The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  That was one. Like Virginia Archibald when she burned her hair, should she leave the other side long for a week?

  She held out the other braid and set the scissors to it, as the door opened behind her and Elsie appeared in the glass.

  Afraid that she might try to stop her—but it would be no use anyway, since one braid was gone—Kay sawed at the braid from an angle and managed to cut it through. “There,” she said. She dropped the two braids into the wastebasket and turned to find her dress and stockings.

  Elsie stared at her, struck dumb.

  Kay slipped her white lawn dress over her head—how light and airy her head felt!—and shook out her hair again. She looked in the mirror. Well, it was not elegant, but she had her manicure scissors in her cabin. She would get Aren to straighten it out for her. Perhaps a little fringe would be nice. She gave Elsie a friendly smile, and left.

  All the way down the corridor she was smiling, she could not stop for joy. Now she could be herself. Not like them, but like herself. The air floated around her neck!

  She had no regrets. Her short hair felt lovely in the back, free and cool. It made a nice shape to change the roundness of her face; and, released from its braid, the hair began to curl, as it had not since she was a child.

  When she met him at the lifeboat in the evening, Aren liked it too. He fluffed it up at the nape of her neck and laughed at her pleasure.

  She realized that she was vain and foolish, but she did not even mind. She was better, lighter, now. “I am trying to be myself as well as I can,” she told him.

  “That’s a full-time job,” Aren said.

  Abruptly, the weather soured. The sea rose up on its tail and raged like a pig in a tantrum, drawing an unbearable squealing of metal and rope even from the sturdy Constellation. The first wild night, Elsie and Julia still slept on deck to avoid the close heat of their cabin, but during the night the wind tore the blankets from their cots, and at the breakfast table Elsie made a great tale of how they had waked up clutching, the blankets slipping and slithering across the decks like great water snakes.

  Kay did not know why the stewards had not bustled to gather them in; perhaps they had not believed the girls meant to stay out all night. But it was exciting, to be out in real weather. She heard Seaton sending her back inside from a storm in the forties below Australia, his cracked voice crying from his lifeboat, Lubber!

  Safe in the coffee room, Elsie read from the draft of her article: “We rescued them, and later woke again as our cots raced each other into the scuppers, and our poor cold feet stuck out over the rail and caught an icy blast of wind and rain. We rolled and rolled, we pitched and tossed. One kept saying to oneself”—and here she sang—“‘When the ship goes wop with a wiggle between, When the steward falls into the soup tureen.’”

  Kay laughed. This storm was like that song. It was all comedy, slapstick: the wild whirl of the propeller leaping high out of the water, and the occasional crash of dishes sliding from the pantry shelves, always followed by a dismal moan from some responsible steward or other. It went on and on. She didn’t mind the storm at all.

  Even with the comic relief that Elsie provided (not from her writing, but from the infectious and understanding hilarity that welled up like a spring in her), Kay felt dislodged, disjointed. Perhaps it was only the remnant of the storm, the wild variations of pressure. Or maybe it was because the aftermath of the storm on an aging vessel meant that Aren was stuck below decks constantly, fighting breakdowns with the engineers, and Kay was lonely.

  She used to be good at being by herself. She’d lost the long view she had in childhood, sitting in the attic window or at the lip of the long coulee; she’d lost the solitude-in-company of life on the Morning Light and the companionable aloneness of being a child with Aren, the protective freedom of the enclosing ramparts of school books that opened into another, wider world. In Nova Scotia, in Yarmouth, everything was close, too close to breathe.

  She had not talked to Aren in three days. This had to be remedied.

  She brushed her cropped hair with both hands and went down into the hold, where she spent a frustrating hour winding through metal corridors and tapping on doors with gradually lessening strength of purpose, being directed and redirected through to successively lower decks, until finally one dark-greased oval door opened a crack to emit a great bellow of heat, and Aren’s face looked out, and hissed at her to go away, that he was fine, he would find her later.

