It is doubtful whether Gerry ever understood the profound nature of the revolution silently accomplished in Mary’s mind. When he asked her to come away with him he was thinking at least as much of days spent in her company as of nights in her arms; he wanted both now, but he did not want the nights without the days.
He wanted her more every day, but he was still, on board the Mark Henry, persuaded that he could be content with snatched months. He had had nothing for so many years that a little assuagement seemed a very great deal to him. As for Mary, she did not think about it; she never wondered what it would be like to come back to Danesacre, to a house that held Hugh and Richard and sometimes Hugh’s daughters, after life with Gerry; she had so little imagination about herself. The Mark Henry rushed on, under an immensity of sky, the captain’s wife wrote in her recipe book, Captain James pondered in his slow way over a number of problems, such as the French shipper’s queer ways, and his wife’s inability to spell; the life of the ship, a self-contained state, followed its regulated way; and its passengers lived in their peculiar world as if the world that contained it had no other reason for existence.
At the ancient little port of Tonnay-Charente, Mary and Gerry went together to present their compliments to M. Duvelleroy and to ask, in the most delicate and friendly manner, why it was impossible for Garton’s captains to extract a full cargo from his warehouse. Every voyage now there were a few casks short, and though on one occasion the captain had seen with his own eyes the missing half-dozen casks, he had not been allowed to take them, and no explanation, or none that he could understand, was ever forthcoming.
M. Duvelleroy was a small rosy man, with the face of a peasant, and dressed as became the most prosperous shipper in the Petite Champagne. He threw himself violently on their mercy. “Imagine,” he cried, “ ’ow pleased I am to deal at last with people of sensibility and refinement. You will understand, madame and monsieur, the delicacy of the ’eart and how impossible it was to explain to your excellent stout-’earted captain—oh, that stout English ’eart, ’ow nobly it beats and ’ow stupid it is—what I desired to be done with the casks he saw in my warehouse, marked all with a red cross, the symbol of passion. Such passion, madame! Now that I am old and fat and my wife is fat, admirable creature, I cherish the memory of it, I say to myself: ’Pierre, my boy, you are a foolish stout little man but you ’ave been a fine fellow, you ’ave been in ’eaven, you ’ave known sublime love, devotion, passion, ecstasy. Warm your old bones, you ’ave been young.’ Thus, madame and monsieur, the red crosses on those casks.”
“Forgive me,” Mary murmured, “if my heart beats as stupidly as my captain’s, but do I understand that the casks were being kept for madame your wife? Because I cannot see______”
M. Duvelleroy interrupted her with a strangled cry.
“For my wife! Give my wife the noblest fine in the district! You mock me. Madame, you mock Pierre Duvelleroy, you refuse to believe that a great passion once dwelt in this withered breast. My wife! My dear good Christine, who has not the palate of a cow, ’eaven forgive ’er. I, Pierre Duvelleroy, ’ave not become what I am by wasting money. No. I design those casks for that kind lady who was my adored, my ravished one, in the days of my youth and ’ers. Ah, London, London, most romantic of all cities, ’ave you ever sheltered more romantic lovers than I and my little white bird with the soft breast! Forgive me, madame, and monsieur who understands, it is so long ago and my wife is so fat. Now she ’as written to me. ’My poor Pierre, I am old and white-haired, and the body you have kissed is bent with rheumatism. Think of it, Pierre, the pains we shared, and the pains I have now. Does it not make you laugh?’ I do not laugh. Not I. I think of er poor pains and I weep, and then I consider what I can do for ’er, for my little old rheumatic one. Why, madame, the thing answers itself! Cognac! The best, the finest, the noblest in the world. I ’ave it ’ere, under my ’and, what will protect ’er from the murderous English climate, and I choose out six casks, six special casks and mark them with my love, and I say to your splendid captain: ’You shall deliver your cargo on the wharf for your customer, but you shall keep back these casks and them you shall forward at my charge to this lady what I shall tell you the name.’ But did he understand me? Did he say, as a man of refined soul would ’ave said at once: ’Monsieur, I understand you, and in this matter my ’eart beats with yours.’ No, ’e did not. ’E said: ’I was chartered to fetch a full cargo of brandy for our London customer, and I’ll fetch it, but I don’t know anything about carrying stuff that’s not on the bill of lading.’ I ’ave spoken with ’im like a reasonable man, I said: ‘You can imagine to yourself, my good fellow,’ ow impossible it is for me to write that lovely lady’s name in your miserable papers. What will my clerks say when I tell them: “Enter six casks for Lady Constance Polchester.” They will smile to themselves and wink and talk, and my wife, my blessed saint with the long ears, will come to ’ear of it. You are a man of the world like myself,’ I say to ’im. ’You understand the delicacy required in these things, is it not so?’ Ah, the splendid fellow. ’E’ave understood not one word, and for now it is five voyages ’e ’as made out ’ere for my brandy and still my special casks are in the ware’ouse and one day Christine will go in and see them and I am a sacked city. She will ask ’What are those casks?’ and she will perceive my emotion, she ’as such a quick instinct, my Christine. What a sack, what a sack! Ruin and desolation. Madame, monsieur, I appeal to you. Every year you carry all my brandy and my life is devastated if I must make a change, but she dies, my little dove, she wrings ’er poor ’ands and dies of ’er rheumatic pains. The casks must go. It is absolutely beyond question that they shall go.”
M. Duvelleroy wiped his brow and breathed as if his heart were beating too quickly for him. The appalling insensibility of the English was more than he could bear. If these two people, looking at him silently, their eyes round with wonder, did not speak, he would scream, he would roll on the ground and spit at them, and very likely they would go home and declare war on his country to avenge the insult.
Mary thought the poor little man looked strained, and assured him gravely that she would arrange for the marked casks to be delivered as he desired. M. Duvelleroy wept and invited her and Gerry, the captain, and the captain’s wife to dinner, which enabled good Mrs. James to add half a page to her book. “An exselent strong clear soope, served in small pankins with handels, an omlet very good, two (2) yonge chickens with middling sizd oisters, and at the side a little Pye, made, as well as I could see, of swetbreads seasoned and forst meat, and larks or other littel birds strowd in with spinage and sparrowgrass. At the ends a Caramell and four littel Puddings. A very good Dinner, all very well served and nice. Shal try the little Pye, with rookes, at home.”
Admirable Mrs James, let us pray that the captain liked your Pye, but I am very much afraid that he preferred a good roast joint to any of the refinements you collected so carefully in every port where you landed with your recipe book and your bright observant eyes, watching for any new thing. He was not an Athenian.
The next day, while the cognac was being taken on board, Mary and Gerry journeyed to Bordeaux, with Mrs James. They put up at a hotel near the Quai des Chartrors, and the captain’s wife promised herself a ripe harvest in the restaurants of the town. But the journey had given her a sick headache and after struggling heroically to control the spasms that defied her active mind, she gave way and retired to bed, leaving Mary to dine alone with Gerry. In the early dusk they walked through the elegant city that owes everything to that eighteenth century Marquis de Tourny whose imagination worked over it with the sensitive ardour of a lover. From the Allées de Tourny they entered a narrow street leading to a quay. The superb arc of the Garonne swept away to right and left like the points of a crescent moon. Mary uttered a cry of delight.
“I’ve seen so little of the world,” she said apologetically. “I wish I’d been with you on your wanderings.”
“I wish to God you had, m
y dear,” said Gerry. “The world would have been a different place and I a different man with you.”
They turned their backs on the river and entered a small café in the Place Richelieu. The place was bigger than it looked from the street, a long room, lit with chandeliers of wax candles and decorated with panels of plump nymphs placidly watching the destruction of a massive youth clad like a good French burgher; a singularly respectable and prosperous Actaeon he was, and the hounds of Diana must have relished him. Gerry ordered dinner, and when he had consulted with the sommelier leaned back and gave himself up to the pleasure of watching Mary. She was sitting forward, her hands clasped on the table; her gaze took in the room with ravished satisfaction.
