“Yours faithfully …”
When he told his wife, she said with contempt, “They are a rich firm, they pay a dividend on their shares. It’s a mean act.”
He would not have this. He made excuses for the Line, times were bad, no, no, it was the right thing — “They’ll put it back later.” He could not let anyone say that the Line was behaving in a mean way. That would make it seem he was not valued, he was a man the Line was willing to treat badly. He was not that fine captain they had admired and trusted more than the others. . . .
Not long after — obviously he was living too long, longer than they expected he would live — his pension was cut again. Quite brutally this time. To a hundred pounds.
Had he ever been so humiliated? He felt stunned. All his fantasies left him at once and he shivered. He hid the letter and thought he was hiding his distress. But he had given it away to his wife by the haste with which he rushed from the house after reading it, forgetting his stick — to walk distractedly from cliff to pier and pier to bridge. How to tell her, tell anyone, what had happened? He saw only glances, like the bars of a cage. His mind stumbled back and forth, looking for a way out. Under his confusion and shame, an acute grief. To have endured at sea so many years, nearly sixty — forty-four years as master — and be put off with less than two pounds a week. All I am worth to them, he thought. And turned swiftly away. Think of something else. Hide it again quickly with excuses. . . . After days, he brought himself to tell his wife. She did not let him know she had guessed. She was sorry for him, and gentle. It really vexed her that he should be made so ashamed. “They’ve behaved abominably,” she said. But he could not bear pity. He turned clumsily from that, too.
“It will only be for a time. They’ll put it back. . . .”
Losing patience with him, she cried, “Do you think so? Not they! They’re like all rich shipping firms, too mean for words.”
“You don’t understand,” he defended himself. “I know they wouldn’t do it unless they were compelled.”
“I understand they’ve had enough of paying you a pension. They grudge it. And in fact they needn’t give you a penny, there’s no legal obligation.”
He felt less uneasy when she spoke in this voice. It vexed him but its harshness was familiar. “We s’ll manage,” he said, moving his hands.
“Yes, we shall manage,” she said coldly, “and it means going without everything. The little you have invested won’t take us far.”
And when have you gone without? he thought bitterly. The other captains’ wives pinched and saved where you spent all you wanted — on the house, on the children — dancing-classes — one to the university — and all the money from your mother poured out on that other one. . . . It was an old bitterness. He said nothing. At bottom he was afraid of her. He turned and went heavily up to his room. Sitting at his desk, he reckoned on the back of the letter, slowly, how much he dared spend of his poor savings. If he spent all, it would not fill the gap. She’ll give her mother things, he thought, of his eldest daughter. Little enough they give me, any of them.
*
The wise thing — now that he was alone — would be to sell this house. If the thought of selling it ever came to him he silenced it at once. His life, at eighty-two, was putting out new branches: it needed this space. He expected to live many many years. Did he expect ever to die? No one had heard him speak of death.
His daughters went away. Next morning he woke up and felt the silence of the empty house like a breath on his cheek. All the rooms in the house — all those he used to creep into when the family went out, and look quickly through drawers and cupboards, seeking what? — lay open to him. He was quite alone. He got up and dressed quickly, like a tramp (in trousers and a jacket held together by their stains of grease and soil). Padding downstairs, he raked the stove. The elderly woman came, and because he had decided to go to the shops after breakfast he splashed a little water on his face and changed his clothes.
He went from shop to shop, bargaining, and chaffing the assistants. The older ones humoured him, but the young girls turned their backs, scornful. He hurried home to dinner, pleased that he had saved tuppence. Leaving his tea set for him and covered by a cloth, the woman went away. He was alone again until the morning. He could go out, to the moors, the cliff, the pier. On the cliff the other old captains would greet him with reserve, but they would greet him. He could be unpleasant, he was perhaps mad as well as a liar. But he belonged with them to the remote past of small ships and slow endless voyages. Behind their eyes, they saw the same wharves, the world had for them and him the same simplicity, and the odour of foreign cities and distance. “Ha,” one of them would say, “Valparaiso—” and it was enough; each saw and felt it.
