Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  “ ’Taint no country, ma’am,” Nat signified. “ ’Tis cloud. A blow, maybe, before mornin.’ ”

  She awoke in the first light of dawn, aware that the ship was rolling heavily, and lay, as she always did, listening for the busy hum of awakening life upon the ship. But this morning its tempo was quickened and changed. Instead of the chink of buckets, the scrubbing of decks, the cluck-cluck of the hens, and the whistling of contented seamen, there came a thundering and a booming and a walloping, and a shouting of urgent orders. She got up, dressed quickly, and climbed the ladder. Captain O’Hara was on the poop, bellowing orders through a speaking trumpet, and men were in the rigging, lying out on the yards, calling out with quick, high cries, like birds up there in their black oilskins, clawing and slashing fiercely in a mad race against time. Flying kites and staysails came down with a great clatter, and the ship’s bell beat clang, clang, clang, with a warning note that was echoed by a queer sort of moaning in the air. The world was all grey, and a cold breath of wind touched her neck with clammy fingers that made her suddenly afraid. “Get below, ma’am!” Captain O’Hara roared at her in a rage, and she turned obediently, but not before she had seen the grey sea ruffling like a bird’s wing, and far away on the horizon mad white horses galloping with the fast and furious speed of unleashed demons.

  “All snugged down, ma’am,” Nat assured her when he brought her breakfast. “She’s drivin’ with nothin’ but a reefed foresail, a spanker, an’ a jib.”

  And suddenly Nat and the breakfast tray seemed to disappear, and Marianne found herself cascading in a smother of crinoline and petticoats down the side of an apparently vertical wall. The ship seemed diving, her stern kicked clear out of the water. Old Nick, hanging in his cage from the cabin ceiling, cursed loudly. Screams rang out from the Dunbars’ cabin, and the sound of smashing crockery, and then, crashing down on them, the most devilish and appalling noise, a shrieking and moaning and neighing as those pursuing white horses caught up with the Green Dolphin, leaped at her, poured over her, fastened upon her, and dragged her down. Lying amid the welter of smashed whalebone and torn frills that was the ruin of her gown, with her hands over her ears, half stunned, Marianne could yet hear the pounding of their hoofs and see their white manes flying, and knew as though she had looked into their hearts their devilish delight that they had got their quarry. Well, this was the end. Her confidence in the Green Dolphin had been mistaken. One jolly old Green Dolphin was no match for the devil’s own herd of white horses.

  But apparently it was not the end. Slowly the Green Dolphin nosed her way up out of the pit into which she had fallen. The vertical wall became level for a moment, and then became vertical the other way on. “The Skipper, ’e ran it a bit fine,” Nat’s noises signified imperturbably from somewhere or other. “All but caught in ’er ball dress. But the Skipper’s always lucky, an’ the Green Dolphin, she’s a lucky ship.”

  Marianne found that Nat’s long strong arms were lifting her up and putting her into her bunk. She was not frightened or hurt at all, but she was bewildered by her fall, by the noise, by the frantic pitching and tossing of the ship. She shut her eyes and lay still while Nat, keeping his footing in some miraculous way, cleared up the debris and fetched her fresh tea. He stood by her while she drank it, swaying to the motion of the ship. “Just a blow, ma’am,” he assured her. “Just a good strong blow, ma’am,” and put one great hand upon her left ankle. It was as though a dog had stretched out a paw and laid it caressingly upon her, and she laughed. “I’m not afraid, Nat,” she said. “You can take the cup and leave me, for I’m not in the least afraid.”

  Nat came to her often, and grinned, and laid his hand upon her left ankle, and just once, when it seemed to her that things were at their worst, Captain O’Hara came. How could she ever have thought he was getting an old man? His immense bulk seemed to fill her tiny cabin, and his laughter rolled about it like genial thunder.

  “Past the worst,” he roared at her through the tumult of the gale.

  “Past the worst?” she ejaculated, clinging to the side of her bunk as once again the Green Dolphin dived madly downward. “Why, these are the worst seas we’ve had yet.”

  “A seaman always knows, me dear. Granted there’s no perceptible difference in the ragin’ o’ wind an’ water, yet somethin’ tells you that, glory be, you’ve won.”

  A few hours later she realized that Captain O’Hara had been right and the worst was over. There was less savagery in the shriek of the wind, and the buffeting of the great seas were the buffetings of a spent giant. And the ship still sailed.

  She was on deck again as soon as it was possible, watching with a smile on her lips, and silently, the blossoming of the sails upon the masts. Though there was sunlight, the wind still drove torn wisps of cloud across the blue, and the sea was a toppling range of snow-capped mountains that tossed the ship from crag to crag. It still needed two men at the wheel to keep her steady in the turmoil of racing waves. Screaming sea birds went by on the wind, and the tired ship strained and trembled as her Captain pressed her ruthlessly forward. Sail after sail was hoisted and bent at his bellowed orders, booming and banging, the wind keening through the rigging and clawing at the busy men frantically struggling to sheet home the canvas. Marianne smiled and went below again and sat and waited. Once there was a sharp report like a cannon as a sail went, but only once, and though the overstrained ship reeled sickeningly, the ominous crack was not followed by any disaster and they continued to race onward at breath-taking speed. All that night the wind moderated, and by morning it was no more than a fair breeze. . . . Captain O’Hara had gambled and won again.

