My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  That was settled for her. George Latter came aboard in Sydney and asked to be allowed to work his passage home. A couple of scoundrels had vamoosed, and old Judas took him on.

  “Did you ever see George?” she asked. “We played together.”

  I shook my head.

  “He was very handsome then,” she said, “though he had been ill and was thin and white. He looked comically romantic. I was leaning over the rail when he walked up the gangway: a Byronic shirt showing the hollows under his neck, black ringlets, a tiny bundle on a stick over his shoulder. You never saw anything so Whittingtonian. The thought leapt to the mind. I remember the mate shouted: ‘Here! We don’t want hands for a bloody panto!’”

  But the old man talked to Latter in his cabin, gave him a tract, and signed him on for the voyage home. Latter was the son of a wealthy mercantile knight who had already done all the Whittington business. George wanted to get away from it, and used the freedom from supervision that his first term at Oxford gave him to join a touring theatrical company. He had come with them to Australia, had fallen ill in Sydney and been left behind, penniless, to fend for himself. That was the whole of his brief and unremarkable story.

  “And, of course, we fell in love on the voyage home,” said Mary Latter. “I had never met anyone like him. When his strength and colour came back, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and for that matter I’ve never seen a more beautiful person since—that is till—what d’you think?” She turned to me with her endearing smile.

  “I know,” I said. “Oliver.”

  “Yes. He’s going to kill ’em. Well, you know, that’s why I was moved to begin telling you things the other day in Falmouth, because The Firebird—that was father’s ship then—ended that voyage at Falmouth. We got in late one afternoon, and at night George and I came up on deck and found the whole harbour swimming under the light of a full moon. I can see it now, especially the grey slate roofs of the town that looked like burnished lead, and I can feel the extraordinary hush of all that canvas stowed, and ropes tied, after months of straining and groaning and flapping. It was heaven. We decided then to slip away together the next day. We did. We were afraid to say a word to father. And I never saw Falmouth again till this week.”

  That was how Mary Latter learned the trade of the theatre—joining a travelling company with Latter, marrying him later, getting her experience as the old barn-stormers got theirs—not from academies but from doing the job.

  “I have never been a very good actress,” she said modestly, “but I do claim to know the game.”

  It was a thin life till Latter’s widower-father died, unreconciled but happily intestate, and George Latter himself, never, I gathered, a strong man, died soon after. And so Mary found herself possessed of a considerable fortune, a profound knowledge of the knockabout life of touring theatrical companies, and a determination to run a company of her own. That was how the Mary Latter Comedy Company came into being, and its founder, a sound business woman, had not diminished but increased her fortune.

  Some days after this conversation I brought Mary Latter’s mind back again to the question of Captain Judas. She briefly sketched in the story of his decline. His proceedings aboard ship became more and more eccentric, and reports of his fervent evangelical services began to disturb the owners. They had no complaint about his seamanship, for there were few men who could get more than he could out of a clipper, but when he began to see in every albatross that followed his ship the visible encircling presence of the Holy Ghost, they called him up in London to give some account of himself. This to him was Paul before Festus, and all the board got out of the quiet little man dressed in respectable navy blue was a sudden and vehement call to repent while the acceptable day was yet with them.

  And so it was that Captain Jude Iscott, to whom the name of Judas Iscariot had now stuck like a burr, found himself for a long time without a ship, then found himself passing from job to job on the down grade, and at last was to be found among the islands of the East Indies. It was there that it became customary to call him quite simply Captain Judas, his name and antecedents falling away and leaving him adrift among the islands, a fantastic and legendary figure. His long hair and beard, the apocalyptic shining of his eye, his undismayed conviction of a call to bring seafaring sinners to repentance, made him half-loved, half-feared, but wholly beyond the pale of sane if sinful men.

  “What finished him,” said Mary Latter, “was a mutiny.”

