Standing with his back against the wall, Mempes listened to the women exchanging civilities. The yellow cat had come to use her claws, he was sure, and he restrained an impulse to run. Women were damnable to each other. His sense of justice reminded him that Gerry Hardman’s wife had cause for complaint. Mary, after all, had taken her husband. Poor devil, to be married to that long white face and used-up body. The long white face was making excuses for Mr. Hardman’s hurried departure. “Personal reasons. Mrs. Hervey’s indulgence.” The crushed petal fell to the ground and Mercy lifted her yellow-stained fingers to her hat; she adjusted it so that the feather curled round her long chin. Mempes glanced at Mary, and was stung by a memory of the small glowing creature he had left those few hours ago. He could fancy he saw the slow withdrawal of light from her eyes as her spirit shrank back into itself. Women were supposed to die of blows like this. It was all nonsense so far as Mary was concerned. She would not die. She would recover, and live on, not without happiness—she was too vital and courageous a creature to be unhappy long—but perhaps without hope, a condition that killed the weak and endowed the strong with an assurance of immortality. Mempes sighed. The sight of Mary defeated, thrown over by her lover, might inspire a moralist. It disturbed him profoundly, though it was a consummation he would have given anything to bring about. There was nothing that could have brought it about but that fellow’s bolting. And what had induced him to bolt—the only decent and conclusive thing he could have done—unless it were a sudden stroke of sanity, was beyond Mempes’ power to imagine. He would take an oath it had nothing to do with his old catamaran of a wife who was now, with a complete abandonment of the pretence that this was a civil farewell call, telling Mary that she was not jealous.
“Because only fools are jealous and because I don’t need to be. Months ago I told you that you and I had played a game in which the loser wins. I thought you were the loser then; I see that I am and that I’ve won. Mr. Hardman will be very civil to a wife he doesn’t like, and after a time I shall make him like me again, in a fashion. He’ll even be happy. I dare say he’ll dream of you, but that, in the circumstances, I won’t grudge you.”
Mempes felt the hair standing up on his back. Well, really, women!
Mary had risen, compelling the other to rise. She looked round her room and out into the green and golden pool of the garden. “I’ve never liked you,” she said steadily, “but I think that in some other life I might have liked you.”
Impossible, Mempes said to himself. “You’re too decent, my dear.” He admired Mary immensely at the moment, watching with grim amusement the effect of her serenity on that Hardman woman. The injured wife was being outmatched and elbowed from the room. It was as good a piece as he had ever seen.
“I should like to have been Mr. Hardman’s wife, as you are.” Mary’s steady voice sank to a whisper. “Perhaps men and women after us will understand us better than we do ourselves. Perhaps they’ll be more fortunate, or braver, and kinder to each other. They may not be asked to pay so high a price as we were. My poor Gerry.”
Very unnecessary, Mempes thought, and watched the slow widening of Mercy Hardman’s lips in a smile. For the first time he saw Mary’s calm break. She lifted her hand to her eyes, but dropping it instantly, stood aside for Gerry’s wife to walk unattended to the door. Mercy hesitated, glancing at Mempes, who averted his eyes. The yellow stain on her white glove caught her eye: she brushed her fingers disdainfully together, and walked towards the door. On her way, the stiff woolwork figures of Flora and the Prince arrested her attention.
“How strange,” she said. The remark seemed to take in the room and all of Danesacre that could be seen beyond the garden. Then she went away, lifting her yellow dress from the gleaming floor of the hall. The front door shut behind her, and Mempes offered up a fervent prayer that he might never see her again. He never did.
There was silence after her departure, broken by Mempes.
“My dear.”
The turn of her head, the raised delicate brows above the changed eyes, gave him an unpleasant sensation in the back of his neck, a swelling under the skin of the nape. He paused and lifted a finger to his stock. There was a sound of wheels in the road behind the house and a door opened and shut. The colour rushed into Mary’s cheeks and her eyes opened widely, blazing with light He knew what she hoped, and the sight was more than he could bear. Hurrying to the door, he pulled it open wide enough for them both to see Hugh crossing the hall in his riding kit. That careless devil, was it? He must have driven home from the stables. Mempes shut the door gently and leaning his back against it, watched the light die out in Mary’s eyes and her hands go up to her face. It did not last long. She recovered herself and said quietly:
“I shall soon learn not to expect him. I did before.”
“Why did the fellow run off?”
“Didn’t you want him to?”
“Don’t want you to be made unhappy, my dear Mary.”
Mary smiled and stretched out her arms as a woman might to her lover. Her eyes looked straight past Mempes.
“For two months I have been perfectly happy. Do you suppose many people can honestly say that they have had as much. Can you?”
Mempes was silent. After a moment he took up his hat and stick from the chair where he had dropped them. Mary seemed to have forgotten him, and he decided to go without speaking to her. She was leaning against the window, her head flung up, and as he lingered, a faint smile crossed her mouth, like the ghost of a caress. What was she thinking of? Of her lover? He had seen her smile like that at a ship building in the Yard. She turned her head and he saw her eyes. He wished he had not: they would haunt him that night, he thought. They said all she would not, all her thoughts of that fellow’s flight. There was nothing he could do for her. Shutting the door noiselessly, he went away, leaving her alone.
As he stalked through the narrow streets of that most lovely of all towns he was thinking not of any woman but of a little girl and of a young man gazing at her short retreating back. Head held up, small shoulders squared, Mary Hansyke walked away from him, and all Danesacre shrank into the compass of Garton’s Yard on a white spring day, with steel-blue ruffled water in the harbour and hawthorn breaking up the valley, and all time was caught between two sunny moments. Forever young, forever brave, forever proud, Mary Hansyke walked across the old shipyard, while the John Garton moved down the harbour, her keel parting a shoreless sea, her prow lifted to the air of eternity. A lovely ship.
FOR GUY
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © 1927 by Storm Jameson
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ISBN: 9781448200184
eISBN: 9781448201501
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The Lovely Ship Page 35
