The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  “I see how honest and brave you are,” said Gerry.

  “Oh, no, I’m not. I’m not at all brave.” She added thoughtfully: “Once I stood on the edge of the cliff and thought of throwing myself over because I was unhappy.”

  “A blind man could see that you and Hervey aren’t married,” Gerry commented. “I never ask you any questions. I haven’t the right to ask questions, but I wish you’d tell me why.”

  Mary answered with perfect simplicity.

  “Hugh got tired of me. At least, he wanted another woman as well.” It seemed to her that she was clearing up a whole stretch of her life in those few words. She was amazed at the ease with which she could talk about it. “I’m not clever enough to feel that I could ever share my husband. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even pretend. I was dreadfully unhappy and disappointed. I never imagined anything could hurt as that did.” She paused and looked at him in a way that startled him. It was like seeing down into the water on a clear day at sea. He lost the sense of the ground under his feet and hung over her, waiting for her to speak. “If I had known that you were coming, I shouldn’t have cried over Hugh and Miss Jardine,” Mary said simply.

  “Hush,” said Gerry. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “I know that you’re here and I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Shall we go? Don’t go. Are you tired of Danesacre already and wanting something else to happen to you?”

  “Nothing like you will ever happen to me again,” Gerry said. He was quite sure of this, but he avoided Mary’s eyes. He preferred not to know how far this avowal had carried him. This pleasant companionship, this sense that one other human being was profoundly interested in him, was moved by his presence, was fond of him, filled him with surprise and pleasure. It was already so valuable to him that he dreaded to lose it by talking about it. He thought ironically: “I may be terribly and completely this woman’s slave. I don’t know. It can only be a bad business for me and perhaps for both of us.” With a deeper irony he reflected that had he been ten years younger no such considerations would have entered his head. The enjoyments desired by a young man were much hastier and easier of fulfilment than the slow rich savouring of happiness he desired now.

  He would have been startled if he had known how many of Mary’s waking thoughts were directed on him. When she was not thinking of Garton’s or occupied with Richard she was thinking of Gerry Hardman. Into her thoughts of him were compressed all those inward forces that, in the hands of saints and prophets, have worked miracles, and all her inherited craving for possession. She had admitted to herself, soon after he came, that she loved him, but the word was so inadequate to describe her engrossing interest that none of the consequences of being in love with her Yard manager occurred to her mind. She longed to be sure of him, but only because of the immense tenderness in her thoughts of him, and because she could not pour it out on a man who, however much he needed it and unconsciously asked her for it, might turn out to be only coolly interested in her. It did not matter to her otherwise.

  She was conscious of immense reserves in his mind. He had asked her about Hugh and he had told her nothing of his wife. It never struck her as odd that she, who had so violently resented the differences between herself and her young husband found it impossible to resent anything this man chose to do or leave undone. But though she acquiesced in his right to be silent where he pleased, she was still a woman in love, and she wanted to know the other woman who had loved Gerry and been loved by him. Besides, he had been hurt, and Mary wanted, as she had forgotten she could want anything, to comfort him. The powerful instinct that had forced her to try and dominate Hugh was forcing her now to break down Gerry’s reserves. Her instinct warned her that she could not dominate this man, but she could conceive no reason why she should not so possess herself of all his thoughts and secrets that she and she alone was his friend and intimately acquainted with him. Surely he needed her?

  She had empty moments when she reminded herself that Hugh had found it quite possible to do without her. After a time, she became sure that Gerry would have liked to talk about his wife, and was held back by an incomprehensible reluctance. It was nothing more subtle than a man’s reluctance to give his wife away to anyone, even an intimate friend. Mary was an unusual woman but she would not have understood that.

  They contrived, by an impulse that was mutual but always sprang from Mary, to see a good deal of each other outside the Yard. Then intimate conversation became possible, and Gerry talked. He never talked to her about himself, only about things he had seen. He seemed to want her company, and feeling that, Mary could not keep away from him. It became—she was too arrogant to practise any subtlety—so obvious that Hugh noticed it, and one day asked her:

  “How long have you known this fellow Hardman, Mary?”

  Glancing at him, Mary saw that he was white, and pinched about the nostrils. It was like the old Hugh to ask a simple question as if his life depended on the answer.

  “We’ve known each other since we were fourteen.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  With a quickness that startled her, she answered: “I’m fond of him. It means nothing.”

  “I hardly thought it did,” Hugh said. “In that case need he come to dinner so often? He’s finished the Lafitte and started on the best of that Spanish wine. He’s what you might call an experienced drinker.”

