The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

by Martin Armstrong

  Mr. Darby moved to a place apart from the crowd and stood, with his hands on the broad wooden rail, anxiously watching her, ready to wave if she should turn. And when she reached the Quay she did turn, paused and turned and looked up for a moment at the high deck, her eyes vague, bewildered, searching the faces that looked down. He waved but she did not see him and suddenly she turned away, hurried towards the station-entrance and vanished into it. Mr. Darby, immovable, watched the entrance in case she should reappear, but the minutes passed and suddenly again the huge shuddering hum of the Utopia’s siren burst out and possessed river and earth and sky, and Mr. Darby felt the deck begin to pulse under the heavy ominous throb of the ship’s engines. That solemn waking of the ship sent through him a thrill of fearful joy. Men on the Quay were hauling at a huge cable, looping it about a bollard. From time to time a whistle was blown. Looking down, Mr. Darby saw that a slowly widening gap like a bloodless wound was opening between the ship’s side and the Quay. He heard the muffled thunder of water threshed into seething commotion: then, very gradually, the Quay and the buildings that bounded it began to move, to slip away towards the stern. The ship was under way: he was leaving England.

  But Mr. Darby had forgotten England. He quite forgot to offer to her that coldly dignified farewell with which in King’s Cross Station a week ago he had sealed the just punishment of London. All his thoughts were fixed on Sarah, and his eyes, following his thoughts, were fixed on the station-entrance. And now, as if in answer to his gaze, a figure—Sarah’s figure—appeared there and waved a handkerchief. She did not see him: how could she see so infinitesimal a detail of that huge moving shape with its litter of agitated human dust? She was waving because she hoped that he would see her, and he would write and tell her, as soon as he could, that he had seen her, that he had pulled out his handkerchief and waved back. But now his spectacles failed him, their transparency was shattered into spars and splinters of dazzling light. He pushed them up on to his forehead and dried his eyes with the handkerchief he had been waving.

  Book III

  Mr. Darby Assumes the Purple

  Chapter XXVI

  The Widow Darby

  It is possible that, because at the moment of departure Mr. Darby had forgotten to rub it in, England did not realize what, through her own foolishness, she had lost. But Sarah realized it bitterly and to the full. For her, England had suddenly grown empty. It is almost unbelievable that so small a man should leave so large a gap as Mr. Darby left in Sarah’s life. When he had first left home and settled in London, though she had felt his absence keenly, she had also felt that he was not totally gone, was yet within reach. But now he was gone indeed. With her own eyes she had seen him swallowed, annihilated as it were, by that monstrous vessel with the sinister dark grey body and the crude scarlet funnels. The cavernous hum of the great siren still rang ominously in her ears, a voice of tragic doom. As she travelled miserably back to St. Pancras, terrible visions haunted her imagination. She saw that comfortable, luxurious cabin with its rose-coloured curtains and carpet, lurch hideously sideways; she saw the dark green water pour in through the door and the porthole, and Jim in bed, glaring unspectacled in terror as the lights went out and the water closed over him. She flung the vision from her, only to be tortured by another of Jim walking alone in a dark and lowering forest. She saw him with extraordinary vividness,—his white collar, his pearl tie-pin, his well-cut lounge suit. He was walking along with his usual jaunty importance, his spectacles alert for the wonders of the Jungle, totally oblivious of the naked black figures with shields and assegais that slid from tree to tree, dogging his steps. Suddenly there was a hideous shriek. … But Punnett; where was Punnett? She had forgotten that Punnett would be with him. Punnett had been to these places before: he would keep him out of mischief. She had every faith in Punnett. The flat, dreary, sordid scene that streamed past the windows was the counterpart of the desolation in her mind. On, on it streamed. Would it never stop? The brief journey back to London seemed interminable.

