4
Mary expected suspicion from the Ling boys. They must know her presence was a menace to their own position. She congratulated herself that George was safely in Middlesborough and that only Rupert remained to be comforted.. But Rupert surprised her. Two years her senior, he had shot up into that beauty which some very young men have, a beauty so evanescent, compounded of youth and reckless spendthrift grace and scorn of careful living, that it is as pathetic as entrancing. His red-brown hair fell in an incorrigible curve over one eyebrow, his eyes under their dark lashes looked at Mary with impudent tenderness and his long mouth smiled more kindly than cousinly. Undoubtedly he suspected her. He made things hard for her, and he did it with such a sublime assurance that she would understand and forgive him that Mary was baffled.
One evening in Mark Henry’s office, she found him folding up a sheet of notes that she had made.
“What are you doing with those?” she demanded and put out her hand.
He withheld the papers.
“They amuse me.”
“I’m glad you find me amusing,” she said demurely. Rupert’s smile broadened.
“No, you’re not. You hate it. You hate me. Do you remember how George and I used to tease you when you were a little girl? Little and quaint and fierce. We were beasts to you. Boys are usually beasts.”
“You were,” Mary said fervently.
“If we’d known,” Rupert mused, “that you were going to come here and try to do us out of our rights, we might have dropped you over the cliff and said it was an accident.”
“I’ve as much right here as you,” Mary retorted. “You’re only half-nephews and I’m a whole niece.”
“Bah, you’re a girl. You’re a sweet girl. You’re my darling little cousin Mary and I love you but I shan’t let you ruin me.”
Mary went away and left him with her papers. She walked up the steep road from the Yard and took the narrow lane that ran inland along the side of the hill, dipping to the valley some two miles farther up. From a bend in the lane she could look back at the upper harbour and the sea. She turned aside here and sat down in a small beech wood. Below her the steep slope was masked with trees that hid the river from her sight. The air was warm, and Mary tired, but an old restlessness kept her alert.
It was one of those evenings, clear and golden, when familiar things are seen in a new light. The blue rim of the sea, the church on the cliff-top, spoke to each other like old friends, and the sense of their peaceful communion entered Mary’s thoughts, but not to bring her peace. Instead, it filled her with a sharpened sense of loneliness. In the whole world she had only Richard, and though she poured out on him the treasures of her tenderness, he did not satisfy her longing for another mind, another voice in her ear, another hand to touch hers. She did not understand what was missing. She only knew that she kept turning to speak to someone who was never there, whose voice mocked her in Mark Henry’s clowning inspiration and Mempes’s courtesy.
She did not understand why sometimes at night this restlessness drove her from her bed to lean on the windowsill and look out across the harbour at the lights of houses in the streets of the town or the lonely lights of farms along the distant moor road. Sometimes she wept, without knowing why, and stretched her hands out and shivering went back to bed.
A step on the dead leaves of the wood roused her and she looked up to see Rupert Ling. He was holding the ravished papers in his hand and he offered them to her with solemn civility. Then he seated himself uninvited at her side and began to talk to her with his disconcerting friendliness.
“Since I saved your life, Mary, by not pushing you over the cliff, why are you not more civil? Do take your notes back. I cut your throat or you cut mine in this fantastic house of Mark Henry, and let’s do it as gentlemen should.”
“If I could only trust you,” Mary sighed.
“Oh, don’t do that, my dear. I can’t endure being trusted. Never trust anyone, least of all your cousin Ling. No one trusts a Ling in Danesacre. They know us too well. Mary, are you happy here? They say your husband was a solemn old mule. If that’s so, who was Richard’s father? Did Jove descend on you? Lord, what a fool I am. Do you really dislike me so much, Mary?”
He was so close to her that she saw the dancing Maries in his eyes. She noticed, blinking her own, how thick his lashes were, and the smoothness of his skin. He was closer now and without warning, her blood betrayed her into a humiliating folly.
