The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  “You didn’t say that a year ago,” she said.

  The tall gentleman laughed, and at the sound Mary conceived a hatred of him of which her earlier dislike was but the mildest of precursors.

  “A year ago! My dear Lottie. Do show some sensibility. A year ago is not now.”

  “A year ago you wanted something from me. Now you don’t. That’s all.”

  “Listen, Lottie, I don’t want to quarrel with you. I’m quite prepared to be your friend. If there’s anything I can do—I’m not a rich man, but if fifty pounds. . . .

  “Just the amount she owes me,” breathed little Miss Short. “How odd. Perhaps it will remind her.”

  It seemed that Charlotte was not reminded of anything but her incomprehensible grief. She began to scold the tall gentleman in a furious whisper that presently became a pleading murmur.

  “I’ve never asked you for anything,” she said. “I don’t want anything. Except not to be left like this. Don’t leave me. Don’t, don’t leave me. I’ll always love you. See, oh see, I love you now. Have I grown less beautiful to you? Tell me why you don’t want me any more? When I want you so much.”

  There was a short silence, and then Mary heard the gentleman say: “Good-bye, Lottie,” followed by the sound of his retreating footsteps and a wail from her mother. Then Charlotte began to cry. Mary rushed into the plant house. It was quite dark, and she knocked over plants and grazed her forehead on some tall yielding stem, that rose up out of the darkness to bar her headlong way. She flung herself on Charlotte and hugged her close.

  “Come along,” she said. “Let’s go home. Come on. Come with me.”

  “What are you doing here?” Charlotte said roughly. She hurried out of the plant house, dragging Mary after her, and confronted Miss Short with a face contorted between tears and rage. “How dare you come spying on me?” she demanded, and rushed out of the ballroom, pushing through the dancers, with Mary clinging to her arm and Miss Short clucking at her heels.

  “Get me a cab,” Charlotte ordered the doorkeeper. He got it, insolently enough, and she bundled Mary and the poor drooping Pink into it. All the way to Lincthorn Road she said nothing and took no notice of Miss Short’s ejaculations. But once indoors Miss Short assumed a certain dignity.

  “You had no right to speak to me like that, Charlotte. I’m not a spy. I never had the figure for it, for one thing, and I didn’t expect you of all people to rush at me like a cataract and drag me through a roomful of half-dressed savages. Fancy-dress! Why shouldn’t I be a Pink? Well, never mind that, I’ve put up with your wild ways all this time, thinking you were good at heart, just as I used to think of you at school when you got into such trouble, but this is too much. I’ve been spoken to to-night as if I were a Turk and compelled to trample on people I don’t know and don’t approve of. And all I’ve got is a little inlaid box. It’s a very nice box, and I dare say will come in useful for something, but I’d rather you took it back and gave me a little of the money you borrowed from me.”

  Charlotte stood up and said bitterly:

  “I’ll give you your money. And I’ll go away from this house now. Come, Mary, we’ll go and pack.” She swept Mary upstairs and stood there in the middle of the room while the little girl, with weary neatness, packed and folded and sought for Charlotte’s scattered possessions in all the drawers and corners of the room. Charlotte’s fine eyes were lustrous with emotion, and her hair lay in heavy coils about her shoulders. Her bosom swelled and lifted as she talked, moving out of Mary’s way, sometimes offering dispassionate advice.

  “I’ve been a fool,” she said quietly. “Don’t you ever make a fool of yourself like that, Mary. Let men beg and beg and threaten to blow their brains out, but don’t give way to them. They won’t blow out their brains. That’s just bird-lime. I’ve been well caught, haven’t I? Never give anything for nothing. The more you give the more you may, and a man doesn’t value anything he hasn’t had to pay for. But what could I do? I’m not young. I’m thirty-nine. I’ve lost some of my looks, Mary. If I’d been too stiff with him, as likely as not he’d have gone off—to find someone easier, or someone who dared to put a higher value on herself than I did. I didn’t dare, Mary. I loved him so.” Charlotte paused and went on in the same tone of voice: “Don’t crush that bodice, girl. Fold it the other way. He’s fooled me. Well, I’ll show him I don’t care. Hurry, Mary. Hurry! We’ll go away. We’ll leave my box and send for it. We’ll go and enjoy ourselves. I’ll show you everything in London. We’ll laugh and be happy and pretend there aren’t any men in the world. Shall we? If your father had been different . . . There’s only one man you’ve the right to expect anything from and that’s the man you’ve married. The others are all—incidents. They don’t owe you anything and they remember that when they feel like getting away.”

