Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The golden sunset poured down into the clearing, and the little circle of human activity shone and glowed against the dark forest background. There were the two huts, thatched with reeds, the orderly rows of felled trees, the raised platform for the sawing of the planks, all the littered paraphernalia of the lumberman’s trade: saws and axes, planks and ropes. And there were the lumbermen themselves, foremost among them Jacky-Poto and Kapua-Manga, the Black Cloud, and Rob Scant and Isaac, hard-bitten old scoundrels who had come from no-one-knew-where and had been William’s good friends and cronies for many years, and William himself in charge of them. They were all stripped to the waist, glistening with sweat, their sun-browned bodies taut and hard yet with muscles quivering under the skin after the long, hard day of labor. In the fiery glow every note of color seemed intensified, while in the background the forest gloomed and darkened and drew a little nearer.

  William put on his coat and, contrary to his custom, left his men to round off the day’s labor without him while he turned homeward. Samuel and Susanna had arrived a week ago for a brief holiday. He and Marianne had been married for eighteen months, but this was the first visit the hard-worked Kellys had paid them, and it had to be made a happy visit, for the Kellys’ hospitable door was always thrown wide for them when they went to Wellington and they had much kindness to repay. Tonight Marianne would cook a special meal, and Tai Haruru would dine with them, and they would have a little festivity. It was a damned shame that Marianne would never invite Scant and Isaac to dinner, for they had been gentlemen once; but however hard he begged her, she would not do it. She liked and admired Samuel and Susanna, from whose house they had been married, and all the brave company of pioneering gentlefolk who had come to New Zealand since its inception as a British colony; but for the old pioneering stock, tough, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking old fighters like Scant and Isaac, she had no use whatever. And she took no trouble to conceal her dislike either. William ground his teeth together in fury as he walked along the winding forest path between the glorious shoulder-high green ferns, remembering the biting sarcasm that reduced dear old Scant and Isaac to speechless misery, the cold silence that greeted the visits of Tai Haruru, to whom as her husband’s partner she could not refuse hospitality. Then he smiled, suddenly, bitterly. Tai Haruru was a match for her, and silence was her best refuge against him. On the rare occasions when he was able to inveigle her into argument, he invariably managed to get the best of it. . . . She was paid back then for her cruelty to poor old Scant and Isaac.

  Suddenly William stopped dead on the path, swore, and slashed at the great ferns with his stick. Oh, God, this cursed hatred, his for Marianne and hers for his friends, this devilish desire to hurt that which one hated. Yes, it was devilish, not human, an alien thing trying to destroy that which was made in the image of God. He remembered dreadful faces that he had seen, faces distorted by cruelty; it had been their inhumanity that had made one shrink and avert one’s eyes. Humanity. Humanism. Those were good words, used always to connote the very antithesis of hate. He threw away his stick, and his hand was shaking. His hatred of his wife horrified him. It was the first hatred of his life, it was growing in bitterness and intensity day by day, and he had no idea what to do about it. Another man would have left her, but it never even occurred to William to do that. When he had taken her into his arms on the Green Dolphin, he had taken her for better or worse, and he was no quitter. Tai Haruru, breaking him in to a pioneer’s life, had taught him not to quit. But there was something that Tai Haruru had not taught him, and that was how to cleave to a hated bargain without hatred. It did not occur to him that such a paradox was possible, and at present he was cleaving to the wife of his bosom much as a bulldog clings to the throat of its victim, letting go just now and then to refresh himself for a new grip in ways that, judged by the standards he had accepted for years past, were normal enough, but which filled Marianne with rage and repulsion.

  He tramped on again, quickly, lest he be late. They must keep up appearances tonight for the Kellys’ sake, for the Kellys had been good to them. That was what he must do tonight: keep up appearances.

