Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Two figures passed by in the shadows, seeking for solitude; and though they were gone so quickly, she did not fail to recognize them, and she got up, obeying her instinct to follow them and at all costs prevent their being alone together. Then she sat down again, very quietly, her hands folded in her lap. No, not again. In this fight for William she had promised herself that she would play fair, and it would not be fair to play that cruel trick on Marguerite for the second time. Perhaps it had not been fair the first time, for Marguerite in her simplicity was at the mercy of her sister’s guile. Yet she has more than I, thought Marianne.

  She sat there frozen by her unhappiness, head bent, and for the first time in her life she had taken her hand off the tiller and was waiting patiently for something beyond herself to take her in charge. She was like a little child lost in the dark, just sitting there waiting and weeping.

  The sound of oars moving rhythmically but urgently made her lift her head. A rowing boat had come out from the harbor and was gliding swiftly toward the Orion’s ladder. Marianne had the sense that it was for this that she had been waiting. She jumped up and ran along the deck and leaned over the bulwarks beside the ladder, looking down into the face of some poor peasant woman who was standing up in the boat, holding the ladder and looking anxiously upward.

  “Yes?” asked Marianne, and her heart was beating painfully against the hard rail on which she leaned.

  “Is Dr. Ozanne’s son on board, m’selle?” asked the woman.

  “Yes,” said Marianne.

  “Then tell him to come quickly, m’selle. The Doctor is at my house in Pipet Lane, and I think that he is dying.”

  Marianne found William and Marguerite talking to the Lieutenant Governor in a green forest of palms in the stern of the ship. She had a fleeting moment of wonder as to whether they had disturbed his solitude or he theirs, and then she delivered her message and ran to find her father and mother. So quick and skillful was she that she had the five of them down the ladder and in the boat in just a few moments, with no one aware of their trouble except the Governor, who helped get the ladies down the ladder and then leaned sympathetically over the rail, watching the boat slip away into the darkness. All that he had heard of Dr. Ozanne had not been particularly favorable, but he was sorry all the same, for though death was a common occurrence, he always found it a damned depressing one. A man never knew when it would strike at him once he’d got himself the wrong side of sixty.

  “How came my father to be at your house?” asked William of the peasant woman who had fetched them, as he and she bent to the oars. “What happened?”

  “There was trouble at my home, m’sieur, and I fetched the Doctor.”

  “But he was not fit to go out,” said William, his voice sharp and impatient with his grief. “He was ill himself.”

  “I could not know that, m’sieur,” said the woman simply. “For six years, ever since my eldest son was born, the Doctor has been my best friend. It is always to him that I go. And not only in sickness. In all my troubles.”

  “What was your trouble tonight?” asked Sophie gently.

  “My husband was not himself, m’dame. He hit our son and the child fell down the steps and cut his head open. Had it not been for the Doctor, I think he would have bled to death, but the Doctor saved him.”

  “And then?” asked Sophie.

  “When it was all over he had a seizure of the heart, m’dame. It was bad for a short while and I could not leave him. But now he is not conscious, so I came to fetch you. There is another doctor there now, whom my husband fetched, and he thinks it will not be long. It was only this last autumn, m’dame, that I noticed an apple tree in the Doctor’s garden with flowers and fruit growing on it together. I trembled then, m’dame, for I knew that in a year there would be a death.”

  There was a silence in the boat. Marianne, sitting beside Sophie, found she was holding her hand. Her heart ached for her mother as well as for William and herself. It was they three who would mourn for Edmond Ozanne; the other two who had not loved him would remain uninjured by his death.

  But Marguerite was very white as she sat within the shelter of her father’s arm, and William, who sat facing her, observed her anxiously.

  “You must not come, Marguerite,” he said. “It will not be the sort of place where you should come.”

  “But I want to come,” said Marguerite, her eyes looking steadily into his. She was determined, this time, that she would be brave for William’s sake. Where he went, she would go, for her being was his refuge as his was hers. “I want to be with you, William.”

  Her voice came clearly, and Marianne, not yet beyond the influence of that moment of humility on the Orion, heard the quiet words as the declaration of a love that was so strong as her own but of an infinitely finer quality. Had fate been kinder, perhaps William would have heard them as a declaration of love too; a declaration that he would have made himself had the Governor not been first in that quiet place among the palms. But just then the boat grated on the cobbles under the archway of Pipet Lane, and they were getting out as quickly as they could, and Octavius was subjecting them all to as much fuss and argument as possible in the process.

  “It will be no place and no scene for ladies at all,” he declared. “Sophie, take the girls home.”

  “You must take them home,” said Sophie. “I am going to Edmond.”

  There was no gainsaying that. Sophie was an obedient wife, but just now and then, in some question that affected a part of her that he had never possessed, she would oppose her husband with every ounce of strength that she had, and experience had taught him that on these occasions he must yield at once if he wished to retain his dignity.

  But his instinctive jealousy of Edmond Ozanne led him to keep a firm hold of Marguerite, who in looks was now so like her mother at her age that there were times when Octavius could imagine that she was the same beautiful girl whom he had fallen so madly in love with twenty-three years ago, and who had given him her affection and faithful obedience but never her inmost soul. “Come, my love,” he said, his arm about her.

