The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  While she changed her clothes and swallowed brandy in gulps, the crew of the schooner was got ashore on a line thrown over the ship, two more brigs were on the sands, and the old out-dated lifeboat, manned by a volunteer crew, was struggling round to them. In the evening the gale abated. Half a mile of strand was strewn with wrecks, and Mary Roxby found herself accepted as part of the town. She had been a stranger and was now at home. She was pleased and a little puzzled. “I’ve worked here for three years,” she said to herself, “and I’m half a Garton, but they never trusted me or liked me until I went mad and enjoyed myself. It’s very strange.”

  The memory of the pleasure she had felt remained with her long after the cut on her lip was healed. There had been first the fear and then the consuming ecstasy. She could recapture a faint reminiscent thrill by shutting her eyes and imagining herself in the sucking water. When the thrill ceased to revisit her, she forgot to think about it, and the moment took its place in the recesses of her mind, with another day and another moment now very dim indeed and almost lost. What did remain with her was the knowledge that life could blossom into an unimaginable loveliness. These rare moments could not be sought; they came, and went, and only while they lasted was she wholly, burningly and consciously alive. . . .

  A year later Mark Henry Garton had to be operated on for stone. His heart, under its layers of fat, was considered to be so weak that the doctors would not risk an anaesthetic. They cut him without one, and Mark Henry held his watch in his hand and rallied them on their slow progress. He was still joking, with his ghastly face, when Mary was let in to see him.

  “Old Bridges was damned nervous, Mary. I said: ’It’s all very fine the way you fellows cut us up when we’re not watching but I’ve my eye on you, and if you as much as nick a piece——’ Well, never mind what I said, Mary. It wouldn’t be suitable for me to tell you, but old Bridges said: ’Hold your tongue, you old sinner, you’re past it,’ and cut into me like a good ’un. You’re a pretty piece, Mary, but you’ll never be the woman your mother was. Where is Lottie?”

  Charlotte had refused to see him, but Mary did not tell him that. Her anger was hot against the doctors. She thought that they had murdered Mark Henry for a silly notion, and she hated Tom Bridges with his long nose and butcher’s hands for the rest of her life. Mark Henry began to talk to himself. He laughed a little and then lay quiet. He lay all night and most of the next day with compressed mouth and quiet eyes. The sky darkened for storm and his eyes darkened: it cleared and they mirrored the placid clouds. What was he thinking as he lay there with his gaze on the gleaming walnut tall-boy between the windows? Of a young Mark Henry pacing the smooth gleaming deck of his first command, of a ship taking the wind and a lad looking over the side at the curling foam running on the dark sea past the bows. Of a merry face and warm lips tantalising his, of long days in a garden, of kind hands, of a voice, a whisper of long grass, a rustle of silk, warmth, quiet, at last nothing but quiet.

  He died just when the old women in the town had said he would die, as the tide turned, his gaze searching the room for Charlotte or some other. . . .

  He had left every penny he owned, the Line, the Yard, and the Tees-side Works to Mary Roxby. The Lings were not mentioned.

  Rupert Ling laughed. He came to see Mary in the house above the Yard and laughed again. He refused to stay on with the firm. “I never believed you’d win, cousin,” said he. “I didn’t think Mark Henry was fool enough to ruin Gallon’s to spite the Lings. I thought he might divide things and then I was going to marry you to consolidate it. We’re both spared something. You a husband you’d soon have hated, and I——”

  “What are you spared?” Mary asked. She came across the room and rested both hands on the table to support her while she looked up at him. In some curious way, Rupert’s mockery had cut the last tie that bound her to her childish past. Not even motherhood and a husband’s death had done what a boy’s insolence did in that moment. She was not timid, or nervous, or afraid of Rupert Ling any longer. She smiled, and her eyes, full on his face, were wide and mischievous. Rupert blinked.

  “Upon my word,” he commented, “I’ve lost a pretty wife, as well as a fortune. You’re too thin, of course, but the fortune would have been fat enough to smother the sound of my heart breaking.”

  “You’re throwing the fortune away,” Mary pointed out. “We’d prefer to keep you.”

