The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “Johnston never referred to the matter again, though, and I have to say from that moment on he was markedly nicer to me. He told me more facts about the whales we saw spouting so spectacularly and the birds which got ever more numerous as we approached Europe. And it came to me: perhaps I’m on his side, really. To be betrayed by someone you really love, that must be terrible, so terrible it’d be impossible to forgive. Perhaps Johnston’s love and his need for that woman and his fury at her marriage are all so strong that it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, because—as he said—he will come back and carry her off even if he himself were a drowned man from the dark sea . . .?”

  “Well, that’s the strangest story I’ve ever heard,” I said, for once not bothering whether I sounded like a “seasoned pressman” or not. “I’ve never heard anything like it before. And as you talked, I could see him, pretty clearly; Alfred Johnston. I have met men like him in my time, you know. In the London Docks. Tall, strong, with fair hair and fair beards.”

  Hans looked at me in such wonderment that I was sure a compliment was forthcoming on my telepathic powers.

  Instead: “In that case you have not met anybody like him,” he said. “Johnston was clean-shaven. And a redhead. A darkish sort of red. And then there were his eyes. Black, but their blackness changed—and I wasn’t the only chap on board to notice this—changed with the weather. Clear when the skies were clear, clouded when the skies were overcast. I don’t know in what human race such eyes are characteristic.”

  That night I dreamed of the Royal Gardens on a day of sea-storm which, strongly though it raged, did not prevent that girl with chestnut tresses from giving one of her talks to children. Among her audience of children, however, I spied Will Postgate armed with a sketchbook even though it was pouring with rain.

  “You must never confuse broom and gorse,” said the instructress, and Will answered: “I shall bally well confuse them if I want to.” The children laughed. Then all of a sudden they turned quiet. Because someone else had entered on the scene. At first as I skulked under the horse-chestnuts, I thought it must be Barton Cunningham because of the red hair. Then I remembered what I had just learned and realized it must be none other than the Bo’sun himself.

  “Mine she is,” he cried out, making for the young female nature teacher, “and mine she shall become, and she shall follow me, even if I have to . . . carry her off as a drowned man from the dark sea.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dead Can Speak—Or So it Seems

  My (unsigned) interview with Hans appeared in The Advertiser of Wednesday, May 6, 1885, and if no colleagues pronounced themselves impressed, Hans himself more than made up for them in enthusiasm. The evening of that day we were engaged to attend a meeting of the Gateway. I’d been half-hoping that somehow Mrs. Fuller would have forgotten about this, but not she. By twenty past seven we were all down in the hall ready—Mrs. Fuller herself, in long skirt of regal purple amplified by bustle and offset by tasseled black shawl, Hans Lyngstrand in a too-loose dark gray suit she’d found for him (the late Mr. Fuller’s or her son Horace’s?) and myself—awaiting the arrival of Stanley, my landlady’s favorite cabbie, “a man more precious than rubies.” I was feeling that knot of tension in my stomach associated in earlier years with those few children’s parties I’d ever attended. I was certainly not expecting Sarah to clump up from the basement out-of-breath, carrying a large wicker basket inside which was Mrs. Noah.

  “Here she is, all set for your gathering!” Sarah said. “I’ve fed her and given her the milk too, but if them at the Gateway choose to offer her a saucerful more, I don’t think she’ll be saying no.”

  “Mrs. Noah is coming with us?” I asked.

  “But naturally,” Beatrice Fuller replied. “She is both respected and loved at the Gateway. She has proved time and again indispensable to our activities.”

  Had Will Postgate, or any other of my London mates, been with me in the hall, had even Barton Cunningham been present, we would have exchanged looks here, even a wink and a grin. But Hans Lyngstrand, always complaisant, always eager to say or do the appropriate, grateful, kindly thing, took the procedure with the seriousness of his hostess. Maybe, of course, he thought that in famously animal-loving England it was quite usual to take a cat out for a social evening. Mrs. Noah herself certainly behaved as though it were. Contentedly established in her basket, the bottom of which Sarah had lined with a rolled-up blanket, she was sitting there with her legs tucked neatly under herself. Nor when he turned up on the very stroke of half-past seven, red in the face and beaming, did old Stanley exhibit any surprise.

