The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “Yes, and much good it did him,” said Lucinda.

  “You knew their son?”

  “How could I not? My father’s his godfather, and, besides, we’re much of an age, he and I!”

  Well, that all tallied, and I felt somewhat put in my place. I was a newcomer, a stranger in this community, this provincial Channel Port, to which I lacked any knowledgeable guide—except Barton Cunningham—with the result that, wherever I went, I was liable to make a gaffe.

  “So, you were a friend of Horace Fuller’s?” I persevered.

  “Friend?” Lucinda’s brown eyes seemed to expand with surprise at the word. “Oh, no! Not at all! He wouldn’t have wanted it, even if I had. Horace Fuller did not have friends.” She seemed aware of a somewhat reproving coolness in her tone, because she amended it and went on to say, “Unlike yourself, I feel sure. I expect you have lots and lots of friends. You and Hans look already like a pair of brothers.”

  I was only too plainly disconcerted when Lotty, whose golden-fair hair, this Sunday kept in place in the front by a broad blue ribbon, distinguished her from all her siblings, called across the table a question she had been clearly itching to ask for some while: “Mr. Bridge,” she asked, “did you go to church this morning?”

  Honesty the best policy here, surely. “No, I did not!” I told her plainly, and unrepentantly. “Why, did you?”

  Lotty seemed not just surprised but somewhat affronted at the question. “But of course! We all went except lazy Cyril. And the Pater of course. And, needless to say, George tried not to go, too, but the Mater said he was turning into a young heathen, and should have his face forcibly scrubbed and his hair forcibly combed, and then be dragged into church if need be.”

  If looks could kill! George had to be content with growling at his sister: “You talk a lot of nonsense, spiteful little missy, and much of it ain’t true.”

  Lotty was not to be deterred: “Why didn’t you go to church, Mr. Bridge? I want to know.”

  The whole table had heard her question, and both her parents were, I could tell at once, interested to hear my answer. But I was spared having to make one, thanks to George’s feeling aggressively superior to his sister.

  “His name is Mr. Bridges, ignorant miss,” he told her. “Bridgezzzz! I’ve never met a girl who got so many things so wrong.” He smiled across at me in male complicity.

  “We go to St. Luke’s,” said Lucinda at my side, in a quiet, confiding voice, “and not because it’s the nearest church—though it’s just at the end of Hillcrest Road—or because it’s the newest—completed only eight years ago, and we all went to the consecration—but because Father Richardson (as he likes to be called) is such a very nice man, and a good man too, and his services are the most beautiful in the whole neighborhood. When Nature can boast the beauty She does, doesn’t man have a duty, Father Richardson asks, to make worship of her Creator as beautiful as possible, he says, with flowers before the altar marking every stage of the Church Year, and garments for the clergy—vestments, they call them at St. Luke’s—changing their colors with the seasons too.”

  I had nothing to say here, but Lucinda was moved to continue: “I’m sure you’d like St. Luke’s, Martin.” There, she had used my Christian name! “And the—what shall I say?—the state-of-mind behind it. We believe in Joy, you see. No dismal sabbatarianism for us!”

  “Well, thank heavens for that!” interpolated Edmund. “Any God worth worshipping would detest all the misery many churchmen still inflict on society, and on the only day when so many hard workers are able to relax. Anyhow,” it was me he was addressing, “you can count on their being no sabbatarian practices here. After lunch we’ll be playing croquet on the lawn.”

  Lucinda gave me a smile that made her face suddenly resemble her father’s. “Yes, and I hope you like the game, Martin. A friend of yours will be joining us.”

  “Oh?”

  “Barton Cunningham. I met him yesterday evening at the Parish Jumble Sale, and he said he would love to come up and play.”

  I wasn’t wholly pleased at this news, which surely confirmed the “understanding” Barton had spoken of for I found it hard to imagine him interested in parish affairs. As it turned out, my young colleague at The Advertiser was not the only friend of mine who participated in the afternoon croquet.

  • • •

  Though back in Norway Hans had never played croquet, he was sure a game very similar to it had been extemporized on the deck of one of his ships, and that it had been great fun. But Edmund proved adamant here; Hans must just sit in the garden and take it easy.