  Rupert shook his head. “Stay here? Stay in Danesacre, with a whole world outside, and a woman at the head of the family? Not I, Mary. Lord save us, to be dependent on a woman for my orders. Promise me a ship, as soon as I’ve got my master’s ticket—and I’ll start in now. It’ll take me seven years, but at least I’ll be getting a look at the world. Do you realise, Mary, that I’ve seen nothing but Shrewsbury and Danesacre in my twenty-four years? School and office. What a life. The world’s full of streets I haven’t walked on, and rooms where women are wondering why I don’t come. The door opens and there stands Mr. Ling. ’Your servant, madam. Your lips are sweet and warm: below there are you sweet and warm? Don’t struggle, pretty bird. There and there and there.’ The best part of rooms, Mary, is that the door that lets you in lets you out again. To streets and quays and fresh ports and foreign towns and warm spiced nights. Think of a tropic night, Mary. Doesn’t it make your cool northern blood run hotter?” Rupert threw back his head and laughed again. “Have I shocked you? No, by George, I haven’t. Why aren’t you shocked, sweet Mary? You ought to be.”

  Mary stood there, liking him better than she had done since brief friendly hours in their childhood. “Stay with us, Rupert. We’ll make it worth your while.”

  Rupert was retreating from her in mock alarm. “There speaks Mark Henry Garton, and there but for the grace of God. . . . I wouldn’t stay with the firm for half your fortune, Mary. If it had been my fortune, I’d never have had the nerve to cut myself loose. I’d have been caught, tamed, done for. I’d have stayed on here and got as fat as Mark Henry, and quarrelled with George, damn his dull eyes—he’ll stay—and married a wife. Now all the world’s my wife, Mary, and I can put a quarrel on life will amuse me to the end of my days. Give me a kiss and I’ll go.”

  “Certainly I’ll kiss you,” said Mary demurely. She drew away as he started forward. “When you’ve passed for master and I’ve given you your first command.” He looked like disregarding the delay and she withdrew so coolly that he hesitated. She had gone before he realised it. He laughed and took himself off. . . .

  He had been right about George. The elder Ling was a heavy young man, with a squinting eye, long limbs and a thatch of wild hair. He came to Danesacre, accepted without visible gratitude Mary’s offer to raise his salary, and agreed, Thomas Prendergast having been entrusted with a commercial mission by the Board of Trade, to carry on as deputy-manager until Prendergast returned. Then he went back to Middlesborough and Mary put off a visit to the Garton Iron Works for six months. She was curious regarding Thomas Prendergast, who was her own age and had been a puddler in the Iron Works and become Mark Henry’s manager the year Mary joined the firm.

  Her hands were full enough. She had summoned John Mempes within a few hours of Mark Henry’s funeral when the will was made public. He came and stood just within the doorway of her room until she invited him to sit near her. In the brief silence that followed he studied her. She was pale and sad, that much was evident, but he thought she was composed. She had added a white fichu to her black gown since the funeral, which surprised him a little. Her hair, coiled at the back of her head, dragged the slender neck backwards, and she rested her head wearily against her chair. She had acquired dignity, and the manager found himself wondering ironically whether it were fortune or a new gown.

  “John Mempes,” Mary said anxiously, “are you going to stay with me?”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  She said: “Of course I want you. I couldn’t——“she bit back the dismay that she felt, “I should not like to do without you.”<
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  Mempes smiled. “I’ll be glad to stay.”

  Mary said: “Thank you. I thought”—she paused and eyed him, blushing faintly, but quite resolute,—“I thought I would consult with you on everything and what you approve we’ll go on with. Ought I to speak to the men at the Yard?”

  “It would be a good thing for you to do,” Mempes answered gravely. . . .

  She summoned up her courage and addressed the men from the slope of the Yard that afternoon. They liked her plain speaking and few words. One man told her so, but another said afterwards that her way of speaking was neither Garton nor Hansyke, and would change when the wind did. She told them that their orders would come through Mempes as before and that she would always hear anything they had to say to her personally, “up at the house, as my uncle did.”

