by Paul Binding
And at the end of the meal, after Mrs. Fuller had proposed that, the occasion being what it was, we should all adjourn for coffee into a garden still awash with warm sunlight, Will said: “But first I shall sing to you. In Oakeshott’s this afternoon”—Mrs. Fuller nodded for she had known this piano and musical instrument–dealer all her life—“I found the banjo I’ve been looking for quite a while. I’ll show you, put it to use.”
As he did, sitting in a dining chair near the window, bathed in soft sunshine, the strong fingers of his left hand flying over the fretted, mother-of-pearl neck of the instrument, and the even stronger fingers of his right energetically plucking all the five shining strings above the parchment-covered “drum,” while he sang in his warm tenor voice:
“I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,
To watch the scene below,
The creek and the rusty old mill, Maggie,
Where we sat in the long, long ago.
The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,
Where first the daisies sprung,
The old rusty mill is still, Maggie,
Since you and I were young.”
The nostalgic lilt of the tune by the time Will had embarked on the second verse paradoxically brought me unasked-for pictures of a time, an all but unbelievable one, when everybody assembled in the kitchen of Castelaniene would be old and likely to address a loved partner to remind him or her of those irrecoverable days long gone by, would be thinking of 1885 in, say, the year 1925 when I would be sixty-three or 1945 when I would be a preposterously unimaginable eighty-three. Somehow the very idea that we all, whatever our dispositions, shared the frightening but somehow also wonderful inevitability of being thrust forward into time and age—and aging, and beyond even that into the measureless unknown (think of the Gateway and the lustrous path it proposed for us here) made me wonder why we were not as nice as possible to each other all day long—or, at any rate, a lot nicer than most of us managed to be.
Speak for yourself, said an inner voice.
The song and its encore came to an end, and Will was sincerely, even humbly thanked (as indeed he deserved to be). After that my friend put his new banjo away into its black case, and stowed this in the hallway, ready to be taken by him with his other bags when he left in the morning. And then he and Hans exchanged house for garden, Sarah waddling behind with the coffee-tray.
Mrs. Fuller and I were therefore left in the hall, she standing in fact in the very spot from which she had harangued me so sternly and so shrilly only two hours before.
I must say something to her, said I to myself, but whatever can I find that would be remotely fitting, that would not earn me another moral rebuke?
“Mrs. Fuller,” I began. But I was rendered incapable of going on any further. For Beatrice Fuller moved toward me, and half-taking me into her arms laid her head on my shoulder. And wept. And wept and wept.
I could feel my own body relaxing to receive her overwrought one. And what could I do better than stand there, permitting not dismissing, accepting rather than spurning.
“I’m sorry,” I think I managed, but through her sobs she said: “One tries so hard, so desperately hard, to make life good, but—but I don’t think one succeeds. I don’t think it’s possible for one ever properly to do so.”
A minute, perhaps two, passed before she bade me go into the garden for my coffee. She would be following as soon as she had dried her eyes. She was as good as her word, emerged without a trace of her outburst on her fine classical face, and there in the long shadows on the lawn talked with particular vivacity about former times in Dengate and the great blessing it had received when Auguste Pugin created for the town so many fine and God-honoring buildings. But never fear, she continued, brushing back an errant spray of white lilac, Pugin’s spirit lived on. Think of the influence Beresford Hope was having, yes, here in Kent, from Canterbury where he had restored a priory to St. Stephen’s School . . . Will, passing me the sugar bowl, gave me a wink just as Mrs. Fuller’s usually rather low voice soared on the very word Hope. Yes, my friend and I—largely anyway—still saw life eye-to-eye.
The barometer rose the next day. The sea, very calm, and still offering up to a virtually cloudless sky those extraordinarily deeper blue streaks in its blueness caused by plankton, looked as though it were positively inviting the visiting hordes from London, the gaudy regiments of bathing machines, the pulsation of the marina down to which a bit later on a little train would run from the main station. Mid-morning Will, having, I imagined, taken an affectionate leave of Beatrice Fuller (did she lay her head on his shoulder?), looked in on The Advertiser and everybody there sped him on his way back to The Smoke with a warmth of regard extraordinary considering they’d first met the man only on Monday! And he was coming back, oh yes, he was coming back all right! He’d be doing the opening of the Bandstand proud!
