The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Another evening like the one now past must never occur again. I would have to keep the strongest bridle on my willful tongue, otherwise who knew what grave damage I could do in the names of truth and honesty?

  Actually Hans Lyngstrand recovered from his “turn” (following Mrs. Noah’s ministrations) with wonderful rapidity and completeness. But for a few immeasurable, appalling moments, I, in company with many, if not most, others at the Gathering, had thought the young Norwegian had slumped to the floor to die. In literal terms I doubt he was “out” for more than a minute and a half, yet when we saw him come ’round, we all felt we were witnessing a kind of resurrection. Those not engaged in calming Beatrice Fuller down made the boy the object of attentive concern. They took him over to the largest of the sofas, onto which Mrs. Castle—maybe seeing in him a kinship to the missing Walter—plumped further cushions for him to sink into like some wounded man into a remedial bath. But these attentions Hans soon declared unnecessary, and in a comparatively short while he was sitting up, doing his best to combine politeness with profession of a diminished appetite as plates of food and glasses of drink were brought to him from the collation already set out by the Colonel’s servants. “One glass of elderflower cordial, sir?”

  “Yes, most kind!” said Hans.

  As for Mary, either its direct cause or its means, according to how you saw things, she appeared, as far as I could tell from my surreptitious glances, to be totally unaffected by the huge to-do her testimony had brought about. Remaining on the far side of the altar table with scarcely a focusing look in our direction, she wore an expression of unconcerned, blank placidity on her child’s face. Yet she could hardly be unaware of the disruptive effect of her communications, could she? Or did being a “vehicle” mean that she had such slight relation to her own outpourings that she could not understand the significance of anything she gave out? Yet there were surely too many specifics in her reports from Beyond for this to be the case. She had known while she was speaking that she was dealing with highly inflammable emotional matter.

  Hans was adamant he did not want to be rushed back to Castelaniene in some conveyance of Colonel Walton’s, as our host proposed. Much better to stay quietly in this magnificent room, which so much reminded him of the Viking halls of Scandinavian history, until the meeting had come to its proper end. Now was the appointed “collation” hour, and Hans assured everybody, many times, that he was perfectly happy to sit and watch them until the appointed time came ’round for that friendly, helpful cabbie to call and take him, with his good friends Beatrice Fuller, Martin Bridges, and Mrs. Noah, home again. He actually referred to Castelaniene as “home.” More than I did—or could. Or would.

  Beatrice Fuller in the meantime had been restored to herself by “sal volatile” administered by Lady Kershaw. I cannot, I thought, have endeared myself to her through the happenings I have put in train, even though they might well seem to have vindicated her own—and her friends’—spiritual beliefs. And most probably a number of other Gateway members also considered us new arrivals, Beatrice’s baggage, as more nuisance than anything else. Probably this is what they were saying to each other in the low well-bred whispered tones in which many of them conducted conversation.

  The journey back to Castelaniene was not, except in the literal sense, an easy one. Because of all that had happened in its course, I’d assumed the meeting at Banstead Lodge had lasted a long time. Not at all. As we left that church-like house, there were some bells in the town still sounding the half-hour—for half-past nine! The streets through which we clopped homewards were by no means deserted, and lights burned in the majority of downstairs windows. I, burdened with an uncomfortable feeling of responsibility for the direction the evening had taken, thought it was up to Mrs. Fuller to start up a conversation. Who could deny that the idea of Hans and myself coming to the Gateway had been hers and hers alone, neither of us young men having so much as heard of the society, or that she had given us no clue whatsoever about its purpose? I have to say I was even less cordially disposed toward her than usual.

  But Beatrice did eventually raise the subject of the evening, speaking in an extremely hoarse voice, unsurprising considering the punishment she’d recently given her throat.

  “You are now in a position to appreciate, Mr. Lyngstrand,” she said, “what the Gateway can do for people. It can link us poor mortals with those who have gone before them into the unknown, like your sea-faring friend. Of course it is not always easy to accept what we hear, and please understand that everybody at tonight’s Gathering will have understood that only too well. But I think it must have been beautiful for you to have heard that your Disappeared One sent you his blessing. I found myself greatly moved.”

