Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  But when he was easy with his oar he looked at St. Pierre, and the sight of it under the early morning sun almost took his breath away. The tall houses rising above the wharfs and the long line of the harbor wall, up and up, one behind the other, climbing the steep hillside, seemed to have absorbed the colors of the morning into their very stone, so that St. Pierre looked like a city built of gold and mother-of-pearl. The windows flashed in the sun, and there was a flame of light burning in each ripple against the harbor wall. The masts and spars of ships were etched as delicately as the tracery of winter trees, and there was no smoke as yet to mar the unearthly clarity of the scene. Ramparts of golden cloud, built up behind and around the farthest climbing roofs of the town, were like a second city in the sky; one could hardly tell where the earthly one ended and the heavenly began. But both of them were reflected in the water of the harbor, and reality and reflection together made up a perfect circle, a habitable globe in miniature, the city of man completely encircled by the city of God, the flawless, shining thing of which God dreamed when He made the world.

  “Marianne!” whispered William, and caught the last of his crabs.

  “Yes,” said Marianne. “Stop a minute. Look. You’ll not see it like that again.”

  They stopped, rocking gently, and now that their oars were still in the rowlocks they could hear the thunder of the sea outside the harbor bar, and the mewing of the great gulls who were circling all about them.

  “It will never be the same again,” said Marianne at last, when the little, immature vessels that were their spirits had taken their fill and were brimming over because they could hold no more, and she spoke bitterly because of the immensity of her thirst that could not be slaked by that tiny draught. “We’ll long to see it again, so as to see it better, but we never shall. And we’ll try to remember it just as it was, and we shan’t even do that.”

  “We’ll remember something,” said William stoutly. “I will, anyway. And I won’t forget today, Marianne, though I live to be eighty.”

  “And I won’t either,” said Marianne.

  “Come on,” said William.

  Marianne roused herself and once more their oars dipped into the water, and the bright drops dripped from the blades, and Marianne glanced over her shoulder now and then and smiled a little, but William, bright-eyed and crimson-cheeked with excitement though he was, did not look.

  3

  “Now!” said Marianne softly. And they ceased rowing and William looked up.

  They were right under her stern, beneath the Red Ensign of the Merchant Service, and high above their heads there fluttered her house flag of emerald green. The water, a little agitated by the wild sea running high beyond the harbor, was slapping against her hull with that indescribable sound, not particularly beautiful, but cool, vigorous, full of camaraderie, that together with the crying of the gulls, not particularly beautiful either, haunts lovers of ships and the sea until the day they die. That hull was a deep green in color, barnacled, and the seas that had washed it had left upon it strange encrustations that were not of this sea. Their enthralled eyes followed the mighty sweep of it up to the taffrail with its shining brasswork, the poop, and then up and up to the dazzling intricacy of spars and towering masts. Slowly, oars resting on the water, they drifted the length of her until they were beneath her figurehead, and lo and behold it was a green dolphin, a boisterous, lighthearted dolphin with a frisking tail, a wide laughing mouth, and merry eyes like those of the dolphin on the signboard at the inn. Only this was an even grander dolphin. It was almost life-size, and so realistically carved that it seemed just about to roll merrily over and expose its flashing belly to the sun.

  “The top o’ the mornin’ to you, an’ what may you be doin’?” boomed out a great voice like a muffled foghorn.

  William and Marianne removed their fascinated eyes from the dolphin and raised them to the figure leaning over the bulwarks, far up over their heads, so far up that they had to shield their eyes from the sun to see him clearly. They saw a large, round, red face, clean-shaven, with a bulbous nose, an enormous mouth without any teeth in it, and little, snapping bright eyes nearly lost to sight beneath huge penthouses of bushy grey eyebrows, the whole surmounted by an old-fashioned periwig such as people did not wear nowadays, twisted sideways with the queue jutting out over the left ear. A dressing gown of blinding cerise, with a pattern of yellow sunflowers on it, clothed the immense broad shoulders below the face, and two hands, mahogany-colored and the size of small hams, were laid upon the bulwarks over which the giant leaned. No answer being forthcoming from the two astonished faces turned up to his, he fumbled in the pocket of his dressing gown, produced a huge set of white china teeth, fitted them in, and spoke again, more clearly this time but with no less resonance.

