The Mystery of the Mud Flats

by Maurice Drake

  CHAPTER XV

  CONCERNING MODERN MAIDENHOOD

  THE shopping proved to be only an excuse for a walk in the fresh March wind. She called at one or two places to leave orders, but lingered nowhere—as I always thought women were supposed to do, shopping—and there were no parcels at all for me to carry. In half an hour she announced that her marketing was done and proposed a walk before lunch.

  Six months earlier I should very likely have been fool enough to think she meant playing with me, as she had at Dartmouth, but last evening’s passage of words had disposed of that idea. I confess I didn’t understand her altogether, but it had at last been driven into my thick head that she wanted to be friends, in spite of her sharp ways. So I wasn’t looking out for causes of offence all the time, and we got on all the better for it. When she snapped at me for slowness or stupidity—as she did often enough, to be sure—I just laughed; and then she laughed too, and we went on as before. It came to me gradually that I’d misjudged her from the start. Of course a man doesn’t like being sneered at bitterly and called a fool at first acquaintance; but it was past denying that I had deserved the sneers, and the name too. It was nasty physic to be told so by a girl, but it was physic that had done me good. Remembrance of her anger and contempt had helped as much towards keeping me steady as getting into collar again. More, perhaps: the work had been a sickener during the winter, and I might have gone back to my old ways if I hadn’t seen where they led. And being slanged by a nice little quick-tempered girl had opened my eyes to the folly of them more than anything else had done—more even than that winter’s short commons at moorings in Exmouth Bight.

  Thinking of all this I was pounding along the road full stretch when it struck me I was walking too fast for her and pulled up to say so. She was keeping up well, but with the wind in our faces I expect her skirts bothered her, for she was flushed with exertion. Winter being only just over, she wasn’t freckled as much as when I’d first seen her, and again it struck me as it had the night before that she was really pretty sometimes. Her features weren’t statuesque, certainly, but her warmed skin was clear, her eyes big and dark, and, if her mouth was impudent, her lips were dainty curves enough. Dark fur was round her neck and with her dark hair framed her face, contrasting with its colour. Her bright eyes and mouth laughed together as I turned to her.

  ‘Penny,’ she said.

  ‘For my thoughts, you mean? I thought I was walking too fast for you.’

  ‘What thoughts made you walk so fast?’

  ‘I was thinking how you slapped my face and called me a fool when first we met.’

  ‘You were a fool, you know.’ She shook her head in deprecation. ‘And you certainly deserved to have your face slapped.’

  ‘For asking you to come for a walk with me? What you are doing at this minute.’

  ‘It’s different now, as you know very well. We’re friends, aren’t we? We weren’t then, and I never imagined we should be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why! Have you any idea how you looked? Filthy, unshaven—a drunken-looking wreck. You were a—a blot on the morning.’

  ‘Why did you trouble to come back and slang me, then?’

  ‘Trouble?’ She laughed—a little low chuckle. ‘It was a pleasure. I hate dirt and waste and slovenliness. I’ll tell you—all the way across in that dirty little leaky boat my fingers were itching to brush the mud off your coat.’

  ‘Why should you take that much interest in me?’

  ‘Oh! the eternal conceit of man! I didn’t take any interest in you personally. It was your dirt I was interested in. Grubbiness always wakes me to an active interest in life. It makes me want to scrub and dust, and bang things about, and set windows open. Can’t you understand? If you’d been clean—a nice, washed and shaven boatman—I shouldn’t have taken any notice of you. See?’

  ‘Don’t I interest you now I’m cleaner?’

  ‘Yes, as a friend, you do. I’ve enjoyed watching that dirty, idle ruffian I found asleep on Exmouth beach turn into a self-respecting man. The wild lust to scrub you has departed, and now I want to see you go on and prosper. You’re a friend, see? I’ve lots of friends and I like to see them do well.’

