her own ignorance, which everything and every one combined to expose, leaving her to fight with naked hands and wits in a world that conceded nothing to a woman except her right to be protected from it. And the law of protection for women ran only within the narrowest limits. Not that Mary worried about the state and status of other women. She was never moved by any talk of women’s rights, having a queer rooted conviction that all rights were only powers called by another name. Mark Henry’s rebuff of fifteen-year-old Mary Hansyke had bitten in. . . .
She brought to her struggle a curiously mixed equipment, a certain fastidious arrogance that belonged to another class, almost to another century, than the one with which she had thrown in her lot, and a stolid proud conviction of her value that was pure Garton. In Mark Henry she had a notable trainer and guide. He had a coarse erratic genius that flung him into grandiloquent schemes of expansion, in which only a mixture of luck and hard work saved him from disaster. He would sit up at night with her, talking and talking, flinging off suggestions, leaping in one sentence from inspired sense to the sheerest fantasy. Much of what he said, and many of the abandoned ideas he scattered so richly, dropped into Mary’s mind to bear fruit in their time. At one time he had an idea of buying a vast oil concession from the American Government, then sorely in need of money. It was a fantastic scheme as Mark Henry outlined it, and went no farther than a sheet scrawled with figures and a sketch of the monstrous fine house he would build on the yield of his first well. . . .
Another time, he conceived a sort of floating pontoon. A fleet of these was to be moored at Dover and used to bridge the Channel in the event of another French War. He went up to London in great state to lay this before the Government and came back furious at his reception.
“A young———,” he told Mary, “sat up on his beam and asked me how I was going to preserve them from rotting in the water. I said they wouldn’t be put out until they were wanted, and if his department wasn’t more than a year later getting the troops on the move, my pontoons would be all right. He said that while the ships were towing the bridge into position they’d be attacked by the French and the men might just as well be landed in the usual way. I said: Oh, all right, have it your own way, invade her by sea, and land your seasick men, not that you’ll go anywhere near the sea, and if you did you’ve got no guts to fetch up.’ And then I came away. I tell you what, Mary, this country is going to the devil faster than decent folk like you and me can hinder it, and it may go for me. I’m through. . . .”
His iron works at Middlesborough were of enormous profit to him. A share of the rich deposit of ironstone in the Cleveland hills had been Gossop’s and was his, and the pig-iron production of the Garton Iron Works went up by leaps. Curiously enough, Mark Henry took little interest in the Works. He left them in charge of a young Cornish manager called Thomas Prendergast, with George Ling under him, and only at long intervals paid them a visit that was like the descent of Lucifer on his subordinate devils. The setting was hellish enough in all conscience. . . .
At the time when Mary joined the firm, it was swinging over from wood to iron with all the impetuousness of Mark Henry’s decisions. In 1858 Carton’s Yard turned out an iron sailing ship with a registered tonnage of 691 tons. She was built for the tea trade and she beat two of the fastest American clippers of twice her tonnage in the race for delivery of the season’s teas in London. Right down through the fifties and sixties Mark Henry’s ships played an important part in the struggle with the Americans, but almost as soon as the Civil War had delivered the enemy into his hands Mark Henry began to lose interest and faith in sailing ships and to turn his whole attention to steam. During the fifties he built four steamships and engined ten more. The year after Mary joined the firm, the Yard built two iron screw-steamers with geared double engines, that he swore were more compact than anything being turned out between Danesacre and the Tyne. One was on his own account. Two years later they launched the Mary Roxby, built for a London firm, in which for the first time surface condensers were used with the compound marine engine. The boilers were made to Thomas Prendergast’s own design, of the water-tube type, remarkably efficient. Unfortunately the boiler-tubes quickly developed small erosions due to a certain chemical action of steam and soot, and Thomas Prendergast, after enduring much official criticism and an outburst from Mark Henry of unparalleled violence, set grimly to work on the necessary improvements.
