The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Legacy

  My train takes me through all the long-familiar sprawl of South London into the well-farmed Kent countryside and toward the sea, and all the time I hear its noisy rhythm saying: “This return is forever—and ever and ever and ever!” As I sit in my compartment, the early evening outside the smoke-blotched windows benign in its warm light, I go over not the play in which I have just seen Hans reappear but the coming into my life of his statue, The Sailor’s Revenge, proof (among other things) that he had, in the short time permitted him by his illness, lived up to his hopes, his ambitions for himself.

  Imagine my feelings on getting the following letter nearly two years earlier:

  29th August 1889

  Dear Mr. Martin Bridges,

  I write to you as a kind of envoy from our mutual friend Hans Lyngstrand who spoke of you repeatedly, and never more so than during his last week of life. I had the privilege of attending him to the very end, which he met, I may tell you, most peacefully, with his head cradled by my arms. Witnessing his passage out of life is, I believe, the greatest privilege I have yet been granted, and while I cannot believe myself worthy of it, I have the strongest wish to be proved not altogether unworthy. Please, by the way, forgive any peculiarities of English style, though it was in English that I always spoke to dear Hans.

  I assisted in laying him to rest in the cemetery of the Scandinavian colony in Rome. His grave therefore now lies among those of many another Northern seeker after light, who finally succumbed to incurable sclerosis of the lungs. None of them, however, could have surpassed our friend in courage or equanimity when meeting death, though his disappointment must have been acute. He had come south, after all, less for his health than for his art, and had dreamed of creating so many meaningful works once he was here in the Mediterranean world. But it is the point of this letter to inform you that Hans’s story is not primarily one of defeat. The great work gestating within him for so long, the “summa” of all his artistic aspirations, is now ready to stand where it was meant to stand—so that you yourself, Mr. Bridges, who played such an important part in its inception, can behold it every day.

  Honesty compels me to admit that The Sailor’s Revenge—this was the sculpture’s title from its very inception—could not have been executed without the help I myself gave Hans, and that, once again through my offices, it reached completion only after the artist had expired. That sad event occurred in March, on the twenty-first, to be precise, the date of the spring equinox which, he always liked to tell me, had four years before brought about the terrible storm in the English Channel which, among so many tragic casualties, bestowed two great blessings on him: his awareness that he had a vocation in life, to whit, be a sculptor, and—you will, I hope, have guessed—his friendship with your good self.

  March 21 seems already a long time ago, and this year of Our Lord 1889 well advanced. August is drawing to a not unwelcome close, but la vendemmia, (the grape harvest) is to hand again, and soon the sweet-chestnuts will be ready for the gathering. For the first two months after Hans breathed his last I was too overcome by grief to undertake work on The Sailor’s Revenge, and even when, eventually, I felt strong enough to resume, I had to combat a strong feeling of personal inadequacy, a fear that I might, simply by persevering, be doing the person I so admired more injustice than justice. But my wisest counsellor, the man I still am happy to call Father, persuaded me to put these doubts, however well-grounded, aside. High summer is a period of great, and at times unbearable, heat here in central Italy, so you can understand why it is only now that I can declare: “My task is done. Let the work travel to its rightful home.” And let it not be judged too harshly, for it is doubly a labor of love. First, obviously, by Hans Lyngstrand himself who strove to attain the greatest heights of his chosen art when he was suffering a mortal weakening of the body and even a certain mental debilitation. And secondly, by myself, who cared so much for Hans and who believed so ardently in his contribution to sculpture that I abandoned business of my own to see to its realization.

  So now, Mr. Martin Bridges, The Sailor’s Revenge can go on the long journey for which it was destined, but—thanks to the insistence of this wise counselor of mine—it will not travel alone. For I myself shall be accompanying this, in literal terms, weighty work of art all the way from its Italian place of creation to England. Both the arrival of this letter and the portage of the sculpture may well take more time than one would like, so I will not confuse or alarm you now with any statement about dates which might prove grossly inaccurate. But I am assuming the first event will precede the second, so I will merely enjoin you to await Hans’s capolavoro with patience and a sense of pleasure to come. I hasten to assure you—are not the English a mercantile people?—that all costs are taken care of, thanks to the administration of Hans’s legacy by the Wise Counselor himself—so all you have to do is to wait for the telegram I shall dispatch to you when I am actually safe and sound in London.

