“Then, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye. Dear.”
Mary turned to speed straight across the moor. Her heart pulsed to a word. Her tongue trembled to repeat it. The startled moor-hens, rising from the reeds as she took her wild flight along the edge of the stream, said, “Dear. Dear. Dear.” The solitary poplar dropped it in her ear as she fled past it over the lawn, and pausing in the cool stone-flagged hall only long enough to make sure of Miss Flora’s distant presence in the house, ran up the stairs and shut the door of her room on everything but a word. She pressed her face against the sheets of her bed. The quiet room sheltered the new-born quivering creature until she was composed again, and could go downstairs to wait for night. . . .
Night came, after a day of eternity, but Gerry did not come. She waited for him until the first signs of dawn sent her back to the house, fluttering listlessly through the heavy grass. For a day or two she expected him, but he did not come, and after that she tried not to think of him. Weeks passed, and she learned to take a particular path to the moor without an alarming leap of the heart. She wore her new clothes and tried sometimes to behave like a young lady, and more often than not succeeded only in behaving like a boy in petticoats. She asked for Wagener to come and give her help with her studies, and Wagener came, but they did not study very seriously. They went out into moor or meadow with a book, and Mary sat on it while the young Dutchman talked. He talked more than she did, for she had nothing to talk about but herself and she was never, after that meeting on the moor, very communicative about herself.
Whether Wagener had a sentimental feeling for Mary Hansyke, it would be difficult to say, but he returned her frank liking in full measure, talking to her as he might to a young brother. She had a bluff good nature that was an echo of Mark Henry’s and invited candour. She could laugh at herself, and Wagener found her intelligent. He was alarmed to find her also obstinate, and once at least he found her stupid and hard, when the occasion was that poor Miss Flora, whose hoard of knowledge her pupil had long since ransacked and would not now pretend to respect. Miss Flora tried threats, at which Mary laughed, and tears, from which she walked away. She knew that the trembling creature would not complain to Richard Hansyke, lest he should see merely her incompetence, and turn her off, to find an eighth pupil, and a ninth and a tenth in a series that stretched away into the bleak wastes of Miss Flora’s future, to that dreadful day when she would be too old to impart to little girls the story of the Scriptures and the habits of the silkworm and would creep into some hole to wait obscurely for her soul’s ultimate holiday. She had been so long with the Hansyke family that she had almost come to believe that she belonged to it and to encourage a little warm feeling of pleasure in belonging to something. Mary’s rebellion finished that. Miss Flora went about with scarified eyelids and a sniff that threatened to become continuous, like the trembling of her hand and the tear that formed in one eye, and fell, and formed again. She even gave up speaking to Mary about her deportment, and in her triumph Mary swaggered about the house more in the manner of a young blood than a young lady. She took a malicious pleasure in humiliating the poor woman by rough speech and boisterous laughter in her hearing.
“Might as well go,” she replied to Wagener’s protests. “She’s no use.” Wagener regarded her comically and she became so resentful of his tolerations that he bowed to the storm and abandoned Miss Flora. “I don’t like pitying people,” said Mary. “If I’m as useless as Miss Flora I’ll not ask for pity.” Then she considered the matter calmly and told Wagener that she had been wrong. “I’ll keep her for the rest of my life. I’ve been making a fool of myself, Wagener. Why did you not tell me sooner?”
“What I like about you,” the tutor said meditatively, “is that you’ll learn. Are you never afraid of failing to do what you want to do, Mary?”
“No.”
He talked to her about love, lying on his back with his flute sticking out through a hole in his pocket.
“I would fall in love with you myself if I were not a tutor and you Mary Hansyke. If I were not so confoundedly lazy, I mean. Your hair, now that you’ve taken to brushing it, is a trap for fools. You are a little too short, but unless you grow fat that will not matter. Your eyes would make a plain woman charming. In your face, with its delicious air of surprise, they’ll drown men. Allow me to instruct you. You won’t heed it, but you like listening to talk about yourself. Love is an affection. Of the senses, if you are lucky, since they cure themselves. Of the soul, if you are unlucky. There is no cure for that and you go marked to your grave. There is also the love which is an affection of the heart, or whatever organ may be supposed the spring of tenderness. This too, once contracted, is likely to trouble you for life.”
