“This way,” said the girl, and he found that with her hand in his she was leading him down a narrow passage. It led out of an alcove at the back of the shop, and in this alcove there stood a Chinaman, his hands folded in his robe of dark blue silk, his head bent and his eyes cast down. Had he been there all the time, wondered William, watching what went on in the shop? He took no notice of the girl as she passed him, nor she of him, but as they went down the passage William heard the rustle of stiff silk, as though the man had passed out into the shop. The slight sound vaguely scared him, as though it were the rustle of a reptile in dead leaves.
And then he forgot his fear in delight at the beauty of the little courtyard to which the girl had brought him. It was very small, with a lily pond in the center of it, planted with flowers and sweet-smelling bushes and blossom-bearing trees, surrounded by a pillared verandah protected by a curly blue-tiled roof, from which led rooms closed in with exquisite carved screens. Near the pond was a stone seat, with a low stone table before it and beside it a little dwarf pine tree growing in a pot. Over the courtyard the sky was pure gold, and a sudden cool breeze ruffled the surface of the lily pond. It came from the estuary perhaps. In any case it blew a tiny breath of common sense into William’s cobwebbed brain, for he suddenly remembered the tall Orion rocking at anchor among the lemon-colored fishing smacks, and he caught his breath sharply.
But the girl, reading his stupefied mind like an open book, gave the cobwebs no chance to blow away. “There is time,” she whispered. “There is plenty of time. We will drink a little rice wine together, and talk a little of England, and you will comfort me in my homesickness, and then you shall go away.” And she drew him down upon the seat beside the dwarf pine tree and sat down beside him with her hand in his.
William was not sure if it was the same Chinaman, or a different one, who almost immediately stood before them with a small tray in his hands, for he kept his eyes cast down as he set it on the table, and was gone again almost immediately, with no sound but the rustle of his robe. The tray had candied red apples on it, and sweetmeats, and bowls of warm rice wine. They ate up all the sweet things, laughing like children, and they drank the wine, and William felt sleepy but amazingly at peace. The scent of the flowers seemed to flow through his body with every breath he took, and mind and soul he was steeped in the golden light. And the girl who sat beside him, in the shelter of his arm, was a part of the beauty and the peace, warm and friendly and comforting. Vaguely he remembered that he wanted to comfort her, too, and save, her from sorrow. Only he was too sleepy to think of the words. The dream seemed deepening all the time, and nothing was quite real.
2
“Damn fool,” groaned William, sitting with his head in his hands, his back against the cool stone of the bridge. He sat beside it, the great arch soaring above him, reflected as a perfect circle in the water that flowed beneath it like a lazily uncoiling length of pearl-grey silk. “Damn fool,” he repeated, for cursing himself seemed at present the only comfort. “Bloody fool.” Then he groaned again. He had not known it was possible to be so continuously sick as he had been, to have such a ghastly pain in his head, or to have every limb so turned to lead that movement seemed impossible.
Presently there was taking place in his mind that undirected, haphazard activity which he was accustomed to describe to himself inaccurately as “thought.” He was a truthful person, and one by one, out of the welter of detested images that thronged his consciousness, he picked out the blistering facts and had a look at them.
He had been bewitched by a pretty wanton, and that as easily as though he had been a mere child with neither knowledge, will, nor the rudiments of sense and decency. He had slept with that wicked little witch and had been drugged and robbed by her. He did not say to himself that other men got into these scrapes and thought nothing of it, for he had never been taught to take shelter behind the common back-slidings. And he was not other men. He was himself. He was the son of a father who, whatever his weaknesses, had as a doctor regarded this particular kind of scrape as sheer idiocy, and had taught his son to do the same. And his moral standards had been set for him by Sophie with her sweetening, wholesome fastidiousness, and by the clean austerity of Marguerite. When he thought of Marguerite he was seared with shame; odd that a spiritual thing like shame should hurt so much that one caught one’s breath and one’s body twisted over as though the lash of a whip had caught it.
