by Paul Binding
Mrs. Fuller’s eyes were brightly glacial with lack of amusement. “I did not mean difficult linguistically, Mr. Bridges. Anyway, I’ve been used to cockney trippers all my life.” Well, how about that! For all my self-disparagement just now, I didn’t see myself in quite this class, even though, as I have already related, I had once or twice joined it, with Will Postgate and the rest. “No, I was speaking of—personality.”
As, of course, I knew. “Well,” I breezed, “it takes all sorts, doesn’t it? To make a lodging-house, let alone a world.”
“Lodging-house? Castelaniene is not a lodging-house, Mr. Bridges.” I could have hardly said a less tactful thing.
“Except that it’s got a lodger in it,” I contended, always keen to have the last word in any disagreement. “Two if you count the Norwegian. And one of ’em you’ve just called ‘difficult.’ I bet you wouldn’t call a purely private visitor that to his face.”
I suppose it’s enormously to Mrs. Fuller’s credit that she didn’t give me my marching orders then and there.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I’m sorry I come into this unfortunate class.”
The look Beatrice Fuller now gave me made me involuntarily lower my head. “Sorry to hear it—yes, I’m sure you are. But are you sorry to learn it? Do my feelings matter to you at all? I rather doubt it, Mr. Bridges.”
Still bending my head over the coffee cup, I said, “I’m not sure I’ve got your meaning, Mrs. Fuller.”
“Oh, come, Mr. Bridges, for a lively young reporter you’re showing very slender powers of observation. Which always must include sharp selfobservation, wouldn’t you agree? In those interviews you’re so keen on, hasn’t the interviewer to take into consideration his own behavior as well as the character of his subject? Surely you must have some awareness of how you yourself behave?” She was obviously going to give me a helping hand here. “Going about as if you were the only person in the world whose wishes and tastes are important. Judging everything and everybody by how much you like them or by how convenient or useful you might find them.”
I wanted to hear no more of this. “So are you telling me to leave, Mrs. Fuller?” I asked. “If so”—for, since she herself had spoken of interviews, there was the one I was due to make, right here in Castelaniene with Hans Lyngstrand—“you’ll have to give me at least a week’s proper notice.”
“Of course I’m not telling you to leave, Mr. Bridges. Do you really see me as somebody who chucks people out because I’ve got a bone or two to pick with them? What insecurity you must suffer from! Besides, you’re a protégé of Edmund Hough, and I would be letting him down if I did such a hasty and callous thing.”
And perhaps, Mrs. Fuller, you need my rent, I couldn’t help inserting here to myself, recollecting the many times I’d seen her poring over bills and household accounts.
“All I ask for is a little more consideration shown to myself—and to the tireless Sarah, and to Mary too, such a sweet and valuable little vehicle. She most certainly should not be obliged to pick up your inexpressibles— your undergarments—from the floor; she has her own refinements, ones more developed than your own, I fancy.” (This surprised as well as embarrassed me. For my part I had thought Mrs. Fuller treated Mary as a lady-of-the-manor might a girl from a cottage on her estate.) “So dare I hope that Mr. Lyngstrand will be the means of your regeneration.”
“Regeneration?”
“Mr. Bridges, I’ve asked you into my drawing-room”—she pronounced the word proudly, as if she believed its curtains and carpet, sofa and wallpaper were not merely indications of her social status but projections of a soul infinitely loftier than mine—“because I didn’t want us to continue in the shallow, unsatisfactory mode of these past weeks. May I be so bold as to say that I regard you”—and she tilted her head up as if miming that boldness—“as an incomplete person. And I believe it is your incompleteness that makes you difficult, so insensitive, willful, selfish, and disappointingly uncheerful.”
I put the coffee cup down for fear I might spill it. Though I could scarcely be pleased by her unflattering picture of me, I was too big an egoist not to be interested by it. And even more so by what she said next:
“I suspect you have seen more of the dark side of life than many a young man your age, and have had sorrows that have bewildered, as well as pained, you.”