  “Evenin’, Mrs. Noah, how’s tricks?” he said, as, obviously well-practiced, he gently swung the cat-basket onto his own front seat. “We like a little ride side by side above a trotting horse, don’t we, my fine missus?”

  Banstead Lodge, home of Colonel Walton of the “truly distinguished mind,” was situated halfway between West Cliff, which St. Ethelberga’s Road straddled, and that northerly residential quarter of the town where Barton Cunningham lived. The house had been built a good thirty years before; the most casual glance up at its creeper-covered, crenellated façade reveals the hand of Augustus Welby Pugin, who had such a personal fondness for Dengate that his architectural influence is everywhere. The pointed arches over the recessed windows and doorways of Colonel Walton’s villa are more ecclesiastical than domestic.

  Mrs. Fuller’s nervousness, after her cabbie had deposited us outside, surprised me. She banged the large dolphin-shaped knocker a little too vigorously against the iron-studded oaken front door, and the elderly maid in black skirt, white blouse, and black-and-white mobcap who answered her looked accordingly irritated.

  “You are the very last to arrive!” this grim woman informed the three of us—four, if you count Mrs. Noah, now arching her back and stretching out her front legs in her basket. Almost reprovingly she admitted us first into a large hall so dark that, but for a light under the door immediately to our left, I could have fancied it part of an empty building. Next we were shown into a huge rectangular room which, with its flagged floor and high vaulted ceiling supported by a double row of stone pillars, resembled the nave of a church. Except in color. A deep red, like Burgundy wine, flourished on Turkey carpets, wallpaper, and hangings, on curtains and heavy velvet table-drapes, on sofas and chairs, even in candles under tinted glass domes. I might have stepped inside the maw of some enormous carnivore. About twenty people were assembled here, for the most part standing, not sitting, and conversing in low solemn voices.

  A large man well into his sixties, his bearing of a man of some consequence endorsed by silver hair and beard, came up to us.

  “Beatrice, what kindness!” he exclaimed, in the tones of a public figure who positively expects to be overheard. “the Gate may be hard and obstinate, but the Way is bright and shining.”

  Mrs. Fuller gave what in a cab-horse would have been a neighing toss of the head. “Colonel Walton, such kindness on your part—as always! The Way is bright and shining, however hard and obstinate the Gate. May I please introduce my friends: Mr. Lyngstrand from Norway who is honoring us with his presence in Dengate for some weeks, and Mr. Bridges, a young man of letters from London.” Friends, eh? Well, I never! “And Mrs. Noah—”

  “But Mrs. Noah needs no introduction, she is the most precious of acolytes,” laughed the Colonel. He looked and sounded like one of those tedious public servants who gave out the prizes on Founders’ Day at the Thomas Middleton School, Camberwell, exhorting us all, yawning and sniggering down in the Assembly Hall below, to think of our country’s unique destiny and our duty to her. Though how many of those men would have gone on to say: “Pray be so good as to take our valued guest to her usual spot on the far table!” and gesture to a cat-basket?

  At this point a tall big-boned woman of much the colonel’s age, and with equally silver hair, bore formidably down on us. Like Beatrice she was wearing tonight a bustled purple skirt with mat
ching blouse. But just as her height and coiffure eclipsed my landlady’s, so did the purple of her dress. She resembled an aging High Priestess from some remote civilization.

  “You actually managed to produce them, then?” she inquired in an aggressive, incongruously hoarse voice.

  “Indeed I have, Lady Kershaw. May I introduce Mr. Lyngstrand from Norway—”

  Hans Lyngstrand gave her ladyship the bow that good manners in Scandinavia require.

  Lady Kershaw responded by saying to him: “You’re the one who almost disappeared, are you not? More than once, I believe. I hope they’re keeping a good grip on you now. By the look of you, they’d jolly well better!” She gave a mirthless laugh, which seemed further to strain her larynx.

  Hans looked bemused. I, by contrast, was experiencing a moment’s sense not so much of illumination as of confirmation. Mary, the other day, had used “disappeared” for “died” or “dead.” What I had not known then, obviously, was that this clearly was Gateway parlance that she’d picked up from her mistress.

  “And you . . .?” Her Ladyship had condescended to address me.

