“I’m not to leave you now? Let me look at you.”
Her face, with its adorably surprised air, was offered to his scrutiny. He took her in his arms again and felt her deep breath like a sob against his lips.
Chapter Seven
1
Opening the door of his room, Gerry Hardman found his wife in the hall, lighting one of the candles that stood there on the old chest that held her scanty store of house linen. He lit it for her. Holding it in front of her face, so that two tiny candles flickered in the recesses of her eyes, like lamps burning in an empty room, she looked at him for a moment before running towards the stairs. He could make nothing of the look. Mercy was an adept at these dark glances, that had once stirred in him a lover’s longing to penetrate the mystery of her hidden life.
She called Good night from the bend of the staircase. Answering her absently, he waited until the door of her bedroom shut behind her. The sense of walls round him had become intolerable, and opening the front door softly, he walked down into the Yard, to the place where he had stood with Mary on such another summer night. The sky was a milky crystal now, and the faint stars-swung across it, rank on dim rank, like the waves of the sea, murmuring and shifting. Strange to look from the water in the harbour to the luminous sky, like looking from sea to sea. It gave the human watcher an illusion of complete solitude, as if he were the last unregarded living speck clinging to the lip of space. He grew tired of his position at last, and rolling over so that he could press his face against his folded arms, he gave himself up to the thoughts that had driven him out of his house.
There had been a boy who had loved Mary Hansyke the moment he saw her. Suppose one had told that boy, as he put his foot into the stirrup to begin the ride from Danesacre to Roxborough, how many years in the future the end of that short ride lay! For a moment Gerry was staggered by a troubling sense of the incalculable forces moulding a human life. He heard a girl’s thin voice: “It’s nearly twenty miles as the crow flies.” What was twenty miles to a boy riding through the night with a ghost of honeysuckle all about him in the darkness and his heart dancing between his thin ribs like the beating of a drum at the thought that she might kiss him on his mouth: he imagined that her kiss would be like the light passage of one of the large white moths brushing against him as he rode. Well, the crow had flown round the world and taken twenty years to do it. And the boy had become a man and the girl a woman, and the kiss when it came was not the sharp fiery mystery of his boyish imagination. The kisses he took from Mary Hervey were charged with pity, anguish, and all knowledge as well as all bliss. It was better so. Now, at last, he had touched reality. After all the fever and troubling of dreams, and searching the world for something that would not fail him, he was finally content. Whatever happened, he had had that, the moment when his body forgot him and left him released and trembling with happiness in Mary’s arms. Strange that such an experience, the most exquisite sense of freedom he had ever known, pure joy, should come to him through the body. All that his spirit had sought in strange countries, in danger, in loneliness and dreams, it had not found until the moment when its lifelong enemy triumphed over it and pinned it down to a quivering instant of fulfilment. There would never be anything like that for him again. Ironically, he realised that he was already thinking of it as in the past. Well, that was life. The strangeness, the shared imperious delight would go, and leave him with what?
Everything that makes life bearable, he cried, a friend for his mind and soul and body, relief from loneliness, hands touching in the night when spirit and flesh are farthest asunder, dear kindness, and a little warmth for days when they would both be so old that life had almost forgotten them. Quand vous serez bien vieille, le soir, à la chandelle. His hands clung to every moment as it passed, but nothing stayed in them. No desire but died of its fulfilment, no miracle, not even the miracle of being loved, that did not grow familiar and same. There would come a day when he would recall Mary whispering to him in the night, with no stir of the blood. That day he would be dead, however much longer he contrived to look a little like life, and he hoped he would have the decency not to insult his lost self with a kindly smile. “Youth will have its way.” Damn it, he was not young, he was thirty-eight, and Mary was only a year or two years younger. It was damnable that it was so. He lacked the complacence, or the courage, that allowed a man to contemplate the old age of a beloved woman with a fatuous smile. To his fastidious senses the prospect of old age was sheerly vile, and it shocked him to think of Mary old. The dark hair he had held when he kissed her face to hide it from the inquisitive moon, would be white, and her smooth skin fallen into lines and hollows. The indecency of life! Yet lovers and sentimentalists made a song about growing old together, as if two deaths were better than one. . . .