  “Bedad, an’ what may you be doin’, wakin’ me out of the first sleep I was after havin’ for a week, eh? Can ye tell me that now, eh?”

  His “ehs” went off like gunshots and were most alarming, but Marianne nevertheless found her voice and answered him with considerable spirit.

  “We can’t have woken you up, sir,” she said. “We haven’t made a sound.”

  “Then what the divil did wake me, eh? Sittin’ me up in me bunk as sudden as a jack-in-the-box.”

  “Perhaps the sun woke you, sir,” suggested Marianne politely. “It’s very bright this morning.”

  The giant straightened himself, shaded his eyes, and looked at the flashing water of the harbor and the little town of St. Pierre beyond it, built up so bright and fair against the golden city of the clouds behind it, and he grunted softly. “Pretty little place,” he conceded. “Nice little hole.”

  “It’s one of the largest islands in the archipelago,” flashed Marianne indignantly.

  “An archipelago, is it?” inquired the giant genially; and hitching up his dressing gown, he turned himself about so that he could look out beyond the harbor bar to where other little islands could be faintly seen above the blown spume of the waves. “An archipelago!” he repeated with mock impressiveness. “Them little fleabites!”

  “You have been glad to seek shelter from the storm here, sir,” William reminded him.

  The giant turned back to the children and grinned. “Faith, you’re right,” he said heartily. “Divil of a storm it was, too. Drove me right off me course, an’ me bound, would you believe it, for the port of Bristol. You two of the natives, eh? Frenchies? Hottentots?”

  “Normans,” said Marianne with dignity. “These islands belonged to William of Normandy. He conquered England. We conquered England. It belongs to us.”

  “Begod!” said the giant.

  He leaned upon the bulwarks and contemplated the two. He liked young things. The girl, though a plain piece, had style about her, a regular little green enchantress she was, and the boy—begod, but that was a fine boy, with a fine head of carrots on him and a merry eye. He was in a genial mood. He had brought a valuable cargo safely from the other side of the world and was expecting much profit from the same, he had been in peril of death a score of times and had escaped; and not the least of his escapes had been the one at nightfall last evening, when he had got safely into harbor instead of wrecking himself on one of the hideous reefs of rocks that guarded these microscopic little islands. His luck had been in this voyage, and he liked this ending to it with two green-clad children from a golden town straight out of a fairy tale paddling about in the dawn over the bright waters of the neatest little harbor he’d ever set eyes on.

  “Captain Denis O’Hara, at your service,” he boomed at them suddenly. “Come aboard the Green Dolphin and have a bite of breakfast.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said William. “As it happens, we come from Green Dolphin Street.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Marianne, and shipped her oar. She didn’t wonder what Mamma would say. She had forgotten Mamma. She had forgotten Le Paradis. She had left her
prudishness behind her when she entered Pipet Lane. She was in a new world. She was alive and happy.

  “Nathaniel!” roared Captain O’Hara. “Nat! Come here, ye divil! Come here, ye son of—begorra, there ye are.”

  His roar subsided suddenly as a little man with the face of a wizened monkey, with gold rings in his ears and a bare chest tattooed all over with mermaids, hearts pierced through with arrows, anchors, a ship in full sail, and a good many other things that one would not have expected the human chest to have room for, popped up suddenly beside him, reaching little higher than his captain’s elbow, and cocked an astonished eye; the other was made of round green glass, about as like an eye as the white china milestones in Captain O’Hara’s mouth were like teeth, and from it a terrible red scar ran down one side of his face into his neck. Indeed, the whole of that side of his face was dreadful to look at. The ear was gone and it looked as though the jaw upon that side had been smashed and had not mended very well.