  “This is Mr. Martin Bridges, a young man-of-letters from—”

  “Man-of-letters fiddlesticks!” said Lady Kershaw, “Mr. Bridges works on that deplorable publication, our local newspaper, as I know perfectly well. And I have only one word to say to anybody who has stooped as low as he. Mammon! Nobody can serve two masters, you know—we have that on the best authority—and there is no doubt which master The Channel Ports Advertiser is serving.”

  On hearing this, as though in protest at its high-and-mighty censoriousness, Mrs. Noah, hitherto so peaceful, gave a piercingly loud miaow, followed by a second one only very slightly less loud, both causing more than one person to turn around anxiously.

  “Well, do the obvious thing, Beatrice!” ordered Lady Kershaw, cross at having her ill-mannered homily interrupted. “Go and take your cat to her usual table, can’t you? She desperately wants to be released from her basket, and can you wonder? Rank cruelty on your part I call it, standing there talking away with a poor suffering animal callously confined. That isn’t the Gateway approach at all, as you ought to know by now.”

  Lady Kershaw’s is a stern vision of existence. Well, that was one way of putting it! Lady Kershaw is insufferably rude, even to those she affects to like! might be another. I couldn’t but feel sorry for Beatrice Fuller. Gone now was that self-conscious superiority, those hoity-toity airs. She clearly counted it a great honor to be accepted, on whatever terms, by these people here. All servility and apology, she now hastened toward the big velvet-covered table at the back of the room, heavy cat-basket awkwardly dangling from her hand, Hans and me self-consciously in tow. There was no other young man present; we should clearly have to stick together until this odd social event came to its allotted close.

  Though Colonel Walton and Lady Kershaw would appear to be the senior figures of the Gathering, almost all the others we passed on our way to the table were of reasonably advanced years and lofty social standing. Hans, I realized, thanks to his father and his patron, Herr Strømme (with his Thorvaldsen statues), was not unfamiliar with such persons, and this showed now in his demeanor. Besides he was Norwegian, an outsider with a dramatic personal history; everybody here would know about the wrecked ship, and so would want to be friendly to him. I was a different kettle of fish. With my sandy hair, freckled face, snub nose, and buckteeth, to say nothing of my London voice, I surely struck them all as more than a mite “common,” just as they struck me as more than a mite “stuck-up.” I would have given anything to leave this wretched throng, but here I now was, and what could I do about it? Nothing except take an inward vow never to come to the Gateway again . . .

  But Beatrice Fuller was motioning me to undo the clasp of Mrs. Noah’s basket. I did this gladly enough, enabling the cat to spring with happy alacrity onto the tabletop. Once there she proceeded, first putting her front right leg into a vertical position, to give her hind quarters the most thorough, if inelegant, of washings. Her intense lavender shade showed to attractive advantage against the Burgundy of the table’s velvet drape. She clearly had many admirers here in Banstead Lodge; this was to its guests’ credit, and they bestowed on her friendly words and smiles, and stroked her affectionately. These same people also exchanged with Beatrice what were obviously the prescribed ritual phrases:

  “What kindness that you are here, Beatrice. The Gate may be hard and obstinate, but the Way is bright and shining!”

  And Beatrice had to come back with: “Such kindness on your part! The Way is bright and shining, however hard and obstinate the Gate.”

  All that was gauche in me, all that was half-defiantly aware of my unimpressive social origins, and—worst of all—all that refused to be impressed by those who gave themselves airs held sway over me now. I was positively relieved as well as startled when Lady Kershaw clapped her hands with a loud bang which made even the composed Mrs. Noah, for a few seconds, break off from washing herself. Silence ensued.

  Then Colonel Walton’s gently commanding voice announced: “Time for proceedings to begin. Please, all of you, be so good as to make your way to the table.”

  Now, as though suddenly wound up by clockwork, all his guests made their several ways, separate or escorted, to join Beatrice Fuller, Hans, and myself around the large table on which Mrs. Noah now sat quite firmly. Some carried chairs or stools with them across the room, so that, within three to four minutes, the entire company, including the Colonel and Lady Kershaw, were seated, hands clasped and placed on the velvet drape. This intensified the room’s ominous semi-religious atmosphere, the table becoming a kind of High Altar.

