Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  Passing now are the ghosts of the dead.

  The winds are hushed, the rude waves hide their head;

  And the fount flows silently,

  And the breeze forgets to sigh,

  And the torrent to moan

  O’er the rock and stone,

  For the dead pass by.

  Kapua-Manga dropped his flute and sang no more, and one by one the Maoris arose, bowed, and passed away into the night. The white folk sat silent, listening to the voice of Tawhiri-Matea crying in the forest, and to the sound of the creek murmuring over the stones on its journey to the great god Tangaroa.

  Then Tai Haruru spoke. “A queer myth, this of the immortality of the human soul. Strange how it persists.”

  “My friend, truth must always persist,” said Samuel, swinging round; and, defrauded of the souls of those dusky children who had slipped away into the night before he could recover from the mesmerism of Kapua-Manga’s chanting, rise to his feet and speak to them of Christ, he fixed his burning eyes upon the heathen at his side. Tai Haruru immediately arose; and turning from Samuel with the gesture of courtesy almost identical with the gesture of Black Cloud when he turned with tact from the subject of the iniquities of the Red Garment, he bowed to Marianne and Susanna and went away also into the night.

  William chuckled. “Slippery eels, these heathen,” he said. “But isn’t their faith as good as yours, Kelly? The Maoris worship their gods of wind and water and forest, and they die with magnificent courage believing that their souls will live on in Reinga. And Tai Haruru—he calls himself a heathen, but his reverence for life could not be deeper if he gave to life the name of God.”

  “The Maoris are without salvation,” declaimed Samuel heavily. “They go to their spirit land sighing and mourning, they speak of the change of death as the change from day to night. They have not learned that to die is to live. They are without hope. As for your friend Haslam, he, too, without salvation, is a man bereft of hope, a dead tree, a giant of the forest smitten by lightning whose leaves will never bud again.”

  They found that they were alone, for Marianne and Susanna had rustled away to the kitchen to wash up the dishes. William fetched himself a drink, for his misery and despair were heavy upon him, and then came back to Samuel again.

  “Salvation’s a fine-sounding word,” he grumbled. “One of those big words you parsons are always using and don’t yourselves know the meaning of.”

  “I know the meaning of salvation,” said Samuel, “and so do you. I offered it to you once before and you refused it.”

  He gripped his hands together again between his knees, praying for wisdom in his dealings with this man. His previous sermon, he remembered, had gone off William like water off a duck’s back. But then he had offered William salvation through a way of life that was alien to him. “It is out of one’s own sort of life,” had said Susanna at the time, “that the gate of salvation opens.” Well, William was living his own sort of life, and what with the drink and one thing and another a nice sort of mess he was making of it, as Samuel had foretold. Yet it remained his sort of life, that he had chosen, and from somewhere within it there must be the way out to the farther country.

  “You are making your good wife excessively unhappy,” he said. He had not meant to say that. The words were drawn from him by the nauseating smell of William’s whiskey and by a sudden stifled sound from indoors, as though a woman wept.

  William set down his glass. “It’s a misfit,” he growled. He had not meant to say that, either. The worst of Samuel was that his sincerity always dragged forth the truth, as though upon a fishhook. An uncomfortable little man to have to do with, though one couldn’t help liking him.

  “And the hell of it is,” he continued, “that Marianne loves me and I’ve never loved her.” He dropped his voice. “Since we’ve been man and wife I’ve come to hate her,” he said heavily.

  “Why did you marry her?” asked Samuel.

  William sighed and was silent. He had vowed that he would never tell a soul of the mistake that he had made, for there was the danger that the knowledge might come round to Marianne.

  Samuel looked at him keenly. It had struck him as odd that before the bride’s arrival he should have been asked to call the banns of marriage between William Edmond and Marguerite Félicité, and that after she had arrived it should turn out that her bridegroom had been mistaken in her names and that she was Marianne Véronique. He had let the mistake pass at the time—there had been nothing else to do—and he asked no questions now. It was the future, not the past of this man, with which he was concerned. He counted William as one of his flock, and himself as responsible for his happiness as a father for that of his child.

