The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  “So—?”

  “So obviously the sailor-boy handed the girl the orange. But at that moment, as ill luck would have it, the voice of some grown man (probably her father) came from the house ordering her to come inside. She attempted to give him back the orange, but he wasn’t having this. Then she told him that if he came back the next day, she would be as good as her word and give him the kiss he’d asked for.

  “That was something really to look forward to, but next day when it became evening, the sailor-boy found himself quite content to spend the time on board the schooner while his mates went ashore. He had the dear old ship’s dog for company (Balthasar was his name), and, like my shipmate, Niels, whom I told you about, this lad was a good concertina-player, and liked to entertain himself making music. But now, as he was doing so, he was filled by a strange, strong, wild emotion, and he knew that he’d have no peace whatever until he was back on land in the town, where he’d have the kiss promised him for this very night. By good fortune there was a Russian boat moored right alongside our Norwegian boy’s, and her crew signalled to him that they’d take him ashore in their dinghy, which they did. But they wanted him to go on the town with them, and out of sheer politeness, he agreed to, just for a short while.

  “Well, one of these Russians fell for our sailor-boy; he hugged him and kissed him, and gave him a present of a watch-chain, and told him how handsome he was, and how he was already in love with him. And all this when there was a swarm of people about, not always respectable folk. And the sailor-boy felt he really had to get away and find the pretty girl and have his kiss, which he was sure would be a thousand times sweeter than even the best of oranges. So he escaped and off he went, in some desperation, in the direction he thought he’d taken the previous night. But somehow or other he went wrong—he after all was a stranger to Bodø—and, like in some bad dream, he found himself back at the harbor-front again. This was terrible! He swung ’round, and took another turn, deciding on it almost on whim, and began to run as fast as he could (and he was quite a sprinter) down a little passage. And then he saw, blocking his way—why, who else but that Russian who had taken such a fancy to him.

  “‘I’ve been looking for you all over this damned place,’ this great bear-like man, smelling of drink, told him, ‘and I’ve been crying my eyes out because I couldn’t find you. I like you so, so much! More than you can possibly imagine—yet.’ And he seized him in his great arms—as strong as any bear’s—and gave him a hug so mighty our sailor didn’t think he would be ever free again.

  “Well, being kept captive against this huge male body odorous with sweat and drink when what he wanted was to go and claim his kiss from that nice girl on the outskirts of this town was more than our young hero could bear.

  “‘Don’t hold me any longer! I have to be somewhere else!’ he implored, to get the answer: ‘Oh, but I must hold on to you, I love you, love you so much!’

  “‘You have to let me go!’ the boy pleaded passionately, only to get a little lover’s laugh in reply. So, after a rush of wilder frustration and impatience than he’d ever experienced before, the sailor-boy took out his knife, the kind of knife every sailor carries with him, and ran it into this human obstacle as hard as he could. Out gushed the blood, the man relaxed his grip, swung backwards and forwards and then—toppled over, dead.

  “Panic followed—imagine it! He had hardly time to be sorry for the dreadful deed he had done. Before many more minutes the Russian’s comrades would be coming along and would stumble on his body. They would then start searching for his killer, and how, with the spattered blood on him, could he not be found? Our sailor-boy ran hither and thither, terrified out of his wits, not knowing where he would be able to conceal himself, but can you believe it, Martin?—this time he did arrive on the edge of the town, and right beside the very house of the girl. And here she was, as beautiful as she’d been in his thoughts.

  “She told him she had eaten his orange with great enjoyment; he told her he had just killed a man; she asked him why; he told her it was because the man in question had tried to prevent him coming to see her and have the promise she’d made him fulfilled. But then he went on to say what was only the truth, that the man he’d killed had fallen in love with him. This was such a terrible truth that the boy began to cry and cry.