  “Oh, yes, very beautiful,” Hans agreed. But his immediate use of her own word made me instantly doubt whether it’d be one he himself would have chosen. Whatever had his real reaction to what he’d heard from Mary’s lips? “I would never have imagined him [Johnston] so kind,” had been his spoken response to the bo’sun’s posthumous blessing, a strange one really. Truly nothing whatever that he had told me about Johnston had suggested kindness of any sort.

  “I expect you were astonished—both of you,” Mrs. Fuller was pleased to include me now in her remarks, “when you saw Mary at the very center of our activities. I did not warn you in advance, because, seeing her, as you do every day, in the function of domestique, you might have been tempted to doubt her powers. Whereas confronted with them, what could you do but marvel? Marvel and accept. Normally she is able to give me such wonderful news of my husband; it is a joy as well as a sorrow to listen to her.”

  This sounded almost like a rebuke. For had we not prevented Mary doing this?

  “Yes, I marveled at Mary,” said Hans. He did not say he accepted, I noted.

  “You have conducted yourself tonight, Mr. Lyngstrand, both sensitively and sensibly,” she said, “and the Gateway was fortunate to have you as a visitor. Obviously you will need a good night’s rest after your shock, but I think—no, I truly believe—that you will look back over this evening as one of the most important and beneficial of your life.”

  The Royal Gardens now came into sight, the poles of the Bandstand under construction glowing silver in the darkness like upright sticks of mercury. What I would not have given to be returning to my quarters from a convivial, bibulous evening with Will and his pals! Better than being here, even remembering Hans, here in stupid Dengate bound for the even stupider Castelaniene. Will Postgate—he would soon be turning up in Dengate. How glad I would be to see him!

  Yes, what or who was it that made my room so unlike its customary self, and me, as it felt, so unlike my customary self? A presence of some kind there surely was.

  I rolled over in my bed onto my right side, thus moving further toward the wall and away from the rest of the furniture. To realize that near me, on top of the counterpane, was reposing a body swathed in white, a white which shone out from certain folds and patches in the fabric into the bedroom’s general murk. It was a young male body lying very still, three-quarters on its back, the remaining quarter resting on its right flank, head turned slightly toward the wall. The body was breathing, gently but regularly, if a mite wheezily.

  The body was Hans Lyngstrand’s of course, and the whiteness came from his crumpled nightgown. Without my hearing or seeing him, he had walked out of the Mercy Room, opened my door, and clambered onto my very own bed—not itself particularly large—while managing not to rouse me. Or was it his advent that had roused me out of my unexpected dream of Camberwell and “Divinity”?

  “Hans?” I asked him in an urgent whisper, “it is you? What did you want?”

  Had he heard me? Should I repeat my questions? Or simply let him sleep? He was after all a boy still recovering from a “grave” illness, with full recovery by no means certain, and, thanks to me, he’d undergone a further ordeal, and a painful one, this very evening. He should slumber on in peace.

&nbs
p; But heard me he had. He moved himself around so that his face confronted mine with brilliant sea-blue eyes gleaming out of the dominant bony paleness. And spoke. What he said astonished me, not least because it was said—if this doesn’t sound too contradictory—as a whispered shout.

  “‘STAND BY THE BOATS! STAND BY THE BOATS!’ That’s what he said, wasn’t it? Johnston! The bo’sun! And he did stand by them. But it didn’t do him any good. No wonder I couldn’t see him when I was in the longboat with the Captain and those others. He perished. Johnston! In those terrible waters of the Channel.”

  It seemed an age before I made reply. “We can’t know that for certain, Hans,” I managed.

  “But Martin, didn’t you hear the message Mary gave us? He drowned to his death and is now in Eternity. On the beautiful shining roadway near all those fields and fruit—but thinking of the woman he loved who was faithless to him—and, so she said, thinking of me. In a kind way, it sounded like. It wasn’t always like that on-board ship . . .”

