by Ngaio Marsh
Since we had last heard of them, Mr Wilkie had been the victim (if victim is the right word) of a disastrous (if disastrous is the right word) fire. It had consumed a block of buildings in one of which his entire wardrobe and property had been stored in readiness for a tour of New Zealand. At first this really did look like ruin: the insurance was far below the amount needed to set the company up again and, being a man of integrity, Mr Wilkie felt obliged to replace any personal belongings lost by his actors. They were asked to let him have a list of the contents of their cases and I am afraid that some very minor bit parts and spear carriers laid claim to astonishingly sumptuous raiment. Indeed, the elderly, rather raffish, gentleman who had not, in living memory, been known to appear offstage in anything but a seedy blue suit and a pair of wicked yellow boots, now turned out to have been possessed of a wardrobe calculated to set him up with credit in the Diplomatic Service.
While Mr Wilkie was still wondering what drastic action he would be forced to take, a splendid gesture had been made by his Australian audiences who raised a public subscription in grateful recognition, they said, of his making the plays of Shakespeare a living reality in their country. Be sure, he was off to London as fast as he could go and there, still in storage and for sale, was the superb wardrobe, and lavish scenery of the late Beerbohm Tree. So now, here he was, rustling in pure silk robes of Cardinal red to a full house and with a most superior company. ‘Best thing that ever happened to me,’ he would say, ‘that fire.’
I had only a very sketchy notion of this play and had no idea what a rewarding actors’ vehicle it is. I have seen it since, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie and cast up to the hilt, but there was a touch in Allan Wilkie’s production that sticks in my memory as one of those moments of illumination that sometimes visit a performance and bless it. When Buckingham launched on his speech before execution and said to the hushed crowd: ‘All good people: pray for me’ they knelt, crossed themselves and began, just audibly, a prayer in Latin. It continued through to the end of the speech and I hear now a beautiful voice saying: ‘when the long divorce of steel falls on me’ and the slight upsurge of that background of prayer. The actor was an Englishman, Alexander Marsh, whose only fault was lack of inches. When my mother asked Mr Wilkie why he didn’t put him on elevators, he ejaculated: ‘My God, if I perched him any higher he’d fall off.’
Of course, I went behind after the show and it was lovely to see the Wilkies again. That was the last time I was ever to sit in front at one of their productions.
For ten days I wandered excitedly about Sydney. Flowers and fruit stalls blazed in the streets, the sun glittered on the famous and magnificent harbour which is a great deal bigger but less lovely, I swear, than more than one of ours in New Zealand. Sydney wears a brash, handsome, cocky look and has the air of knowing what it wants and going for it. Sydneysiders make New Zealanders look, I daresay, a bit dull, sheepish and provincial. This is the most positively antipodean city in the South Pacific. Neither geographically, ethnologically nor even historically do Australia and New Zealand resemble each other. We quite like each other: our common interests and our isolation from the rest of the world draw us together but there’s nothing New Zealanders enjoy less than being called Australians. Perhaps this is because we are insular and they are continentals.
The Balranald was to sail before dawn and I thought I would give less trouble to my hosts if I went aboard the night before. I was driven down in the evening by their chauffeur and I remember feeling, as he escorted me to the gangplank and handed my overnight bag to a brightly familiar steward, that this was not an appropriate mode of embarkation in the Balranald.
My cabin was forward on the port side and was exactly twice the size of its bunk. There was a washing-unit, three pegs, a porthole and no other means of ventilation apart from a small grille in the bulkhead. The only place for my cabin trunk was beneath the bed. To get it under, one opened the door, sat in the corridor and shoved with one’s feet. When it was safely stowed I went up on deck. Why is it that on the beginning of a voyage, passengers look so objectionable to one another? Why is each dismayed at the sight of someone with whom, in a day or two, he or she will have struck up a pleasant acquaintance and later on, very likely fall in love? What, pray, has he or she subconsciously expected in the way of fellow voyagers? Argonauts and Nereids? The narrow decks of the Balranald were crowded with passengers all of them, no doubt, entertaining the strongest misgivings about each other. We herded into a dining saloon with strips of coconut matting on the floor and, sitting mum at long tables, consumed cold meat and beetroot. At about eleven o’clock I went to bed.