  Of course he was. He was not in hell or Gogol’s lower depths but only helping a steamship run, after all, so she went up to her cabin and washed her hands and face and lay down on her bunk to have a short weep over her own useless stupidity.

  Then she found that she had got her period, and some of the interior turmoil and self-recrimination was explained. She was still a woman, subject to her body, even if her hair was short.

  One evening at sunset, when the wind had blown forever and there was no warm corner left to hide in, land appeared on the starboard bow, tumbled white blocks on the horizon. The mountains of New Zealand. Elsie waxed rhapsodic, addressing the “snow-capped mountains rising out of the sea, far, far off, but coming nearer.” And then scribbled that down too.

  The sun came up next morning, as suns have done for eons, making a spectacle of itself and of the sea. Kay pulled herself out of her bunk and dressed in a flash, and went up to see what all this shining was about.

  “It’s like the hymn—Rise, crowned with light,” Elsie sang, while Julia stood silent, transfixed, at the railing.

  They were going into Lyttelton Harbour, between cliffs, the sea and cliffs equally opulent, the sea plated in pearly gold from the early sun, the hills veiled with yellow gorse.

  Elsie sang on: “Exalt thy towering head and lift thine eyes! See heaven its sparkling portals wide display, and break upon thee in a flood of day.”

  Julia joined her, taking the tenor line. “See a long race thy spacious courts adorn: see future sons, and daughters yet unborn, in crowding ranks on every side arise, demanding life, impatient for the skies.”

  “I don’t suppose you would know that one,” Elsie said kindly to Kay. “It’s Lutheran—American, like me and Julia.”

  Unable to resist, Kay lifted her own chin and sang, “See barbarous nations at thy gates attend, walk in thy light and in thy temple bend.” It had been the anthem last Easter, when Virginia Archibald had for a few weeks persuaded her to join the choir. That had not been a success; Kay’s voice had volume but not beauty, and she could not bear to sing in company. But when Miss Coots the organist fell ill on Maundy Thursday, Kay took her place and saved the day, in a minor way.

  “Derived from an eclogue of Pope’s,” Julia said, confident in her American education.

  “Derived from Virgil,” Kay corrected her, and then wished she had not. But she pushed doggedly on, explaining, because it was quite funny really: “An eclogue of Virgil’s celebrating the expected birth of a longed-for child who was to bring good fortune—but the baby Virgil expected was the child of Marc Antony and Octavia.”

  The girls looked at her blankly.

  Oh, Mr. Brimner, Mr. Brimner, you have not fitted me for ordinary chat. This interesting footnote to history made Julia and Elsie stop talking to Kay, and she deserved it. Nobody needs to know everything you know, she told herself.

  She stood alone, watching New Zealand come into view. Unfolding hills rolling down, down, nudging the sea with their knees. Like the softer parts of Nova Scotia, along the south shore, but with even less barrier between land and sea.

  Behind her, Elsie’s pleasant trilling voice took up the thread again and pointed out to Julia, as she wrote her notes, how the sunrise was lighting the tops of the hills with crimson, leaving the hidden parts in darkness “like valleys of mystery or death—look, the glow, creeping down, on and on, until the world is shining!”

  She was such a flowery, overflowing person. At first Kay had disliked all that orotundity, but she had come to e
njoy it, and would have liked to tell Elsie so. But it was impossible to tell people what one admired in them; or inadvisable, in case one’s enthusiasm put them off.

  The inner harbour approached, and then they were in its shade, the bare black outlines of the hills (“crowned,” Elsie said, “with red and gold”), and then the sun came up over the tallest hill and everything was both glowing and ordinary.

  Kay went below to find some breakfast.

  6

  Wellington

  A day later, after refuelling at Lyttelton, they sailed into Wellington, on the North Island, the end of their voyage on the Constellation. Mr. Cliffe the screenwriter came up on deck that morning looking radiantly happy. Elsie asked him what had happened to make this change and he said, “Lalla Rookh!”

  “Of course!” cried Elsie, and Julia said, “For us, that name will belong to you forever.”