  What to say to this? Or to what Hans said next: “I don’t think Alfred Johnston would like the kind of existence Mary described. He was a very active man, he liked danger and difficulty and facing them with his own strong body and mighty will.”

  Nor was this the last disconcerting remark of Hans’s. “Martin,” he asked, “why did you ask Mary that question tonight?”

  Was that what he’d come into the room to find out? His tone suggested that he already had been pondering the problem hard and long.

  I replied with what seemed to me the truth. “I needed to know about Johnston.” But I then added, more truthfully still: “So I could be of help to you.”

  Hans shuffled himself a little nearer to me. Now we were contiguously side by side. “You’re such a good friend to me!” he said. “I doubt I’ve ever had a better one. Not in Bergen, not on the high seas, not anywhere.”

  I knew then that he intended to stay the whole night in my room, to go to sleep next to me. And this he did.

  I myself did not sleep—at least not very much. A line of Milton’s my mother (who’d suffered from sleeplessness) liked to quote came into my head: “What hath night to do with sleep?” And yet the words retained the innocence they (presumably) possessed for my mother. Strange it was to be lying next to another body at once uniquely itself and yet, in all important details, the same as one’s own, to be entering into some unspoken pact of sharing. Yet by the time Dengate bells rang out three o’clock this state had come to seem oddly natural, if that isn’t a contradiction, far more so than the uncountable solitary nights that had preceded it. These dark hours united into a milestone in my life, though, in a strict factual sense, nothing happened in them.

  As six o’clock pealed out—and yes, I had by now managed a little sleep, full, it seemed to me, of the persistent movement of waters both in the heavens and on the face of earth—I was aware of Hans gently clambering off the bed, so as not to disturb me whom he clearly thought asleep, and then leaving my room as stealthily as he’d entered it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Morning After

  Another Thursday morning at the newspaper, and this one brought us dramatic news of one of our own. While Stanley’s cab was taking Mrs. Fuller, Hans Lyngstrand, Mrs. Noah, and myself back to Castelaniene, Mr. Thomas Betterton, no less, was falling down the steep flight of stone steps connecting Church Lane with High Street. We were without our Deputy Editor.

  “We did a piece only three months ago saying His Worship the Mayor ought to have those damned steps seen to,” said Archie Penry.

  “I think you may find they weren’t the principal cause of the mishap!” said Philip Goodenough, with a smile and a wink. “A few drinks too many at the regular Wednesday revelry down at the Masonic Lodge was the culprit, I fancy.”

  Barton Cunningham, tilting his chair back into the morning sunshine, guffawed disloyally at our club-of-two’s exchange. “You may have a point there, Mr. Goodenough,” he said. “Anyway, the sawbones has already seen my godfather and told him to put his feet up for a few days.”

  “Goodness me, the cruelty of some people’s lots!” exclaimed Archie.

  Young Peter Frobisher chuckled appreciatively from his corner of the room. Nothing made the boy feel more of a man than being privy to such banter. I myself felt definite relief we were to be spared the Dep Ed’s bulky inhibitive presence that day. Perhaps he’d be away from the office quite some time.

  “Cruel indeed!” grinned Barton Cunningham, relishing being on the opposite side of the divide from his godfather. “But I don’t want you to be too disappointed, Mr. Penry. At the end of only a few days, Uncle Tom will indubitably be walking about once more, even if it’s only with a stick.” He followed this sentence with words which sounded remarkably like “More’s the pity!” and would surely have gone on to break more confidences had not Edmund emerged from his private office, probably having overheard some of the disrespectful talk.

  “Gentlemen, please!” Edmund’s voice was a virtuous elder brother’s reproaching his less-than-kindly siblings. “An injury to the senior member of our team is hardly a subject for amusement, though of course healthy laughter will always go a long way in assisting us through life.” This mild reprimand was surely just a mite hypocritical, since Edmund noticeably kept his deputy at a distance, the two men differing so widely in temperament, mode of living, and political allegiance. “Barton, a word with you, if I may.”

