Mary drank her tea to a recital of Thomas Prendergast’s faults. He seemed to have been the least worthy Prendergast ever born. She stood up, pulling down her veil to hide her face, and said good-bye to his mother. She was taller than the bent little creature by a head, but she felt a child and her private causes for grief a child’s sorrows. “My mother died four years ago,” she said. “She sent me an Exhibition mug when I was a little girl.”
Mrs Prendergast overlooked this irrelevance.
“Good-bye,” she said relentlessly. “Don’t cry for Thomas. I dare say you’ll miss him, but he’s not worth any woman’s crying over. No man is. . . .”
Thomas Prendergast’s death hurt Mary more than she cared to own, though less than she thought. Several people called, after her return to Danesacre, to ask her about the riot, and she found herself, among her fellow shipbuilders, the object of a not unsympathetic curiosity. It was felt that she had shown commendable firmness in her handling of her strikers. The Yard, with memories of its own strike, was offhand with her when she went through.
She was surprised to discover how little she had to tell her callers. She knew that it had been a critical business, but it had seemed at the time, like every other crisis in her life, a mere question of getting through with it. Until the moment when it had ended with that stretch of blackened ground, the sprawling bodies in the sunshine, and the poor dripping bloody indignity in the widening pool, and Prendergast crumpled across his mother’s knee. All she had done until then was to stand in the dusty office of the Works and watch men dropping between her and a row of red-coated automata. And afterwards she had walked out, too intent on getting to Prendergast to give more than a passing thought to the danger.
The thing that haunted her imagination was Mrs Prendergast’s tragic rage. Beside that, beside that worn bent old woman, accusing her son, everything else was unimportant. Even the dead man. His blood, soaking quickly into the black friable ground, vanished from the earth, except such tiny part of it as still ran in his mother’s veins. But her bitterness lived on. It seemed a bitterness of all women, an anger born afresh with every man child tearing himself from his mother to begin a separate life.
One day, Old Smithson, meeting her in Harbour Street, said broadly:
“Eh, missus, ye taught un a lesson on’t Tees.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Mary retorted. “You can’t teach men. They’re fools and always will be.”
“Hoity-toity,” the old man cried. “Seems ye’ve getten a bit above yourself, Mary Hansyke.” Maliciously, he reduced her to childhood.
Mary smiled unexpectedly. The astonishing thought crossed Old Smithson’s mind that her eyebrows were like the narrow wings of a bird spread for flight. He was shocked, and went home to clear his brain with turkey rhubarb.
But Mary had discovered what she most resented about the riot and Prendergast’s death. It was its sheer wastefulness, offending some instinct rooted deeply in her nature. She thought of the inconclusive strike, and the confusion, and the idle works and silent docks. There was no sense in it anywhere, in the futile quarrel, in the soldiers’ fatal automatism, in the silent huddled bodies that a moment before had been centres of throbbing nerves and tense muscles, alive with hopes and anxieties and needs. Men were shamelessly wasteful. They wasted with an extravagance for which there was no excuse, and when they had nothing else to waste, wasted the only thing they could not replace, life. A sudden inexplicable anguish seized her at the thought of Richard. What could she do to instil in him a loathing equal to her own, of the incalculable spendthrift folly of men? He would grow away from her, as far as Mrs Prendergast’s little boy had grown from that eager running child; there would be another riot or a war and he would rush into it, emptying his bright blood on the greedy ground that must surely have had enough of blood since the world began. She saw him flinging himself towards death as Thomas Prendergast did, and she said to herself that she would never recover from it, never.
At the thought that he might hold himself back, she was uneasy. Torn in two, her heart bled invisibly, drops like Mrs Prendergast’s few bitter tears.
She forgot what she had come out to do, and stood still on the bridge, looking up the harbour. The tide was coming in, and the water ran up into the folding hills, shaking the moored ships and sucking past the wooden piers of the bridge. The curve of the hills closing in the upper harbour was very comforting. It had been given so many men’s dreams and thoughts to hold that it had the air of stooping to the water with wide gentle arms.
