The Loving Spirit

by Daphne Du Maurier

  Once more Philip was master of himself.

  ‘I must congratulate you on your fine performance then, no doubt,’ he said. ‘You should have been an actress. May I ask who gave you the permission to come into this room?’

  ‘If you think you can frighten me you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,’ answered Jennifer. ‘I don’t care if you’re the head of this firm or not, you happen to be my great-uncle and I’m not at all proud of the fact. Now, naturally, you’ll dismiss me, but I expected it. I only took the job to have things out with you. Now I’ve met you I realize you’re not worth it, that’s all, just not worth the trouble. Good-bye, Uncle Philip.’

  She turned and walked out of the room.

  ‘Stay,’ he cried, moving after her. ‘Stay, come back.’

  ‘Well - what do you want?’

  He stroked his chin and looked at her.

  ‘I have enjoyed this interview,’ he said slowly, ‘enjoyed it very much. I was in need of a little mental amusement. So you are my great-niece, are you? Not at all proud of the fact. What a pity. Well now, supposing you do me the extreme honour of dining with me tonight.’

  ‘Dine with you?’ Jennifer considered the matter. ‘What! in that awful old house in that dreary terrace?’

  ‘Yes - I’m sorry it does not meet with your approval.’

  ‘Well - I might. I don’t see why not.’

  ‘That is decided then? I shall expect you at eight o’clock punctually.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be there. See you later.’

  Jennifer left the building extremely surprised at the state of affairs. She had expected fury, or at least dismissal, instead of which he had calmly invited her to dinner. ‘He’s probably potty,’ she thought to herself.

  She put her head in the back sitting-room of the shop.

  ‘Uncle Philip has asked me to dine at his house,’ she told them.‘I thought it only genial to accept, though it rather bores me.’

  The two old women stared at her aghast.

  ‘Philip Coombe has asked you to his house? You’m jokin’ of course, Jenny.’

  ‘No - honest I’m not. I was surprised myself. I told him a few home truths and he asked me to dinner. Personally I think he’s mad. I’m not in the least afraid of him.’

  ‘But there’s no one ever goes to his house, Jenny - he’s never asked no one. He’s got somethin’ up his sleeve, depend upon it. I wouldn’t go, my dear.’

  ‘Of course I shall go. Good evening, I won’t be late.’

  Jennifer walked up the hill in high spirits. This was something of an adventure. She rang the bell of a grey and gloomy house, and was shown into a fair sized, barely furnished room.

  A small fire was burning in the grate. From the way it was smoking Jennifer guessed it was many years since it had been last lit.

  Her uncle was standing in front of the fire. To Jennifer’s amusement he had changed into a dinner jacket, of very old-fashioned cut, probably taken from some fusty cupboard, and unworn since the last century.

  ‘Good Lord - I didn’t know you were going to cope,’ she said. ‘I haven’t brought any evening dresses down here.’

  ‘What you are wearing is delightful,’ he told her, and she supposed he was making her some sort of compliment.

  The dinner was better than she had expected. They started with fish, and went on to a vague hash, flavoured with onion, followed by what he termed ‘steam pudding’.

  Afterwards they had coffee, and he handed her cigarettes, obviously bought for the occasion. ‘I never smoke myself.’ he told her. They talked a little while of various matters of Plyn and of the clay industry, and then after a slight pause he cleared his throat, and rubbing his hands softly together and avoiding her eyes, he began to speak once more.

  ‘I must admit to you I have an object in asking you here this evening. The idea came to me very suddenly. I am an elderly man as you see. I may have few years, or only a few months in which to live. It is lonely here at times for an old man like myself. Now this is what I propose. That you live here with me for good - in fact - I propose to adopt you, become your guardian - what you will.’

  ‘You must be crazy,’ said Jennifer. ‘Why, you don’t even know anything about me. Besides, after the way you treated my father and my grandfather to calmly turn round and adopt me - whatever for?’

  ‘My reasons are my own. Possibly they may be connected with what you have just said. My treatment of your father and your grandfather.’