  Barton, who, because of his familial connection with Mr. Betterton, had an aura this morning of unique if lightly-borne connection to the mighty, followed Edmund into his office almost as though he were about to be invested with his godfather’s authority. But he came back after barely five minutes, this quite plainly not having happened.

  “Here, Bridges,” he said, and I could tell he wasn’t much pleased at what he was having to relay. “Assuming you’re not already engrossed in another earth-shattering interview, I’ve got two things to pass on to you. First and foremost, you’re to help me sub a piece my poor injured god-papa left unrevised.”

  “I’ll be glad to!”

  “Me being busy sorting out the thorny problems of Margate’s Cricket Club finances doesn’t matter a hoot to Edmund, clearly!” grumbled Barton.

  Sulkily he sat down at Mr. Betterton’s desk, behind its huge Remington. While our printers were still perfectly prepared to receive copy in longhand, journalists increasingly, even dyed-in-the-wool old codgers like Mr. B, favored giving them articles typed beforehand, usually by themselves—though Edmund dictated his to the good Mrs. Carter, who then typed them out at twopence a sheet. The practice of typing has accelerated this last couple of years to a degree I would not have predicted; I approve. It’s so much easier to gauge the effect on readers of a piece in finished newsprint if you see it typed-out first!

  Barton was a chap who took naturally to machinery, and the sight of his godfather’s handsome possession, and the prospect of using it himself, cheered him up, made him feel less of an office-lackey.

  “Imagine yourself back in the olden days, Bridges, if someone as wet behind the ears as you can do such a thing,” he said, all but caressing the Remington, “when typewriters lacked shift keys. But to fellows like ourselves not moving out of capitals into lowercase seems like Ancient Egyptians having to deal with papyri . . . Shame we can’t find Godpapa’s last will and testament on this roller, ain’t it? The fellow’s not short of a bob or two, and when he snuffs it, ’tis rumored Yours Truly will be getting a little something. That’d be most welcome. I could even flee the old parental nest. Still, whoever died of a twisted ankle?”

  The accident that had befallen Barton’s godfather could not but remind me—why hadn’t I thought of it at once?—of Alfred Johnston, who had so painfully injured his foot on board Dronning Margrete, and so been holed up in his cabin during foul weather, with Hans and those old Norwegian newspapers for company. Had that not happened Hans would not be the haunted youth he now was.

/>   Oh, would I never get the figure of Johnston, a man I’d never met, out of my mind? Did I really want this pressure on me from Hans Lyngstrand’s recent experiences? Or even from Hans as an individual?

  I didn’t know. But, as I sat beside Barton Cunningham and his godfather’s Remington, I realized I required other types of companionship too and right now I was being given Barton Cunningham’s and was pretty glad of it.

  “Was it his tin that made your parents choose Mr. Betterton as your godfather?” I asked Barton, a touch impertinently, but I knew he wouldn’t mind.

  “I shouldn’t wonder. You see, the Governor and he were great pals when they were both in Bengal,” said Barton. Ah, Bengal, where it rained harder even than in spring-time Dengate! Other chaps always had more exotic histories and backgrounds than me. “My father was working in indigo there, y’know, making his own little pile, and Uncle Tom was on a newspaper in the same city. There were no flies on him, I can assure you, and he collected lucrative tips from every quarter he could, so when he came back to Kent, he had enough to buy himself handsomely (or so he thought) into The Advertiser, hoping one day to run the whole bally thing himself. Sad story, Uncle Tom’s, really. A liberal lord came along and bought the group of newspapers up, and appointed as editor a man of his own, Edmund. So, where had the poor old chap to go but the Deputy’s desk here, and we all know how influential that is. And, of course, along to the Freemasons of an evening also, to drown his sorrows . . . Anyway, let’s have a dekko at what the old man’s been up to before he toppled over. I can’t believe we shan’t find it needs an improving drop of Young Blood.”