  Then it was Kay’s turn not to know things, but Elsie kindly told her, aside, that Lalla Rookh was a terrible junky Oriental-romance poem, very old and stale, that she was better off not knowing. Kay felt forgiven.

  The bustle of disembarking took them all unprepared, even though they’d seen the land approaching for a day. The girls rushed down to finish packing, and Kay went after them more slowly, having less to pack. The air was sweet and clean here, and it would be good to get off this boat.

  At the poste restante in Wellington, as well as the bank draft Francis had promised, there were letters from Nova Scotia, one for Kay and another for Aren. Thea’s blue-spiked handwriting gave Kay a deep sway of vertigo, from missing her sister, however much she dreaded opening the letter.

  Dear Kay, although it pains me to call you “dear” at this moment, for I am very gravely disappointed

  There she had crossed out disappointed and written Angry, with a capital A.

  Angry with you. With Francis too, believe me, but I will not speak of that.

  And with Aren, for agreeing to this very foolish plan, and for leaving his post in Halifax. It took considerable arranging for Francis to find him that berth and it reflects badly on him when Aren drops everything to run to the other end of the earth on a wild goose chase.

  It is all so useless! you don’t know what pain you may be letting him in for, or how sad you will cause him to be, perhaps for the rest of his life. I do not know why you can never be persuaded to leave well alone but always must go prying into things and trying to discover the roots of things.

  But that is not at all what I want to tell you.

  Since you have done this ill-judged thing, you are to keep a close guard over Aren and never leave him, nor abandon him to the good graces of some strangers.

  Kay laughed at the irony of that, and again at Thea’s furious, oblivious underlining, which had scratched right through the paper.

  If I could come haring after you, I would, but I cannot leave Francis nor Roddy—and then there is Aunt Lydia, who needs sameness and quiet and good nursing.

  She won’t get that from Lena Hubbard, Kay thought. But she was glad (wasn’t she?) that she had not told Thea about Lena manhandling the poor old body.

  You will remember that I have been writing to Dorothy Fruelock all this time—she is back in the village of Pangai, widowed now; her daughters married one after another, and only Pansy is left to keep her mother company.

  I did not mention it before, and have only mentioned it to you now, but before Rev. Fruelock passed on, they spent some intervening years in the Diocese of Papua, serving on Palau and the Sonsorol islands, one of which you will remember is Pulo Anna. She has news of Aren’s people. I have written to ask her to talk to you if you think it wise to see her.

  And I do beg you to consider well whether or not it is wise. Aren has a loving family and home in us, and for good or ill we are the only family he truly remembers. We have seen him through sickness and health, and have loved him all this time.

  Well, Kay would not argue with Thea about any of that. Good intent—was it enough? Kay did not think so any longer. What news could this be, that Mrs. Fruelock had?

  Thea expostulated and condemned and lectured and prayed—even wept, it looked like from the blots on page three—and finally arrived at acceptance of the journey, exhorting Kay to make certain that Aren had suitable clothing and was well supplied with every ointment and remedy for malaria, coughs, fevers, bruising, et cetera. Aren had been given a similar list to supply to Kay, including making sure that she ate her greens and roughage, “for otherwise her system simply ceases to function,” and recommending Jervin’s cod liver oil for such an eventuality.

  Kay wrote her sister a careful reply, promising to take every care of Aren and to make certain he knew that they were his real family—which she knew to be both wrong and true. She wrote down all the things she had been thinking as they sailed, until it seemed to her that she could write nothing more. She signed the letter affectionately, knowing it would be many weeks before Thea could read her reasoning, and hoped, in a postscript, that my dearest sister will forgive me, if I cannot agree with your thinking. And then added another, p.p.s. And that you will also forgive me if you cannot agree with mine.

  Aren came in to find her in the hotel’s writing room, and handed her a sealed letter to enclose in her packet. “I have promised to keep you regular,” he said. He caught the ink-eradicator bottle she threw at him, and went off whistling.

  She did not know whether or not to tell him what Thea had said about Mrs. Fruelock. She would think about that.