  What alternative was there to behaving like everybody else, however awkwardly, however reluctantly, especially as Hans—so much more at ease with these folk than I was—was following the collective example? So I leaned forward as in prayer and encouraged my hands, with fingers interlocked, to relax on the wine-red velvet, to give the rest of my body a lead. As for my eyes, I had them half-closed, with the result that I saw my surroundings from behind a curtain of red-filtered eyelid. And in this unnatural posture I felt a curious change come over me.

  No, of course I didn’t like these members of the Gateway, these friends of Mrs. Fuller’s, with their cut-glass voices, snooty manners, and general air of ignorance of what it could be like, say, to serve in a stationer’s shop, as I had done for two whole years, on dirty, often disreputable Walworth Road. But sitting in this unnatural attitude as one of them, I felt my dislike of the company physically decrease, ebb away, though no doubt it would eventually return. I simply could not pretend to myself any longer that I didn’t know what they were all here for, nor could I pretend it was unimportant. For nothing could be more important than what lurked so palpably behind the whole Gateway, awareness of which animated every member of this oddly assorted community. Why didn’t one oneself spend every minute of every day thinking about it—with wonder, curiosity, awe, and (hard to bear but harder indefinitely to stave off) terror?

  As maybe Hans already did. He had good reason to, if anybody did.

  Perhaps I should make an effort to shut my eyes and keep them shut, just for a few seconds! As I blanked out the room, what I was seeing instead was that miserable little parlor in Crespigny Road, Camberwell, which, with its curtains drawn, had contained my father’s coffin until the day of his funeral. Hardly anybody had come to pay their respects, my father having had few relations and fewer friends (but many an enemy and many a creditor). Overripe lilies were standing in alabaster vases like sentinels over the concealed corpse, and I seemed right here to catch a whiff of their sickly-sweet scent. So I opened my eyes again, to rid myself of their presence . . . However long were we to remain thus bound together in silence?

  And Hans next to me, what images was he at present seeing? He had surely an extensive tragic gallery to choose from: the hands making their way in sheep-like quiet and dignity toward those lo
ngboats which, more likely than not, were to take them out of existence rather than back into it; the boys he’d shared jokes and played games with, cruelly tossed about on the wild March waves of the Strait until they met destruction. Or, just as troubling, those whose deaths he had not witnessed: the concertina-playing Niels, White One, the ship’s beloved cat, whom Mrs. Noah reminded him of, and then, of course, Johnston, Alfred Johnston of the strange vow and the eerie threat.

  Then at last—oh the relief!—Colonel Walton got ponderously up from his chair and, all eyes upon him, spoke up:

  “Dear Friends, We of the Gateway are met here tonight as always, because we believe, to use our own words as they have evolved through our mutual sympathies, that though the Gate itself, which we have no alternative to facing, may be hard and obstinate, the Way that extends on its far side is bright and shining. We believe that, limited and erring beings though we are, we have been blessed with the ability to communicate, if fragmentarily, with those fortunate enough—and often after the severest misfortunes—to have preceded us on the Way Beyond The Gate, and to be progressing along it, some slowly, some at a happier speed, toward the eventual destination of us all: the source of Everlasting Light, the Nameless, the Ineffable.”

  I was proved right. Death, and Death alone, had brought these folk to Banstead Lodge, with its constant attendants, Pain and Sorrow, most likely still keenly at work. Lady Kershaw, for instance—what beloved husband or daughter might not this old harridan have agonizedly watched over? Surely, therefore, I should give them the benefit of that quality extolled in their ritual greetings; kindness. I recalled, to my irritation, reading that the great W. T. Stead himself, who held Life, public and private, up to such intense scrutiny, was interested in what lay beyond the frontier-line of Death.

  “We have been further blessed,” continued the Colonel, “in having, over the years, to aid us in our communications (invariably of unspeakable comfort) truly sympathetic and virtuous human vehicles. Our latest vehicle, the youngest we have yet been privileged to avail ourselves of, is no unworthy addition to those honorable ranks. Friends, the hour has now come for us to invite into our midst our newest vehicle who moves between the world before the Great Gate and the world beyond it. This I proceed now to do. I PRITHEE ENTER.” He gave the table three hefty, booming thumps. And if any man-made sounds could penetrate the hermetic realm of the grave, surely these could.