That’s what she had said that night in Manchester—the first time I took her to the theatre—when the curtain came down after the first act, and everybody but she seemed to want to chatter. More and more Maeve must have her silences.
The moon had climbed quickly. We could see the whole circle, softly effulgent, resting with its lower rim on the heads of the trees. Judas’s lights were hidden by a bend of the river. There was nothing but the water and the trees and the heavens swimming in misty radiance. From the banks there came an occasional cry: the throaty tremolo of an owl, the swift sharp piping of little coveys of oystercatchers darting along at the water’s edge. Here and there the wood thinned out, ran into bare patches of hillside upon which we could see the cattle couched in groups frozen to stillness beneath the dead light of the moon.
The river turned and twisted. Boring into the silent heart of enchantment we passed through cavernous glooms where the trees rose high and out again into moon-washed space, stippled with the dark shadows of bush and barn and rick.
Presently Maeve said in a low, thrilled voice: “Look! The swans!”
I allowed the oars to rest, and looked over my shoulder. I had thought we should soon be reaching the swans. I had seen them before, but not by moonlight. The bank on one side of the river dropped away, and there was marshy land threaded by runnels and pools and inlets that were now drawn in lines of burnished lead on the flat map of the land. On all that water the swans were resting: scores of them, some with their heads beneath their wings, some rocking sedately with their necks erect. There were large white birds, gleaming like icy figurings of beauty, and small brown cygnets that missed the superb transfiguration of the grown swans.
I took up the oars again, and slowly thrust the boat towards the fleet of birds. Some that were alert rose on the water, pressing down their black webs and reaching their splendid pinions up into the radiance of the moonshine. Then slowly they began to drift away before the approaching boat. Their unease communicated itself to the others, and long snaky necks were uncurled and raised above the rocking boats of the bodies. Soon all the swans that were near enough to have cause for fear were moving over the water. They seemed to glide without propulsion, mysterious beauty, slipping away through the moony texture of a dream.
Suddenly Maeve, who had been lying back, sat upright and clapped her hands in one loud explosive sound. Then the noise of wings broke the tranced quality of the moment. Some of the swans rose on the water and with trailing feet thrashed their way through the broken lights that quivered upon the ponds and inlets. Others rose above the water, and the creaking of their wings was a sound more thrilling than I had ever heard. It was astonishing, seeing them so close at hand, that such great bodies could be lifted clear; but soon six of them were up and climbing into the silvery luminescence of the sky. Instinctively Maeve and I lay on our backs to see a sight that was so unaccustomed. For a time we lost them, and then, when all other sound had faded away among the birds on the water, we heard far off but very clear the creaking beat of the pinions. We saw the swans, high above our heads, flying one behind another with necks rigid; and soon they passed, the incarnation of wild and inaccessible beauty, one by one before the face of the moon.
We lay there for a long time, not speaking, hoping that the miracle would recur; and at last Maeve said: “It doesn’t happen twice. Let’s go home.”
It was very late when we tied up at the quay. The moon was high, and brighter and smaller. The tide had turned. We stood for a moment and watched how everything was obeying the water: the boats all swung round at their moorings with their noses pointing to the west, the moonlight yellow upon the ripples of their dancing, leaves and twigs hurrying by, and the water itself, with hardly a murmur, deep, mysterious, timeless, swinging to the sea.
Across the water Captain Judas’s lights were burning yet, as though neither time nor tide could come between him and the spectres of his pursuit. Maeve with one hand pulled her coat closer about her. She placed the other within my arm and snuggled her body close to mine. “Thank you,” she said. “I shall never forget tonight. I shall never have a lovelier night. I shall never see the swans again flying across the moon.”
“Nonsense,” I said, urging her towards the path. “You’re going to see all sorts of lovely things, young woman. You talk to me in ten years’ time, and tell me whether you haven’t seen lovelier things than an old river showing a false face under the moonlight.”
