The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Did I know then the hours beyond counting of deepest satisfaction that Lucinda and I have been privileged to share since, tending just such plants as these, some of them having originated indeed as cuttings from the very growths all about us that July morning? Sometimes I believe that I did know, though how hard it would be to argue the case to, say, a skeptic like Will Postgate or a cynic like Cyril!

  I now ripped open with my pocket-knife first the packet of concert programs, then that of handbills. “And let’s hope and pray that the quantities match!” I said. “And it’ll be a finicky task putting them together.”

  “Finicky, but couldn’t it be just a little enjoyable?” riposted Lucinda. For a happy moment I thought she was actually flirting with me.

  And enjoyable enough it turned out, but our time together did not flow past easily. Our conversation got off to an awkward start. For a reason that defies my understanding I began it by deliberately commenting on the very feature of the matter with which we were dealing about which I least wanted to talk and which most irked me.

  “These are pretty good drawings old Will did of the Gardens and Bandstand, are they not? They absolutely make the booklet and have come out on the page jolly well. Barrett brothers did ’em proud.”

  “Will?” queried Lucinda, “Will?”

  Odd not to grasp immediately who I was talking about, especially considering the gallantry he had shown to her a month back, indeed in these very Royal Gardens he had now honored in pen-and-ink. Did she, friendly in manner though she was, believe herself to reside on such a different social plane from the likes of Will and myself, who carried the tang of London streets wherever we went, that she could banish from her head a few meetings with him as of no consequence and need her memory jogging?

  “Will Postgate. You must remember him.” It was still impossible for me to imagine anybody forgetting my exuberant, magnetic friend. “Edmund—your dad . . . your father—commissioned drawings from him first of the Church Steps that were Mr. Betterton’s undoing and then of the Bandstand.”

  Lucinda gave a little laugh which I would have considered artificial coming from anybody else. “I don’t think Thomas Betterton had an undoing. Just short-lived discomposure and a few days of hobbling ’round, a little dramatically (dare we say?) with a stick! And anyway, it wasn’t the steps themselves that brought about his accident, they were merely the means, the catalyst. What was responsible was the Demon Drink, I fancy.” And she laughed again, a little more naturally this time.

  But if she remembered all this, I pressed, she surely must also remember Edmund’s asking Will for drawings.

  “Oh yes, of course!” she said. “It’s just that, having been away from here for such a while, I have had other things to think about than the Bandstand and all the fuss that it’s been attracting. But yes,” and she applied her gaze to a page which showed the structure from the south, as if taking it in for the first time, “he really has caught it well, your friend. I can’t remember: did he study art ever?”

  “No, he’s been a common-or-garden journalist all his working life. But, like Mr. Betterton except at a far earlier age, he is a Deputy Editor on his paper now.”

  “And is that your ambition, Martin, may I ask?”

  “My—?” I was speaking, after all, to the Editor’s daughter! How could I possibly tell her of all people about my plans for myself, let alone those concerning my place on The Advertiser itself?

  “I don’t know that I have ambitions of that sort,” I fenced. “I just want to be a good journalist.”

  We by now were about a quarter of our way through our work. A simple enough task yes, but one second’s slip might result in a distinguished person, in his eminence of a Bandstand seat, lacking a sheet of important information. I couldn’t afford to take any risk of botching our job (nor, I hasten to add, did we do so!) but the chance of talking about myself to the prettiest and most charming girl I had met in my entire life was scarcely one I could pass by.

  “I suppose,” I went on, “it’s different for you. Girls are not expected to have ambitions and then to live up to them. Or not live up, as the case may be.” I could not keep out a wistful note from my voice. I had set myself the goal of succeeding where my father had failed—who had realized such ambitions as he must have had only in grandiloquent, drunken talk—and yet there were days when I felt it must be nice to be, say, a whistling postboy content (seemingly) with his daily round.

