The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  He was in the middle of a new book. He had a acquired a secretary, a friend of his sister, who came from London, took rooms in Danesacre, and worked with him for six hours every day. Sometimes they worked in the evening, and then Mary sat with them, poring over her own papers, or idly watching Hugh’s head close to Miss Jardine’s as they bent over her notes. Miss Jardine was tall, taller than Hugh, with a complexion of extraordinary fairness, and hair of uncounterfeited gold contrasting with her dark brows. She had a small pouting mouth, an ugly nose, and a rather affected carriage of her body and poise of the head. She was very conscious of her position as an independent woman. At times, she bore herself more like a portent than a woman. She was an admirable secretary, and with her help Hugh was achieving something like research.

  For a long time he remained entirely oblivious of Mary’s attempts to draw him into Garton’s.

  She proceeded with them in her secretive fashion, the slow tenacious fashion of a mind that will wait years to accomplish a desired end.

  Their second child, born a year after the first, was another girl. Mary named her Sylvia—the first had been called Clara after Hugh’s mother—and was pleased because she was like Hugh. The older child, by some freak of the selective imagination, bore a striking and ludicrous resemblance to old George Roxby. Charlotte noticed it first, and thereafter Mary could never look at the fat solemn child without seeing George Roxby in his steel frame, groaning and rolling about his house. She had been fond of George, but his reappearance in her family annoyed her, and before she was four years old Clara knew better than to approach her mother on any errand that Sylvia could be made to do. Neither child saw very much of their mother. They spent most of their time in a cottage on the moors with Miss Flora and the most admirable of nurses, whose polite hostility to Miss Flora embittered the old Scotswoman’s last years on earth.

  Hugh was perfectly well aware that her daughters bored Mary. . .

  They had one unmistakable effect on her. Their coming made her curiously subservient to Hugh. She ceased to quarrel at all with him, giving way with a new gentleness on points that a year earlier she would have disputed to the last word. A quality of submissive tenderness entered her love, some faint hint of appeal. . . . The swift radiant confident-speaking Mary was still there. She laughed still like a boy over the irresistible absurdities of life and people. But there was something a little wistful in her adoration of Hugh, a new softness . . . Hugh hardly noticed it.

  If her girls disappointed Mary her son did not. Richard was eleven years old when Sylvia was born, a tall handsome boy, with dreaming eyes behind long lashes. He had a tutor, with whom he was very friendly, but he contrived, plotting it out in his own mind, to secure at least an hour of Mary’s time every working day, and for her ears he saved up his more interesting adventures and his secret dreams. He was a mixture of innocence and self-possession that baffled his tutor and his stepfather, and continually surprised his mother.

  She had a model made for him of a steam-engine. It had a boiler which was heated by oil, and a funnel with a safety-valve. During its making Richard was in a state of tremendous excitement. He hung round the workshop and could hardly bear to wait until the red paint on it was dry before he carried it off to show Mary. But Mary was shut up in conference with John Mempes and did not emerge until Richard was in bed, with the engine on a chair by his side, where his eyes would fall on it first thing in the morning.

  “Does it go?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said gravely. “I shan’t try it until you can be there.”

  Mary had to hurry away to Middlesborough first thing the next morning and it was three days before she got back. And then she was busy all day until the late afternoon. So that it was after tea, on the fifth day of possessing it, that Richard started up his engine. He filled the boiler with hot water, lit the tiny old lamp and waited, his hand clutching Mary’s. The water began to bubble. Steam rushed in a thin white jet out of the safety-valve. The piston worked. For five minutes the engine was a centre of hissing, throbbing life. Then it all died down, the piston, after a final convulsive jerk, ceased functioning, the jet of steam wavered and disappeared. It was all over.

  Richard stood looking at the dead silent thing. To the unbearable excitement of the last few days succeeded a dreadful blank. His very body felt empty. “Is that all?” he thought. He looked up and caught his mother’s eyes fixed on him with an expression he could not fathom. For one moment he thought she was laughing at him, and then that she was sorry for him. Suddenly she knelt down and hugged him closely. After an infinitesimal moment of rebellion, he yielded to it and laid his flushed cheek on her neck. She was wonderfully comforting and soft. He loved her enormously.

  “I’m not kissing you because I love you,” he said suddenly, “but because you feel so soft. Let’s go for a walk.”

  They walked rather silently along the top of the east cliff. After a time Mary said:

  “You could drive a crane off that piston.”

  Richard brightened.

  “I could,” he said, and slipped his hand into hers.

  “I should like to be an engineer,” he observed.

  Mary was aware of a sharp pleasure.

  “What sort of an engineer?” she asked. “An engineer who makes engines for ships?”

  “No, not ships,” Richard said thoughtfully. “Something that gets you about. But not ships. I don’t care much for ships.”

  His mother was a little disappointed, but she began an account of the various branches of engineering, to which he listened in silence. Abruptly his mind made one of its bewildering leaps.

  “Would my grandmother be interested in engines?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary said. “I don’t think so. She doesn’t know much about that sort of thing. You’d better talk to me about it.”