She shivered a little. “Ten years!” she said. “What a long time! I shall be twenty-four! I wonder what will have happened to us all in ten years’ time: me and Rory and Oliver and you and Eileen.”
“Why, child,” I said, “that’s easy. You will be a famous actress, making me more conceited than is good for me because everybody will be coming to my plays just to see lovely Maeve O’Riorden.”
“Oh!” she whispered. “That would be beautiful.”
“And Rory will be—let’s see—probably his father’s right-hand man in the most famous decorating firm in the world.”
“Dear Ugly! His brain’s full of banshees. He makes me afraid.”
“And Oliver will be a curate with golden hair, and all the old ladies will love him so much that they’ll put sixpence in the bag instead of threepence. And so they’ll make him a bishop. Eileen, of course, will marry a nice man who keeps a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop in the corner of a village street. She’ll have lots of babies and she’ll steal sweets for them out of the shop when her husband’s outside sticking up the news-bill. And so they’ll go bankrupt and pay fourpence in the pound.”
“Oh, you dear old silly, you do talk nonsense. And yet—I—I—do love you so.”
And there was Maeve suddenly stopped dead in the path, in the pitch blackness of the wood, with both arms round me, and her head on my chest, which she could only just reach, sobbing her heart out! I let her stay there till the storm subsided, then, as we were near the house, I picked her up and carried her across the dew-drenched lawn. Everyone was gone to bed. I set her down under the light that was burning in the hall, and she raised to me a face that looked very small and white and tragic, tear-smudged. “Kiss me,” she said.
I bent down and kissed her and tasted the salt of her tears. Then without a word she went draggingly upstairs. I sat down and lit a cigarette. I had kissed Maeve many times, but I knew I must not kiss her again.
*
I gathered that the outside world did not mean much to Captain Judas, but from time to time he went to Truro to see if any letters were addressed to him there poste restante. I was going up in the Maeve to do some shopping the next day and took him with me. He talked very sensibly all the way, and was full of information about the craft we saw at the town’s quays, about their ports and cargoes. He had a word of commendation for the neat appearance of this ship and a growl of scorn for another’s slovenliness. Only when the Maeve was in the narrow water between timber-yards on one side and flour warehouses on the other did he begin to show his nerviness. The warehouses stood up sheer from the water, and at open doors two and three floors up stood men powdered with flour from head to foot superintending the pulleys that were swinging the loaded sacks up and down.
He looked at them with apprehension. “Keep her out, my boy, midstream, midstream,” he muttered. “A defective pulley, one of those sacks—whoosh! flop!—where am I then? Eh? An old game. They’re up to all the tricks. But I know ’em. I know ’em. And when we get ashore keep away from the cathedral.”
“Right you are, captain. I’m only doing a bit of shopping.”
“And I’m only going to the post office. Mind you, I know nothing against this bishop—nothing definite, that is—haven’t checked up yet. In the meantime, caution.”
“You know, captain,” I said, as we stepped ashore, “you’ve got a very noticeable appearance. Your long beard and long hair. Doesn’t that rather give you away to ‘them’?”
He chuckled knowingly. “You haven’t got to the
bottom of me, my boy. No, not by a fathom or two. There’d be something in what you say if I had always been like this. But I was clean-shaven and had hair cropped like a convict’s when they—when—”
The old man stopped dead on the pavement. He turned to me a face that was blank save for the vivid light of his one sound eye. His mouth twitched. He tried several times to speak, and seemed to be tortured by an effort to remember something that escaped him. “It was—when—” he began again, and then leaned against a wall and passed his handkerchief over his brow. I saw that my remark had touched on something deeper than I had intended. I took his arm. “Tell me, captain,” I said. “That Norwegian timber ship we passed. D’you reckon she’ll get out on the tide tonight?”
“Tonight? Never! Lucky if they make it tomorrow, the rate they’re going on.” He was himself again.