  “The girl gave the sailor-boy the kiss he had come all this way for, and for the sake of which he had robbed another human being of his life. And the kiss was more delicious than anything he’d ever dreamed of. But there was nothing she could do directly to help him, in a situation getting worse by the minute, for the search-party for the Russian’s killer must surely now be underway. But she did tell him to keep his blood-stained hands out of view, and then assured him she would never want to marry anybody else. Back the boy sped toward the harbor, but of course every street, every alleyway was now a-stir with people looking out for a murderer, and he was obliged to take refuge in a very crowded waterside dive full of boozers and wenchers. To his great surprise an old woman strode into this highly unsuitable place loudly proclaiming that he—he, trying so hard not to be noticed—was her son. She simply wouldn’t take his no for an answer either, but seized hold of him with a strong scrawny hand and arm. All the folk there laughed, thinking she had come to haul away her innocent lad out of the temptations of such bad company! Then—‘There’s nothing for it but to come with me!’ she whispered to him, ‘it’s the only way after what you’ve done that you can be safe.’

  “She was a Kven, one of the mysteriously gifted Finnish folk you find in the north of Norway. She tugged him down the street, pulled him into her little cabin, a humble place covered in reindeer skins and the skins of other animals from the wilderness, and made him first wipe the blood off his hands onto her skirts. Only minutes had passed before—knock-knock-knock!—two Russians were banging on her door demanding to know if she’d seen any young man who probably knifed their mate. She told our sailor to remain still, answered the door and told her callers in no uncertain terms to be off with their bother.

  “Finally, when the coast was again clear, this old lady personally gave the young sailor the good washing he needed so there was no longer any blood on his person and made some swift changes to his appearance and his attire, saying that, looking as he now did, he could get away to safety easily enough. Down at the harbor a young relative of hers had a little skiff that could take him to his own ship; she explained how he was to find him. But one thing first—she must remove his knife. He was never to use it again! What could our sailor do but consent? Anyway, he did not want ever to use it; one killing was more than enough for him. So he sat there and let her remove the knife, but, when she’d got it from him, she proceeded to perform the strangest act imaginable. This old Kvennish woman hacked at her own thumb, so violently that the blood quite spurted up.

  “And have you guessed the secret I’m coming to, Martin? Do you see the point of this story?”

  “Nnnn!” I shook my head, unsure I was even here in Castelaniene and not in the remote Norwegian port of—what was it called?—Bodø?

  “Well, the old woman asked our sailor-boy: ‘Do you not recognize me? Not even after what I’ve just done? I am that peregrine falcon you helped down from the mast, and who struggled and then ungratefully bit you on the thumb. I have now just hacked my own thumb in repayment and so am able to give you that same freedom you gave me and which you’ve otherwise forfeited through your misdeed.’”

  “And did he go free after all that, your sailor-boy?” I felt curiously agitated, and yet the tale was even more remote in happenings as it was in setting.

  “Of course! In fact, all cleaned up as he was, he found the old lady’s relative with the skiff in next to no time, and was able to catch up with his mates coming back from their carousals. The dog Balthasar was pleased to see him, in fact everyone on board was in a good mood, and they all went on to make an evening of it—and I won’t say that our hero wasn’t playing the concertina ag
ain before they decided at last to turn in.”

  “But did he not think of the Russian? If not that evening, then later? He’d taken his life.”

  Hans’s eyes played on me in the darkness of bed and bedroom. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I felt tiredness about to break over me like ocean waves. “I expect . . . Well, that he did.” I finally got out.

  “Of course he did,” said Hans. And then it was that he leaned over me, and his tongue entered my mouth like a strong sweet-flavored fish intent on finding its mate.

  Was I surprised? I don’t think I was, though perhaps I should have been. His tongue was the sailor-boy setting out from that ship for the town where there was so much to do and to find. In his story there’d been a peregrine falcon tangled up in a mast and then gloriously liberated, there’d been oranges, those fruits of the south, and the sweetest of kisses that these had brought about. And there’d been knives—dangerous and disaster-bringing—but also fierce conductors to happiness.

