The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  Hugh’s face underwent a change with which she was becoming familiar. The eyebrows shot up, lending it a peculiarly merciless air of mockery, and his delicate mouth was pressed into an edge of pallid lip. A haughty expression appeared on her own face.

  “You think of nothing but what you can get,” Hugh observed. “You’re quite incapable of appreciating the point of view of a gentleman.”

  “I don’t see,” Mary said curtly, “what being or not being a gentleman has to do with it. Mark Henry Garton wasn’t what you would call a gentleman but he never let his men and his shareholders down by going bankrupt.”

  Hugh was struck by this observation, and inclined, having secret personal reasons of his own for doing so, to agree with it, but some mute unseizable obstinacy drove him to oppose her. He would not be overborne by the force, leaping from her small thin person to demolish him in an argument, that always astonished and usually silenced him.

  “You and I,” he said disdainfully, “cannot possibly have the same notion of what constitutes a gentleman. It’s not a question of class. It’s a sort of politesse du coeur.”

  Mary confronted him with blanched face. She was in fact appalled. A moment ago they had been walking side by side, warily it was true, but with perfect amiability, and in a moment this frightful pit had opened between their feet. The wilfulness of Hugh’s criticism stung her. Profoundly mortified, she told herself that at last she was seeing him clearly. He was utterly incapable of sympathising with the difficulties of her life. What on earth had she been about to suppose that he would? An amateur of the arts, an indolent delightful creature, and no use to any one. . . .

  Who would have believed that judging him so mercilessly, she burned with shameful longing for his approval.

  “Gentlemen,” she said at last, “should keep out of the shipping world. It wasn’t Mr. Benham’s gentlemanliness but his incompetence that ruined him. I dare say that is why you sympathise with him.”

  They were both perfectly calm and civil, two charming young people conducting a polite discussion. A short while ago they had been lovers, Now they were completely indifferent. The revelation of each other’s real natures had killed in the space of a few moments all the mistaken tenderness they had been cherishing. Still, one must be civil. A devil was raging behind each smooth face. Hugh rapped his on its knuckles and it laughed. The sound was more than the other devil could bear.

  “How dare you laugh at me?”

  “I’m sorry. I apologise.”

  “You needn’t.” Mary controlled her face. Surely he could see that she was bleeding to death? The devil had gone out of her with that last defiance. She was hurt, she was dying of grief. She looked quickly at Hugh and an emotion that was not quite pain and not quite joy filled her. She was suffering but she was thrillingly alive. This was real, and without Hugh she would never have felt this fury of living, this exquisite unhappiness. Her body trembled.

  Suddenly Hugh rushed across the room and dropped beside her on the floor with his arms round her waist.

  “Darling, darling. Forgive me, I’m a fool. I’m a brute. You’re a thousand times better than I am, and a thousand times cleverer———”

  “I’m not. You’re much cleverer than I am.” It was true.

  Hugh’s face was transformed with emotion. His eyes beseeched her. “The truth is I’m jealous, Mary.”

  Delicious moment. Mary bent over him to hide the triumph in her eyes, and her voice was the immemorial voice of women flattering the folly of their lovers. “Why are you jealous, my heart?”

  “You spend your days with John Mempes. It’s to him you talk of the things nearest your heart. You live your real life with him. Ships are your life. I’m an addition. It’s—it’s monstrous.”

  “Oh my dear, my dear.” Mary was carried away by her passionate eagerness. “You know that’s not true. I would have given it all up if you had insisted. You know I love you more than anything in the world.” She was overwhelmed by remorse and gratitude. Thank heaven everything was all right, and she had said none of the un-forgiveable things that had risen to her lips. She bent to press them, quivering from the narrowness of their escape, on Hugh’s head. He jumped to his feet and pulled her up against him. Exhausted, they rested quietly in each other’s arms. The thought crossed Hugh’s mind that he and Mary were never really at one except in their moments of passion and passionate surrender. He dismissed it impatiently and set himself to stroke her smooth hair. He was by no means tall, but her head came below the level of his chin, and as she hung from him, managing to cling to him and look up at him at the same time, he had to stoop lower still to kiss the vivacious young face. That pleased him. A pleasant sense of his power over her deepened his love.