There was one letter for Captain Judas. As we went chugging slowly homeward, he read it again and again. He had laid the envelope on a thwart, and I noticed that it was addressed to Captain Jude Iscott. I noticed, too, that printed across the top of the envelope was “The Mary Latter Comedy Company,” and it was strange to me to think of old Judas being in communication with the world of the theatre. The Latter Company was well known. Maeve and I had occasionally seen them in Manchester. They toured the provinces with contemporary comedies—what one might call the best of the second-rate stuff that was sure of good houses. I couldn’t help commenting on the envelope lying there under my nose. I prodded it with my finger and said: “I’ve seen these people, captain. They’re pretty good.”
He looked at me abstractedly, turning the letter in his fingers. Then he said: “She doesn’t know how difficult it is to get out here. She’s arriving at Falmouth this afternoon, but how on earth is she going to do the rest of the journey?”
“Are you having a visitor?”
“Yes, my daughter—Mary Latter.”
“Good Lord! She’s your daughter? I’ve seen her act.”
“I wish you hadn’t, Mr. Essex,” he said severely. “I don’t approve of it. Babylonish whoring.”
He continued to stare at the letter. “Flesh and blood,” he muttered. “That’s the trouble, Mr. Essex—flesh and blood. Strange deep things, your own flesh and blood. There’s no turning back on that. I settled that long ago.”
“I’ll bring her from Falmouth,” I said. Instantly, he was all polite deprecation; but I bore him down. I was on holiday. To run the Maeve into Falmouth was as amusing a way of spending the afternoon as any other. And, anyway, I wanted to talk to Mary Latter alone. The captain wished to stay aboard the Jezebel, to make all ready. Despite his daughter’s Babylonish whorings, he understood the duty of hospitality. But he was full of old-fashioned notions about unprotected females. His daughter might not care to entrust herself to my hands. How was she to know that I was not some desperado, capable of anything. So I climbed aboard the Jebezel, and he wrote a letter which he gave me to read. My good friend William Essex... trustworthy... honourable... may safely entrust...
Armed with this introduction, I met Mary Latter at Falmouth Station that afternoon. A small trunk initialled “M.L.” was all the identification I needed. I declared myself and handed her her father’s letter. She read it and smiled. “The dear thing! Are you the novelist?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll shake hands again, just to say thank you. You’ve given me pleasure.”
“And you me.”
“Good. We’re getting on well. How do I get to this hulk of father’s?”
“You’ll see. First, you’d better have some tea.”
“I’d love it.”
She was a friendly and intelligent woman, easy to talk to, with no demure pose of femininity. I judged she was rather older than myself. She had strong regular features which missed good looks. Her dark, purposeful face gave the impression of difficulties met and overcome. She was dressed in the spartan fashion of the time, with a straw “boater,” a white high-necked blouse, and a dark skirt. Anything less suggestive of Babylonish whoring I had never seen. I smiled as I recalled the phrase.
“You are amused,” she challenged me.
I told her what her father had said. “The dear thing,” she smiled again.
We took a cab down to the Market Strand, left her small trunk there, and then walked back to some tea-rooms in the main street. It was a pleasant place, with a bay window from which we could overlook the harbour, full of steamers and little curtseying yachts and packets passing to and fro from Flushing and St. Mawes. She seemed tired. I poured her some tea.
“It’s pleasant here,” she said. “He should be happy. Is he happy?”
“I think so. I see him a good deal, and he seems to enjoy life—in his own way—you know?”
She sighed. “Yes. I know.”
“There’s a whole pack of us down there. I suppose we’re good for him. Especially the children. They keep him busy.”
“He always liked children,” she said, and drummed on the table with her finger-tips, looking out over the colour and animation of the water. “He still—writes—at night?”
I nodded. “He told me all about that. He showed me his papers.”
“We had a little house at Deptford,” she began irrelevantly, “a pretty place with a magnolia tree against the back wall—one of the biggest I’ve ever seen—”
Then she stopped, with almost a blush on her dark, somehow weather-beaten-looking face. “I’m sorry,” she said, again with that bright and kindly and courageous smile. “I was going to tell you the story of my life. So soon. Too soon.”
