The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “So much in common between Herr Thorvaldsen and me, it’s astonishing,” Hans informed me, his bright eyes an extra deep blue. “Not that I am going to be so great a man as he . . . Impossible!” said Hans with a laugh that maybe disguised a hope that such an ambition might not be unachievable. “There’s the woodcarver grandfather, and Thorvaldsen as a boy delighting in the old man’s designs and even helping with them. And then his experience as a youth on a frigate-ship (though the ships I’ve been working on never came in that category) and all the dreams he had when young of going south to see the home of the great classical legends—everything I find out about him reminds me of myself, Martin. And once he’d got there Thorvaldsen went on to live twenty-three years in Italy—in Rome itself. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. He even used to give himself a Roman birthday, March 8, because he felt his life only truly began when he first arrived in the Eternal City on March 8, 1797. This book is going to be a real inspiration for me.”

  “You’d better point out which of his stuff you like most,” I said, to stem this flow of fervor, which disconcerted me, I don’t mind admitting. I had given art scarcely any thought at all my whole life long.

  Hans was only too willing to oblige. I appreciated I would more likely than not be a spot bored during the next quarter of an hour or so, but then I’d been bored often enough in my young life and had learned how to cope with this state.

  “Well, this is one of my very favorites, here: ‘Ganymede and the Eagle’,” Hans was saying. “Thorvaldsen gave himself over to the classical masters from his very first days in Rome; he did lots of studies of Ganymede.”

  The plate to which Hans Lyngstrand was now directing my attention reproduced a marble composition in which an eagle drank from a cup resting on the raised right knee of a strikingly handsome youth with a strong, gentle facial expression. He was completely naked, his skin smooth and hairless, his left buttock reposing its flesh on his left calf. In his right hand he held a jug, presumably containing more water for the great bird to drink. The posture of its subject riveted me like a magnet drawing my eyes to itself.

  “And who was Ganymede when he was at home?” I asked.

  Hans furrowed his brow in puzzlement, then said: “I don’t know exactly where he lived, Martin, not at the time of Thorvaldsen’s statue. Later his home was Mount Olympus where he waited on the gods.”

  I blushed. “I must apologize, Hans. ‘When he’s at home’ is just a silly English expression. All I meant was—whoever was Ganymede?”

  Hans recited to me, like a keen schoolboy repeating his lesson, “Ganymede was a young man that the god Zeus liked so much he changed himself into an eagle so he could get to know him. Ganymede was a thoughtful, generous sort of boy, so he gave the bird water to drink. Later Zeus—disguising himself as an eagle—took him in his beak and carried him off to Olympus where he became cup-bearer to all the gods but to himself in particular.”

  “And was that a good thing to happen?”

  Hans looked as though unable to make head nor tail of a question both so literal and so facetious. Perhaps indeed only a young unserious Englishman would have asked it.

  He made no reply but turned the page of his book: “And here’s another of Ganymede, alone this time. And here is an earlier piece, the sculpture that first made Thorvaldsen famous, ‘Jason.’ All Rome praised it, including the greatest sculptor of the time, Canova. I think I’ve told you already there’s a plaster cast of this work in my patron Herr Strømme’s house in Bergen. So I got to know it very well, I even used to have imaginary conversations with it.

  “You may think it strange, Martin, but now these classical figures keep reminding me of boys I’ve known on board ships. Specially ones who are now dead; so often it was them who were the strongest, the bravest, the best. Knut. Jantje. Jakob. Boris . . . Look at this page, Martin. This is one of Thorvaldsen’s masterpieces—‘Shepherd Boy with Dog’; it brings Giacomo into my mind. He came from Italy, from a farm on the hills above Genoa; he would often tell me about it when we were on watches together.”

  The statue was certainly a beautiful creation, though never could I have brought myself to say so, the boy, seated on a sheepskin on a rock, with his dog below him on his right. Probably many times on the heaving Atlantic Giacomo—or Knut or Jakob or any of the others—would have achieved a similar attitude of sturdy triumphant gracefulness (and perhaps even in the Channel too before the ship went down) . . . But I didn’t want to tarry over these works much longer and pointedly shifted in my seat while Hans continued to turn pages. But a picture of a sculpted head, inclined gently downwards above large, muscular, splayed-out arms, caught my attention.