  But Marguerite resisted him gently. “I want to go with William, Papa,” she said.

  “You will do no such thing,” said Octavius obstinately; but it was not really Marguerite, but her mother, whom he held so possessively against him.

  “Please, Papa,” she said.

  And the obtuse William, anxious to shield her, backed up Octavius. “It would be best for you to go home, Marguerite,” he said.

  “No,” said Marguerite.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Marianne tartly. “I’m going with Mamma and William. There’s no need for both of us to be there.”

  Marguerite looked appealingly toward her mother, but Sophie was already moving quickly away with the peasant woman. She had forgotten all about Marguerite and William. Neither of them had been born when she had first known Edmond.

  Marguerite thought it would be sheer selfishness to argue further, and she yielded. She looked once more toward William as her father took her away, trying to give him something of herself to strengthen him, but he was already following her mother, his arm through Marianne’s.

  Marianne held William’s hand, that he had slipped within her arm, tightly against her side as they went up a flight of stone steps to the doorway of one of Pipet Lane’s most beautiful old houses. They went up an oak staircase and into a lofty, beautifully proportioned room that had once been a lady’s parlor but now, divided into two by a curtain, was living room and bedroom for a man and his wife and five little children. Marianne never forgot that room and its poverty, lit by the faint light of the two tallow candles stuck into bottles on the old Adams mantelpiece with its lovely broken carving. He was no good, that drunken brute of a fisherman who sat on a stool hushing a wailing baby in his arms. He had been momentarily sobered by what had happened, but he could be no good or he w
ould not in six years have reduced the girl with the flower-blue eyes whom Marianne had first seen in the doctor’s waiting room to this toilworn unlovely woman.

  Beyond the curtain were an old battered four poster and a little truckle bed. On the small bed lay a white-faced boy with a bandaged head, muttering and moaning under the tattered coverlet that covered him, and on the other lay a figure utterly quiet and unstirring. It did not need the fact that the doctor who had been fetched had turned now from the large bed to the small one to tell them that they were too late. The sudden sense of impotence that caught at their hearts, that bitter hopelessness of being able to do no more and go no further, told them what had happened. Edmond Ozanne was dead.

  The other doctor turned and straightened himself. “I am sorry,” he said. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “Will the boy live?” asked Marianne urgently. That was what mattered, she thought. Dr. Ozanne had given his life for this child, and she did not want it to have been given in vain.

  “He’s in no danger now.” said the doctor. “They’re tough, these children, and he’s been skillfully treated. But he’ll need care.”

  “He shall have it,” said Marianne. It was a vow, and she made it standing at the foot of the fourposter looking at the dead man lying before her. He had been dead long enough now for the amazing dignity of death to take possession of his mortal body. There was strength in his rigidity, an assurance of purging in the sharpened lines of the white face, peace in the stillness, and a sudden throb of triumph in Marianne’s soul; for this, in spite of all, had been a man who had left the world the richer for his passing through it, and even if immortality were an empty dream, that were sufficient justification for the fact of life. He had lived for the poor and the outcast, he had served them up to the moment of his death, and she in whatever ways she could find would serve them too. This moment linked up with that other moment in the Doctor’s waiting room six years ago, when the poor had taught her something of the meaning of courage. She would try to serve them as the Doctor had, and maybe they would teach her one day what love meant, too. “Good-by,” she said to her friend. “Good-by.”

  Then her practical nature turned immediately to the problem of the living, and she turned toward her mother and William standing together beside the bed. It surprised her that the tenderhearted Sophie was not weeping, and it surprised her even more to see the look of happiness, almost of relief, that shone upon her mother’s face. She was too young yet to realize how those who know life can, in that brief moment before the selfishness of their own grief claims them, rejoice in the passing of someone loved. . . . Safe. Past all further corroding by the sin of the world. Past all danger and all pain. Safe. . . . Oblivious of those about her, Sophie gently kissed the cheek of her love and then knelt down to pray.

  But William had been visited by neither triumph nor relief, for he had lost his father. His face was buried in his hands, and he was sobbing like a child.

  The doctor touched Marianne on the shoulder. “Your mother and I will see to things here,” he said. “Take this young man home.”

  Marianne took William’s arm and led him away. “I will see you again,” she said to the woman who waited beyond the curtain. “What is your name?”

  “Charlotte Marquand,” said the woman, and their eyes met again in friendship, as they had done in their girlhood. Then Marianne and William went down the stairs, William so blinded by his tears that he would have fallen had she not guided him. It amazed her that he, the man, should be weeping so while she and her mother were dry-eyed. He was nothing but a child, she thought. He would never be anything but a big, sentimental, warmhearted child; a child whom she adored. “Don’t cry, darling,” she said, as she would have said to the little boy with the cut head on the bed upstairs.

