Todd rose. “Very well,” he said spitefully. “I’ll send for you when I want you.”
Holding the door of his room open for his visitors, he watched them file through the bank on their way out, Mary and that young Hardman in front, she smiling at something he was saying with his mouth close to her ear. John Mempes was following behind. It struck Sweet William that the look on the older man’s face was strange, very strange. Shutting the door, he considered it for some time, until light broke on him, and he chuckled. He chuckled again at the thought of how he would annoy his wife that evening, with tantalising morsels of the splendid scandal he had just glimpsed. She was a poor stick. What a fool he had been to marry and fill his house with pious women. He thought regretfully of days when he drove his own coach up to London for a month in the middle of the season. There had been himself, Mark Henry Garton, old Ritchie Hansyke, who afterwards married Mark Henry’s flash sister, and Archie Roxby, a solumn devil, and dead now like the rest. They always had a box at the Opera, to please Hansyke. There was no singing nowadays worth hearing, and no acting. The actors had lost fire, and the women! Sticks, without legs or bosoms. He chuckled, with real pleasure this time, at the memory of a fairy Mark Henry had driven down to Richmond. Addy was her name. On the return journey she tied up the horses and Mark Henry’s moustaches with yellow ribbons off her petticoats, and hardly waited for the horses to draw up before she was jumping down into Mark Henry’s arms crying: “Catch me, Harry, I love you so much I don’t know what to do with myself.” He had envied his friend that day. . . .
More than a month went by before William Todd sent a note up to the house in St Mary’s Terrace requesting a private interview. Reading it, Mary wondered what trap he had laid for her. She had reached in the protracted struggle a stage of weariness when she felt that she could see Garton’s smash without a tear if it were not that her bankruptcy would throw Richard, with nothing at his back but an unprofitable estate, on his own resources or on Hugh. Neither alternative struck her as desirable. She had in good measure her generation’s kindly contempt for the succeeding one.
She went down to the bank and sat looking through the window at the dappled harbour, with the feeling that neither success nor failure would mean much after the agonising effort that had preceded it.
Sweet William wore his most formidable face.
“Hey,” he said in a loud harsh voice when she came in, “what do you want? Money? Mark Henry Garton never had to beg.” He glared at her with contemptuous blue eyes.
“Neither have I,” Mary said. “I came here at your invitation. If you don’t want to talk to me, I can go away again. I’ve nothing more to say. You’ve had all the details of the reconstruction I intended to carry out alone.”
“Found you couldn’t do it,” Sweet William jeered. “Very like a woman.”
“Garton’s has sprawled,” Mary said placidly. “Blast furnaces, our own line of boats, building for ourselves and other people, a marine engineering works, an experimental department. We’ve spread too far: it’s unwieldy. To recover, we shall have to concentrate. D’you see? Given time, Garton’s can become, outside the Government, the most complete building yards in the country. It’s all there, ground on the Tees, the men, the reputation, experience, equipment. It wants steadying, that’s all. I don’t intend ever to be caught out like this again. Next time there’s a drop in shipping, Garton’s reserves are going to see me through it.”
William Adam Todd got up and rolled about the room a little; he came to a pause in front of Mary, his powerful head on a level with hers. Mary endured his scrutiny without change of colour. She felt perfectly able to hold her own with this man. A cruel pride in her youth, straight body, and strength of will sustained her.
“Any truth in this talk about you and your manager?”
“Which one?”
“Eh, you whey-faced sinner, the young one, the young one. The old one, too, I dare say. I’ve heard it, I’ve heard it. Do you know what they say about you in the town? You don’t look it, but nothing goes by looks. I look like that old sinner Palmerston to the waist; below it I’m not a man, I’m a hoop. But I hope to roll after old P. into my grave without rolling to the divorce court after him, and I warn you now against trying any tricks on me. I’m not to be humbugged that way.”
“We’re talking about my Yard, not about my morals,” Mary observed scornfully.
“Who tells you how to build your ships, if some man doesn’t?”