The thought coming into her head that she had never been so near a young smiling mouth, she swayed by a natural logic nearer. Rupert was looking down at her with a queer expression of insolence and excitement, and when he took hold of her thin shoulders she lay for a moment unresisting in his arms. Almost in the moment of surrender she knew that she had made a fool of herself. She glanced at him and read in his face, as clearly as if he had told her, that Rupert did not care for small thin girls with sleek hair. He liked tall, amply-curving creatures with bosoms that cradled his head. He was making fun of his little cousin. Mary’s childish hatred of him rushed over her afresh and she jerked herself free with a force that sent him staggering back among the leaves. Now he was laughing outright and chanting in his young soft voice: “Mary loves me. She loves me, she loves me not.”
Mary snatched her papers out of his hand and went trembling away. . . .
She suffered torments of self-abasement after this. Rupert did not kiss her again, but he made things harder for her than before. He spread about the Yard a belief that her presence in the office was one of Mark Henry’s crazy whims, an unpractical practical joke. A woman in office! He spread a more sinister slander, that ran through Yard and town in an undercurrent of fleering looks and jests. It concerned Mary and John Mempes, and Mary remained ignorant of it for years. . . .
Rupert Ling was not the only complication in Mary’s life during this time. She had been at Danesacre seven months when Miss Short wrote to say that Charlotte Hansyke had called on her to borrow money. “She looked so old and distraught,” wrote Charlotte’s friend in her lovely etiolated handwriting, “that I did not like to refuse her and I said I would send some if she would leave me her address. But, my dear, I am not a rich woman and I find it very hard with the Funds behaving in so odd and apparently uncontrollable a way owing, they say, to the behaviour of Lord P——, to satisfy even my own poor simple needs. How can I send Charlotte twenty pounds or even ten, or five? And you were such a kind practical little girl as I remember you, and I appeal to you to reason with dear Charlotte and tell her that she must not come browbeating me in my own house.”
She enclosed an address in Tottenham Court Road, and thither Mary hurried to find Charlotte living with an unpleasant little man of indeterminate profession and a habit of tweaking Charlotte’s ears when things were going badly. Charlotte, looking old and ill, embraced Mary passionately and as passionately refused to leave her protector. He for his part was very willing to give her up for money down, and when this became clear to her, Charlotte flew into a violent rage. She accused Mary of being the ruin of her life from the time when she so inconsiderately forced her way into the world, of being in league with Mark Henry to ruin her, and in a fantastic climax, of intriguing to steal Charlotte’s own lover. And all the time the unpleasant little man stood smirking by, fingering his notes, and delighted to be the cause of so much emotion.
As long as she lived Mary never forgot the sight of stricken Charlotte gathering up her few possessions in a silence heavier than tears. It came to stand in Mary’s mind for the useless lives of all the wilful extravagant helpless women created by a masculine world and broken in it. She took her mother back to Danesacre and watched her, with an emotion between laughter and tears, translating herself from passionate Charlotte Hansyke into Richard’s grandmother. Charlotte became, by the most natural transition, the boy’s slave. She inquired from Mary all the details of his Roxby inheritance and expressed surprise and dismay that Mary had left it so long in the hands of James and
Charles Roxby. She insisted on going to stay with Richard at Roxby House, and there she gave herself such airs as the grandmother of the reigning infant that the brothers combined to snub her. She came back to Danesacre and wept in Mary’s arms.
“They said Richard was unfortunate in his vulgar connection,” she said, “and they hoped he would lose the Danesacre accent in time. They made a fool of me by talking to me about people they knew I’d never heard of. Who was the Duke of Devonshire’s crazy ward and whom did the third Earl marry? How should I know?” Tears of mortification shone in Charlotte’s eyes, still dark and lustrous in her addled face. “I’m nothing now. I’m nothing, nothing. No one respects me. You don’t respect me, Mary. You never tell me anything you’re doing. Soon even Richard will learn to despise me.”