  “You’re not out of the wood yet, young man!” he told him. “You can be our judge-and-jury. There are bound to be little disputes of the finer points of the game. You can sort ’em out!”

  He’d only just given this injunction when onto the croquet lawn stepped Barton Cunningham, enviably debonair: red-and-black-striped blazer, cricket shirt open at the neck, and dark flannels. The smile he flashed at me was casual yet just a mite gloating.

  “I just couldn’t resist the prospect of a good game when Lou gave me the invitation!” he told me. So, it was “Lou” with him, was it? The name her own brother called her. “Ever played croquet before, Bridges?”

  “I have!” True, though I had never before been to a house with its own croquet lawn before.

  “Something of a champion, are you?”

  “I’m not so dusty!” I replied. “Hans, this is Barton Cunningham who works like me on The Advertiser.”

  Let me not bore readers with how many times I “ran” a hoop or achieved roquets (the striking of another’s ball with one’s own) before the impressed eyes of all participants and the referee Hans. Never in my life had I played so well; my strokes showed the requisite union of mind and muscle, and I was pronounced a real asset not only to my team but to Furzebank House as a center of the sport. The teams, with their different colored balls, were as follows:

  THE BLACK AND BLUE TEAM: Cyril Hough, Martin Bridges, and (after an argument because her younger brother wanted to play alongside Cyril) Lotty Hough;

  THE RED AND YELLOW TEAM: Lucinda Hough, Barton Cunningham, and George Hough.

  Honesty compels me to say that Barton, after an initial overrating of himself and a few signs of impatience when what he strove for didn’t come off, was sporting enough to cheer some of my best efforts, while boyishly exclaiming “Darn it!” and even “Damn!” when his own proved less than brilliant. As for Lucinda, I realized in the very first few minutes of the game that her concentration, so admirably in evidence when talking to ragged children about trees and flowers, frequently strayed when it came to hoops and mallet-strikes, thus bringing out a teasing chivalry in Barton and a barely disguised impatience in George.

  At about four o’clock Elsie emerged from the house with a tray bearing a large jug of a pressed lemon drink, but Cyril made it clear that this was merely an interval; more hard play (with a look at his sister here) was to follow. He and Barton then began a conversation which became quite animated on some issue of scoring, and both George and, a little to my surprise, Hans joined in (showing the knack he must have developed as a sailor for getting on quickly with, and even pleasing, the company he found himself in). Edmund went back into the house. All this gave me the opportunity to go up to Lucinda seated on a tump of grass beside her sister Lotty and strike up my second reasonably communicative conversation between us.

  “You’re obviously a seasoned croquet-player, Martin. It’s good for us to have you here at Furzebank.”

  “I’m not really that, I’m afraid; in fact, I don’t think I’ve had a game of croquet for over a year.”

  “That says even more for your performance today. You’ve certainly got yourself an admirer in my second brother, George. ‘He should have been in our team!’ he kept on whispering to me. George doesn’t think that I take the game earnestly enough.”

  “But do you?” I was bold enough to ask.

  Lucind
a smiling shook her head. “I can never think of sport in the way you men all do. Games don’t deserve the huge importance you attach to them. To hear Cyril and Barton talk now, you’d think the fate of England depended on the rules of croquet.”

  I felt this combination of irony and reproof in her voice somewhat undermined my own recent display of proficiency, and, even more importantly, that this proficiency hadn’t quite served its desired purpose of winning her esteem.

  “I don’t really care about such things either,” I said. “For me a game is just a game. Other things matter far more.”

  “What things?”

  This was hard to answer since what mattered to me most was my newspaper career, and I could hardly say that to Edmund Hough’s daughter. So I ventured: “Other living beings—I don’t want to stay as ignorant of them as I am at present.”

  “Isn’t the remedy in your own hands? Why haven’t you done anything about it a long time ago?”

  “Because I was leading the wrong kind of life. A London life.” As at the Gateway what came out of my mouth next took me by surprise. “I’d like to join your classes in the Royal Gardens—my work permitting, of course. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday afternoons, isn’t it?”