On that sweltering Sydney night the port was hermetically shut: a foretaste of many more nights in harbour. Watersiders were loading the forward hold about two feet away, as it seemed, from my head. Whine, judder, clunk, thump, rattle. I lay panting on top of the bedclothes and wondered when it would get light and I could go on deck. In the end, I fell asleep.
Strangely, I remember nothing of our departure but have an idea it was delayed. She was an old, coal-burning, freight-cum-passenger ship and we soon discovered that she was on her last voyage. Her liver-coloured sides would have done with a coat of paint. Her appointments were far from smart. I doubt if there are any one-class ships today at a comparable fare, offering such Spartan accommodation. Her master was an ex-naval commander who had been stationed in Constantinople at the same time as a cousin of mine in the Royal Scots. Eric wrote to him about me and after we had been two days at sea I was commanded to the presence. Here was another player of records, this time, appropriately, sea shanties, which were less remorselessly canvassed in those days and sounded their best in that setting. The master would give his guests liqueurs while robust gramophone voices roared: ‘Fa-a-r away you rolling river’ and ‘Spanish Ladies’. The night seas streamed past us and stars careened across the portholes. It was all wonderfully consistent in tone and so was the Owner himself. He was so like an RN officer in an Ian Hay farce that he was scarcely credible. His face was red, his eyes blue and, so it was rumoured, his temper exceedingly short. He was an implacable disciplinarian and not greatly loved by his officers who were forbidden to fraternize with passengers to any greater extent than could be contained by a brisk walk round the deck at stated times of the day. They must not sit or play games. He was obeyed but his object, at least in one instance, was defeated since an ardent romance developed between his fourth officer and a tough, bronzed and cheerful young lady from Sydney. Everybody discussed this affair including the lady, but nobody knew how such a degree of complicated infatuation could be induced by the prescribed number of circuits, eight to the mile, at a gruelling clip and under strict observation from the bridge.
There were any number of delightful passengers. Mrs Robertson, a pianist, for example, the bones of whose left hand had been broken by Dame Clara Butt. Dame Clara, it will be recalled, was a famous contralto of Edwardian and early Georgian days whose superb voice has been unfairly compared to a foghorn and who was enormously tall and possessed a formidable physique. She had been a student with Mrs Robertson and one afternoon, in merry pin, had gaily rapped her over the knuckles with a ruler and at a single blow transformed her from a concert pianist into her own accompanist. Generously, Mrs Robertson seemed to bear no grudge but undertook any number of tours with Dame Clara who did not appear to be tortured with undue remorse. Her husband had the wonderfully satisfying Lear-like name of Kennerly Rumford and sang duets with his powerful wife: accompanied, of course, by Mrs Robertson.
There were two amusing ex-public-school boys returning to England on what was left of their allowance, an English girl who was disembarking at Durban to marry a doctor and two young men whom she and I chummed up with. All I can remember of these pleasant fellows is the Christian name of one of them – Esmond. He was an enthusiastic British Israelite and lent me several books about the inscriptions in the Pyramids which I found profoundly unconvincing. There was an English actor of a liv
ely disposition who organized ship’s entertainments and invited me to help him and there were a retired naval officer who did sums all day and his wife who wasn’t allowed to interrupt him.
Slowly and dirtily we steamed across the Indian Ocean and so infatuated with the voyage did I become that the increasingly dubious food and the stifling condition of the cabin did little to subdue my pleasure. With about a dozen others I used to haul my mattress along a corridor and up a companionway and heave it on the amidships hatch. There we lay, not perhaps very comfortably, listening at first to the sounds that a ship makes within herself; a complex of bells, the pulse of her engines, the hiss of her flanks through the night sea and the quiet movements of the watch. The stars were steady and luminous in the tropics and vague ideas about navigation made one feel they were important. I would fall asleep watching them and the night would go by in a little grey flash. Almost at once, it seemed, the quartermaster’s voice was saying: ‘Toyme ter get up-er. Toyme ter get up’ reminding me of Fred Scully and his ‘Over-ture and beginners’. Bare feet thudded along the decks. Already hoses spurted and fanned and sloshed into the scuppers. We would fumble up our unwieldy mattresses with fingers still nerveless from sleep and blunder off to our cabins which were already oven-hot.