Well, that was the worst of it just now—the shame. But there was the other side, a purely material side, to this disaster, and that was bad enough. Heaven knew what had been in the sweet rice wine of which he had drunk so much, for with the girl in his arms he had very soon slept, a horrible drugged sleep from which he had only awakened out here in the street in the full light of early morning, stripped of all the valuables that he possessed. His money had gone, his watch and gold chain, his gold compass, his gun, his uniform coat and waistcoat. He had nothing left but his shirt and trousers and—yes—the Maori knife in its sheath in his trouser pocket and the carved wooden necklace that was still hanging round his neck. He took the necklace off and looked with puzzled bewilderment at the beautiful carved images of birds and beasts and flowers, with the figure of Lung-mu, who protects sailormen, hanging at the bottom. What had induced them to leave him his knife and Lung-mu? Had the little witch felt some tenderness for him after all? Had she been not entirely false? Or was it simply that the knife was a thing of no value and the necklace had been hanging about for years unsold in the shop and so they had not bothered to remove them? Though the second reason was probably the correct one, there was balm in the thought of the first; for she had been so exquisitely pretty; he could feel even now the touch of her hand on his cheek when he lay in her arms, and the softness of her mouth.
He staggered to his feet. He must get on quickly and forget the images that filled his mind. He must get down to the harbor before the Orion sailed. If he followed this river flowing at his feet like uncoiling grey silk, then he would come to it.
But in his ridiculous weakness he found it a long and toilsome way, and when he tried to hail an empty chair, the bearers glanced sideways out of their slits of eyes at his disreputable figure, smiled inscrutable smiles, and took no notice. And the sun rose higher and beat down on his bare head, so that he would have been sick again had he not been so completely empty. And there was a maddening sentence beating with hammer strokes in his head, each stroke a throb of blinding pain, the last words he had heard on board yesterday before he went ashore. It set itself to some equally maddening tune whose origin he could not remember. “H.M.S. Orion sails at dawn. H.M.S. Orion sails at dawn.” What was the damned tune? Somehow, as he stumbled on, it seemed all-important that he should be able to put a name to it. He was a fool about names. Always forgot them, or got them mixed up. Marianne was always nagging at him about it. She was a bit of a nagger, Marianne, always trying to make people, and events conform to her own chosen pattern for them. Not like Marguerite, who took people as they were, loved them and let them alone. “H.M.S. Orion sails at dawn.” Now he had it! It was the tune of “Mon Beau Laurier.” Marguerite had danced to it in the woods at home. He could see her now, swaying alone in the center of the circle. Men had come, swung her round, and then she had been alone again. Now there was just one word beating in his head. . . . Alone. . . . He had a vague idea that he had done something, he could not now remember what, that had condemned her to perpetual loneliness; Marguerite, who had always seemed like the other half of himself.
It was the harbor at last, crowded with the shipping of all nations, junks, merchantmen, sloops, cutters, barquentines, ships of the Levant, of Scandinavia, of Asia, but not, as far as he could see at the moment, of the British Isles. He looked out toward the estuary, where the sea birds were wheeling round the lemon sails of the fishing smacks, but the raking masts of the Orion were no longer towering there. Too late. H.M.S. Orion had sailed at dawn.
; He stumbled into a corner and sat down, his head in his hands again. The Orion did not wait for drunkards, for laggards who forget the time. The Navy has no concern with what men do with their shore leave; it is when they forget the time that they are damned. What was the time now? A chime sounded over the water. Eight bells and the forenoon watch, that would have been William’s watch had he been on board. The Orion was well out to sea now, and the bells were ringing out the doom of a damned soul.
For a long time he sat in a sort of stupor of despair. There seemed nothing to do, so he did nothing. He was utterly alone. That, obviously, was the meaning of damnation—alone and nothing to do—nothingness.