  Lucinda paused on these last words of mine, handbill fluttering from her hand in mid-air. “Whether they are expected to or not, girls should have ambitions,” she said. “I’m a New Woman, at least, I think I am. We can’t just spend our entire time on earth ministering to the needs of the masculine or to the House Beautiful.”

  “No,” I said, taken aback, jolted into some thought, if of a momentary and minuscule kind on the subject. “I can see that.” A life devoted, day in day out, to the House Beautiful would, it suddenly occurred to me, be so deadly dull as to be unendurable, at any rate to any woman remotely like myself (a being hard, if not impossible, to construct). Wouldn’t I rather be a soldier in the blood and burning dust of Khartoum or a sailor having to jump into a longboat to avoid being dashed against the hull of his sinking ship than a girl in such a situation? “But nobody talks to you about rungs of ladders or spiritual mountains to be climbed to the cry of ‘Excelsior! Excelsior!’ which is the lot of almost every young man.”

  Lucinda laughed again, but it struck me that there was no mirth in it. “I suppose one idea for us women now—the idea that I try to make my own—is to find things that you believe in, free from all the paraphernalia of jobs and positions and payment and pensions and so on, and do it. But that’s easier said than done, let me assure you! (Martin, will you pass me another booklet, please?)”

  “Do you know,” I spoke my words aloud when I should, I thought, have kept them to myself, “do you know something? I have never once given a thought to what a girl—particularly a girl like you—thinks about what’s she’s going to do with her life. That’s strange, isn’t it? Maybe it’s because I had no sister—no sister who survived, that is—and my mother was unwell a lot of her life, and died, when I was seventeen, in a Fever Hospital near Epping only two days after my father’s death in South London of very different causes. So I never really had the chance of talking over how women should think of their futures.” Heaven knows why I felt it necessary to insert all those details of my own life, except first, that I am (and was even more so seven years back) an egotist, and second, that I divined it would interest her. Divined rightly; her eyes shone with sympathetic curiosity.

  “I am sad to hear about all that,” she said, “but perhaps circumstances aren’t ever explanation enough for anything. Cyril and George have sisters, me first in years among them, but I doubt they have given the subject of women and the opportunities they should have for a fuller life any sustained thought whatever. I honestly believe that if there was some measuring instrument—or a barometer or a divining rod—for the human brain, you would find that Cyril has thought a hundred—possible a hundred thousand—more times about the changing price of tea than he ever has about the inner life of any female. Except the Mater when she’s upset, and he can do his male, humorous, cheering-up act.”

  I could well believe this to be true.

  “So, don’t be too hard on yourself for not having been thoughtful enough in the past. What’s important, Martin, is that you have done so now. It’s like starting a language—once you have realized, say, there are two definite articles and two major auxiliary verbs—I’ve been learning Italian so I can take examples from that: articles ‘il’ and ‘la,’ and verbs ‘essere’ and ‘avere’—then you have the key, and once you’ve got that, you just have to apply it to the door or the chest or whatever it is you’re wanting to open. Now you’ve understood that certain questions you ask every day about yourself and your friends equally apply to the women of your acquaintance, you’ll never be a
ble to think of life in the same way again.”

  It seemed ungainsayable, so much so that there was little else for either of us to do but to resume the task until it was—triumphantly—finished. A whole pile of booklets quite unmistakably containing handbills lay on the little glass-topped table before us. The temperature in the conservatory (and outside, doubtless) had become higher, the scent of tobacco-flowers stronger, the white of the sky whiter and even more pervasive, for the canopy had descended so that it appeared to be almost touching the thirsty-looking ground, and Elsie brought us more delectable and needed lemonade.

  Time for me to go—for Cyril to be summoned to get out the dogcart, and take me down into Dengate. But Lucinda waved a hand as I said this.