  Her first tidings of the affair were from a newspaper. It recorded the picking up of Captain Jude Iscott and a ship’s cook in an open boat. The captain was unable to give an account of himself, but the cook had some garrulous tale of mutiny to tell. And then the little affair, which after all could not mean much to English newspapers, sank from sight. Mary did not even know what ship her father was commanding; it was not mentioned in the reports. It was merely recorded that the two men had been put ashore at Penang. So what did that woman do but resolve to go to Penang. You will begin to understand my admiration for Mary Latter.

  “You see,” she said, sitting there in the stiff formal clothes that she didn’t change even for holiday, “I had just come into all that money. I thought a change would do me good. I was used to knocking about.”

  In English lodging-houses, yes. But Penang!

  She told in her matter-of-fact way how she arrived in Penang, as though it had been Bournemouth. It seems that there was a hospital of sorts, and she learned that the captain and the cook had both been patients but were now discharged—gone no one knew where, except that they were supposed to be hanging about pending an inquiry.

  Mary had plenty of money, and from her hotel—“you never saw such a disgusting place—and the food!”—she sent out well-paid scouts who, before long, brought in the cook.

  “I was rather frightened. I never like black men.” But the cook was a decent fellow, a Malay, not so black as Mary thought. His English puzzled her, but she wormed a story out of him. And, when all was said and done, it was a simple enough story of a piece of straightforward cut-and-dried villainy. It was a small steamship that Judas had been commanding. He had an engineer, a mate of sorts, two hands and the cook. They were all villains except the cook. Every one was in the plot to steal the ship. The cook was invited to join the party, pretended that he would do so, and warned the captain. The captain replied by singing on the bridge a hymn in which he informed the world that he was “strong in the strength which God supplies through His eternal Son.”

  This did not prevent the plot from coming to a head that night. He was seized as he slept in his cabin, and was told to get into the boat. He resisted. He was frog-marched on deck. “Get in, Judas,” the mate ordered, “and take your thirty pieces of silver with you.” He tossed a contemptuous handful of coins into the boat. The cook attempted a diversion by the heroic method of rushing from the galley with a pan of boiling water which he threatened to hurl upon the mate. Before he could do this, he was knocked on the head by a member of the crew, and he knew nothing more till he woke in the boat. The steamer was out of sight, and, indeed, was never seen again under the name she had borne. There was no wireless in those days.

  Judas was in the boat, too. He had been knocked on the head like the cook, and when he recovered he was raving. He picked up the coins from the bottom-boards and flung them into the sea, screaming to the dawn that was reddening the water that he had not betrayed his Master.

  The poor Malay passed a few desperate hours. It was with difficulty that he prevented the captain from leaping overboard. There was no water in the boat and no protection from the burning sun. Both men suffered from the wounds in their heads, and it was only the odd chance of being picked up before that day was over that saved their lives.

  Such was the Malay’s plain tale, and such were the circumstances that finally tipped Judas’s mind from extravagance to insanity. Mary Latter was taken to him that night by the Malay. The captain who had been teetotal all his life wa
s in a dive behind the water-front, addressing an enthralled company on sin and salvation and denying that he had betrayed his Lord. He was very drunk.

  Again her simple narrative gave me a clear picture of that extraordinary scene: the crowded, beer-stinking den, the buzz and ping of a myriad insects about the swinging oil lamps, the throng of evil faces catching the light as they pressed round the little wildly-bearded man with the blazing eye and burning tongue. Into the midst of this Rembrandt group strode without warning the stiff severe figure of the woman who had gone to Penang as though it had been Bournemouth. “They all looked struck silly.” That was her sole comment on what must have been a superb moment.

  It seems that she went up to Captain Judas, took him by the arm, and said: “Father, you come with me.” He was helpless, and cried a little, and she and the Malay took him to her hotel and put him to bed. In the morning he was quiet and repentant and pliable. She told him he was going home on the next available ship. “But the inquiry!” he objected; and wherever she went she heard the same dismayed ejaculation: “But the inquiry!” “Damn the inquiry,” said Mary Latter. “Let ’em come and hold it in London.” And whether it was ever held, or what happened if it was, she never heard or cared.

