The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  “You promised.”

  “Would you try to keep me to a promise made at such a moment?” he asked ironically, knowing the answer. Not from the woman who had injured him could he expect generosity. At this moment, he remembered with vivid accuracy the details of his last interview with her, and heard himself making that despairing promise. Good God, how he had suffered. He could almost feel the salt taste in his mouth as he pleaded with her to stay. He had meant every word he had said, and what a fool he had been. “Fool I was and fool I am,” he thought, “but a man who has neither the wits nor the moral force to keep his wife has no right to complain if she goes off.” With a grim humour he reflected that now, when it no longer mattered, he was more than able to cope with her. She would behave herself if he allowed her to pass the remainder of her life under his roof.

  “Of course I keep you to it,” Mercy Hardman said. “You made the promise freely of your own will. If you refuse, if you push me back into the life I’m living here, you will not be happy as long as you live. You’ll remember that I came to you and asked to be taken back and that you refused me. Wherever you are and whatever this Mary Hervey of yours does for you and is to you, you’ll never get rid of me again.”

  Gerry leaned across the table and spoke to Mary.

  “I think she’s wrong,” he said clearly. “I think I should forget her again as soon as we got away from this place. She flatters herself grossly in supposing that she’d haunt me. But she is my wife, and I did promise to take her back. I don’t suppose that anything she has done or any number of years could make her the less my wife. I married her and I’ve got to look after her as long as she wants me to. Do you see that, my dear? I think I hardly need have said all this aloud, except that this is something you cannot care to see. If you don’t see it I shan’t be surprised, or mind.”

  Mary stirred and smiled with a faint childish hauteur, because Mercy was looking at her. “I am behaving worse than a fool,” Gerry thought quietly, “to take the woman back, but I must do it.” He looked at Mary again to assure himself that she was still what he knew her to be. She put out her hands in a gesture meant to express complete acquiescence in whatever he chose to do, but suddenly he felt that he was losing her. He looked at her with helpless anguish as if she were dying, as if he were standing beside the bed where Mary lay dead.

  “Mary,” he cried.

  Mary’s fingers touched the stem of her glass; she lifted it, and swayed, falling forward across the table. The wine was spilled from the broken glass and ran out in a thin stream, but when Gerry got her out of the café and into a cab, what he had thought was wine on his hand turned out to be blood, from a cut on Mary’s wrist. He tied it up, and held her in his arms while the cab lurched slowly across the quays. The lights of a wide square fell across Mary’s face and she struggled to sit up.

  “Gerry,” Mary said, “did we do right?”

  “Hush,” he said under his breath. “Please hush.” It had just occurred to him that he had only given her two kisses since he first saw her, and he covered her face with kisses. His whole life up to this point drew itself into a blinding ray of light that poured into him as he sat in the jolting cab, with the smell of musk and old leather in his nostrils and his love in his arms. His body was blazing with light, like a house of lit windows.

  “My dear,” he said, stammering, “my perfect love, my life.” Mary lay still in his arms.

  “We can never go away together now,” she said dreamily, “because we could never come back. Mercy would find us out wherever we went. Oh my dear, my dear, why did you do it, why did I let you do it? Love. I should like to die, now, before I have to let you go.”

  “The Garonne is running out with a full tide,” Gerry said wildly. “Shall I stop the cab?”

  Mary smiled and took her arms away from him. Her smile said: “How absurd you are and how I love you.”

  “We’re not like that,” she told him, “and Richard is waiting on the Mark Henry for us. You dear Gerry. Every time I see you coming unexpectedly from the Yard into my room I am so happy I could dance on the tulipwood table, like Mark Henry Garton when he launched the Mary Gray of which he was so proud. A long time ago, when I was a little girl, I used to think there would be sure to be a shipyard in Heaven with the sound of hammers and blocks and men singing O away you rolling river; until Miss Flora told me that they didn’t need ships because of their wings. I was disappointed and then I saw that it wouldn’t have been at all exciting since nothing could go wrong.” She stopped, unable to explain to him that though everything had gone wrong for them she was happy because nothing could take from them the past evening. “Sitting in that café,” she said, “I felt your body on mine, do you understand me, as if we were married and shared one soul between us. Nothing better than that will ever happen to me. I shall remember it all my life. There are tears in your eyes. Put your head here and let me hold you. I never thought I should make you cry, Gerry.”