  “The thing is done now,” he said sternly.

  “Of course,” said William with a touch of arrogance. “And I’m no quitter. Hate it or not, I’ve never yet made a bargain and not stuck to it.”

  “Yet to stick to a hated bargain with hatred is to damn your soul in hell,” Samuel reminded him.

  Poor William groaned in acquiescence.

  “It is not impossible to cleave to it with love,” continued Samuel.

  William emitted a contemptuous snort.

  “No,” insisted Samuel. “Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing. If I say to you that hatred is only the reverse side of love, you’ll tell me that I’m a liar. Yet it’s true. Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin. To possess one is to possess the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.”

  “I don’t want metaphysics,” growled William. “I want practical instructions.”

  “We’re not entirely human,” said Samuel. “There’s divinity in all of us. And as in the divine regard there is no shadow of hatred, there must have been some moment in your life together when you loved your wife?”

  William rubbed his nose, considering. “There was that moment when I met her at Wellington,” he said. “I didn’t hate her when I saw her standing there on the deck of the Green Dolphin, with Old Nick in his cage beside her. She looked such a little bit of a thing—and she’d brought that damned parrot across hundreds of miles of ocean just to please me. I took her in my arms and kissed her. I’ve never felt more tender to a woman than I did to Marianne then.”

  “There was your moment of vision,” said Samuel, “and from now on you will live your life by the light of it. In faith that what was then, is, that love is coexistent with hatred, you will take your married life with this woman and wrest it into conformity with that one moment.”

  “Eh?” said William.

  “With all the strength that you have,” said Samuel, “you will endeavor to give to your wife, through every moment of your life together, for however many years it may last, the same joy that I have no doubt you gave her when you took her in your arms on the deck of the Green Dolphin.”

  “Not possible,” said William. “Just wild idealistic moonshine.”

  “I agree that the task is superhuman,” said Samuel. “I did not say that you would accomplish it, I said that you should endeavor to do so with all the strength that you have. Fortunately for us men, when human endeavor is strained to the utmost it taps divine energy, and the two together are invariably sufficient for salvation. If you lend your life to this task in this way, you will undoubtedly save your wife from disaster.”

  “Salvation again!” groaned William. “Always salvation. And who am I that should set myself up to save Marianne? She’s trying to save me, she’ll tell you—from the drink and one thing and another.”

  “Give her the happiness of thinking that sh
e’s done it,” said Samuel. “To think she’s saved you will save her from the misery of her present sense of frustration. She’s a proud woman, and her sense of failure is poisoning her whole life. As for you, you’re capable of both a self-abnegation and a humility beyond her power at any time; and there’s no abnegation to touch that of letting another have the praise of what is in truth your own accomplishment, no humility so pleasing to God. Well, there is the choice. You can acquiesce in things as they are, or you can wrest them by the power of faith the other way round. It’s the old choice between chaos and creation, darkness and light. Always the same old choice—which side of the coin do you want?”

  He finished abruptly, knocked out his pipe, and got up. Leaving William slumped in his chair, his mind swinging heavily this way and that between those two alternatives of chaos and creation, the one so vile and the other so impossible, he made his way through the heavy, sweet scents of the garden to that gate in the palisade that opened upon the primeval wilderness. He stood there holding to it, his knuckles showing white through the skin, the sweat standing out on his forehead as he prayed with desperation for the souls of men. Behind him in the house William was blundering to a choice that might be for him the choice between salvation and damnation, and before him, it seemed to his fevered imagination, the tall figures moved weeping through the fern, dusky children whose hearts were torn between the lust of killing and the grief with which they watched the heroes go down to the darkness of the grave. Sheep having no shepherd. He found that the gate was unlocked. He opened it and made his way between the walls of fern into the darkness of the forest. But he saw no one, he heard nothing except the sighing of the wind in the treetops, the crying of a night bird, the strange rustlings of small beasts in the undergrowth. Not yet. The darkness rose up before him like a wall, like the invisible frontier of which he had been told, that frontier that the white man crossed at his peril. Yet as he stood there, straining his eyes into the darkness as a man upon a mountaintop strains forward to see a far-off glimpse of the promised land, the certainty came to him that one day he would cross it, carrying with him the saving knowledge of the love of God. He might cross it to his martyrdom, but martyrdom held no terrors for him. The only thing he had not relinquished, when he gave himself to Christ, was the right to follow his Master to the cross.