Other landladies coming into my mind, I drew back from the possibility of making her a confidante—well, not just yet.
“My advice to you, Mr. Bridges, is quite simply this: open yourself more abundantly to the Forces of Life, do not fend them off with jokes and sallies and plans for petty advancement.”
Petty advancement—was that how she saw the stages by which a serious journalist gets on? I wondered.
“Come to the Gateway with me. We are hospitable to everybody, and as a guest of mine you would be received with the greatest consideration. Colonel Walton has a truly distinguished mind, by which you could well profit, Lady Kershaw’s is a stern vision of existence, though we are probably none the worse for it. It might be of real help to you.”
But why should I need “real help”? Here I was, without home or family, without any financial support—or supporters—behind me, and I hadn’t done so very badly for myself, had I?
“We convene in an eminently dignified place,” Mrs. Fuller was now telling me, “Banstead Lodge on the Newchurch Road, Colonel Walton’s own home. And—I checked this earlier in my diary—we have a meeting there a week on Wednesday, on May 6 at eight o’clock in the evening. A light collation is served after we have done what we came to do.”
And whatever, I wondered, might that be? I didn’t much like the sound of this Gateway nor did I want to meet all these Isle-of-Thanet toffs, not even if a “collation” was on offer. But agreeing to go on Wednesday to Colonel Thingummy’s “eminently dignified” house was better by far than being kicked out on the Dengate streets for being “difficult” and lacking in “cheerfulness.”
Therefore—“I’d be honored to come along, Mrs. Fuller,” I said. “It’s extremely generous of you to ask me. Bearing in mind,” I couldn’t help adding, “my shortcomings.”
“We will let those rest awhile now, I think,” said Mrs. Fuller with a sudden smile which lightened her pale, tired, bony face, making her look not merely more relaxed but much younger, as young as she’d seemed on our very first encounter that wet March afternoon, and yes, as pretty as then, for all her “silver threads.”
“I’m sure after due consideration you can amend, even eradicate them . . . And now we should talk about something else, I think. About Mr. Lyngstrand.”
“Yes, indeed.” Best temporarily to withhold the already hatched plan for an interview with him. Edmund had clearly told her nothing about it.
“That nice young man is in a grave way; I fear you may not have understood quite how grave, Mr. Bridges. (Let me refill your coffee cup!) Do you realize how long the poor youth spent clinging to his boat in freezing water? That longboat he managed to get into with his Captain capsized at least twice. It was virtually inevitable he developed pneumonia as he did—high temperature, acute respiratory problems—but (and here’s a very important thing) Mr. Lyngstrand turned out to have a weakness of the lungs anyway, maybe inherited, maybe the legacy of some childhood illness. Once he’s back in Norway he’ll undergo another full-scale examination, and further treatment. It is our business to see that he is as comfortable and calm here as possible—for we have to remember even the move to this house may have set him back a little—so that he’s well enough to endure the fatigue of the long homeward journey. His patron is coming over for him in person.”
“He seems”—surely I was obliged to say this?—“troubled about something. Someone, I should say. Someone called Johnston who has either disappeared or died.”
“Disappeared or died”—embarrassingly these words applied also to George Fuller, I realized, but happily Mrs. Fuller didn’t react.
“A close frien
d?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered. For Hans Lyngstrand had not once described “the American” as any kind of friend, though he had called him a genius. “He was the bo’sun, and therefore vital to the ship. He says he saw him getting into the dinghy alongside his own longboat. After that—the rest is silence . . .”
Mrs. Fuller, rather than look at me as she absorbed my reply, fixed her gaze on an engraving over the mantelpiece of some classical scene, as though its mezzotint could reveal truths about her present guest’s problems. “There may be . . .” she began. “Yes, why ever not? . . . There may be ways in which our Gateway could help Mr. Lyngstrand as well as yourself. I think he would be a good subject for its attentions, with a naturally favorable disposition toward it. After all, he’s already responded well to Mrs. Noah, says she reminds him of the Ship’s Cat, their beloved White One, a favorite of every crew member but particularly of himself, and who, he fears, went down with the vessel, poor creature.”