  It was now Lucinda’s turn to blush, if only very slightly. “However do you know that?”

  “One of your”—I was about to put little “Martin” from Farthing Lane into a facetious category: “acolytes,” “disciples,” even “beaux,” but have happily changed in mid-course—“pupils told me. He had to leave for home before you’d finished, and we collided by the park gates. He seemed to have profited a lot from your instruction.”

  “I’m so glad!” And she sincerely sounded it. “Well, I don’t see why you shouldn’t come, though the class isn’t intended for the likes of you. Someone who till only recently has been a Young-Man-About-Town.”

  “Hardly!” I said, though I didn’t dislike this description of myself. I was just wondering what brief account of my previous life and self I could now give her, by her side as I was, when I became aware that the attention of all the others on the lawn had been aroused by a new arrival.

  I turned around to see no lesser person than—Will Postgate himself.

  How could I have forgotten that Will was due in Dengate this very day, Will my greatest friend, the one who had given me so splendid a send-off in Soho, and written me so flamboyant an announcement of his imminent visit? Well, of course I hadn’t forgotten; in point of fact, waking up at half past six at Hans’s side before he slipped back into the Mercy Room, I had thought: “Today Will is coming!” But from the moment Cyril had collected Hans and me in his dog-cart to this moment now poor Will had vanished from my thoughts.

  Actually no adjective could be less appropriate than “poor” for Will as he presented himself to the garden of Furzebank House. His stride and stance made Barton and Cyril seem almost schoolboys, though in plain fact he was their senior by only a short margin. As for Hans, his precarious health—revealed in his pallor, thinness, and involuntary stoop, in all of which I was coming to detect gentle improvements—was thrown into immediate somber relief by Will’s vigorous masculine body.

  “So this is where you’re hiding yourself, Martin, my old chum,” he said, in a loud, ringing voice, “and a darned good choice on your part, I don’t mind saying.”

  No sooner had he said this than I appreciated what I had never noticed: how strongly Will’s voice was redolent of London streets, more so than my own, especially as I was now doing my best to trim it to harmonize with Edmund’s lightly mellow tones. No question of Will trimming anything. And his exterior appearance? If Barton’s striped blazer was dashing, Will’s scarlet one was nothing short of dazzling, going with his well-waxed moustache, flowing hair, and immaculately pressed cream-colored flannels. He was carrying in his large strong-fingered hands a straw boater and an artist’s drawing-pad. If all that sounds unlikely garb for a man at the end of a long walking-tour of Hampshire, the South Downs, and the Cinque Ports, then he accounted for it in his next remarks—addressed to me but received (as he intended) by the entire croquet party turned silent on his advent.

  “It was Mrs. Fuller of course who told me where you were, and Martin my lad, why ever didn’t you tell me what a good friendly soul that excellent lady is? She wouldn’t have me staying at the dismal hostelry you’d gone and put me up at. Oh no, I must stay in her house, in her best spare room, which she and her faithful old minion would get ready for me forthwith. All this was decided, I’ll have you know, within minutes, minutes, of meeting me. But then I do seem to have this lightning effect on people. So I am now ensconced in Castle Aneen itself, antiquities on my bedroom walls and a spacious wardrobe for my togs. In this room, after a due interval, I duly made a change of apparel, and then set out for here, and a goodish uphill walk it’s proved. And voilà as they say in Frogland.

  “Moreover,” and he turned his handsome head to indicate Edmund standing a few paces behind him, “I’ve just been granted the great honor and the immense pleasure of meeting the famous editor of The Channel Ports Advertiser at long last. As I’ve already had the pleasure of informing him, I suspect we’ll be seeing a bit of each other in the months, nay years, to come, holding as we both do important positions in the same newspaper group. I haven’t yet told you, Martin, that just before I left for my holiday, I was made a Deputy Editor, nothing less, of the old rag.”

  This obviously was the news he had tantalized me with hints of in his letter.