  5

  With sleeves tucked up and large aprons over their spreading skirts the two ladies washed up the dishes. There was scarcely room for two crinolines in the small kitchen, but they were accustomed now to achieving some sort of workable compromise between current fashion and pioneer life, and if it occurred to them sometimes that it would be easier to wear tattooing and feathers, as the Maoris did, the immodesty of the thought did not find expression on their lips.

  “I hate the man!” said Marianne fiercely, scrubbing violently at a saucepan; and she burst into sudden tears.

  “Which man, dear?” asked Susanna, wisely ignoring the tears, and gently and unobtrusively wiping away the soapsuds with which Marianne’s enraged splashings had sprinkled her.

  Marianne stopped, choked, and stood with one hand across her eyes, fighting her tears. Ridiculous to cry like this! Ridiculous and humiliating before this woman who was socially her inferior. She blew her nose violently, conquered the weakness, and resumed her scrubbing. “Mr. Haslam,” she said. “His influence upon William has been disastrous.”

  “Don’t make him a scapegoat,” said Susanna.

  “A what?” demanded Marianne.

  “A scapegoat. It’s such an easy thing to do. It’s such a comfort, always, to blame one’s failure upon someone else.”

  Marianne ceased her labors for a moment and drew herself up to the full imperious height of her tiny figure, wiping the soapsuds off her fingers with incomparable dignity. Was Susanna presuming to preach to her? She took too much upon herself. She was not a parson, merely a parson’s wife.

  “My dear, in looks you remind me so much of Queen Victoria,” said Susanna. “Here, let me do the washing, it’s less tiring, and you’re quite exhausted.”

  She pushed Marianne gently out of the way and had the saucepan clean in the twinkling of an eye. “I’ve been washing up all my life,” she explained. “My father was a country doctor, you know, and he was so poor that we lived like a laborer’s family. There were many children, and my mother died giving birth to the last. I was the eldest. When my father died, and the children were all out in the world, there was no money for me, so I became housekeeper to an old clergyman in Manchester. I was not fit to teach, or do anything like that because, you see, I had never had any proper schooling. It was hard work in Manchester, but I did not mind, because I met Samuel there. So you see I have always been used to hard work—not like you, who have lived as a lady. You get too tired. You ought to let William help you.”

  There was humility in her tone, but no subservience. It conveyed to Marianne that though in the old world one of them had lived like a lady and the other had not, yet in the new world they were equal. Marianne’s figure relaxed a little, though she still continued to speak tartly.

  “You have just told me I am a failure. It would be a humiliating confession of it, indeed, if I allowed my husband to do half my housework.”

  “It is not in the care of your house that you fail,” said Susanna.

  “You are being insufferable!” snapped Marianne.

  “Yes,” said Susanna. “I suppose I am. Forgive me.”

  “Now you’ve begun, Susanna, you’d better go on,” said her hostess in a towering rage. “It’s no good speaking half your mind and not the whole of it. Go on. Tell me. Why am I making a failure of my marriage?”

  “You’re too independent,” said Susanna. “We love those whom we serve. You never let William serve you.”

  “He smashes everything.”

  “No Christian woman should love her china more than she loves her husband.”

  “Susanna, how dare you!”

  “I really don’t know how I dare,” said Susanna, marveling at herself. “I suppose it is because I am going away tomorrow and I am so sorry that you are not happy.”

  “I’d be happy if it wasn’t for Mr. Haslam,” fumed Marianne.

  “You mean if it wasn’t for hating Mr. Haslam. It’s a pity you hate him when he’s God’s gift in your life.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Susanna? Are you suggesting that I should fall in love with Timothy Haslam?”

  Susanna flushed crimson with painful embarrassment at the mere thought. “Oh, no, no! I just meant that if you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe that everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.”