  2

  The weeks went by once more with a peaceful rhythm, but not without their dangers and excitements, and moments of experience that would be unforgettable while life lasted. One morning Marianne came on deck to find that they were among icebergs. Sea and sky were a cold blue-green, and the crystal ramparts of ice scintillated with every color of the rainbow, gashed here and there with yawning caverns of intense blue. For an hour she leaned on the bulwarks, oblivious of danger, as the Green Dolphin pursued her way with slow caution. No recklessness now. Captain O’Hara had more respect for these mighty floating castles than for any wind that ever blew. Even the sea itself seemed awed. The waves crawled up the precipitous crystal walls only very slowly; and then fell back, and they did not venture near the blue mouths of those dreadful caverns. Some of these ice castles were half a mile long, towering to pinnacles that cut the sky two hundred feet above the water. The glorious Green Dolphin seemed to shrink to a mere cringing speck upon the sea as she crept past them, her sails dirty and buff-colored against their peerless white. They would have crushed her to powder had she come too near.

  Marianne never saw the whales, but she heard them. One night there was a muffling of grey vapor about the world when she went to bed. The horizon was lost and a feeling of asphyxiation, a horrid sense as of the closing in of walls upon her, had made her glad to go below. The darkness came early without moon or stars or wind. She went to sleep to the sound of the foghorn and awoke to hear terrible, mournful voices crying in the night. The foghorn blared and the voices answered, deathly, defeated. The darkness was so thick and choking that she could have screamed. A sense of dreadful doom pressed upon her, and her body shook with fear. Those voices out there were the voices of creatures unjustly struck and punished, doomed to eternal anguish without wrong or cause. A moan came from the sea, and the sweat broke out on her forehead as for the first time in her life the deadly fear of her own existence came upon her out of the darkness. “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a child conceived. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day.” The voices died away, lamenting till the end, and she did not sleep again. There was no dawn, only a thinning of the darkness into a clammy grey veil of
fear. When she went on deck there was no sea to be seen at all, only that horrible wall of fog forever closing in, and she lingered only long enough to ask what had made those terrible sounds in the night.

  “Only the whales, ma’am,” they told her, and she went below and laughed at herself because she had been so afraid.

  There was no danger after the fog, only a glorious sweeping onward to a haven that one could think of now as not so far away. They had been months at sea and she had embroidered a whole exquisite layette of baby clothes and laid it away in silver paper. New Zealand was only two weeks away when she locked the long, delicately scented brocade box that contained it, and hung the key round her neck on a golden chain. Then for the twentieth time she took out all her trousseau dresses, shook them and brushed them, pinched out the laces and smoothed the ribbons. It was fully summer now on the Island at home, with the bees humming over the heather and the gardens shimmering in the heat, but in New Zealand when she landed it would be winter, and she would be glad of the warmth of her bottle-green cloak with the orange lining. William would take her to a friend’s house, she supposed, to change into her wedding gown of lavender silk trimmed with valenciennes lace, worn with a lavender shawl with silver fringes, and a bonnet trimmed with violets and a spangled veil. She had always expected to be married in the old, grey, weather-beaten church of St. Pierre beside the harbor, where she had been christened and where she had worshipped all her life. It would be odd to be married perhaps in some wooden church, before some makeshift wooden altar, with no familiar faces about her, a stranger in a strange land. Yet perhaps she would hear the sound of the sea through the open window, as she would have done in St. Pierre, and beside her there would be William. And that was all that mattered—to stand before the altar with William—that had been the goal of the whole of her life.

  Not for a moment did she envisage him as altered at all. . . . He was still only twenty-nine. . . . She saw him as she had seen him last, speeding across the harbor in the Orion’s picket boat, his open boy’s face sobered by parting and sorrow, but still ruddy, with its natural laughter not too far away, his clear eyes fixed on her, and her alone, in loving gratitude. That was the image of him that she had carried in her heart, and she had no difficulty in imagining the image of herself that he had similarly adored through all those years, the image of the piquant woman with the exquisite figure and superb dark eyes, whose strength was his salvation and whose love his prop and stay. If even the thought of her had upheld him through the years of loneliness, what would her presence do? She was in an ecstasy already at the thought of the rapture of their mutual love, and the sweetness of home life together.

  They sighted Wellington at ten o’clock on a perfect New Zealand winter’s day. For a wonder there was no wind, and the air was crisp and still like that of an English October, when the first tang of frost is in the air. The mountains rose up opal-tinted out of the crystal sea against a sky veiled yet translucent; and seen from a distance in the clear, cool light, it seemed to Marianne that the houses were built of pearl and roofed with amethyst. That was her first impression of this country—that it had been cut with sharp precision from precious stones—and all the wind and dirt and heat that she subsequently endured were never to expunge it from her mind. Her first impression was much the same as William’s; but while he had been struck chiefly by its primordial quality, she was almost wounded by its sharpness. Like all young things, it would strike hard and not care how much it hurt. Well, she was sharp too, she flattered herself, with something of the same jewel-like brilliance. They would be a match for each other.