  “And who is that?”

  “Oh, that is Jesus Christ!” he said with something like embarrassment. “Perhaps we should leave him till later? I am very familiar with Jesus. Karsten Strømme owns a cast of that sculpture also.”

  I could think of nothing to say back. These statues were all like messengers from a world totally unfamiliar to me.

  Perhaps that was the reason why I was later able to tell him as I’d told nobody else ever about my own life, my childhood: Father’s drunkenness, Mother’s tearful ineffectual remonstrations, my desolation and my relief after their deaths, my job at the stationer’s, and then at the newspaper. He received it all as if absorbing it into his very being.

  Saturday was (indeed it still is, seven years later) a ragged kind of day at the newspaper when many jobs that have been shelved for one reason or another get polished off, often somewhat speedily, in order to begin the week on Monday with clean consciences—and clean worktables. But remembering what that little urchin (the one apparently called Martin, like myself) had told me about Saturday afternoon being the time when the chestnut-haired girl held her outdoor nature classes, I went home after work via the Royal Gardens. Benign sunshine flooded the little park. The candles on the horse-chestnuts looked taller, thicker, firmer, and a few inches nearer the sun, than at the beginning of the week. Courting couples were strolling hand in hand along the pathways of the park, and I decided actually to pass through its wrought-iron gates and join their throng—in the hope, of course, of catching a glimpse of the nature study group if it had, as it should, assembled today.

  I must have walked a hundred and fifty yards at the very least when I spied them—and what a pretty sight! Sitting on the far side of the large right-hand lawn, in the center of a collection of about twenty children, was the girl of my thoughts, wearing today a white chiffon scarf which showed the color of her hair to perfect advantage. I stopped dead in my tracks to drink the sight in, and, at the very moment I did so, she raised her head and saw me, catching me in my stationary posture of inquisitive long-distance scrutiny. I was pretty sure she recognized me as the prying young man of Monday—or was I flattering myself? Lowering my head reluctantly, I walked on.

  As for the morrow, it’d be quite a day, would it not? Hans and I would go to luncheon at Edmund’s, and—yes, why wasn’t I thinking about this rather more?—Will Postgate was due to turn up here in Dengate after his Hampshire/Sussex/Cinque Ports walking tour. But that night, alongside a now peacefully sleeping Hans, I dreamed of somebody quite different—Jason, his fleece over his shoulder.

  “You’ve no idea of the dangers of the voyage I made to get hold of this,” he said, “and how many times I looked down into the sea, and thought: ‘What unknowable life-forms exist down there!’ But then, truth to tell, unknowable life-forms exist everywhere . . .”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Furzebank Ho

  In London I had never been as aware of Sunday morning bells as now in Dengate, nor, for that matter, of all the many people who, even in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, obey their summons. I’d watch them all making their way churchwards, their faces transformed into masks by the smart hats surmounting them, hats the men would have to take off once inside church while the women kept theirs on. What a pantomime! I noted the young plodding chee
rlessly behind their elders and from time to time exchanging sheepishly conspiratorial grins with each other.

  These bells, so busy since daybreak, had just finished ringing out noon when Edmund’s eldest, Cyril showed up in his dog-cart outside Castelaniene, as had been arranged, to take Hans and me to Furzebank House. Aglow from his trot through the morning’s balmy warmth, he looked like a younger, slimmer Edmund—the same dark curly hair, the same beard running lightly around the jaw instead of covering it, and when he spoke, it was with his father’s breeziness.

  “Cyril Hough, at your service!” he cried. “Would you fellows appreciate a little jaunt ’round the neighborhood before I deliver you safe and sound to the family manor?”

  He obviously expected the enthusiastic answer he got. “That sounds a first-rate idea!” I said.

  Then—“Mrs. Fuller,” he shouted out, “the Pater sends his greetings. Soon it’ll be you I’ll be fetching for luncheon at Furzebank.”

