The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Donaldson Ma from St. Stephen’s was in the throng—how could he not be?—and, in the interval before the music began, came up to me and asked if I were going to write about this occasion for “my” paper.

  “Oh, it will be a joint effort, I expect!” I said, modestly—and correctly.

  “But I expect your contribution will be the best part of it,” said the noble prefect flatteringly. That is”—and here he leaned toward my ear almost roguishly—“if you don’t ‘chuck’ before writing it.” Then, resuming his normal dignity of stance and manner, he continued: “I would like to introduce you to my pater, but regrettably, as you can observe with your own eyes, he is parleying with all the bigwigs who are present. You see, if there is a bigwig around, then the pater will not only know him but have something on the man!”

  This I could well believe. At this moment however, someone who most certainly could be termed a bigwig appeared at our side: Mr. Whittington.

  “What fine speech your father’s was, and how truly proud you must feel at being his son!” he enthused to Donaldson Ma. “I myself rejoiced in his every syllable. Did you not do so, too, Mr. Bridges?”

  “But of course, sir!” I said.

  Mr. Whittington beamed at me as if, on this happy day, he had chosen quite deliberately to believe I was telling the truth. “And, Mr. Bridges, I am looking forward to an account of this day as splendid in prose as that you penned about St. Stephen’s Glorious First of June.”

  Well, I had arrived, hadn’t I? It endorsed the moment in Mr. Whittington’s comfortable study in School House.

  Lucinda seemed always to be on the furthest edge of any group of people I approached, protectively escorted—I nearly wrote chaperoned—by her brother, Cyril. I wondered that Will, who was nodding and smiling away at a great many folk, did not go make his way up to her and start his usual flirtatious banter, but he scarcely left Beatrice Fuller’s side, so was reserving his gift all for her, I supposed.

  As for the music provided, the Invicta Orchestra played, in my then ill-informed opinion, extremely well, their firmly marshalled sounds floating up toward the tightening white of the sky joyously and at times splendidly. But it was the Grieg Symphonic Dance that took me out of myself most completely. It had a wistfulness that was yet positive and spoke of love of life, a charm that was enveloping but not too sweet, an infectious lilt of melody and a liveliness of rhythm that carried the listener forward to a realm that was, I felt, right there—somewhere—in this real world. I glanced at the program notes and saw that Edvard Grieg’s ambition was “to paint Norwegian nature, Norwegian folk-life, Norwegian history, and Norwegian folk-poetry in music.”

  I thought of Hans again. Hans from Norway, Hans now in Norway. I regretted the distancing formalities of his letter. He should be here as a presence, kind in body as in soul, right beside me in Dengate.

  But all during the ceremonies, and the social exchanges of both the interval and afterwards, meteorology was asserting itself formidably. The heat was less and less bearable—too many of those proudly printed programs were being used as fans by hands working them with something like desperation—and yet, strangely, the sun itself was obscured by the thickness of that all-consuming white sky canopy. The sensation became inescapable that this was aerial material being pulled tauter, and yet tauter, by the minute, until tearing-point was reached. Then the anxious looker-up saw that into the whiteness black clouds, heavily laden it would seem, were moving, more and more obtrusively. Thus the last items of the concert and the later exchanges of social intercourse were strangely illuminated, in some hybrid of day and night when you could still see as clearly as in the first but had the unease, the feeling of being out of one’s natural element that one can have on a nocturnal walk (such as mine to the View a short while back) when surroundings well-known in ordinary circumstances turn foreign, and almost menacing.

  Back in Castelaniene, how to disport myself? It was even more socially difficult for me this evening than it had been on Will’s last visit. Beatrice was so much his gladsome hostess, catering and anxiously observant, I so very much a lodger (even if my situation had improved somewhat) in the way of things. And the weather was now easy—and alarming enough—to read. The heat was breaking; we were in for a real storm. Given the relationship flourishing in the body of the house, I would be perfectly willing, said I to myself, to spend the evening alone in my attic-bedroom. The eruption of thunderstorm we all knew now to be an inevitability would be a dramatic accompaniment that could add to the pleasures of whatever travel-book or adventure-novel I chose.