  Jennifer grasped something of his meaning, and was filled with contempt. In some mysterious way she had frightened him down at the office, she had shaken his faith in himself, and now he wished, not for any fondness of herself but for his own sake, to make some amends to her, daughter of Christopher, granddaughter of Joseph, in case there was any truth after all in the legend of existence after death. In case there was immortality. By adopting her he would acquit himself of what had been. She would be his means of salvation. From no love, no real atonement, but from a hidden terror. That was his reason. He wished to use her as a screen to his fear.

  Jennifer thought rapidly.

  ‘Would I be free to do as I wished?’ she asked. ‘Could I change this drab, gloomy house and try and make something out of it?’

  He considered the matter for a moment. Jennifer knew he was thinking of the expense.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you can be completely free. As to the house, you may alter it as you wish.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Jennifer slowly, ‘in that case, Uncle Philip, I’ll say yes. But I want you to understand that I come to look after your house. I refuse to treat you as my guardian, or for you to call me your adopted daughter.There must be no question of it.’

  ‘So that is a bargain, eh?’

  ‘Yes - Uncle Philip - we’ll call it a bargain.’

  She shook hands with him for the first time.

  10

  News travels fast in a town such as Plyn. The following day it was all over the place that Christopher Coombe’s daughter, a girl fresh arrived from London, had met with her great-uncle Philip, the terrible, dreaded Mr Coombe of Hogg and Williams, and she was to live in Marine Terrace with him as his companion.

  The theory was that this Jennifer Coombe was nothing more nor less than a common fortune-hunter making up to the old man who had ruined her dead father; she expected to be made his heiress.

  Over in his shipbuilding yard word came to John Stevens of the amazing happenings in Plyn, but he was too busy with his yachts and his plans for the future to be greatly interested. When old Thomas Coombe told him the news with much excitement and shaking of his head, John, who was busy over some blueprint in his office, took his pipe out of his mouth and smiled.

  ‘After his money, is she? She’ll be a clever girl if she gets it. I don’t see Philip Coombe parting with a halfpenny.’

  ‘Why, John, it’s the truth I’m tellin’ you. There’s that there house up to Marine Terrace all painted already, new curtains in t’window, an’ the gal orderin’ him about from pillar to post.’

  ‘She must be an unholy terror, unless the old chap’s in his dotage at last. Is that the child who used to live at Ivy House? Harold and Willie’s young sister?’

  ‘That’s her, John. Bin educated in London - quite a young lady my sister was tellin’ me. They took to her seemingly, but I don’t know - sounds a queer sort o’ concern to me.’

  ‘Well, Cousin Tom, we haven’t time for young women of fashion making up to disagreeable old gentlemen, though I dare say it’s all very intriguing. D’you mind coming and casting an eye over this print?’

  So he dismissed the matter from his mind.

  At twenty-four, John Stevens was a very strong-minded and resolute young man. The dreamy boy had grown into one of the most efficient and enterprising of people; he had set out to build up a business and to make it well known through the whole of the west country, and he was succeeding. In a year or two his name would be among the best
yacht-builders of the day, challenging the big firms on the north and the south coast. John had few thoughts for anything but his work, and he had long got over his old habits of dreaming and star-gazing, of seeing into the future, of feeling disaster and death.

  John the boy had lain on the hills watching the sea, John the man wrote in his office or stood in his yard directing his workmen. John the boy had climbed aboard the wreck Janet Coombe and dreamt of the past, his eyes fixed on the little white figurehead in the bows, John the man waved aside sentimentality and possessing now the entire rights of the vessel, Philip Coombe being weary of the whole concern and selling his share for a small profit, he was considering breaking up the ship when he could spare men to the task. So it happened one Sunday afternoon in the middle of the summer, towards the end of June, this downright determined John Stevens was distinctly annoyed to find a recurrence of his old boyish symptoms, in other words the urge came upon him to leave his plans, to go from his office, and to walk across the hills to Polmear creek. From time to time the ship made claims upon him such as this, and John resented these claims. He resented any suggestions of weakness.That a figurehead should possess any powers over him at all was preposterous.