  “Mark Henry swore of tener than he listened,” a man said slyly.

  “I’ll listen oftener than I swear,” Mary promised. They cheered her a little and she went away unelated, a girlish figure, conscious of an immense task obscurely begun. Later in the afternoon, she sent for Mempes, and discussed with him the future policy of the firm. When he was going she said shyly:

  “Are we friends, Mr Mempes?”

  The manager looked at her with a whimsical surprise on his arrogant face. “I hope so.”

  “Then will you use my Christian name and let me use yours?”

  “In this room I will,” Mempes said. “Thank you, Mary.” He lingered, smiled at her, and went. . . .

  During the first few months of her rule, her popularity increased. She was rarely seen. The work went on as before and there was plenty of work, with trade and prosperity increasing. There was no lack of money in Danesacre and the fact of a young girl at the head of Garton’s from a nine days’ wonder became a thing of little interest. The fiercely individual people of Danesacre disliked showing surprise. It began to be an understood thing that Garton’s niece owned the Yard and the Middlesborough Works, but that John Mempes ruled, and there were people who remembered Rupert Ling’s malicious gossip. But it was not open talk and the tendency was to leave Mary Roxby alone. She kept herself quiet, she harmed no one, and she was half Garton. Let her be. Garton’s Yard was satisfied, and feeling on the whole friendly towards its girl owner.

  It would be difficult to say just when the tone of the Yard began to change. There was to begin with a rumour that Mempes was opposing the complete change-over to steam begun by Mark Henry and carried forward by Mary. People said he thought she was going too quickly. Danesacre opinion was for him and against her. The iron-framed, teak-planked clippers building in other yards for the wool and tea trades were superior in speed and strength to their American rivals and would never, so far as Danesacre and the Yard could see, be supplanted by clumsy boats relying on borrowed wind. They were a glory to behold, and they were the natural build for a ship. No good could come of the tea-kettle business. Iron clippers were all very well, but iron steamers were an unnatural invention. What, in any event, the Yard asked, did a girl and the crazier niece of crazy Mark Henry Garton know about ships? She should stick to her feminine last and let John Mempes have his way. She had critics in plenty outside the Yard, among her fellow shipowners and builders. There was a widespread disbelief in the possibility of building marine engines capable of doing the long voyages at a profitable rate. The Yard, which knew all about the failure of Prendergast’s water-tube boilers without understanding its causes, had its supporters in shipbuilding circles, and not in Danesacre only. The world’s sailing ships were even yet not on the crest of their form. Seven years after Mark Henry’s death Rupert Ling wrote from Melbourne that Port Philip Bay was full of the finest sailing ships ever launched. Decks of polished teak and mahogany shone in the sun, and gleaming brass-work stabbed the air with long glittering lances of light. Mark Henry’s lifelong rival, called Old Smithson from his thirtieth year, might be excused for refusing to believe in the possibility of a steam-driven hulk ousting these radiant exquisite creations. Even when the same year saw the door of Suez swinging open, Old Smithson would not believe. . . .

  The Yard talked, but since so long as there was work to be done, shipwrights and carpenters and boilermakers would do it and draw their wages, what did it matter whether the Garton Line, as the Yard’s ships now designated themselves, sailed under steam or canvas, or both? The work went on and the talk went on with it.

  The truth behind the talk was nearer like it than truth and rumour commonly are. Mempes had found Mary obstinate on the question of steam. Too busy to leave Danesacre, she wrote to Thomas Prendergast, and received from him twice a week long replies in a fine clerkly hand, setting out every detail of his progress in the building of marine engines, with specifications and diagrams of boilers and compound engines, and the arrangement of ships’ machinery over which Mary pored until she did begin to add a measure of technical equipment to her stubborn belief in the future of the steamship. Prendergast’s letters had a crude clarity in odd contrast to his lawyer-like hand. Later it was discovered that he could not write, but dictated his reports. As Mary read and re-read them belief grew into an act of faith. She laid an ultimatum before Mempes. There would be no more sailing ships built in the Yard. The Line was to become a line of steamships. The orders in hand for steamships on account of other firms when Mark Henry died would occupy the Yard for the next two years and no order for sail would be taken. The girl argued with him on the question, while he beat her down with figures from Smithson’s Yard and facts about the wool and tea trade, until argument reached a stalemate and she silenced him with a definite order. Mempes was a little angry and when he found that she had been keeping back the correspondence with a Liverpool line for the building of a liner for the Chinese route, he was very angry. There was no reason why Mary should have kept the letters from him. He challenged her and she said frankly that she so disliked his attitude to steam that she intended to handle all such correspondence herself until it came to actual terms.