  He found it difficult now, after the long, dragged-out unhappiness of the last eighteen months, to remember with exactitude the extraordinary emotions of his wedding day and night; but he tried to do it as he blundered along through the fern. He had scarcely been sane, of course. The shock of seeing Marianne upon the deck of the Green Dolphin, when he had expected Marguerite, had first knocked him silly and then set his brain racing at a white-hot, feverish speed that had driven his body into immediate and demented action. He had realized at once how it was that he had made that hideous mistake. He had written that letter to Octavius in a maze of love, with the whiskey bottle beside him to aid composition, and, what with the drink and the love, his stupefied mind had played its silly old trick upon him and he had confused the two names that from boyhood he had always vowed were much too much alike. A series of hateful coincidences had done the rest: the omission of the bride’s name both in Octavius’ answering letter and in her own little note scrawled in unrecognizable handwriting, and the inclusion of the little bunch of primroses, Marguerite’s favorite flowers. He had seen it all in a blinding flash as his great body lumbered mechanically up the gangplank, without the slightest idea of what it was going to do when it got to the top. Then he had seen Marianne standing there by the pile of luggage and the bird cage, alone now because the Dunbars had moved away. The microscopic size of the brilliant figure, the slightly scared way in which she had been clutching reticule and umbrella, the look of rapt ecstasy on her small white face, with the eyes childishly closed, as though she were a little girl at a party who when she opened them expected to see a lighted Christmas tree, had struck from his sentimental, easygoing nature a sudden rush of almost unbearable tenderness. She had always loved him. All through his boyhood she had worked for him unceasingly. All the happiness and prosperity of his young manhood he had owed to her. She had stood by him and his father in the days of adversity. She had journeyed all alone from one world to another, through danger and discomfort, dragging that cursed parrot with her, simply to answer the cry of his heart for home and mate. Could he go to her and say that he did not love her or want her, that she must turn round and go home again? Could he ask her to face once more the danger and hardship of a long voyage just because he had made a stupid mistake? Above all, could he ask her proud spirit to face the contempt and derision of friends at home when she was returned, thrown away by a fool of a fellow who had been too tipsy even to recall correctly the name of the woman he loved? Another man might have done those things in the name of truth and common sense, but he had lacked both the strength and the cruelty. Instead he had gone to her and taken her in his arms and kissed her. Holy Moses, but he’d been a fool! He had married her for pity, exactly as his father had done. He had vowed as a boy that he would never do that, and he had done it. Holy Moses, but he’d been a fool!

  He had moved through the rest of that day in a condition so dazed that he could remember nothing at all about it now except his excruciating longing for the strong drink that had not been provided by Samuel and Susanna, who had staged his wedding. He and Marianne had been married that afternoon in Samuel’s wooden steepled Church, and he had subsequently gathered that the bride had been so magnificently arrayed that half Wellington and almost the entire crew of the Green Dolphin had gathered to see her walk from the Parsonage to the Church on Captain O’Hara’s arm; Captain O’Hara being also a sight for sore eyes in a bottle-green coat, a flowered waistcoat, and a stock so high that his round, red face had been permanently tipped backward for the rest of the afternoon. The enthusiastic crowd had waited patiently at the Church porch all through the ceremony, and had cheered themselves hoarse when the dainty little bride had appeared again, radiantly happy, her hand on her husband’s arm, the bells pealing out over her head. Of the ceremony itself William had now not the faintest recollection, but he su
pposed that he and Marianne had stood before Samuel, Captain O’Hara on the other side of Marianne, the first mate of the Green Dolphin beside him as his groomsman, Susanna and dear old Nat and a few others looking on, and that in the presence of these witnesses he had spoken these appalling words: “I, William Edmond, take thee, Marianne Véronique, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”

  Well, there it was. Those had been the words. One could not get away from words like those without being a quitter.

  2

  Their relationship as man and wife had been poisoned from the outset by his inability to satisfy her ardor. His reluctance put her in an odious position; it wounded not only her love, but her woman’s pride.

