Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The next day she was speechless with exhaustion and seemed to have aged ten years in the night. William, also weary, with heavily sagging shoulders, had the wisdom to leave her alone. After breakfast, a farce of a meal at which neither of them could eat anything, he went off for a walk, leaving the house silently, with no romantic burst of song, no cheery banging of the door, and she sat all the morning on the sofa, listless, her hands folded idly in her lap. She sat as once she had sat on the deck of the Orion, like a lost child. She had taken her hand off the tiller and was waiting patiently for something beyond herself to take her in charge.

  But she was thinking none the less, thinking slowly, wearily, fumblingly, of the nature of William’s love. She did not think about Tai Haruru’s, for that had been quite simple—just the spontaneous turning of a creature to its mate. She saw that at last. They were the two halves of a whole, he and she, and one day they would come together again. “You’ll not forget me though you live to be a hundred,” he had said. Certainly she would not. The movement of her old woman’s body through the years to its appointed end would now always consciously be accompanied by the running of the little child home through the dark wood. That was simple. It was William’s love that she thought about, the slow, difficult thing that he had built up through the years to save her.

  Yes, he had saved her, and she acknowledged it. Perhaps he was right in saying that in material ways she had saved him, but spiritually it had been the other way round. What sort of woman would she have become if he had not made the mistake in that letter, if it had been Marguerite who had sailed out to New Zealand to marry him and she who had been left behind on the Island? She had a good look at the bitter woman she had been at the time when his letter came, and trembled. And what sort of woman would she have become if he had told her the truth at Wellington and packed her off home again? She dared not even take a look at that woman. And yet last night she had been furious with William because he had deceived her. “William! William!” she cried, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. How desperately hard it must have been for him. What a price he must have paid for her salvation! That was what love was—a paying of the price. That was the key that she had always been feeling after and had never found, the key that would admit her to the new state of being that she had always longed for. Just paying the price. As simple as that, and yet supremely difficult, because though there might and must be symbolic action, it was the state of mind that mattered. There had to be a childlike, humble abandonment that was the most difficult thing to achieve in all the world. She had always wanted to set her own stamp upon life—heaven knew what it would cost her to give herself up to being the wax and not the seal. Yet how she had always unconsciously loved that great principle of childlikeness, dimly aware of it often as a presence standing by her. She had loved it in the poor, loved it above all in Nat, loved it in William. William! William! “Ton peuple sera mon peuple, et ton Dieu sera mon Dieu.” From henceforth it would not be only to some earthly country that she would follow him, but she would try to follow him into his spiritual country too, to that country where great kindness reigned, where the fire blazed on the hearth, the doors were flung wide open, and men and women gave to each other all that they could. It would not be too difficult, surely. On that day when Dr. Ozanne and William had come to the Island she had quite easily run in through their open door, beside the swinging sign of the merry Green Dolphin, and found William standing before the fire. . . . How long the hours seemed now, with him out of the house. . . . She longed for him to come back from his walk that she might try and tell him something of what was in her heart, yet she knew that when he did come she would still be too shaken to say anything. They would struggle with their lunch in silence, as they had struggled with their breakfast.

  She wondered where he was. Could he be with Marguerite? She had no bitter feelings toward Marguerite now, only an immense respect. For Marguerite, loving William, and believing her sister to have been chosen instead of herself, had not become the kind of woman Marianne would have become if left behind upon the Island. She had become—what she was. And not even now did she know that she had really been William’s chosen. Marianne had assured herself of that fact yesterday. Over and over again yesterday William had assured her that he had never told Marguerite of the mistake that he had made. That he never would tell her. Marianne could rest assured of that, he had said over and over again—he would never tell Marguerite—he would never subject his wife to such a humiliation. He had never told a living soul.

  But this morning, at breakfast, he had corrected that statement, flushing all over his bald head.

  “I had forgotten, Marianne, that I told Tai Haruru. I must tell you that I told Tai Haruru.”

  Yesterday she would have been angry at this. Today she did not mind. She was glad that there should be nothing at all about her that Tai Haruru did not know.

  William came home to lunch and told her that he had been rambling over the common beyond the harbor, that lay in the opposite direction from the convent, and in proof of his statement he had brought her a comic little posy of sea lavender and sea holly. She thanked him and set it in water on the parlor mantelpiece, but, as she had expected, she was still too shaken to dare to begin to say anything. But William was immensely comforted by her gentleness. It gave him hope that when once she had recovered from the shock, things would be normal between them again. How he had ever come to let the cat out of the bag, he had not now the slightest idea. It had just somehow seemed to happen. The cat had taken sudden life to itself and simply jumped. That was the worst of hidden things. They always seemed to pop out in the end. He had spent a night of self-reproachful misery, but now, with Marianne so gentle, he began to hope again. He remembered how, far away in the Country of the Green Pastures, he had wished that there might be truth between them at last. It would be a grand thing if it were to turn out that their love was now so strong and stout that it could stand it.

  They spent a strange, silent, yet somehow not unhappy evening, William holding an open book before his nose and not reading a word, Marianne dropping knitting stitches for the first time in her life. She went to bed very early, but this time she did not lock the doors for she knew that William had grasped the fact that she must be alone.