  But “Who is this man?” I hear you ask. “Is he somebody I should be trusting?” Well, in answer to the first I will content myself with saying that I was for many months Hans’s neighbor and constant confidant, in both matters personal and artistic, though not so much a fellow artist as a fellow craftsman. That is to say, I do indeed know about clay and calculations, maquettes and measurements, the working methods of Bertel Thorvaldsen and of the greatest sculptor of the present age, M. Auguste Rodin. But I do not have any talent that the world would care to label “artistic,” my abilities and achievements lying in other directions. And to address myself to the second question—what shall I say that will properly convince you? . . . Well, I know that you and Hans met when you were both living at Castelaniene on St. Ethelberga’s Road in the Kentish Channel Port of Dengate. I know that you had the room on the left as you ascended the third staircase, whereas he occupied that on the right. And I know that the editor of the newspaper, to the address of which I have taken the liberty of writing this, goes by the name of Edmund Hough. I know, too, that you grew up in that part of London called Camberwell, where you attended the Thomas Middleton School. If these are not proofs of an intimacy of information about your life bestowed on me by the deceased, then I do not know what in the world would constitute them.

  Yours in the friendship of Hans Lyngstrand, beloved Norwegian sculptor who died so regrettably young,

  Orazio Martello

  Until this moment I had not known Hans Lyngstrand was dead. The last letter I had received from him had come a good month before the Christmas of 1888. In common with my practice with its predecessors, I had read it (this perhaps more thoroughly than the others) but had not replied to it, nor contemplated doing so. I knew therefore that he had arrived at long last in Rome, the city of his hopes and dreams, knew too that he had found a hearty welcome at the Scandinavian Club there, a majority of members of which were practicing artists, some as young as himself, “feeling the need to surrender completely (for a while, at any rate) to the noble but joyous achievements of the classical world.” The Club had an excellent library apparently, and organized many delightful social events, debates, parties, excursions, picnics. Hans had supplied the names of many persons, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, even Icelandic, all of which, it must hardly need saying, meant precisely nothing to me. Hans’s only complaint, but lightly, almost casually made, was that he still felt “too tired rather too often,” but the enormous distance he had had to traverse to reach the Eternal City was probably the principal cause of this, and when he’d rested more often and not accepted quite so many irresistible social invitations, then he would doubtless feel better. More himself. Himself? And involuntarily I’d seen two images of my correspondent imposed on each other, one a pale, thin youth struggling painfully for breath, as on those first nights at Castelaniene, the other my bed-companion I have tried to pay homage to with my pen.

  “Only complaint,” did I just write? There’d been another. That he hadn’t hea
rd from me “for a long time.” That, of course, was euphemistic politeness. After my first and reasonably friendly letter to him following his departure from Dengate with Herr Strømme, I had deliberately not answered any letter from Hans whether it came from Bergen in Norway, Saeby in Denmark, Molde in Norway, Hamburg and Munich in Germany (en route for Italy), and now from Rome itself. How could I after learning that what he’d given me and I had so lyrically accepted had been but a continuation of his practices he’d handed out to others, as a ship’s whore, a seamen’s moll. I could only wonder at his going on to write to me at such length and so comparatively often. Nor had I felt even that Christmas-tide the slightest temptation to pick up a pen and give him the asked-for reply. But I did, I know, experience a real pang when he mentioned his persistent tiredness—that much I will say in my own favor—and, if I am honest with myself, did not rate the chances of his ever putting that condition behind him very high.

  So, my readers, how have you envisaged my state of mind after reading this document from Mr. (Signor) Orazio Martello? Here was I being told that (despite never getting a line from me in four years) Hans had been speaking repeatedly of me the very week he died, and in such a way that two people at least—the letter-writer himself and this mysterious “Wise Counsellor”—believed the proper home of The Sailor’s Revenge (and just its title itself quickened my heartbeat!) would be with myself! Sorrow, guilt, shame, confusion—all of these surged to the surface of my being within a handful of minutes, together with some far less praiseworthy or morally dignified concerns which it will be my painful duty to set down.