I climbed as stealthily as I could up that steep top flight of stairs, aware that my life in Castelaniene had undergone almost literally a sea-change. By caring for Hans’s well-being, I would morally improve both my inner self and my outward standing. And my interview for The Advertiser might well flush out the missing Johnston thus alleviating some of the young Norwegian’s anxiety—to such an extent that his health could be restored, this old reactivated lung-trouble shaken off.
“Martin? Is that Martin?”
I halted on the landing. “Yes, it’s me!” I couldn’t but recall those haunted nights of illness that are part of everybody’s childhood, when Death feels so close you could put out a hand and stroke it. “Can I help you, Hans?”
The Mercy Room door was still ajar. Beside the young Norwegian’s bed was now burning a nightlight, under a little dome representing St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“There is so much I’d like to tell you, Martin.”
I stepped right inside his room, surely now having carte blanche to do so.
“And I’d like to listen!”
“But I can’t tell it to you tonight, I’m too tired . . . What a state of things,” he grimaced, like a small boy facing up to horrible medicine, “for a sailor to be exhausted by a change of bedroom, me who’s been in seas like mountain ranges, and seen schools of killer whales and helped hold down a man gone crazy after drinking too much raw spirits. And, on top of all that, shared a cabin with Johnston”—yes, Johnston!—“when he was possessed.”
“Possessed” was a term I’d not encountered outside the Bible. I must not press him for more, not now, though how could I fail to be intrigued? I detected fever in the youth’s voice as well as in his nightlight-illuminated face—those over-bright eyes, those too flushed cheeks—and recalled Mrs. Fuller’s concern that transference from the hospital might have worsened his condition, at least for a while. My eye fell on the Spanish galleon nearest to the bed, swaying on its rope from the rafter, and I suddenly saw its movement as representing Hans’s health. It may improve, it may not! Maybe. Maybe not . . .
Then, with an abrupt yet clearly deliberate gesture, Hans drew his hands out from under the bedclothes, and placed them, palms down, on the counterpane: “What kind of hands, Martin, would you say these are?” he asked.
For all the fragility of the body of which they were extremities, they looked muscular, sturdy, capable.
“A sailor’s hands?” I ventured.
“Well, of course they must be that, I’ve worked on ships long enough. In fact they recently made me an Able Seaman, and now want me to qualify for Second Mate. But I never will. I have another vocation, and I was wondering if you could tell what that is from looking at my hands.” He turned them over, showing me tough-skinned palms with unusually strong lines.
His sickness has disturbed his reason, I thought, and fear accordingly rolled through me. I was no physician or nurse, had no talents for either profession. What had happened to my father and mother had given me a full enough acquaintance with illness and death for one still young, as Mrs. Fuller had divined, and yet I found both of them baffling, terrifying, better banished from thought or talk.
“You’d better tell me!”
“Would you not say that these were a sculptor’s hands?”
“I—I know nothing at all about . . . sculptors,” I replied, before I knew what I was saying. Then, unable to keep my stupid fear down, but realizing I must humor, even soothe him, I added, “But yes, I can see that they are.”
“I’m so glad, Martin!” said the young Norwegian. “Because I know they are. I had so much time in the hospital to reflect. You see, when I was in the water, I saw, just for a few moments, the strangest sight imaginable: my hands suddenly expanding in size above the waves until they appeared far bigger than any human limbs could possibly be. Then there spoke a voice inside my head, saying: ‘Yours are hands for making things!’ Didn’t that mean that, if I were spared, I should work with those hands, and how better than by becoming a sculptor? Because sculptures are the greatest, most timeless things that human hands can create.”
Strange as this may sound, no sooner had he made this admission, unlike anything I’d heard spoken before, then my tremulous uneasiness left me. It was as if I partook on the instant of his curious self-confidence. I stood there, a yard from his bed, my feet splayed out on a rag-rug, and told him: “I am sure you are right, Hans.”
