“I discovered how to produce synthetically the old Tyrrhian purple. In Roman days the dye was got from shell-fish — I suppose a sort of mussel. They called it ‘Murex.’ But the secret was lost, absolutely lost for two thousand years, until I got it a second time — oh, after hundreds of experiments. Look out!” He shouted as a breaking wave slapped the windward quarter of the ship and hopped over on to the deck with a splash, whipping both their faces with its spray. Mona laughed and wiped the water from cheeks wearing roses nowadays which they had never known before.
“It’s all right. I like it,” she said, and Mark Thewliss resumed:
“I persuaded Mardyke that I had at last got something which even the Germans, with their freedom from restriction and their better organisation, hadn’t got. And that was a tough proposition, I can tell you. For he’s a timorous soul, a great respecter of Governments — damn them! — and never for adventuring. A fine figure he’ld have cut in Elizabeth’s time, wouldn’t he?” and he spoke with a curious violence, as though he envisaged in the hesitating William Mardyke his own antagonist and obstacle. “Well, anyway, he was persuaded and put my fine new dye upon the market. There it was, the only genuine, A Imperial purple. We started off with the big drum beating. Even William rubbed his hands together and smiled graciously at his chemist. Fine! Yes, but complaints began to come in. Made in pretty frank language too. ‘I don’t like receiving rebukes of this kind,’ William said to me, pulling a long upper lip. No, and I didn’t like reading them either. But they were justified.”
“They were?” cried Mona, as much amazed that Mark Thewliss should confess to a failure as that he should have failed at all.
“Yes. Guess what had happened?”
“I can’t.”
“My Imperial purple wouldn’t stand the electric light, and of course the electric light has come to stay. By daylight — gorgeous, the exact Phoenician shade. But switch on’ the light and it became a flaring, vivid scarlet. It wouldn’t do, and I couldn’t devise any way of altering it. William Mardyke made the only joke of his life over it, though he didn’t mean to make any joke at all. He was furious in his timid way. He had lost some money and a certain amount of prestige amongst his clients. He said ‘People won’t submit to looking a Roman Emperor one moment and a Scarlet Woman the next. They find the transformation abrupt and offensive,’” and Mark Thewliss laughed. “Not so bad for William Mardyke, eh?”
He was gaiety itself as he recalled the history of his expensive error. Mona stared at him.
“And you don’t mind?” she cried incredulously.
But if Mark’s point of view was dark to her, hers was no less dark to him.
“The mistake?” he returned with a shrug of his shoulders. “Mistakes and failures are in the day’s work unless you’re a born genius with a fairy godmother, which I am not. Failures are the condition of success — that is, of any success worth having. You only reach the one through the experience you gain in committing the others. That’s my belief.”
Yes, that was his belief; and the cost and the loss of prestige to Mardyke and Campion did not trouble him one whit. Set as he was upon his own personal advancement and ultimate triumph, he could even drag a value out of this rebuff. For it cost him nothing It only damaged the firm he served. Mona Lightfoot compared him for a moment to some glittering — perhaps soulless — stone which showed you now one, now another facet, and all equally hard, equally impenetrable. She had a sudden terror of him. She had hopefully entrusted to him everything that she had — and he had taken it. Did he value it? Was it just another one of those mistakes which were helpful to him but might be sheer ruin to the people he used?
She drew back from him, but he did not notice her movement.
“Of course I mind in a way,” he continued, and a note of anxiety was audible in his voice. “I mind, you see, because that error might jeopardise my position with Mardyke — and just at this moment I want him.”
He suddenly reached out his hand, caught her arm and held it tight.
“I want him terribly, Mona.”
His voice, his grasp were suddenly a prayer for her sympathy, for the solace of her companionship during the time of suspense and expectation. And as she had yielded to it in the saloon of the Frascati restaurant, so she weakened to it out here in the Atlantic. He was diamond-hard to the rest, for her he had supplications. Could there be flattery more insidious? Her heart leapt and the blood rushed into her face. He clasped her closer to him.