  “Where are we going?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know. Far enough from here. We’ll find somewhere. Quick!”

  At last they had finished. Mary straightened her back and began to tidy her hair. A fury of impatience seized Charlotte.

  “Come,” she said. “It’s getting light. It must be four o’clock.”

  “What about Miss Short’s money?” Mary asked.

  “Oh,” her mother said doubtfully, “do you think I ought to give it to her?”

  Mary said she did think so. She waited while her mother extracted some notes from an envelope in her bag, and, taking them from her, went downstairs in search of Miss Short. She found the poor woman asleep on the couch in the sitting-room. Her lips were pursed and open, as if sleep had overtaken her in the middle of a cluck. When Mary spoke to her, she bounced off the couch into a posture of agitated self-justification and appeal.

  “You’re not really going, Mary? You can’t go now. It’s the middle of the night. No one will take you in. You’ll be murdered. I’m sure I’m very sorry if I spoke hastily to your mother, but I was upset, and I’m impetuous. My poor father always said it would be my ruin and now you’ll be brought back swollen corpses to my feet and I really don’t know what I shall do. What can you do with a corpse?”

  “Here’s your money.” Mary said, thrusting the notes towards her.

  Miss Short took them with a hand that trembled between relief and eagerness and a sort of shame. She looked from them to the pale little girl and murmured:

  “You really mustn’t go like this. I appeal to you, my dear. I don’t know however I’m going to explain it to the neighbors. Besides, I’m fond of Charlotte, and I don’t like living alone.” Miss Short began to weep.

  Mary looked at her with the indifference of fatigue. “You shouldn’t have spoken to her as you did,” she said. “You might have seen she was upset. Do you know what I think? I think you ought to get someone to come and live with you who’d look after you, and not want to go out to the fireworks. There’s a good deal to be done in this house for anyone who likes that sort of thing. That pedestal, for instance. But don’t try to live with anyone like my mother. You’re not—not quick enough.”

  Charlotte’s rapid footsteps sounded on the staircase.

  Mary turned to go. She held out her hand. “Good-bye. I ate as little as possible. I hope you’ll enjoy yourself in France, and not have any accidents.”

  Charlotte took no notice of the poor quivering weeping figure in the doorway. She stalked down the narrow gravelled path to the garden gate, carrying Mary’s bundle, without a glance at her friend. Never was a Pink more draggled and broken by a night of storm. Mary felt sorry for her, but a touch of contempt for Miss Short’s incapacity to deal with a situation she herself had created mingled with her pity. She waved her hand and stumbled down Lincthorn Road in Charlotte’s wake.

  Charlotte strode down the hill towards the town at such speed that Mary’s short legs were taking two steps to her mother’s one, and she was out of breath and gasping. They passed the reservoir, a sinister-looking place at this hour in the morning, when a light that was almost tangible, so grey and opaque
was it, enclosed Mary and her mother, Pentonville Hill and all London in a quivering translucent globe, like a bowl of goldfish. They reached the bottom of the hill and there Charlotte hesitated. Mary looked round her at the deserted street. It was offensively dirty, and again she thought longingly of Carton’s Yard and Harbour Street, that even in its narrowest part was not sordid, like this, and as it climbed the hill out of the town became the cleanest windiest road in Danesacre. She drove the thought away. Here she was, and here in these squalid streets she was apparently to remain, and she would not allow herself to dwell on thoughts of Danesacre. She looked at her mother and for the first time realised what Charlotte meant when she talked of her age. The early light was cruel to Charlotte’s face. There were lines down each side of her mouth, and the flesh under her eyes was stained and puffy. Mary came closer to her mother, moved to comfort. In the same moment she divined that Charlotte was feeling bewildered and helpless in the black tunnel of the street and a tremor of fear invaded Mary’s own solid little body.

