Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  It was in this attitude of humility, sobbing with her head on her arms, that William found her.

  “Marianne! Marianne!” he cried in consternation, and knelt down beside her and took her in his arms. She said nothing, but clung to him like a child and sobbed on as he clumsily stroked her hair and sought desperately in his fuddled mind for the right words to comfort her, and to express aright the resolution that he had just made out there on the verandah, after Samuel had left him.

  “See here, Marianne,” he said at last, “I’ve been a clumsy fool since our marriage, a drunken, selfish brute of a fellow, and I’ve made you wretched. But I see my fault and I ask pardon. If you’ll forgive me, I’ll start afresh and do better. Please God I’ll be a good husband to you yet. Say you forgive me, Marianne.”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” sobbed Marianne passionately. “If only you’ll love me, William. If only you’ll love me.”

  “I do love you, my girl,” said William steadily. “When I do or say things that anger you and you doubt my love, think of our wedding morning, when we met on the Green Dolphin and kissed each other with that blessed old parrot looking on. You did not doubt then that I loved you. When things go wrong between us, think of that moment and say to yourself, ‘That’s William. That’s what he really feels for me.’ That was a good moment, my girl. That was our real marriage. We took each other then for better for worse. That was a good moment. That was the moment that must set the standard for our life together.”

  Marianne had ceased sobbing and was quiet in his arms, trembling a little, very small and subdued. “That and this,” she said. “I’m sorry, William, that I’ve hated Mr. Haslam, and Scant and Isaac. I will try not to hate your friends.”

  William was altogether dumbfounded by the humility of her bent head and gentle childish words. If she could always be like this, then perhaps it would not be so hard. But, of course, she wouldn’t be. The childishness of Marianne at this moment was not a facet of her nature that could be expected to appear other than rarely.

  “You fight the hatred, and I’ll fight the drink, my girl,” he said. “And then maybe we’ll not do so badly.”

  He lifted her to her feet and took his arms from her, but she was so exhausted that she nearly fell. She lifted her arms and then dropped them again. “I believe, William,” she said weakly, “that you’ll have to unhook me down the back.”

  He was once again dumbfounded. Never before had she even tolerated his clumsy presence in her room while she was dressing or undressing, and now she wanted to be unhooked down the back. Breathing stertorously, his hands shaking with his anxiety, he bent to his task, cursing himself for that last pull at the whiskey that he had taken before he had come to her. A man needed to be cold sober for a job like this. But his good angel must have been in attendance, for somehow he got all the hooks out of the eyes without dragging more than a mere half dozen away from their moorings in the silk, and he took down her heavy hair and brushed it, and then, tactfully withdrawing so that she could do it up in its curl papers (for he had the sense to realize that not if they lived to be eighty must he let out even by so much as a hint that he knew about those curl papers beneath her nightcap), he took her little shoes to the kitchen and polished them, and set out the breakfast china, and smashed the slop basin and hid the pieces, and hoped to God she would not storm and scold when she found them in the morning.

  When he went back to their room, she was already asleep, her cheek on her hand, her nightcap with its goffered frills tied demurely beneath her chin. He was reminded suddenly of that morning when he had looked out of his window in Green Dolphin Street and seen her leaning from her window in Le Paradis, her face transfigured by her passionate delight in the beauty of the morning. He had shared her delight and felt at one with her then. And they had had a jolly adventure together that morning. She was a good adventuress and a good comrade. Perhaps, after all, it would not be so bad.

  Chapter II

  1

  Marianne dressed herself as quickly as she could. All was bustle this morning, for William with his lumbermen was taking the timber down the creek to the sea to be loaded there upon a timber ship sailing from Wellington to Sydney: the Thrush; skipper, Captain Parker. During the two years since the Kellys’ visit, something very like prosperity had come to the settlement, and Marianne was aware that William and Tai Haruru, just men, did not hesitate, albeit reluctantly, to attribute it to her own unresting ambition and creativeness. They had thought themselves doing well when she came to them, but now they were definitely prosperous. Whether the prosperity was worth the unending, driving exertion of mind as well as body that she expected from them, Tai Haruru was doubtful, and William in no doubt at all—it wasn’t—but it was the price that both of them paid for domestic peace. Marianne knew it, and smiled as she dressed herself. She had gained enormously in self-mastery during these last two years. She had learned now not to let her sharp tongue run away with her but to use it as a tool for a set purpose; and when she had got her way with it, the atmosphere of peace and gentleness that ensued was also her deliberate creation—the greater the yielding of the males, the greater the subsequent calm in which she permitted them to bask.