  “I’m not crying because of you,” Gerry said, “but for both of us and for what I’m losing, for what I lost that day at Roxborough.”

  The word filled Mary with longing for her home. On the hills was peace. She wished that Charlotte had not sold Hansyke Manor, because she would have liked to go back there and comfort herself with something that was hers. She would like to lay herself in the life of her family as in a cool narrow grave, a child returning to the body of its mother. Gerry’s head was heavy against her shoulder; she could not take Gerry with her there, he had no part in the life of old dead Hansykes. “He is part of my life,” Mary said to herself, “but he did not come out of my past and when I am dead I shall go back to Roxborough and Danesacre, the moors and the sea; my feet will remember old streets and I shall not remember Gerry, but I shall remember the shipyard and the old old church on the cliff and the old road across the moor.”

  The cab lurched aside into the street where their hotel was. At the door of her room Gerry took Mary into his arms. She leaned against him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “Tired,” Mary said. “Deathly tired.”

  He watched her walk unsteadily into the depths of her room. The room swallowed her up, and he was left leaning against the wall in the dim corridor.

  6

  On the first night of the return voyage Mary shared her cabin with Mercy Hardman. Mercy came aboard in the yellow gown she had worn in the café, with a small box, so small that Mary thought she must be wearing her only frock, and remembering the days when one frock was all she had to wear in Mark Henry’s house, felt a moment of sympathy for Gerry’s wife. She stayed on deck when Mercy retired, talking to the captain’s wife, until she thought that Mercy had had time to get into her improvised bed on the couch. Then she went down to her cabin, knocking on the door. Mercy was seated on the edge of the couch, her face smothered in a white grease, which she was wiping off, using one of Mary’s fine damask towels. The process revealed her face moulded into hollows and wrinkled like an old yellow candle. She was in her chemise, an intolerable garment that clasped her flattened body too closely.

  “I’m getting old,” she said dispassionately. “I’m nearer fifty than forty and my life has made me older. If I had not such a thick skin it would be in worse state than it is. You have one of those delicate northern skins, they don’t exist in the south. I don’t like you. I don’t think you’re beautiful, but I envy you your health; I never had as much. I suppose Gerry has resigned you; he’s not the sort of man to go gay with a wife in his house. That’s of no importance to me, but I don’t like you any the better for it. Your eyes offend me and so does the way you look at me.”

  “Forgive me,” Mary said. “I did not intend to offend you.”

  Mary Hervey had a great dignity for so small a woman; it stiffened her back as she stood in the centre of her desecrated cabin. Mercy Hardman moved uncomfortably on her couch, but she was too hardy to be quelled. A wish to assail Mary’s innocence seized her and pushed her p
ast caution. She began to talk to Mary of her life, forcing on the younger woman knowledge that sickened her, and all the time Mary brushed her long hair with a steady motion., neither answering nor checking the flow of Mercy’s malice. Mercy talked herself out and laid down between the blankets, her face turned despitefully towards the room. She knew that Mary loathed the thought of undressing in front of another woman, and kept her dark eyes widely open.

  Mary finished brushing her hair. With a great effort she gathered herself together in the quiet of her mind, shutting out the cabin and the curious and intolerable woman who was Gerry’s wife, until she seemed to be standing alone on the rocking floor of the boat. The port above her bed was open, and the sea tilted past her eyes and sank again below the level of the port as the Mark Henry slipped along in a gentle westerly breeze. Mary undressed, turned out the lamp and got into bed. There she lay for a long time, tossing in the immensity of the safe decent sea. Every now and then her eye sought the vague shape against the door which was the other woman’s yellow frock, hanging there and swaying in a foolish jig like an unhouseled ghost. At last she fell asleep.