  “Drink more of Elsie’s concoction first,” she said, “and it’s nice for me to have a bit of a chat before the day gets underway . . . I am glad to be back in Dengate, I suppose, because things didn’t—well didn’t really work out in London. I had an introduction, you see, from Father Richardson of St. Luke’s—where I worship, as I think you know—to Father Marwood in an East End parish, Poplar, and I thought of doing the same for the children of his neighborhood that I did for ours. Tell them, show them the delights of the natural world as it reveals itself in the city, all the birds to be seen, and the plants growing in waste-ground or peeping out from behind cracks in walls, and some surprising sights in unlikely places—wild strawberries, for example; fraises du bois really thrive in soot. But they were not interested; they were uninterested—and worse.”

  Worse I interpreted as hostile, even belligerent. Poor Lucinda. I could see that for all her ardor and apparent confidence, she was vulnerable, indeed easy to hurt.

  “I suppose the truth is that there is a lot more to do for the poor in society than just take them on a few nature walks, and that—like you and women, at your own confession—I simply, culpably, haven’t given it proper sustained thought.”

  Such a look of dejection came over her face when she had said this that I was given the chance to say: “It’s you who shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, I think, Lucinda.”

  She could not bring herself to agree. “And instead return to a life of taking a handful of Farthing Lane kids ’round the Royal Gardens,” she said, with an unamused, in fact positively rueful smile. A pause followed in which neither of us felt comfortable and I got up onto my feet but without making for either door, but it was she who broke it. “Anyway,” she said, “my father thinks you are a bit happier in Dengate than when we last met”—was I?—“but still not happy enough in his view. I listen to Barton Cunningham often—we have an understanding, but I know he would like you to be told, because he has said so—all about his constantly itching feet, his desire to be off and away somewhere adventurous, so I am used to hearing the secrets of restless dissatisfied young men. Aren’t you both those things?”

  How could I not think here of Hans Lyngstrand with his enforced sea-voyages and his ambition to be a sculptor? And how could I not think also of Barton Cunningham, and in his case with a sudden unadulterated warmth. He had indeed taken me into his confidence, as much as he had Lucinda, and it had been such a relief to know that Lucinda and he were not a semi-affianced pair that I’d felt a rush of generosity toward him for that reason alone. But I didn’t want him to leave Dengate either; he was my best friend here.

  “Restless?” I remembered my abortive visit to Dengate Railway Station. “Perhaps not literally. And dissatisfied—well, maybe not now I have had this Big Idea.”

  Lucinda’s eyes opened wide in (just) perceptibly ironic curiosity.

  “A Big Idea. Whatever might that be?”

  I told her about my plan for puzzles, conundrums, and jokes. And while I was doing so somebody else came, through the door from the house proper, into the garden-room. George Hough, liberated from Saturday’s schooling for the rest of the day because of the town festivities. He nodded his head in a pally sort of way at me (he clearly remembered my croquet prowess) and then seizing the jug of lemonade, tilted the contents (quite expertly) into his mouth.

  “A puzzles page! A jokes page! Cripes, that’s an idea and a half! Go on—give us some samples,” he cried after his rough-and-ready selfrefreshment.

  “Well, here is a puzzle,” I said.

  Reciting its lines formed a little island of pleasure in what was to be a charged and hateful day, because I could see that listening was going to bring Lucinda a necessary, if short-lived, freedom from care:

  “Twice nine of us are eight of us,

  And six of us are three,

  And seven of us are five of us—

  Oh, dear! What can we be?

  If you’ve not had enough of us,

  And still would like some more,

  Then eight of us are five of us,

  And five of us are four.”

  This baffled both Lucinda and George, as it would myself had I not known the answer already.

  “Try letters,” I advised them, and then not unhappily seeing the continuing blankness on their faces, explained. “Take the first line. How many letters are in the word ‘nine’? Four, are there not? So twice four accounts for the ‘eight of us’ in the verse. Then apply that reckoning all through.”

  Both of them did. I saw now that sister and brother could look very alike, and that what united them was a capacity for intent enthusiasm.

  “Yes, yes,” George all but shouted, “‘And five of us are four.’ ‘Five’ has four letters! Bravo! . . . And now I want to hear a joke.”