  But desperately tired though she was, she still could not sleep, for she was torn two ways by the thought of her sister. Marguerite did not know, she had never known, she would never know. Was it fair? asked one half of Marianne, the half that had taken its hand off the tiller and was waiting to be taken in charge; and the other half replied—what did it matter after all these years? Marguerite was happy. No need to tell her now. No need to face the humiliation of telling her. It would do no good to either of them. Marguerite, after all these years, would only be distressed, and Marianne shamed as it was not right a woman should be shamed. No. Ridiculous to tell her after all these years. William had not told her. If William had not told her, why should she?

  Because only she could tell her, said the other half of Marianne. William could not—he was bound by loyalty to his wife. She was bound by nothing but her own pride. If she could break her pride, if she could do this thing, paying this price for Marguerite’s sake, would not this be love? The small, symbolic action might be the first step, the fitting of the key into the lock of a door that should admit her to another country. Had she not always been seeking another country, a magic city on the horizon just out of her reach? Would she find that it had been close to her all the time—just a state of being? Had she been to the other side of the world and come back again only to find it in the place where she had started from?

  But, no, she could not do it. How could she do it?

  The argument went on all night, but six o’clock found her up and dressing herself, very quietly so as not to disturb William, with the astonished Charlotte already roused and sent out to fetch a carriage to take her out to the Convent of Notre Dame du Castel. Se
ated before her mirror, removing her curl papers, she was astonished beyond measure to find herself embarked upon this madness. And how she was to arrange an interview with the busy Mother Superior of a convent at this hour of the morning, she had no idea. She supposed matters would arrange themselves somehow. The fact was that she had been taken in charge and seemed to have got out of bed and roused Charlotte at this ridiculous hour without any volition of her own.

  There was the carriage. Too late to turn back now.

  She was the old Marianne as she put the finishing touches to her toilette with grim determination, arranging her hair becomingly beneath her fashionable high-crowned hat, disposing the folds of her green gown carefully, and not forgetting her rings or her earrings or the cameo brooch at her throat. With just the same meticulous care had she dressed when the Maoris were sounding their war trumpet outside the settlement house, and in the same spirit had she demanded her corsets when death threatened her at the pa. She had always taken a pride in dressing up for a fight. And fighting, she had realized long ago in Dr. Ozanne’s waiting room, is never over; only, when you are old it narrows to the battlefield of your own body and soul. This, she realized, was probably only the first of a long series of skirmishes with her pride, a series that would end only with the humiliation of her deathbed. She took a clean handkerchief from her drawer, sprinkled eau de Cologne upon it, shut her reticule with a determined snap, and sallied forth.

  4

  Marguerite shut the door of the cottage behind her and stood for a moment thankfully drinking in the fresh morning air. There had been an epidemic of sickness in the village of Notre Dame, and those nuns who were experienced in nursing had been busy this last week dealing with it. But yesterday two of them had themselves fallen ill, and Marguerite had taken the place of one in an all-night vigil at the bedside of a dying old woman. It had been a trying night in the stuffy cottage, and there was still a part of Marguerite, not yet subdued, that shrank from illness. She had been glad when she had been relieved. She was glad now to step out into the sunshine of the new day. Say what one would, death was a horrid discipline, and the abandonment of it seldom easy, even for the saints.

  She glanced at her watch. She had twenty minutes before she must be in her place in the refectory for the nuns’ silent, frugal breakfast of brioches and coffee, that would be followed for her by a short sleep before the work and prayer of the day. The tide was out, and she would take a turn across the sands in the hope that the fresh air would banish her headache.

  Tall in her black draperies, walking not with the cloistered walk that William had dreaded to see but with the swinging, easy grace that she had never lost, she crossed the shining sands toward Le Petit Aiguillon. The beloved old rock towered up there ahead of her. She would walk as far as her old friend and then turn again. It was a heavenly morning, bright and blue and clear, and the familiar feel of the firm, rippled sand beneath her feet, the salt tang of the wind in her face, brought happiness flooding back to her again. For the poor woman in the cottage it would soon be over now. The bad things of life were very transitory. It was the good things, the ribbed sand, the wind blowing over the white-capped waves, the sunshine and the stars, that were so tough and durable.

  She reached the rock and went round to the far side, where it was easiest to climb. Not that the Mother Superior of Notre Dame du Castel had any intention of climbing Le Petit Aiguillon, not at her age, but she was living again in memory that day of her childhood when three children had climbed to the top of it and a boy and a girl had kissed each other there. She had stood, she remembered, with her small feet in the footprints of the Abbess who had come from Notre Dame du Castel to meet and forgive her sister the Abbess of Marie-Tape-Tout. What an absurd legend that was about the two Abbesses! It must have got confused with some fairy story or other, for the footprints on top of the rock were not those of grown women but of fairy creatures. If the two Abbesses were to appear before her now, they would not be wearing black habits but garments of elfin green.