“I am going to build ships,” Mary said.
“Paper boats, Mary.”
“Mark Henry Garton promised me I should.”
Wagener rolled over on the grass, waving his flute. “My poor dear,” he murmured, “and I thought you had already learned something. Promised you! You have everything to discover. I shall now play you a little air I composed, illustrating the vanity of human wishes. . . .”
A few days after her fifteenth birthday, Mary set off to ride to Danesacre. She told herself that she wanted to see her mother, and discuss her future with Mark Henry. She was in reality driven by one of the restless impulses that had lately grown more frequent. The lazy life she led at Hansyke Manor had become intolerable. She had been endowed with an extra allowance of vital spirits and they raged in her these days like seven devils. She got up at four o’clock and rode down the Danesacre road through a river of mist. She rode astride in a short skirt, boots and thick stockings. She could not see the mare’s legs or her own feet. Airy hob-goblins of mist clung to the trees and floated off down the road in front of her. Invisible peewits wailed in a milky twilight.
The wind on the high moor was cold and when Mary came upon a fire lit in a small hollow she got down off her horse and approached it. One of the figures crouching over the blaze turned round.
“Sylvia Maud,” cried Mary. She hobbled her horse to a furze bush and descended into the hollow. From this point she could see the side of a caravan looming through the mist.
“My, if it isn’t the Queen,” said Sylvia Maud. She presented Mary to her companions. “The Queen, Queenie if you like. Mr Bob Smykes. Bertha, his old woman. Fearful cough Bertha has. Once or twice last night I thought I’d gone to bed with one of the fierce old sheep of this neighbourhood. Albert Smykes, arlequin and odd man. Hurry up with that frying-pan, Albert. Could you do with a hot potato, Queen?”
The mist exuded a lean youth with grotesquely developed thighs into the circle of the fire. He was certainly very odd. Mary averted her eyes from him and accepted a hot potato thankfully.
She asked after Mrs Maggs.
“She married the cabman, and it broke up the home. Both her brothers were taken off the same week. The old army game, my love. Science, not art. Turned the ace once too often. Maggs asked meto stay but I couldn’t stand the widow’s dream of love. Besides, he wasn’t exactly amusing, was he? So little Sylvia Maud took to the road again.”
Mary looked astonished. “He said he wasn’t a marrying man.”
“He ain’t,” Sylvia Maud said darkly. “She’ll rue it. What are you doing here, Queen? Go on, you don’t live here. Nothing lives here but parsons and devils. Last place we stopped at they put Albert and me in the pound, him for his tights and me for a joke I made. Both was a bit far gone, but not past decency.” Sylvia Maud shivered and laughed and her teeth chattered lamentably.
Mr Bob Smykes cleared his throat. “We’re outlaws,” he said pleasantly. “No social order is complete without its outlaws. We supply the eternal need of society for something to persecute. We are the goats, the crucified.”
Sylvia Maud made a joke that covered Mary with blushes. To conceal them, she stood up and said she must be getting on her way. The dan
cer said good-bye and begged her to drop in again later in the week if she happened to be passing.
“But where are you going?” Mary asked.
“The cruel three,” began Mr Bob Smykes, when his wife was taken with a fit of coughing, at the climax of which Sylvia Maud explained that their horse had fallen the day before and breaking his collar-bone and two legs, had been shot. “We got to earn a sovereign and buy some farmer’s worst nag before we can move on. And from what I seen of this countryside,” she concluded, “I’d sooner try to buy a drink in hell than a horse off one of these——”
“I’ll give you mine,” Mary said hastily. “She’s strong. She’s not really a riding horse. Her mother’s still ploughing. She’ll do everything you’re likely to want.”
Sylvia Maud eyed her curiously. “You must be rich,” she said. “What were you at in Endymion Road? And who is likely to believe you gave us your horse?”
Mary blushed for her stupidity. “That’s right,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. I’ll give you a letter about it. Have you a sheet of paper?”