There were people in the little town, solitary old men, not sea-captains, who believed all he said. And perhaps they were right and the others unjust and wrong. What lies could be stranger than the truth of his life — beginning that snowy morning in 1868, and covering a world? Now gone.
The order of his days fixed, he was never moved to alter it. They were very full days. He had to find time in them for all the joys of the childhood he had skipped. His evenings were given up to these. The sorting of his stamps. The competitions … but about now he gave these up — it was not only that so many of them cost sixpence; it was that he never had a success, never. Even he could not delude himself any longer. . . . His notes on the weather. Dearer than them all, his scrap-books. During the first year he worked on them in the kitchen, as usual, spreading them, and his bowl of paste and the scissors, every evening on the large table. And he kept his bedroom on the top floor. Then, the second winter, he moved down to the first floor, into the better of his wife’s two bedrooms — she used to move from one to the other in her restless way, always expecting to surprise sleep. At the same time he took over her sitting-room and made room in it for a large dining-table where he spread his scraps, and had his meals set at one end. Now at last he was at ease in his house, as he had been in his ship. A happiness as new and delicate as a convalescence filled his days from waking to lying down to sleep. And new joys. He covered sheets of paper with designs for his garden. None of them could be carried out, but he saw them, when he was at work there, hovering above the disorder of unpruned roses and beds of wild woodruff, ready to settle, and felt a deep secret pride. What a garden it would be! Every day, too, he put bread out for the birds; he watched them, with eyes used to watching, and saw that they have all our needs and troubles. There was even a large old sparrow who was superior to the others and needed — naturally — a larger share of the bread.
One summer his eldest daughter stayed with him for a week. It was so short a time that she laid herself out to please him. She went out with him and he presented her to his friends — who knew very well who she was. But it was as if he said: Look — you thought no one cared about me but here is my daughter, the writer, you know; and she wanted to see me.
He had become terribly shabby. It was not because he was poor. In his wardrobe hung good clothes he had never worn. All his life, even when he was a young captain, he had put off wearing a new uniform — to wear it would spoil it before the great moment … the great moment. . . . His wife used to scold him into a degree of decency. Now he did as he pleased, and it pleased him to dress like a tramp.
*
The house, too, decayed. The sea salt in the air rotted the paint, and inside, the rooms began to look as though they were left open to the north-east gales. One day, the silk of a huge four-fold Chinese screen split across, and some of its padded figures against their backgrounds of rice-field, tea-house, mountain rivers, and sea-coast, lost their inside. The old captain’s clumsy attempts to mend it caused other rents. He trod soil and the paste from his scraps into the delicate old rugs. The house was too large for one woman to keep clean, but he did not notice that it was neglected and dirty. Then came the war: a bomb blew in several windows at the back of the house; he had them boarded up,
darkening the rooms.
For the rest he ignored the war — except when he wrote angrily to his daughter that “some fools think me too old to manage a ship ”. Every disaster of its first years was only a proof of the everlasting superiority of England and the Tory party. It vexed him intolerably when people talked of mistakes. Neither England nor the Tories had ever made a mistake, nor ever would.
When his eldest daughter came again, she was shocked by the desolation of the house. Less than five years since her mother died, and nothing of her lingered in the rooms she had loved as a second self. The old captain — he was eighty-seven — was destroying everywhere. Two panels of the ruined screen, torn from the others, leaned against the wall of his room. Among the disorder of a room shrouded in dust-sheets she found the remains of the Chinese cabinet made of many different woods, where her mother had kept pieces of fine lace. Somehow he had destroyed the lacquer, then broken it off its pedestal. The scent still clung to it — of the past, of voyages.