  Well, it was time for the present Abbess of Notre Dame du Castel to be going home again. She was no fairy and she was uncommonly hungry. She rounded the rock at a brisk pace, eager for brioches and coffee, and came once more in sight of the bay.

  And then she stood stock still, her heart missing a beat. Was she lightheaded after her sleepless night? Was she dreaming?

  For advancing toward her over the shining sand was a strange little figure clad all in elfin green. She held up her full green skirts in either hand, and she wore green shoes, and on her head was an absurd high-crowned green hat. Marguerite stood there watching in incredulous amazement, blinking in the dazzling early-morning sunshine, while before her astonished eyes the fairy creature turned to a somewhat fantastically dressed old lady, and the old lady to her sister Marianne.

  “Well!” was all she could say, when the two of them stood together beneath Le Petit Aiguillon. “Well!” And then she burst into a peal of laughter.

  Marianne faced her, clasping her reticule, very taut, very upright, very vexed with her sister. If it wasn’t just like Marguerite to laugh! At this solemn hour—she laughed. She had always been a flippant creature, but one would have expected the holy habit of religion to have modified her flippancy just a little. Hopeless. She was unchanged.

  “I am sorry, Marianne,” said Marguerite, and her lips were grave again, though her eyes still danced. “I was so astonished—you looked like a fairy.”

  “A fairy?” ejaculated Marianne indignantly. “I’d have you to know, Marguerite, that I am sixty-eight years of age.”

  “You don’t look it, mon petit chou,” said Marguerite. “Not in that hat.” And then the laughter went out of her eyes as well, and her voice took on a sudden sharp edge of anxiety. “What is it, my dear? Are you in trouble? William? Is William ill?”

  “In excellent health, thank you,” said Marianne; and changed creature though she had thought she was, for the life of her she could not keep her heart from twisting with jealousy in the same old way, or her voice from snapping with exactly the same old snap. “But there is something I wish to say to you, Marguerite. I had meant to call upon you at the convent, but from the cliff I saw you down here in the bay, and so I left the carriage and came to join you.”

  “Shall we go back to the convent, my dear?” asked Marguerite gently. She was all gravity now, for she had recognized in the face of the woman before her the signs of mortal conflict.

  “No,” said Marianne firmly. “What I have to tell you is not easy to tell, and I should like to get it over. We can sit down together on this rock.”

  They sat down and Marguerite thrust away her fatigue, her headache, her longing for food and sleep, and became utterly and prayerfully concentrated upon the woman at her side. “I am listening,” she said, and she neither moved nor spoke while Marianne told her story.

  Marianne did not spare the girl whom she had been. She began at the beginning and told Marguerite how she had fought her for William, and how she had deliberately separated them on board the Orion. She painted that old Marianne in black and truthful colors before she went on to speak of William, of their meeting at Wellington, the misery of the early days of their married life, and of his subsequent goodness to her that had turned disaster into happiness. She did not spare the New Zealand Marianne either, neither the woman whose self-will at the settlement had nearly brought a horrible death upon them all, nor the woman whose ambition had nearly wrecked her daughter’s happiness, nor the woman who only a few months ago had not scrupled to separate William and Véronique in order that her pride might not be humbled. During the last two days and nights all her rags of self-deception had been stripped from her and she had seen herself exactly as she was, and this woman she now showed pitilessly to Marguerite. Then she came to what had happened two days ago, and slowly and deliberately told Marguerite of William’s slip of the pen in his letter to their father. “It was you
he wanted,” she said. “You were his love, his chosen mate. And you still are. I am only the woman he married because he had to. To marry me was the only way to save me from disaster, and he knew that. It was you he wanted. You are his love.”

  She said this over and over again, impressing it upon herself as well as upon Marguerite, in a quite expressionless voice. Only the stony rigidity of her upright little figure upon the rock, her hands locked together so tightly on her lap that they seemed all bone, betrayed her to the woman who sat beside her as a creature all but drowned in the depths of her humiliation.

  “It was odd,” said Marianne, “that William should have let it out by chance in that casual sort of way. He reproaches himself terribly that he did so. . . . Yet perhaps, Marguerite, of all the things that he has ever done for me, that little bit of chance carelessness will turn out to have been of the most benefit.”

  “Perhaps there is less chance in life than we realize,” said Marguerite softly. She was holding on with both hands to the rock, for the singing joy that was sweeping through every part of her was making her body feel light and airy as blown sea spray, light as the body of a young girl running to her lover’s arms in the morning of the world. Her soul, too, was running, faster and faster, across a blue meadow where the stars grew like flowers upon either side, to some unimaginable meeting place beyond the sun and moon. With a great effort she steadied herself and stopped running. Not yet could this young girl give way to her joy, for she had to rescue this poor old lady beside her from the depths of a too great shame. Old lady? But she, Marguerite, was an old lady too, an old nun in a black habit. “I’m old,” she said to herself incredulously, “I’m nearly as old as Marianne. And a comic spectacle we must be, too, sitting side by side on this rock, Marianne in that absurd green fairy hat and me in this ridiculous white wimple, having all this to-do about a portly old gentleman we were both in love with forty-six years ago. . . .” And she began to laugh again.