After he’d left Mr. Forrester turned to me, tears in his usually inexpressive eyes, to say: “A thoroughly nice fellow that friend of yours, Bridges. How rare and how welcome to meet someone of his—of your—generation with a natural, lightly worn regard for the Bible, who isn’t all cynicism and Mr. Huxley!” And he gave that thin beard of his an extra hard tug as if by doing so he could explain that wateriness of the eyes which, in truth, embarrassed me, especially as I knew Will and he did not.
And later Mr. Betterton—wonder of wonders!—was pleased to say to me: “Enterprising fellow that friend of yours, Bridges, even though he does think a shade too well of himself. But he combines enterprise with judgment, with a prudent assessment of matters, and you could well take a leaf out of his book. They’re damned fine drawings he has done of our town—he has respect for it, you see, Bridges, and I am truly pleased to hear we’re going to have many more of ’em.”
Ironically the fact that I had introduced Will to Dengate (and vice versa) had raised the community’s regard for me to an extent that no efforts on my own part had done—or probably could ever have done . . .
What would they all have thought, had I been able to tell them, about Will’s taking me to Limehouse, years ago it now seemed. He’d led me through a wilderness of dark warehouses and tenement buildings, to a house with a virtually windowless front, and in its rotting interior an older mulatto woman ensconced on a throne-like chair smoking a pipe with a strangely powerful sickly-sweet smell. She had, under her charge, several girls, some of them clearly many years younger than myself (I was twentyone) and not one of them speaking the Queen’s English, indeed only two of them actually were English. I was then asked to choose one of these; she would then take me to a little back-room I could already glimpse off the landing, with dirty tattered muslin curtains. I was rendered wordless, was absolutely incapable of making this choice for myself (and not out of embarras de richesse either). Instead I turned to my omniscient friend and worldly guide who alighted for my delectation on a girl slightly older than the rest with golden-colored skin (I believe she came from Ceylon, that mysterious Island of Spicy Breezes). She proceeded to lead me into that designated little room, but so horrified me there with her depraved and utterly loveless gestures and her crude verbal obscenities (which came out of her like imperatives on behalf of vileness itself) that I turned tail, and fled to Will now waiting for me in the cheerless hall chatting (but doing nothing more) with a couple of the other girls. I clung to him (in a not dissimilar way, truth to tell, to how Mrs. Fuller had clung to me on Friday night; we human beings do not have available to us so many other physical modes of expressing our feelings), begging him to release me from this trial of manhood.
A little perplexed but quite genuinely concerned, he said, “I made a mistake, soldier. I’ll get you out of here.” And he did.
After supper on Tuesday evening, a Buttons arrived at Castelaniene from the Majestic Hotel. In his braided, brass-buttoned, bandbox-neat uniform the little lad seemed hardly made of flesh-and-blood but when he spoke, he did so, of course, with the accent of “Martin” from the Roya
l Gardens and the telegraph boy. His voice was one of squeaky excitement.
“A great rich foreign gentleman wants you to meet him in the west conservatory in an hour and a half’s time,” he informed me. “He is Herr Strømme from Bergen in Norway. He is something big in shipping. He has at this moment his ward, Mr. Lyngstrand, also from Norway but not a hotel resident, dining with him. Am I to tell him that you accept?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, “with pleasure!” But these last two words were inappropriate surely.
“And he begs to be allowed,” bowing here to Mrs. Fuller, “to call on Madame at her house at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, an occasion he looks forward to with the most enormous pleasure. Will I be able to take back to him Madame’s confirmation that this designated time is suitable?”
