The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  Hugh talked readily and very well. He leaped from one subject to the next with a dexterity that fascinated Mary, who could never talk in public unless she were deeply moved. Hugh’s trick of picturesque exaggeration was delightful to her. Everything that happened to Hugh happened with more force than to anyone else. He made the recital of a walk down Regent Street sound like an adventure among man-eating savages. Mary listened to him with a brave pretence that he was not the centre of her world. Her own failure to contribute anything to the entertainment distressed her not at all. Hugh was amusing enough for two. She watched his changing sensitive face and thought: “All these people only see him as he is now, animated and bright-eyed and deliciously self-sufficient. They don’t know what he’s like when they go and he turns to me and says: ’Darling, thank God that’s over,’ and talks only for me, quietly. They don’t hold Hugh in their arms when he’s tired and comfort him and love him. Dear Hugh. Do I like you best when you’re unhappy and come like a little boy to be soothed or when you’re madly alive and saying: ‘Let’s do this, and this?’ I don’t know. I love you all the time.”

  Hugh was indeed very young, and entirely undisciplined except by his delicate senses. Life had taught him no such lessons as it had taught Mary. He had almost everything to learn. He made an engaging and softly affectionate lover. His life, since his mother’s death, had been rather starved of affection, and in his pleasure in Mary’s love he gave her everything he had, his thoughts, his young adoration, passion in its first sweetness, everything that a sensitive youngster whose intellect and sharpened senses are dividing his energy between them, has to give to the first woman he loves. If he knew that there were dark shadows in Mary’s experience that his had never compassed, he would not look at them. He made delicious protecting gestures towards her.

  But there the shadows were, and one fell across their companionship when Mary spoke of going home. Hugh gave her a quick surprised look.

  “But you are at home, Mary. Do you want us to live somewhere else? We will if you like, but I love this house. Does Louise bother you?”

  Mary looked round the book-lined sitting-room of the house Hugh shared with his sister and shook her head.

  “I don’t mean that,” she explained. “I mean Danesacre. I’ve stayed away longer than I ought to.”

  Hugh bounded to his feet.

  “But, Mary, we can’t live up there,” he cried. “It’s the end of the world. Darling, you’re joking.”

  But Mary was in desperate earnest and when Hugh realised it, realising in the same moment that his young wife had another and absorbing interest beside himself, he behaved like a wilful boy. He accused Mary of having played at love-making and so bewildered the girl by his vehemence in complaint that she felt a criminal and had hard work to control tears of same. Yet she was sure that she was right and Hugh wilfully shockingly wrong. She tried argument.

  “But, Hugh, I told you about Garton’s. The Yard. The Works. You knew everything about it. I’ve been there six years, since you went to Oxford. Think, Hugh.”

  “Then it’s had enough of you,” Hugh said angrily. “You’ve got a manager, haven’t you? Let him look after it. What is the use of paying someone to work for you and doing it all yourself?”

  The point of view was so novel that Mary paused to consider it, and Hugh followed up his advantage by pleading with her in the gentlest way, coaxing, teasing, laughing, melting her to a strange weakness as she looked down at this dear husband. But still she came back to the immovable fact of Garton’s. There it was. It was hers, her burden if you like, though she had never thought of it as that. But something she had to carry. She conceived of herself for a moment as having abandoned the Yard, and the picture filled her with dismay.

  “Whatever should I do without it?” she demanded.

  Hugh had turned pale.

  “You never explained to me that it meant so much to you,” he said.

  “I did,” Mary said humbly. “But you don’t listen to me very much. . . .”

  It was not a soothing remark, and Hugh walked away and left her. In his absence, Mary came through bewilderment to a cold lucidity. Hugh must give way. There was so much less for him to give up in coming to Danesacre than she would lose by staying in London. The idea of sacrificing Garton’s was preposterous. She thought it out as Mark Henry’s niece, and forgot that she was Hugh Hervey’s wife, until he came in late at night when she was ready for bed, and she saw by his face that he had been wrestling wretchedly with his problem. Then with a superb gesture she threw everything away and ran to put her arms round his neck.