  “Are you sure you love me, Mary?”

  Mary looked at him soberly. She thought that it would be a very queer woman who would not love this adorable creature. Generous, kind, sweet-natured—he was everything she was not, and undeniably attractive. She was quite simply convinced that no man had ever been more charming to look at than Hugh. She loved him for it, as well as for his more serious qualities. Tightening the arm round her shoulders, Hugh brought his face close to hers and as she yielded herself to his embrace she knew that what she loved in him was neither his magnanimity, his sweet soul, nor any other of his admirable qualities, nor even his charm. What she loved in him was a kind of youthful extravagance he had. His capacity for complete abandon made the most powerful appeal to her. Never could she so surrender herself as Hugh, in such moments as this, could and did. If she had once been capable of it, she was not now. The reckless fury with which Hugh flung himself into an emotion was forever impossible to Mary Hervey, who had been Mary Hansyke and Mary Roxby before reaching her present haven of refuge. She felt very wise and sad and profoundly happy. How pale Hugh was. The dark hair above his temples was wet. She resolved that there should be no more such scenes. In future she would manage Hugh much better.

  Her eyes were those of a young girl, shining with the wise innocence of extreme youth, and the shy droop of her head might have ravished even a less interested onlooker. Impossible to believe that this was the same woman whose rancour and miserable pride had just expressed itself with such frightful bitterness. She smiled enchantingly.

  “Dear Hugh. Please smile at me. You have no idea how delightful you look when you smile.”

  “Thank you,” Hugh said.

  Chapter Two

  A Few weeks later, Mary realised, from a casual question put to her by Old Smithson’s wife, that she was carrying Hugh’s child. It was characteristic of her that just as she had failed to observe any of the early signs of it, so she put off telling Hugh. She put it off until she began to be afraid someone else would tell him. Then she blurted the news out, coming purposely from the Yard to Hugh’s study in the middle of the afternoon, to tell him.

  She was nervous and apologetic. Hugh’s sudden smile bewildered her.

  “You don’t mind, Hugh?” A blinding memory of Mrs Maggs’s kitchen hung between her eyes and Hugh’s face. It confused her, filling her with an extraordinary emotion in which shame, a queer shame that she should have remembered Archie at all, predominated. She would have liked to erase Archie from her life, As she stood there, leaning against Hugh’s desk, nothing was real to her but Hugh, neither Richard, nor the life unstirring and relentless within her.

  It was absurd to think of Hugh as a father.

  He sprang forward and taking her in his arms sat down with her in an arm-chair.

  “Mind? Did you think I, would? I like it.”

  Mary looked at him doubtfully. He was laughing. His smooth young voice was soft and reassuring. He bent his face to hers.

  “Tell me all about it, Mary.” Now she caught the familiar mischief in his voice. Her heart leapt.

  “There’s nothing to tell you.”

  Hugh’s face altered. His brows drew together in an anxious frown. “You’ll be all right, won’t you? Promise me it’s all
right, Mary.” He had turned pale.

  “Oh, my love,” Mary said. She raised herself, so that she could nurse his head between her arms. Her small face was transfigured with happiness.

  “Of course it will be all right.”

  “I couldn’t live without you, Mary.”

  “You won’t have to.” Slipping out of his arms, Mary sat down on the floor at his feet and embraced his knees. She did not look at him.

  “I promise, Hugh.” He had to bend down to hear. “You’re the only person who matters to me. Even this,” she laid her hand against her body in a strange delicate gesture, “doesn’t matter, beside you. I—there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”

  In the recesses of her mind a voice repeated: “Richard matters, Richard matters,” but she ignored it.