Mary had lately given Richard a young horse for his birthday. She saw again the boy’s darkly blazing eyes and crimson cheeks, and heard his voice, stammering with pleasure. She felt the thrill it gave her to watch Richard happy because of something she was doing for him. At these moments her little body ached with an exquisite sense of lightness and excitement. But she watched him with a calm face, as who should say: “Don’t think I’m giving you anything out of the ordinary, or that you’re anything but an ordinary boy.” In an everyday voice she said: “You must mind his knees on the upper road. He’s not like one of your rough little ponies.”
Richard glanced at her. As if she did not know that he would die rather than graze that satiny skin. As if she were not excited herself. He slipped an arm round her neck, squeezing it hard. The nearness of his smooth glowing face, a boyish replica of her own, gave her a strange dizzy sensation. “Thank you, thank you,” he whispered.
“Don’t choke me,” Mary said. She kissed him. . . .
Suddenly afraid that something might have happened to Richard, she turned round and hurried back to her house.
Chapter Five
1
Nothing warned Mary of Gerry Hardman’s reappearance. Her thumbs did not prick, and she had not been thinking of him the day before. Even the signature: “G. Hardman,” at the end of a letter laid by Mempes on her desk woke no throb of memory. So little do the gestures of our bodies conform to the naively romantic impulses of our minds that when she saw him she neither turned pale nor felt that her life to this moment had been a dream. She could not have written down her stock of experience to so low a figure.
Our journey through this world is marked by gravestones, under which we bury the things we find it necessary to discard, our eighteenth year, a dance, a treacherous ambition, a book of verse, our youth, our first love, our dreams of freedom. In the last grave of all we bury ourselves and every coffin contains a bankrupt. No memories that Gerry Hardman might have had of Danesacre had prepared him to find there a ghost from one such grave. If they had he would have turned tail and fled for his life. He had seen and left Mary when she was a girl of fourteen, shy and untried, when neither men nor life had laid hands on her dreaming mind. When he found her again she was a woman of thirty-three. Her slender body had lost the angularity of extreme youth. Her eyes were shadowed with the shadows of things suffered and things feared, and the smoothness of her skin—he remembered it as incredibly smooth and flawless—was blemished and faintly marked. Even at that she was lovelier than he remembered, though there was about her loveliness an indefinable suggestion of arrested development, as if her youth had been halted on the verge of maturity and she were destined to grow old, to fade, without having come to perfection. She faced him across a wide flat-topped desk in her office in the house above the Yard, and her face, for a fraction of time, was the face of young Mary Hansyke, deliciously surprised. . . .
She said in a voice of amazed gladness:
“I should have known you anywhere,” and immediately became very practical, concentrating on the business that had brought him. He was a candidate for the position of manager to the Yard, John Mempes having announced himself, to Mary’s secret relief, unable to manage both Yard and Line any longer. Mary asked him every question Mempes had prepared for the candidates. She went through all his papers. Once or twice she made as though he had answered her, while he was still manifestly hesitating over phrases.
“It’s absurd that I should be asking you these things,” she murmured. “You know everything and I almost nothing. Mr. Mempes would have been here to help me, but he’s away ill.”
In the end, sighing, she sent her apologies to two other engineers whose persons and abilities were at the disposal of Garton’s, and cleared a space on her desk with a sweeping gesture. Propping her face on her hands, she looked wistfully at the man in front of her, studying his face with unselfconscious care, noting how fine-worn it was and nervously lined, remembering things she had forgotten about the boy, his small mouth and arched narrow nostrils. She remembered then that she had once thought Hugh like him, and marvelled that they were no more alike than a blurred sketch is like a cameo. She was looking for the boy in the man, and finding him in the demure friendliness of Gerry Hardman’s smile.
“Why didn’t you come?” she asked simply.
Gerry leaned forward on the desk.