Someone knocked him sideways and removed the coil of rope upon which he sat. He sprawled on the worn stones where he had been flung, supporting himself on his hands, and Lung-mu on her carved chain swung backward and forward like a pendulum. He watched her stupidly. Lung-mu. Tape-Tout. Lung-mu the dragon goddess, her little image in the stern of many an Eastern boat, an incense stick alight before it, keeping her worshipers safe. Marie Watch-All of the grey seas of the West, guiding the Island fishermen home to the village under the cliff. Lung-mu. Tape-Tout. The silly names rhymed and made a sort of chant, a stupid sort of chant that a child would delight in singing. Yet it was a better sort of thing to have ringing in one’s head than that “alone.” It suggested vaguely to William that in a world where worship is as natural to men as breathing, it is not possible to be alone. No, he was not alone, and therefore not yet damned. He struggled to his feet. If he was not damned, he must do something. From what ship had those eight bells sounded? He had heard them, he thought, away to the left. Evidently her crew was on board and she was getting ready to put to sea. But it might be that they were a hand short, that some besotted fool had fallen out even as he had done, that even at the very last moment they would take him on. That was what he must do—try to get to sea again. He was not going to stay here in this detested city. He hoped never to set eyes on the place again.
He made his way round the harbor, scrutinizing the ships as he passed them, but none that he saw looked ready to put to sea, and none called to him with a voice that awoke any answer. Yet still he stumbled on, increasingly convinced that he had heard those eight bells ringing, increasingly certain that on the ship where they had run there was an empty hammock where he could sleep and a job to be done that he could do. Somewhere to sleep and something to do. Shelter and work. If one had those, one could carry on.
Her masts and rigging were delicate yet strong against the sky, and her brasswork was winking in the sun. And, Holy Moses, the wonder and style of her, lofty and thin, raked to the nines and built for speed! Mad excitement gripped him. He fell over something, picked himself up and stumbled on again until he could see what flag she flew at her stern. It was the Red Ensign, and above the skysail fluttered her house flag of emerald green. She was an English clipper. And just below the ensign he read her name. The Green Dolphin. Was he mad? He must be. Things did not happen this way in real life. He was standing beside her now, at the foot of the gangplank, but he could not see her very clearly because the world seemed pitching and tossing about him and there was a film across his eyes. He rubbed them and looked again. The Green Dolphin. No, he was not mad. And where else in the world was there a ship with lines as exquisite as that?
The world was pitching about him again, yet somehow he managed to get up the gangplank and leap upon the deck. “Here, you, what now? Get out of that, you dirty swine.” The great hairy hand of an old shellback hit him in the chest, spinning him round, and then a huge boot assisted him expertly toward the plank again. But he clung grimly to the bulwarks. “Captain O’Hara’s orders,” he gasped, winded from the blow. “Let me be, damn you. You’re a hand short, aren’t you?”
“You a new apprentice?” ejaculated the man. “Then get forward, you fool, and find the Mate.”
But William, body and mind still sick and confused from the poison of the drug he had been given, was back again on a summer morning of his childhood. He did not look for the Mate. Instead he went down the companion ladder to the Captain’s cabin, and stood there clinging to the teak table where years ago he had carved his initials, and looked about him. It was all just the same. There was the old chair, richly carved with sea creatures, the weapons hanging on the bulkheads, the tattooed heads of the cannibals. And there was the beautiful curtain with the golden dragons that hung before the Captain’s bunk. Only today it was drawn back, showing the bunk with its pillow and neat blue coverlet. William let go of the table, staggered to the bunk and lay down. The pillow was exquisitely cool to his madly throbbing head. The water shadows flickered gently over the bulkheads and the ceiling. It was infinitely peaceful. It was like coming home. He shut his eyes and listened to the familiar ship sounds that were a part of his life, the creak of cordage, the shouting of orders, the gurgle of water against the ship’s side. Then came the scrape of a fiddle, voices singing, the rattle of the hawser, and the steady tramp of feet as the men manned the capstan. Then they were moving. He could picture the smooth waters of the estuary shipping away between the green fertile banks, the wind filling the sails as the ship gathered way. Faster and faster, and now there was a sound of humming overhead and the wind whistled in the rigging and the shrouds. They were drawing near to the mouth of the estuary, and then suddenly, the scream of a gull, the great buffet of a wave, the glorious lift of the ship as the sea took her. . . . William sighed, turned over and went to sleep.