  She spoke the truth, now I came to think of it. She had lots of friends, and a queer, varied set at that. Ward, a clever, well-informed man of science, and Miss Lavington, sleepy and beautiful—both made almost a pet of the little scatterbrain. Voogdt, many-sided man of the world though he was, always had a special smile for her benefit when they met. The old skipper of the Kismet had spoken of her in quite a different tone to the rest of his employers. ’Kiah always had a grin underneath his touched cap when she came his way. And though I’d always thought her a wicked-tongued little shrew, I knew no other woman in the world I could talk to as plainly as I could to her, and if I’d been in a mess of any sort and she could have helped me, I would have gone to her readily. I don’t think I ever put any credit to her on that account. I should have just taken her good offices as a matter of course. It seemed her proper job, somehow, meddling in other people’s concerns. You couldn’t know her long without feeling that about her—that she was in her element flapping dusters, and stirring things up, and putting them tidy. It never occurred to me she deserved praise for it.

  Her voice cut in on my thoughts.

  ‘Penny,’ she said again. ‘How you do stride along when you’re deep in thought. Don’t get thinking on board, or you’ll walk overside.’

  ‘I was thinking of what you said—that cleaning and tidying-up is your métier. I think you’d look rather pretty with your head tied up in a duster like a little Japanese housewife.’

  ‘Is that intended as a compliment?’ she asked, with her eyes narrowing. ‘Rather a back-handed one, isn’t it—to tell a girl she looks her best when she’s partly covered up?’

  She laughed freely again. ‘I wasn’t sure. You mustn’t use the word pretty in that tone when you’re talking to me, or else you’ll find you’re steering for another slapped face. I know just exactly how pretty I am. I see my looking-glass every day, and compliments are barred.’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘D’you mean—’ I began.

  ‘I mean that I know the extent of my personal beauty,’ she said tartly. ‘I know my nose tips up the wrong way and that I freckle. I hate silly compliments, because I know exactly how much they’re worth. I’ve lived for years with Anne—with Miss Lavington—and nobody dares try flattering her. Whereas—how is it a girl of my type can’t talk for an hour to a man without the fool trying to stuff idiotic compliments down her throat? I suppose the magnanimous animal wants to console me because I ain’t a beauty, like Anne.’

  She talked so simply and so entirely without affectation that I felt as though she were discussing some third person, and I answered her as impersonally, with no thought of compliment—just trying to put the other side of the case, as it were.

  ‘Your eyes are big and dark, and your mouth’s very pretty,’ I got out and was going on when she stopped and faced me with her eyebrows level—almost scowling.

  ‘You’re asking for it,’ was all she said, but I dried up, for she looked vicious, and there we stood staring at each other. She seemed to expect some sort of apology, so I begged her pardon and said I was sorry. ‘Though what for, goodness knows,’ I said. ‘I meant no harm.’

  ‘Enough said,’ she replied, laying down the law. ‘Kindly remember personal comments are forbidden in future. Now we’ll go back to the town and you shall give me some lunch. And with the wind behind us you can walk as fast as you please. I’m hungry.’

  We had something to eat at a confectioner’s, and I enjoyed it immensely, blessing Voogdt’s notion of the fertiliser sacks for keeping me ashore this day or two. She was bright and merry as you please, and I didn’t feel constrained as I had at her table the night before. I got her on to talk about things that interested her—the Woman’s Suffrage business for one—and the more she talked
the better I liked it. You can’t talk to most women for long without coming back to the only subject that interests them—and that’s themselves, nine times on ten. They always seem to be thinking about something else—their own back hair, most likely. But this girl didn’t seem to think about herself at all; she gave one the notion that even if her back hair had come down it wouldn’t have affected her conversation—unless she stopped to curse it for getting into her eyes. The Sphere of Womanhood was the thing she was most keen on—the Suffrage, and all that, and at first I made her rather wild by laughing at it. When she showed signs of getting really nasty I quieted her by pointing out that sailors couldn’t vote either, but that they didn’t make half as much fuss about it.

  That was a new idea to her. She meditated over it awhile, judicially, with her chin on her hand.

  ‘Why don’t they agitate?’ she asked.

  ‘Stick hatpins into policemen and horsewhip ministers, do you mean? Because they’ve got other work to do. If they were ashore agitating what would become of trade, and their wives and kids?’