  But that solitary consolatory occupation was not to be permitted me.

  Will and I coincided in the hall while Mrs. Fuller was down in the basement with Sarah discussing particulars of the delicious dinner ahead.

  “I’m very much afraid, old Will,” I said as decisively as I could, “that my good landlady thinks I am playing gooseberry.”

  “Steady on, soldier,” said Will, and the somewhat over-deliberate smile he’d worn all day left his face at last. “I’d say it’s poor Beatrice who’s feeling she is the gooseberry!” He repeated the word with detectable dry amusement as though he didn’t think it quite appropriate to such sophisticated circumstances. “And can you blame her? When the three of us are together, you say everything to me, never even shifting your glance in her direction.”

  “I do not!” I said.

  “Old man, you do, and you know that you do! Like this!” And on the spot he gave a grotesque parody of what my movement had looked like twenty minutes back, head swivelled to one side so that I could barely see where I was going.

  “Very funny!” I said. “Quite a Dan Leno turn! Does Beatrice Fuller like you best for your incomparable humor, or does she prefer you in the role of Don Juan?”

  “Come off it, old man, you’re spoiling for a fight, I can tell, and that isn’t like you,” said Will softly. “Why do you mind so much me being friends with Beatrice—”

  “Being friends!” I echoed scornfully. “That’s the right phrase for it, is it?”

  “Acting the beau with,” said Will, flushing ever so slightly. “It’s the way of the world, n’est-ce pas?”

  A headache that had begun after the Invicta Orchestra’s last musical offering was now irrefutably worse, its ball of pain enlarging, and surely gyrating behind my forehead, disturbing who knew what areas of my brain, itself aware of imminent conflict in the sky beyond the house.

  “But,” Will was continuing, “I do accept now that you think I shouldn’t be pursuing intimacy with your own landlady.”

  The idea behind his last words was so comically mistaken I couldn’t resist a sarcastic laugh, one louder than I’d intended.

  “What rot, what utter rot you talk,” I said.

  “Well, if that side of things doesn’t trouble you,” said Will coolly, standing with his feet firmly placed wide apart on the floor, like a young bull about to charge, “what the devil does, might I ask?”

  I could still hear, some way below, the voices of Sarah and Beatrice, but not the words they were actually saying. Even so I stepped more closely to my best friend from London to say what now I simply had to say but that she mustn’t hear—at least not yet.

  “What troubles me, Will, is . . . she isn’t worthy of you.”

  For at least a minute I thought he couldn’t have heard what I’d said and was about to repeat myself when: “You know everything about worth, do you, old man?” spoken with a quizzical smile.

  “Of course I don’t; how, knowing me, could you believe I’d claim that of myself?” I said. “But I do know you, and I do know her, and I know the difference between you.”

  “Well, with so much knowledge perhaps you’d be so good as to hand it on!” The teasing formality of his language had about it more of the throwing down of a gauntlet than of entreaty, and I realized this at once, but what could I do now but expand on my statement?

  “She doesn’t tell the truth.” I whispered t
hese words in his ear, but I felt as though I were shouting them.

  “Strong words, old chap,” Will stroked his splendidly black and bristly moustache. “I can’t believe a lawyer would let you get away with saying them, and I’m not sure that I should either.”

  “Hear me out, Will, please. Her husband is not dead. I’m now pretty sure of what, somewhere inside me, I suspected all along. And—worse still!—she has cast out their son.”

  Will stepped back in something like shock. Afterwards I was to think that really a self-appointed Lothario like my old pal, my former mentor, wasn’t much concerned about a husband whether living or dead, and had perhaps himself detected certain ambiguities, even contradictions in Beatrice Fuller’s accounts of hers. But a son!—this he had not bargained for.

  “She has no son,” he said as definitely as he could manage, “as she has informed more than once.” I could tell that, to his consternation and chagrin, I had scored a point, and that whatever he’d just chosen to say in reply, he believed what I’d just informed him was true.