  And I myself had a knife—oh, yes I had a knife all right, and it was between my legs and, I could feel it increasing itself, expanding to that point when it was more master than possession, more owner than owned. But then the other chap, him with the intent tongue, had, I appreciated, a knife too, also getting larger, preparing itself . . . The sea-blue of his eyes, so intimately close to mine my distance from them could not be measured, shone even in the small-hours darkness of my bedroom.

  Was there really any likely alternative to what now took place? My own tongue found its fish-like strength, my own knife wanted to go to its work. The Russian’s hug had seemed everlasting, and the sailor-boy had grieved at the way he’d broken it, the kiss the girl gave the boy, a whole day after she had eaten the orange he’d handed her, had been so delicious that estimation of the time it lasted defied the human brain. There were moments, with Hans, when I felt our limbs were those of one animal, possibly with a single heart, that we had some time ago passed out of our separate identities and beyond the control of the clock. Even of the sun, into some only half-suspected realm where calendar and hourglass were as impossible as separation—or even separateness.

  Well, in the end, Time did establish itself again; it always does so long as we remain alive on this earth, and we found ourselves, a little reluctantly, drawing apart, second-by-second accepting that this return to normal had to be. But still we lay there with only a notional space between us, and I felt a peace which could again be envisaged in terms of Hans’s story (already, it now seemed, part of the past, our past, his and mine)—the vast quiet of the sky into which the freed peregrine had flown, and of the sea onto which the sailor-boy, despite being guilty of so heinous an offense, had been permitted to return.

  Then I said: “Hans, you were wanting me to tell you a story before . . .” Before we came together, I meant to say but didn’t. “Then I didn’t feel like it. Now I do, if you want to hear it.”

  “Of course I would like to hear it, Martin,” said Hans, “very much!”

  I told him how at the Thomas Middleton School, Camberwell, that big, dreary block of bricks, I was sitting one wet February afternoon as a member of the Fifth Form, as it ground a slow way through Shakespeare’s The Tempest, under the guidance of one of the few masters I in any degree liked, Mr. Grayson, a tall, stooping man in early middle age, with an apologetic manner but a capacity for enthusiasm rare among those paid (pretty dismally) to teach us. We were reading Miranda’s lines which surely could have applied to circumstances in which Hans Lyngstrand had found himself on the English Channel:

  The sky it seems would pour down stinking pitch,

  But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek,

  Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered

  With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,

  Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,

  Dashed all to pieces. O, the cry did knock

  Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.

  Had I been god of power, I would

  Have sunk the sea within the earth, or ere

  It should the good ship so have swallowed and

  The fraughting souls within her.

  I told how at the end of this evocative speech into our class walked our Headmaster. Though I beheld him every day, as the embodiment of authority, and heard him every day in morning assembly as the voice of moral power, he had never once yet so much as spoken to me nor I to him. He did not even know me by sight, as my story makes plain. He was a tall, thin man who often held his head in the air so that his gray-black beard was upward-tilted. I scarcely thought of him as a human being at all, and after the events of that particular rainy day had even less reason to believe him one.

  I told Hans how the whole room fell silent with awe and wonder. None of us could remember this having happened—or even being said to have happened—before. Those three boys—Fenwick, Marsden, and Stiles—who amused themselves in Mr. Grayson’s excellent periods by playing Consequences—that is to say, by passing under the desk pieces of paper with sentences on them for the others to complete, invariably on the subject of female anatomy—straightened themselves out immediately and sat attentively upright as though Shakespeare’s last play was what interested them most in life. The Headmaster surveyed us all with petrifying eyes, and poor Mr. Grayson looked as uncomfortable as any schoolboy caught surreptitiously munching an apple during a religious service.

  “I believe you have here, sir,” Authority boomed, “a boy by the name of Bridges.” He did not deliver these words very amiably; there was menace in them, and the beard went up even further into the air.

  “I have indeed, sir,” said Mr. Grayson as if admitting such an unfortunate truth might spare him—and indeed the whole class—all manner of further trouble. “Please to stand up, Bridges.”