  “We won’t go, Hugh darling, you shall do what you want. We’ll stay here and never go back. There, will that do? Dear, will it do?”

  Hugh held her away from him, and read her face.

  “No, it won’t do,” he said roughly, and strained her to him again. “We’ll go there as soon as you like. To-morrow.”

  She leaned back in his arms and he saw the joy and relief in her eyes.

  “You—you’d be unhappy here,” he said queerly, and loosed his hold. Mary stood in the middle of the room in her night-gown, with her hair falling about her. She was so much the neglected little girl that he turned back and caught her in his arms.

  “It’s all right, my little love. I don’t really mind going to live among the savages with you. You’re all that matters, really. Don’t you understand?”

  Mary was crying in his arms.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, choking. “I don’t want you to give anything up for me. I only want——”

  “Only want me to want the same things that you do,” Hugh finished for her, mischievously.

  “Why, yes, I do,” Mary said, laughing through her tears.

  “You little egoist,” Hugh said, “you dear beloved little egoist. You absurd baby. What right have you to be the owner of a line of steamships and furnaces and engine works and Heaven knows what else? There, I love you. Is it all over? Are you happy?”

  “Yes, I’m happy. I’m always happy when you are. But you were so angry.”

  “Well, I’m not now.”

  With Hugh’s arms round her, Mary was in no real doubt on the point, but she sighed.

  “What is it? Hugh, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” Hugh muttered. “Nothing. Except—I love you.”

  “Oh, my dear. . . . Yes, I know.”

  She thought, in her innocence, that she was going to faint, and reeled a little when he loosened his hold. “I never felt like this in my life,” she confided to him.

  Love and mischief competed for place in the beloved face above her own. . . .

  Hugh was falling asleep, with his head on her shoulder, when the thought struck him that she had an odd strain of hardness for one so soft and loving, but he put the thought away and fell asleep, like a contented child, sure of being kept safe and warm in her protecting love. . . .

  They arranged to go to Danesacre in the following week. Louise found an opportunity to condole with him on having married into a barbarian tribe. He was very short with his sister, for whom he had a real affection, and some of his irritation transferred itself to Mary. He smothered it and took her to Bloomsbury to meet his rebel friends.

  A colony of young wives and husbands lived together in a house in Queen’s Square. The wives wore their hair cropped in page-boy fashion, and dressed in odd delightful gowns cut after the fashion of Italian primitives. Their husbands were clean-shaven like Hugh. Mary was tongue-tied and fascinated. She sat beside a vivid young creature with red hair. The lines of her body, when she moved, revealed approaching motherhood, a circumstance of which she presently spoke with a frankness that startled Mary into lively blushes. The other young woman laughed softly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot Hugh had married a young lady. My name is Andrews, Sylvia Andrews. Do you think you could ever come to tolerate us? But I hear you’re taking Hugh away to reign with you in Hell. There, you’re shocked
again. Do forgive me.”

  Mary smiled, feeling a quick liking for Sylvia Andrews.

  “It’s not exactly Hell,” she explained. “It’s only a shipyard.”

  “The same thing,” Sylvia retorted, shaking her cropped head. “Do be kind to Hugh and don’t overlook him when you’re back on your throne. He’s very sweet, but he easily gets discouraged.”

  A little vexed by this young woman’s pretensions to understand Hugh, Mary turned her attention to the other people in the room. As no one took any notice of her she could examine them at her ease. The room itself was remarkable enough. It was furnished sparsely, with chairs and a table as unlike the heavy mahogany of Mark Henry’s house as anything could be. They were new, but they reminded Mary of much older furniture in Roxby House. Across one wall hung a crimson banner, embroidered in white with the words: “Workers of the World Unite.” More and more people came in, some apparently working men, and two old gentlemen in formal dress, one of whom Mary saw spitting vigorously into a bowl of flowers after tasting something handed round in quaintly coloured cups. He caught Mary’s eye. “Water in it,” he said darkly, and proceeded with his purging. “Very dangerous.”