  She had hoped, though there was really little chance of it, that she would reach London in time to catch the late afternoon train north and so gain the shelter of home that night, and when she saw that this was impossible it seemed to her that another burden was added to her misery. Yet, in spite of her longing to be at home, she felt herself unable, when she reached St. Pancras, to face the dreariness and weariness of a night journey, and determined to spend the night at the Great Northern Hotel and travel home next morning. Next morning, perhaps, she would be feeling a little better. How wise she had been to pack Oliver Twist. Till dinner-time and, after dinner, till bedtime she would lose herself in Oliver Twist. Already she was very tired, and if she wearied herself out by reading till she could read no more, perhaps she would be able to sleep.

  • • • • • • • •

  Next morning, after a night of haunted sleep, she awoke more resigned and travelled home in that state of numbed emotion which is like a sunless calm after a storm. Jim seemed to have receded from her into a remote distance: her eyes were focused upon her home and her job. They roused in her now no enthusiasm and no warmth, but they were real things, solid things on which she could expend herself. They meant work, work that for her was the one means of health and sanity. By work she would keep at bay the ghosts of anxiety and dejection and fear which dogged her, on watch for the moment when she would be idle.

  And so, as soon as she was at home again, Sarah threw herself into her work with even more than her old energy. Lady Savershill noticed it and noticed, too, her drawn face and altered spirits, and urged her to take her work more easily. But Sarah relentlessly persisted. ‘Work is what I want,’ she said.

  ‘But not overwork, my dear woman,’ Lady Savershill replied. ‘Nobody was ever the better for overwork. It’s good neither for the worker nor the work.’

  She did her best to talk Sarah out of her mood. ‘Come, Mrs. Darby, there’s nothing to make a tragedy over. Your husband has gone for a short visit to Australia and that’s all there is about it. The voyage will do him all the good in the world. When my husband went to Japan last year I didn’t work myself to a skeleton.’

  Sarah couldn’t explain to her, nor even to herself, that the case of her and Jim was utterly different, but though she couldn’t define it she felt it, felt that it was full of disruption and tragic implications.

  • • • • • • • •

  Four days after Mr. Darby’s departure came a telegram. She tore it open in terror. ‘Just touched Gibraltar,’ she read. ‘Somewhat lively in the Bay of Biscay. All well.’ She heaved a deep sigh of relief. How nice of him to telegraph. She read it over and over again, hearing his very voice and articulation in the three bare phrases. She folded the telegram carefully, put it back into its envelope and bestowed it carefully in a drawer. For two days it kept her reassured and heartened. Then her depression returned. She found herself becoming that creature she had always despised, the woman of moods, the nervy woman. The note of a ship’s siren on the Dole, the hum of a factory-buzzer calling the workers in Newchester or Portshead to work, were enough to rouse all those grim apprehensions that the Utopia’s siren had sown in her, and, once roused, they persisted for half a day. When the distant moaning of fog-bound ships told of fog on the North Sea and in the estuary of the Dole, or when a rising gale buffeted her bedroom window and struggled noisily in the chimney, she lay awake all night, a prey to terrible fears and forebodings, not knowing that windless starlight brooded over the Gulf of Lyons and that the winking lights of Capri were visible across miles of Mediterranean. Every few days a wireless message from Jim came to restore her, each redolent of his own unique style, and it is apparent from these messages that while Mr. Darby’s interest in the world about him remained as wide and as alert as ever, he was far from allowing an indiscriminate enthusiasm for travel to paralyse his judgment or lower his standards. Toulon had been fortunate enough to win his approval: ‘Spent morning in Toulon. Much
pleased with town and harbour.’ A famous volcano, on the other hand, failed to please: ‘Negotiated Straits of Messina last night. Etna disappointing.’ That Port Said was a part of the great continent of Africa was, for a man of his critical taste, not enough: ‘Lunched in Port Said. Not a town to recommend.’ But in the same communication he had a good word for the Suez Canal: ‘Now entering Suez Canal. Remarkable engineering feat.’

  Sarah kept an open atlas on the harmonium and, guided by Jim’s telegrams, followed his progress. The whole width of Europe lay between them now. He dwindled down the Suez Canal as down a drain, and Sarah poring over that insignificant crack between Asia and Africa, found it difficult to believe that there was room in it for the monstrous hull of the Utopia.

