“After she died,” went on the Doctor, “William and I made up our minds to come back to the Island. I’d never been happy away from it, mind you, but my wife, poor soul, had no love for the sea. But I have. If you’re Island born, you’re not happy out of sight and sound of it. You’ll pine for the mewing of the gulls all your days, my dear, and eat your heart out among the bricks and mortar.”
“Was the parrot your wife’s too?” asked Marguerite.
“That parrot Lydia’s? Bless my soul, no! She’d never have that parrot in the same room with her, his language being what it is. He lived with me in my surgery. That parrot has seen life. One of my patients, a seafaring man, gave it me in lieu of payment. He’s silent now, depressed by the voyage, poor fellow, but once get him going with the nautical oaths he picked up from his first master, and the medical terms he’s picked up from me, and he’s a treat. . . . William, give Old Nick a drop of whiskey to get him going.”
“No, sir,” said William firmly. “Old Nick’s remarks are not suitable for young ladies.”
Marianne looked at him with approval. It had not taken her long to realize that William was much more of a gentleman than his father. He was untidy, he was lazy, and she was quite sure that Mamma would not approve of much of his behavior and conversation, but his careless elegance and his intuitive knowledge of what was suitable could have come only from good breeding. There must be something of his mother in him. Yet what she loved best in him, his looks and his overflowing kindliness, had come from his father. Prim though she was, she did not mind that Dr. Ozanne was without the manners of a gentleman, that his clothes smelled of whiskey, that he handed her slices of bread on the point of a knife. She would never forget the perfection of his welcome when she had first come into the room. She did not wonder that Lydia his wife had descended from the heights of her gentility to marry him. Only, if she had been Lydia she would not have kept him a prisoner in her country; however much she hated the sea, she would have gone with him gladly to his. That was the way she would behave when she had married William. She would say to him as Ruth to Naomi, “Your country shall be my country.” . . . And she would keep him from the whiskey bottle and keep his clothes tidy. . . . Sitting beside him on the narrow packing case, his body pressed against hers, she could feel the warmth of his young life in hers and she imagined, as do all children whose only experience of affection has been that of the parents whose devotion meets their own more than half way, that love is always mutual, and that what she felt for William he must feel for her. Secure in that conviction, she thrilled with an ecstasy even deeper than that she had known when she held Marguerite in her arms. She saw the firelight leaping on the walls, and rain lashing at the windowpanes, and heard the roar of the wind over the roof, and was at one with them in the joy of her love. In that moment she gave herself to William. She had found in one moment her quarry and her mate, and as huntress and woman she was satisfied, tasting the sweets of the end of the way, unaware in her inexperience of the rigors of the journey that she was undertaking with so light a heart.
But to William, the child, her three years’ seniority turned her almost into the semblance of a maiden aunt. It was upon Marguerite, the other child, giggling with delight as she sat on the footstool at his father’s feet and stuffed herself with bread and treacle, that his merry eyes were fixed in admiration. And her answering merriness met his half way. She dimpled at him, as she pursued with her pink tongue an errant drop of treacle that was rolling down her chin, and thought he was a nice boy.
An elegant figure in a grey bonnet and cloak, storm-buffeted, was vaguely seen by Dr. Ozanne to stop outside the bow window and look in, but the children were making so much noise that he did not hear the unanswered knock at the door, or the agitated footsteps in the passage, and was unaware of Sophie Le Patourel’s entry until she actually stood in the doorway. Then he stumbled to his feet, fumbling to brush the tobacco ash off his stained waistcoat, painfully aware of the disorder of his person and his room. For he recognized Sophie and remembered their walks upon the sea wall. He guessed that she would be one of the great ladies of the Island now. He had meant to claim acquaintance with her, in the hope that she would have kindliness in her heart for his motherless boy. But it was not like this that he had hoped to encounter Sophie again: travel-stained, hopelessly at a disadvantage. This was a sorry beginning for the new start in life for which he had hoped so much, for himself as well as the boy. His look of a mangy, sad old lion came over him, and for once he had nothing to say, only a comical look of mingled dismay and pleading to give her as he held out his hand.
She took it, though her face was white with her horror at the change in him, and at the disorder and vulgarity of the scene in which she found her daughters ensconced with every appearance of comfort and delight. But though she smiled, she could not for the moment speak. It was the parrot who spoke.
“My, what a fine craft!” shouted Old Nick, suddenly coming to from the comatose condition into which the journey had plunged him, and gazing at Sophie in admiration. “Come right in, my dear, and take a rhubarb pill.”
Everybody behaved well, even William on his packing case. With great presence of mind he buried his curly head in his right trouser leg in his efforts to choke his hoots of laughter.
Sophie was superb. For all the notice she took of Old Nick she might not have heard him; though the shock seemed to enable her to recover her power of speech. “Welcome home to the Island, Dr. Ozanne,” she said gently. “I am come in search of my naughty girls. I was a careless mother and they played truant, and I am afraid they have intruded on you. I hope you will forgive us.”