  This sentence, though charmingly enough spoken, did not disarm Mrs. Fuller who gave the chilliest and shortest of smiles, and only when the dog-cart was actually moving off down St. Ethelberga’s Road did she call out, “Of course, remember me to both your parents.”

  “Working in the Smoke as I do,” Cyril told Hans and me, “Mincing Lane—Blandish and Young, tea-brokers, you probably know ’em?—I really appreciate being down in old Denners of a weekend. You know—trees, flowers, gardens—there ain’t many of those particular commodities at my outfit.”

  The cart turned the corner of our road with a sudden liveliness of motion on the horse’s part, Cyril keeping him on a very free rein. Our jaunt around residential Dengate as it climbed toward the downs took in two lookout points from which we had fine views of town, harbor, and shimmering Channel—why, I thought with surprise, this place was somewhere you might actually like to live. Even me! Cyril provided a running commentary on many houses and gardens passed.

  “That big house belongs to Mr. Howard Iddesleigh. He’s something colossal in Mincing Lane; they faint there at the very mention of his name . . . Hullo, hullo, do I see drawn blinds at the Gudgeon-Rogers’? One of ’em must have kicked it, I suppose. Probably the old man. Oh, well, in the midst of Life we find Death, or whatever the saying is.”

  But it was hard to find Death on a morning as kind to the senses as this, even someone who knew the dark history and troubled prospects of the young Norwegian sitting beside him. Laburnum drooped its racemes the other side of walls over which lilacs bent fragrant sprays of purple; hawthorn, with its white scented snows, was everywhere, in the gardens, beside the roads, forming hedges for the fields or the common-land—and then there was, especially on the fringes of the town, the gorse whose yellow the girl in the Royal Gardens had told those kids never to confuse with that of broom, also plentiful here.

  “The Pater’s got some favorite lines about the gorse, or furze as he likes to call it—that’s why our old mansion is called Furzebank Ho,” said Cyril, turning his head to address Hans and me behind him. “But as he’ll doubtless be spouting ’em to you, I won’t quote ’em now! By the way I most sincerely hope you fellows will be getting enough food today, and at a reasonable time, too. Some days you can get pretty darned hungry before the grub comes up, I’d better warn you right off. To be warned is to be forearmed, after all. Mater and Pater don’t keep a servant, though there’s a maiden who comes in from the Lower Town thrice a week. So we rely on a nice old hag who’s a relation of my mother’s and lives with us, working her fingers to the bone for her keep. But I’m sorry to say that, for all her excellences, she isn’t always as efficient as one might hope, even if we have visitors—or should I say, ’specially if we have visitors—and as for the Mater herself . . .” I couldn’t make out whether it was by accident that this sentence didn’t reach completion. At any rate he said no more because the horse had to be gently persuaded to turn down a half-concealed lane, after which, I could see, you left town behind for further down-land. That we had almost arrived I could tell from a rather wonky signpost saying TO FURZEBANK HO, the last three letters of the second word having been scrubbed off by some mischievous urchin; hence Cyril’s facetious name for his home.

  The dog-cart took us now down a narrow lane with high, thick, tangled gorse-bushes on either side, their scores of gleaming yellow phallusshaped flowers filling the air with sweet, wine-like scent. Beyond the gorse I could see orchards—nut-orchards, apparently, producing the famous Kentish cobs—and inside these were geese grazing, dazzling white against the green of grass and leaf and the blue of the bright sky. The lane came to an end in a farmhouse, the object of our drive and of many hours’ speculation: front wall white clapboard, and side-walls half-timbered, darkish seasoned brick crisscrossed with oaken beams.

  When Cyril turned the dog-cart into the yard to the back and side of this, I was taken aback by the untidiness and the shabbiness of what we confronted: outbuildings looking in need of repairs and re-painting, and in front of them a large, unsightly assemblage of discarded bits-and-pieces: spare wheels, broken shafts of earlier carts, chests and boxes crammed with obvious rubbish. As Hans and I prepared to descend from our conveyance, two fiercely hissing huge-seeming birds, necks stretched out, heads bent down like rugby-players about to tackle, came running from the unenclosed orchard to our right.