  With the exception of the captious old gentleman and his friend, every one in the room was young. Most of them were very young. There were few women, except the short-haired young hostesses in their decorative clothes. One tall woman dressed in faded red velvet and apparently a foreigner, entered in with two bearded men and possessing herself of a plate of sandwiches sank down heavily beside Mary. She examined every sandwich with long dirty fingers before offering one to Mary.

  “You eat nothing? It iss all right. No animal food. I haf searched. My stomach revolts at the animal. One morsel and poof, he iss rushing before me.” She made signs expressive of a cascade or a volcano in eruption. Meanwhile the sandwiches disappeared and Mary sat nervously watching for any evidence of undetected animal. But all seemed well and the woman began to talk with bewildering rapidity about something called the International. Mary shook her head in polite ignorance.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “What is the International?”

  The other started back as If Mary had bitten her. “You know not? Franz. Emile. A spy. Here.” She broke into voluble denunciation, standing up, beckoning, and gesticulating towards Mary, who was angry and very uncomfortable. Hugh hurried across the room, and Sylvia Andrews came to slip her arm in that of the excited woman and explain that Mary was the wife of a friend, untaught indeed, but quite harmless.

  “Sheep!” ejaculated the woman. “All sheep. Here you will haf no revolution. Sheep do not revolt. Except in the stomach.” As if the word had roused an unpleasant train of thought she looked about her doubtfully and hurried out of the room. Hugh sat down beside his wife, and between laughter and annoyance tried to explain that the International was a society of socialist workers founded in London a little over a year ago.

  “What will it do?” Mary said.

  “For one thing, prevent little children being worked to death in mills and potteries and bakehouses. Literally to death, Mary. Poisoned, maimed, squeezed of life.”

  Mary gave him a look of startled horror.

  “But—are they?”

  “You’re like all the rest,” her husband said bitterly. “People don’t know.”

  “You can tell me about it,” Mary answered rapidly. “But go and talk to your friends. They’re looking at us. You’ll have years to talk to me.”

  Hugh touched her hand.

  “Bless you,” he whispered. He moved away and came back to breathe in her ear: “I love you.” The crowd swallowed him up and Mary shut her eyes the better to keep his face before them.

  After a while Sylvia Andrews drifted back to her, and from her scrappy talk and more from the chattering crowd, Mary began to gather an extraordinary impression of eager youth engaged in high and romantic adventure. How these young wives and husbands worked. There were no servants in the house. Sylvia herself, with her child heavy in her, went every day to a room where poor mothers left their babies during working hours. She sewed and scrubbed and played with them. Another of the little colony had two children whom she was educating herself and yet found time to copy out her young husband’s book from his untidy manuscript and look up facts and references for him. Two of the husbands ran a printing-press for revolutionary literature, one was an experimental dyer and all, wives and husbands alike, were working and praying and looking for an event they called alternatively the Revolution or The Dawn. How the Revolution appeared to their candid eyes, Mary could not clearly see, except that there would be no blood and no horrors, and after it the cities would be clean and dignified, the children rosy and well fed and the whole land a place where vigorous men and healthy radiant women worked side by side for each other and their children and the children of all the world. It was The Dawn.

  These confident young creatures expected Revolution every moment. They lay down at night on their rather hard couches and slept side by side in the happy thought that to-morrow would see it breaking over a travailing world, and rose up to work joyously in the sure hope that the evening would bring their dreams out of the womb of the day.

  They were so joyous, so confident, so honest and kind, that Mary’s own generous youth ran to meet theirs. She was almost ready to tell Hugh that they would give up Danesacre to join the little colony of workers for the dawn and work with them. She spoke about it to Hugh when they were walking home through the deserted streets.

