The Lovely Ship

by Storm Jameson

  There was a moment, with Hugh’s hands clasped one on each side of her little body when she felt her life stirring and throbbing in her like a bird struggling for freedom between the hands that held it. She was half frightened and wholly thrilled, with a dizzy sense of her own powerlessness and an ache that she knew was caused by her inexpressible love for this dear Hugh and pride in his need of her.

  To-night Hugh would be late. He was dining at the club, a special dinner given by Old Smithson to celebrate the roofing of his splendid new house. When the last slate was in place the men at work on it had emptied the casks of beer provided in anticipation of the moment. The rejoicings thus traditionally begun were now to be rounded off at considerably greater refinement of expense. Hugh was attending the ceremonies reluctantly, having already had experience of the chasms yawning between himself and the shipping society of the town. He went off swearing to return as soon as he decently could and by eleven o’clock Mary had already begun to expect him. He did not come, and gazing dreamily towards the canopy over her head she gave herself up to a pleasant sensation of melancholy. It seemed so long since, as a very small child, she had come into this room once a week on her way downstairs, to ask for and receive her weekly threepence, standing, divided between scorn and apprehension, beside the bed while Mark Henry went through the regular pretence of having to be convinced that Saturday had indeed, past all decency, come round again. What a defenceless creature that stolid self-confident child now appeared to Mary Hervey, how far, how pathetically far from realising what lay before her, of grief, humiliation, agony, disappointment, of immeasurable and unutterable comfort and bliss. None but herself knew what dark shadows made her present happiness so bright. A faint reminiscent shudder in the depths of her body was all that remained of two frightful nights spent at the side of her first husband. And there was not even a line on her face, when she examined it in the glass, to recall the years of struggle and poverty that had followed Archie’s death. The memory of those years was enjoyable. She was preparing to enjoy it for the hundredth time when her reflections were interrupted suddenly by a shiver of cold. The age of unbridled fresh air was not yet, but Mary had queer ideas, and a cold breeze was blowing through an open window across her bare shoulders. Slipping down between the bedclothes she gave herself up to one of her rare moments of triumphant pride. Why, she had made a success. Mark Henry himself, succeeding to his father at the mature age of thirty-three, had not managed any better. . . . A walnut tall-boy standing between the windows caught her eye. The glow of the fire played across it, like light on water; in its depth a shoal of tawny curling flames flickered and slid. It was in this tall-boy that after Mark Henry died, she had found his papers and all his personal possessions except his clothes. No Garton had ever died leaving fewer traces of himself behind. As Mary went through the meagre pile she laid Mark Henry’s years aside one by one. At the top of the pile were the things he had used last, a pen, a sheet of paper covered with notes of ships’ engines, his will. Underneath these, she came upon a letter or two, one from her own father, Richard Hansyke, concluding: “My service to Mr Mempes, and I am vastly in his debt for the trouble of procuring me the cask of cognac from the French shipper. Speaking by the purse, I am the more pertinently in your debt for that same cask, but I have spoken with my purse on this question and find it so depleted by reason of my obligations to your sister and my wife that I would wish you would come and look in it yourself. You are very welcome to all you find there. Ever believe me your oblig’d faithful and affectionate brother-in-law, Richie Hansyke,” and another that Charlotte had written him from London when she and Mary were living there and wanted money . . . a miniature of Mary herself as a very little girl . . . below that, almost nothing, not a letter from his youth (his youth had never written to him), not a single object that might be a token of love or friendship, nor more miniatures, no dead flowers pressed between the pages of a book, nothing except a locket that had been his mother’s. It was empty and the hinge broken. At the very bottom of all was a boy’s exercise book, and a crude drawing of a boy on horseback. “Charlotte Garton drew this of her deare brother, but hee is more handsome than she could make him.” Nothing more. Young Mark Henry Garton stood for a moment beside his niece among his discarded years. The sun glinted on his thick red curls and illuminated his boy’s reckless beauty. A smile touched his shapely lips. Then he was gone. Like the sun sliding off water, like the dip between waves of the wooden clippers he loved, Mark Henry Garton disappeared from men’s sight. One of the acquisitive Gartons had died, leaving behind him these poor shreds of possessions.