  At the evening of their wedding day his memory started functioning again with a hateful clarity. After supper she had gone up to the guest room that the Kellys had put at their disposal, accompanied by Susanna carrying the candle, and something in the way in which she had left the room, with silk skirts importantly and possessively rustling, had stung him out of his dazed condition into sudden, appalling awareness of just exactly what he had done. And Samuel, tactless, blundering ass of a fellow, had suddenly at this moment started quoting from the wedding psalms: “O well is thee, and happy shalt thou be. Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house, thy children like the olive branches round about thy table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord—”

  “Hold your tongue, Samuel!” William had bellowed suddenly at the well-meaning little man, and had dragged himself to his feet and lumbered out of the room and out into the night where the burnished stars were shining and the wind rising, and walked up and down in an agony, remembering how once he had likened this austere wind to Marguerite. Marguerite! Marguerite! Through so many years he had remembered and adored her, as a suppliant a saint. In pestilence and earthquake, in war and tumult, in pain, fear, defeat, frustration, loneliness, he had stayed himself upon the thought of her. When the better days had come, and with them the news that she was still unmarried, it had been as though the gates of heaven had opened, so glorious had been his hope. . . . No, not hope, certainty. . . . From the moment of the writing of his letter he had been perfectly certain that she would come, so certain that from that moment on he had set himself to become the sort of fellow that Marguerite’s husband should be. But in spite of much well-meaning effort he had not succeeded very well, and his lack of success had opened his eyes a very little to the slow, unconscious approximation of his standards to those of the men about him, a ten years’ process that had completely changed the boy that he had been to the man that he was. He had been a bit scared then, but not badly. Marguerite had never been a prude. She would neither condemn nor scold, she would simply see clearly, understand thoroughly, forgive completely, and then they would start again.

  Marguerite! Marguerite! But as he had paced up and down in the cool, lovely wind, he had said to himself that he was not married to Marguerite. It was not Marguerite’s forgiving love that waited for him in that attic room. It had all been for nothing, that grim battle to recapture some of the integrity that he had lost. It had been for nothing . . . nothing . . . and how in the name of all that was fantastic could the man whom he had tried to make anew for Marguerite become the husband of that sallow-faced, passionate, possessive little woman for whom at this moment he felt nothing but dislike? Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he had swung down the hill to Hobson’s Saloon and spent the night there.

  He guessed that Hobson and Mrs. Hobson had been hard put to it next morning to get him into sufficiently good shape to present himself at the Parsonage, together with the wagon that was to convey himself and his bride and her luggage to her new home. But they had managed it, and he had been there, hat in hand, shamefaced, miserable, obviously the worse for wear, but completely sobered and deadly polite as he stood in the parlor and bowed to his wife and wished her good morning. Samuel and Susanna, retreating from a situation which completely bewildered them, had seen to it that the two were alone together.

  Marianne’s face had been dead white, with dark smudges beneath the sleepless eyes, but she had held herself stiffly erect and drawn on her gloves with nonchalance. “Good morning,” she had whispered, and then gasped and said no more. It was her nature to turn in fury on those who injured her, but the pain of this wound that William had dealt her had been so great that it had struck her speechless. She had turned aside from his offered arm and swept before him out of the room and down the steps, and settled herself without his assistance in the wagon, the parrot on one side of her, her husband on the other, and her luggage piled up behind. It had been the light farm wagon belonging to the settlement, and Victoria, the great roan mare who pulled the plow, had been between the shafts. Susanna had had the forethought to put a cushion on the hard plank seat for the bride, and to stow rugs and a basket of provisions behind the trunks, and she had tied white ribbons on the whip and on Victoria’s harness.

  It had been the sight of those white ribbons that had enabled both William and Marianne to thrust their misery out of sight and don the smiling faces suitable for the occasion. They had remembered suddenly that they were bride and bridegroom and had reacted automatically to the remembrance. Samuel and Susanna, coming out to wave good-by to them, had thought that perhaps nothing was wrong after all except William’s habitual lack of sobriety, of which it was earnestly to be hoped that his good wife would soon cure him.