  She felt Hugh’s body shaking between her arms. He said nothing, but presently lifted her up. They subsided into the depths of the chair again and were consolingly silent and aware of each other only as of another beloved family face, very close in the homely dusk. . . .

  Autumn, that year, was reluctant to leave Danesacre. In innumerable gardens flowers that should have been gathered up with the harvest lingered on. The breath of the earth was warm, even in the early morning, and up the valley the trees turned gold, then scarlet, then tawny, and remained so, like great somnolent beasts, secure in their strength. They were not like dying trees. They were like young trees of a new strange species.

  Hugh rode alone between them. Last year’s leaves deadened the sound of his horse’s feet, but no single leaf had been stripped from the branches above him. When he emerged from the wood on to the bridle path that led up to the moors and the high road to Danesacre, he rode under an immense ball of blue sky, where the superb white clouds seemed as changeless and permanent as the autumn trees. The little town at the lip of the river seemed the impermanent changing thing, pathetic in its smallness. As Hugh clattered down Harbour Street, the narrow ghauts and valleys on either side of him were filled with a rumour of life, like the murmurs of children in Pompeii, the evening before its submergence.

  He was always, when he got so far as this on his homeward journey, consumed with anxiety for the short remaining distance. He went in search of Mary at once. The sound of her voice from any part of the house was enough. Satisfied, without seeing her, he went up to his room to change.

  The advance copies of his first book had arrived on an afternoon post. He found Mary frowning over her copy. She was reading it with avid care, like a child learning a lesson, and every now and then she turned back to re-read a page before going on with what she evidently found a difficult task. She sighed heavily, and Hugh ran across the room to snatch the book out of her hand and offer himself as an alternative occupation.

  “What were you doing with my book, baby? You can’t understand it. Any more than I can understand freight sheets and diagrams of engines. Why do you bother your adorable head with it? It bores you. Confess it does.”

  “I don’t understand it very well,” Mary acknowledged. “But I did want to read it, Hugh darling. Because you wrote it and because it’s a splendid book. If it had not been, Mr. Murray would not have paid you the money to let him publish it. Don’t you want me to read it?”

  “No,” Hugh lied. “Kiss me, Mary.” Her judgment of his book’s value left a wry flavour in his mouth.

  Mary kissed him, and began to discuss the subject that lay near her heart at the moment, which was the new bathroom. No bathroom approaching it in completeness and beauty existed in the town, though that, as Hugh pointed out, was no great triumph, since the bathrooms in Danesacre could be counted on the fingers of both hands.

  To celebrate the publication of his book Hugh opened a bottle of the ‘57 Perrier Jouet, a majestical wine, just as its perfection, absolutely right, and Mary had ordered and supervised a dinner as nearly flawless as so important a meal should be. Hugh was too excited by the arrival of his books to notice her extreme pallor, and it was not until dinner was over that she turned to him with something between a gasp and a cry.

  “Hugh,” she said weakly.

  “What is it? What is it, Mary?”

  His alarm steadied her at once. She sent him off to find her woman, and went tranquilly upstairs. Charlotte had been ill, and was in bed. Mary turned over in her mind precautions against rousing her. She did not want her mother’s presence. A forgotten sense, welling up from her childhood, of Charlotte’s unreliability, flooded through her. She wanted no added worries. In her heart of hearts she was terrified, as she had never been when Richard was born. Then she did not know what it would be like, and proceeded from terror to terror by imperceptible stages. Now she saw the whole thing in front of her.

  She wished it had not happened on the very day when Hugh’s book had come. Louise Hervey, who had been in the house for a week past, thought contemptuously that it was just like Mary to have miscalculated the affair by a month. Neither of them knew that the child so near birth was to evince during her life an almost incredible capacity for mistiming her effects. This was nothing but the first instance of her habitual clumsiness.

  Later, Mary asked Hugh to go away. Her suffering was becoming so intense that she did not know how much longer she could endure it. Hugh’s face receded before her on a dizzying wave of pain, coming close again in the brief intervals of peace. He was holding both her hands.