Mary soothed the passionate creature and at twenty wondered if at fifty she would have half that fire, but she did not attempt to take her mother into her confidence about her ambitions and her dreams, She was very kind and considerate, but she kept her out. . . .
Her son was a problem of another kind. She adored him and he her. She collected his sayings and wrote them down in a book that she kept in her desk. One rainy morning she went to call him and found him lying with obstinately closed eyes. “Wake up, little son. Wake up,” she said softly. He chuckled but would not give up his pretence of sleep. She bent over him, searching his features for signs of Archie. She could find none. He was like herself, and she thought that God had given him to her to make up for Archie. His long dark lashes lay on cheeks radiant with health, and his crimson mouth, compressed in an attempt at gravity, invited the kisses she presently gave him, covering his face with kisses, tickling him with her eyelashes, making him quiver with laughter and delight and happiness. At last he sat up and observed that he was like a flower because he always felt inclined to curl up and go to sleep when it rained. The corner of a note-book was visible under his pillow, and after a struggle Mary possessed herself of it. “That’s my memory book,” he said gravely.
Turning over the leaves, scrawled in pencil with indecipherable “memories,” Mary came upon two that she could read.
“Whipped just for being sick.”
“Banged for talking too much.”
“Oh, Richard,” she said reproachfully, “I’ve never whipped you for being sick.”
“No,” he said, “but you looked as if you would like to, and you did bang my head for singing after you put me to bed.”
Mary fell on him and produced a tolerable imitation of a Cruel Mother Eating Her Child, at which he laughed madly and they rolled on the bed in a crisis of mirth and affection.
The memory book remained in Mary’s thoughts for a long time. She wondered whether it was not unnatural for a very small boy to be confiding his thoughts to a book. A queer feeling that she was not giving her little son anything like enough haunted her at odd moments through all these striving years. . . .
She tried later to appease it by descending with ruthless vigour on James and Charles Roxby and demanding in Richard’s name an account of their stewardship. Finding that they had done nothing to maintain the value of the property and were selling the paintings in the gallery, a Rembrandt, a Van Dyck, and five Gainsboroughs, for their immediate needs, she put them on a fixed allowance to be paid twice a year, and began to look round for a bailiff to act for Richard. . . .
5
The recurring note of these early years is Mary’s extreme poverty. She was wretchedly poor. Mark Henry paid her, grumbling at his own ruinous good nature, an apprentice’s wage. Out of that she had to clothe herself and Richard and buy everything, but food, that they both needed. What she got in a year would have kept them for a month. So the meagre allowance was spent on her son, and for herself Mary darned and patched and contrived until her growing beauty could no longer carry off her shabby clothes. It was during this time that she began to collect, with the infrequent tips that Mark Henry threw her when he was pleased, very delicate, extravagant and useless undergarments. She never wore any of them. She put them, bought one by one over barren months, into a small drawer with bags of orris-root and lavender, and sometimes spread them out to gloat. They were all acquired, in obedience to some obscure impulse in the young girl’s mind, for an undefined occasion when she would take them out and clothe herself in unabashed softness. Only the occasion never came. . .
For nearly four years she worked as an underpaid slave in Mark Henry Garton’s office. Mark Henry kept her in what he was pleased to call the construction department, which was his own office in the house above the Yard, and taught her details of the making of ships. That is to say, he expounded his theories of shipbuilding and left her to get the roots of the matter from the ship’s architect, who had his office in Harbour Street, on a floor of the Yard Superintendent’s house. Then suddenly Mark Henry flung her into the Line office, into the outward freight department, and left her to find her feet among bills of lading, ships’ manifests, schedules of sailings, agents’ reports, details of docking facilities, and all the imagined and unimagined network of human effort following a ship from home port to home port—to see it safe and to make it pay. . . . She went about with a thin line between her eyes and an air of unyouthful anxiety that vanished only when she was free to go to Richard’s nursery. Then she was a young girl again and her hair fell down and her cheeks were flushed and rounded with laughter. . . .