  “A joke?” I echoed, stalling. “Well, I’ll try to do my best. See if this tickles you. A man went to a dinner party, and when the vegetables were passed ’round, he took hold of the dish and turned it upside down on his head. You can imagine what a mess he made doing that, and what a clearing-up there had to be. But the hostess kept her best society manner throughout, and simply asked him: ‘Why ever did you do that with the spinach?’ ‘Spinach? My God!’ exclaimed the guest heatedly. ‘How absolutely dreadful! I thought it was cabbage!’”

  See if it tickled George Hough indeed! Becoming more and more helpless with laughter, he threw himself for support against a large potted oleander, and so slight was his control of himself that he came pretty near to knocking the whole thing over. “‘I thought it was cabbage! I thought it was cabbage,’” he repeated, red in the face with his breathless delight, “that’s absolutely priceless, that is. Tell the story again!”

  “Well,” said Lucinda—hard to deduce, after so overwhelmingly hearty a reaction from her younger brother, how much, if truly at all, it had amused her!—“if, Martin, you’re in any doubt about the success of your New Page for our paper, George is giving you your answer.”

  After we had deposited the programs-containing-handbills with the overseer of the ceremonies in the Royal Gardens, Cyril—who did not appear much impressed either by the Bandstand itself or the festivities in its honor—insisted on taking me back all the way to Castelaniene. I didn’t refuse; it was almost too hot to walk anywhere, even to the nearest letterbox, and that uncomfortable sensation that the sky was bearing heavily down on us all was steadily getting more oppressive. I had no need to return to the paper; all the offices, shops, and businesses which could were closing at lunchtime, for the whole town was en fête.

  “Denners is an excellent place, one of the excellent-est, and we all love her,” observed Cyril. “as I remember telling you before, I need to come down here from The Smoke pretty often, to do my poor old soul a bit of good after so much erosion by tea and tin. But when the town puts on airs, well, then it becomes bloody parochial, and I get embarrassed witnessing it. The Invicta Orchestra scraping its way through a few dull pieces and that bookshop poet reciting some sententious doggerel he’s written for the occasion—what man with a ha’p’orth of gumption would want to waste his time listening to stuff like that?”

  It was hard to disagree with this dismissive question, not that Cyril gave me much time to do so. “Of course
Denners suits some people more than others. It suits my sister Lou, for instance. She would like to think it didn’t. But it does.”

  After what was coming already to seem like an extraordinarily intimate talk between his sister and me in the Conservatory, I could not desist from asking: “Why? I mean, why does she want to think Dengate doesn’t suit her when it does?”

  Cyril emitted two or three staccato laughs of ironic amusement, but took a moment actually to reply to me, so busy was he guiding his obstinate and already rather tired horse around the corner into the street where I lived.

  “She wants to do good, Lou does, feels she was born to do so. I say, just get on doing the good you can, don’t go seeking opportunities all over the bally globe. But she feels she should be working on behalf of democracy and freedom of the spirit—that sort of business—for which talking to a few ragamuffins in the Royal Gardens isn’t quite enough. So she betook herself to The Smoke—where I saw surprisingly little of her so otherwise engaged was she—and she has returned—well, pretty darned miserable. For Lou anyway. I mean, I see the picture clearly enough. The daft old cleric, to whom her incense-swinger at St. Luke’s introduced her, went and put her up in some little mausoleum of a clergy-house in Poplar, and off she went each day, trying to introduce the rough kids of his parish to the joys of ferns sprouting in factory yards and Red Admirals hovering on sprays of buddleia, when what they really like is fights with knives and kicking each other in the unmentionables and getting pally with shady adults so they can join their desperate gangs sooner rather than later, and all that sort of jolly stuff. Lucinda, you see, is something of a New Woman, desperately committed to thinking the best of humanity—and I don’t say that there might not also have been a man somewhere in London who let her down almost as badly as those wretched Poplar brats. Anyway she has come back pretty despondent, but she loves her native town, and will gradually improve.”