“I’ll tell you something,” Mary retorted. “No one gives me directions in my own firm, and no one ever will. Garton’s sails under my orders, no matter who comes aboard.”
“Eh, Mark Henry, is that you?” Todd exclaimed. He went back to his desk and sat down, relapsing into gravity with the alarming suddenness that never failed to startle Mary.
“I’ve examined your estimated costings for the reconstruction,” he said. “And the sum at which you want to capitalise the new firm. It’s not high enough. I’ll put up four times the cost of reconstruction and take it out in a half-share.”
Mary said nothing for a moment. The swiftness of the move confused her; she was a slow thinker. For once, however, thinking fairly quickly, she turned to Sweet William with a smile. Mempes and Gerry had both warned her of this danger.
“No,” she said flatly, “I won’t.”
“You won’t what?” Todd raised himself in his seat, with his elbows pressed into the arms of his chair.
“I won’t agree to capitalise at any such sum. I prefer my own figure. What we were going to suggest, to meet the expense of reconstruction, is a loan to the company by you, partly repayable over a term of years and the remainder taken out in a quarter share in the company.” She glanced at Sweet William’s face; the rising tide of purple alarmed her. “You have every fact and figure before you,” she said hurriedly, “on which to make up your mind about the security of the investment. If you don’t like it, you won’t touch it on any terms. If you do like it—we’ve waited a long time for you to say as much—those are my terms.”
She judged it wise to leave him before he got the better of his tongue, and as she passed his house on her way to her own, put up a silent prayer for forgiveness to Sweet William’s wife and daughters. They needed prayers, though they could grant none. Sweet William came home in the likeness of an avenging demon. He threw his wife’s new hat and frock out of the window and when an astonished woman carried them back to the house, presented them to her with a gentleness that froze her blood; he ordered one daughter to practise her music for three hours and another to wash the timid ringlets out of her hair, standing over her while she mingled her tears with the cold water and brushed her flattened locks until her arm ached. He had the fire raked out and the gas turned off at the main, making it impossible for anyone to prepare as much as a cup of tea. Then he went off to the club for the evening, threatening them with a frightful retribution if a light was turned on or a fire lit in his absence; as he walked down the garden path the thin strains of a Couperin Bourrée, played with melancholy clearness, came on his ears like the sound of sacrificial cries. He was satisfied.
He had already resolved to accept the offer. It was a good offer, more generous than fair. Garton’s, in spite of having outrun the constable on this occasion, was a property any man would be glad to get a finger on. And the best part about it was that the other party to the bargain did not know their offer was generous, a satisfactory morsel to roll under his tongue. But she should wait. He would keep her waiting a month or two for his acceptance. That would teach her a few things. He was to sail under her orders, was he? She should wait for her wind, and see how she liked that.
4
Two days after Mary’s private interview with the banker, an apprentice at the Yard received from the manager a bulky parcel, with instructions to carry it up to Mrs Hervey’s house. Opening it, Mary found the curtain from Gerry’s room, with a note. “I only heard to-day that you admired this. You can conceive with what pleasure I sen
d it to you. G. H.”
Gathering it up in her arms, she buried her face in the lustrous old silk. . . .
She walked along Harbour Street to the Yard. Dusk poured down into the old cobbled street from every ghaut and alley opening off its narrow length. On her right the flagged passages between the houses ran down to the harbour, and she caught glimpses of dark water and slippery steps in the light falling into the harbour from the windows of small rooms. On her left the hillside rose sharply to the height of the cliffs, and here the houses climbed crazily up and down and across the steep face. Flights of stone steps mounted dizzily into the purple shadows, and narrow yards and alleys rushed away on either side of the street and were lost in gaping mouths of the night. Doors stood open in every alley, letting out thin streams of candle-light, with the sound of women’s voices. Out of one, two young sailors came, with lights in their hands. Mary passed the old walls of Garton’s sail loft, and the sturdy house built for himself by Old Smithson’s father when the far end of Harbour Street was considered a suitable residence for a shipowner. Mark Henry’s house stood farther out of the town, where the road began to climb steeply away from the harbour-side, and as she paused before toiling up to it Mary realised that Harbour Street was very quiet. The children that played noisily on its cobblestones until far into the night were nowhere to be seen, there were few lights and no women standing talking on doorsteps and in the entries of the yards. It was so long since she had been down this way that she had forgotten how heavy the hand of Hard Times was on Harbour Street, and that the children were too hungry to play and the women too listless for much gossip.