  Mary had not the least idea whether he had believed her or not. His lips were pressed together and he was looking at her with an intense scrutiny. The intolerable idea came into her head that Hugh had grown tired of Miss Jardine—who indeed would have expected that to last so long?—and wanted to be reconciled to his wife, and she shivered. There was no place for Hugh in her present world and he had no right to stand forlornly on the edge, reminding her of something she had forgotten and did not now care to remember. She put him out of her thoughts and forgot the lie as quickly as possible. Hugh was not even real. Nothing was real but the happiness she held in her hands with agonising care. It possessed her to the exclusion of everything else. She was proud of the submissiveness of her love and thankful that it never left her. She had been half afraid that one morning she would wake up and find that there was nothing different about Gerry at all, that he was just an ordinary man with no power to change the whole colour of life for her. And every day that this did not happen her gratitude to him deepened. The very Yard, which had always been to her the most exciting place in the world, became more so when there was a chance that as she crossed it on her way from her own office to the offices of the Line on the pier she would catch a glimpse of Gerry, or meet him hurrying down Harbour Street, or standing outside the architect’s office, engrossed in talk with that portly man. There were several points on her journey where she might see him if the nearer ones drew blank.

  So few were the people with whom she had anything approaching intimacy that no one said to her: “How is all this going to end?” Of all the tumult of warning, hatred, and longing that occasionally appeared on John Mempes’ heavy sardonic face when she sat opposite him and Gerry at her own dinner table with Hugh affable and elegant on her right, she saw nothing at all. She had the illusion that she was impenetrable. Absurd creature. She was as impenetrable at these times as a moor stream with the sun on it. Her thoughts darted to and fro in the clear water for all who looked to see. Every glance she threw at the man facing her gave her away to Mempes’ fierce grey eyes, and she threw a good many. Gerry drew her like a magnet. The longer Mempes watched the more convinced he grew that Mary was the fellow’s mistress. He was quite wrong. Gerry Hardman had not thought of asking her to become his mistress, but she was none the less possessed of him more completely than by any physical possession. Small wonder that Mempes, incapable of metaphysical conceits, raged inwardly and indulged himself in an abysmal contempt for her husband’s blindness. Until one day he caught Hugh scrutinising his wife with an air of painful perplexity, and after that despised him not for
blindness but for a shameful modern squeamishness. Not for Mempes were any vulgar notions of delicacy between husband and wife on the subject of the wife’s affection for another man. Have it out with her. Make her behave herself. More than once he had an impulse to chastise Mary himself.

  4

  One evening, after dinner in his rooms, Gerry Hardman walked to the house above the Yard, preparing as he went an excuse for calling there. He needed an excuse to cover his nakedness. He was afraid of the surrender Mary unconsciously demanded. She would strip him of everything, his thoughts, his gestures, all that covered the reality of him from other eyes, if once he submitted himself to her. He was afraid to give any person so much power over him, and afraid not to give it to Mary. The thought of surrender was infinitely attractive. During the six months he had been in Danesacre she had invaded his mind in a way he would not have believed possible. He had ceased to wonder how far he was possessed by her. He craved the sensation of throwing up his hands and abandoning himself to her to do with what she liked, but in nineteen years Gerry Hardman had learned caution. He found himself ridiculously engaged in repeating her name aloud in the emptiness of his room, and the only way he could rid himself of the sense of her presence was to plunge into work. He worked long into every night and went to bed exhausted, to remember her as his eyes opened. He did not know whether he loved her or not, but he knew that he did not desire her, which he found strange until he thought about it, and saw that to him she was still Mary Hansyke and his young innocent love.

  His state would have been incomprehensible to John Sacheverell Mempes. So for the matter of that would Mary’s—to Mempes and to all other right-thinking people who have ceased to believe in the visitation among men of love as an irresistible destroying spirit: Mempes had another word for it. He was not charitable enough to call it a madness.

  As he hesitated outside the gate of Mark Henry’s house, Gerry saw Mary at the foot of the short slope running down to the Yard. It was almost dark. He knew her by the slope of her thin shoulders. She was coming up to him, walking with her head tilted back, and he waited for her. Her face swam up towards him through the layers of dusk, a pale drowned face floating up to the surface of dark water. He felt her approach as if it had been going on for a long time, for nearly twenty years. At last he moved to meet her and they met half-way up the slope.

  “Were you coming to see me?” Mary said.

  “I wanted you.”

  They turned down again towards the Yard and walked across it. The skeleton of a ship saw them coming. It lay between them and the harbour, until they passed the other end of it and reached a broad grassy path following the walled edge of the harbour to a small house on the edge of the hill. They stood still. The water lay as still at their feet.

  “If there was anything I could say to you,” Gerry began, “that could explain to you what you are. Have I the right to talk to you?”

  “All rights,” Mary said, and clasped her hands, drawing her shawl closer across the thin silk of her dress. A fleeting regret crossed her mind that its rich deep crimson had blackened to invisibility in the dark. She shivered, less from cold than a nervous tension.

  “I want to tell you this much. My wife left me ten years ago, when we had been married two years. She left me at Marseilles, on the voyage out. I had no warning of it, of her desire to go. She told me one evening that I was”—Gerry moved his head stiffly—“an unsatisfactory husband. She left me in no doubt of it, and the same night she went ashore. I gave her all the money I had with mc and told her that she would always find money, what I could spare, to her account with my solicitor; he would give it to her on her signature. So far as I know, she has never called upon him: she writes for money when she needs it, from Marseilles, and Paris, and once from Lisbon. She—I didn’t try to stop her. That’s not true. I implored her not to leave me, but I took no measures to prevent her going. Should I have done? She was a very resolute person, eight or nine years my elder, very dark and beautiful. I think I was still something of a boy. She dominated me. I loved her. For five years, the years of my marriage and three after she went, I loved her entirely. I thought of her, I wanted to absorb her as she had absorbed me. I pursued her with my love.” A spasm of bitterness crossed his face. “I got so low as writing letters for my solicitor to forward with the money.” He thought over that for a moment. As if just remembering the woman beside him, he spoke in a softened voice. “Am I hurting you, Mary?”

