Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “I can see now why you didn’t place too much faith in it, ma’am. Although where they could have got to, all the same, him and the green-eyed young lady …”

  “His story has not been disproved, as I said before,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Not all of it, ma’am,” agreed Pirberry.

  Harben, on his return, seemed to have lost his fear of the lurking men with the boat-hook, and went for a swim every morning just before breakfast. He was rather edgy and nervy, partly because his book struck a snag, as he called it, and partly because he was fretting, for, to his great disappointment, the Admiralty, to whom he had applied again upon his return, had not, so far, written to him again.

  He got out the tub, brought her along to the boathouse of The Island, and overhauled her completely. Then he went down-river to have another look at the house. He went ashore in the dinghy, drew it up on the wet and shining gravel, and walked across the shingle and up the stone steps. He strolled past the house once or twice, glancing up at it as he passed, but it seemed to be deserted, and he could not make up his mind to knock at the door.

  The last time he passed it he walked as far as the bridge. There were plenty of people about, for the weather was fine and warm, and he reflected upon the difference between that fine warm day with its people, and the moonlight night of almost a year ago when the old man had died in the house, and Leda had come down to the tub.

  On his return, he met the foreman of the boat-builder’s yard, a grizzled man, brown-faced, stiff-bearded, with sloping, strong shoulders and hands like the wood with which he built his boats.

  He greeted Harben, expressed pleasure at seeing him again, and drew out a piece of paper.

  “I don’t know whether you’ve still got a boat in commission, Mr. Harben?”

  Harben pointed her out.

  “Oh ah. That’s her,” said the man. “Well, I’ll have to give you the tip, sir, and it’s serious. Every boat that’ll keep out water will soon be required, and urgent.”

  “What’s it all about?” asked Harben. The old man lowered his voice.

  “We haven’t been let know that, sir. Only, we’ve had our orders. Navigators, deck-hands, amateur yachtsmen, tug-owners, pleasure-boats—I mean the river steamers, sir, and them that goes round by Margate from Tower Pier—our orders is to warn the whole lot of you you’d better stand by to help the soldiers.”

  “Not a German invasion?” asked Harben. The foreman shook his head.

  “’Taint to be known,” said he, “but there’s doings along the river and over to France. As you’ve still got a boat, sir, you’ll need to be ready to use it. Great doings there is, for them Germans has marched into Belgium and ’Olland, and got the other foreigners on the run. Mr. Olney told me. Never hadn’t ought to, but ’e did. Take my tip, sir. You get your tank filled up, and a bit of tommy aboard. Nothing won’t come amiss. And a life-saving jacket or two, and some brandy and rum. There’s the whole bloomin’ Expeditionary Force out there.”

  Harben laughed.

  “Belgium and Holland invaded!” he said. “Oh, rubbish Tom! Where did you get that tale from?”

  But it was all in the morning papers. Mrs. Bradley had had the same story from Pirberry, earlier in the day.

  “There might be a job for Mr. Harben,” Pirberry had informed her. “You say, ma’am, he’s overhauled his boat.”

  “He’s on the river today. I don’t know where he has gone, but I’ll hazard a guess.”

  “Chasing that girl at the house by the river,” said Pirberry. “Some young gentlemen are fools. Anyway,” he continued, “if he likes to run down to the estuary within the next three days, no doubt he’ll get marching orders. Then, if he comes back, no doubt I can question him, ma’am.”

  “Good heavens!” said Mrs. Bradley. “I knew things have gone very badly, but are they as bad as all that—that he might not return?”

  “They’re almost as bad as they can be,” Pirberry answered. “The Belgians are falling back and the French are finished. All the roads to the coast are blocked with refugees, and we’ve got to get the soldiers away, ma’am, by some of the channel ports, and nothing short of a miracle’s going to do it.”

  Harben left the tub at her moorings and returned to The Island by train. Next day he was back at the moorings and, with expert help, took down and overhauled, for the second time in a month, his powerful engine. Then he ran the tub back to The Island to break the news to his friends that he was to leave them again.

  When the orphan boys, who had welcomed him back with that disinterested enthusiasm that only children can show, learned that he was leaving again very soon, they were unconsolable.

  “But what about our seamanship tests, sir? You said you’d get us to pass them!”

  “Won’t you show me that star-knot, sir? I’ve got a bit of rope. She gave it me.”

  This formidable title indicated their hostess. Sister Mary Dominic gently, Harben wrathfully, corrected it whenever they heard it. Harben corrected it now.

  “She? Who’s She?”

  “Mrs. Lestrange Bradley, sir.”

  “Why the dickens don’t you say so, then?”

  “Very sorry, sir. But where are you going to?”

  The last afternoon was brilliant. It was nearly the end of May. Harben was to set out on the following morning. The sun was high, and Harben was sprawled near Sister Mary Dominic’s chair in the pleasant, lush, riverside garden, resting on his elbows, chewing grass and gazing across the river. He heard her rustling the pages of her book. He looked round at her, saw the title of the book, and sat up.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Bradley lent it me. I asked for it.”

  “But why on earth?”

  “I think I may have misjudged you. I want to know more about you than I do.”