  “I couldn’t do any more for him, could I?” she asked anxiously. “For years he was in a little cottage in the Hebrides till he became convinced that a few Catholic priests who went there for a holiday were emissaries of Rome, spying out his doings. Then he became crazy to have a ship again and live up a creek. So I let him buy the Jezebel. Don’t ever mention money to him, will you? I’m sure you wouldn’t, anyway. I like him to write his own cheques. It pleases him to do that. I pay a bit into his account every month. He bought the Jezebel out of it.”

  For the first time in all our talks together there was a slight break in the steadiness of her voice. “He keeps accounts,” she said. “It’s heart-breaking, you know. He has insisted on showing them to me. Every penny he owes me is down. It’s all going to be paid back out of royalties when his book’s published.”

  The lights sprang up in the Jezebel’s dark side. “I must go,” she said. “If I don’t, he’ll start writing, and I want him to keep off that while I’m here.”

  *

  When we left Heronwater that time, Mary Latter travelled with us to London. Captain Judas came into Falmouth to see us off. Sam Sawle was there to take the old man back in the Maeve.

  All the others being aboard, Judas walked for a while up and down the platform with me and his daughter. He had nothing to say, but pathetically held on to an arm of each of us, keeping us on the move within the space of a quarterdeck. We had to get aboard at last; and when I leaned out of the window as the train was moving away I saw the little man as no more than a bent back and dejected shoulders, already shuffling off the platform, a different figure from the bellicose bantam who had confronted us on our arrival. He would be lonely. It was years, Mary said, since he had “taken” to anybody at all. He would draw his curtains early and get down to work.

  I sat in my corner. Opposite to me was Mary Latter, Maeve next to her, with a hand through Mary’s arm. That was a good piece of work! Mary had taken to the child, and I had allowed them to be much together before sounding Mary on the chances of her giving employment to Maeve. First there was the consent of Dermot and Sheila to obtain, and that was not difficult. They were both intelligent enough to know that a real bent, amounting almost literally to a calling, was rare in a child of Maeve’s age, and that to give her her head was the course of wisdom. My own admiration for Mary Latter as a practical, ruthless and dependable woman was able to convince them that Maeve could not be in better hands.

  Mary herself talked the matter over with me and Maeve as we walked our little quay one evening. “I hope you’ve got no nonsense in your head,” she said severely to Maeve. “Don’t think you’re going to see your picture on post-cards. You won’t while you’re with me, anyway. Can you type?”

  Maeve shook a frightened head. “Well, if you come with me you’ll have to learn to. And to write shorthand, too. You’ll have to write letters for me, and perhaps when I’m tired you’ll have to read to me, and now and then, if you behave yourself, I’ll let you come to the theatre and smell the place, and see how things are done, and get it in your bones. And perhaps in a year’s time we’ll put a little apron on you and a slavey’s cap, and let you go on and say: ‘The rector’s called to see you, ma’am.’ And if you can say that properly, perhaps we’ll let you say something else. See?”

  Maeve nodded again, speechless but happy. “Very well, then. So long as you understand. You’ll have to learn as I did—just by doing it. How old are you?”

  “Fourteen, madam.”

  Mary frowned. “Good gracious! You’re younger than I thought. Never mind. I expect you’ve got more sense than I had at fourteen. Now run away to bed. You won’t get much sleep when you’re with me.”

  When Maeve was gone, she said: “Thank you for bringing the child to me. I like her.”

  “I think she’s lucky,” I said, “and—d’you mind my saying this?—I think you’re lucky, too. I’m glad she’s going to learn by knocking about. It’s the best way.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s marvellous. They learn all we can teach them, and then leave us in the lurch.”

