After some length of time Arthur Wetmore and George Bayard appeared, with Mr. Best in charge. They picked up all the dishes very neatly and vanished again.
Twenty minutes later, there came a knock at the saloon door.
Mr. Brimner looked up, but Kay was closer, and she went to open it as Thea called, “Come in!”
In the doorway stood a short, lean fellow in a brown tunic, his front hair shaved high and a black braid over his shoulder. Neither old nor young. “I, cook,” the man said, tapping his chest with one finger. “Liu Jiacheng. I bring tea.” He bowed, turned and—like sleight of hand—produced from a small cart behind him a tray with the silver teapot, and the best teacups. The tea smelled of flowers.
“Oh dear,” said Thea, coming forward. “My husband—the captain does not like China tea, I’m so sorry—”
“Nonsense!” came Francis’s voice thundering down through the skylight. “I am entirely indifferent to tea! I will drink any sort you have.”
The man nodded to Thea. “India for captain, it is made.” He bowed and took his trolley up the stairs, lifting it without effort.
The thin cups, so old that they had no handles, rather burnt Kay’s fingers, but the white flower floating and opening in her cup made her feel much better.
* * *
—
That night she woke, sitting bolt upright, clawing her way out of a dream. She could not breathe. The whole of the world was full, a swirling vortex of multicoloured specks, from the ship out to the horizon as far as she could see. Broken china? But that would not float—this mass of sluggishly moving fragments rose and fell with the waves, seeming to tamp them down in a great whitish blanket…miles in every direction, thousands of miles. It choked her eyes and her mind and her throat. She drank the water left in her little jug and sat up in her bunk, afraid. In the dream it was all her fault. Somehow she had done this terrible thing to the world. It was an hour before her heart stopped pounding and she could lie still again.
The Boston seaman, made an example of, was sent packing on the next lighter. He would find another berth, Francis told Thea—not that he himself gave a straw whether that was the case or not. “Any infection of spirit below decks must be rooted out like a bad tooth,” he said.
They were lying in bed, beneath the last clean counterpane. But after supper Jiacheng had inspected the linen closet with Thea, and assured her that he would launder for Aft as well as Below. She assured him, in turn, that she and Kay were accustomed to helping on laundry day and would be happy to continue, and with slight but multiplying mutual bows they finished the first skirmish at a draw.
Francis was in a strange mood, both elevated and despairing, tight-strung unhappiness combined with satisfaction. As if he had not been sure he would be able to deliver such a punishment—and at the same time, as if the act of beating someone into lawful submission had a kind of pleasure to it, the pleasure of physical prowess. As if men were made to, meant to, fight each other with their hands.
Thea was wary of this mood. The woman in Eleuthera, Rhoda, had said she’d best hold off her husband for six weeks. “Till you are all healed up, all the body from the turmoil—if you don’t want infection or to make it so you have no other baby.” Thea had not told Francis this, but he had made no demands on her as yet. Only in this exalted, unhappy mood, it seemed that he wished to; he lay close behind her, pressing against her, wordlessly seeking entry. That thing that wants, wants, without thinking, that cannot tell what is seemly and what is rash. In truth she had a yearning herself, because the day had been fractured and the city was strange and then the man shouting above, and her darling Francis—who was both soft and hard, who kept the ship as he had to keep it, like it or not, though it was perhaps harder for him than for some, to do that. Let him revel in it, then. It had been five weeks, and at his blunt, unvoiced beseeching she felt an answer rising inside her after all, which she had thought she might never feel again.
Next day Mrs. McGiverin, the captain’s wife from the Restigouche, moored on the Dom Pedro jetty, rowed out to visit. She wore a great blue peaked hat, which she said kept the sun off her face in these lower latitudes and saved her from showing her age. Which she then instantly told Thea was forty-eight.