  “Away with the pair of you,” Cyril told the geese, standing before them in an attitude mimicking theirs. “Back, back! You may once have saved Rome from the Gauls but that’s no reason for you to be unfriendly to guests having their first glimpse of Furzebank Ho.”

  At this little commotion a woman came out of the farmhouse through the back door. Wearing a loose sky-blue smock, she waddled toward us—all too clearly in an advanced state of pregnancy—with a put-out expression on her otherwise pretty, fresh-complexioned face.

  She said: “Well, this is a fine time to arrive home and no mistake, Cyril. Whatever have you been doing with our visitors? Taking them to Dover and back?”

  “Keep your hair on, Mater,” said Cyril. “I’ve merely been showing Mr. Bridges and Mr. Lyngstrand some of the beauties of our neighborhood.”

  “I’ll say you have!” said the “Mater.” “Pausing in front of every single building and jabbering your head off the while, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  I hadn’t expected the rusticity of Edmund’s wife/Cyril’s mother’s voice. She had a tumble of copper-colored hair and a shiny face like an apple polished on an apron. She stomped up closer to Hans and me, and, looking at us rather as she might have done at some mangy sheep that had strayed into her orchard, asked: “So which of you two is the Norwegian one?”

  Hans bowed and admitted to the identity.

  “I thought Norwegians were meant to be tall,” she said, and then, to me: “So you’re the new boy in Edmund’s office.”

  This was not at all how I wanted to be designated. I put out my hand but it was not taken, not out of impoliteness but because Mrs. Hough’s own hands were wet and floury.

  “Put the horse and cart away right now, Cyril,” she ordered her son. “I don’t want any more time wasted than it’s been already . . .You two had better come along inside with me.”

  Perhaps, considering her “interesting condition,” which Edmund hadn’t mentioned to me, Mrs. Hough hadn’t wanted to entertain visitors today. Certainly nothing in her manner suggested she was pleased to see us. Foxgloves were growing against the side-wall of the farmhouse alongside the broom and the crimson valerian, and I noticed that, before passing back through the open back-door, Edmund’s wife quickly slipped three of her own fingers into the fingers of the floral “gloves,” as though following some rural superstition.

  We exchanged the noonday sunshine for a big, oak-beamed, flag-floored kitchen, which, when my eyes adjusted to it, resembled, I thought, in its disorder and its abundance of children, an ill-run baby-farm . . . Not to confuse readers as I myself was confused my first quarter of an hour at Furzebank Ho, I will tell the
m that Edmund and Susan Hough have eight surviving children: first the quartet of Cyril, Lucinda, Lotty (Charlotte), and George; then, after a sad period when offspring did not survive more than a year (and often not that!) Bella (Isobel), Rose, and Grantley. On August 2 of the year I’m writing about, 1885, Lionel, the child Susan Hough was now carrying, was born.

  An elderly woman with straggly white hair and watering brown eyes (but she’d been peeling onions) came up to me: “I bet I know what you are thinking, young man?”

  She gave me no time to respond, but recited:

  “‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

  She had só many children she didn’t knów what to do!’”

  Well, that wasn’t far off the mark.

  “Except that Susan ain’t old, and this house ain’t a shoe.” And she laughed so hard at her joke, which she must have made many times before, that I found myself laughing too. I rightly surmised that here was “that nice old hag who’s a relation of my mother’s”—Elsie Woodison. By the time I’d taken in who she was, two little Cairn terriers, tired of being pulled about by infants, had come up to me and started to tug at my trouser turn-ups.

  Cyril returned from re-stabling the horse.

  “Crumbs!” he exclaimed. “Are you both still in the kitchen in the middle of all this moiling? Where’s the Pater?” I had been asking myself this. “He will certainly want to know that his protégé and one of The Advertiser’s biggest heroes have arrived.”

  “About an hour later than was expected,” his mother couldn’t resist saying, as she carried a large saucepan over from the range to the principal kitchen table. “But that’s only to be expected from His Highness the Great Intelligence when he condescends to do a favor for somebody.”