  Richard gave her a clear look.

  “We must be careful what we do,” he observed. “A woman’s heart soon breaks.”

  Mary stifled a gasp of laughter.

  “Do you think so?” she murmured. “I dare say it does. Yes, I’ve sometimes felt as if my heart was breaking.”

  “Oh, your heart’s all right,” Richard said callously. “I meant my grandmother’s.”

  Mary could think of nothing to say. She supposed Charlotte must have been talking to the boy about her ruined life. Probably she had told him that every one despised her. Mary felt a spurt of anger. How dare Charlotte confuse her boy’s mind with all that nonsense. She glanced at her son, and felt intuitively that Richard was not at all confused. He had accepted the odd fragility of a woman’s heart and added it to the store of incomprehensible facts existing at large in a world which interested him very slightly. He was far more interested in his dreams, whatever they were. Mary felt a pang of the grief that visits mothers, when they remember that the clear-eyed trusting son of their body will go out into that world and discover that men and women are mean, unkind, cruel to each other, treacherous, cowardly. She wanted to snatch him up and guard him from the intolerable unkindness of men—and other women. She waited for him to scramble over a stile after her, and kissed him when he reached the ground. . . .

  A month later Charlotte Hansyke died. Her husband had died suddenly a few months before. He had grown queer-tempered in the last years, and turned away all his servants except one fierce old man, as queer as himself, who refused Mary admittance when she went to visit her father in his illness and could hardly be persuaded to let Richard Hansyke be prepared for decent burial.

  An old will left everything to Charlotte. With unusual decision she ordered Mary to sell the whole place. Mary sold it, and for the first time in seven hundred years, no Hansyke held land in Roxborough. The severing of those ancient roots seemed to affect Mary very little. She told Hugh that she had driven her own roots too deep into Danesacre. She felt more affection for an orchard in Kensington than for the bleak stretch of upland field and moor that had become so much Hansyke that no new o
wnership could persuade Roxborough people to call it anything but “Hansyke’s.” Up at Hansyke’s,” they said, when the new housekeeper ordered her purchases to be sent to the house. The new housekeeper ground her teeth and the new master was displeased, but that had no effect on Roxborough.

  Mary said she did not care, but she avoided Roxborough after the sale. The new owner invited her to come and see the alterations. She was very civil, but she steadfastly refused to go. . . .

  Charlotte’s death was a sharper sorrow. Mary’s vitality rebelled wildly against the thought that Charlotte would never see Danesacre again, nor the crowded lively harbour, nor the old church with its immemorial peace, nor any of the steep narrow streets that she had known as a child and as a young proud girl, and a woman heavy with life. The ships would sail out of the harbour, the little streets would echo with the feet of Danesacre people, the sun would glitter on the multitude of small dancing waves, but Charlotte Hansyke would not see it. Everything would go on without her as if she had never been. Mary choked with grief and pity. It was as if she wept less for Charlotte than for Charlotte’s bitter loss of living.

  2

  After this, she made up her mind quite firmly that Hugh must and should become part of the life of Garton’s as he was part of hers. A feeling that she would thus be securing him against nameless dangers supported her. About Garton’s there was something permanent and solid, which in the midst of an impermanent world consoled her with its assurance of immovable foundations. Confronted at every turn by shocking evidences of the truth that in the midst of life we are in death she sought persistently, foolishly—blasphemously, Miss Flora would have said—for something deathless on this side of the grave. And as the Yard had outlived already several generations of Gartons she began to see in it a power that conferred a kind of immortality on its servants. Nothing in England was safer than Garton’s, not even that sacrosanct pattern of all property and institutions, the Bank of England. Once attach Hugh firmly to this tremendous institution, and she felt she could sleep without fear of the dreams that haunted her, dreams in which, with her mother dead and Richard away from her in some far country, she had lost Hugh, and was seeking for him in an anguish that gradually woke her. Then she would sit up and bend over him, touching him to make sure of the reality of his presence at her side. She listened to his regular breathing, and sometimes, incomprehensible creature, remained awake until dawn, to have the pleasure of seeing the outline of his face, softened in sleep, emerge from the obscurity of the room. It gave her the same sharp stab of pleasure that she felt on seeing the lovely line of a ship emerging from its cloud of scaffolding.

  She might have proposed to Hugh quite simply that he should join her in directing the Line and the Yard. But it never occurred to her to go straight to her goal. She approached it down every conceivable by-way. She brought him problems of Yard and Line. She tried to enlist him on her side against Mempes in the great question of steam versus sail. She showed him Prendergast’s accounts of his experiments with condensers and pressure, supplementing her gifts of silk shirts and costly books with these more romantic tokens. Hugh was very civil, even mildly interested.