  In the morning she could not face the prospect of sharing her cabin with Mercy Hardman for the rest of the short voyage. She rose early and went up on deck. Gerry was leaning against the taffrail, watching the water pouring past the side of the boat as the Mark Henry slid and swung over enchanted green hollows lucent in the sunshine. Mary went up to him and said directly:

  “I’ll let you and your wife have my cabin“

  “That wouldn’t do at all,” Gerry said simply. “I couldn’t share a room with her.”

  “I had to share mine,” Mary said, and then understanding him turned away, blushing deep red all over her face. She saw their life, Gerry’s life with his wife, as it would be, Gerry living in a house with this woman whose room he could not share, seeing her across his table, talking to her, sharing in her life in spite of himself. “It’s too much,” she exclaimed. “You can’t endure it, Gerry.” But Gerry stared out over the sea as if he did not care to look at her, or as if he saw something that he preferred not to let her see.

  Later in the day Mary sought out the captain and explained to him her difficulty about Mrs Hardman. Captain James made no bones about understanding her.

  “I appreciate your feeling, ma’am,” he said. “I wouldn’t have that woman in my cabin for half Garton’s. No, ma’am. I’d rather sleep with a serpent, in a manner of speaking, and Mrs James feels the same thing. I am happy to say that we are in accord on this point, as on every other except her refusal to learn to spell. As I say to her, ‘Suppose we had children, you couldn’t teach them, could you?’ And she says, ‘If I only had a child, Mr James, I’d teach myself anything.’ So there we are, and in a manner of speaking I take you. I will see to it that Mrs Hardman has another cabin. She can have the second mate’s, he being a young man and this his first voyage on his ticket has no right to complain where he sleeps. Leave it to me.”

  Thankfully, Mary left it, and for the rest of the voyage had peace, so far as the Mark Henry’s return trip could be called peaceful. Not that the ship herself was unquiet, there never was a boat steadier at sea than the Mark Henry. But an atmosphere of morose unrest and impatience hung over her from the officers’ mess to the fo’c’sle. It was distinctly felt that there were too many women aboard. Any feeling about a particular person will run through a whole ship with lightning quickness, and before noon on the first day out Gerry Hardman’s yellow-gowned wife was taking the blame for every misfortune that occurred, from a dropped coil of rope to the cook scalding himself in his galley. In the Channel they narrowly escaped being cut in half by an American schooner; the danger averted, Captain James addressed the Yankee in a mournful voice: “Damned stop-for-nothing fool,” he said gently. “Doesn’t care a curse for God, the devil, or the other fellow. May he rot to-night in hell.” But Mary overheard the bos’un laying direct responsibility for the affair on “that yellow______,” a sentiment which the second mate, probably suffering under a sense of personal injury, received with a certain disregard for discipline.

  So the Mark Henry came home with one more passenger than she took out, and Mary offered Gerry the house above the Yard to live in with his wife.

  “It has grown too small for me,” she said, “now that Clara and Sylvia ought to have a proper governess and live at home. I shall move into St Mary’s Terrace, which is a long way from the Yard and the office but on the right side of the town. Harbour Street is not a very nice street, after all. I shall buy Old Smithson’s big house there; they say his widow will take less than it cost him to build it to get it off her hands. This house shall be yours.”

  “I couldn’t afford the fair rent of your house, Mary,” said Gerry.

  “Ah, my dear,” Mary said, “may I do nothing for you? The house is an addition to your salary. You will need more money now.”

  “Thank you,” Gerry said grimly. “You are very good.”

  Tears came into Mary’s eyes in spite of herself.

  “I love you,” she whispered to him.

  “Yes, I know.”