  It had been her suggestion that the timber should go down the creek by barge to the sea instead of being hauled slowly and laboriously overland by wagon to Wellington. She had plunged boldly for the expenditure of building the barges and erecting a strongly built stone jetty running out into deep water at the little fishing hamlet at the coast, with shacks for the men, and sheds and yards for the timber. She had also driven William and Tai Haruru into employing many more lumbermen in the forest, and shaping the whole business on a far more ambitious scale. There was even an office on the quay at Wellington now, with a trustworthy Scotsman named MacTavish in charge, and Marianne herself took the long journey into Wellington regularly, and stayed with Susanna, and put the fear of God into MacTavish and his clerks. The enormous increase of the business upon insufficient capital had been a gamble, but they had won it. “Haslam & Ozanne” was now one of the chief timber exporting businesses in North Island.

  Marianne enjoyed putting the fear of God into MacTavish and the clerks, and she enjoyed dealing with the finances of the business. William had no head for figures, and Tai Haruru hated them, but her mathematical brain delighted in them as a conjurer in his colored balls. For hour after hour she would sit still and absorbed, her back straight as a ramrod, never lifting her eyes from the ledgers except just now and again to swing round and glare like a gorgon at a clerk who had tittered or dropped something, or who was slacking. She had eyes in the back of her head, the clerks thought. They hated her. She always seemed to know what they were doing, no matter how absorbed she might seem to be in her work.

  Yet, though she was so absorbed, she was never unconscious of the life of the harbor going on outside her window, of the gulls and the ships and the familiar harbor sounds. In spirit she was very near the Island of her childhood on those days of hard work in the office. One day, she thought, when she was an old woman, she would like to go back to St. Pierre, sail into the harbor and let down her anchor forever. William could not go back, of course, because of that regrettable incident in his youth, but probably William would die first. Men usually did. There always seemed to be more widows than widowers. . . . Men succumbed earlier than women to the exhaustion of married life, William had told her once in a fit of temper. . . . But in any case, before she could know rest, she had her ambition to satisfy. She must win for herself and William that great house and wealth, and servants and flocks and herds such as Job had in the days of his prosperity. Well-to-do though they might be by pioneer standards, she still had to work harder than any peasant’s wife on the faraway Island, and her clothes were shabby and worn and she was always very tired. But it would all be worth while, if she could get what she wanted in the end.

  As she dressed, she reminded herself happily of all
that she had gained already. First of all there was William himself. She believed that by dint of many and most persevering scoldings she had more or less won him from the drink. He was a new man, healthier, happier, less addicted to bad company, full of admiration for her efficiency, touchingly grateful when, following Susanna’s advice, she did violence to her own nature and invited his so-called co-operation in her housework. He was grateful, too, for the effort she made to be more polite to Tai Haruru. Of course there were still times when he made her life wretched, when he was morose, rough-spoken, got drunk with Scant and Isaac, went to Wellington to fetch the stores and gambled away all the money she had given him to pay for them, came back to answer her reproaches with sullen silence or a sudden, blinding rage that left her oddly shaken and afraid. Yet she said to herself that he knew now that he had a wonderful wife, and when the quick rage had passed, and his naturally sunny temper had asserted itself again, he would take her in his arms and tell her so, and she would forget that just for a moment she had been afraid. She never tried to analyze this fear. If ever she woke up in the night and heard a small, insistent, nagging voice asking deep in her soul if their marriage was really as satisfactory as she thought it was, she immediately silenced it. Of course it was. She had made a new man of him, and he knew it. She had revolutionized the timber business, and he and Tai Haruru knew it. She was a marvelous wife and he was deeply aware of the fact. . . . And now she was to bear him a son.

  At last! She had almost given up hope, for she was now thirty-eight years old, but at last the miracle had happened. In another month William would take her to stay with Susanna in Wellington, where there was a good doctor, and soon after that the boy would be born. It was amazingly good of Susanna to have promised to take her in and nurse her, but she was not at all well and she needed the help of another woman. And Susanna was immensely interested in Marianne’s little son. It was her opinion that his flame of life had been lit by Marianne’s striving after gentleness. Marianne herself thought that was all moonshine. It was not gentleness but determination that had produced the child. She had willed the boy with all the strength that she had, and had issued her commands to Almighty God during a very long period, and she was not accustomed either to having her will defeated or her commands disregarded. She always got everything in the end.

  But it wasn’t a very pleasant process getting the baby. For the first time in her life she felt really ill, and for the first time in her life she longed for her mother. But it wasn’t any good now longing for Sophie, for Sophie was dead. She had become ill soon after Marianne had left the Island, and after two years of pain she had died, and now Marguerite, still unmarried, was alone at Le Paradis with a totally blind father. If she found life hard, she gave no sign of it, for her letters were always cheerful, and Marianne in her busy life took the letters at their face value and did not worry about her sister. As for William, he never mentioned Marguerite at all. When the letters came, he read them in silence, and then handed them back to Marianne. But he had been very upset over Sophie’s death and had wept for her in the most foolish way, considering that she was only his mother-in-law. Marianne herself had not grieved overmuch; but now, as she waited for the birth of the child, she found herself thinking of her mother constantly. Even so, in this same sickness and weariness, had her mother waited for her.

