The millennium was very bitter now in the bellies of the shipping people. . . .
She shut the garden door behind her at last, and doubly reluctant, because of her anxiety about Garton’s and her destination, walked slowly away. She was going to call on Gerry’s wife, for the first time since the Mark Henry brought her home. She had not been able to bring herself to call sooner, in spite of an odd pity she felt for Mercy Hardman’s isolation in the town. If Danesacre people did not take to the stranger coming to live among them the wretch might as well have been dead. Danesacre did not take to Gerry Hardman’s wife, and left her entirely alone. She walked through its streets ungreeted by man, woman or child, smiling in a curious inward fashion, as if her face and her long mouth had some jest they were enjoying together. Her yellow frock and monstrous swinging earrings made of her an exotic figure in the little town where only the gardens and the old walls were allowed to dress gaily. She always wore yellow, a procession of yellow gowns, far more, said Danesacre, than Garton’s manager could afford. Yellow silk, with flounces from waist to hem, primrose, lemon, pale daffodil, mustard, or deep chrome yellow, attended her walks abroad, and the men leaving the Yard glanced up at the windows of Mark Henry’s house and caught a movement of yellow behind the panes, like the slow swaying of a tropical flower on the dark glassy waters of a lake.
Mary looked round Mercy Hardman’s sitting-room and wondered at its inexpressive air. Mercy’s manner suggested that she was pausing in the house on her way elsewhere. She smiled at her visitor.
“Would you like to see your house?”
“No, I thank you,” Mary tried not to speak stiffly.
“See, at least, Mr. Hardman’s room,” said Gerry’s wife, and led Mary to what had been Mark Henry’s office and her own. In this room was nothing but the tulipwood desk she had left him, a chair, a bookcase painted white, and over one wall a curtain of an exquisite and enchanting beauty, embroidered with birds and old flowers in deep rich colours on a ground of royal purple. Mary examined it in growing wonder.
“I’d give anything to possess that,” she said. “I never knew Mr. Hardman had such a curtain.”
“There are a few things you do not know about my husband,” Mercy observed. “He produced it out of one of his boxes when we came here. I think he said he found it in Norway. Perhaps a Dovrefjeld witch gave it to him, he looks sometimes like a man who has had to do with fairies.”
“Do you like your house?”
Mercy looked amused. “Why, I don’t know. It’s a house like any other. When I was a little girl I thought I should like to live in a forest high up on the side of a mountain and hang a waterfall from my doorstep to the valley below.”
Mary turned her small surprised face to the face of Gerry’s wife. Mercy Hardman repelled her with a suggestion of evil lurking in the back of her mind, like a witch’s broomstick behind the door; but she had an air of freedom that drew Mary against her will. She thought: “How hard and old you look, you’ve seen life as men see it and suffered from men because you’re a woman. I believe I could talk to you, and understand what you said.”
“Why did you marry Mr. Hardman?” she asked.
“Because he was enchantingly innocent and impudent, and deep in love. He will never love you like that.”
“How you could bear to leave him, having had him,” Mary said slowly, “I don’t know.” She spoke against her better judgment, urged by a shameful curiosity to find out something about Gerry’s marriage.
“I’ll tell you why if you like. I left to better myself, as I thought, but I wasn’t so experienced as I had supposed I was. I hate and despise men, but they’re stronger than we are and the world belongs to them. I had an idea that I was stronger than the world, that it would have to let me alone, but it broke me as easily as if I’d been any sort of female fool. I daresay you think you’re strong, but step outside your world and see how much of your strength and courage is left after a year of drifting from one foreign place to another. I’m old and I’m dirty to my bones. That’s what it’s done to me. I’m hard, I wasn’t defeated when I came on you in Bordeaux but I was getting tired of a losing fight. I’ve no respect for the world because it’s beaten me, I don’t respect anything but cleverness. I’m clever but not clever enough. I’m tough, I shall outlive Gerry, but I shan’t live long enough to see the day when a woman can afford to be as greedy as a man.”