  I looked at the date at the top of the letter. August 29, 1889! What a long time it had taken to reach me; it might well now be out of date, and the writer have completed his own journey. August, which had witnessed such unrest in England as we had not known for half a century, was over and done with, and we were now over halfway through September. The Channel Ports Advertiser was just about to publish a detailed article on the autumn equinox, trying to assure readers of the possibility of no seasonal gales blowing up this year. I was not seated at one of the long tables in the office, at which readers last left me—oh, no! A five-foot-high green baize screen now separates me and my big desk from all the other toilers in the field providing me with a kind of extemporized study-room. Yet the screen, indispensable as a symbol, does not guarantee me true privacy, I’m afraid, and Edmund (whose idea, after all, it was) can and does come barging in on me any time he feels like it.

  So though I needed time to take in the information my letter from Italy contained, its matters of life and death, I was not permitted this. Waving what looked like a positive wodge of telegrams, my editor/father-in-law burst in on me, the perspiration (of pleasure, judging by his expression) pouring down his amiable, florid face.

  “It’s actually happened, it’s actually come about!” he exclaimed. “The ‘dockers’ tanner. And what I say is: Hooray, hooray! Hooray for the Cardinal, hooray for Londoners and the English spirit, hooray all ’round in fact!”

  With my mind trying to image (or, more accurately, trying not to image) my former friend Hans Lyngstrand (whom I’d once loved not only in spirit but in physical form) drawing hourly nearer death and yet speaking of, why, of me, Martin Bridges, I needed, believe it or not, a full moment to take in what Edmund was so excited about, even though the phrase it contained had been ringing in all our ears and dancing in front of our newsprint-reading eyes these past many weeks. Three years of crowded domestic life (for I have reached this concluding chapter of my book in May 1892) can make even the public events of 1889, last year of the last decade, seem distant, gone forever. All summer long—do you recall it?—the dockers, among them some of the very poorest men in the kingdom, had marched and formed protest groups in the London streets, arousing not reluctant but lively, instinctual sympathy and support in unexpected and powerful quarters, outstandingly in Cardinal Manning, the Archbishop of Westminster himself, who soon passed from being a supporter to becoming an outright impassioned champion. Over in The Smoke, Will Postgate and, even more so, his special handful of still radical friends, had got much exercised by the affair, whipping themselves daily into fresh furies or choruses of exhortation, and had naturally tried to rope me in. Names that Will had regaled me with, that evening walk on his first ever visit to Dengate had been on all lips, together with that of Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader, “a hero in the land, a Man among men,” to use Will’s own words. I had been involved only superficially, I’m afraid, though I tried hard to pretend otherwise. Besides I could not say I cared for the look of certain scowling chaps hanging around the quays in Dengate, trying to get something going at the wharfs. Anyway, was I not, unlike Will and many of his best socialist cronies, “a family man” now?

  As for Edmund himself, half cockerel, half schoolboy with pleasure at what had just come about, the dockers” agitations had not, in truth, made for an easy or enjoyable time for him (though he always tried to make the best of everything), and this during the season when Dengate was usually celebrating itself with genial pride, encouraging everybody to forget worries, and come down to its sands. A goodly proportion of his readers were far from friendlily-disposed toward the strikers or the attention they had attracted, especially when, on the twenty-second of August, work in the Port of London docks stopped altogether, and there were 100,000 men with time to vent grievances. Significant “friends” of The Advertiser had interests in Channel Ports docks and ships, and literally the last thing they wanted was any copycat activity in Dengate, Dover, Margate, or any encouragement from the region’s press. Some of these august and influential men wrote letters to the paper—most of which Edmund “forgot” to publish—saying that Ben Tillett was a traitor, a latter-day Jacobin who ought to be hanged as an example to all, and that the self-styled Dock, Wharf, Riverside, and General Laborers’ Union was an evil rabble, every bit as barbaric, if not more so, than the movements produced by Revolutionary France or Russia in one of its regular phases of anarchy.