  What could I do but what I was bidden. Twenty-five pairs of eyes in that classroom were on me now, as if already I’d been found guilty of something so terrible it had brought Justice Made Flesh to drag me out of the room. I myself, if completely taken aback, did not feel quite as fearful as you might imagine, for I knew that I’d been leading a completely blameless life, outwardly at any rate, and I was perhaps too innocent and inexperienced to imagine one could ever be held responsible for another’s wrongdoing.

  “So you are Bridges!” the Headmaster maintained his boom, though by now he was barely a foot away from me. He spoke as if he had very recently been wondering what I looked like and now he’d found out, didn’t much care for the reality. “Bridges M., the focal point of so much grief. Sir, I beg leave to take this boy with me out of your doubtless highly instructive class.”

  “Mr. Grayson, possibly embarrassed by being called “sir” in public by the most august figure in his existence, had reddened as thoroughly as any junior boys, and now made inarticulate murmurs of assent (but what other course did he have?). I could feel the communal sigh of relief (in which curiosity was also audible) to which he himself contributed after I’d followed the Headmaster out of the room, and the latter had turned ’round and decisively, grimly, shut the door behind us.

  The Headmaster’s first words were astonishing. “I take it you have such a thing as a ‘locker’!” He pronounced the last word as if it were foreign, and not the name of an item integral to the system over which he presided.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “It’s in Wing C.”

  “Please be so good as to lead me to it. I shall be watching you pack all your effects into your satchel, to be sure we have seen the last of you and your belongings.”

  I made no demurral whatever, felt myself in no position to. Doubtless an explanation would be forthcoming sooner or later—and I could put matters right. I therefore led him (as he’d asked) through his own school, to those dismal quarters which contained my locker (along with those of other boys with surnames in the group A to M). And when I got there, this lofty human being was pleased to stand over me, his beard now virtually grazing
my neck, while I packed every item of school stuff—from Latin dictionary to a tennis ball for impromptu playground games, from a wodge of blotting-paper to, heaven knows why, a spare cuff-link—making impatient humming noises the while, as if I could not perform my task too rapidly for his satisfaction.

  “Every item disposed of then,” the Headmaster at last was able to say. “Just as well because Bridges, you will not be darkening our doors again.”

  “Sir? Why is that?”

  “You should by rights ask your father,” said the headmaster. “But perhaps you do have a right to an explanation, too. Mr. Bridges has defaulted on payments to this establishment. We exercised clemency last term, to him and by extension to yourself, so that you have had your tuition here from September to the present, to this very day, free. FREE, do you understand, sir? FREE. Not only has the outstanding amount not been made up, but we have received no fees for this term either. And when we requested them, we met only with insolence and fiscal incompetence. Therefore, there can be no place at the Thomas Middleton School for you, Bridges, nor is it good for your fellow pupils to keep company with one who has not been paid for, with no moneys forthcoming, who has been attending the classes FREE. And lest you think I am being hard-hearted”—it was difficult, both then and later, not to think this of him—“I will add that we do have certain benevolent schemes for parents in temporary distress. We notified Mr. Bridges of them, and encountered exactly that insolence and that fiscal incompetence”—how proud he was of finding these, I must admit apt, terms!—“of which I have already spoken. Take your satchel then, sir, and leave the school premises as unostentatiously as you can.”

  I now told Hans with whom I’d shared more than I had with anybody—about Walter Bridges himself, about the puritan household in East Anglia he came from and his own rebellion against their Bible-readings, their total abjuring of alcohol or tobacco, their Sabbatarianism, all of which had encouraged him to think of himself as “destined to preserve the full-blooded freedom of the Regency in the strait-laced culture of Victoria’s mid-century.” Certainly he unfailingly put his own pleasures—“needs” he called them—well before duties, whether to those companies unwise enough to employ him as a pay clerk (later, senior pay clerk) or to his family.