“Yes, I need him terribly,” he repeated nervously. It seemed that he was sure of her. He turned and, shaking off his anxieties, cried gaily:
“Good-bye to the Bishop!”
The lighthouse was a long way out of sight, for by now the Sea Flower was reaching up the Sound between Tresco and St. Mary’s.
VI. THE SHUTTER CLOSES
THE MONTH HAD still six days to run when the Sea Flower on her eastward passage sailed past the red cliffs of Bigbury Bay.
“Salcombe!” said Mark Thewliss with a little catch in his breath. For there letters were to be received.
They crossed the bar on the flood, guided by the white splash of paint on the rock under the Head and the beacon on the hill behind the Moult.
“That’s all right now,” said Mark as Mona steered the ship past the sub-tropical garden on the point; and though the Sea Flower had fathoms of water to spare at this moment, he spoke in a tone which Drake might have used when at last, after his three years’ voyage, he got the Golden Hind safely moored by Deptford Quay.
It was growing dark on a Saturday evening, and the lights were already blazing in the Marine Hotel and the houses on the water-front before they rounded the point at the head of the channel and anchored in the haven for small boats on the broad water below Kingsbridge.
“The punt’s leaking and the post office will be open to-morrow morning for an hour,” said Thewliss. “There’s a boat-builder I know here who might perhaps forget that to-morrow is Sunday. So I’ll row round early and collect our letters.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Mona.
Thewliss put her ashore at the narrow steps and rowed on to his boat-builder in the angle at the top of the town. He met her an hour afterwards outside the post office and gave her the oddest glance. She answered it directly.
“I suppose that I had not the right to go with this lie upon my finger,” she said, and it was the first and last time that either of them had alluded to her wedding-ring. “But — but — I wanted to go.”
She would probably have been herself at some pains to describe exactly the motives which had taken her, on this last Sunday of their holiday, to the early service at the church. It was impious and she recognised its impiety, but her overcharged and anxious heart compelled her. At the back of her mind was the prayer that whatever news the expected letter might bring to Mark Thewliss, it might not mean for her what she had come to call “the end of everything.”
But besides the prayer she had been driven on by the acquiescence which was the very strength of her, the clear recognition of the things possible and the things impossible; and perhaps above all by the craving to get rid for a while of all the passionate hopes and aching fears which for so long had made their secret home with her, to kneel quietly and to receive. But Mark Thewliss had at his command an invaluable tact when matters awkward for his comfort were concerned. He was content with the one odd and puzzled glance — he would have avoided that if he had given thought to it — and handed her a couple of letters.
“For you.”
One of the letters was written by Mary Tipper. It was full of heart and romantics and vulgarities.
“I forward a letter from Liverpool” — Mona had given Mary Tipper’s address at her lodging in Liverpool— “written by a gentleman, too, I do declare, unless my knowledge of handwriting misleads me. My dear girl, I am dying to hear from you. Is Poker-back on his knees to you? If so, keep him there. Marrow-bones for men! That’s my motto.” There was more
to the same effect.
The second letter was from Mr. Perriton, her employer, very woebegone and lachrymose and altogether composed in too supine a spirit to provoke any feeling except disdain. Mr. Perriton complained that he had received not a line from her, that he didn’t even know her address at Bexhill. For himself, he couldn’t settle to anything — he was very lonely — he had been to New Brighton in vain — work was accumulating in the office prospects were opening up — only he didn’t seem to have the heart to cope with them. Mona read the letters as she walked up the long street, and crushed them into the side pocket of her coat.
“And you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He showed her an unbroken envelope.
“Let us have breakfast first at the hotel. I’ll read it on board the Sea Flower. Heaven knows what it says...I want privacy when I read it — just you and me.”
He, too, crammed his letter into the side pocket of his coat, but without any of Mona’s indifference.