She had a wealth of theories and superstitions and advice. No children on board now, but she had raised four sons at sea, all now in New England; none in the ocean business. “They had their fill!” Mrs. McGiverin shouted up to the skylight, and Francis looked in from above to salute her smartly.
Speaking confidentially, but still in a perfectly penetrating voice, she listed closer to Thea. “I hear you lost your stewardess to Easthaven, but you are better off without a complainer in the saloon. I won’t have ’em myself, another woman on board ship is a nuisance. I run a tight ship, you ask Captain McGiverin! No second-guessing, altered orders, oh I thought you wanted—none of that for me. Fair’s fair, and I suppose the steward was useful, but good riddance is what I say.”
Kay said it too, but she said it under her breath. Because—and here was the sting of it—as soon as Mrs. McGiverin began slagging Lena Hubbard, Kay was forced to see Lena’s side of it. How she ought not to have kicked her, no matter what; and how she could not go on indulging in tempers. Could not ever again lash out.
From the corner of her eye she saw that Thea was watching her face, which was most likely scowling dreadfully. She smoothed it out and asked Mrs. McGiverin if she would like to see her sampler, which made Thea flush and smile.
There! It was easy enough to be civilized.
As the Morning Light was making ready to leave port, a ship out of Halifax arrived, bringing mail from Yarmouth which included a letter for Thea from Aunty Bob. She read it out loud at breakfast, exclaiming as she read.
You will be sad to hear that Lydia has suffered a small stroke, not anything to worry you on the other side of the world! but it has slowed her down a trifle. Her mouth drags on one side, but she is still able to plauge poor Olive
Her spelling is worse every year,’ said Thea, aside.
and make all and sundry dance to her bidding. Queenie and I go out to Orchard House once or twice a week to give the girl a rest; last week she had hystericks and cried on my bosom, ‘Now I may never leave Mother!’ Am afraid you will have some trouble reading this. Love to all and Francis and to poor Kay, I hope she has—
‘Well, none of that is important.’ Thea folded the letter and ran up to ask if Francis would let her write quickly in answer before they sailed, to send her sympathy back to Aunt Lydia, with some over for Aunty Bob and Queen and of course poor long-suffering Olive.
The emptiness of ocean, after port.
Along the forties on a still night, the stars bent near the earth.
It was too bright for sleep just yet, and only eight o’clock. Warm and safe by Thea’s purple-indigo skirts, Kay leaned on the taffrail, looking into the heavens and the long-spreading veil of the Milky Way. When you stare deep into the dark, the sense of up and down dissolves—everything is out, out, outward.
Mr. Brimner paused in his nightly circumambulation.
“Infinity,” Kay said. “What is it? What comes after infinite?”
Thea moved, turning slightly away from the glory. “Oh—it is all God’s love, I think—expanding, transcending.”
Going off his watch, Mr. Wright offered to bring up his old telescope, to show them “the wonders of astronomy, et cetera…” and went below to rustle it out.
Mr. Brimner took up a portion of rail beside Kay, because really it was impossible not to stop and stare. “What is the boundary of the universe?” he asked, perhaps not speaking to her. But went on, after a moment, “In an old Hindu tale the earth rests on the back of elephants. Who stand upon a great tortoise.”
Thea said, “What absurdities people once believed!”
“William James tells of an old lady
in America who told him that story, as gospel. To enlighten her, after the Socratic method, he asked, and what does this turtle stand on? Another turtle, said the old lady. And on what does that turtle stand? A bigger turtle! But my dear lady, James asked, what holds up that turtle? Oh it’s no use, Doctor, said the lady, waggling a finger at him: It’s turtles all the way down.”
Half-listening, Kay looked up into the reaches of blackness stretching out on either side, on every side, into never a border, no end to it, because what could be outside? There is no outside—everything is here, revealed, the deepness shining to tell us.
8
A Change of Heading
Mr. Brimner gave Kay back her notebook one afternoon after checking her declensions of the aorist, with one finger stuck in an earlier page, which he then opened to.