During all this time Mary was absorbed in her effort, first to learn enough to oust the Lings and after that to hold what she had got. Picture her on a high stool in front of the shabby desk that had belonged to Mark Henry’s father. The monstrous folds of her skirt fall all round the stool. Her hair is brushed straight back from her grave young face, and the white collar she washes every night and sews in every morning is very worn and shabby. She is frowning over cargo lists and looking timidly towards Mark Henry to discover whether this is a morning on which he will put everything aside to help her or one when he will roar at her for a ninny and a fool. In the end she does not trouble him but glides silently away in search of the necessary information. Perhaps she meets Richard on the stairs and there is a brief, a very brief, interlude of whispers and hugs before the small boy goes on to his private enterprise and she to her endless toil.
She had a talk with John Mempes during her first months in the firm that remained with her for a long time, though afterwards she thought she had missed its significance. He had stayed late in Mark Henry’s own office to explain to her the specifications of the new steamship, and at midnight, when he rose to go, he opened the wide curving window and stood there with her, looking out over the harbour. The town, save for a few nodding lights along the pier, was asleep. They heard the watchman in the Yard moving about his brazier, and a faint smell of tar and new hemp drifted up to them.
“I’m glad you didn’t leave us,” Mary said softly.
Mempes looked down at her with ironical pleasure.
“I don’t know why I stay. Probably because I’m not sufficiently interested in anything to make a move. I don’t fit in anywhere here. I believe I could talk more easily to my grandfather—he and I would at least agree on our notions of a gentleman—than I can to my contemporaries in this place. Or to my grandson—if I had any I could name. I have a fancy that all this wealth we’re piling up—we’re going, you know, to see an expansion of trade and money and possessions wilder than Mark Henry’s wildest dreams—and the smug pleasure with which you people who are piling it for yourselves survey the process, will turn to a dust of death in my grandson’s mouth. I’ve an idea he’ll be as bored as I am, and as uninterested and as unmoved by your complacent dreams. You’re a little complacent yourself. When I look at the vision of hell Mark Henry and his friends have erected on the banks of the Tees, when I see him building his ships and scrapping them and building bigger and planning to build bigger still, with never a thought for the ultimate effects of his blind greeds, I grow first hot and then bored. Let them pile it up, and let it topple over and crush their grandsons.”
“Not Richard,” Mary said.
Mempes smiled.
“We’ll spare Richard. But what about Richard’s son?” His voice changed abruptly. “And since we’ll sooner or later move to the Tees you’d better help me persuade Mark Henry to take up an option on more ground between the railway and the river. Queer he can’t see he’ll need it. He seems to think he can go on building ships at Danesacre for ever.”
Mary resented the swift change from personal to impersonal. She tried to bring him back to a flattering intimacy, but Mempes eluded her, as Mary was abruptly conscious he must often elude the women who tried to pin
down his graceful flutterings. She felt humiliated and said good night with a stiff dignity. He took her hand and kissed it and retained it in his own, looking at it absently, as if he had something more to tell her. Mary’s pulse quickened under his fingers, because she was shy and because Mempes was a romanticf and attractive creature.
They were interrupted by a frightful uproar, and running out into the hall, saw Mark Henry on the landing above, in a nightshirt from which his hairy legs protruded in a very graceless and shocking jig. Miss Flora was half-way down the stairs, clutching at her thin bosom and dumb with fear. The scene, fantastic in the quiet night, was illumined by the candle in Mark Henry’s hand and more sombrely by his flood of comments. He had a magpie trick of hiding his possessions all over the house and it appeared that, having hidden a box of pills under the mattress in an unused bedroom, he had risen in the night and issued forth to look for it, unaware that Miss Flora had that day moved herself to the bedroom in question.
“Go away,” he roared. “Go away and tell the town you’ve been ravished. Ravished. Murdered. Scalped. Hamstrung. Filleted. Salted. Smoked. Of all the plagues on an honest man to have his house filled with females who lie in wait in beds to scream rape and murder at him in the middle of the night. Come back. I’ll ravish you. I will. It’ll come hard, but I will. G-r-r. I’d ravish you to perdition if I could.”
Mary ran to soothe the terrified old lady and lead her back to her own bed, while Mempes comforted Mark Henry with hot lemon and brandy and finally tucked him up, still rumbling like an incipient earthquake, near dawn.
The Lovely Ship Page 10