“Do you like this, Mary?”
“I like it, I like being here with you.” She smiled at him dreamily. It was so long since she had been in a restaurant, not since the early days of her marriage, when she and Hugh occasionally took a meal in public, with what had been for her a delicious sense of almost immoral luxury. She looked round her with an air of calm assurance. How much more she knew than the proud diffident girl of those days, and how happy she was, happier than she had ever expected to be when Hugh left her. She felt for Gerry’s hand under the table-cloth.
“What a lot of queer people,” she whispered to him.
“They’re nearly all the most repectable of middle-class Frenchmen,” he said teasingly. “You absurd insular child.”
Mary blushed. “You’re laughing at me, but I don’t care. I suppose they’re all right, but they dress queerly and I don’t know enough French to understand what they’re saying. They may be saying anything. But I am very happy.” She looked over his shoulder and frowned. “A woman in a yellow dress has been staring at us ever since we came in. She’s at a table against the wall, directly behind you, Gerry. Do you suppose she’s English?”
Gerry threw a quick glance behind him, and his face, when he turned it back to Mary, was old and blanched.
“That is my wife,” he stated.
Mary stared at him in consternation.
“Oh my dear,” she said. “I am so sorry. What shall we do? Would you like to go away? Does it hurt you to see her, would you like me to go away?” She made a movement to rise from the table.
“Don’t,” Gerry said under his breath “Please don’t go.” He glanced at her face. “It’s all right, my dear, I never felt less liking for anyone, I’m just startled. I can’t quite think what I ought to do. It’s rather awkward, don’t you think? Do I just bow to her on our way out, or ought I to speak to her? . . . Ten years. . . . She’s changed.”
“She’s coming over here,” Mary said quietly.
She watched the aloof civility with which Gerry greeted the woman in the yellow dress, and in her turn murmured a conventional word. Mercy Hardman looked from one to the other with a smile.
“You might ask me to join you,” she said pleasantly.
“Please,” Mary said. Her lips moved stiffly to produce the single word. She found it difficult to speak, because Gerry was not speaking. His numbness affected her. She looked at the woman sitting between them and could not imagine her Gerry’s wife.
She saw that Mercy was handsome in a rather battered way, had been beautiful, with a skin of the whiteness that suggests depths on depths of whiteness beneath it, and dark eyes, not set straight in her face, but tilted at the outer corners. She saw that Mercy had a long mouth, red and shapely; she was tall, taller than Gerry and much taller than Mary, who sat collected within her small body, not at all afraid, and ready to spring at the tall handsome woman. She turned her head to look at Gerry, and her face quivered in spite of her. He looked into her eyes and his lips moved. What he said was of no importance. She smiled at him and nodded, and watched the tension of his slight body relax. He leaned forward against the table and spoke to Mercy. He asked her formally if she were well.
“You don’t ask me if I’m happy,” said Mercy Hardman. Her smile held Mary’s attention. It was less a smile than a lingering emanation of the smiler’s thought; it was unkind and shockingly unreal, almost meaningless, and what meaning escaped from it revealed Mercy as old and tired and dreadfully knowledgeable. “You know everything,” Mary thought, and her horrified eyes sought Gerry to discover how much he knew about his wife. Gerry sat bent, looking down at his folded hands on the checked cloth, and Mary realised that he was not thinking of Mercy at all; he was thinking of a past that had nothing to do with either of the women who were watching him, a lost past of simplicity and hope. He did not look up, and in the silence a frightful consideration rose to the surface of her thoughts, and she knew, as clearly as if the words had already been spoken, that Mercy Hardman was going to ask her husband to take her back. Mary felt herself caught in a whirlpool made up of her own thoughts and the other woman’s; she was dragged round and round and down until she was almost at the bottom of the whirling dark water. “I’m fainting,” she said to herself, and made a great effort that flung her up and out into consciousness of the lighted café. The constellations of the candles danced across the ceiling.