“No forgiveness required, ma’am,” boomed Dr. Ozanne, clinging to her hand as to a life line. By gad, here was a woman for you! Putting him at his ease. Taking the blame upon herself. A fine figure of a woman, too. She’d filled out grandly since her girlhood. No woman like the Island women. Hadn’t he said so? By gad, he had! “Your girls have given us a sweet homecoming. Had I known they were yours, ma’am—though surely I should have known, with all that charm and beauty before me, all that elegance—all that—split image of you, Sophie—charming girls, ma’am, charming—” Sophie helped him out by an interruption.
“Is that your boy?” she asked.
“Stand up, William!” commanded his father.
William stood up, crimson-cheeked, moisture streaming from his eyes, but proud in the knowledge that not a sound of mirth had escaped him. Sophie went to him and touched his unruly hair with a gentle finger. “You are like your father when I first knew him,” she said. She had intended, when she stood upon the threshold and looked in at the uproarious tea party, to see to it that for the girls’ sake there was no friendship between this house and her own, but the sorrow that she felt at the tragic change in Edmond, and William’s untidiness and motherlessness, caused a complete reversal of intention. Unaware of what she was doing she pulled William’s cravat straight.
“You must come to Le Paradis and play with my girls,” was the remark that to her own intense dismay she heard issuing from her lips.
And so on that stormy autumn evening Sophie Le Patourel took the lives of William and Marianne and Marguerite and knotted them together forever. There was a little silence after she had spoken, and looking up they saw that a watery sunset was illumining Green Dolphin Street with a flood of gold.
Chapter II
1
William woke up and wondered why he was awake, for except for a faint patch of grey in the direction of the window it was still night in his little room under the eaves, and it was his habit to sleep without fluttering an eyelid from the moment he fell into bed at night until that moment in broad daylight when his father opened his bedroom door and flung a book at his head. He lay and listened. Except for a drip of water from the eaves and the distant surge of the sea there was absolutely no sound. Even his father’s snores, that were always the rumbling
undercurrent of his dreams, were stilled in the room next door. The whole world was uncannily silent. That’s why I’ve woken up, thought William. When he had gone to sleep the wind had been blustering in the chimney, and shaking the old timbers of the house so that they creaked and groaned in protest, as it had been doing almost ever since they had landed on the Island nearly three weeks ago. The sudden peace was startling.
A cock crowed, a raucous sound like a cracked trumpet being blown by someone who was too excited to blow it properly, and the grey square of the uncurtained window became a little clearer. William, as excited as the cock, slid out of bed and put his boots on. By the absence of snores next door, and even more by the feel of the house, a secret, conspiratorial sort of feel, he knew that his father had been called out to a patient and he was alone in it. He liked being alone in the house. He and the house were friends.
Whistling a cheery tune, stark naked except for his boots, for he considered his nightshirt unnecessary and seldom bothered to put it on, William felt about the room for the clothes he had scattered broadcast the night before. He always put on his boots first of all because, as they were the last things he took off before he got into bed, they were always there handy. Socks he disdained. They were a nuisance, invariably in holes and never more than one of a pair to be found. And with peg-top trousers on, no one knew if you had socks on or if you hadn’t. His feet were as hard and tough as feet can be and never got blistered by the rubbing of the boots; he seldom washed them, so they did not suffer from the softening effects of hot water. As he rummaged for his clothes, he hastily wondered where his father had gone. Some poor woman had had a baby, perhaps, or a drunken sailor had fallen out of a window, or there’d been a glorious bloody fight in one of the waterside taverns and his father had been fetched to stitch up the cuts. Though they had been on the Island three weeks only, Dr. Ozanne already had quite a number of patients, though they were all poor people, not rich ones. How vexed Mamma would have been! It had always upset her so that Papa’s patients were generally poor people who could not always pay their bills, and not rich people who could have even if they didn’t. If a patient did not pay his bill, William hadn’t been able to see that it made any difference whether he was rich or poor. But Mamma had thought it made a lot of difference. She had cried sometimes when in London she had seen Papa’s chariot waiting outside some poor hovel, but smiled when she had seen it outside a house with a polished brass knocker and scrubbed white steps. But she hadn’t smiled very often. The fact was that Papa loved poor people who were very ill or dreadfully hurt, and they loved him, but he was not very fond of rich people who were not as ill as they thought they were and wasted his time telling him what they thought, and when he interrupted them to tell them that they thought wrong they weren’t very fond of him either, and didn’t call him in again. . . . And Mamma cried.
At least not now. She was dead. William, who had at last found his shirt, thrust his head up through it and looked at her portrait over his bed, faintly visible now in the growing light. She was very pretty with her golden ringlets, blue eyes, delicately pointed face, and sloping shoulders, and he remembered her kisses with affection and her lovely scented clothes with an appreciative sniff, but he couldn’t help feeling that life was a lot more comfortable now she was dead. She had cried such a lot, and scolded such a lot, and made Papa so unhappy. His loyalty had always been his father’s. Even as a small child he had known that scolding and crying were not the way to make Papa stop doing those things that Mamma did not like him doing. And if she hadn’t liked the sort of person he was, why had she married him? Perhaps she had thought that she could change the sort of person that Papa was. Can one ever change a person? Mamma had apparently thought one could, but William himself was doubtful.