  “I definitely refuse to love Mr. Haslam,” said Marianne. “And I refuse to insult Almighty God by thinking that any gift of His to me could take the form of that wicked old heathen. Susanna, that you should dare to talk to me like this in my own kitchen!”

  “Forgive me,” said Susanna. “You know, dear, it is very difficult for parsons and their wives. They must speak the truth as they see it, for that is the work to which God has called them, but when they are no better than those they preach to, and possibly worse, it is very irritating for their congregation and very embarrassing for themselves. I assure you, dear, that there are times when I wish with all my heart and soul that Samuel was a cattle dealer. . . . Though, to be sure, he’d make a very bad cattle dealer.”

  “And he makes a good parson,” said Marianne with sudden generosity. “And you make a good parson’s wife. You’ve said your say now, Susanna, and can rest easy.”

  Her anger had died out of her, its place taken by a sudden sense of weariness and hopelessness. Her mind turned this way and that, repudiating Susanna’s reasons for her wretchedness, seeking others.

  “If only we had a child!” she said suddenly. “I have a boxful o
f lovely little clothes all put away. Did you ever have a child, Susanna?”

  “Yes,” said Susanna. “It was in Manchester. We could not afford a good doctor, and the one we had was not very clever with me, and I lost the babe and could not have another.”

  “Poor Susanna!” said Marianne.

  “I think that you should rest more, work less hard,” said Susanna. “And you should not hate Mr. Haslam. You will not have a child while you hate.”

  Marianne laughed. “You know nothing of eugenics, Susanna!” she said.

  “No,” said Susanna. “I don’t know what they are, even. But my grandmother told me that a woman has more hope of a child if her heart and mind and body are soft and gentle like the earth in spring. My grandmother was a country woman, a farmer’s daughter.”

  Their work was finished and they went together to Susanna’s bedroom door, and after a moment’s hesitation they kissed each other, with affection and respect, and then Marianne went to her room.

  It was filled with moonlight and the scent of flowers, and the long blue curtains of the fourposter stirred very gently. The air that blew in from the garden was cool and refreshing now, after the heat of the kitchen, and Marianne knelt down before the open window and with a sigh of relief lifted her heavy hair off her hot forehead. Frustration was still dogging her, even in this new land of opportunity. Was there anything in what Susanna had said? Would she have more hope of winning William if she schooled herself to give herself into his hands in submission and helplessness? To cultivate weaknesses of her own seemed a strange way of winning her husband from his, but she had to own that in the eighteen months of their married life dominance and strength had utterly failed. And hatred? Her hatred and jealousy of Tai Haruru had not caused William to love her more, but less. William was faithful in friendship and incredibly obstinate. Yet how could she cease hating? She had always had strong and unswerving likes and dislikes, and she did not see how she was to deny herself her hatred of Tai Haruru without denying her own nature. She must just act, she supposed, act all the time as she had been acting for a short while at supper tonight, be so consistently polite that William would cease to notice her dislike of his friend. . . . Keep up appearances. . . . Possibly that was more important than she had hitherto realized. She had wondered tonight if the deceptions of civilization were an achievement or an absurdity. Possibly they were an achievement; something creative. And would she care how much, or how exhaustingly, she must act if by her acting she won William? . . . If she won William. . . . Suddenly she remembered that night aboard the Orion when she had wondered if she would ever experience either the fairyland of mutual love, or the homely place beyond it where men and women who have so loved put a light in the window of the house of life and kindle a flame on the hearth. She and William had had no fairyland; for some reason or other the woman that she was had not been the same woman whom he had loved and dreamed of and idealized for so many years; and though they lived together, there was neither brightness nor warmth in their life. She remembered that on that night she had suddenly for the first time in her life turned aside from the forcing of events into a mold of her own contriving, bent her head and taken her hand off the tiller, and waited for something outside herself to take her in charge. She had felt like a little child lost in the dark, she remembered, just sitting there weeping and waiting. But she had felt at peace, as peaceful as Susanna must feel when she took all that came as the gift of God. She dropped her head on her arms, stretched along the window sill; and though she did not pray, she abandoned herself, and wept and waited.