  She felt his grasp less as a consolation than as an appeal. He was appealing to her, in this room full of grown-up strangers, like one child appealing to another for comfort. She pressed his fingers.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Go now. Love.”

  Hugh stood up. The thought crossed his mind: “She’s been through all this before.” Thoughts of that other man who had been before him with Mary tortured him. He turned to go. Suddenly, swinging round again, he dropped on his knees, pressing his forehead against the bed. Mary’s hands quieted at once. She laid them one on each side of his dark head.

  Her being was suspended in an instant of calm. She was reluctant to let Hugh go. In this instant she felt, deep in some untortured part of her body, that he would never again be so much hers. It was as if Hugh were leaving her, with his child. Pain engulfed the instant forever. She relaxed her hold. Hugh went away, and she forgot him.

  She had another instant, of overwhelming satisfaction, that at last she was correcting the blunder that had made Archie Roxby the father of her son.

  “Give him to me,” she said.

  The briefest pause. Then Louise Harvey’s voice, unsubdued, the voice of the childless woman.

  “You have a daughter, Mary.”

  Chapter Three

  1

  For some time there had existed in Mary’s mind a strange new conviction. It was so strange that at first she had done no more than glance at it and pass it by. But it had made itself felt again and again, appearing at inconvenient moments, a perpetual accompaniment to her waking thoughts. Occasionally it got into her dreams and she woke up profoundly troubled.

  It was no other, to put it as briefly as possible, than the feeling that she had done wrong to keep Hugh out of Garton’s. Once admitted, it grew and grew, and assumed the monstrous proportions of a fixed idea. She had not admitted it willingly, or at once. She had been married four years when it became with her a recognised article of belief, and during these years she had learned a good many things about Hugh.

  Part of what she had learned was not, one would have thought, such as to strengthen her belief. There was, for instance, Hugh’s carelessness about money. He had backed Benham’s bill for five thousand—a sum he could never hope to pay if the bill were not met. Of course it was not met, and for a long time Hugh said nothing to anyone about it and was on the brink of disaster when he told Mary. There was enough Hansyke in her to find Hugh’s conduct not inconceivable, but Mark Henry Garton’s niece was shocked and upset. To have thrown away all that money! She cleared the bill, and Hugh never repaid her. Moreover, he
seemed quite incapable of seeing that he had done a foolish thing. He told Mary blandly that she did not understand the obligations of a gentleman. Mary swallowed the obvious retort that this gentleman’s obligation had obliged her to find five thousand pounds at an inconvenient moment, and took the precaution of going through Hugh’s bills. She found several outstanding for large sums. Hugh had lately taken to keeping a stable, and this, together with his extravagant need for books and documents, ate up all and more than his income. Mary approved of the stable. It was the right thing for a gentleman of leisure, and appealed to her Hansyke training and instincts. She preferred ships, but there was no doubt that horses were more genteel. She paid Hugh’s debts and continued to pay them.

  But all evidence to his unfitness notwithstanding, her wish to have Hugh in the firm grew steadily. She said nothing to anyone about it, not even to Mempes. An obscure jealousy was at work in her. She was jealous of Hugh’s writing. She could neither understand nor enjoy it, and at the back of her mind was a curious sense that she was not getting the full use of her property. She would not have admitted this feeling but it was there. Her love for him seemed to double itself in an effort to regain lost ground. She tried to take an interest in his work and cut a rather pathetic figure, sitting for hours over books on mediaeval history. She came to various conclusions about the Middle Ages, at which Hugh laughed. Sometimes she had a queer flash of emotion, in which it came to her with the force of a blow that at a given moment in time, on some familiar village green, men and women had stood and gossiped in living voices about the world round them. They had been alive. They had laughed, and cried, and suffered, and lain down to sleep. At these moments she had a sense that she was about to make an astounding discovery about life. She was on the brink of plunging into a profound and unparalleled experience, and then the tide of light receded and left her where she was, unchanged. These strange fleeting moments she could not share with Hugh.