  Outwardly he had changed little during four years. His manner was still that of a very young man. In spite of debts, horses, the writing and publishing of two books, the fathering of two daughters, and election—due to the position of Garton’s in the town—to the committee of the shipping club, he had still at times an air of inexperience and boyish naïvete which caused some of the older men to regard him as a fool. It deepened Mary’s passion for him. He was, for her, the young husband of the first weeks of their marriage, and the way he confided in her, no less than his periods of almost sullen withdrawal, filled her with an increasing gentleness and anxiety to please him. She coaxed him as one of her captains would have coaxed an awkward ship, feeling his life taut and quivering under her hands, feeling her heart quicken with joy when he responded and she could see a clean run before her.

  She felt that she had no one but herself to blame for his moods of sullenness. It was she who by her arrogance had shut him out of part of her life, and she whose stupidity made it difficult for her to enter properly into his. There had been a moment in the first month of their marriage when Hugh was eager to help her and she had made him understand that Garton’s did not want him. She was bitterly ashamed of that spiritual discourtesy.

  She persevered with her excursions into the Middle Ages. And now she found herself confronted by an unexpected obstacle. Hugh did not want her to be interested. He made that devastatingly clear. An incident that occurred one day towards the end of 1869 made it clearer. Mary and Richard had been discussing their Christmas plans and when the little boy left, Hugh said abruptly:

  “Count me out of it. I shall be in London.”

  Mary swung round, startled by this blow.

  “At Christmas, Hugh?” To withdraw from one’s family at the season of orgiastic reunion was a project that had never occurred before to the head of any household in Danesacre. Mary could not credit her ears. She would not have been more struck if Hugh, in the same casual tones, had announced to her the end of the world approaching down Harbour Street.

  Hugh’s eyebrows shot up. “Why not? What is the difference between Christmas and any other holiday? You and Richard always manage to amuse each other, and I’ll send the babies something special from town.”

  Mary rallied her wits. Of course, Hugh was right. There was no difference between Christmas and any other time. Seizing on his words, she proceeded to make a platitude out of what was no less than a denial of one of her most cherished beliefs, one of the sacred beliefs of all decent people, as sacred as the institution of property itself, and derived from a source at least equally divine.

  “Why, of course. You’ll enjoy a Christmas in town, Hugh.” No one looking at her would have guessed that a moment before she had been confronted by a vision of her hearth deserted, England in ruins, the whole solar system toppling about her ears. She wanted every one, herself and Hugh included, to realise that this revolutionary departure from custom was no revolution at all, but the most likely and sensible thing in the world. In the depths of her mind a voice kept repeating over and over again that it was in fact a revolution. That something was wrong. Something was happening of which she had no knowledge and over which she could exercise no control.

  Her mind, proceeding from revolution to revolution with amazing facility, put forward another suggestion to diminish Hugh’s.

  “Suppose I were to come with you, Hugh darling?” Visions of Richard’s piteous disappointment passed through her mind, to be ruthlessly dismissed. At this moment no one existed for her but Hugh. She waited confidently for his answer.

  It came at once.

  “Oh I shouldn’t do that if I were you,” Hugh said quickly. “Richie would break his heart.”

  He left the room at once, before she could reply.

  It is doubtful whether she would ever have replied. She was stunned.

  Tears of shame burned in her eyes.

  All the time her mind was composing phrases of the explanation she would give Richard, her servants, and the incredulous rest of Danesacre. Poor Mary.

  Fuller knowledge broke on her one evening some weeks later, with the startling swiftness of the earlier blow. Hugh was in love with Miss Jardine. They were already lovers. He was planning to go away with her, not for ever, only for a month. One month of perfect happiness, and then back to work. Mary stared at the proof, placed by most unlikely chance in her hands, and tried to realise what had happened to her.

  She could not. These things happened to other women, but not to her.

  Minutes passed. She held the betraying letter in her hand. Thought stirring in her benumbed brain suggested to her that she had better burn it. There was a candle on the table beside her. She held the letter in it while it caught fire, and shrivelled to a black wafer. She went on holding the fragment in the flame. Then she dropped it and
wandered across the room. After a time she became conscious of pain in her hand.

  One finger was horribly burnt, almost to the bone.

  The dressing of it took some time, and when that was finished Mary began to cry. Slowly at first, and then with sobs that shook her body, a deep-down visceral grief. It tore and shattered. . . .

  When Hugh came in she was standing by the fire in his room, still in the frock she had worn at dinner, with a lace bodice cut down between her breasts and full rucked sleeves that would have looked absurd on less slender arms than his wife’s. He thought that she looked tired and came to press his mouth lightly on the back of her neck. Surprisingly, she turned round and taking him in her arms covered his face with kisses. They had a quality that set the blood throbbing in his temples, but when he would have returned them, she put him gently away.

  “Dear,” she said and paused and began again. “This Miss Jardine. Do you love her very much?”

  “What have you done to your finger?” Hugh asked, after a pause.

  Mary glanced down at her hand. The consciousness of pain had left her again.

  “I burned it,” she said indifferently.

  She was studying his face with a passionate intentness, as if for the second time in her life she had to get it by heart, before it was lost to her. Hugh was pale, and his mouth was compressed out of all softness or kindness. He looked very young and a little cruel.