  ‘Women have work, too.’ She was hot about it in a moment.

  ‘D’you think I don’t know it? I’m a woman’s work myself, and so is every man or woman born. Don’t mistake me. I don’t say motherhood is a reason against the franchise. I’m all for your having it. But I don’t think it’s a matter of great importance. I haven’t a vote myself, and don’t want one—and woman’s true work is important—vitally important.’

  ‘Woman’s true work, meaning wifehood and the rest of it,’ she sneered. ‘How about me? I’m not married, and don’t want to be.’

  ‘You announced your special job this morning,’ I said. ‘You’ve a call for tidying things up.’ I chuckled to myself, thinking I had her there, but I hadn’t.

  ‘And that’s just what I’m doing working for the Suffrage,’ said she in an instant, and so scored off me instead.

  Apart from the abstract question of the vote, it was amusing to hear her talk of her life and the women she worked with. She hadn’t any very lofty ideas of women’s ability, whatever she thought of their deserts. To hear their talk made her think of beating to windward in a shallow draught boat, or of making bricks without straw—of any job which meant lots of exertion and precious little to show for it. She had her own word for it. ‘Like trying to drive little pigs one way in an open field,’ she said, with a twinkle, pleased at the simile. All through she spoke of other women with a sort of affectionate contempt, as though they were a lot of children playing at being grown-ups.

  ‘Poor dears!’ she said. ‘The poor, muddling dears! Listen to this, now. A woman speaker was sent to me at home, in Edgbaston, to stay the night, speak in Birmingham next day, and then go on again to Rugby. She arrived at ten p.m. in a cab, with a small baby, a nurse, and a trunk about as big as the cab itself. She’d mislaid my address, gone to a post office to get a directory, listed all the Brands in Edgbaston, and driven to each address in turn till she found me. Whilst the baby was being put to bed she argued with me about High Church services versus Low, until the cabman sent in to know if he was to wait. Then she asked me to pay him—to charge it up against head office, of course—and I did so. He said he’d been driving from place to place for over three hours, and the woman said vaguely that she thought that was about right. She seemed to think I was to blame for her losing the address.’

  ‘Poor kid,’ I said.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’ she demanded indignantly.

  ‘Yes. I was referring to the woman’s baby,’ I said. I had her that time, and she showed it by getting pink and stammering a little.

  ‘Poor mite. It had slept all the time, the nurse said. She was a capable woman, fortunately.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  ‘Oh, she was past praying for. She went off next day after attending her meeting, and left half her clothes lying about her room. I wasn’t going to have that, so I just made a bundle of them and drove down to the station in the hope of catching her.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Did I not! She’d packed her purse in the trunk, and was turning out all its contents on the platform to find it, with the cabman waiting in the background. Her train was gone and she had forty minutes to wait for the next—a slow one.’

  ‘Do you want any more arguments against the movement after that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t be a fool. A thing is either right or wrong, no matter who pleads it. This is right and just, and you know it. Not all the silly women’s folly in the world can alter its essential justice. This woman was a dolt, of course, but so are many men. You don’t want to disfranchise them.’

  ‘Men don’t use hatpins and dog-whips,’ I said.

  ‘Disfranchise them wholesale and they’ll use rifles and bayonets,’ she retorted. ‘There, I don’t want to spoil our lunch by arguing. Right’s right, and wrong’s wrong. You know it, and so do I. And what’s the use of squabbling about it?’

  ‘Good enough,’ I said. ‘I’ve finished. When I’m settled down and have a vote I’ll use it for feminine suffrage. That’s a promise. And let me tell you this: if you women used more straight talk and less hatpins you’d make more converts.’

  ‘Now you’re being nice,’ she said, with approval. ‘I’m promised a vote, so my day’s holiday hasn’t been wasted; and I’m pleased with myself and you too.’

  The argument and the lunch finishing together, we went out into the street and I asked if I should see her home.

  ‘Not yet,’ said she. ‘What’s the good of spending fine weather indoors? Lets go down to the waterside and say how-de-do to the faithful ’Kiah. I like ’Kiah, and I haven’t seen him since I scared him so at Terneuzen.’