  “Give me a moment. You don’t hurt me, only what you say hurts.”

  Gerry let her lean for comfort against his shoulder.

  “Go on,” Mary said. “Did I stop you? I’m sorry. Go on now.”

  “Your face stopped me, and there’s nothing more to tell you.”

  “But now?” It cost Mary a violent sacrifice of the pride she had thought subdued, to ask the question. She would not have asked it if she had not felt that she could not go on living without the truth.

  “Do I love her now? No, I don’t. I stopped loving her seven years ago. I don’t hate her. I couldn’t hate anyone to whom I had given so much. She lost her meaning for me, that’s all. I don’t want to see her again.”

  “Shall I lose meaning for you?” Mary asked in a low voice.

  “You are my meaning,” said Gerry, surprised by his own words, and repeating them with a sudden overwhelming delight: “You’re the meaning of everything. Nothing else is of the least importance. Do you understand? Dear Mary, do you understand me?”

  “I won’t pretend I don’t,” Mary said. “What do you want me to do for you, Gerry?”

  “Nothing. Only exist.”

  Mary sighed. “Well, I don’t want anything of you, except to remember that I give you everything, and ask for nothing in return. There’s no price on me, Gerry.” She looked up at him with a smile full of a delicious humility. She was a little afraid of all she meant by that smile. “I won’t be a burden to you, or expect that you should do things for me because of this, or give up anything for me or in the least way be obliged to me.”

  “I shall never ask you for anything, Mary.”

  “Yes, you will, my dear.”

  “Shall I?”

  “How sweetly you smile at me. You will ask—all men do—and whatever you ask I’ll do for you.”

  “You’re too good,” Gerry said simply. He was unbelievably happy. He was going to say: “I’ve been looking for you ever since I forgot you,” but he kept quiet, trying to steady himself in the rush of emotion that threatened to sweep him off his feet. It was so many years since he had felt like this about a woman; he had thought he was safe from it for the rest of his life and he was startled at discovering in himself depths of which he had never suspected the existence. The promise of a dangerous ecstasy beckoned and warned him in the same moment. This was something outside his experience; he was no longer a young fool. He might come out of it badly. “I’m mad to-night,” he thought. “In the morning I shall be no better than Gerry Hardman again, engineer of no reputation except in a few places not really on the map, confused with dreams, restless.” He revolted at his hesitation. “I’m spoiled, Mary, “ he said suddenly, “and rather meanly cautious. Are you sure you care to have me back?”

  “More than anything in my life.”

  “Then take me. I haven’t any secrets from you.” His body, supporting Mary’s, trembled. “I give up all my secrets. Let me be your friend for the rest of my life. Let me be kind to you, and worship you. Let me be so close to you that I can’t fail you or lose you.” He paused and looked at her with longing. “I’ll always remember you as you are now, your pale cheeks, and your eyes. I like your eyes. How kind you’ve been to me. You’re so close to me now that I can hardly see you.” He thought that if he put his hands on her, they would not feel her; so completely did she seem to have passed into him that there was no space between them.

  “Are you happy, Mary?”

  “Yes, happy.”

  Mary was trembling with happines
s, but she felt quiet and composed. Her soul folded its hands and rested on the surface of the darkness.

  “Do you hear anything?” she asked.

  “No. There are no sounds, only your voice, your dear voice.”

  Mary listened again and heard a wind a long way off up the valley, the sigh of a tree in the darkness near them, the water moving at their feet. The movement came from the beating of a pulse in the sea, the heart of the sea sending a faint infinitesimal tremor to its farthest shore.

  “Oh, how glad I am to have learned a little before you came,” she said. “I should have made so many mistakes.”

  “I’d rather have had you and the mistakes.”

  Mary was cold. In the last half-hour she seemed to have spent all her strength. She touched Gerry’s hand.

  “Do you mind if I go in?” she asked timidly. Wonderful to feel for a moment that she could ask him this, as if he were master of her comings and goings and she submitting to him.

  They walked back, past the spectre of a ship, up the slope to the gate of the garden. The house invited Mary in, but she turned her back on it to look at Gerry. They leaned towards each other, their lips touched in a fugitive kiss, the lightest breath of love. Neither of them had spoken of love or used the word in their thoughts. Mary drew back.

  “Good night,” Gerry whispered.

  “Good night.”

  5

  One morning—it was some weeks after the meeting in the shipyard—Mary woke very early. The dawn mists were floating off the surface of the harbour. Like the black and silver scales of a fish the water glittered in the sun, slipping, sliding, shivering. The masts of a schooner lying at Garton’s wharf made the most delicate and inviting gestures to the trembling air, and above it all; above wharf, water, ships, stretched a sky of limpid purity.