Freights were high and going higher. The Yard was full of work, building iron-screw steamers for Plymouth and London firms, and sending them round to the Tees to take in their engines. Garton’s was lifting and riding on such a swelling tide as Mark Henry had never seen.
Mary recalled abruptly an unanswered letter from the John Roxby who had gone into trade in the forties and dropped out of the family’s cognisance. He had written, signing himself her Humble and Obedient, to ask whether she thought it possible that Roxby House would come into the market, James Roxby having died of age and port, and Charles reputed to be dying. Her Humble and Obedient sounded cocksure. Mary made a wry face. She would write him a formal letter. “For the attention of your good-self. There is not the very slightest chance that My Son Richard Roxby will sell his inheritance.” The man must be making money. Every one who had the luck to have anything to sell could not help making money now. An army of sellers was invading all the corners of the earth. They sold to the people at home until these had no more money to spend. Then they sold to the heathen Chinee, the Red Indian, the ordinary Indian and the black man. In top-hats and morning-coats they penetrated the ports of northern China, and presented themselves bearing gifts before mandarins, negro kings, and Persian satraps. It was called, indifferently, stimulating desire and opening new markets. Sometimes nations came into collision in the new markets and then there was talk at home of wetting the event with blood. But the world, for all it was being so rapidly foreshortened and stimulated and opened up (like an oyster attacked by a galvanic battery) was still so large, and the whole adventure so new and splendid and progressive that no one could imagine its coming to an end, and the Hervey’s of the shipbuilding world were put to it to build fast enough to cope with the running to and fro across a changing world.
Still thinking resentfully of the Roxby brother-in-law she had never seen, Mary turned her back on the harbour, and saw John Mempes coming towards her from the direction of the sail loft. He walked slowly, holding himself erect, his grey top-hat, the only grey topper in Danesacre, balanced over one eyebrow. A half smile played round Mary’s lips. She had a deep affection for the manager, partly, so to speak, her own, and partly a legacy from the serious stolid child who had followed at the heels of dandified young John Mempes in Mark Henry’s shipyard.
Mempes must be nearly fifty, she thought. He looked older, for all his stiff back. He had broadened, and his face had settled into grim lines. He shaved, exposing a menacing chin, but his hair grew down his cheek-bones and curled a little over his ears. It struck Mary, watching his slow progress, that he was oddly bigger and sterner than the men of her own generation; she could not imagine Hugh at fifty having that majesty of being.
She checked a sigh. John was a splendid man. He steadied her. He was a faithful second self, a cautious temporising voice in the back of her mind, the most loyal of advisers and friends, but an unsatisfactory companion for the young owner of Garton’s. He agreed that the Canal, now three years old, had altered the face of things, that the orders placed at the Yard were perhaps bringing nearer a move to the Tees from the confined shipyards on the Danesbeck. He had agreed to the building of two more steamships for the Line. But beyond that he was a sealed fountain. He contributed nothing to Mary’s glowing vision of the future. He was a tired man in these days and a man in whom the springs of life were definitely running backward. He said that the vision of modernity sickened him, a queer enough thing to say, if it meant anything at all.
“Good morning, John.”
Mempes smiled at her, standing with the grey top-hat held negligently in one hand. The sight of her gave him a sharp definite pleasure. Such a vivid glowing young woman she seemed, standing there, hatless, in a grey frock, with lace at her throat. She was often hatless, and in the house or out of it never wore a cap, a flouting of convention much canvassed by Danesacre’s matrons, old and young, and bitterly resented by Mrs. George Ling, who was three years Mary’s junior and bore herself as befitted the wife of the under-manager of Garton’s Steel and Iron Works and the mother of four fine growing Lings. John Mempes liked it. His eyes rested with secret satisfaction on her small uncovered head with its crown of lustrous dark hair.
“You’ll get a sunstroke,” he grumbled.
Mary laughed. “My hair is too thick.”
Vain of it, Mempes thought. Well, let her be. There was not a head of hair like it in Danesacre. From under his brows he examined the small round face offered to his gaze, narrow squared chin, and eyes like rock pools under a blue sky, as deep and secret. The long lashes rested on her cheeks for a moment, and then lifted, with that familiar effect of surprise and pleasure.
“I’m going over to Middlesborough, John.”
Mempes twitched an eyebrow at the disconcerting young woman. What was she after? He distrusted the Cornish manager of the Works. The fellow was undoubtedly crazy. He wasted money.
“What are you going there for?”
“To see Thomas Prendergast about the new German contracts for steel rails.”
Mempes growled something unintelligible.
“They’re good contracts,” Mary said defensively.
“The man’s not sound.”
“He has ideas.”
“He may have the plague for all I care,” Mempes said. “It’ud do him and us less harm in the end. His ideas cost us money. More money than we have any right to be spending.”
“Garton’s can afford to spend,” Mary observed. “We must experiment to advance.”
“Oh, experiment,” Mempes said. “Build another City of Truro perhaps?”