  “Lord, Mary,” Hugh cried, “you couldn’t live in that house; it would drive you crazy in a week. Neither could I, for that matter. Andrews is my best friend and Sylvia is a pet, but they use each other’s handkerchiefs and have babies all over the place. You pick them new-born out of coal scuttles and things. My little love, you’d hate it.”

  “I only thought,” his little love said wistfully, “that you hated the idea of Danesacre, and these people are your friends.”

  “And you are my love and my wife, and all I want,” Hugh said. “I can write in Danesacre as well as here. Better. I shan’t be so distracted. Besides, you’d hate it really if I’d said: ’All right, let’s stay.’ Wouldn’t you?”

  Mary sighed and kissed him solemnly, standing under a lamppost to do it. Afterwards, as if he were afraid that he had betrayed his friends, Hugh began to talk to her about the Yard and Garton’s Iron Works. He told her that these ought to be run on proper decent lines. The men themselves should run them and decide what was to be done and how to do it, and Hugh offered, in a burst of enthusiasm, to give up writing his book, and help her to reorganise things.

  His words chilled her. She knew that he was talking the most arrant nonsense, but she hated to tell him so.

  “The men wouldn’t like it,” she said slowly. “They wouldn’t take orders from John Burrows. Besides, Burrows would probably bully everybody once he got power.”

  “You must have patience,” Hugh declared. “They’ve been slaves so long that they think and act like slaves. They must be educated to freedom.”

  “But what’s going to happen to my ships and the Works in the meantime?”

  Hugh laughed and called her a crystallised little Tory, and promised her a Cossack for a birthday present, to oversee her workers.

  “The Yard would make short work of him,” Mary observed, and added suddenly: “You’re a Tory, yourself, really. The other’s only a dream you had. Oh, a charming dream, but a dream. . . .”

  His words remained with her. She thought: “It would be dreadful if Hugh talked like that to John Mempes; I couldn’t bear it. John would think he was a fool. Or to the men. It might make incalculable trouble. Hugh’s a darling, but he doesn’t know anything about life.”

  A day or two later she began to discuss with him the arrangement of a room that was to be his study. She said shyly: “You’ll need to buy some more books. There are no works of reference in Danesacre. I should like to give them to you. Could we go out
and order them? You must finish your mediaeval guilds. I’d hate to think I’d spoiled that.”

  “Keeping me out of mischief,” Hugh thought acutely but he threw a glance at Mary’s honest little face and kept the thought to himself. The books were ordered, and a few days later the young Herveys travelled north.

  4

  Mary was sitting up in bed waiting for Hugh. They had been home a month, but she had not yet got used to sleeping in the big front room that had been Mark Henry’s bedroom. Up to the very day of her eventful visit to London she had slept in the smaller room on the second storey that had been hers since she came from Roxby House six years before. Nothing had so definitely marked her altered state as did her discovery, when she stood in the hall on the evening of their arrival, listening to Richard’s delicious shy greeting, that on her own responsibility the housekeeper had moved her things downstairs to the unused best bedroom. Of course she ought to have thought of this, and commanded it. Shame for her own inexperience thus ruthlessly exposed, and an exciting sense of new rich aspects of life spreading in front of her sealed her lips. She never even commented on the change. And to the end of her life she never knew that the woman, distrusting her own impulse, had consulted Mr. Mempes on the change, and received ironical commendation that struck a chill to her heart.

  It still surprised Mary a little to find herself lying in Mark Henry’s bed. Its size and heavy magnificence robbed her of self-confidence and she was always glad when she heard Hugh open the door of his room across the landing. There would be a second’s pause, and then the door in the wall to the right of the bed would open softly, and reveal Hugh wrapped in the thick silk dressing-gown she had bought him in London. Coming quickly across the room he kissed the glowing young face lifted at his approach, before slipping off the dressing-gown and climbing on to the bed, which thereupon ceased to be for Mary a vast and rather terrifying expanse of smooth sheets and became the securely secret place where she and Hugh continually surprised each other by fresh revelations of grace and exquisite kindliness.