She had forgotten to tear out those pages about Annie. “I do not wish to discuss it any further,” she said. Giving him such a look, so that he would never refer to the story again. Because if Thea heard, or Francis, they would know Kay could not be trusted. She had been very stupid to write it down at all.
Mr. Brimner nodded, closed the book and left it beside her on the table. He did not ever push against one the way some people did.
* * *
—
A true storm overtook the Morning Light as she crept along the forties below Australia, reaching for New Zealand. The first real storm of the voyage—more like a prairie blizzard than the thunderstorms they’d weathered so far. All hands on deck; Jiacheng the cook was pressed into service and worked his full rotation with the rest, binding his braid round his neck so it would not be caught in a rope twist.
Early in the forenoon of the first day, the wind increased until the mainsail must be furled or be torn to pieces—or have the ship over. After Arthur Wetmore tore open his leg on a marlinspike, even Mr. Brimner was called up to help haul rope. Kay watched, tucked in close by the lifeboat, as ten men struggled high above with the furling, and a dozen below kept haul on the ropes. The men above were like ants strung out on a laundry line, so small and helpless against the whipping of the wind.
At last they had the great sail furled; then the ropes had to be made fast. Mr. Best’s shouts were thrown back into his mouth, but the men knew their work and stood firm to it. When all was tight, they shimmied one by one along the spar, back to the mainmast and down, down, safe except for new howling of the frustrated wind. Kay scarpered below before Francis could catch her up on deck.
As the gale worsened that night, Francis not only ordered them to keep to their bunks, he said they must be strapped in. Thea worried that Kay would be lonely and afraid, so he strapped both together into their bed, his and Thea’s. Kay did not want to go in with Thea—it was babyish, and beside Thea she could not do the things she did at night to make herself sleep. And she was afraid that she might have a nightmare and make Thea angry.
If she did, the storm overrode the dream. No other sounds could match it. They spent twelve hours in the full grip of wind and wave, clutching one another when the pitch and yaw was at its worst, talking a little (or trying to), drowsing from sheer nervous strain and waking, with a startled groping for each other, at some fresh banging shriek or paroxysm of the ship.
During the blizzard last winter in Blade Lake, Kay had shivered alone over a stoneware hot water bottle, wearing all her warmest things, huddling in the bedclothes for two days while Thea came and went and ice grew like ferns on the windowpanes. But this shuddering seaquake was stranger and longer, and far louder than the whining ghost-wind around the school. The frantic bucking of the Morning Light in massive seas was sometimes dreadfully frightening, and the constant creak and groan of wood made one worry that the boards would pop apart and spill them all into the ocean to drown.
At one lull, a momentary silence, Kay woke in semi-darkness. Beside her Thea lay at the far extent of the strap, her back curled into the side of the curving wooden wall, weeping silently. She must be thinking about her little baby. Kay touched her closed eyelids, stroking the fine skin as gently as her fingers would move, until Thea took one arm from the blanket-trap to stroke Kay’s cheek in turn. In a while they slept again. They had turned into animals, sleeping to heal themselves from fear.
No food came, since Jiacheng was on deck; Francis had left a tin of biscuits and a cask of water near. Sick from the pounding motion of the hull, Thea could not eat, but she drank a little when Kay carefully poured out half a metal cup, only spilling a very little. Once or twice they struggled up to sit on the chamber pot, clutching at the bed rail and snatching the lid back on as quick as could be.
One of those times, as Kay clambered back over to the far side of the bed, Thea opened her eyes in the semi-darkness of the storm light and said, “I am pleased to see how hard you are working with Mr. Brimner. He says you make marvellous progress.”
Kay felt her face heating. “I do not work hard enough,” she said.
“Well, I dare say, but you have a natural cleverness for languages and learning. You take after Father in that way.” She meant that Kay did not have to work to understand things, as other people did; as Thea did herself. It was a way of criticizing someone, in fact, for being facile and lazy.