  A cab crawling down the road from the city galvanised Charlotte into action. She hailed it, waving Mary’s bundle. The man drew up and regarded the two of them in a stupefaction that presently issued in material form. He spat vehemently. Then he fell to studying them again.

  “I want you to drive us,” Charlotte began imperiously and paused—“across the river,” she concluded. The cabman found his voice.

  “Well,” he said mournfully, “I don’t know what you’ve been up to. How’d I know you an’t the one as is wanted for doing in her husband last Friday night in the City Road, slitting him up from top to bottom like a herring, the saucy piece.”

  “You can see for yourself I’m not,” Charlotte said. “Come. Are you going to drive us over the river, or aren’t you?”

  The man said nothing to that, but pointed with his whip to the door of the cab, which Charlotte took to mean consent. She lifted Mary in, and followed her, sinking on to the cushions with a sigh of relief. The cab proceeded slowly southwards. Once the driver stopped and, getting down from his seat, came to peer in at the window. He had a melancholy face, lined and grimy, and marked now with profound suspicion and disapproval.

  “Get on,” Charlotte ordered. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Don’t you go slitting nothing in there,” he warned her, and clambered back into his seat.

  They crossed the bridge and were crawling down a road bordered by gardens when two belated revellers, sprung apparently from one of the groves, ran out into the road and held up the cab. They were, Mary perceived, gentlemen, and looked as any of the guests at Hansyke Manor might look after dining with her father. They were very merry. One cried, “What have we here?” and opened the door of the cab. The driver sat unmoved on his box. He did not even look round to observe the fate of his passengers. His back expressed dejected resignation.

  With the handsome merry face of the young man so close to her own, Mary abruptly lost her sense of him as a familiar object in her world. She remembered Miss Short’s prediction. Her stoicism and her worldliness dropped from her in the same moment, and a frightened little girl of thirteen buried her face in Charlotte’s dress and sobbed. Charlotte was superb. She said: “Well, gentlemen, are you sufficiently amused, to have frightened a child and insulted a lady? May we go on?”

  The young man stepped back and flourished an arm. “Our mistake,” he murmured. “The wrong bed again. Proceed, cabby. Proceed, Phaeton, your father’s horses smoke upon the air.”

  “He’s not wore out,” the driver said. “He an’t really smoking. He’s a good horse.”

  He curled his whip lovingly round the animal’s ear, and drove for another hundred yards before he pulled up, and getting down from the box, inquired just where Charlotte wished to be taken.

  Charlotte did not know. To gain time, she began to accuse the man of cowardice in the recent encounter. He rolled a flaccid eye.

  “Nothing to do with me,” he said stolidly. “Strange females as drive about town in the early hours takes their lives in their hand. I an’t going to get myself slit for no one. Where d’you want to go now? He’s a good horse and he an’t my dad’s. He’s mine. But he’s been driven enough for one night. Where are you going?”

  Charlotte confessed that she did not know, and the man looked at her with a return of all his old suspicions. “You can’t stop here,” he said. “This is a cab, not an inn. If you done it, you’d better give yourself up. I’m sorry for you. I dare say you been hasty.”

  Charlotte sagged against the back of the cab, and Mary realised that her mother was resourceless. She felt an access of confidence and courage. Stepping out of the cab and sticking her thumbs in the pockets of her coat in imitation of Mark Henry, she looked round. They were in Kennington Road. From either side, streets of smaller shabbier houses emptied themselves into the thoroughfare. Mary picked out one at random. “Drive slowly down Endymion Road,” she ordered, “and stop at the first likely house for lodgings that you see.”

  The cab, lurching a short distance, stopped in front of a dingy little house, with a fly-blown card, inscribed BEDS, propped up in the window. There were signs of awakening life in the street. Mary descended and hammered on the door. There was a long wait. She hammered again, and the door was flung open with a suddenness that made Mary suppose the owner to have been lurking behind it, waiting for the hammering to begin again. The thinnest woman Mary had ever seen stood blinking in the dark entry of the house. She was so thin that her ribs and the whalebone of her bodice competed for notice. She was as melancholy as the cabman, and Mary had the fantastic idea that he had vanished and appeared again behind the door as his own sister. She glanced over her shoulder. He was still on his box, sunk in gloomy thought, and Charlotte was descending heavily from the cab.