In some of the rooms the paper hung from the walls, and everywhere were cobwebs and dead leaves — it was autumn, they drifted in and lay about — the colour of his hands. He lived now almost entirely in the rooms which had been her mother’s, squatting there in disorder and dust.
He fell ill that winter — the third winter of the war. It was the first serious illness of his life. His housekeeper, a dutiful woman, looked after him and he recovered. He never spoke about his illness. He wanted to forget it and he put down to the cold and the winter roads his curious uncertainty when he went out. He waited for the spring to give back his strength.
Spring overlooked him. It had other things in war-time to do than trouble with an old captain. . . . Summer. His long practice in evasions found him every conceivable excuse — except his feeling of giddiness — for walking far. He talked of going to the moors, he never went. But then a miracle did happen. One day at the end of October he had a letter from the Line beginning: “Owing to the increase in the cost of living — (had they just noticed it?) — it has been decided to raise the allowance paid to you to £200 per annum. This will commence from the 1st November. . . .”
The joy, the relief he felt, had scarcely anything to do with the difference between two and four pounds a week. Suddenly he wished with an almost painful sharpness that he could hear his wife saying drily, “I see you had a letter from the Office? ”
Holding the letter, he stumbled upstairs, chuntering under his breath. “You see, they put it back. Part of it. I knew they would as soon as they had it. I told you.” He stood in the doorway of her room. What was beating in him that was not his heart? “You see, they can spare it now. . . .”
He wrote his eldest daughter, holding the news back until the end of the letter. To the Line.
“DEAR SIR,
“Your welcome letter to hand, re increase in Pension. I cannot find words to thank you for it, it’s like a ray of sunshine in a heavy Atlantic gale, my only regret is that I am not able to do anything to earn it, and every time a Convoy passes I have an intense longing to be at sea again and doing my share in it.
“I am still hoping that I shall have a chance for I have an old score to pay back to the Germans and it’s better to die fighting than rusting out.
“I am keeping fit and in good Health and ready for anything that comes along.
“I trust you are well.
“Now I will finish and thanking you again for your Generosity.”
*
He died less than a fortnight later. One evening, when he had laid out his scrap-books for the evening’s work, he decided first of all to rake the stove in the kitchen. But suddenly the room tilted forward as though in a heavy sea, he fell, burning his hand, then stumbled up and fell, again and again, until he saw it was no use, and lay still. He lay there the long November night. At moments he knew he was lying helpless in a place of pain; and at others it seemed quite natural to him that he should look down and see, cold in its white light, the snow covering the narrow street by the harbour and the footsteps in it of a young man of thirteen leaving his mother’s house to apprentice himself to Captain William Kirby.
In the morning the woman came, and his neighbour’s sons carried him upstairs. He lived, as they say, for five days. They told him to expect his eldest daughter: obediently he expected her. When she came he looked at her without interest. With the terrible insight he now had, he knew she did not care for him. A greater warmth came to him from the district nurse and his neighbours. He knew himself, too — at last — and, without glancing at them again, he laid down his rough defences against life. They had never been needed. It had been a mistake, and very gladly he found that his childhood was still waiting for him, in the same cool light, to begin. . . . Close to him he felt someone suffer. The nurse asked loudly and kindly, “Well, captain, how do you feel? ” Each time she asked it, he answered, “I’m all right.” It was his last signal, before the distance became too great. . . . He had nothing to do but live the lifetime of gentleness and stoicism he had intended. Each time one of the women bent over him she saw his silence make another effort to finish what it had to say about his happy life. No one ever ended a voyage more simply.
*
His eldest daughter had to arrange for his grave. “Of course you will wish the captain to be buried with his wife …? ” She explained calmly but with a secret confusion that that was not possible; room had been found for her mother in the old Hansyke grave, near her mother; it would never do to lay Captain Russell there. Looking at the clerk as she said all this, she thought: And if you knew how vexed she was when he came into her room for a moment … and yet — would she be vexed? Perhaps now … what can I know of their hearts?