Mary blushed. The City of Truro had been a dreadful and humiliating blunder, Would John never stop talking about it? She looked at him with anger. It glanced harmlessly off the manager’s heavily debonair face. She could do nothing with him when he looked like that, the deep-lidded embodiment of everything Garton’s had been and nothing it was. She might as well stare at the back of his head.
Her sense of humour, a rare possession and lurking very far down in her feminine soul, came unexpectedly to her help. The City of Truro had a funny side. Two funny sides. A smile came and went on Mary’s red mouth.
“Garton’s hasn’t got where it is by being afraid of mistakes,” she said mildly.
“Another mistake like that, and you won’t be in a position to make ’em,” Mempes observed. His heart had leapt in sympathy with that fugitive smile, but he would not show it. He liked her courage, and her youth, indomitable at an age when the run of Danesacre’s wives and mothers were passing maturity. Why, he thought, she must be thirty and over; she had the skin of a young woman and the figure and poise of a girl. Her small body radiated health and abounding life. He liked the way she had balanced between her belief in her luck and her apprehension of yawnings in the ground under her feet. What he did not like was the element of recklessness and insecurity in all her enterprises since the Suez Canal had opened for her like a door opening on a new world. She had rushed into her world. Danesacre had had more than one occasion to recall the fact that she was Mark Henry Garton’s niece. They said she was turning out such another adventurous fool, and hopefully prophesied the crash.
Mary could not conceive the possibility of a crash. Mempes could and he was often afraid for her. When she would not listen to him he was angry, and when her disobedience was justified he trembled because success gave a fillip to her wilfulness. What could you expect with a chin like hers? It was the spit of Mark Henry’s.
He could not make her see that the present flood of orders was bound to slacken. She behaved as if the Yard would go on for ever working at full pressure, turning out ships for firms who could not get them fast enough; as if freights would go higher and higher beyond their present dizzy altitude. They would go higher, but they would drop again. Mempes did not share the prevailing complacency about the splendid times he lived in. The seventies, ay and the forties and fifties and sixties, were too splendid for his fastidious stomach. He knew h
ow the thing worked. There were good years, when wealth added into vast towering fortunes, and threw up fabulously ugly buildings and great factories and workshops; in their shadow grew and spread congested areas of meanly conceived towns and houses filled with men and women who sometimes had enough to eat and sometimes had not, and then they grumbled or starved to death or rioted and in any event lived or died disregarded by the master brains who were riding in on the swelling tide of the nineteenth century progress. The process caught up women and little children and squeezed the blood out of them, and a few misguided people, mistaking progress for murder, kept trying to stop it and were dubbed Radicals and traitors for their pains. Mempes had no sympathy for Radicals and little for oppressed men and women. The sight of misery angered him. But he knew what happened at the climax of every period of expanding trade. The expansion went just too far, until the warehouses and wharves were glutted. Then the factories closed down and the shipyards fell idle and silent, and the people in the dark quarters of towns and cities, and in the squalid cottages of picturesque little villages, were brought face to face with such elemental things as hunger and disease and death, and faced them as best they could, as their forefathers faced pestilence and Black Death coming on them by an act of God, until the hard times passed and good times began again. And if John Mempes cared nothing how many men and women starved to death during the hard times, he cared agonisingly for the safety of Garton’s, because Garton’s was Mary Hervey, and he loved her, with a tight-lipped craving to possess not her body only, but her mind and soul, that never left him. He had lost her, and he ached over her courage, and her wilful venturing and her warm beauty. The world might choke to death with its overreaching greed for all he cared. But not Mary.
His doubts made him a very solitary man in Danesacre. The shipping people told that his eyes were set backwards in his head, which explained why he saw nothing good later than the last century. It was only partly true. He walked about Danesacre, his hands clasped behind his back, his grey top-hat well forward, a grim figure of a dandy, and made uncomfortable remarks in the club about upstarts. There was more than one shipping fortune made in Danesacre during the early seventies, and the upcomers did not like the slighting air of Garton’s manager. His beaked nose, thick twitching eyebrows, and jutting chin intimidated the younger men. They left him alone. He sat for hours every evening in the club window, looking out to sea across the tumbling roofs of the old houses on the cliff below. What visions rose at him from the swirling grey bosom of the water? He saw the ships passing north and south, the spreading canvas of clippers, crowned and caressed by the envious sun, the smoke-smudged track of steamers, the small coasters, sail and steam, wallowing along with less grace than persistence. The light faded and sunk in night, sea and sky lay in a soft profound obscurity. The lights of the passing ships, like stars fallen from the thickly scattered sky, pierced the over-arching darkness. Sea and sky, ships’ lights and stars, were one, as if the little town were perched on the verge of space.
Then he turned his back on the window and gave himself up to other thoughts. He thought of the Yard and the Works and of the owner of yard and works, of a slender neck and a head heavy with dark hair, of a rebellious young mouth and eyes glowing with wilful fire, of a soft voice saying: “I like you.” How long ago. Eight years, and then she had married the London fellow, who had left her. The fellow had come back again, but no tale of an Italian holiday had taken in John Mempes. He knew better. Besides, he had seen the yellow-haired piece who had been the fellow’s secretary standing in the garden of a cottage in a sequestered village up the valley. Keeping her there, was he? The fool. Mempes growled aloud, and stalking across the room, went home, troubled by the world, by Mary, and by the frightful vision of Mary broken on the world’s inexorable wheel, alternating fat years with lean ones, and by her own refusal to look beyond present fat to coming lean.