What did it matter? In Heaven’s name, why think, when all his tale of life had narrowed down to the reflection of himself in Mary’s eyes, a shadow trembling between delight and pity. There had never been another woman like Mary, so honest and lovable, with the added grace of intelligence, and so kind—how absurdly protective she was towards him—nor would ever be, whatever more articulate men might say or write of their mistresses. She said so many delightful things to him that he was filled with pride and ashamed in the same moment. And he was going to reward her kindness with scandal, a huddled flight, and lifelong exile in some damnable foreign city, where only to remember an English June was to ache for death.
Good god, to think that they could get at each other only by smashing everything in their lives and hurting other people, that decent son of hers, and Mercy turned out again. It struck him suddenly that there was something pathetic about Mercy as she went upstairs with her candle.
The thought chilled him, but a moment later he was recalling, with a rush of tenderness, Mary’s last words to him. “You need me so, Gerry. I shall be proud to be your wife.” Such love to have come too late. Such pride to be another whip across her back in the years ahead.
He knew that he could not take her away.
He had known it, refusing to know that he knew it, all through the past two months since the night in her house—he knew that now—yet he felt it as if he had been shot in the stomach. He sat huddled together, his small mouth tightly compressed. Because he needed her, to exile and torture her for life? He couldn’t face it. He had not her courage. Oh, God help them both. . . .
Light, and the paling of the stars surprised him. For some time he had been lying face downwards, pressing the palms of his outstretched hands against the earth, as he might have laid them against Mary’s breast. It had not seemed a moment since the night began, but as he thought that, it seemed an eternity, and dawn an unexpected miracle, like water in hell. Getting stiffly to his feet, he walked through the Yard, making plans as he went. He would get away at once, leaving Mercy to follow him. He could do it, since the Yard was not working and work on the Tees-side yards had been stopped. Before Garton’s needed another manager they had plenty of time to find one. What he himself would do he hardly knew, at the moment. It was no time to be looking for a new post. He supposed he would find something, enough for him and Mercy. Put it that he knew he would. Engineers of his capacity were as rare as new jobs. No need to make a fuss or scare up a revolting self-pity. Keep his pity for Mary, left in Danesacre.
She understood everything, would she understand this, understand that he could not face hell with her? Probably no woman could. No, she would not understand. She would be horribly hurt, and cry at night. He groaned aloud. She would think of him only that he had not wanted her enough to face things for her, and never see what had made a coward of him. And perhaps she would be right. Did any man know the depths of his own meanness? Women were perhaps different, or merely lacking in imagination. Well, he thought unemotionally, he would gladly have died for her, and that was no empty form of words, and poor enough comfort to a woman for whom he was refusing to live. She would be hurt, and she would forget. The selfishness of him, that
cried out to her not to forget, to keep him in her heart! What nonsense he had been thinking. As if he could forget, as if the mere return of June would not be enough to remind him and bring back the tightened ache across his chest that only Mary could ease away. As if he did not know to what he was condemning himself, to a perpetual pain that time would dull but only dying would assuage, to a life without savour and a loneliness more terrifying than death.
An upper window of his house was lighted, and looking at it with a faint surprise, he caught a glimpse of his wife’s yellow dress between the curtains. He shivered, and leaning his arms against the wall, hid his eyes on them for a moment. The sense of Mary’s presence in the Yard became so vivid that he fancied he saw her move quickly through the half light to the gate, and there pause with a slight gesture of her hand towards him. He closed his eyes again. When he opened them he looked all round him and down towards the shadows at the foot of the slope. There was nothing anywhere.
He turned, a slight figure, head flung up, and went in to his house.