  Chapter Six

  1

  The drawing-room of Mary’s new house in St Mary’s Terrace was in her opinion its most satisfactory room. The rest of the house was full of furniture from Hansyke Manor, most of it very old and of a marvellous quiet austerity, but this one room she had furnished herself and to please herself. It contained all the best of Mark Henry’s mahogany furniture, large chairs and carved heavy tables polished to such perfection that when Mary looked at them she seemed to be gazing down into depth on depth of tawny golden flame. Against one wall stood a great sideboard of exquisitely marked wood, made to her order by John Calverly, the old furniture maker of Harbour Street, who lived alone, and among the pots and pans of his meagre breakfast made furniture for every Danesacre bride who could afford it; he had been six months making Mary’s sideboard, with mouldings and heavy headings round the doors and the lovely curved door in the front. Hansyke silver covered it, and on the walls, hanging strangely between the monstrous birds and pomegranates of the wall-paper, were the fruits of Charlotte’s childish toil, the landing of Prince Charlie and Flora Macdonald in woodwork, the colours a little dimmed and yellow, and a Holy Family in many coloured silks, fading almost visibly in the sun that poured through the long glass doors opened to the garden.

  Issuing slowly on to the lawn through one of those same glass doors, Mary paused for a moment to admire the square front with its twenty tall windows glittering in the slant rays of the sun. Old Smithson had built himself a good house out of the profits of his yard. A cautious old fox, he got out at the top of his fortune, when freights were high and sailing ships approaching the pinnacle of their glory. He had sunk a large sum in this house, building it of stone from the Roxborough quarries. Every inch of wood in it was solid oak; from roof to cellar not a splinter of soft wood. It had been three years building and he enjoyed it barely one, delaying to occupy it until he thought it fit to live in. No Danesacre man ever rushed headlong into the perils of an imperfectly humanised house. “Let your new house to a stranger the first year, a friend the second, and live in it yourself the third.” Old Smithson could not endure the thought of anyone else occupying his house, but he kept it empty and fires burning in every room for six months before he went in. After so much forethought he deserved a better enjoyment of it than he got, cut short at the end of ten months by a stumble at the top of his cellar stairs. Breaking his leg at the bottom he died of chagrin two days later. His widow was a poor stick of an ex-governess, whose anxiety to rid herself of the house Mary recalled with contemptuous kindliness. The poor woman was willing to take any price, and would undoubtedly have lost money had not Mary scrupulously insisted on paying her a fair price, not a penny below or over.

  Turning her back on her house, Mary walked diagonally across the lawn to a green door in the wall. It was not a very large garden, but where the other b
ig houses of this elegant terrace had gardens running steeply down to the road, Old Smithson had had the ground banked up in front of his house to make a level stretch of lawn from his drawing-room windows. It stood thirty feet above the road, a smooth green plateau, set about with lilacs and laburnum; against one wall a small rose garden carpeted with black pansies, and on the other pear trees, a tracery of black boughs and fragile blossom on the rough stone.

  Mary lingered, her hand on the latch of the door. She was reluctant to go away. The solidity of her house was a refuge in these days when she was discovering how far Garton’s had built out on what were at best perilous foundations and in places no foundation at all. Freights had been dropping for three years. There was no sign that they had touched bottom. Half her ships were laid up. One of her yards, Smithson’s Yard, was not building, and the orders in hand at Garton’s Yard were not enough to see the year out.

  She was not, thank God, alone in her peril. In this bitter close of the great seventies shipbuilding firms were in trouble all over the country, and for one that was riding the storm, ten were shipping heavy seas. Garton’s, because of its overloaded commitments, was in worse case than many. There was an overdraft at the bank. The money had been spent in building the new Tees-side yards, begun in the swell of the good years, and persisted in during three bad ones. She ought to have suspended the work when the first strain wiped out her reserves. That had been Mempes’ advice, strongly supported by Gerry. . . . Mary threw back her head in unconscious imitation of Mark Henry. The older she grew the more of his gestures she used, entirely without knowing it, as if the years were uncovering in her young body a buried resemblance to that grim old rascal. . . . The work on the Tees would have to be. suspended now, and hating the necessity, she put off from month to month giving the order. John Mempes’ triumph was a pill. He had been right all the time, Garton’s was going too fast. It had become like an over-sparred ship and the storm was punishing it. . . . She would let the work at the Tees go on a little longer, six months longer. Things might look better in six months.