“There must be a Russell grave somewhere,” she said smoothly.
The man turned back and back in his folios, guided by dear knows what thread stretched underground. At last he stopped, and with a little surprise showed her the entry made in 1822 — when Nicholas John Russell, mariner, had bought his lot, near the sea-ward boundary. He consulted another folio and said, “That’s lucky. There’s room for one.”
There were still things she had to do. She forced open the drawers in the upper bedroom. They were filled, she found, with the broken rubbish of his voyages, photographs, so many photographs, dried tropical leaves, shells, foreign coins. The photographs, when she was breaking them in pieces, tried to save themselves by becoming memories. They were not hers. Then books of his clear writing, the ink of the first already grey. These were filled with poems he had copied out of newspapers, noting under each not the name of the author but the paper — thus the Sydney Herald had the credit of writing Maud — and jokes, hundreds of jokes, and drawings, traced and neatly coloured, of women usually in corsets. She filled sacks with the torn pages. And in another room she found wooden sea-chests full of the tall folios — forty-four, as many folios as years — in which since his first voyage as master, in 1881, he had recorded every day the weather and his observations on ports, harbours, cargoes, currents — “Between Cape St. Roque and St. Lucia found equatorial current weak and from that bearing it was frequently hidden by the trees” — foreign cities, with strange personal asides which perhaps had been written for her mother’s eye. She was sure that her mother had ignored any chance put in her way to read these millions of words. Yes, millions, many millions. In hour after hour at sea, alone in his cabin, more alone in the rigour of his authority, he wrote on slowly. In port, he wrote down everything, the price of fruit, the names of streets — “They had one of their Revolutions so-called the month before we come and of course new names on the streets to celebrate ” — the history of the country, the foreign names of birds, perfumes, a mountain. His mind noticed with the joyful indiscrimination of a child, and a seafarer’s patience: it fprgot nothing.
They must be destroyed, she thought. She began by tearing the large stiff pages without reading them. But the clearness of his hand-writing was inescapable; from each book when she opene
d it some image stepped out, and she could not deny it its moment of life — the last. Each as it came was less and less like the tall shabby old man stumbling about his empty house.
There was the one, senior but not yet the oldest captain, whose ship was sunk by the Germans during the last war. He began writing at once on the German cruiser, in a small notebook squeezed in among the folios as that year in German prison camps was pressed between the others. The entries went on through the year, very brief: the food, his health — he was often ill from the bad food and the entry was simply, “In the Lazarette ”; but once when he was in hospital in Charlottenburg he wrote, “When will freedom come? ” It seemed to come in March 1918. He had been sent home with other prisoners of his age — he was sixty-three — and his daughter remembered his arrival and her mother’s indifference, and that no one asked him to describe his year, or the sinking. Nevertheless in the small book the entry ran: “Home, the weather clear and cold, light SW-W winds, smiling faces and a warm welcome.”
Did he, as he wrote the last words, try to believe them? Before the end of the war he was back at sea.
There was the collision in the North Sea, at night, in a thick fog, with a Swedish ship his own struck amidships. He took her crew on board “13 over the bows and 3 by lifeboat”, and shook hands with each man as he stepped on the deck, affably, as if it were a social occasion, while he noticed that one and all were carrying luggage, and reflected that there was something odd about the whole business. He retired to his cabin and under the eyes of the Swedish master covered pages with his suspicions. . . .” This after 30 years master without an accident, and to run down an old ship that look as if she was wilfully put athwart of a busy track for someone to hit. I cannot imagine a master of a steamer stopping her and letting her lie athwart of a track where he must have known that all steamers between Huntcliff and Flambro are steering on a course in a line with the shore whereas if he wished to remain stopped in a dense fog why he did not steam farther off the Land clear of shipping. . . . The ship being 36 years old was better lost than saved.”
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 23