She had an uneasy ride of it. It was not courage, but a kind of blind hunger, an obstinate clinging of her hands to life and the things she wanted, that kept her in her seat. Humiliated and beaten off in one place, she seized hold in another. She was so much less agile-minded than Rupert Ling that he found it easy to make a fool of her. Bit by bit, like a beggar with one foot in a door, she insinuated herself inside, until captains coming into the office after a voyage to make their report, found their way to her desk because she could be trusted not to waste their time or to have forgotten their names. These were days when captains picked up their own cargoes for the return voyage, making friends with shippers in the ports where they unloaded, planning, keeping their accounts with scrupulous care in small note-books, as anxious to make a little extra money for the owner by clever calculation of freights, as the owner himself. Mary began to know which captains were popular with shippers, and which showed, in Galveston, an intuitive skill in balancing a cargo of cotton and cane to get the last penny of profit out of it. She knew which was inclined to overdrive his ship and which shortened sail on the least provocation. She learned their idiosyncrasies and became, partly out of real interest and partly because she was over-anxious to justify her presence, very skilful in the right word of greeting. She was learning how to handle men. . . . Captains began to bring her gifts, flowered silk and brown gleaming gods from China, little lacquer boxes from Sasebo, fans, trays, miniature pagodas, strings of amber and ivory. Some of the things went to Richard, some she put in her secret drawer. She began to feel a little confidence in the place she was making for herself. . . .
John Mempes puzzled her. When she came, she had taken it for granted that he was her friend and would help her. Gradually, after rebuffs so delicate mat their significance only unfolded itself in chill humiliating thoughts of the night hours, she realised that Mempes was not going to do anything of the kind. He would not hinder. He would give her any explanations for which she asked, but of himself, nothing. He was neutral. Elegant, irresponsive, faintly smiling, he watched her puzzled progress from ignorance to dawning confidence, he watched her pick herself up after successive tumbles, and did not move to help, unless a desperate cry, forced from her by some unbearable urgency, brought him to her side.
It was characteristic of Mary that she did not resent him. It never occurred to her that Mempes ought to help, just as in all her life she never expected help, and never resented enmity or injury on the person of her injurer. I believe she was incapable of a personal grudge. It looked like weakness, but I do not think it was.
During
her third winter something happened that did more to strengthen her position in Danesacre than all her hard work. One Friday evening she walked down Harbour Street to the east pier and found herself forced to cower in the lee of the lighthouse from a wind that cut the breath out of her body. It increased during the night and in the morning was blowing a north-easter of frightful velocity. As Mary sat at breakfast the first ship of the fleet of sailing vessels on the coast came ashore near the west pier. A coble manned by seven men took off the crew. Before noon, a Newcastle schooner, a Prussian barque, a brig and another schooner were all ashore. In the late afternoon Mary left the Office and joined the crowd of men and anxious dry-eyed women who from the pier were watching the wreck of a Danesacre schooner. The sea ran with bared teeth against the pier, and in the dusk sky and hills shrank into the space of a hand. The lifeboat was pulling out again and as the watchers strained into the thundering darkness a green wall of water rose up against it and tipped it over into the pit of the sea. A shiver and a cry ran through the crowd on the pier as a head here and another there, heads of husbands, sons, fathers, thrust up from the waves. There was a rush for useless lifeboats, and Mary saw a cork-jacketed man working towards the shore. She shouted and an instant later was waist deep in the screaming icy water, one in a stumbling gasping human line groping for the battered wretch. She drew breath in agony, blind with spray of broken waves, the current sucking at her feet, and fear, debasing and inhuman, rose and invaded her whole being. It was only for a moment and then she was filled with joy. The hollow booming of oncoming waves gave her a sense of pleasure sharper than any pleasure she had ever conceived. She drove her teeth into her lip in an ecstasy. The man was touched, caught, held, and with his rescuers was back in safety, and Mary, her throat torn with shouts she did not know she had uttered, and blood dripping on to her hand from an unnoticed wound, staggered into shelter.
The Lovely Ship Page 11