Sylvia Maud darted at Mr Bob Smykes and began beating him about the body with her minute hands. He remonstrated. “Paper,” she said feverishly. “Give me a piece of paper. I’ve found a fool. What have you got in your pockets? I can feel everything but paper.”
“You can’t feel a shirt,” he observed pleasantly. “Here you are.” “ Mary began to write. Struck by a sudden thought, she altered her first intention and wrote out a receipt for the sale of her horse for ten pounds. “That sounds better,” she said, handing it to Sylvia Maud. “My, you are smart,” the little creature agreed. Mr Bob Smykes delivered himself of an eloquent speech which made Mary very uncomfortable until she realised that she represented in his eyes a large and appreciative audience. Albert accentuated the peculiar conformation of his body by a pantomime of delight that embarrassed her beyond words, and only Bertha, speaking for the first time, asked what the young lady was going to do without her horse. An expression of alarm and dismay crossed Sylvia Maud’s face. Mary hastened to reassure her.
“I shall be all right,” she said. “I’m halfway on my journey. I can walk the rest of the way.” An unexpected thrill of pleasure ran through her at the thought that she would be walking over the same road as Gerry Hardman. She disregarded it instantly and hurried away, not even stopping to say good-bye to the mare. A hundred yards down the road she looked back. The mist had swallowed up horse, caravan and hollow. Mary strode on.
She had covered about three miles and was walking through the fields of a dale that bisected the moor, when she began to feel hungry. There was an inn not far off along the road and she decided to go there and ask for breakfast. Feeling for her purse in the pocket of her coat, she found it gone, the whole pocket cut clean away. At the same moment she recalled the glint of a knife seen in Sylvia Maud’s hand. A hot wave of indignation swallowed up her first dismay. She swung round to go back and then halted, irresolute. “I must think this out,” she said aloud. She sat down on the wet grass and rested her elbows on her knee. “It’s no use going back,” she thought. “They’ll be far enough now. With my horse. The ungrateful wretches. Mary Hansyke, you’re a fool. You’ve been feeling so pleased with yourself for playing the great lady and you’ve been tricked and robbed and laughed at. Serve you right. You didn’t give them your horse out of kindness but just to show off. They treated you exactly as you deserved to be treated. Well, I hope they don’t show the purse in Roxborough. It would be recognised and they’d get into pretty serious trouble. I’d warn you if I could, Sylvia Maud, but after all, you are a thief, and you’ll have to take your chance.” Getting up from her chilly seat, Mary trudged on, with a grim expression of her soft mouth, and a stomach so empty that she thought she felt it sag:
Another mile and she was on the high moor again. The mist had cleared and the hot sun sucked up a pungent scent from wet ling and heather. Mary was very warm now and growing weary. An empty farm cart overtook her and she hailed it. The driver’s face puckered when he spoke into a saddened multitude of wrinkles like a tragic mask, and from his mouth issued a thin melancholy note, the sound of a bird crying in the reeds. He might have been the first Tragedian in his rude cart-booth. He was going into Danesacre, and once convinced that Mary was Mark Henry Garton’s niece, he agreed to drive her to the Yard. Mary sank thankfully on to the floor of the cart. It was springless and the jolts rattled her like a sack. After a while the man offered her his coat to lie on. Mary demurred at taking it.
“You maun do as you like,” the tragedy said indifferently. “I’m all of a muck o’ sweat.”
Mary took it and lay a little softer. The man said nothing more until they were nearly in Danesacre. Then he observed: “You’ll be Charlotte Hansyke’s lass?”
Mary admitted it. “She’s off to London again,” the man wailed. Mary restrained a cry with a violent effort. Humiliated by the thought that the man might have noticed the effect of his words, she grunted and sat up with a yawn. She would not show any interest or ask a question, and they made their slow progress to Garton’s Yard in silence, Mary avoiding the significant glances of the passers-by. Her cheeks were burning and she could hardly stand when she climbed out of the cart. She felt bruised from head to foot.
Meeting John Mempes in the garden, on his way from house to yard, she asked him peremptorily to pay the man. “Where is my uncle?”
“Sleeping his dinner off,” Mempes said. “What are you doing here, Mary?”