  Everybody, from Lotty and George right up through to the broker of Mincing Lane himself was given a chance to absorb this impressive promotion and to let the jaw suitably drop. For a reason that eluded me I was not as glad to hear it as I would at one time have imagined I’d be.

  The London Martin Bridges would not just have thought but would have promptly declared: “They couldn’t have made a better choice than you, Will, old man! Heartiest congratulations!” Whereas now . . . could this odd dull sensation in the Dengate Martin Bridges’s stomach be a symptom of some dishonorable jealousy? Surely not! I was nowhere near being appointed a Dep Ed anywhere, though secretly I had high hopes of attaining this rank (if not an even higher one) before the age of thirty, W. T. Stead still constantly in my mind. But however less than whole-heartedly pleased I was by Will’s barging into the Houghs’ home with breezy grandiloquent announcements of his own good fortune, I did succeed in saying aloud, “That’s the most splendid news, Will! Well done!”

  Will gave me a nod as if these words were no more than his due (and possibly somewhat less), and then insisted on knowing who everybody was. To Cyril he said: “Oh Mincing Lane, I’m often over there myself. Next time I go there you can give me a few scoops of your best dried char!” On hearing Barton’s brief self-introduction he commented: “I suppose you’ve been showing the ropes to this young shaver!” (Myself!) “Well, that thankless task fell to my lot a few years back, but ‘Give ’im time!’ is what I say to you!” I was not best pleased by this. To Lucinda he said: “I never knew so distinguished an editor would have so distinguished-looking a daughter!”—which I thought decidedly brazen.

  After all this, like some newly-dispatched general interesting himself in the pastimes of the common soldier, he gestured toward the croquet hoops and to the mallets lying abandoned on the grass, saying: “And was a battle of croquet about to commence when I so rudely made my entrance? And if so, can I atone for my intrusion by taking part? I’ll be an asset to any side I join, I promise you. I’m something of a dab hand after so many games on the lawn at the back of The Crooked Billet, Lewisham. Don’t you remember, Martin? Second Saturday in June last year, if I’m not mistaken. Crikey, if our team’s fortunes had been left to you . . .” He chuckled at this dire possibility. “But happily, they weren’t. One William Postgate was at hand to do the necessary.”

  So soon we were reorganizing ourselves for another match. But Will’s brand of male panache scared off the girls, for firs
t Lucinda, then Lotty, declared they’d rather watch than play.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear this, Miss Hough,” said Will to Lucinda. “You would have been a team’s greatest adornment.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought teams wanted adornments, only good players!” riposted Lucinda. Which made Will laugh and say: “Touché! . . . You and my friend Martin seemed locked in a very serious conversation when I burst in on the scene here. Putting the world to rights, were you?”

  He so patently didn’t think that was what we were doing that I piped up: “In a way, yes! Lucinda was expressing her belief that children everywhere, but particularly in the poorer areas of towns, should be in touch with nature, should know the names and features of the plants and animals all ’round them.” Well, if that doesn’t sound like a “serious conversation”, I thought, I don’t know what does.

  Oh, if only I had never said all that! Will, slapping his right thigh, now exclaimed: “A woman after my own heart. I’m forever saying how London kids should be made more aware of nature, which affects them all the time without their realizing it. Expanding children’s knowledge of the world is quite a little hobby-horse of mine.” Was it? First time I was aware of it, but then Will’s certainly was an active mind and doubtless he had many hobby-horses he hadn’t seen fit to let me in on. “We must talk about this more, swap ideas . . . Anyway, back to really important business. To whit, croquet. And after we’re done, I shall make sketches of you all. Brought my block of artist’s sheets along for no other purpose.”

  The two new teams were as follows:

  THE BLACK AND BLUE TEAM: Cyril Hough, George Hough, and Martin Bridges;

  THE RED AND YELLOW TEAM: Edmund Hough, Barton Cunningham, and William Postgate.

  The Red and Yellow team won handsomely, though not before a fit of temper from George who claimed that Mr. Postgate had cheated, and threw his mallet down in outrage at this. Only after I had taken George aside behind the largest hawthorn, and flattered him while decrying this intruding friend of mine, was peace restored.