  Her mixture of candour and secrecy baffled him. So too did her gaiety, that occasionally broke all bounds in their interviews, with the result that Mr. John Sacheverell Mempes, whose youthful grace had stiffened with the years into a rather stately courtesy, sometimes found himself rallied and railed upon with much thin sweet laughter at the very climax of one of his careful speeches. Then he became more formal than ever. Mary repented when she saw that he was mortified, and was gentle and deferential on the instant. He found himself halting on a phrase that rang pompous in his own ears even before he caught the twitching of her delicious young mouth, and began to make himself simple, not so that she should understand him but so that she should not laugh.

  Her obstinacy was beginning to alarm him. The docility she had shown him at their first interview melted like dew in the hot sun. On the question of steam neither persuasion nor reason moved her an inch. He faced her across the old tulip-wood table that had been Mark Henry’s working-table, an expert in the handling of women and a polished subtle gentleman with years of experience ripening in the brain behind his wide forehead, and was outfaced by a young girl with at best four years’ knowledge and an unreasoning adherence to the policy she had taken over from an inspired buffoon, more buffoon than inspired here. She had the most headstrong and insensate belief in her luck. Mempes despaired when he saw orders that should have come to Garton’s going to their rivals. He knew with absolute certainty that the numbers and tonnage of Danesacre’s sailing ships were climbing and bound to climb. He had, and told her that he had, the liveliest interest in steam. Ultimately, he believed in it, but he did not believe that the compound marine engine would be improved on for another half century. Thus the demand for steamers would be naturally limited. It might even drop, and Garton’s Yard would have lost trade and way, would be ruined before progress caught up with Mary Roxby’s inherited infatuation. John Mempes was a clear-sighted man—to the end of his elegant nose. His nose was an eighteenth century nose at that. It achieved the middl
e of the nineteenth with tolerable ease. After that it began to block John Mempes’s vision.

  One day he said:

  “Mary, I don’t know what will become of you. You’re the most ingenuous creature I ever knew and capable of the most disingenuous actions. You don’t tell lies, but you conceal truths. You’re as pigheaded as Mark Henry and twice as arrogant. In short, you’re an intolerable woman and I don’t know why I work for you.”

  Mary was leaning back in her shiny straight-backed arm-chair. The folds of her black frock melted into the black horse-hair of the chair back. She was looking past Mempes at the harbour, and the branch of a tree waving outside the window made warm dusky patterns on her face and neck. Mempes lifted an involuntary hand to brush them away, and as he checked the absurd gesture he knew why he stayed on with Garton’s. He was lazy, hating change, and he was in love. Love was no new experience for Mempes. At thirty-nine he had sufficient experience of women to be as much amused as alarmed to find himself in love with the young owner of Garton’s. It was inevitable, at his age, that he should fall under the spell of youth. He might almost have been expecting it. It was a delicious sensation and Mary was delicious and in the silence that followed his words, he gave himself up to a delicate savouring of his emotions before her beauty. It surprised him to discover that desire, the easily satisfied longing for possession, was not among them.

  He wanted her to stay forever unpossessed. Forever young and faintly smiling, to recline in her chair looking at the harbour through the gracious eighteenth-century window of Mark Henry’s office, with sun and shadow playing on her face and life suspended in a morning air. Forever the faint sounds of the shipyard to linger in the warm room, forever a ship, her slender masts raping the motionless air, to lie over against the house, forever peace, and life on top of expectation.

  Mary stirred. She turned a clouded gaze on her manager.