  17

  It was at the beginning of September, 1906, that Maeve left us. We had a glimpse of her in the following April when the Mary Latter Comedy Company came for a week to Manchester. She had not yet set a foot upon the stage, but she was not the Maeve she had been. She had a calmness and confidence that were lacking when the theatre to her was no more than a dream. Now she was on the threshold. It was a matter no longer of contriving, only of waiting, and she was waiting with a fine self-reliance.

  When August came she did not join the party at Heronwater. Mary Latter was going abroad for a month: France and Spain, Italy and Austria: “a regular gadabout,” she called it: and Maeve went with her.

  But the party was made up from an unexpected quarter. It came about this way. Dermot and I had been making a round of the Easifix works in Hulme, and we were walking home together when he said: “I’m sorry, Bill, but we shan’t be joining you at Heronwater this year. You know what I mentioned to you some time ago—that night you met Kevin Donnelly—about Rory living in Ireland?”

  I nodded grimly.

  “Well, it won’t be so long now before he goes, and I thought it would be a good idea if he saw something of Donnelly—got to know him in a free and easy way. There’s a daughter, too—Maggie—a girl about Rory’s age. I’m going to ask them both to spend a holiday with me and Sheila and Rory.”

  “And what’s wrong,” I asked, “with spending that holiday at Heronwater?”

  Dermot’s eye brightened. “You wouldn’t mind? Or Nellie?”

  “Nellie never minds anything. And as for me—well, if you’re determined to send Rory off on this damned silly business, let’s see him while we can. I’m fond of the little beggar.”

  Dermot stopped in his tracks. “Silly business!” he exploded suddenly. “Let me tell you—”

  “No,” I said. “Don’t tell me. We don’t argue on this. That’s all there is to it.”

  Dermot took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The touch of opposition had made him sweat. His grey-green eyes were glinting. He took a pull on himself, put on his hat, and said: “I won’t quarrel with you. Come on.” He took my arm.

  “Gladly,” I said with a grin. “I’m proud to be seen walking down the street with so distinguished a figure. The lovely hat and all.”

  I think Dermot was looking his best at about that time, when he was approaching his fortieth year. He was very tall and thin. His face was long and fleshless and aristocratic, finished off with that provocative point of red beard. His hands, too, seemed to have incredibly lengthened. He had the longest fingers I have ever known on a man, and his wrists were beautifully slender. He dressed the part. He had t
aken recently to an immense black sombrero, and that day he was wearing a loose grey suit and a green tie. I hadn’t seen Shaw then, but I think he and Dermot must have looked much alike at that time.

  “There are two more things I want to tell you,” Dermot said, smacking the side of his leg with a silver-topped malacca cane. “I’m clearing out of Manchester and I’m chucking this Easifix business.”

  “Clearing out of Manchester! But, my dear man—”

  “And it’s only a matter of time before you do, too. I give you another two or three years at most.”

  “But why—?”

  “Because a good deal of my work’s in the south now, and I want to expand it. I shall keep on the place here and leave a manager in charge.”

  He spoke with determination. Evidently he had worked out his details. “I’ve got premises,” he said, “in Regent Street. I can’t go in for a year. The lease isn’t up till then. I want Rory to be away first.”

  He flicked a look at me, and his eyebrows flew up. “Comment on that, damn you,” he seemed to say.

  “And look here,” he added. “This Easifix Company. You and I have drawn a tidy income out of it for years, and now I want to sell out and draw a lump of capital out of it. I advise you to do the same. It’s becoming a bore. Now the thing’s swimming along as it is, there’s no need for me. Anyone can design the toys.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Needless to say, it will be one of the terms of sale that he either retains his position or is retired on a pension. We can see that he gets a good holding of shares. And when I go he can have my house.”

  “You’ve got it all fixed.”

  “I have. Every point. What about you? Hadn’t you better chuck it? You’re doing very well out of your books.”