  “That’s what I meant by ‘not honest,’” I made myself elaborate, for what I now could feel in my stomach was that unmistakable jellifying motion of sheer fear which comes about when you’ve truly offended someone you care for and cannot extricate yourself. “She said that to you because she knows it can have two meanings, and that if you challenged her, she’d say she doesn’t have a son she any longer recognizes. But she does have.”

  There was much more I could say here, but at that point, through the window of the door to the garden, we saw a flash of lightning, followed at once by another, like a brief dazzling image of a two-legged skeleton. Then came the growling tumble of still far-off thunder.

  These gave Will the time he needed to deal with me and my revelations. Once more he came a few paces closer to me, once more he resembled the image of a young bull lowering his head with only aggressive purpose.

  “Don’t you say another thing about her, do you hear,” he said, “you evil-minded little—virgin. Do you think I’ve forgotten the pathetic exhibition you made of yourself at Limehouse? Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant are absolutely right; the male who shuns the flesh, the normal sexual instinct is . . . sick. The very word ‘chaste’ is eunuchs’ cant. The sickness gets into the head, and there it bloody well stays.”

  What I could say in retort to this cruel judgment? But the voices in the basement stopped, and in the horrid silence we heard Beatrice ascending the stairs.

  “I had had fantasies of a dinner al fresco tonight. But it cannot be,” she said, “so we shall have to have our repast in the usual dull place. Martin”—I was surprised she called me this and not “Mr. Bridges”—“we are of course expecting you to join us.”

  Good of you, when I pay for all my food here, I felt like saying. But what should I say? “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Fuller that is really so generous and hospitable of you”?

  But I was forestalled by Will who, in a brisk no-nonsense voice, said: “Oh, but Martin’s just been telling me how he has an invitation for this evening he simply can’t get out of. Quite the society man he’s becoming these days, don’t you think, Beatrice? A young-man-about-Dengate if not about-town!”

  Beatrice Fuller looked at me with virtually the first natural expression on her face with regard to myself that I had as yet seen. I might have been her son. And when she spoke it was in a low, almost anxious tone:

  “But, Martin, it seems just a little foolish to be going out now when—when there’s a real storm not just brewing up but actually beginning. I’m sure whoever’s expecting you will quite understand. Nobody would want any guest to go braving thunder-and-lightning purely to be polite.”

  I rose to the occasion. The old actor in me again!

  “Oh but you know me, Mrs. Fuller,” I came up with a jocular voice that positively amazed me, for I absolutely wasn’t going to set myself against Will Postgate, Will my former friend. “My word is always my word. Besides when—if—I get there, I shall be enjoying myself tonight. And no young man can resist an opportunity for enjoyment.”

  So there was nothing for it now but to accept the sou’wester and umbrella Mrs. Fuller proceeded positively to press on me, to supplement my mackintosh, and leave the house.

  By the time I had passed the Royal Gardens day had given way to night—and it was not yet eight o’clock. Above the clustered alleys that lie to the back of the harbor I saw lightning zigzagging like some luminous whip being flicked, then cracked; its movement made this premature darkness seem darker still. Then, from somewhere over to the West I heard bangs and thumps of thunder. What schoolboy in our land has not had to learn by heart our Laureate’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Cannon to right of them,/Cannon to left of them,/Cannon in front of them/Volley’d and thunder’d.” I was not in this situation yet, but as I walked toward the Esplanade I was approaching it. The storm was certainly moving westwards, while I myself was walking eastwards; sooner or later our paths could not do other than converge. This meeting was, I felt, what the whole tense, white day had been tending toward.

  As the Majestic with its line of lighted conservatories came into fuller view, the rain came down. Came down as suddenly and as overwhelmingly as though its descent was the result of a switch being turned by some resourceful theatre producer in some cunning modern device. Its fall was very straight and very fast, for there still was next to no wind.

