The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Well, how could this not please me? How could not it incline me to a favorable picture of “Dick” Whittington, me always so responsive to praise, not least from a headmaster after having been so badly treated by my own? So when the man went on to say that he believed St. Stephen’s met the great Beresford Hope’s desiderata for every community, that it should strive to be a secular Sancta Civitas with every citizen, be he senior classics master or under-gardener, honoring God by cheerfully fulfilling his duties, I smiled, nodded my affirmation, and jotted down this lofty vision of the establishment, virtually word-for-word, in shorthand.

  How different a return journey always is from the outward one! Those very orchards which only two hours earlier had announced liberation from the scene of my daily round, my entrance into the boundless-seeming fertility of the interior, of the Garden of England itself, now more and more presaged the Channel Port that already had absorbed the London boy I was. I had brought out sympathy—and, I dared to think, respect—in two of St. Stephen’s most important “citizens,” three if you counted Mr. Azariah Welbeck. What I had learned about the Founder’s Day celebrations would make not just a decent piece, but an appealing one. And yet I could not say to myself in all honesty—but perhaps in all dishonesty I did do so that morning—that I either cared or approved of the institution I had visited and all that it entailed and all that I meant.

  Come to that, what had my real reactions been to Furzebank Ho?

  I can’t answer these last questions, not fully, not satisfactorily, even as I write now.

  Too satiated with recent impressions, and still trying to settle my recalcitrant system down, I leaned back in my dusty plum-colored compartment seat and began to review what I had taken in of the regime and values of St. Stephen’s. And then—belatedly, it may seem to my readers—it occurred to me of all the information gleaned, none was more extraordinary, none deserved further analysis, than the (half-) statement by Mr. Welbeck that Mr. Fuller had drawn attention to his son’s misdeed, even had it labeled as a far worse offense than it was—for Horace Fuller had explained to his father that he was borrowing the money and would endeavor to pay it back in full. And he’d always been so tenderly kind to young Mary.

  That evening, after really very little thought on the matter, I slipped a note under the door of the Mercy Room:

  Dear Hans,

  After returning from this morning’s visit to St. Stephen’s College, I found that my activities on The Advertiser have undergone a significantly increase. Good for me in most ways, though a little daunting also. I hope I’ll be up to their expectations of me, but I will really need uninterrupted nights if I am to do all this new work as well as I can. I am sure you will understand this, and for your own health I believe that quiet nights will be the best thing too.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Martin

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Friendship’s Changing Faces

  Never earlier would I have believed that Will’s presence, and in the same house as myself, could prove bane rather than blessing. In South London I had cherished every moment I spent with him out of the office. But down here in Dengate he wasn’t the old Will of London. Or—terrible, disloyal thought, perhaps he was! Could it simply be that, back then, I had been so patently his junior, so unabashedly in need of an elder-brother guide and protector, and he too vain and lazily good-natured to refuse the role, that I hadn’t been able to see the extent of his indifference to almost all feelings of other people except their admiration, actual or potential, for himself? I should, I now told myself, have recalled more often our visit to Limehouse, that second dark event I still needed to confess to somebody but had, out of self-protection, suppressed so that it returned only in the occasional bad dream or involuntary twinge-like thought.

  Now I see that my resentment of Will—from (to be truthful) Sunday night’s supper to the Saturday morning he left Dengate (to be in time for a cricket match in Streatham on Saturday afternoon)—was inseparable from my severance from Hans. Fear of Will’s finding out about our intimacies had beyond doubt played a huge part in my determining on this. But it would be incorrect—as well as dishonest—to blame him for what I myself had set in train.