  Harben laughed, but he knew that she was serious. But what more was there to know? She had known a good deal about him when she and Sister Sebastian had first come aboard the tub, and by this time she knew as much about him as he knew about himself. She knew that he was impulsive and could be gentle. She knew (although he would not have admitted this himself) that he was rashly chivalrous and kind. She knew that he wrote, but neither he nor she knew, or could ever know, what was the basis of the unavoidable compulsion under which he wrote; a compulsion which nagged at him even when he was not writing. She knew—to descend to more mundane but not less important matters—that he had enough money to live on, even without his writing. She knew that his mother had died when he was five, and that his father had left him money. She knew how much money it was, and thought it very little, for she came of a wealthy family.

  She knew that he was communicative, not secret; that he was, on the whole, an idler, for he confessed that he never worked regularly, even at his writing, but only by fits and starts. She knew that he detested beginning a book and was depressed when it was finished. She knew that, almost as soon as he had finished one book, he felt compelled to begin another.

  She knew that he had friends; that, often, he did not see them nor write to them from one year’s end to the next.

  Having answered him, she bent her head over the pages, and read, with intense concentration, the words which he had written.

  Harben left gazing at the river and watched her as she read, and tried to imagine her in the life she had led before the war.

  He tried to imagine her, first of all, at morning. He could fancy how she would put on her white serge gown and above it her scapula. The gown would reach almost to the floor of her cell, but would clear it sufficiently to show (although not her white stockings) the buckles of her broad black shoes. The gown had wide sleeves reaching to the wrists, and underneath those sleeves she would have fastened others, detachable and close-fitting, which were made to button neatly on to the short sleeves of her flannel petticoat. He knew this because Sister Sebastian had told him so when they were discussing the Dominican habit.

  The scapula was an
over-garment consisting merely of a front and a back panel of serge. Beneath it, so that the beads could be seen in graceful loops at her left side, was a fifteen-decade rosary.

  Above the scapula she would put on the white linen gimp which covered her shoulders and the upper part of her breast, and above it, around her head, she would fasten a stiff white linen binder and surmount it with her long black veil.

  Yes; he knew all about the Dominican habit from Sister Sebastian, for if there was one thing above all others which could give Sister Sebastian an almost sinful feeling of pride, it was this white serge uniform, of which, Sister Sebastian had informed him, every fold and fall and fastening had to be as exact and correct as that of a soldier on parade. The belt of stout leather from which the rosary hung was braced like a soldier’s belt, and the long black cloak was analogous to a military cape, for Dominicans, like their founder, had the soldierly mind, he had learned.

  The Order was an active one. Doctors, fully qualified nurses, trained teachers, domestic science experts, social workers, superintendents of hostels, were to be found among its members. Some Houses specialized in one kind of work and some in another, but the sisters were never allowed to forget that their founder had lived and worked in the world, and not in the cloister; had been a preacher and a missionary, not a mystic, a contemplative, or a visionary.

  Harben, nodding acceptance of these facts, had also learned from Sister Sebastian that Sister Mary Dominic came of one of the oldest Catholic families in England, and could have shown (had she been at home) the priest’s hole where protagonists of the martyr Edmund Campion had lain hidden, and the blackened east wall where a company of Levellers had set fire to the family mansion at the time of the Civil War.

  Now another and a deadlier war was afoot. Other Catholic priests in Occupied Europe had suffered and were to suffer a fate as bloody as Campion’s; towns, not separate houses, were to be burned and devastated until civilization itself was fighting to live. Whole countrysides were to be blasted by high explosive, proud cities and then whole countries were to fall and yield and be enslaved. Satan was out of hell, and his legions of furies and devils were loosed on a world grown slack and careless, on people absorbed in little lovings and hatreds, coarse pleasures and dirty little sins. So Sister Mary Sebastian had told Harben, interspersing her words with comforting pictures of Heaven.

  Still regarding the peach-down cheek, the delicate mouth, and the sweep of black lashes over eyes that were bent on the book, he continued his mental exercises, imagining Sister Mary Dominic in the life described by the older, more genial nun. At five minutes to seven, the sisters went to their chapel. There they made meditation until seven-thirty, when the Little Hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, and None were recited by the choir sisters, whilst the lay sisters went to work. Then followed Mass, attended by all whose duties allowed them to come. At a quarter to nine Mass ended and breakfast was served. He could see the prim lines, the orderly heads, the clean, fresh, morning faces of the nuns, and, among them, the lovely head of Sister Mary Dominic. He sighed, and she looked up immediately, as though, underneath her outward and visible concentration, she was as much aware of him as he of her.

  “Well?” he said. “And what do you make of the masterpiece?”

  “Nothing very much,” she answered. She closed the book, but kept a finger between the pages. “I think”—she looked earnestly at him—“you will not be offended?”

  “Of course not. You’d never offend me, no matter what you said.”

  “Well, I still think you have some very silly ideas.”

  They both laughed. Then he said soberly:

  “Silly? You don’t say wicked?”

  “No. I don’t say wicked. I think you were young for your age when you wrote this book.”

  “Yes,” he said, sober still, and thinking suddenly of Leda. “Yes, I was young for my age.”