She brushed past him without answering and, bursting in on Mark Henry Garton where he lay asleep with a red and yellow bandana handkerchief over his face, woke him without ceremony.
“Where is my mother?”
Mark Henry glared at the heated girl. He was furious at being wakened, and cursed her without repetitions for five minutes. Mary waited until he was out of breath, and repeated her question.
“Gone back to the straw,” Mark Henry said. “I wish she’d taken you with her, you shameless young piece. I’ve a good mind to take a rope’s end to you.”
“You can’t,” Mary said sweetly. “I’m a young lady now.”
“You don’t look it,” her uncle commented. “Get out of my sight before I examine you to make sure. Be off, be off!”
He covered his face with his bandana and his indignation blew it off again.
Mary withdrew in haste and spent the afternoon in the Yard with John Mempes. He told her that Charlotte had gone back to London a week earlier after a violent quarrel with her brother.
“Couldn’t you have kept her?” Mary asked.
Mempes looked at her sharply. Mary was kicking at a stone and he saw only her averted cheek. “I did my best,” he said smoothly. “My attractions—palled.”
“You mean that you did not take the trouble to exert them,” the girl said bluntly. “Poor mamma. I hope she has gone back to Miss Short. She couldn’t possibly manage Endymion Road by herself.” Even to John Mempes she would not show her grief at Charlotte’s going.
They discussed the Yard, and the new iron steamer now building. Mary told the manager that she had come to ask Mark Henry Garton to take her on and train her in his office. Mempes showed no surprise. He was as polite as always and a little formal. Mary noticed the formality and set herself to get round it. She succeeded so far that Mempes confided to her his thoughts of leaving Garton’s Yard for a bigger firm on the Clyde. Mary was alarmed.
“Oh, don’t leave us,” she begged.
“Would you miss me?” Mempes asked gloomily. “I can’t imagine why any one should. I seem to myself to be the world’s worst failure. I waste my wit on louts who would prefer a kick up the backside. I can never make up my mind just what to drink with black coffee: I’m inclined to stick to a sweet Château, but I’m conscious it’s not the right thing. I fall in love in order to fall out again. Last week a woman with magenta hair and white boots called here and had herself announced as my wife.”
“Was she?” Mary
interrupted, a little shocked.
“I think I must have seen her before,” Mempes said vaguely. “But she wasn’t my wife. I never had a wife. It’s a long ceremony and I’m too easily distracted. Mary, if you take my advice you’ll settle yourself in life as soon as possible. Leave it too long, and you’ll lose the knack. You’ve probably had too many adventures already to be as stupid as you ought to be. As for me, I’m thirty-two and when I left Oxford I thought I was going to raise the level of humanity by building ships. I raise nothing but your uncle’s profits and upon my soul I am an ass to do it. You haven’t any rose-leaves about you, have you, Mary? . . .”
Mark Henry Garton had recovered his temper before evening and Mary spoke to him confidently about joining the firm.
“What’s this, what’s this!” he exclaimed. “You’re not going to join the firm. Girls can’t build ships. What d’I tell you about your—well, never mind, you’re a young lady now. You’re not a little girl any longer. Don’t be silly, don’t be silly.”
Mary’s house of life came down about her ears. She stared at Mark Henry. “You promised,” she said breathlessly.
Mark Henry disposed of all his promises, past, present and to come, in one comprehensive ordinance. Mary recognised the uselessness of argument. She swallowed down a flood of speech, and slipped off into the silent yard. There, sitting on the grassy ledge where she had often stayed to watch the ships leaving harbour, she abandoned herself to a desolate fit of weeping. That over, she tried to reconstruct her future. “You can’t go on living at Hansyke Manor,” she told herself. She played with the idea of finding Sylvia Maud and throwing in her lot with the dancer and her friends, but the memory of Albert’s grotesque figure decided her against it—that and a shamefaced reluctance to appear as beggar among people on whom she had lavished riches. “You’re fairly caught, my girl. You’re defeated. No, bless me if you are. There’s a way out of this, if you can only think of it. At least you’ve learned not to rely on promises you can’t enforce.”
The Lovely Ship Page 7