2
Knocking at the door of Mary’s room in the Line office, Mempes entered, and discovered Mary at the window. She turned round as he came in, and said: “Good morning, John,” with a smile that offered her, standing there in the morning sunlight, to his intent gaze. He advanced into the room, looking at her with a meditative eye that took in every detail of her appearance, from the shawl on her arm to her glowing cheeks. Glowing was the only word to describe her. An aroma of happiness rose from her, like the fragrance from the lime in flower in the tiny courtyard outside his room. He saw the breath come and go under the lace below her throat, with a kind of quick impatience, as if she wanted to be out in the windy sunshine breathing that in. As he drew near her, a strange sensation entangled his senses, the outermost ripple of her emotion. He felt dizzy and put out a hand to steady himself; she caught it between both hers.
“Are you well, John?”
The firm warm pressure lingered on his palm, like a tangible proof of what he had long suspected and now knew. Hardman was her lover. Her whole attitude confessed it. She was marked with it, set apart, the tones of her voice and the gestures of her body said as clearly as if she had proclaimed it aloud: “I am loved, I am happy.” His eyes were darkened and he felt a dreadful longing to hurt her in some physical way. She ought to be punished. She was shameless. The caressing movement of her body as she walked across the room was utterly and abominably shameless. Why, the whole town could see what she was about, what offence against common decency she was flinging in its face. They must be blind, or they would stone her for it.
His mind cleared suddenly, and looking at her, he caught an appealing glance that impressed him as strange and rather pitiful, since she was not given to asking help. The ridiculous thought struck him that she was too small to be altogether shameless. He said: “What is it, Mary?”
“I’m going away.”
The tide of his anger rolled back, blotting out her face, and the clear honest eyes that so monstrously retained their honesty through all this.
“With Hardman.”
“With my lover,” she corrected him, and all at once his fury left him, for good, he thought, at the spectacle of her sacrificial folly. Why, she was mad, possessed. The fellow had bewitched her. She didn’t know what she was doing, offering herself to insult, obloquy, disgrace never to be washed out. She had better jump into the harbour than do this, and how often, before many months were out, would she wish she had. He looked at her calm face and an exclamation of despair broke from him.
Mary was smiling at him. “Don’t worry about me, John.”
“You’re mad.”
“I’m sane. Look at me. Do I seem mad?”
Grudgingly, he admitted that she did not, and at the same moment his heart ached to think how soon that air of profound untroubled happiness would vanish, her mouth harden, and her eyes, her lovely honest eyes, learn to look past leering glances as if they had not struck on a spirit raw and quivering with insult.
“D’you know what you’re going to, Mary?”
Her small face was sober enough now. “Yes, I know. I’m not a fool, even though I’m in love, too deep to get out. I know I shall regret—this.” She nodded at the model of the Peerless, high up on the yellow-grained wall. “Don’t think I shan’t. I’ve given it more of myself than I can easily take back. I shall long for England, and Danesacre. But I’d rather be unhappy with Gerry—” Her voice, lingering over the fellow’s name!”—than happy without. That’s what it comes to. Forgive me for talking what must seem nonsense to you.”
He hesitated over Richard’s name. She must have read his face, for she turned her own away and looked across the harbour.
“Should I leave Richard if I were not—sure?”
The few words, uttered with her accustomed restraint, convinced him more than anything else could, of the hopelessness of dissuasion. He recalled the times he had been outfaced by her quiet obstinacy. He might talk, until his tongue swelled in his mouth, she would not be moved. Did she talk to her lover, he wondered, find words for him? Good God, what repressed creatures men and women were, like ships with hatches battened down in a storm. Here was himself, raging with jealousy and pity, stuttering his few inexpressive words, and Mary, smiling and serene in the grip of an emotion that was destroying her life, scattering it in a little whirl of angry dust. He recalled Gerry Hardman’s slender face, its mask of arrogance a little awry—that poor devil was too sensitive by half. Hervey, too. Mempes had a poor opinion of Mary’s husband, but he found himself suddenly willing to concede that the fellow might have his own repressions. What a world! What a supper of jests, a comedy of flesh and blood puppets, silent on the rack.