  “Then I have learnt something from your book,” she said; and this time she closed it and stood up.

  “Don’t go,” said Harben. “It’s the loveliest thing in life to sit with you in a garden. You’re so beautifully restful and quiet. You’re like the river—restful and quiet—and eternal.”

  “I must go,” she said, taking no more notice of the words than she would take, presently, of falling autumn leaves. “We live, you know, by the sun.”

  “By the clock,” he said, a little bitterly. “I wonder you don’t get tired of it all. Do you—ever?”

  “No,” she said, giving the question her complete consideration. “Rhythm is what God has ordered. The sun rises and sets at its appointed time, and the grass grows and flowers blossom and fade. So with us. We are working and praying, feasting and fasting, grieving, rejoicing, living every year the life of Our Blessed Lord. Only Satan grows tired of the rhythm of earth and heaven.”

  She returned the book the next day. Mrs. Bradley thanked her, and asked politely whether she had enjoyed it.

  “It is so sinful,” said Sister Mary Dominic, sadly. “And he—he is not sinful at all, except as we all are, according to our mortal nature. I have brothers. I know what makes a good man. And he is good. Why does he write like that?”

  “Yes, he is good,” agreed her hostess, returning the book to a shelf, and not attempting to answer the question.

  “You do not talk to me,” said Sister Mary Dominic. “Why is that?”

  “Because you would find my thoughts and opinions either objectionable or incomprehensible,” replied Mrs. Bradley concisely. “You and I, child, must be content to run along parallel lines. They are parallel lines, you know.”

  “Yes,” said the nun, with a sudden, most wonderful smile. “Yes, may God bless you. I know.”

  BOOK SIX

  Dunkirk

  Last came, and last did go

  The pilot of the Galilean lake.

  John Milton

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Beaches

  The weather was calm and fine, the cruise down-river uneventful. It occurred to him that he might be going to his death, and so he allowed himself to stop off by the house where Leda had lived, and moor there for the night.

  He went ashore just after dark, Mrs. Bradley’s revolver in his right hand, an electric torch in his left, mounted the steps of the house and knocked at the door. No one replied to his knocking. He tried again. But not a glimmer of light nor the stifled sound of a movement gave him any reward. He went slowly back to the tub and slept on board.

  He was casting off at daybreak when he saw a white-robed Dominican coming along the concrete path. She was so much like Sister Mary Dominic in the distance that he did not start up his engine, but watched her coming along, incongruous in that place of his other life. It was Sister Mary Dominic. He took her aboard without a word.

  She offered no explanation; he asked no questions. He smiled at her as she took her seat in the well.

  At Greenwich the tub was stopped by river police, and Harben was asked his business and destination.

  “I heard they wanted small craft to cross to France,” he said. His papers were examined, the officer smiled, wished him good luck, told him to look out for floating mines off the Estuary, and on went the tub. At Woolwich he was stopped once more, but after that he got down as far as Tilbury, and there had instructions to go with all possible speed to Dover Harbour, or, if the harbour were full, to lie off in the Downs. As this coincided with earlier orders, he merely engaged his engine and sped away.

  His little craft bucketed badly in the tidal streams of the Estuary. It was five hours after high water at Dover, so he came out on the ebb past the lightship Tongue, then headed south for the North Goodwin, thankful that, with his shallow draught, he need make no allowance for sand.

  Past North Foreland and Ramsgate they ran, and down past Deal and Walmer, inclined with the coast at Hope Point and Saint Margaret’s Bay, and then bent south-west at South Foreland and sighted the long breakwater which marked, in time of peace, the ferry to Calais.

&
nbsp; Other breakwaters enclosed the harbour, which already was crowded with craft. The tub, which, in spite of her clumsy, ungainly appearance, was well engined and could develop a speed of eighteen miles an hour, arrived at the harbour in the early evening, and wriggled in close to the pier. Harben went ashore for instructions, was issued with duplicate charts of the channels leading into the harbour of Dunkirk, and was able to give an assurance that his compass was properly adjusted and that he was provisioned. He asked for fuel, and got it, was warned of mines and the possibility of attack, learned that he would have to be prepared to embark men from open beaches, and promised that when he was loaded he would re-embark his passengers on the larger craft which would be lying off-shore, and go back, if he could, for another load.

  “We can’t tell you in detail what you have to expect,” said the officer who was directing him. “The mess out there is bound to be pretty frightful, and you may find you’ll have to rely entirely on your own mother wit.”

  They had forty miles to cover to reach Dunkirk. They crossed, on strangely smooth water, in two and a half hours. It was then growing dark. The town, which they had seen from two or three miles out because of the smoke that hung over it, was lighted by spurts of flame. The noise of guns and of bombing was thunderous and almost monotonous. A bomber came over them twice, and sprayed the sea. Showers of vicious machine-gun bullets spattered the water like rain. The plane flew off to attack a larger target. Harben look at Sister Mary Dominic, raised his eyebrows and received her answering smile.

  “I’m going in now,” he said. They could see the beaches; the sand-dunes uneven and greyish; the black forms of men, and the hulls of the warships standing off from the harbour.