We were nearly three weeks, I think, on the leg to Durban where the ship would spend two days coaling. Everybody was beginning to feel a bit jaded. When, on opening a folded slice of cold meat, I found it encrusted with small shells I made up my mind to cut loose in Durban. My friends were all collecting addresses of nice, clean, cheap little places to stay. I, who could afford it less than any of them, took what I hoped was enough money out of my hoard and resolved to spend the night ashore in a good hotel. I have never regretted doing this sort of thing.
This is not a travel book: I shall not try to write about Durban in any detail. Landfalls and arrivals on a sea voyage are, to me, a strange delight and this, the first in my experience, was immeasurably exciting. The impure land-smell reached out to sea and disturbed senses that had been scoured and simplified by salt air. A coastline, a pilot boat, shipping, buildings, docks, progressively encroached upon our exclusiveness. Details emerged: people on the wharves, a black man wearing, with perfect dignity, a bowler hat and a pair of corsets, who waited among his fellows, for us to berth. He was one of the gang of coalers. The gap between ship and dock narrowed. Bells rang in the engine room. Mooring lines were flung out and caught with bass-voiced ejaculations. The people on the wharf and the people in the ship stared dispassionately at each other. Friends exchanged greetings. Gangways were established. The Balranald, temporarily bereft of her somewhat vulgar personality, opened her bilges and indifferently relieved herself.
The pilot boat had brought a letter for my English friend from her fiancé saying he had been delayed by an urgent case in Johannesburg and giving her instructions about trains. Once ashore, she and I went by Zulu-drawn rickshaws from the port into Durban. I was not at all sure that I wanted to do this. I came from a country where it would be beyond the limit of anyone’s imagination to envisage a member of one race running between shafts like a horse for the convenience of a member of the other. I didn’t quite see that what was unthinkable for us should be OK in Natal. The Zulus, oiled, decked out in feathers and beads, superb men, stood by their rickshaws and shouted for custom.
I swallowed my scruples and we went that way from the port into Durban.
At the top of the hill my Zulu shouted and sat at an exact balancing point, on the shaft of his rickshaw. We coasted silently down the slope at what seemed to be a terrific speed, between glaring white houses and flamboyant splashes of colour.
The hotel was in a pleasant square and was cool and lovely. White turbans and white garments moved through shadowed rooms. Bare or slippered feet slapped discreetly down quiet corridors. I booked myself in and then, with some other of our shipmates saw my friend off in the Johannesburg express and set about exploring Durban.
I saw the Valley of a Thousand Hills from a height called the Berea and, returning, wandered about the streets until my heels blistered and the heat was too much to be endured. Back at the hotel I found my cool room and its own dark bathroom and for what was left of the day, I bathed and rested but was too excited to sleep. In the late evening I dined on a wide verandah of the hotel and watched the world go by.
Who was the fair young man who joined me during dinner and ordered, I think, a bottle of champagne? I fancy, he must have been one of a party at a nearby table and I suppose he must have been a fellow passenger: I didn’t just pick him up. But I cannot recall his name or meeting with him on any other occasion. I remember that he asked me to join his party which was celebrating an engagement. I did so and supposed it was a South African custom to link arms and click glasses so ceremoniously. What a fuss! Having, out of excitement, slept not at all the previous night, and having walked, looked and stared myself to a standstill during the day and having taken, moreover, two glasses of champagne and some van der Hum with my dinner, everything now became hazy. I think I refused an invitation to go on somewhere and instead went straight to bed and to sleep for ten hours.