“And the punt?” she asked.
“It will be ready by midday. Meanwhile they have lent me one.”
An hour later in the cabin of the cutter he was still twisting the unopened letter over and over between his fingers.
“Let me tell you about it, Mona.”
“Yes,” she answered eagerly, and she sat at the cabin table opposite to him, her eyes fixed upon his face, her chin propped in the crutch of her joined hands. He wanted, then, to beat out with her the problem of his life and plans. How much of good augury for her hung upon his want? “Yes! Oh, yes.”
“I shall get the whole sequence clear in my own mind, shan’t I, if I go through it step by step aloud,” he explained, and he did not notice the light fade from her face. She was put in her place. She was to be the blackboard on which he chalked his sum to make sure that it was correct; and blackboards don’t discuss.
“We start with the plain fact that we have not yet by synthetic production competed successfully with the vegetable production of indigo. The plant is grown in Java and Bengal. Each leaf contains on an average 0.5 of colouring matter, and there is a great industry in Yorkshire living on the extraction of the dye. The plant is put into vats and fermented. A good deal of marsh gas and hydrogen are thrown off, and the liquid is run into other vats where the air acts as the oxidising agent and precipitates it. One of the drawbacks of natural production is that the plant contains so many other substances besides what we call indigotin that you can’t depend upon getting one unvarying shade even from one vat. Of course the shade produced by synthetic indigo is always the same. It can only be carelessness if there’s any variation. There are no other substances in the dye than what are known and wanted. Of course, too, synthetic indigo is cheaper. So that in two respects, economy and invariability of shade, we have the advantage over the Yorkshiremen. Do you follow?”
“Yes,” said Mona.
“But what we haven’t synthetically got and they with their vat dyes naturally have is that delicate violet bloom, such as you see on fruit and on mountains too, which makes, say, velvet the most lovely of all the fabrics. The firm which can put a synthetic dye upon the market answering to that condition is going to sweep the field. Now look!”
He turned round on the settee and took from a dispatch-case a flat parcel. He opened it, and from an inner wrapping of tissue-paper he spread out upon the table beneath Mona Lightfoot’s eyes two squares of black silk-velvet, each measuring a foot square.
“Now — you are the purchaser. Which do you choose?”
Mona Lightfoot took them to the door of the cabin and compared them, holding them close to examine their texture and then at arm’s length to judge their effect. Both pieces were delightful to the touch and charming to the eye; and both had the bloom of which Thewliss spoke, a tint of dark blue, softly shimmering, that came and went as the velvet was turned, evanescent, delicately sensuous, if such a term can be applied to a fabric. It was difficult for Mona to choose between them. But it seemed to her in the end that there was a depth, an effect of luxury and perfection in one which the other lacked.
“This is lovely,” she said, holding out the piece which she had selected.
Mark Thewliss blew her a kiss.
“Mine!” he said triumphantly.
He took the piece in his hands, and his long slim fingers caressed it ever so daintily. Mona could never quite reconcile the slenderness of his fingers and his lightness of touch with the wiry strength of his lean body; just as she could never fit his almost feminine appreciation of delicate colours and exquisite fabrics into a harmony with the granite in his character and his practical earthbound ambitions.
“Yes, this is my doing,” he continued, and was silent for a moment. Then:
“Isn’t it curious? They say romance is dead. But here are you and I in a little cabin of a little cutter in Salcombe estuary with two little square pieces of black velvet between us, and one of them means the end of an industry in Yorkshire and of plantations in the Far East, and makes a great avenue out of this cabin to all that a man could desire.”
“Yes,” Mona replied. “Mardyke and Campion’s will jump at it.”
“They’ll jump at my price for it, too,” Mark Thewliss returned grimly, “but in quite another way.”
He folded up the pieces of velvet and put them back into the case.
“You see, Mona, it’s like this. This is my discovery, my secret. I have tested it in every way. Electric light can’t play one trick on it. It’s sure. I look at myself in the glass in the morning, and I say ‘Your name’s Brainy Boy.’”