“I wish I liked you,” Mary said abruptly.
Mercy smiled. “I don’t like you. You’re young, young enough, and although I’ve beaten you by coming here, this is a fight where the loser wins. Bah, I’m old. So will you be, and tired and disappointed.”
Mary rose to go.
“You’re right,” she said steadily. “We could not be friends. I don’t think I shall come here again. Good-bye.”
At the door she glanced back. Mercy Hardman was standing in the middle of the shadowed room, her long white face thrust forward above the yellow stem of her gown. . . .
At the gate of the Yard she met Gerry. He gave her a queer look, half grateful, half surprised, at seeing her come out of his house in her formal silk gown with her hands clasped over the fine carved handle of her sunshade. Looking at him, Mary saw that he was very tired; his eyes were bloodshot and strained, and his face fined to the edge of vital tension. He carried his body like a man in constant danger. She left him and hurrying home wept fiercely, angrily. . . .
2
The end of six months found the situation of Yard and Line not better but worse, and Mary face to face with what the shipping journals called Difficulties and John Mempes more simply and annoyingly a Judgment. In Danesacre only one new ship had been launched in the past year. It was out of Garton’s Yard: the firm which had ordered it went bankrupt a month later, and Mary had to sell at a loss to another firm. Freights were so low that she could do nothing else, except lay it up. She could not afford that.
She had changed a good deal in the past year. The bones of her beauty were still intact, but she looked worn and tired.
She thought about the Difficulties one night, standing in the window of her bedroom, watching a big moon climb slowly across the sky. Leaning far out, she could see over the roofs of the houses built far below hers, to a thin streak of harbour and a few masts and wharves, remote and strange in the white light, like the ships and quays of elf land. The upper harbour was very full, with the tide just on the turn, and the moon running where water should, under the bridge. Stained with light, the hills folded in the little town, letting the brown Danesacre slide between them to the sea.
A wry smile crossed Mary’s mouth. She was recalling Mempes’ face as it had confronted her from the other side of her desk during the afternoon, one minute after another dropping heavily away while he waited for her consent to stop the work at the Tees. She had given it in one word, feeling like Mark Henry under old Bridges’ knife. Could freights go any lower? Falling, falling, beating down on her brain; she heard their monotonous rhythm even while she slept. Things were very bad in the country, but no one would have guessed it. What Mark Henry called “goings-on” were in full blast. They had made the Queen an Empress, and Disraeli a peer. The last was a going-on would have hit Mark Henry hard. But what hadn’t the man done! The Suez Canal purchase was certain. The Transvaal had been annexed: young Smithson was going out, they said, and breaking his mother’s heart. A poor thing. . . . The Jew had been in Berlin, talking. He was the father and mother of all “goings-on.” Peace with Honour, and the depression that had been falling on industry and commerce like a gentle rain from hell—Mempes out of Shakespeare—at the darkest wettest moment of all. What a peace! What a country! Could freights go lower?
Looking back over the foundering seventies she observed curiously that for all her prosperity, now vanished, and all the money she had spent on research, she would have had little at all comparable with the startling sixties to show a Mark Henry miraculously restored to her from some incongruous beatitude. The great
swing-over from wood to iron and sail to steam had been accomplished in her Yard before the seventies began. During them she had spent enormous sums of money on experimental work: her files were choked with Gerry Hardman’s notes and reports, over which she pored with a good deal more intelligence than she ever brought to Hugh’s slow output of scholarly books. But the steamer she had built a year ago, carrying one propeller and fitted with one tandem compound engine, was an advance in details only on her seven years older sisters. Sensible shipbuilders in Danesacre said that progress had been crystallised for another half century, but Mark Henry Garton’s niece—at the very moment when her mind should have been too crushed under the imminence of Garton’s peril to entertain visiting angels—was suddenly convinced that they were wrong. The more she thought about it, when she ought to have been thinking about her overdraft, the more her spirit was troubled by the shadow and thunder of approaching change. As once before in her life, when Mempes argued with a young girl about steam and sail, Mary stood consciously between the past and the future and heard both roaring in her ears like great seas. Sail and steam, wood and iron. Steel. She had forgotten how many years it was since she had refused Thomas Prendergast permission to build a steel ship. Her imagination fastened on the thought of steel ships. They would have to be built on the Tees where the steel was. Danesacre would never build them nor the old bridge open to let a steel ship through. Her fleeting resemblance to Mark Henry passed across her face like a shadow passing over water. She longed to comfort him with a steel ship to match the iron ones he had left her. Match them! Why, steel was stronger and lighter than anything Mark Henry had ever imagined. “That’s something I’ll teach you,” she told him, nodding her head, as if Mark Henry were lurking in a corner of Old Smithson’s garden. (Impossible to believe that the spirit of Mark Henry Garton lived on anywhere outside Danesacre.)