  His ships outlived him; and the will giving them to Mary was dated only the day before his operation. She shivered, lying in his bed, not at the thought that he had died there with his eyes sliding from tall-boy to window in search of life, but at the thought of the narrowness of her victory. She might have lost. The daughter of one Garton and niece of another, she might have lost Garton’s to the Lings, in whom ran not a drop of Garton blood. Thank God, oh thank God. . . . She might have thanked, for her present splendour, wise counsellors and a geographical revolution coming just in time to justify her inexperience. She preferred to thank a Deity distant enough to leave the worldly glory to herself.

  At this moment she would have defended even her pride. An exultant sense of power filled her as the warmth of the bedclothes gradually entered into her shivering limbs. She felt able to deal with anything that was likely to confront her. What could be too much for a young woman who in less than seven years had got herself accepted as a personage in the town, and crowned that achievement by marriage to the most charming and distinguished man who ever walked at a young wife’s side through the enchanted streets of Danesacre? She liked Hugh’s faintly quizzical smile for the oddities, human and topographical, of the little town. She liked his rather dandified air. John Mempes was not more elegant, and Mempes had not the advantages of youth, dark hair, and a romantic grace that invited the dashing lines of a coat cut slightly tighter above the waist and slightly longer below it than any other coat in Danesacre. She liked to walk beside Hugh’s coat, and she thrilled every time another woman’s eyes, after greeting her, slid round to Hugh’s face. She knew that she was envied, talked about, criticised. The thought of criticism stiffened her small body and curled her beautiful lips. Nothing could touch Mary Hervey, secure in her pride of place and her husband’s love. How full life was, and gay, and splendid—like a street with the flags out and bands playing. Music—ah, music. The air was music in these days. Life went to a beating of drums and a glory of fifes for the wife of Hugh Hervey.

  The thought struck her suddenly that she had gone near to missing this rich existence. Suppose Hugh had utterly refused to accompany her to Danesacre. She would have had to choose between him and Garton’s. Impossible to give up her ships, and yet—had she not offered to give them up? She allowed herself a brief voluptuous contemplation of the sacrifice she had been willing to make for Hugh. It was a proof of the grandeur of their love (no one had ever loved as they) that each had been ready to make tremendous sacrifices. A faint sense of relief that it was Hugh who had been called upon to make the gesture of immolation crossed her mind. She dismissed it at once. It made no difference to Hugh whether he lived in Danesacre or London. It made no difference to his work . . . if the writing of books could be called work. Mark Henry Garton’s niece had doubts to which she did not own. . . . Mark Henry had none. He strode in, with a model of the Mary Gray under his arm, as if he had just come from the offices of the Garton Line—he had come from the head of the church steps, and the model of the Mary Gray was standing on the top of the tall-boy where it had stood when he died and for many years before that—and laughed at his niece’s choice of a husband. What a fool! To write books while his wife built ships. Mark Henry laughed to wake the dead. . . .

  Mary turned uneasily in his monstrous bed, and wished that Hugh would come in.

  She was supremely unconscious of
the faint touch of arrogance in her love. Lying waiting for him, she marvelled that Hugh should have found her admirable enough to marry. She mused over the catalogue of his charms, his young sensitive face, his confident delight in her and in the resilient energy of their bodies, eager for the most gracious pleasure, his quick mind, and the violent fastidious likings and dislikes that made living with him the most exciting and amusing thing in the world.

  A door banged, echoing through the silent house, and Hugh’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. Mary had fallen asleep and she did not wake until her husband sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. Then she woke suddenly, blinking in the light, and put out a hand that Hugh took between his own hot fingers.