I had passed by the Majestic Hotel almost daily but had never yet gone inside. Entering the hotel’s palatial foyer, I was to be assailed immediately by uncomfortable boyish shyness and a sense of my own social obscurity. Scarlet and gold lavishly complemented each other everywhere: on the double staircase; in the vast dining-room even now very full, in the uniforms of all the many flunkeys who, on being addressed, spoke as Buttons had done, as if they were birds (or captive natives) who’d been taught a great many sentences of our speech but were not completely certain of their meaning. Even on this balmy night, so suitable for loose clothing and such casual delights as a quick swim in the sea, men of only-too-obvious importance were parading about in evening dress, their shirts so well-starched they could have stood up unaided, while their wives, often proudly on their arms, swished long-trained dresses behind them and darted the beams of their eyes suspiciously about, as though on the lookout for the multiple signs of conspiracy. I didn’t care for the place at all, but the more I registered its lack of amiable qualities, the more I felt I would never make the grade appropriate to one of my ambitions unless I were considerably more acclimatized to it than now.
The Majestic presents to the Esplanade a front of glass conservatory broken only by the grandiose entrance. The conservatory is a captive jungle of potted palms and of other plants all too exotic for me to identify (having in some cases never seen their like before): scarlet flares emanating from fleshy dark-green leaves, long prickly stalks with white flowers on their spikes like little severed heads. Among this riot of tropical flora tables were placed—bamboo, or was it that fashionable thing, mock-bamboo?—at which people, couples of a certain age for the most part, were sitting, receiving and enjoying from the panes of the glass roof above them an amplification of the day’s waning sunshine while sipping those drinks proper to the rich. I did not relish the prospect of passing time among these fine folk, of possibly crashing into some rare thorny plant or knocking over somebody’s bottle of vintage champagne. But happily the pair I had come to see were sitting, I now made out, not far from the door: Hans himself and an older man surely nearer sixty than fifty. Neither had seen me come in, so I was obliged to present myself, something which can make me feel awkward even to this day.
“Good evening!” I said, positioning myself in front of their table. “Allow me to introduce myself, Herr Strømme; I am Martin Bridges.”
“And very pleased to meet you I am indeed,” said the older man getting up. “You have—I have heard many times including today—made my Hans very happy during his time in Dengate.”
And just how happy you can have no idea, and never will have, I could not help irreverently saying to myself.
“It is kind of him—and you—to say so!” And the little inclination of my head I almost automatically gave this “great rich foreign gentleman” was more appropriate to a Norwegian, or indeed to most young men from a European country, than to someone like myself used to the mores of South London streets.
“Please to sit down with us!” Herr Strømme beckoned to a flunkey and asked him to bring me a chair. “We are refreshing ourselves with hock-and-seltzer and we will be glad if you join us.”
Well, I could hardly ask for porter, could I?
Herr Strømme was gray in hair and gray in his beard too which ran from earlobe to earlobe but was not long. His complexion was a weathered one suggesting much exposure to wind, rain, and sun, though he must have spent a good deal of his time in offices and counting-houses rather than on the high seas on board his own ships. His close-set eyes were even bluer than his ward’s; repeatedly in the hour that followed my own eyes traveled to them, so fascinated was I by the sheer intensity of their color. Even more than in the case of my dear friend, I thought it like glimpsing fragments of sky or sea at their very best as they peeped out between skin and bone. His voice was a remarkably deep one, which sank to an unusually low level when he was wanting to emphasize a point. For all that his English sounded like an educated Englishman’s, he became at such moments quite hard to follow, and I had to lean right across the table, in danger of knocking over a glass as I did so, to catch all of his steady, serious, kindly but not unintimidating conversation. Of which I shall give the gist.