She discovered in her memory a hoard of detailed knowledge on the possibility and advantages of mild steel, acquired at various times from Gerry, and suddenly become alive in her mind. “Two years from now I shall build a steel ship,” she said, without remembering that work on the Tees-side yards had been suspended. When she remembered it she smiled rather grimly and brought herself back to the present. But safe in a harbour of her mind lay the steel ship; its sound graceful lines ravished her eyes. It left the harbour and sweetly took the sea; it had the clean movement of a clipper and twice the strength of iron. It was right and perfect with the exquisite rightness and perfection of good ships, the finest things men make. . . .
A young wind had got up with the moon. It stole upon Mary unawares and blew a strand of hair across her eyes. Her room was filled with scent from the ghostly lilacs below the windows, and the toll of falling freights ceased clanging in her brain. She felt unreasonably happy and peaceful. Time, like a captured flame, hung motionless in one of those moments when the spirit discovers what it is to be quick, aware, in every particle, that it lives. Her fear of time, snatching away day by day the warm beauty of the world, left her, and the exquisite sense of an unending tide of life flowed into her body. She no longer felt alone, since nothing in Danesacre could be wholly alone or unfriended. Not an old boat, too old for sea, lay abandoned on the muddy reaches of the upper harbour but was companioned by a ghostly company of proud and lovely ships. Mary thought that if she could see clearly enough she might see the glorious Peerless, sunk years ago off Yokohama, fluttering home to Garton’s wharf. “I built the Peerless,” she said aloud, and felt herself thronged about by many friends, the men who had built themselves small boats when Danesacre was a cluster of Saxon huts below a church, and with them the builders of little ships who went out to board and capture French frigates, and the men who launched the wooden whalers, generation pressing on the feet of generation of shipbuilders who had seen their thoughts become ships on the stocks in old yards. And there were others, less shadowy, at her side, Mark Henry Garton, that boisterous dreamer, and a stolid little girl, watching the Mary Gray stand out to sea. . . .
She felt suddenly tired, and discovered that she was chilled to the bone. Shutting the window down, she turned her back on the inhuman magic of a moon-ridden world. She roused the fire to a blaze, and sat down at the end of the bed, her hands folded on its heavy carved foot, and her chin resting on them. She sat erect, never having learned to loll. She looked younger, staring out at the flames from under the canopy of the great bed she had brought from Hansyke Manor. The kindly light obliterated the marks which life and her endurance of it had set upon her.
Without any warning she found herself facing the knowledge—it might have sprung at her out of the heart of the fire—that she was waiting for Gerry to ask her to go away with him. When he did that, she would give up everything else and go. After all, nothing else mattered. Garton’s, all the careful elaborate structure of her life, did not matter at all. She pulled herself up. That was not true, and rather silly. They did matter—she did not know how much—but Gerry mattered far more. Burying her face in her hands, she saw the years of her life pass behind her eyes: a grey panelled room at Roxby House and Archie’s sour Hanoverian face, the naked body of her baby son, Wagener’s death, kind good Wagener, Mark Henry Garton and the long apprentice years, a London orchard, and her young beloved husband. The thought of Richard wrung a moan out of her, forcing its way between her lips like the cry of some small animal, caught and mortally hurt in a trap.