  Wherever to take myself in these conditions? I had been a rash fool to turn myself out of doors. More bangs, more thumps now, and no longer just over the west, the marina itself seemed the target of this aerial bombardment, and when I heard a heavy crashing in the near distance, like the ejection of a positive avalanche of boulders from some quarry in the sky, I looked ahead of me surprised that the marina hadn’t been blown up. In fact it was standing strong as ever in all its gaudiness, as the flashes of lightning revealed. Perhaps, I thought with a bitter inward smile, I should take myself into the lighted luxury of The Majestic, but even in this storm I could not bring myself to dare to do this; I doubted any of its stuck-up uniformed staff would let me in. Instead I must head, like the Six Hundred in Tennyson’s poem, into the “Jaws of Hell.” But angry and unhappy though I was, I did not think I wanted this destination, not just yet, indeed never at all. I surely didn’t deserve hell, in which I’d never been able to believe.

  Lowering my head, though, in this breezeless air, that made little difference to the soaking the skies were giving me, I walked on until I appreciated—two short bright swishes of lightning enabling me to do so—that I had now arrived at that point of the Esplanade at which two months back, walking in the other direction, Barton Cunningham and I had spotted the two pretty girls and had simultaneously turned ’round to have another look at them. On my right side the sea, as yet smooth as a roll of fabric, was blacker than the sky and receiving, without demur, the downpour it was releasing, but only yards away was that little piece of municipal chinoiserie, the little shelter erected on the Esplanade’s seaward side. Beneath its pointed shingled roof and seated on its wooden bench—which had space enough for at least four people—I would at least be out of the rain, and comparatively less vulnerable to any ground-aiming forks of lightning than in any other possible place in the immediate vicinity.

  Virtually the moment I stepped inside it, the rain increased in velocity. Before long its vertical lines were battering the roof so fiercely I feared for its survival; the timbers might well come splintering down onto my head. The shelter was open on both the landward and the sea-facing side, so, for all the continuing lack of wind, blasts of rain issued in from the Esplanade to deposit rapidly expanding puddles on the uneven ground. Hopes of keeping dry soon faded, and any enterprising streak of lightning could have struck at me without much difficulty. Nevertheless, I thought, here I’d better stay, and who knew for how long? Dante and Beatrice, as I sarcastically called the pair in Castelaniene, were doubtless now billing and cooing indoors. For al
l the latter’s words of affected concern for me, I wondered if either of them were giving me a thought. I imagined their sportive frolics interrupted by a knock on the door. Four men (policemen? St. John’s Ambulance?) stood on the porch carrying a stretcher. On it lay the body—was it alive, or was it burned-out shell?—of a young man struck by lightning: one Martin Bridges late of The Advertiser.

  Such thoughts, embellished to induce further self-pity and dark gratification, occupied me so thoroughly that it’s a wonder I became aware at all of another person availing himself of the shelter. Afterwards, going over the encounter (as time and again I would obsessively do), I thought it distinctly possible I neither saw nor heard him make his actual entrance into it. He was, as I was to note presently, stealthy in movements. But at this moment, as I strive to bring the scene back for my readers’ sake, I now believe, obscured though he was by all the resentful images of Will and Beatrice playing inside my head as in some perverted puppet-theatre, that the burly but bent figure of a man did impinge on me even as it came in from the rain, shaggy hair dripping water just as the roof-ledges were so noisily doing, and clasping in his rough chapped hands a brandy-bottle.

  Even so his addressing me—and after how many minutes I cannot say—in that low, harsh huskiness so characteristic of both heavy drinkers and sufferers from bad colds made me, quite literally, jump in my seat. And this despite the fact that I had been just roused from my gloomiest broodings by the loudest explosion of thunder so far, surely detonated a mere matter of yards above the Esplanade and this more-and-more fragile-seeming shelter.

  “That,” my fellow-occupant gasped, tilting his chin upwards toward the blackly bruised sky beyond, “is his only way of speaking to us. He has just the one language for expressing what he thinks, for giving us warnings.”