3
He was awakened by a volley of vigorous oaths and a great hand clawing at his shoulder, and found himself looking up into an enormous scarlet full moon of a face with a roaring mouth in the center of it full of immense china teeth. William was a powerful man, but Captain O’Hara was even stronger. With one great wrench he had William out of his bunk and prostrate on the floor. But even as he fell he was joyfully conscious of the rolling of the ship, and his instinct told him that they were well out to sea. . . . Captain O’Hara would surely never turn about now to return him from whence he came.
“Who the divil are ye? Eh? Eh?” roared Captain O’Hara, stirring the prostrate William with his foot. And then, raising his voice to a bellow, “Nat! Nat!”
William clawed himself up with the help of the teak table, and slithered into the great carved chair. He still felt weak and dizzy, but the long sweet sleep in the bunk had restored a few of his wits to him again. And strangely enough, in spite of the thing that had happened, he felt a sudden ridiculous throb of happiness. He looked up into Captain O’Hara’s bewildered, infuriated countenance and smiled, and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with his knuckles like a child.
And, suddenly, there was Nat, with his filthy scarlet nightcap, his wizened, mutilated monkey face, his tattooed chest and his glass eye—just the same. They had scarcely changed at all, these two; for when William first met them, they had been at that time of life when to that of which a man is capable he has already attained, and life has little more of his story to write upon his face. It was William who had changed, William who had grown from a boy to a young man of whom all things were yet possible.
“Nat! Nat!” said William softly, and swaying in the chair he felt again in memory the clutch of Nat’s scrawny hand in the small of his back, as he had felt it years ago when Nat had helped him scramble over the bulwarks. And he knew again that he liked this noisome, hideous little man. And in Nat’s one eye, as he stood back staring at William and rubbing the bristles of his ill-shaven jaw with a horny finger, there was a faint, puzzled glimmer of recognition.
“What the divil?” inquired Captain O’Hara, and pushed up his old-fashioned wig to scratch his bald head.
“You said you’d never forget me, sir,” said William, and putting his hand in his pocket, he tossed the Maori knife on the table.
Captain O’Hara was still puzzled, but Nat let out a sudden hoot of laughter and croaked out a few of those
almost unintelligible sounds that passed with him for speech, while he pointed to the initials W.O. on the table.
“That boy?” shouted Captain O’Hara. And he too roared with laughter and slapped his great thigh with his hand. “Begorra! That boy from that tight little island! Remember that little harbor, Nat, an’ the town on the hill? Bedad, it seems like yesterday.” And then suddenly his laughter ceased. He had never forgotten the beautiful boy that William had been, or the affection he had felt for him. He looked at him with concern. “What’s up, son?” he asked. “What’s the trouble? Eh? Eh?”
The mention of the Island had been unfortunate. William’s head suddenly went down on his arms and he sobbed like the great baby that he was.
“Empty stomach,” diagnosed Captain O’Hara, and speeded Nat with a jerk of the head toward the door. “Now then, son,” he continued, “we’ll have a meal together, like we did before in that little island of yours, an’ when you’ve some vittles in your belly ye can tell me what you think you’re doin’ as a stowaway upon my ship.”
Then he spat reflectively through the porthole, filled his pipe, and left William to sob himself quiet until Nat reappeared with crusty doughnut twists, pigeons’ eggs, fresh fruit, and fragrant China tea.
“The last shore meal we’ll have, son,” said Captain O’Hara, knocking out his pipe and adjusting his teeth. “Do it justice.”
They ate hugely, William’s resilient stomach rising to the occasion with an ease that was astonishing considering what it had recently gone through, and then Captain O’Hara reached for his pipe again and raised one eyebrow.
“I’ve nothing much to say, sir,” said William wretchedly, for his momentary happiness had left him now and he was back again in the depths of his shame. “I’m a seaman. I had shore leave and got into trouble. When I got back to the harbor my ship had gone, and I thought I’d better find another. I saw the Green Dolphin and came on board.”
Green Dolphin Street Page 22