  Panic seized Mary, but she stood still. “You let rooms?” she asked.

  The thin woman looked doubtful. “I don’t know,” she murmured.

  “If you don’t,” Mary said severely, “you oughtn’t to have that card in your window.”

  The thin woman glanced at it defensively. “It says BEDS,” she pointed out.

  “Beds must be in rooms,” Mary argued. “Unless you keep them folded up in the attic, in which case I don’t see what use they are.”

  Charlotte came and stood at Mary’s side.

  “We only want a bedroom,” she murmured. “We can pay for it. We’re quiet people, and my little girl is very tired.”

  The thin woman looked from Charlotte’s ravaged face to the motionless driver, and back to Mary. The little girl smiled, and abruptly the thin woman stepped back.

  “ I’ve got one room,” she said grudgingly. “You can come and look at it.”

  Charlotte followed her daughter into the dark little passage.

  The room was at the end of the passage. It was small, indescribably frowsty, with a carpet the colour of dried blood. Charlotte shuddered, and looked shrinkingly at the brown expanse of bed.

  “I don’t like this, Mary,” she breathed.

  “Where can we go then?” Mary whispered back.

  Charlotte said fretfully aloud: “I feel ill. I—I’m tired, Mary.”

  Mary turned to the woman. “How much is this room?” she asked, and when the woman told her she engaged it for a week. “We’ll pay in advance,” she promised, and taking Charlotte’s bag from the hand that nervelessly relinquished it, went out to pay the cabby and rescue her bundle from the seat where Charlotte had abandoned it. She paid the man what he asked and then said boldly: “If you like to go to 26 Lincthorn Road and fetch a box we left there, I’ll give you double.” The man said he would fetch it when his horse had had a rest. He whipped up and drove away. Mary looked after his retreating back with a forlorn sense of having lost a friend. “Not,” she said to herself, “that he was much good in a crisis, but I was getting used to him.” The thought that she could feel regret at the departure of a gloomy and apathetic cab-driver brought home to her, more sharpl
y than anything else, the desolation of this adventure. She hurried back into the house, and paying the thin woman a week’s rent, shut the door of the bedroom on herself and Charlotte. She would have locked it, but she saw, with faint dismay, that it had neither lock nor bolt. She turned her attention to Charlotte, who was lying face downwards on the bed, abandoned to misery.

  Charlotte lay there most of the day, exploring who shall say what by-ways of humiliation and despair, while Mary slept in a black shiny arm-chair, moving restlessly every time her face came into contact with a patch of uncovered hair. Towards evening, Charlotte woke her up. “I’m going out,” she said. “I didn’t want you to wake up and find me gone. You’ll be all right here. I’ll ask the woman to give you some food. Then you must go to bed and wait until I come.”

  Mary jumped up. “Where are you going?” she demanded. “I don’t want to stay here alone. Take me with you.”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  “I won’t be late. At least”—a brief gleam came into her eye—“I don’t think I shall. You must be a brave girl and stay here.”

  Left alone, Mary examined the room with a growing apprehension. She extracted a comb from the bundle and began to tidy her hair. There was a knock at the door. The comb clattered to the floor. The door opened and the thin woman’s face appeared, attached to its edge.

  “Supper’s in the kitchen,” she said, and withdrew.

  The kitchen of 19 Endymion Road was a livelier place than Mary’s bedroom. It was, to her first glance, overstocked with life. There was the thin woman, her name discovered to be Mrs Maggs, bent double over a frying-pan from which rose fumes of smoke and a smell of burnt fat, a small boy, so skinny and sad of face as to be patently her son, a man with reddish hair, and a man with warts. The last two presently took their departure: Mrs Maggs, Mary, and the little boy were left alone. They had barely started supper when the melancholy cabman brought Charlotte’s box. Mary had to borrow the money to pay him from Mrs Maggs, who invited him to stop to supper. He accepted, with the first sign of alacrity Mary had ever seen in him, and joined the group round the table, where he displayed toothless and anticipatory jaws.