  Janet Coombe was a decided nuisance. She was always bent on telling him what to do. Of course it had been she who had suggested starting the ship-building yard, but now that this was accomplished he was hanged if he would listen to her any more. It was all his imagination anyway, she was only a bit of painted wood.

  He turned frowning to his work, a pencil in his mouth, his hair ruffled. He reached for a textbook at his side. He read a couple of pages but the words jumped up and down before his eyes. He looked out of the window and saw the blue sky and the glittering harbour. He heard the gulls crying on the Castle rocks.

  ‘Oh! - hell,’ said John, and threw his book across the room.

  Two minutes later he was walking up the path that led to the fields, and Polmear creek.

  Jennifer pulled her boat close to the ladder and made fast the painter. The tide was on the ebb, but they were only neaps and she would not find it aground when she was ready to return. She put her hands on the shaking rope ladder, and swung herself over the bulwarks on to the sloping deck. She looked around her curiously. This was the first visit she had ever paid to the schooner, and she had already been in Plyn over two months.

  The glass on the skylight roof was smashed, and scattered about the deck. The winch was broken, pieces of broken spars and odds and ends of tattered gear lay unheeded in the scuppers. Part of the shrouds were gone, and the top of the mizzen mast had been carried away.

  Some things remained strangely intact, the hoops around the masts, the wooden belaying pins in their sockets, the pumps.

  Jennifer peered down into the dingy fo’c’sle, the notice clear cut on the bulkhead ‘Certified to accommodate 6 seamen’. There were three cots still hanging, an old saucepan lay on the floor, and tucked away in one of the cots were the coverless pages of a magazine. Men had lived here, slept here, the little space had rung with their laughter and their song. Now all were gone, forgotten, dead perhaps. A drip of moisture from the deck above fell upon her hand. The atmosphere was chill and queer. As she turned to climb the ladder, she saw the photograph of a woman pinned upon the wall. A cutting from a newspaper of the year 1907. Someone had scratched a heart beneath it with his knife, and pierced it with an arrow.

  On the deck she looked into the tiny galley; the oven was still there, and two empty bottles. One cracked plate remained in the rack.

  The wheel stood as it had done thirteen years before when Dick Coombe had helped bring her into harbour, and Jennifer was standing on the very place where Christopher had fallen, his back crushed by the falling spar.

  She made her way down the companion-way into the cabin.

  First she came to the mate’s hole, a space no bigger than a small cupboard, and from thence into the main cabin, or cuddy, a room about six or seven foot square, a swinging table in the centre, a built-in bench, and lockers on either side.

  A sliding door led to the master’s sleeping cabin, a cupboard scarce two feet larger than the mate’s, but with the addition of a wash basin. Here Christopher had sobbed himself to sleep as a lad, on his first sea voyage from Bristol, while Joseph his father tramped the deck above, bewildered and embittered by his son’s distress. Jennifer sat down at the table, her chin in her hands. A clock was still nailed to the bulkhead, the hands had stopped at twenty-four minutes past nine. The lamp still swung in its gimbals, the brass dim and discoloured.There was a calendar of 1912 hanging beneath it. The cabin smelt damp, rotten; through the floor boards the water crept at high spring tides.

  The drawer in the table was filled with charts, yellow now with age, and dirty and well thumbed. Joseph had sat here once, and spread the charts upon the table. He had marked them with his seal - ‘Joseph Coombe, Master.’

  Jennifer rose, haunted and wretched. She opened the lockers and found them filled with indiscriminate objects. There were some old books, paper, sodden with the damp, and a man’s cap.

  She passed into the captain’s cabin and rummaged around in his lockers. Here she found a bent tooth-brush, a collar stud, and one sock, in the corner of a drawer a small worn prayer-book. On the fly-leaf was written ‘To Dick, from his loving father Samuel Coombe, May 1878.’