“Are you all right, Mary?”
She nodded. Already, she knew quite well what was going to happen. When Gerry’s wife asked him to take her back, he would not be able to refuse. He was a fool. Her thoughts yearned over him as never before. The wilfulness of his folly silenced her, as women are silenced when their men choose war. It shocked, outraged, and thrilled her unspeakably. She wanted to cry, to snatch him back, to plead with him. Did he know that he was giving her up, leaving her? She sat silently with her hands in her lap. In the attitude she had adopted to watch Mark Henry’s ships leave the wharf, to wait for Charlotte in Mrs Maggs’s kitchen, to sit beside Richard’s cradle in Roxby House, to listen to Hugh in the early days of her marriage, she now waited for Gerry to take, under her eyes, the step that would separate them forever. “I am not like that,” she thought. “Never would I admit such a woman into my house. It’s not strength, it is madness.” She accepted the fact of Gerry’s madness on this point, as she accepted everything else about him, but her heart sank.
What was going to happen to her? She reflected with merciless scorn that her own indiscreet scheming had brought Gerry here—to meet his wife. It was what might have been expected of such a folly. Grimly she assured herself that she had always known it could come to nothing, her mad passion for Gerry and his for her. The first touch of reality had thrown down the poor structure they had erected between themselves and the truth. How could it ever have been managed that they should go away and come back again to Danesacre, as Gerry had suggested and she agreed? It was not merely wicked. It was something far more deadly to her pride. It was foolish, the sort of unregulated behaviour of which she had always believed herself incapable. It never occurred to her to despise Gerry for making the suggestion. His situation was different from hers. It was herself she despised. Her eyes were opened and she saw that she was capable of the worst and vulgarest follies.
There was worse to come. With her eyes on Gerry’s face, she knew that there was no folly she would not have committed to make him happy. Her pride compelled her to acknowledge the final consequences of her infatuation. What was the use of pretending? She would have taken him on any terms. That was the extent of her madness, as far past the comprehension of sane people as his. She looked at him and her glance said: “Whatever you do I love you.”
Gerry shut his eyes because of the love in his Mary’s face. When he opened them again Mary was leaning back between two folds of the dark curtain behind her. She was very pale and composed. The waiter was carrying away untouched dishes and placing others. Gerry poured himself out a glass of the Latour recommended by that excellent fellow, the sommelier, the friend of all the world. “To your good health and bless you,” he apostrophised the sommelier. The La-tour was all that dear friend had promised, a rich splendid inspiring wine; it warmed Gerry and eased the tightened nerves behind his eyes.
“Well, are
you happy?” he asked Mercy wearily.
“Not at all,” she said promptly. “I am unhappy. I want you to let me come back to you, Gerry. I should have come to look for you if we had not met here. You haven’t forgotten that when I left you—how many years ago, my poor friend—you said: ‘If you ever want me I am ready to help you; I’ll always want you and you can always come back. Will you remember?’ I have remembered, you see. You have remembered, too. You could never forget a promise like that.”
Gerry straightened his back.
“On the contrary,” he said civilly. “I have forgotten it entirely. I don’t doubt your memory, Mercy. It is precisely what I should say under the circumstances. I was very distressed.” He looked across at Mary and felt that she understood him; she understood that he had been in agony when he made that promise. He looked from her small colourless face to the face of his wife and his spirit rebelled within him. Why should he admit this stranger into his life, this smilingly unpleasant woman, whom already he disliked and feared? She disgusted him. She was old, her face was old under its skilful cosmetic, her mind was ruined and unkind.
He said bluntly:
“I don’t want you back, Mercy.” He thought Mercy winced and then that she was laughing at him.
The Lovely Ship Page 28