  It was autumn, and the wind rattled the casement. They were a bit late, thought Marianne, getting the wood off. The autumn storms would be on them before they knew where they were. The wood should have been shipped earlier. It would have been, but for Scant being ill and William taking so much time off from the forest to help in the house because of the baby, and Tai Haruru having to do her work at the Wellington office. The delay was a pity, but she had been so ill these last few months that they had had to help her. Well, if William was not too slow dawdling down the creek, the wood would still be got off in time.

  She finished her dressing, opened the window wide, and leaned out. The sky looked curiously veiled, as though it were dusty, and in spite of the wind it was stiflingly hot. It had not rained much lately, and the queer dusty look that was in the sky was over the whole earth too. The woods looked desiccated, the autumn flowers in the garden drooped and had a dirty look; even the exquisite mountains had lost something of their clarity of form and purity of color. “Earthquake weather,” thought Marianne suddenly. “I don’t like it.”

  She could never accustom herself to earthquakes. They left her as oddly shaken and afraid as did William’s occasional rages, and before they came she had that same feeling of unease, the sense that all was not well, somehow, beneath the foundations. Vigorously she thrust the sensation from her. Of course all was well: with the weather, the timber business, and her life. Everything was always well when a resolute spirit such as her own stood at the helm. She took a clean handkerchief from her drawer and went downstairs to give William his breakfast.

  But he had laid the table himself and was just finishing his meal as she came into the room, his head tipped back and a huge blue teacup turned upside down over his nose. He absorbed the last sugary drop vulgarly from the bottom of it, set it down, wiped his mouth on a large and gaudy bandanna, jumped up and came, to her. “Sleep well?” he asked her solicitously. He was hugely delighted about the baby, immensely patient with her, tender and understanding over her whims and petulances. “Hate to leave you,” he growled now, sighing noisily, and took her in his arms.

  But looking up at him, she saw that his tawny eyes were dancing, and she felt a pang of intolerable anger and jealousy. It was always so when he was going off, on his own, on some rather lengthy expedition. Upon these occasions, when he should have been heartsick at parting from her, he looked like a schoolboy going home for the holidays, and it made it no better when he pulled a long face and sighed lugubriously like this, for always his eyes were dancing.

  “It’ll be hateful, left here alone with Mr. Haslam,” she said pettishly, shutting her eyes that she might not see the merriment in his but only feel the strength of his arms about her. “He should go this time, not you.”

  “Taking the wood to the sea is always my job,” said William cheerfully. “It needs no special knowledge, only good will and muscle. Old Tai Haruru has his work cut out here, training that new batch of men. A kauri tree must be felled just right, and there’s no man in the world knows more about it than he does.”

  She withdrew herself from his arms. “You’re always glad of an excuse to leave me,” she said harshly.

  “Now, sweetheart, that’s not fair,” he protested, mopping his forehead with the bandanna. “If I seem a bit cheery this morning, it’s for thinking that maybe down by the shore I’ll be catching a glimpse of the old Green Dolphin sailing along to Wellington.”

  “Is she due in again?” asked Marianne almost eagerly, and, sitting down, she poured out a cup of tea and allowed herself to have her thoughts diverted. The Green Dolphin was still speeding gloriously about the seaways of the world, with New Zealand as the focal point of her activities, and they occasionally saw Captain O’Hara and Nat, and were always the happier for seeing them. The jolly old Green Dolphin was a spiritual power in their lives. That morning of their faraway childhood when they had discovered her had been the only time when they had been perfectly happy together.

  “You’re a good traveler,” said William. “I’d like to travel with you in the bush one day. Right over the Maori frontier. It’s a new world there. Make you open your eyes wide.”

  She looked at him over the rim of her teacup and he saw a sudden flash of excitement light her face. So she was still an adventuress at heart. He was glad. But all she said was, “The Green Dolphin is coming from China this time, isn’t she? I’m glad of that. We’re using the last caddy-ful of tea.”

  The problem of overseas supplies was a perpetual one for housewives. In Wellington, when the tea was running low, Susanna lived with one eye on the tea caddy and the other
on the flagstaff that would announce the arrival of an overdue tea clipper, and when she saw the flag run up, she used the last spoonful. But Marianne could not even do that. When the tea was finished, she just had to wait in patience. One learned patience in a country where one’s newspapers were eight months old and it took five months for a correspondent in Nelson in South Island to receive a reply to a letter sent to Auckland in North Island and answered by return of post.