  The highest locker Jennifer found she could not open. She pushed and pulled, but it stuck firmly, and then finally after one determined wrench, it opened. She soon saw the reason for it. Inside was a large wooden box of some depth. She lifted this out, and carried it into the cuddy, placing it upon the table. On raising the lid and looking inside she found it to be full of papers, documents, and bundles of old letters.

  One by one she laid them on the seat beside her. There were bills of sale here, bills of lading, documents relating to the ship’s cargo, to the freights at various ports, accounts of passages, a few rough pages from the ship’s log.

  Here was Joseph Coombe’s Master’s Certificate, the piece of parchment that had given him and Janet the happiest and proudest moment of their lives. Here was a faded photograph taken in 1879 of Joseph and Susan with their four children, Christopher, Albert, Charles, and Katherine.

  There were letters of Joseph’s and of Dick’s, about the ship’s record passages, there were bits and pieces of detail making in one stupendous whole the sketchy outline of the Janet Coombe’s history.

  As Jennifer wandered amongst these forgotten things she saw again, in the reading of them, the proud sway of a ship upon a lifting sea, she heard the singing canvas and the straining masts, she heard the shouts and tramping of men upon the deck, she saw the figure of Joseph, his dark hair and beard wet with the spray, his voice crying some order - and carried away by the wind.

  She heard the scream of a gale and the thunder of the sea. She saw Joseph throw back his head and laugh.

  Then she looked around her in the cabin, she heard the drip of the moisture from the deck, she saw the broken glass and rusted nails upon the sodden floor - mournful - mournful.

  Beneath all the letters, at the bottom of the box, was a small bundle tied with a piece of worn tape. Something in the handwriting clutched at Jenny’s heart. She had seen that writing before. It was in books of her mother’s. The writing was Christopher’s. The envelopes were addressed to Joseph Coombe. She turned them over and found the seal unbroken. They had never been read.

  She felt she had the right to read these letters that had come like this out of the past.

  Now for the first time in her life Jennifer learned the truth of Christopher’s early days in London.The last letter was dated 22 November 1890, never read, never answered. Condemned to lie in this box for over thirty-five years until his daughter found it.

  The tears were running down Jennifer’s face now, she rocked herself backwards and forwards in distress.

  ‘Oh! my darling,’ she said, ‘my darling.’

  She had not heard
the footstep on the deck, nor the soft creaking of the ladder, and as she raised her eyes from the pile of letters on her lap she saw that someone was standing in the cabin doorway, looking at her. For a moment neither of them spoke. Jennifer, too startled to move at first, saw Christopher with his long legs and fair ruffled hair - like a vision this flashed before her and was gone, and instead was a young man she had never seen before.

  John had ploughed over the dry mud to the schooner, he had noticed a small boat on the starboard quarter fastened to the ladder, floating in a foot of water.

  ‘Trespassers,’ he thought, and climbing aboard had made his way down to the cabin. There he stopped, his eyes narrowing, his heart thumping, for surely there was Janet Coombe herself kneeling against the table, her hands clasped, her dark hair brushed away from her face.

  Then the vision was gone, and he saw this stranger was only a young girl with the tears running down her face.

  ‘Hullo,’ said John.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Jennifer, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  ‘You’ve been crying about something?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stepped forward and noticed the box on the table.

  ‘How did you manage to get that drawer open?’

  ‘I wrenched it until it came of its own accord.’

  ‘I thought I’d jammed it too tight ever to be moved.’

  ‘Did you put the box in there, then?’

  ‘Yes - about half a dozen years ago. Before then it used to lie on this bench you’re sitting on. I was afraid it might get damaged, or that some curious fool would come across it. I see now it wasn’t safe even in the drawer.’

  ‘Do you mean I’m a curious fool?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you. Have you put the letters back?’

  ‘Most of them. I’m going to keep these.’

  ‘Which ones are they? Do you mean to say you’ve been and broken the seal? Isn’t that rather a filthy thing to go and do? I put them at the bottom on purpose. They belong to someone who is dead - who died over twenty-five years ago.’