  They had a week to wait in Wellington for the next steamer, the Tofua, which would take them to Nuku’alofa, then up to Ha‘apai to Pangai, to meet Mr. Brimner. If he had got Kay’s cable and was still alive, which she told herself was not sensible to think about. Doing them one last favour, Captain Hilton had cabled ahead to reserve a cabin on the Tofua for Kay; the returned fare for Aren’s passage from Halifax paid for his. He consented to a cabin, but he handed Kay fifty dollars, his pay for working on the Constellation, and would not take it back. With the bank draft Francis had sent and the money she had left, that would let them find some way onward, Kay felt sure. Although she could not yet imagine what way.

  Aren had come out of the ship’s refrigerator rooms in a deeply filthy condition. The first order of business was to get him thoroughly cleaned. The little town of Wellington had proper steam baths; Kay looked him over the first time, and sent him through again.

  As they were walking up Cuba Street after Aren’s second time through the baths, they met Elsie and Julia.

  Kay saw how surprised they were to find her with a young man, and for a flashing instant also saw, in the angled window of a shop—as if outside her body, as if through Elsie’s eyes—herself and Aren standing together on the grey street, the same height, with the same guarded expression. A compact, nicely made young man with a cap of clean black hair and a calm face, standing with a girl he knew and trusted. Her short, free hair and the quietude she had learned from him made her look like him, like someone who could be trusted.

  Strengthened by that, she grinned at the girls, saying, “This is my brother, Aren—Aren, Julia and Elsie sat at my table on the Constellation. Aren worked his passage over in the engine room,” she added, daring those girls to say something wrong.

  “Well, Aren!” said Elsie. “Pleased to meet you!”

  “Captain Bathurst mentioned your brother on the very first day,” Julia said, smiling. “But I instantly forgot—how nice to meet you finally,” she said. She put out her hand.

  All right, they had done pretty well. We can still be friends, Kay thought.

  “Do you plan to stay in New Zealand for some time?” Aren asked, after the hand shaking had been accomplished.

  Elsie made a face, and Julia said firmly, “Yes, we do.”

  “Because Julia wants a rest from seafaring,” Elsie said, “and I have to file some copy with my paper or I’ll lose the whole reason for coming.”

  “And also the payment,” Julia reminded her
.

  “So we’re here for a month, but then—on to Samoa!”

  “We have never been to Samoa,” Aren said. “I envy you.”

  “We’re going to Tonga on the Tofua, a week from tomorrow,” Kay said.

  “Oh, Tonga! And Fiji too? Our ship—what is it, Julia? the Matua, I think?—stops at both islands, but we won’t stay on. We’re heading for Stevenson’s grave, you know.”

  Kay did know, having been told early in the voyage what the end point was, but Aren had never heard. “Why Stevenson?” he asked Elsie.

  “Oh—everything! His life, his vision, Treasure Island!”

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for me,” Julia said.

  “I learned to read from Treasure Island,” Aren said.

  Julia said, “It is a very good primer.” She took Kay’s arm and they all set off to walk together along the broad pounded-dirt sidewalk. “Are you staying at the Royal Oak?” That was the hotel where the Constellation’s cart had deposited passengers after disembarking.

  “We must move today,” Kay said. “It is above our budget.”

  Elsie clapped her hands and said, “Come with us, then! We’re moving up into the hills this afternoon, to a small inn called the Blue Moon, recommended by a woman at my paper. It’s a quarter the price and all-found, and it looks sweetly pretty, as my aunts would say.”

  The landlady looked doubtful about a coloured guest at first, so that Kay wished to smack her face, but with Julia and Elsie’s introduction (and perhaps at a higher rate—Kay could not tell and decided not to ask) they were able to get lodging at the Blue Moon. Kay and Aren had two little rooms side by side, each almost filled by platform cots with mosquito netting, like beds in Bali. As soon as he’d dropped his sea-chest in a corner, Aren took himself off into the garden out the glass door that showed a path into the hills, and Kay let him go.