Recovering herself at once, she began to prepare for bed by taking down her hair. It was as thick as ever and had lost none of its gloss and colour. When it hung loose, she folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly for a long time, thinking, resolutely excluding all extravagance from her thoughts. Why had not Gerry asked her to leave everything and go? Why did he continue, day after day, working for Garton’s as no one had ever worked but a Garton, sitting up half the night at work—so Mempes said—in the room that had been Mark Henry’s office and then hers? He talked to her every day in the Yard, but he never looked at her. It was hardly credible that he had confessed his dreadful need of her on board the Mark Henry. . . . Mary pressed her lips together. John Mempes had once said to her: “Women have no sense of decency, at least none that I can understand.” What was this masculine sentiment that allowed Gerry to ask her on the Mark Henry to steal months for him and restrained him now—though he must have known she was waiting to be asked—from requiring her life? She told herself that she was losing everything because of his incomprehensible silence.
And this was the woman who, in order to keep her ships and her Yard, had withstood the wishes of an adored husband. She had ceased to wonder why she was ready now to behave in an entirely different fashion. It was not that she—a Garton—desired any less to build ships in the old Garton yard. If she could have kept Yard and Gerry she would have thought herself the happiest woman on earth, but she had long since come to believe that happiness was not the important thing, not even the normal thing in life, in her life at any rate. What she wanted was important, whether it brought her happiness or not.
Ever since the scene in the Bordeaux café she had known that she could not, this time, have both man and ships. And if on that evening she had doubted which she wanted the more, she had no doubts now. Her ultimate instincts were involved in this, the intense narrow pertinacity that had moulded her character from its earliest days, and the reckless almost scornful generosity that accompanied it. Gerry belonged to her and he was eluding her. He was overworking too. He was killing himself, destroying what was hers. All other things she possessed, however dear and hardly got, were less to her than the undisputed possession of this one human being. She had ceased even to have illusions about him. She knew that he was abnormally sensitive, that it was a weakness in him. She knew him to be less tenacious than she was herself, that he had courage but not endurance. She loved him the more for these weaknesses, as if she were the only person who knew of them. Probably she was, and yet she could not impress her will on him. He had a fineness that she had not
, a curious gentle haughtiness of spirit that she respected without understanding it more than a little.
Mary sighed. Gerry’s face, as she had seen it a few hours earlier in the Yard, nervously alert, a little grim about the eyes, and smiling, floated up to her from the pool of black and silver shadow under the window.
She sat huddled up in the dusky circle of the firelight, crouching on the bed, her back arched protectively in the attitude of a woman holding an exhausted child in her arms. The shadow between her breasts might have been Gerry’s dark head, and as though it had been, her head drooped forward and her mouth wore a brooding delicate smile. He was her child, her hurt tired child. Her outstretched arms ached, her breast ached for the pressure of his slight body, her body trembled. It was because he had been hurt and set on edge that she wanted him so much, because he had belonged to another woman, because he was tired, distrustful, spoiled. Strange and dreadful mystery, that she should want anything so much as she wanted the rejected lover of another woman.
What she felt for him was not young love, the ghost of her love for Hugh—if any ghosts walk at noon? Her pains were real, a fire that burned her past assuagement, a hunger of mind and soul. She discovered how much of love lay beyond desire, a world of tranquillity and tenderness. She would make up to him for everything, if he would ask her.
An hour passed, two hours. Mary lay face downward across her bed. Her dark hair spread out on either side of her like the hair of a drowned woman. There was nothing ostentatious about her grief. Her face being hidden, only the long-drawn quiver of her body showed that she was crying. It ceased at last and she lay still. . . .
The next day Mempes brought her word that the bank was unable to renew her overdraft. She went down to see the banker. He had been Mark Henry’s friend and school comrade and she could not believe that he would refuse to help her out.
The Lovely Ship Page 30