  But Will’s own behavior was in itself vexing. Take his dealings with Mrs. Fuller herself, my landlady, his hostess. I ought to have known from his very appearance on the Furzebank lawn—togged up in his nattiest—that he had charmed the mistress of Castelaniene, for how else to explain that she had, almost on sight, offered him her private visitor’s bedroom (her late husband’s dressing-room). And Sunday’s “light collation,” during which he’d told stories of himself as a man well-known in both worldly and radical circles, was the first of no fewer than five other evening meals. Mrs. Fuller no longer absented herself from her own table, but attired herself specially to grace it, sticking an absurdly large comb into her Grecian hair and draping over her shoulders a shawl I had not seen before—and I thought I knew them all. Sitting there I allowed my attention to stray—I had plenty, too much indeed, to think about, including the to me reproachful absence on Tuesday and Thursday evenings of Hans Lyngstrand, apparently feeling unwell again, and having his meal brought up to the Mercy Room by Sarah. That suited Mrs. Fuller and Mr. Postgate just fine, they could indulge in sophisticated badinage to their heart’s content. And this young man who had so persistently mocked all forms of snobbery now encouraged Beatrice Fuller to talk about herself and her stupid petted early life, early visits to France, including a trip to Monte Carlo itself, her girlhood friendship with fascinating old Lady Winchelsea, and one never-to-be-forgotten experience the two of them had had in a small half-ruined old church on the edge of Romney Marsh where, indisputably alone one winter’s afternoon, they had most definitely heard a monk singing a medieval chant through the shadowy chancel. At this point, I have to admit, that Will did turn to me and give me a surreptitious, unmistakably amused wink, but by this time (it was Wednesday, so the fourth damned dinner), I was too fed up to do anything but pointedly, unsmilingly, ignore it.

  And Will’s ways about the house—had I not noticed how he made Mrs. Fuller’s usually pretty low spirits rise, had I not been fully aware that in any choice between the two of us, she would have straightway plumped for him—I would have been embarrassed by them. Why my very own parents—neither of them of Mrs. Fuller’s lofty circle—would have considered him socially unacceptable. He walked around without his jacket or waistcoat, baring vulgarly bright braces and shirts with the sleeves rolled-up; he whistled as he performed his ablutions, shrilly and loudly, and even sang snatches of music-hall songs in that careless manner I’d formerly found endearing.

  “Let me introduce a fellah,

  Lardy dah, Lardy dah!

  He wears a penny flower on his coat,

  Lardy dah! . . .”

  But he could (and did) vary that kind of thing with “La ci darem la mano,” or “La donna è mobile” (sung in cockney Italian).

  Yet had Hans Lyngstrand and I not been avoiding each other, had he not absented himself from two out of the five weekday meals, had he not kept the door of the Mercy Room more often shut than open, I would probably—despite all the above—have been less intolerant of Will. All Hans ever said about the letter I’d slipped under the door of the Mercy Room was “I agree with you, Martin! We both need a good night’s sleep.” And as if to demonstrate this need he was consumed by a terrible cough, rendering his face first alarmingly red, then alarmingly pale.

  Mrs. Fuller was not the only female whose path Will crossed at Castelaniene—and I am not thinking of poor Irish Sarah either with her “Roman” devotions. There was, of course, Mary, who came to the house every day except Sunday, the very day on which Will had arrived there. For obvious reasons “the little vehicle” and I could not exactly do as Hans and I were doing, keep out of each other’s way. But, ever since the meeting at the Gateway we had tended not to look each other in the face when, as we were bound to do, we met—in
hall, on landing, on embarrassingly narrow staircase—though I gave the attic floor a wide berth when I knew there was any likelihood of her “doing” it. But the sly not to say furtive glances she regularly gave me out of sore eyes set in puffy cheeks repeatedly implied some disreputable secret between us (as there surely was; I did not feel that I came out of the evening at Banstead Lodge well). How in the world had it come about that this daughter of Dengate’s Farthing Lane had discovered her ability to get in touch with the next world? And what had she thought of my acting on behalf of Hans Lyngstrand? Had she wondered at a bond between us?

  And I more than suspected she had. Whether her intuitive powers really extended beyond the tomb I was from the first sceptical, but just from observing her I felt they were quite formidable when exercised on the still living. And now I could add to myself—though probably wasn’t candid enough to do so—that she was perfectly capable of telling the difference between a bed slept in by a single person and one slept in by two!