“I started,” he answered, with an equal simplicity. “My horse fell with me. He was a wretched hack, the best I could get. My leg was hurt and my head. I was out all night. I caught some sort of fever and was ill for months. Afterwards I tried to get back to you, but they couldn’t understand why I wanted to go back to that place. Did you remember that I didn’t even know your name? My family took me south for a rest. It’s maddening to be a boy and have to go where you’re taken. We’re kept children so long. I was crazy with anxiety half the time and half the time enjoying things. Do you know that feeling? I was a year late going up to Oxford, and in my first long vac I rushed up to Roxborough. I found your house. They told me you were married, and your name and where you lived. I suppose they thought I was mad when I began to laugh. I went away to that lane where ’I saw you first, and I cried, Mary.” Gerry paused, and it was still in the room. The room was adopting a respectful attitude before these human ghosts. “I’m telling you about a boy who died a long time ago,” he said apologetically. . . .
“That boy,” he began again, and hesitated. “People would say it was absurd. They’d say that a boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen can’t be in love. I was in love. . . . I went back to Oxford and stayed another year. Then I threw it up. I couldn’t stand it any longer. It was all childish and futile, playing about there, talking. Pretending to study. And heart-sick. Mary, I was. Do you mind my calling you Mary? I couldn’t be the careless young idler you’ve got to be to enjoy Oxford properly. I couldn’t even tolerate it. I left. I took up marine engineering instead of the other thing. . . .”
A man’s pleasant voice was raised in the garden below the window. “Richard,” it called. “Ritchie.”
“My husband,” Mary murmured.
“Roxby?”
“You remembered? No. I married again.” She thought. “There’s everything to tell, and I shall tell him nothing and ask him nothing.” All that mattered had been told in the explanation of his failure to come back. An enormous relief filled her mind. She did not wonder why she, a grown woman of thirty-three, with three children and two husbands to her account, should be feeling this ridiculous happiness and lightness of heart at the clearing up of an incident that had happened years ago to a very young girl. She glanced up at him with a disturbing mixture of shyness and pride. “My friend . . . you are my friend, aren’t you?”
All her distrust of herself was in her voice; a glance at his face encouraged her.
“I waited for you that night at Roxborough. For hours.”
“Not for hours, Mary? Oh, poor girl. Poor Mary.”
“I’d have waited years for you if I’d known,” Mary said. . . .
Again there was silence in the room, while these two who had touched hands before life seized and twisted them, looked at each other across nineteen years of separate experience, and tried to remember those confident unspoiled moments. Memories came out of the years, stood at their side for a little space and went away.
“I don’t even know what you’re doing here,” Gerry said at last. He smiled at her, and again his smile filled her with an exultant happiness. “I haven’t done any of the things I meant to do when I left Oxford. I’ve muddled about in odd corners of the world. I’ve wanted to know things, more, much more, than I’ve wanted to do them, with the result that at thirty-five I have no settled plan in life, almost no settled ambition. I fought in a revolution. I’ve seen a few things. The hills of North India, Singapore. I spent six years in Singapore. I married. I’ve drifted through the world.”
“With your wife?” Mary asked in a flattened voice. It could have no special significance for her that Gerry had a wife waiting somewhere for the result of this interview. No. It merely destroyed all her pleasure in it. That was all.
“No. Alone. I don’t live with my wife. I’ve been alone for a long time. One sees more. . . . I don’t think I’m a very sociable sort of beast.”
Mary looked at him carefully. He had quite evidently suffered severely—over his missing wife, or something else. It was written ineffaceably on the sensitive face over against hers. A strange emotion seized her, composed of regret, pity, and a shameful curiosity. She knew it was shameful and in the effort of subduing it, her cheeks grew scarlet and remained so.
“I’m glad you’ve come back,” she said hurriedly, with an air of having just escaped saying something less proper to the occasion. “I thought of you sometimes, and wondered what you were doing. It’s more like a miracle than chance—your coming here.”