  The journey, slow and rough going with the laden wagon bumping over roads that were never more than a cart track, and often a great deal less, and involving several cold nights spent in the open, had most unexpectedly proved almost happy. It had brought out all that was best in Marianne: her courage, her love of adventure, her passionate delight in new experience, her joy in beauty. And William, observing the fortitude with which this elegant, fashionable little woman endured the first rigors of a life for which little in her previous existence had prepared her, had been seized with compunction. He had not sufficiently realized, he had told himself, great, hulking, strong fellow that he was, how hard this life would be for a woman, and his huge natural kindness had welled up through his bitterness and enveloped Marianne in the old tenderness. The thing was done now, he had said to himself. Nothing for it now, so far as he could see, but to make the best of a bad job. And so when driving was easy, he had driven with his arm round his wife, to ease the jolting, and each evening he had made her a little tent with the rugs under the wagon, and built a fire to warm her, and had cooked her delicious pioneer meals in the open, and laughed and joked and told her stories of this land, to which she listened with the delight of a child listening to fairy tales, a delight that touched him to renewed tenderness. . . . If only they could have gone on forever like this, he had thought, not living but just playing at it, then it would not be so bad. Traveling is always like a children’s game, he had thought, with its picnic meals and makeshift sleeping places, its sense of having escaped alike from past and future; it is the childishness of it that one enjoys. But games don’t last; presently it is reality again, with past and future barbing the easy jests and rendering the idle actions consequential.

  One night, as he had sat by the fire preparing their evening meal while Marianne lay with her weary, aching limbs stretched upon the rugs beneath the shelter of the wagon, he had forced himself to speak of Marguerite. It had been torture to speak of her to this other woman, but he had felt that he must know whether the mistake that he had made had caused her suffering.

  “Marguerite is—well?” he had asked.

  “Well, but a good deal changed from the girl that you remember,” Marianne had replied.

  “How—changed?” he had asked.

  “Like so many beautiful women, she has become lazy. It is always the way; when a woman has a pret
ty face, too much attention is paid her and she thinks of herself as a queen with nothing to do but sit still and smile and receive homage.”

  William had sat silent, for he had not been able to reconcile this picture with the Marguerite whom he had known.

  “She is assiduous in attentions to Mamma and Papa,” Marianne had continued. “She is affectionate, and they are the immediate entourage; that is the explanation, I imagine, for I do not think that she ever feels very deeply. She has not married, you know, though she has had many offers. It appears that she has not been able to summon the emotion that would have enabled her to overcome her natural reluctance for exertion.”

  “Marriage is certainly full of exertion,” William had said dryly. The exertion of being Marianne’s husband was, he had felt, going to wear him out completely before he was much older. “Did she feel the parting from you?” he had asked again, painfully and tentatively.

  “If she did, she gave no sign of it. She made the good-bys easy with her laughter, for she still has that happy gift of enjoying everything enormously. She enjoyed getting my trousseau ready, and she was laughing when she waved good-by to me. I expect she was glad that I was leaving her to rule with undisputed sway at home.”

  Though these obviously prejudiced statements had told him little, yet William had extracted two crumbs of comfort from them: whatever her emotions might be, Marguerite was still the mistress of them, and though by his stupidity he had deprived himself of her adorable companionship, he was not guilty of having taken it away from Sophie and Octavius. No life seemed wrecked except his own.

  And so, once again in the sunset light, they had come to the hilltop from which one looked down on the settlement and the creek. This was the moment that he had looked forward to almost beyond all others; pausing at the top of the hill and showing Marguerite the home that he had made for her beside the creek. But with Marianne beside him he had not stopped, he had driven straight on down the hill. “That is our house, the one with the flower garden running down toward the water,” he had said; and when Marianne had cried out aloud in delight, he had forced himself to smile and meet her eyes, but he had not been able to say any more.