“I think you are more like Father than I,” Kay said, at first meaning to wound Thea back, but finding it was true. “You worked with him, and he talked to you and admired your skill, and when he was ill, you ran the school—you were as good at it as he was.” And Thea had Father’s spiritual insight too, which Kay knew herself to lack.
“If you put the same effort into your other studies, you could perhaps go to normal school one day—not that I believe you would enjoy teaching.”
Kay did not think so either. “I will not be a teacher,” she said. “Perhaps I will paint…” But that was childish boasting; she had no skill, she was of no use in this world at all.
“You certainly lack the patience to teach.”
“Well, what am I to do, then?” There was some pleasure to this, to Thea’s attention on her future, even if it was a sore-tooth kind of pleasurable pain.
“Perhaps you will marry, one day. Or find some other calling. You need only submit to God’s will, but you are too fond of your own ideas,” Thea said. “It is not a bad thing to feel so certain about one’s own opinions, I suppose.”
“Mary submitted. She said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
“Well, you will not be asked to be the mother of God,” Thea said, in the dry way that meant she thought Kay ridiculous.
A strong awareness of her own hugeness, her possibility, rose up in Kay, contrary to Thea’s damping. “There could be some other task, that someone might one day have to do?”
Thea turned away from Kay to lie facing the door, no longer willing to discuss nonsense. But she left her warm feet behind her so that Kay’s could still be warmed.
The door opened and Francis came in to check on them, as he had from time to time when he could be spared.
Kay lay quiet, breathing as if asleep. Behind a tangle of eyelashes, she watched him bend to kiss Thea. It was so strange to see Thea lift her face to meet his mouth. That happy yielding to her husband, even in the midst of the storm. As if they had always been together—as if all the years Kay had had Thea to herself at Blade Lake were a story, or a lie.
* * *
—
It went on and on, twenty hours, thirty…nearly forty hours before the storm spent itself and spat them out the other side. Thea stayed the whole of the storm obediently in bed, but after thirty hours Kay found it physically excruciating to be swaddled all the time, and convinced her sister that she must creep quickly back to her own bunk, just for her Greek book, or begin screaming.
Each step across the bare and battened-down saloon was dangerous. The passengers—all she and Thea could ever be—had been ordered to stay below, but how could anyone notice? It was six
o’clock and would be dark again soon; she must find some brief respite in the air.
In her cabin, Kay dressed and put on her mackintosh. She climbed slowly up the companionway, gripping the handrail hard, stretching her neck to reconnoitre before she stepped up on deck. It was not so bad, not anymore. It was cold but not raining, and the motion was only the predictable rhythmic rolling of heavy seas. She pulled the mackintosh tighter about her neck and slipped around the port side, out of the mate’s eye.
The water was black, except where it wept or ached into dull gunmetal grey. Holding tight, Kay leaned against the rail, hip bones crushed into the wood until it hurt. Everything hurt all the time anyway, her head, her throat. Her insides, those wormy guts, and the bottom of her back.
Thea was wrong about her being so clever. She was too stupid to learn Greek. All she could do was read music and make her fingers go in a certain way at a certain time on the piano. It did not even sound good, only correct—nothing like the beauty of Thea’s own playing. And now the piano was out of tune, along with everything else.
There must be something I can do well, some work I can do, Kay thought, desperate in this darkness and storm about the course of her life. Well, but why must there? God had no use for her, no reason that she was good, or anything, or any thing.
On a sighing subsidence, the cloud that had wept over them parted and the moon shone through, a thin, bright, painful light, showing you the path across the sea. Which you could never walk on, or you would drown. A swell came again, and the wind rose into a shrieking roar, racing over the water to dive into the reefed mainsail and the tiny storm jib. Kay grabbed at the rail, her knees bending to take the roll. It was fresh!
The Difference Page 10