“Tell me what you want me to do for you, Mary.”
“Thank you. There’s everything to do. This morning William Todd wrote accepting our terms. I was waiting for that. Now I’m going to offer to sell out to him. If he had refused our offer, I’d have looked elsewhere for a purchaser. I shall make him the first offer and look elsewhere only if he won’t bite.”
“This is a bad time to sell out.”
“I know. I don’t like it, but Todd’s acceptance forces my hand.”
“He’ll buy—at his price. At least, you’ll have something.”
Mary’s face, sweet and surprised, confirmed his worst fears.
“I’m not selling out for that. The money’s for Richard.”
He argued with her, roused past discretion by this unexampled folly and furious with her when she said: “Happiness has no price, John.” There was no sense in anything she said, she really was mad. His arguments had no effect, as he had known they would not, and unable to stay there any longer, contemplating the finality and completeness of her fall, he left the office and strode along the pier into the town, walking without aim. He had no relish for his ridiculous position as Chorus, punctuating a tragedy with his useless comments. Half-way along the darkest narrowest street in Danesacre, he stepped on to a strip of flagging to avoid the wheels of a carriage being driven furiously in the direction of the railway station. A glance in the window showed him Hardman himself, leaning back, with his eyes fixed straight ahead on some point in the driver’s solid back. The look on his face shocked Mempes into a smothered exclamation.
The carriage rattled past, and he found himself shaking. “I’m getting old,” he muttered. “But—that poor devil.” Leaning heavily on his malacca stick, he stalked gloomily to the club, but he was hardly there and sitting in his favourite window, when a fresh consideration brought him to his feet. The “poor devil” had not looked like a successful lover, and the cab had been driving towards the station. Without waiting to drink the glass of sherry he had ordered, he hurried off, leaving the ancient waiter dumbfounded and disapproving in his wake. By steep alleys and steps descending to the pier, he reached the office he had quitted two hours earlier. In the other room all was as it should be, every clerk bent over his books. His room l
ed through to Mary’s, and there, at the window in her own room, he found her. Her face, drained of blood, wavered towards him through the sunlight reflected from the dazzling water of the harbour. Holding a letter between her hands, she said quietly:
“He has gone.”
“Gone? Where’s the fellow gone?” Mempes growled. “I’ll get him back for you.”
“Dear John.”
She smiled at him, shivered, and fainted. He picked her up. She recovered before he could carry out his intention of laying her on the table, and clung to him with her head hanging back, her eyes wide open and crazed with fear. He told her that she was “overdone” and took her home. The effort she made to walk steadily through the outer office pulled her together, and she sat quiet and composed in the cab. Horribly afraid, he went with her into the house, intending to leave her with some woman. The opening of the drawing-room door revealed Mercy Hardman, elaborately dressed as for a very formal call, her hair looped and plaited under a wide hat. The feather that adorned it lay across the brim and curled on her shoulder between the tucks and ruffles of her silk frock. If she had seemed, in the streets of Danesacre, an exotic figure, like the green and red parrots and fuchsia plants the sailors brought home and hung in their windows or cherished in tiny shell-bordered gardens, in Mary’s drawing-room she was fantastic. She was sitting on a couch of Spanish leather and mahogany in the window, and hardly rose when Mary came in, an insolence that affected Mempes unpleasantly. Outside, the lawn was drenched in sunshine; the tall sunflowers against the wall were full of clear golden light, they outshone the blue sky and dropped their bright petals across the grass. One blew in through the window and drifted over the carpet to Mercy Hardman’s feet; it lay among her flounces, a fragment of living yellow, yellower than her frock. Mercy picked it up and held it between her gloved fingers, crushing it slowly as she spoke.
The Lovely Ship Page 34