The next morning when, still footsore, I came out of the hotel, there, squatting by the kerb with his rickshaw, was yesterday’s Zulu. He said, with a pleasing smile, that he was my boy and where were we going? My scruples about one human being trotting between shafts for another were honestly held and they now returned but were weakened by my blisters and confused by the attitude of the man himself. Obviously, he had waited there a long time when he might have been working elsewhere. He would therefore be a loser if I offered an explanation (which he would not understand or appreciate) and then, po-faced, tottered on my blisters in search of a taxi. Should I have given him a compensatory sum and a self-righteous commentary? An odious solution which he would no doubt have rightly interpreted as an insult to himself and his rickshaw. I took the rickshaw. He pointed out places of interest, nodded, smiled, trotted and uttered cries of greeting or warning to other rickshaws. Did he hate me in his heart, think me mad or not think about me at all? Without any shadow of doubt – the last.
He carried me to the native market, a place of enchantment. There were no white people about but a great strolling crowd of Indians, Negroes and ‘coloureds’ whose precise races I was unable to define. The shipboard diet of corned beef, suspect mutton, sardines, perpetual beetroot and plum duff had taken its toll. I longed for fresh fruit. Here, in a vast stone building, was a riot of pineapples, pawpaws, bananas and nartjies, that superb cross between a tangerine and an orange. Here were baskets with magenta motifs woven into them and wide beguiling hats. I bought a hat for fourpence and a basket for twopence which quickly became a cornucopea for eleven-pence. I walked all through the market and came out in a colonnade occupied by Indian vendors of vivid cottons. Suddenly I wanted very badly indeed to paint. Without so much as a sketching block or a stick of charcoal to aid me in this desire and with the realization that it would in any case be impossible to set up an easel in the noontide heat and traffic of the market, I stared and stared, scribbled on the back of an envelope and hoped to remember. I had got a camera, bought in the ship, and I aimed it at the subject and thought that if the shot came out it would serve to jog my memory. Then I walked out into the glare on the opposite side of the market.
There he was, sitting on the kerb, nobly confident.
The last thing I did in Durban was to go to the theatre and whom did I see? Miss Sybil Thorndyke and Mr Lewis Casson (they hadn’t yet been damed or knighted) and their small daughter, in a revival of an Edwardian drama.
It had been a lovely interlude. I decided to return to the Balranald that night as she was to follow her usual practice of sailing early in the morning. Surely, I thought, she will have finished coaling.
A row of taxis waited outside the theatre – I had half expected to find the Zulu – and I took one of them to the hotel to collect my things and then drive to the port. It w
as now close on midnight: very hot, still and heavily overcast.
The hotel bill was a little more than I had expected and I had treated myself to the play. As we jolted through the dark roads to the port – and it seemed much farther than I had remembered – I looked in my purse and found, as I remember, about ten shillings. Not enough, I thought; almost certainly, at this hour of the night, not enough. I would have to ask the man to wait while I got my hoard from the purser’s office. A block of ice ran down my chest into my stomach and turned to a coal of fire. The office, of course, would be shut.
I hadn’t noticed the driver and in any case it was very dark and he had a hat pulled over his eyes. I leant forward.
‘Er. I say. One moment.’
‘Yes, Madam? Forgotten something? Shall I go back?’
It was a very pleasant voice.
I explained. I said I was sorry and that I expected if I hadn’t got enough money (I told him what I had) I could perhaps find the officer of the watch and borrow some from him or perhaps there would be time in the morning –
‘Please,’ said the voice, ‘don’t give it another thought. Of course it will be enough. Plenty. Really. I promise.’
Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards thrown in. He did not turn his head. He drove on and made a little conversation. Had I enjoyed the play and was the hotel comfortable? And the ship?
I wondered if I had mistaken a private car for a taxi and he was amusing himself by taking me at my word. But no, it was a taxi and a very ramshackle one at that. Some young Englishman who had got himself into a scrape and was earning his return fare, perhaps?
When we reached the wharves and, finally, the Balranald, he said he would carry my things aboard. I said I could manage perfectly. He replied that he wouldn’t dream of letting me go aboard at that hour of the night by myself.