  From the moment when New Zealand had first been sighted she had been seated on her pyramid of boxes, in her green gown and green cloak, and the green bonnet with the orange feather, clasping the umbrella and reticule, Old Nick in his cage beside her. Now, as the Green Dolphin entered the harbor, she walked to the bulwarks and stood there waiting, erect and still, showing no outward sign of agitation; but her face was dead white, and her heart was beating so madly that she was almost suffocated. For a moment or two, as they glided toward the long quay, backed by a row of shops and offices, that had taken the place of the old wooden jetty, she could not see; then with a great effort of will she controlled herself, and gathered up mind and soul and body for the supreme moment of her life.

  She saw William a full five minutes before he saw her, for her gay little figure was almost submerged by the sudden irruption of Mrs. Dunbar’s immense grey crinoline beside her, while he stood head and shoulders above the men about him. Yes, there he was, pushing through the crowd on the quay like some great animal trampling down the undergrowth, oblivious of the fate of what got in his way, fighting his way toward the ship with a wild, mad eagerness that tore at her heart. He was wearing a sky-blue coat with brass buttons and carried his hat in his hand, and his hair was the same tossed, untidy, red-gold mop.

  Then he came nearer, and with a sudden, sickening sense of shock she saw that ten years of pioneer life had changed him almost out of recognition. Little of his great beauty remained with him, and his elegance and look of breeding had entirely vanished. He looked ten years older than his actual age. His figure had thickened, and his face, though it was kindly as ever, had coarsened. She shut her eyes and a trembling shook her. She was not an inexperienced woman, and she knew in that moment exactly what her life with this man was going to be. She was, in modern parlance, up against it, and her task was not going to be made easier by the fact, evident in the letter he had written to her father, that he had no idea what extent he had changed.

  Then once again she controlled herself. She loved this man. She remembered his old comeliness, kindness, and courtesy. These things were not yet dead in him. He was only twenty-nine. He could be saved, and she would save him. Her generation was not troubled by the fear of priggishness, or by an overdeveloped sense of its own limitations. It could found a thing called a Mutual Improvement Society without a smile. It saw life in strong contrasts of black and white, and was aware of neither presumption nor absurdity in the spectacle of what it called a good woman solemnly dedicating herself to the reformation of what it called a bad man. In sentiment, if not in intellect, Marianne was of her generation. “I’ll be a perfect wife to him,” she whispered passionately. “I’ll make a fine man of him. I will. I will. So help me God.” And if the last words were a mere platitude, and not inspired by any awareness of her own frailty, the tone of them gathered up all that she was, all that she ever could be, into one white-hot flame of genuine and dedicated courage.

  He had come to her before she was aware of it. She opened her eyes and saw him standing there, his face dead white, as though he had just passed through some moment of almost unbearable emotion, his figure set and still. “William! William!” she whispered, looking up at him with devouring eyes, the tears streaming down her face, her arms moving with a helpless childish gesture of frustration, because they were impeded by reticule and umbrella and could not embrace him. It was the still muteness of his emotion that touched her to such a tempest of tears, bearing witness as it did to the intensity and depth of his feeling. “William! My darling! Together again after all these years! At last!”

  He could no longer stand there like a stuck image. Very gently, reticule and umbrella and all, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was not the embrace that she had expected, but the immense tenderness of it was very sweet, and more suited to a public place than passion. For a long moment they clung together, and then he picked up the parrot and led the way down the gangplank. At the bottom he stopped and turned round, smiled at her, set down the cage, picked her up in his arms and lifted her onto the quay, as a man lifts his bride over the threshold of her home. Then, leaving her there with Old Nick, he went back to see about her luggage. He had not said a single word, but she did not mind, for the smile that he had given her was the old smile of the boy William whom she had known ten years ago, the old, cheerful grin full of th
e old comradeship and kindness, with, added to it, a man’s resolved good will. She was happy as she stood there waiting for him. She had the conviction that whatever the struggle and pain that lay before them, yet they would somehow win.

  Part 3 The Wife

  For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.

  THE MARRIAGE SERVICE.

  Chapter I

  1

  The thud of axes and the rasping of the great saws were the only sounds. Then, at a shout from William, echoing back and back into the forest from man to man, they gradually ceased, and the huge, primordial stillness fell like a blow. Even after all these years William was still always a little stunned by this moment at the end of the day when the silence that had been waiting in the forest passed over man’s petty little activity like a curtain of cloud falling across the face of the sun, blotting it out as though it had never been, and he never left the tiny scene of his antlike labor at the forest’s rim without feeling that when he came back in the morning it might have vanished. Subconsciously he was fully aware of its insolence, and of the retribution which man’s presumption must at last bring down upon itself. In the New World there was no sign as yet of the droughts that would one day bring ruin upon the men who had lifted their hands against the trees, but there was a premonition of them in the way the mighty silence of the wilds struck like a blow . . . and the constant threat of earthquake always kept one humble.