  “How warm you are,” she murmured. Rousing herself, she saw that his eyes were very bright and his mouth comically pursed.

  “Come to bed, Hugh. It must be dreadfully late.”

  Hugh shook his head. He drew his dressing-gown tightly round him and sat swinging his legs and smiling mischievously.

  “It’s, not very late, and I’m wide awake,” he observed.

  “Do you want to talk?” Mary asked drowsily. “I could listen.”

  Hugh’s eyes, sliding away from her, fell on a letter propped against a box on Mary’s dressing-table. It was addressed to Miss Louise Hervey, in Kensington, London, and a curious expression crossed Hugh’s face as he studied it.

  “You wrote to Louise, then?”

  Mary was silent. Her heart had set up a furious beating. This violent behaviour of her heart frightened her. She put a hand against it, hoping that it sounded less loudly in Hugh’s ears than her own. Strange that any part of her exceedingly stolid little body could be so affected by a certain tone in Hugh’s voice. Strange that a heart, repository of the obstinate strength of a family whose women lived to be very old and whose men could hardly be killed with a pole-ax (as one of Cromwell’s own captains had found to his cost on the person of a seventeenth-century Hansyke), should be so easily startled. It knew Hugh well enough. He had lain above it enough times.

  “I wrote to her just before I got into bed. I asked her to put off her visit for another month.”

  “Why?”

  Mary lay looking at Hugh for a full minute before she answered, taking in every detail of his bearing, from the obstinate set of his lips to the lock of hair that fell in an untidy curve above one eye. She longed to fling herself into his arms.

  “I wanted to get things straight,” she answered coldly.

  “What things? The house is perfectly all right. How much straighter will you be at the end of a month? I don’t understand, and I don’t like having Louise put off when she has offered to come.”

  Offered! Mary swallowed her outraged retort. That it should be considered a condescension for Louise Hervey to come to Danesacre. It was too much. Mary blamed Louise. A man could not be expected to see what was going on in that London woman’s mind.

  Yet even in this moment, with all the Danesacre housewife (that primeval creature) in her up in arms, Mary acknowledged to herself that had it been anyone but Louise she would have suppressed her feelings and accepted the self-invited guest. She was really a remarkable young woman, in more ways than one.

  Nothing of this appeared in her face as she looked at Hugh, wondering how to put an end to an intolerable dispute. Slipping from the edge of the bed, Hugh stood rocking on heels and toes, with hands on his hips. He was flushed and absurdly charming. Mary thought: “You’re hurting me and I love you for it.” She realised that Hugh was rather drunk. He must have been very bored at Old Smithson’s dinner. Regardless of the cold, Mary sat up in bed, and stared at her young husband. She was not afraid, she was not shocked. Most of the men she had known habitually drank too much—her father, Mark Henry, her first husband, her fellow shipbuilders. It was a common, even a gentlemanly fault.

  No, she was not shocked. But she was moved by no ordinary emotion. Her whole world had changed its aspect. She could not even fathom how profound the change was. An obscure sense of outrage stirred in her body. It had nothing to do with Hugh. It belonged to another existence, almost to another woman. In fact it did not belong to a woman at all, but to a horrified child of fifteen, plunged into the depths of another bed, in another different room. For a moment the friendly room round Mary was filled with malignant shadows. The outlines of Mark Henry’s bed wavered and changed, became something faintly obscene. She pulled herself together, and spoke uncertainly.

  “Hugh.”

  Hugh approached the bed and leaned over her with the smile she knew so well. Alas, she thought, Hugh’s smile would always be her undoing. She felt herself weak and defenceless.

  “What’s the matter, Hugh? Darling.”

  “I’m dreadfully sorry,” Hugh said softly. “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sober. It was so hot at that infernal dinner, and they talked, my God, how they talked, and boasted and toasted, and praised themselves. Do forgive me. I’ll go and sleep in my own room.”

  Mary touched his arm with a hand that shook in spite of herself.

  “You needn’t. Unless you want to.”