Gerry said nothing, and smiled. He was not nearly so deeply stirred by this meeting as was Mary. If she had been more experienced, she would have read, in that attractive half mischievous smile, that she was talking to a man who had long ceased to believe in miracles. There were very few things in which Gerry Hardman believed, least of all in a divine intervention in his life. Why should any God trouble about him? Why should Mary Hervey? He did not know that Mary had already, with her astonishing capacity for seeing only what she wanted to see, begun to regard him as different from other men. That she was already measuring other men by him and finding them less attractive, clumsier in mind and body, less sensitive, less appealing. Her mind exulted in the prospect of seeing him every day. She tried to subdue the delight his mere presence gave her, but Mary Hansyke had taken possession of Mary Hervey’s body, and the woman was only able to resist faintly the young girl’s intense pleasure in the moment. Useless now to have told her that this was not the confident dreaming boy of that far-off day, but a tired man, a man weary beyond any weariness she had ever endured. Life presented itself to her as a vista of intoxicating possibilities. Visions of endless, delicious conversations on the subject nearest her heart—ships—floated through her mind. They might ride, and talk as they jogged along, their horses amiably consenting. Did he ride? Of course he did. He fell off. The terrific consequences of that fall of his rushed upon her. But for that, there would have been no Roxby House, no Hugh, perhaps, for her, no Yard. She was awed by the mysterious workings of life. Impulsively she put a hand fairly on his as it rested on the table.
“Isn’t it odd,” she said solemnly, “that we should be sitting here like this after all those years, both grown staid and sensible? With years and years to be friends in. Are you pleased? I’m so pleased I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at you.”
“You’re very like Mary Hansyke,” Gerry said irrelevantly. “You have the same faintly surprised little face. You are little, you know, Mary.”
“You’re not very tall yourself,” Mary said, and her face flushed with sudden joy as she looked at him.
Gerry Hardman was a slight compact creature, apparently all nerve and muscle; the strength of his body was in his long narrow back, the strength of his face lay all above his eyes and its beauty lay in them and in the delicately arched nose and small mouth. He was fined down to a mind. The mind was balanced and had once been impudently gay. But though the gaiety in him was not done for, it had all the air, when it did appear, of having been perverted to cynical uses.
�
�I like you,” Mary said, and suddenly shy, got up and held out her hand.
Just before Gerry went it occurred to him to ask whether he had been selected fairly for the Yard or not. He put the question harshly, with an expression of haughtiness on his face that suggested at least one reason why he had found it difficult to remain long in any job.
“If you knew me better you wouldn’t ask that,” Mary said quickly. “I have a single mind about Garton’s.”
Gerry was satisfied, but the question threw her into an extraordinary confusion. “I couldn’t possible have let him go,” she thought. “Suppose he hadn’t been good enough. I’d have chosen him just the same.” She pressed the palms of her hands to her cheeks, appalled at this discovery of treacherous depths in her mind. The lines of her face softened into laughter. “I don’t care,” she said in a light joyous voice. “I don’t care. I’m glad.”
2
John Mempes was sitting in his room in the pier-side offices of Garton’s Line. His back was to the low partition that divided his room from the big room where the clerks sat. When these stood up they could see his broad shoulders and the back of his head. There was an expression about them that hushed every tongue. Young Russell, whose brother sailed as second mate in Garton’s newest steamship, took a piece of paper and wrote on it: “Manager in a rare taking about something, we think.” The recipient nodded and tore the paper up. He pushed the pieces back to young Russell who, standing up to drop them in the waste-paper basket, knocked a ruler off the table. He turned horribly white, and held his breath, waiting for the explosion from the next room. It did not come. Young Russell subsided into his chair, a faint colour stealing back into his cheeks.
Mempes had heard nothing. He was thinking with concentrated precision about the position of Garton’s. Freights stood at a height that would probably have killed Mark Henry. If old Bridges had not finished him off before the middle of the sixties he would have died ten years later of the millennium.
The Lovely Ship Page 24