  They went out into the clear moonlight and turned homeward, but when she would have taken William to Le Paradis he resisted. “I’d rather go home,” he said. He had never liked Le Paradis; since his boyhood its elegance had always made him feel a clumsy ass. In his bewilderment he forgot that Marguerite would be at Le Paradis. He wanted to go to his own place, like a fox to its earth.

  Marianne understood and yielded at once. Dr. Ozanne had left the lamp burning low, and the cushions in his armchair were still hollowed to the shape of his body, and there was a whiskey bottle on the small table with an open book beside it. Old Nick sat in his cage with hooded eyes, drooping and silent. These things hurt her as had nothing yet, but William dropped into his father’s arm chair so abandoned to his grief that she did not think he noticed the hollowed cushions, and she quickly picked up the book and the whiskey bottle and carried them with her into the kitchen where she went to brew hot coffee. It amazed her, as she heated it, that Marguerite did not come. She, in Marguerite’s place, would have been watching from the window of the old schoolroom, and now she would have been in the parlor with William in her arms.

  But Marguerite did not come, and it was she who, after she had made him drink the coffee, sat on the arm of his chair and comforted him. Though she was not a naturally tender woman, the right words came easily, and he clung with a sort of desperation to the fact that she too had loved his father, realizing dimly that every human heart that loves the dead keeps something of them still living upon this earth. “You liked him,” he kept saying. “You understood him. You sat here with him yesterday morning when he was not well.” And Marianne replied patiently again and again, “Yes, William, I loved him. He was kind to me and I loved him. He was kind to many people. He was kind.”

  Kind Green Dolphin Street. She looked about her at the shabby room that she knew so well. Strangers would live here soon, and she might not enter it again. But she would often see it. Its walls would be about her whenever a door swung wide in greeting and a warm hand gripped hers.

  And suddenly, most surprisingly, it was she who was weeping, sitting on William’s knee with his arms about her, and he who was comforting her.

  2

  The next five days, until the Orion sailed, passed like a sort of nightmare, for there was so much to do, so much to decide before William left for the other side of the world, and so little time to do it in. The ritual of an Island funeral was in itself so complicated a matter that until it was brought to a successful conclusion, no one could spare a thought for private grief or love. Every thought was centered upon the number of yards of black crape that would be required for trimming for the complicated mourning garments that must be tried on by the hour together if there were to be any hope of their fitting, and upon the choice of bearers to carry the coffin, six bearers who must be of high standing in Island society and must carry the dead man to church by the way he had taken in his lifetime. And then there was the preparation of immense supplies of food for the funeral feast, with especial care taken over the funeral ham; for on the Island màngier la tchesse à quiqu’un was the proverbial way of saying that you attended his funeral; the ham was very important. Then invitations to the funeral must be written out on black-edged notepaper and carried around to all the friends of the deceased by a rider on a black horse, and those who had loved the Doctor must be given the opportunity of seeing him in his coffin and touching the forehead once in blessing. And then when it was all over, there was the ritual of the reading of the will, leaving all that the Doctor died possessed of to his son William; only it was found that the Doctor died possessed of nothing but debts which, with luck, would only just be covered by the sale of the house and furniture.

  When the day of departure came, William had not slept for nights and had scarcely eaten. Through the mist of grief and bewilderment he had been only dimly conscious of his surroundings. He had been vaguely aware that the Le Patourels had been amazingly good to him, but he had scarcely distinguished Octavius’ exasperating but highly competent fuss from Sophie’s motherly advice or Marguerite’s loving and self-effacing care. The only thing he was really clear about was that Mar
ianne had loved his father and had been with him that morning when he had not been well. . . . Though he had died without any of them being with him, his only son having left him for a ball, at least Marianne had been with him on that morning. . . . In all the misery of self-reproach for all the times he had failed his father, from his boyhood until that night when he had left him to die alone that he might go to a ball, the only comfort was in the thought that Marianne had been there that morning. He clung to that, and to Marianne herself, as to a life line.

  “Write to us, William,” she commanded, as the five of them stood on the harbor wall on the blustery morning of William’s departure, surrounded by his baggage, waiting for the picket boat that was coming to fetch him. Marguerite, clinging to her father’s arm, said nothing. The chill wind whipped her long skirts about her ankles, and her face within the shadows of her bonnet was white, with ugly blotches beneath the eyes. She had cried all night, it was easy to see, and now there was no more strength left in her. They were all listless and tired after the strain of the last few days, and drained of emotion. The picket boat was late, and the bleak embarrassment of a delayed departure had them all in its grip. They had said all there was to say before they left Le Paradis, and now they were only longing for the pain of parting to be over. It would have been easier if the sun had been shining and they had all been looking their best; there might have been happier last memories, then, to keep and carry away; but it was a cold and ugly morning, with rain in the wind, and they were all looking their very worst. Sophie was shivering in a black cloak that did not become her at all, Octavius had cut himself while shaving, William had a streaming cold, and Marianne looked forty if a day.

  “Mind you write,” she said again in a bright and brittle voice, and for the fourth time.

  “Don’t I always write?” asked William with a touch of irritation. “Where’s the black valise? I’ve left it behind.”