  By the second week in September, however, the public mood throughout the realm had so perceptibly changed that Edmund in his Advertiser articles could write of the respect shown at last to laborers who had “given so much and received so little” as a proof of “that great heart and that noble tradition of fairness that distinguishes” England from almost every other country—and some of those readers only recently fuming with rage wrote to the paper to say how in sympathy they felt, and how gratified they were with the generosity the Editor was displaying. And now, said the telegrams Edmund was wafting in my face, with particular thanks to the Roman Catholic Archbishop, the dockers had won their right to sixpence an hour’s pay, and the whole country was prepared to rejoice with them, the Channel Ports included. Edmund indeed saw himself in the very vanguard of the celebrations and wondered that I was not similarly elated.

  “Oh, but I am pleased,” I assured him. “Dockers’ tanner at last—that’s tremendous. If I sounded—it’s just, you see, Edmund, that . . .” But I did not want to go into the contents of Signor Martello’s letter, doubted indeed that I could summarize them without fatally tripping over words. Besides Edmund would probably by now have forgotten who Hans Lyngstrand was, though he might, if prompted enough, have remembered that he was the subject of my first interview-based article for him. “Personal stuff—well, I know all about that, naturally,” said the ever-kind Edmund. “There are times when I can’t remember how many children I have. And talking of private matters, among these epoch-making ’grams came one addressed for yourself, reply paid.”

  He must have been quite surprised at the way I snatched it.

  ARRIVED IN LONDON YESTERDAY. WOULD LIKE YOU TO COME AND COLLECT YOUR INHERITANCE TOMORROW AFTERNOON FROM GIORGIO FATTERINI GALLERY, BOND STREET. I SHALL EXPECT YOU ABOUT THREE O’CLOCK. PLEASE WIRE TO SAY CONVENIENT. ORAZIO MARTELLO.”

  My heart’s missing a beat caused me to gulp alarmedly for restorative air.

  “I have
just become a legatee,” I told an amazed and immediately curious Edmund, “and I need to go up to town tomorrow.”

  I did not tell Lucinda the reason for my imminent visit to London; I would have to do so in due course, unless by some happy stroke of the mind I could think of a way of evading that. At this stage the very word “legacy” was bound to beget the question “who from?”—it was not as though I came from a large or affluent family, coming indeed from the precise opposite of this—and, for reasons too obvious to need stating, I did not want just now to utter the name Hans Lyngstrand to my wife. Besides she had only met him that once, when he had made but a slight, if entirely amiable impression on her. I would, I said, like to go for a walk, after dinner, “to think over this meeting I have in London tomorrow. I’ll be taking Balthasar with me, of course.”

  “What, to London?”

  I pretended to take the question as a serious one rather than a willful misunderstanding. “A dog in the West End? In Bond Street? That’d be out of the question, Lucinda. I meant on my stroll now.”

  Balthasar would anyway have assumed he accompany me on any evening walk I took. Our house being situated at a convenient distance from Furzebank House itself, it was easy enough to take a path up to the very crest of the downs to look down over town and harbor. But the day had been one of seasonal sea-frets, now intensifying with the onset of dusk. No stars visible in the sky above, and the waters of the Channel showed like a slice of darkening flesh between shawls of gray mist. Tear these apart, though, and the true expanse of sea would be revealed, and, though still, indeed calm tonight, who knew what treachery it might not soon be capable of, when the equinox came around again? The assurances my newspaper was giving its public on this subject meant little! Balthasar was burrowing his nose into tufts of grass which had doubtless preserved the aroma of a rabbit or another passing dog, and I found it better for my spirits to turn to him and investigate what he was up to, for the sight of the fog and water brought today’s news back into my mind in an uncomfortable new guise. Death had not taken Hans Lyngstrand here in the Strait down below, but it had caught up with him sooner rather than later, after a long cat-and-mouse game, and to what avail his body-wracking survival four years back, with all its concomitant hopes and plans? Yet, against all odds, he had carried out the great work born of his experiences in the ship that had gone under only a few miles from where I was now positioned. And tomorrow I would be seeing it, would be in touch again with Hans, whom I’d treated so ill.