  “Get ’em aboard,” said Captain O’Hara. “Put ’em in my cabin. Tell that lazy scoundrel of a cook to get the galley fire goin’, an’ look sharp with breakfast.” And he rolled away to complete his toilet.

  Nat flung them a rope to make the boat fast and lowered a rope ladder over the side. Marianne got on to it with skill and mounted with nimble ease, but William had more difficulty, owing to the way in which the Green Dolphin and the rowing boat decided to part company every time he endeavored to transfer himself from one to the other. But he did it at last, and Nat’s great, long, hairy arm shot out as he mounted toward the bulwarks, gripped him in the small of the back, and heaved him over as though he had been of no more weight than a puppy.

  When one stood beside him, one saw that Nat was immensely strong. It was only his face and his little, short bow legs that were wizened; his chest and shoulders were broad and strong, and his arms and his huge hands muscular and brawny. He wore a filthy scarlet nightcap on his bald head, and his clothes were in rags after the voyage. His one eye was rheumy and sad, and he had the most dreadful collection of rotting stumps of teeth in his gums that William had ever set eyes on, stained by the tobacco he was chewing. He did not speak at all, just chewed and spat, chewed and spat with the regularity of a swinging pendulum. He was a horrid sight to look at, and his person, as William rested against it in rolling over the bulwarks, was most noisome. Yet with the first clutch of that scrawny hand in the small of his back, the first glance of the sad little eye into his own, William liked Nat.

  Whether Nat liked William there was no knowing, but he set him down upon the deck with surprising gentleness, spat an extra long squirt of tobacco juice into the exact center of a carefully chosen ripple in the harbor, and led them along to the companionway. As he walked, it was noticeable that though he moved with speed, he dragged one leg painfully after him, like some sort of a grotesque bird with a broken wing. What had been done to him, Marianne wondered, that he had that eye gone, and that scar, and that dragging leg? Evidently life was not all joy in the Merchant Service. A sudden cold breath blew from the sea, making her skirts balloon about her, and she shivered as she pressed them back into place.

  But glorious excitement gripped her again as they went down the companion ladder to the Captain’s cabin. “Sit ye down an’ make yourselves at home. Look alive with that breakfast, Nat,” Captain O’Hara bellowed from behind a ballooning curtain, where sounds as of an elephant coming into collision with a hippopotamus in a restricted space suggested that his toilet was nearing completion.

  Nat, with the gentle pressure of a hairy hand upon each of their chests, sat them down upon a narrow bench running the length of a bulkhead, spat through a scuttle, and left them. They looked about them entranced. It was a tiny place to be the cabin of so great a personage as the captain of a clipper, but then, as Marianne informed William in a whisper, all available space had to be for the cargo. Yet if tiny, it was packed with an astonishing number of objects of interest. The curtain that hid the Captain’s sleeping place was of Chinese embroidery, richly encrusted with amazing golden dragons with ribald faces and scarlet tongues. The heavy table of East Indian teak before the bench where they sat had had initials carved all over the top, and the great chair upon the other side of it was most richly carved with sea creatures of every sort and kind: whales and sea elephants and mermaids and flying fish and dolphins and crabs all mixed up together with such a glorious disregard of likelihood that the very audacity of it made the foregathering seem quite probable. But even this chair was outdone by the things that hung upon the bulkheads. There was quite a collection of weapons: an old Austrian wheel lock, a tomahawk, a bow and arrow, muskets, pikes, and daggers. There was the jawbone of a shark, a stuffed baby crocodile, the skin and awful tentacles of an octopus stretched across the ceiling, and three strange brown objects, about the size of a man’s head, with what looked like tattoo marks all over them, that were perhaps coconuts. These things covered every available inch of space, so that the children, sitting on the bench, dared not move or lean back for fear the shark should bite them, the octopus reach down and wrap its terrible tentacles round them, or musket balls be discharged into their backs from behind. For none of the things in this cabin seemed inanimate. The ribald dragons, swaying backward and forward with the catastrophic heavings of Captain O’Hara behind them, seemed about to leap forward at any moment, and the reflection of the sun upon the water, passing in ripples of light over the bulkheads and ceiling, made everything upon them seem alive. . . . Especially those strange brown tattooed objects about the size of a man’s head.