Climbing the hill to Mark Henry’s gate she stood for a moment looking down into the silent yard, wondering whether Gerry had understood her brief message and was expecting her. She was before her time.
The Yard was empty and silent now; in a very short time, in a year perhaps, there would be a ship building down there beside the water. But if all went well and Sweet William rose to the baited hook, it would not be Garton’s ship. The Yard would have been sold; another firm would be building below Mark Henry’s house, and their boats would be launched in the wake of the Mary Gray and her lovely sisters. Sharpened by regret, Mary’s mind leaped forward half a lifetime and saw the Yard empty again, deserted, grown with grass, forgotten by the years. Shipbuilding would leave the beautiful Danesbeck, even as Garton’s was leaving it now, because every year the world had less need of the wooden ships that Danesacre had built with loving perfection and every year it would be less profitable to tow small iron steamers from the ancient yards to be engined in new yards on Tyne and Tees. Already how far and half-forgotten was the time when the shipwrights of Danesacre built their ship from her laying-down to the last touch that made her ready for sea. Now ships were built in sections by gangs of specialised workers. Everything was changed. Mark Henry’s wooden ships stood out to sea with a crew of skilled sailors and a captain prepared to find a cargo for the return voyage and render faithful account of it, sometimes without a single written figure. There were no sailors on the steamships, only deck hands; her master sailed under orders, her accounts were kept in the office, and her owner knew his banker better than he knew his captains. He needed to.
The glory of Garton’s Yard was going: already it had passed from Mary’s keeping, as far and as far beyond recall as had passed her old simple desire for ships. . . .
Night, like a great cat with its haunches in the east, was licking at the fields behind them, when they stood on the cliff-top in the shelter of a loose stone wall. Neither Gerry nor Mary had the least recollection of the way they had come there. They had in fact followed blindly the via dolorosa of all Danesacre lovers who lived on the east side, down the narrow odorous cobbled gully of Harbour Street, to the flight of steps the street exuded like a sigh against the face of the cliff, up, up, treading the way of mourners and worshippers, until they reached the gravestones rooted among long grass, among which Danesacre lovers, breathless from their long climb, took measures to assure themselves they were alive, along the flagged path between Church and graves, and so out upon the cliff edge.
It was the hour of miracles, the hour when St Mary appeared to affrighted couples, the hour when Richard Garton, master mariner, died in 1700 of a broken skull, shifted his coffin a little nearer the crumbling edge of the cliff, in preparation for the day when he would tumble, coffin, bones, and broken skull, down the cliff side into the yards of tiny houses at the foot.
Mary and Gerry saw no miracles. Yet they were depending on one. This wall, in the lee of which they were hiding from the night wind off the sea, was an authentic miracle, a miracle of ingenuity. There was not a fragment of binding material in it, and yet the irregular stones of which it was composed withstood the fury of a North Sea gale, and the assaults of rain and time, as no more civilised and comely wall could have done. It was older than Mark Henry’s grandfather, and it had supported innumerable lovers against its accommodating surface, accommodating because of its very irregularity. He was a captious lover who could not find a rounded edge that fitted the curve of his back when he leaned against it. The fields behind it and probably some of its own stones remembered the feet of Northmen carrying fire and slaughter to the town, to the Danes’ Acre. In short, this wall, on which Gerry and Mary were leaning, was an epitome of romance, of human will power outliving the brief span of men’s lives, of cunning northern adaptability, the very soul of dead Hansykes and Gartons. If it could have been translated into music it would have made a loud and triumphant noise like violins ascending in rapid chords. Even then it is doubtful whether Gerry and his Mary would have heard it, so absorbed were they in their own transitory passion, a romance of fugitive embraces and sighs carried away by the wind.