But before I do so it is important for me to record that Hans remained noticeably and (as far as I was concerned) uncharacteristically unanimated throughout my visit to the Majestic. No doubt his reunion with his patron had moved him greatly, had overwhelmed him with its reminders of experiences and emotions temporarily put to one side whilst he had been in England. He sat there, from time to time lifting his glass to his lips, attending to the shipping magnate half as though he were in his employ (as in a manner of speaking he still was), and therefore eager to do the respectful and grateful thing, yet at the same time, in some private but palpable part of himself at a distance from his situation, even detached from it. While it was more obvious to me than for some days past that Hans had only quite recently recovered from an extremely serious illness, he also looked—dressed in comparatively formal clothes Mrs. Fuller had acquired for him—far more ordinary than I would have imagined possible, than surely was the case. He held himself very straight and rather stiff, and any person casually observing him would have put him down as a well-bred young man, not English, but from one of those northern countries we are pleased to acknowledge as cousins; a bit conventional-ridden, a little afraid of social spontaneity, but with a natural dignified decorum.
If this person had been able to take in all Herr Strømme’s comments, he or she would have had some of the above confirmed (the patience of Hans’s reception), others a little confused, because the picture that emerged of his ward suggested a certain amount of willfulness, even caprice rather than of sustained circumspect behavior.
“Hans here has always been a young man keen to learn, it is one of his qualities his many friends like him for. And learn he has—many, many things, and very diligently and quickly—but always they come, I think, from enthusiasm, from having his imagination fired. At school, classes in mathematics did not appeal to him—with the result, he has deficiencies even to this day in that intrinsically important domain. Were he been sitting the examinations essential for becoming a Second Mate, we should have to attend to that.
“But now he has other ambitions for himself, and for reasons of health—after the terrible shock to his system following the accident in the Dover Straits—we should, I believe, respect these. But one does not become a sculptor”—he gave a kindly but not altogether uncritical, let alone approving smile here—“simply from the wish to make a statue, or even from the thought of what pleasure it would be to have clay in your hands. Even those artists who have their Christiania studios in Pultosten—the renowned “Cream Cheese” to translate into English—the very center of our city’s Bohemians, of experimentation with style and subject—study all day and all night to perfect their art. They bother with the most exacting and perhaps tedious studies of both calculation and measurement, be they ever so wild. They have the closest knowledge of human anatomy, fit to rival if not eclipse a medical student’s, they understand the chemical components of the material they work in and the problems of its
strength and durability as thoroughly as any builder or engineer. I know that some of our most audacious artists in Norway—Christian Krohg or Erik Werenskiold—would say precisely what I am saying now were they to encounter Hans here in a conservatory of the Majestic Hotel, Dengate”—and he smiled again, perhaps at the absurdity of this notion—“and would, I fancy, say it in terms of far greater technical detail than unfortunately I—a mere man of ships and accounting offices—can ever hope to do.
“I therefore insist, if I am to help Hans some way toward achieving what is, at the moment, his ambition”—his very intonation suggested the possibility (the probability?) of what was true of this moment, on this lovely May evening by the Channel when Hans was still virtually a convalescent, not being at all true of later moments, even, say, a couple of months hence—“that he applies himself to every aspect of mastering his chosen mediums, learns—as we are speaking of sculpture—of the arts of Greece and Rome, and for aught I know, of Egypt and Assyria as well, that he allows dates and numbers into his brain, and teaches his hands how to accomplish the most precise and demanding tasks. It will be a training—and I use the word advisedly, just as I might of someone starting work on one of my ships or in a counting-house I respect—demanding at least three years of his life, and possibly four.”
I bowed my head before this. The man who had spoken had a kind heart and a morally discriminating conscience; that much was clear for all the pedantic Puritanism an easier-going person such as myself was bound to be irritated by in his little speech. I did think, however, letting the seltzer fizz in my mouth, that if ever Hans was to do anything in the world as a sculptor, it would owe immeasurably to this man here, who had such energy behind the dignified composure of his exterior.
“And now we must talk about yourself,” Herr Strømme said, but his knowledge of the newspaper world from Christiania and Bergen to Berlin and London was such that I felt I would cut a figure little more impressive than that of some glorified errand-boy, so concentrated in my replies entirely on the composition of the area my paper served—the Channel Ports of Kent and Sussex—a subject on which I was now pretty thoroughly informed, with many (probably not very interesting) facts and figures to give.