  “I oughtn’t to have come in at all. I didn’t mean to. But I saw the light under your door.”

  “Are you tired?”

  Hugh nodded. “If I shut my eyes I should fall asleep on my feet.”

  Mary smiled, a radiant exquisite tremulous smile. She felt strangely tranquil. Everything was all right. Hugh looked very young and beautiful as he stood there, half ashamed of himself, and half mischievously aware that she did not care what he did so long as he came to her about it. She lay down again on her side, her little body making a meagre show under the clothes.

  “Turn out the lamp, Hugh. And get into bed. Quickly.”

  Hugh did both things. Mary drew him into her arms and he went asleep mere with violent suddenness. She did not even know he was asleep, and lay for a long time in a very uncomfortable attitude. Like any old wife of Danesacre she believed it to be fatal to sleep to rouse a person from the twilight consciousness that precedes it. When at last she moved her cramped limbs, she discovered that nothing would have roused Hugh. She lay awake a long time, revelling in the sense of her complete possession of him. He had gone to sleep with the abandonment of extreme youth, surrendering himself to her with the sublime trustfulness of an infant towards its mother. How happy and triumphant this made her. Extraordinary to be feeling like this, considering the circumstances. Extraordinary Hugh, to be the cause of her feeling it. She smiled to herself in the darkness, and stretched an arm across the unconscious sleeper.

  It was impossible that she should be aware as she lay there, so small, soft, and yielding, that she was indulging her most powerful instinct, the instinct of possession, the longing, the passionate need to possess, that she had inherited from generations of fiercely grasping Gartons, men who had torn possessions from the grudging hand of life, from that first forgotten Garton who, standing in the door of his cliff-fast cottage, had conceived the idea of owning a boat of his own, and had thereafter never rested until his new and inconceivable hunger was appeased. He died and left more possessions than his boat, less tangible than it, to his son. Garton’s Yard existed in the imagination of four generations before Mark Henry’s great-grandfather gave it a form and a being. The very bed on which Mary lay was a tribute to the grim intensity of desires outliving the brains that had cherished them. Mary Hervery, born half Garton, was the heir of their immortal rage. Her adoration of Hugh was rooted in the knowledge that he was hers as nothing had ever been, as her son could not be. He belonged to her and to her love. She would have him always, to live with him until they were both old, and even beyond the grave, in the dim but undoubted heaven of Miss Flora’s faith and hers. Dear Hugh.

  The thought of the grave and of dying struck coldly across her happiness. Heaven was all very well, but the dissolution that preceded it was a prospect on which no Garton cared to dwell. It was too complete a defeat of the faith by which they l
ived. Unconsciously, Mary tightened her hold on the other warm, softly breathing body close to hers, and so fell asleep, one hand clenched round Hugh’s relaxed fingers.

  5

  Mary was very happy. Every instinct to extravagance that had been stifled in her during her years of poverty now ran wild, not for herself but for Hugh. Already, in London, she had realised that ordering meals for her new household would not be the simple affair it had been. One rule ran in every decent Danesacre house: “It’s always best to buy the best,” and no good cook in Danesacre ever used cooking butter or lard, even for greasing her tins. But Hugh’s tastes fell in that class of exquisite simplicity so difficult to achieve. Mary was proud of the strain he put upon her resources and secretly tremendously impressed by the complicated nature of his tastes. The Hansyke, no less than the Garton in her, rose exultantly to the emergency. She discovered that Hugh never ordered his own underclothes. Louise did that, and trembling, afraid of making some frightful mistake, she undertook this duty too. Once made free of the world of male elegance, she rapidly became a connoisseur of the severest kind. Nothing but the best was good enough, in shirts as in butter, and Hugh found himself the possessor of an increasing store of stockings, shirts, and more intimate wear of exquisite and superlative quality. Sometimes he protested, but not often, since Mary, pleased to be giving him something, was a sight that made him chuckle even while for no discoverable reason it wrung his heart.