“Let it keep till we’re in the boat.”
“I suppose it’s the idea of seeing him again after so long. Five years.”
I picked up the story bit by bit while Mary Latter stayed on the Jebezel. It began with the little house in Deptford, and the garden, and the magnolia tree, and the mother who was always there, and the young father there between voyages. A harmonium played a large part in it. Mother played it every night, and they sang hymns; and when father was home he played it and they sang hymns. “And it was very beautiful,” Mary Latter said. “You know, I used to enjoy that exquisite sadness that only young children know anything about: the little dark parlour, with the window opening on to the garden where the magnolia tree was, and the blue summer dusk, and the melancholy hymns that made me think of father away on the sea. We always had the hymns last thing at night—just mother and I—I was an only child. Then I’d go up to my bedroom, and I could see the river, and in the winter there would be lights on it moving through the mist and the moaning of the sirens.”
But the exquisite sadness would turn to joy when father’s white cap with the bit of gold on it was on the harmonium, and father himself was there playing the hymns.
There was a mission chapel that they attended every Sunday, and sometimes on week-nights, too; and when father was home he often preached; and mother and Mary, sitting side by side, were uplifted into some incredible realm where God’s especial favour and protection were over and about them. And in the little house at Deptford there were great wrestlings in prayer, father and mother and Mary all on their knees and father’s voice ringing out into the dusk of the summer garden or filling the room when it was winter, and beyond the curtained windows the ships crawled bellowing through the mist.
“That’s how I grew up,” Mary Latter said, “in an atmosphere of hysteria and exaltation. When school was done with, such as it was, I just stayed at home and helped mother. We went on praying and singing our hymns, seeing hardly a soul except our two selves and on Sundays the people at the mission. She died when I was sixteen.”
It was a blow to the girl brought up trammelled and dependent; and she failed under it. Her father, who had just obtained his first command, decided to take her to sea with him. “It was terrible,” she said, “terrible. To think of it can still make me go hot all over.” She shuddered as she sat beside me on the look-out.
She saw the old
man for the first time as a sheer religious maniac. They were on a big square-rigged sailing-ship with a tough and godless crew. The old man, not so old then, had had the harmonium put into his cabin, and the hymn-singing went on. Sailing through a tropic night with the cabin door open so that the crew might have the benefit of what was going forward, he would play upon the harmonium and sing “I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,” and “At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the Light.”
“And there was nothing perfunctory about the Sunday service,” she said. “All hands had to be there and stay the course: hymns and prayers, and one of his impromptu sermons. It was ghastly, the atmosphere of mockery, that he was never aware of. They would parody the hymns, using obscene and blasphemous words; and cry out in the midst of his sermons; ‘Alleluiah!’ ‘Glory to the Lamb!’ all in derision and cruelty. His name, you know, is Jude Iscott, and they began to call him Judas Iscariot. The atmosphere behind his back was horrible: the laughter and contempt, the filthy gestures they would make with the tracts he compelled me to hand to them, all the muttering: ‘Who sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver?’”
She pieced it together very vividly, and I could see the big ship dipping across the blue, white-ridged sea, with her full press of canvas, and the young girl sitting before the harmonium that had been dragged out of the cabin for the service, and old Judas standing bare-headed with his hair and whiskers, iron-grey then, she said, blowing in the wind as he testified to God’s love. And ranged below them would be the officers, decently sedate, and the ring of grinning faces, waiting for the chance to let go in a hymn. You can do anything with a hymn: I had heard the boys in Hulme. It must have been dreadful for the only woman aboard.
“You see, so long as I was ashore, I only met people who liked that sort of thing. Now, it was like being a missionary to cannibals. I was not heroic. I loved him and admired him, and he was a marvellous sailor, but I knew I could never make another voyage with him, and the thought of being all alone in the house at Deptford, for months on end, terrified me. I didn’t know what to do.”
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