CHAPTER THREE
Important Information Comes My Way
Back then, when The Advertiser came out once a week only, Thursday morning had a special quality; then it was that we put our minds to the next issue—and even to the one after that. On the morning of Thursday, April 30 (Hans Lyngstrand’s third complete day at Castelaniene), Edmund summoned me into his office to say: “Bridges, I’d like your interview with Mr. Lyngstrand handed in this coming Monday, May 4. Readers are still interested in the fates of the wrecked Norwegians, and their youngest survivor already has a place in their hearts.” And he gave another of his boyish smiles as if already he had in front of him a 1,500-worder to bring tears to our readers’ eyes. “But before we know where we are, the gale in the Channel will have been forgotten in favor of Spring: what bird’s nesting where, what the latest London fashions are. Folk are fickle, even in Dengate.”
As if suddenly illuminated, those framed words above his desk met my gaze:
Flesh unto spirit must grow,
Spirit raves not for a goal.
By now I knew these to be the words of George Meredith, “The Sage of Box Hill,” as people apparently called him. Didn’t they recommend me to put all diffidence aside and harness my spirit to successful accomplishment of the task ahead? For a disagreeable truth now bothered me as, surprisingly, it had not done before. For all my enthusiasm for interviews, I had myself never actually conducted one, let alone written it up. Nevertheless, “Monday it is, sir!” I promised.
“Bravo! And as a reward for your good work—nay, I jest, I was intending to invite you anyway—I propose that a week this coming Sunday, that’s to say the tenth of May, you hie yourself to my family seat—to whit, Furzebank House, my modest Englishman’s castle situated at the northern edge of our great borough—to partake of that best of English institutions, the Sunday family luncheon. Susan, my wife, is already planning substantial dishes to put a little more flesh on your protruding bones. My brood will of course be at table with you; I doubt, at twenty-three, that you’ll be much interested in the Little Ones. However, the Grown Ones—my son, Cyril, my daughter, Lucinda—are another matter, and they have already expressed a wish to meet you. Your glowing reputation, Bridges, has preceded you.”
So Beatrice Fuller had not told him I was insensitive, selfish, and willful. Or was this Sunday luncheon, like my visit to the Gateway in a week’s time, a means of improving my morally deficient character?
“And, of course, if he’s well enough, Mr. Lyngstrand must come with you. I will see to transportation, so have no cares on that score.”
“Your idea or his, this interview?” he asked, as we contemplated one of the last April showers that year from The Advertiser’s doorway.
“I suppose it was simultaneous,” I said. “I mean, on our very first meeting I told Edmund how much I admired W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall and he said he did too. And here’s the perfect opportunity for me to live up to my words.”
Barton Cunningham eyed the rain again. “We mustn’t let this feeble trickle from the clouds put us off. If you knew Bengal when the rains come, you’d scarcely notice it.”
“You do know Bengal, I take it?”
“Well, I’ve made the comparison, haven’t I?”
I was suspicious of Barton’s motives for wanting to walk my way when he himself lived on the northeast side of the town, and even more so when he suggested we take “the long way ’round,” down by the harbor, up along the Esplanade, through the Royal Gardens. But after the fug of the offices I welcomed exercise on a day of fresh light rain and intermittent sunshine. We had been scarcely two minutes together before Barton said, a trifle conspiratorially:
“I’ve got something else to tell you about Old Fulsome. Don’t know why I didn’t when we first spoke on the subject. And there’s me who won a prize for being the Best Cub Reporter in Kent . . . You see Old Fulsome and his missus have a son. He went to the Hole, too—I mean, St. Stephen’s College. Named Horace, after the great Latin poet Fulsome was always gassing about, who had a villa in Latium that Fulsome went to visit, and then bored us all with descriptions of. Horace Fuller was a mite younger than Yours Truly.”