  Will however had no such recollection or suspicion to impose itself between his appreciative eyes and Mary’s ubiquitous body. I knew only too well that before long he would make a jaunty remark about her to me when we were alone together. And he did. It was late on Tuesday afternoon—Will’s drawings had now gone over to our printers’ to be readied for Wednesday’s issue of The Advertiser—and the two of us were sauntering homewards to St. Ethelberga’s Road.

  And, out of the blue, he remarked: “I’m quite surprised, my friend, you’ve never spoken to me of Mary, a nice little wench fair to outward view, that is if she could get over her summer cold, or whatever it is that’s the matter with her.”

  Needless to say, I blushed at this, deeply, hotly, but hoping Will would not notice. However he did.

  “Oho, so you have taken her in,” he crowed, grinning. “If she could get her flesh a little more evenly distributed and a spot of color into her face—which we won’t call ‘pasty,’ will we, Martin?—then the old poetic word ‘buxom’ might be applied to her, n’est-ce-pas?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” I mumbled. “That suggests quite a different sort of—character.” Buxomness surely went with Edmund’s prized quality of “cheerfulness.” It would be hard to think of anybody with less of this attribute than Mary Poulton.

  “So you’ve given the lass a bit of thought,” he said, grin staying on his face like the Cheshire Cat’s in Alice. “Glad to hear it. I’m relieved your only preoccupation isn’t Our Sensitive Sailor from across the German Ocean.”

  I didn’t like the tone of this, and a current of decided resentment of, if not downright hostility to, Will ran through me. “Since Mary appeals to you so much, even though not yet buxom,” I said tartly, “you could do worse, I suggest, than find out a bit more about her.”

  “I’ve found out quite a lot about her, thank you very much, Martin. I am rarely slow or silent (or deaf for that matter—sometimes to my peril) when it comes to girls.”

  “Oh?” And I could hear aggression in my voice, but I must keep it low. Every bow-windowed façade in the residential street might have ears. “So what things about her do you now know?”

  Will tossed the sketch-pad he’d been carrying up in the air and deftly caught it; as a sportsman he relished such displays of his prowess, however trivial. “What do I not know, soldier? The dear thing can be quite a little chatterbox at times. I know that Mr. Poulton senior (who may well, she fears, not be her father) is a bricklayer by trade who has fallen on hard times—like so many men in this glorious decade of English history in which we are privileged to be living. That her mother was ill after the birth of her last child, and still has to drink porter daily. That the late Mr. Fuller—clearly a most admirable individual; it’ll be a brave man who walks in his shoes!—took pity on her when she was working at your horrible St. Stephen’s College and, out of the goodness of his heart, found her a place in his own household. And I have in fact come across a very interesting confirmation of his feelings for Mary . . .”

  “Come across?” I couldn’t keep the interest out of my voice. And felt they boded badly.

  “Yes, up in my room I have been giving the Dear Departed’s impressive array of books a looking-over. Impressive in number that is, I’m not much of a one for the classics, as you should know by now. In my opinion the allegedly magnificent classical education accorded to our upper crust is more a curse than a blessing. Anyway in between the pages of a volume of Odes by a chap named Pindar—one of those books full of footnotes in tiny print—I found four little samples of Mary’s hair, each labeled.”

  “Of Mary’s hair!” I clapped my hand over my mouth for I feared I’d spoken too loudly in the polite quietness of this street. It was possibly—outside Hans’s stories—the most extraordinary thing I’d ever heard!

  “Yes, Mary Grace Poulton, aged 10—Mary Grace Poulton, aged 12—Mary Grace Poulton, aged—”

  For some reason I didn’t want to hear any more. “Yes, I get the point!” I cut in impatiently. But only in a literal sense did I do this. Why, at the ages Will had cited, Mary wasn’t even skivvying at St. Stephen’s. Just romping about Farthing Lane, presumably, dodging or minding her numerous baby brothers and sisters.