And why had Papa married Mamma? Had he just been sorry for her because she was always so delicate and wanted him so badly? It was silly to marry for pity, William thought. It was a thing he would never do. No, never. He inflated his chest and put on his trousers and whistled “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?”
He never said these things to his father, only to himself, for he respected the feeling that had made his father hang his wife’s portrait over her son’s bed and keep her prie-dieu beside his own with his whiskey bottle on it. She had been their wife and mother and she had done her best for them both; she had been beautiful and now she was dead, and it would not be chivalrous even to hint to each other that they were more comfortable without her. Indeed it was scarcely chivalrous even to think it, and William thrust the thought away as he put on his brilliant green coat and waistcoat and whistled “Blow the Man Down.” Both William and his father were chivalrous to the very depth of their souls, their chivalry shot through with an amiable weakness that would make them easy game for the predatory until the end of their lives.
William poured an inch of ice-cold water into his basin, smeared his face and hands, rubbed the dirt off them with a towel, fished out a broken comb from beneath the bed and forced it through his tangled curls as far as it would go; he did not pursue the matter, however, for it hurt, and he never did things that hurt if he could possibly help it. Then he opened his window and thrust his tousled head out into the dawn.
Holy Moses, but this Island was a good place! The keen cold fresh air hit him like a blow in the face, stinging him into exultant life. The tumbled wet roofs of Green Dolphin Street gleamed like silver, and over them the emptied rain clouds had thinned to a sheen of silver grey shot through with gold, with here and there a sort of lake of unclouded sky the color of aquamarine. Far down to his left the night still lay over the sea, with one star bright like a lamp, and the boom and surge of the waves beyond the harbor bar came clearly to him now that the window was open. Up above him to his right his view was closed in by the roof of No. 3 Le Paradis, dark against a sky the color of a rose, and from the hidden garden floated a scent of jessamine. Over the top of the wall drooped a branch of the great magnolia tree, heavy with rain, every leaf turned to silver in the dawn, one great blossom dropping its waxen petals one by one upon the cobbles of the street below. William watched each petal as it drifted slowly down, light as air, untarnished, lovely, until with a soft thud the whole flower fell and the branch above, relieved of its weight, sprang upward in delight and the raindrops showered down from it in a mist of silver spray. A clock struck somewhere far down in the town, and then, quite suddenly as it seemed, the sun was up and the sea was a sheet of gold, and in the garden of No. 3 a bird was singing a mad, wild paean of praise because the storm was over and the night was done. William suddenly dropped his curly head on his arms. The light was so brilliant now that it was hurting his eyes, and there was a queer confused longing in him somewhere, because the loveliness of the world made him want to jump up and do something for somebody and there was nothing he could do. The bird could sing, but he could not do anything. Yet at the same time he was happy as never before. On this speck of an island, set in the midst of the thundering sea, held in the curve of the immensity of sky, washed by brightness, cleansed by the great winds, his father had been born. That mysterious delight that springs up when we stand where our fathers have stood was unsealed in William. It seemed to flood through every corner of his soul, just as the keen air was pushing through his clothes to every part of his body, making it feel cool and clean after the stuffiness of the night. He was glad he was alive. He was glad that the roots of his being were in this place and no other. He felt the passionate surge of life and creation that had brought him to this place and to this hour beating within him like an imprisoned bird trying to get out. Once again he wanted to do something, to save someone from wild beasts or drowning or something like that. But there weren’t any wild beasts and no one was drowning. There was not a soul within sight. . . . Yes, there was.
Something seemed to reach out and touch him, as though he had spoken and a voice had answered. He lifted his head from his arms and looked up. A dormer window hi
gh up in the roof of No. 3 Le Paradis had opened and a small figure in a white nightgown was leaning out as far as she could get, breathing in great breaths of the fresh air, her arms along the sill. Marguerite! No, damn, it wasn’t, it was only Marianne.
He had seen Marianne and Marguerite twice since the day of that first riotous tea party. He and his father had been to a Sunday family dinner at Le Paradis, and he had also drunk a dish of tea with the girls in their schoolroom and played spillikins with them afterwards. But neither of these meetings had been very satisfactory. At the Sunday dinner he and his father had been ill at ease in their shabby clothes at the shining mahogany table, careful of their language, careful not to spill the wine, racking their brains to remember the good manners and the conversational gambits that Mamma had taught them but which had fallen into disuse since her death, horribly aware that they were a couple of uncouth heathens who had not been to church that morning. Sophie had been sweet to them, but the girls had been fettered by the obligation of being seen but not heard while partaking of nourishment in the presence of their elders, and the dignity of Octavius in a mulberry waistcoat, his chin propped up upon a stock at least six inches high, had been utterly shattering to supersensitives like Edmond and William. They had wilted, and gone home early, and felt the worse for the dinner, and taken a glass of hot whiskey and water and a rhubarb pill respectively, and gone to bed in much depression of spirits.
Green Dolphin Street Page 4