Mona laughed, though she had little heart for laughter at that moment.
“You say that to yourself, do you?”
“Yes, and I argue a little, too. I ask why should Mardyke and Campion get all the cash and the glory, while poor Pillicoddy Thewliss gets at the most a beggarly rise of his salary. No, missy. So I go for the big figures.” He nodded his head with confidence and then gasped a little at his own audacity.
“What did you do?”
“I wrote a letter saying what I had succeeded in doing and enclosing a sample like that which I showed you; and I stated that if Mardyke and Campion’s wished to retain my services and have the benefit of my discovery, they must pay me a salary — well, I get eight hundred a year now — a salary of — what do you think?”
“I can’t guess.”
“Ten thousand a year.”
“Oh!”
Mona Lightfoot sat back in her chair and stared at Thewliss. She thought of William Mardyke and his timidities.
“He’ll never do that. What did you call him?”
“A funkstick. Yes, I know. But look at it this way. He won’t pay me more than one year’s salary The secret will be known in a year. Very likely a patent will have to be taken out. I can’t afford to do that. He’ll have to do it, and he’ll know the process. He won’t want me any more. He’ll just give me the sack. Right! But I shall have ten thousand pounds in my pocket, and with ten thousand pounds I can set up a laboratory of my own.”
“And if he doesn’t agree?” asked Mona.
“Yes. If he doesn’t agree! There it is!” and Thewliss returned to his unopened letter. “There’s the risk. I’ve got that little mistake about the Tyrrhian purple against me. I’m out of a job with a bad mark against my name. Yes, it’s a risk,” and then his face flushed and with a sudden violence he beat his tremors down. “But I’ve thought it out.’ No man coming from nothing without a penny to back him has ever reached the great position, the high power, without taking such risks, not once but twenty times, as I am prepared to do. Let’s see what Mr. Stay-as-we-are has got to say.”
He tore open the envelope and read the letter. All the writing was upon one page, but it seemed to Mona that Mark took an eternity to read it. He laid it down in the end, folded it with an almost finical precision and put it back into the torn envelope. His face had grown pale beneath its tan, but Mona could draw no inference from that
pallor. She was indeed too deeply wounded to give much thought to anything.
“If he had wanted me to share his joys and his disappointments, he would have shown me that letter. He would have tossed it across the table the moment he had read it, eagerly, and watched my face whilst in turn I read,” she argued. He looked on her as an Oriental might. She was the unconsidered solace.
“You ask me no questions,” he said at length, a little fretfully. He wanted the flattery of her questions.
“None.”
“Mardyke offers me a partnership.”
For a moment there was complete silence in the cabin. A rowing boat occupied by some children went splashing past the cutter amidst cries and young laughter.
“I never thought of that solution,” Mark Thewliss resumed, speaking aloud, but to himself rather than to her. “Yet I might have thought of it. Yes. You remember Gregory, the head clerk? He was prepared for it. When I passed through the office on my way out the day I met you, he climbed down from his high stool and hurried across the room to open the door for me. Pretty significant that, from old Gregory. He had theories, hadn’t he? Some men are born servants and others born masters. He managed to possess a queer sort of dignity from recognising that he was a born servant. When he hurried across the room to open the door for me, it wasn’t mere servility. No! He understood that I belonged to the others...” He looked up to find that the cabin held no occupant but himself.
Mona had slipped out, leaving him absorbed in his triumph. She stood now upon the deck with her hand about a stay, striving to rejoice too. He had staked high and won. She was glad — yes, she was determined to be glad. She herself had staked higher still and lost. Well, she had done it with her eyes open. She must not show any sorrow that she had lost, lest she should appear to reproach or to appeal. Luckily there was little time left during which she must keep a guard on her every word, her every look. For the sorrow was there welling up in her heart like blood in a wound.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 591