He did not like the news that she was going over to the Tees. Quite apart from his distrust of Thomas Prendergast’s ideas, he viewed Mary’s friendly attitude to the fellow with jealous dislike. Damn it, the man was nothing, a common dog of a puddler picked up between Mark Henry’s thumb and finger, no companion for a lady. He called Mary a lady because she was half Hansyke; the Garton strain was middle-class, a coarse strain in fine stuff.
“You don’t need to go to the Tees to overlook Prendergast’s contracts,” he said. “Let him write over.”
“I prefer to go.”
“You’ll get into mischief.”
Mary gave him a clear look, and he turned away angrily. He heard her voice in his ear. “Don’t be silly, John. I hear there’s trouble on the Tees. It doesn’t affect us, but I’d like to look at it. I want to look at a number of things. We shall move there some day, after all.”
Mempes’ gaze took in the Yard and the old harbour. An unreasoning regret possessed him.
“You’re like the City of Truro. You’ve grown too big for decent handling. You’ll presently go down in a storm with others like yourself, and a lot of poor wretches clinging to you.”
Mary laughed at him and in a flight of misguided imagery he told her that she resembled a hankering cow, overfed and under the impression that the whole world was one lush meadow. That was more than enough for Mary. She went away at once, with her head up. His face relaxed into a grim smile, reminded by her retreating back of an offended little girl who had left him standing in the identical spot. . . .
Mary drove over the moors to Roxby House and found Charles Roxby ill in bed. He had been dying so long that no one believed in the imminence of his end, though he had wasted until he was more like a catgut than a man, a mere whispering spite in a lawn night-shirt, with long fingers that sorted silks and plucked at the sheets. His face wavered at Mary and he said:
“I hear Hervey’s on with a golden girl. You have to pay for youth. Archie gave you no such pangs.”
“Be quiet,” Mary said grimly.
“I’ll be quiet,” Charles chuckled. “I’ll be as quiet as death. But can’t you hear them whispering together in the night? Come close, my darling, and closer and warmer. Eh, Mary?”
It hurt her quite horribly for a moment, but she recovered at once. Her air of self-sufficiency, the armour she had begun to clasp round her as a little girl and had laid aside for Hugh, was not proof against this sort of thing even now. Her face expressed nothing. “Hard little devil,” Charles commented to himself. He had never been able to touch or understand her, but he was very old and so near death that he had given up trying to explain things to himself. There were several things he wanted to explain to other people before he died, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble. It was easier to go on making malicious remarks. Die as you’ve lived was his rule of decent conduct. He lifted his thin old eyelids suddenly and saw Mary looking past him with an expression of unfathomable doubt in her eyes. They reminded him that he had seen the same expression in the eyes of a young deer in Roxby Park when he crept to within a foot of it before betraying his nearness. He was startled, almost shocked, and recoiled among his pillows. No young woman had the right to expose herself in such fashion. What could have made her afraid? He considered for a moment telling her that nothing that could happen to her mattered so dearly as she might think it did, but the effort was too much trouble. He closed his eyes and pretended to be, asleep.
Mary’s wistful face before old Charles Roxby was no accident. Even to herself, she was awkward and uncertain. She felt less certain than young Mary Roxby with her baby and her injudicious dreams. That girl had not had Hugh. She did not know how easy it is to make the most frightful mistakes—by chance, in a chance moment of distrust. She knew nothing, and was not dishonourably afraid. Mary Hervey was afraid of several things. She had been taught distrust of herself by Hugh. Because he had turned from her she believed herself to be an unlovable woman.
No one knew what she felt. This gives her comedy its faintly tragic air. She was so strong that there was nothing she could not endur
e in silence. Her small, apparently fragile body was the guardian of a spiritual vitality handed down through generations of landfast Hansykes and resolute acquisitive Gartons. She had sometimes thought of death, during months when she worked until a fatigued body could be trusted to fall into sudden sleep and roused to work again, but a strange ironical sense of her own powers of endurance had carried her through it all. She knew that she would live down her loss. And after all she had lived it down.
She left Roxby House and continued to drive over the moors northwards, sitting stiffly in her carriage, with hands folded in her lap and eyes staring blindly. The moor was wild with Spring, every peaty stream bubbling madly down, every larch tree offering its shy enchanting flowers, the bogs starred with asphodel and sundew. The carriage jolted down into a small valley and passed a cottage standing in an orchard. The half-opened buds of apple blossom, spraying up against the blue sky, filled Mary with an ecstatic sense of happiness. At the same time she was surprised to feel tears forming in her eyes. She accused herself of becoming shamefully sentimental, and strove successfully to get rid of them without having recourse to lifting her veil.
The Lovely Ship Page 21