“What do you want us to do, Gerry?” Mary looked up into her lover’s face to smile at him, and saw that he was white and intolerably perplexed. She drew herself out of the circle of his arms. “What is it?” she cried. “Oh, my love, what is it? You frighten me when you look like that.”
Gerry bent her head back with a gentle hand and while he kissed her she could not see him. “I don’t know,” he said under his breath. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you what I want to do, Mary.”
Mary drew away to look at him. A foreboding sense of loss chilled her and drove her back into his arms.
“Don’t think of anything but yourself,” she said, and sighed. “Think of yourself and tell me what you think.”
“I can’t think of myself, Mary, without thinking of you. I can only think of us together. I’ve been trying for a year to imagine you away from here, and away from Richard, living with me in some place abroad where I could scratch up a job. It would have to be abroad, I’d get nothing in England after the scandal, and only I know what those foreign jobs are like and what it’s like to live out there. I couldn’t tell you. The discomfort and disappointment and the intrigue and the jobbing. And having to hide ourselves because the decent English people wouldn’t know you and we couldn’t stand the others. Forgive me, I’m putting it at its worst, but I know what I’m talking about. Could you stand it, living like that? Think of it, Mary. Imagine long days beset with heat and flies and foreign servants, waiting for me to come home, with nothing to keep you company but thoughts of Danesacre and Garton’s and what you’d lost. I daren’t remind you of Richard. Could you stand that, or would you soon hate me? Think, think. My dear, to take you out there and see you grow tired and indifferent to me, good God, I couldn’t stand it. Besides, it might kill you. Most of those places are damned unhealthy.”
Mary brushed aside material objections to fasten on the subtler and more dangerous stumbling-blocks she perceived in her lover’s temperament. “I could bear anything that you could. You’re all I want.”
“Hush,” Gerry said quietly. “When you talk like that I lose my head. I want you so much. Why didn’t I find you in time, Mary? You’re so dear, so very kind and sweet.”
“I can’t go
on offering myself to you,” Mary said sadly. “You must take me or let me go.”
“I can’t let you go.” Gerry looked at her sternly, more like a judge than a lover. It was, after all, a stern business for both of them. “I need you too badly. But, my dear, you don’t know what I’m asking you to do. I know and I’m afraid. I’m horribly afraid, Mary.”
Mary felt strangely weak. She pressed her feet firmly against the short wet grass under them to assure herself of its reality. What had she been about to get herself into this quandary? The niece of Mark Henry Garton, who had successfully evaded all personal entanglements through his long and stormy life, found it hard to sympathise with the perplexities of Mary Hervey and Gerry Hardman. She thought shrewdly that if she allowed herself to dwell on the thought of Richard one half as much as Gerry was dwelling on the discomforts of foreign stations she would never harden her heart to leaving him. She could not do it except by reminding herself that young as Richard was for his twenty years and horribly as he would miss her and hate the way she had gone, he did not need her even now so much as Gerry did, and in a very few years would need her hardly at all. She knew Richard. Outwardly the most yielding and affectionate creature, he was yet almost entirely self-absorbed. She had made too few demands on him. His need of her was what she chose to imagine it, no more. She knew all this, but the thought of leaving him, of cutting herself off from the warmth of his ingenuous affection, from the exquisite thrill it gave her to think that this tall graceful young man going up to his father’s college at Oxford was the tiny child she had made before she made a single one of her ships—this almost killed her.
There was the Yard too. She had had it almost as long as she had had Richard, and she actually did not know how badly, when it was lost to her, she would regret it.
Standing beside Gerry on the cliff path, between the sea and the church that contained the Garton pew and a good many of her private memories, she wondered what forces in her being—forces of which the Mary Hervey of a suddenly-remembered Watch-Night Service was blessedly unaware—had driven her to this situation and this hour, when she was calmly considering the necessity of running away with her lover. Without passion, she wondered at herself.
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