  ‘That was a shame,’ I said. ‘He was really frightened—his life was a misery for days afterwards.’

  ‘I made sure he’d desert,’ she said.

  ‘Not he. He’s too straight and good a chap for that.’ I told her how he’d stuck to me when I was broke. When I’d done:

  ‘He thinks a lot of you,’ she said. ‘I wonder why?’

  ‘Because I think a lot of him. I trust him and he can trust me. That’s why. And it’s because you women haven’t that sort of trust in you that you can’t—’

  ‘Stop,’ she said threateningly, her finger in air. ‘Stop it. That argument’s concluded. I hate flogging a dead horse.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, and we walked the rest of the way to the quayside in silence.

  A Tyne collier lying next ahead of the Luck and Charity was discharging into some trucks alongside, and the din and flying coal dust seemed worse than ever after the walk and cleanly served lunch in a girl’s company. We walked round the end of the line of coupled trucks and found our boat wrapped in an atmosphere of idleness, her hatch off, her hold empty, and ’Kiah sitting on the fo’castle companion smoking and admiring his laundry hung out to dry upon the forestay.

  That caught her ladyship’s eye, of course.

  ‘Look,’ she cried. ‘Only look! These clothes hung out in a shower of coal dust. Man, the reasoning animal!’

  ‘’Kiah would have done better to dry them on the green lawns all round us, I suppose,’ I said dryly.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she demanded.

  ‘I mean that he’s got no other place to dry them. Coal dust is clean dirt—better than damp clothes, anyhow.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he dry them by the stove downstairs?’

  ‘Why should he trouble? In this wind they’ll dry quicker where they are, and a bit of coal dust won’t hurt him. It’s sanitary enough.’

  ‘I shall tell him,’ she said.

  ‘For goodness’ sake leave him alone. If you start talking to him about shirts and socks you’ll horrify him. Really you will. He’ll think you’re indelicate.’

  ‘He won’t?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘He will, I tell you. I know him better than you do. You don’t know the queer notions of modesty these men have. Do you realis
e that he’d think it indecent if you saw him with his feet bare? You’ll only make him vilely uncomfortable if you talk laundry. Do have sense enough to disregard his washing altogether.’

  Just then ’Kiah saw us and jumped up, touching his cap and grinning a welcome—to Miss Brand more than to me, presumably, since I’d seen him at breakfast-time.

  ‘Where’s Mr Voogdt?’ I asked.

  ‘Gone ashore,’ said ’Kiah, and then turned his attention to helping Miss Brand across the gangway. I stayed where I was, looking at our dirty little home. I suppose it was the ‘Mister Voogdt’ waked me to thinking what a queer crew we were for a coasting ketch. Me, skipper, with a deep-sea ticket—and extra master’s at that—Voogdt, mate, an educated man, with polish and brains, picked up from the roadside, practically starving, and ’Kiah as ordinary a coasting hand as one could meet anywhere. Add that our cargoes were, comparatively speaking, worthless, our ballast really valuable, and that we were practically engaged in piracy, for aught we knew at the risk of our lives, with this jolly little girl as one of our partners, and it struck me anew that we were an unusual trading concern, to say the least of it.

  CHAPTER XVI

  OF A CONVIVIAL GATHERING

  NEXT morning we were up early and away before the turn of tide. The bags had come alongside the evening before, and with the help of the stevedore’s men we had the lot aboard before midnight. I had got into the way of hating putting to sea of late, but somehow things looked brighter this morning than they had done for a long time. The day or two of holiday had done me good; there was a touch of spring in the air; once we heard a thrush whistling, halting notes, but sweet and clear, when we tacked close in to the north shore of the river. Voogdt seemed to feel the influence too. He was tending jib-sheets, a job which should have kept him fairly busy beating to windward in a narrow channel, but he found time to come aft and sit on the skylight to fill a pipe.

  ‘Nothing much wrong with this, is there?’ he asked, loosening his neckerchief. ‘Summer’s coming.’