  And then into my head came old Azzy Welbeck’s words defending Horace Fuller: “I always liked young Horace, a most unusual boy, one of Nature’s democrats. Always had a kind word for those who worked here, no matter in how humble a capacity. There was one little maid—Mary, her name was—whom he always stopped to talk to, even made things out of little odds-and-ends so she could put them in her room or on her person, threaded empty bird-shells or acorns on pieces of colored string. That sort of thing!”

  Yet at the time he was engaged in such charming acts of kindness to a small girl, she was already so well known to his father that he was taking samples of her hair, docketing them and slipping them into a volume of Pindar (of whom I had in fact heard, if no more than that).

  Will himself had not apparently noted this discrepancy, though he had in his possession all the facts needed to do so. “And she is a keen reader,” he continued. “She likes the Brontë sisters. She can write a beautiful hand, thanks to Beatrice Fuller, and she’s even taught herself shorthand into the bargain. One day she hopes to rise above the servant-class—even her position in a cultured household like Castelaniene—and become someone’s private secretary. That’ll be the day!”

  Annoyed as well as more than a little surprised by my friend’s boastful account of his knowledge of Mary which so outshone my own, I said: “Well, Will, there is still more you could learn about her, I think.”

  “You have in mind . . .?” There was a lubricious twang to Will’s voice.

  “The fact that she regularly relays messages from the dead.”

  “You don’t say!” He sounded, as I’d both hoped and expected, incredulous.

  “Hasn’t she told you about it?”

  “Relays . . .? The dead . . .?” I had shot a successful bolt here all right. Will was the most stalwart of skeptics. “I don’t believe you, Martin. It isn’t true.”

  I suppose it is a sign of the fashion of our times—where séances of one sort or another continue still to be quite the thing, and in a variety of circles, including those eminent ones graced by the great W. T. Stead himself—that his dismissal of my information did not sound as whole-hearted as it might have been on some other topic.

  “There’s only one way to find out—ask her!” I retorted and quickened my pace toward Castelaniene with the monkey-puzzle tree in its garden and the conspicuously many-colored fanlight over its door.

  I am pretty sure he never did. Perhaps I’d set up doubts enough in him to nip for once a little underhand dalliance in the bud. It would have appealed to him, enjoying the favors of a skivvy employed by a woman to whom he was being the attentive young gallant; it had happened before after all. Maybe he had already snatched a kiss, indulged in a little deft pawing on the stairs—or am I extrapolating
here from my own buried store of carnal fantasies? But to have a liaison, however brief, with a practicing medium was quite another matter.

  Practicing medium? To say this phrase to myself was to arouse questions I had not quite allowed to occupy me; they were surely worth asking. How had Mary discovered her strange powers? How had Mrs. Fuller known that she possessed them? What had led them, singly or in duo, to the Gateway, and how had others there—a haughty, educated crew—come to be so impressed that they had agreed to make Mary (for all I could see) their only conductor to the road trodden by the dead?

  At The Advertiser they all took to Will, damn him!—well, he did not meet Mr. Betterton, as Dep Ed his own coeval, until Thursday. But with that exclusive duo, Philip Goodenough and Archie Percy, he was on joking terms within (as it seemed to me) a matter of seconds. They were amused by the sight of his artist’s block, and asked him if he would like them to pose for a portrait, and told him it was like having Leonardo or Raphael about the place. Will beamed in response from ear to ear. To Terence Hathaway, soft-spoken, bushy-bearded king of layout, Will as illustrator was directly answerable, and he addressed him with a lightly borne but patently sincere respect that would have melted a far less warm heart than that exemplary one. Before long too Will was swapping and sharing very specific financial details with Mr. Forrester, our business manager. (I can’t say whether Will gave him genuine quotations of affairs at my former newspaper or whether he just plucked them out of the air—something he would even nowadays be capable of doing.)

  When he saw the Bible beside the balance-sheets on Mr. Forrester’s desk, Will—usually a proselytizing unbeliever—commented (the hypocrite!): “Ah, there’s such practical wisdom between those covers—even for those coping with the money problems every newspaper in the country poses!” And Mr. Forrester’s thin, severe, Primitive Baptist’s face lit up, so unaccustomed was he to hearing from his colleagues good words about the Good Book.