  “But they are men’s heads!” gasped Marianne in horror. “William, William, look! You can see the teeth, and the closed eyes—and—and—oh!”

  She was interrupted by the simultaneous entry of Captain O’Hara from behind the dragons and Nat with a huge coffeepot and an immense steaming dish of bacon and eggs.

  “That’s the style, my hearties,” cried Captain O’Hara, flinging himself into the great chair opposite the children with no regard at all for the feelings of the mermaids who formed the seat of it. “Up with your knives and forks. More power to your elbow. Begod, bacon and eggs! Where did ye get them bacon and eggs, Nat?”

  For the first time in the children’s acquaintance with him Nat essayed to speak, but the strange, stuttering noises that came from his mouth were incomprehensible to them. Captain O’Hara, however, seemed to understand. “Went ashore last night? Got ’em off the natives? It’s meself that’s proud of you, Nat. Good for the archipelago.” He paused to place an entire egg within his capacious mouth. “Begod, it’s good,” he declared, munching with appreciation. “After all those months of that darned salt beef and rootie, I tell you, these eggs are darn good. Faith, Nat, what’s the good of six eggs to the present company? Only a couple apiece. Look lively! Fetch ’em along!”

  Nat dragged himself out of the cabin, and as he went his mouth took on a painful sort of twist that was yet somehow recognizable as a human smile.

  “Pleased to see me enjoyin’ me vittles,” explained Captain O’Hara. “Good old fellow, Nat. He an’ me have been shipmates since boyhood. Where I go, he goes. Keeps the young uns in order for me finely. Grand hand with a cat-o’-nine-tails.”

  And Captain O’Hara drained a cup of coffee to the dregs at one intake. He was an epic feeder, one of those men who by sheer immensity of person and appetite, combined with a corresponding strength of mind and purpose, can turn everything that they do, even the mastication of a rasher, into an event of earth-shaking importance. It was grand to be with him. Failure or weakness could not breathe the same air as Captain O’Hara. One forgot that inefficiency even existed as one watched his way with a fried egg. Marianne thought he was the grandest man she had ever met, with the possible exception of William’s father. Dr. Ozanne had not got Captain O’Hara’s strength, but she thought it possible that he excelled him in kindliness of heart. It was difficult, perhaps, to be immen
sely strong and immensely tender at the same time. Gentleness implied a weak spot somewhere, like that spot of decay that makes an apple soft.

  And how magnificent was Captain O’Hara to look at, now that his wig was on straight and he had exchanged his cerise dressing gown for a smart uniform coat with brass buttons the size of small soup plates. His gigantic stock, too, added to the impressiveness of his fine jaw and nobly proportioned double chin, and his gold-braided waistcoat drew attention to the massiveness of his proportions in those parts.

  Nat came and went with more eggs, more rashers, more milk and coffee and cream and sugar, and pieces of toast of the size and consistency of paving stones. He moved deftly, in spite of his dragging leg, and his great, hairy hands never spilled anything. Marianne noticed that that parody of a smile twisted his lips several times as he watched his captain eat. And now and then he smiled at her and William, and both of them returned the smile. Marianne, as well as William, was beginning to like Nat. For some reason or other he made her feel extraordinarily gentle, a sensation to which she was not accustomed, but which she found pleasant.

  “What has happened to him?” she asked Captain O’Hara, when the door seemed to have closed behind Nat for the last time. “Whatever has happened to him?”

  “Happened to him? Happened to Nat?” asked Captain O’Hara in surprise, sitting back in his chair and investigating with a large forefinger some little maladjustment of his white china teeth. “A good deal happens to a man in a seafarin’ life, me dear. Damn these teeth! I bought ’em off a Frenchman in Hong Kong. They’re all the rage in Paris, so the fellow told me, but they’re about as much use to me as a sick headache. No grip, if ye understand me, no grip at all.”