  The Stedmanshad postponed their annual holiday till late this year and now pressed her to go with them; Lady Savers-hill too had been urging her to take a rest and change of air, and Sarah, attracted by the thought of a fortnight with her old friends, accepted. As Mr. Darby entered the Red Sea, Sarah and the Stedmans drove north in Sarah’s car to comfortable lodgings in the little coastal village of Gard.

  The holiday season was over and they had the place almost to themselves. The inhospitable northern coast, often grey and bleak in the height of summer, broke into a splendour of blue and yellow under the cloudless sky of that September. The air was warm, but through the warmth came the fresh sting of a breeze from a sea of transparent greens and blues. Above the long empty sweep of clear yellow sand the castle of Joyous Gard with its great square keep rose bare and sunny against the bare sky. Only with the nights came the chill foreboding of winter.

  Sarah gave herself up to the holiday. She was unhappy and in need of consolation, and she laid herself open to all the consolation the holiday offered her. The bright, lonely place, with its deserted beach, its advancing and receding sea, and its air of living in a remote past, soothed and calmed her; the happy, easy-going joviality of George Stedman and the placid friendliness of Jane warmed and comforted her heart. For once in her life she was glad to be passive. She did not even think, but allowed her emotions to ebb and flow like the tide. The three of them recalled Jim affectionately as one that belonged to the past: ‘before he went away,’ ‘when he was still with us,’ they said, as people say of the dead. And in Sarah’s mind, too, there gathered about him the regretful, half-sweet half-bitter atmosphere of death. His departure from Tilbury, his gradual recession across Europe had been a kind of dying. The terrible siren of the Utopia rang in her memory as a grim trumpet-blast portending death. Her emotions, her states of mind were those of a widow. It was only when Jim’s telegrams arrived, like incongruous, comical memories of the departed, that the blood flowed back into the ghost that walked their minds and he became for a brief while real again. A message despatched as he steamed out of Aden (‘ steaming with a vengeance,’ he added with telegraphic jocularity) spoke of ‘phenonymous heat in Red Sea.’ He wirelessed again from Singapore, complaining that he had seen nothing of it because the climate had fogged his spectacles. ‘Ceaseless perspiration. Losing weight. And now for China Sea.’

  Jim’s telegrams delighted George Stedman. ‘He’s a one, is Jim,’ he roared. ‘“Steaming with a vengeance!” I like that “Steaming with a vengeance!” Cost him a pretty penny that extra bit, I bet, but it’s worth it.’

  The mellow September weather persisted throughout their visit. They strolled far up the shore, taking a picnic basket and a kettle which they boiled among the sand-dunes, or they drove in Sarah’s car to more distant points, sandy bays, inland moors, ruined castles, villages, or country towns, returning, pleasantly tired, to supper. Sea and wind were kind to Sarah. There were no gales, no fogs, no nightly roaring of waves, nothing to rouse fears and forebodings. If she woke in the night, the watery hiss of a faint wind or the windlike whisper of the sea hushed her to sleep again. When, after a fortnight, they drove home, Sarah felt herself wonderfully restored.

  ‘You look a different woman, Sarah,’ said Jane Stedman.

  ‘I am a different woman, Jane,’ she replied with conviction.

  For it was not only her health that was restored. Her mind had been healed. Gard, so quiet, so beautiful, so permanent, had given her something of its serenity. As the car crawled along the narrow winding roads, making for the great main road from Scotland to Newchester, her mind flew back to the little village as to a haven of rest. If ever she was unhappy again she would return to Gard and be cured. Even to think of it brought refreshment, as she discovered in moments of depression when she was back again at work in Savershill.

  Ten days later Jim wired that he had touched at the island of Formosa. ‘Narrowly escaped typhoon. Anticipate glimpse of Cape Abor, south-westerly corner of Eutyca, this afternoon.’ She went to the map on the harmonium and saw that he was already beyond China and Japan. The word typhoon alarmed her and she got out the dictionary and looked it up. ‘Violent hurricane in the China seas occurring especially from July to October,’ she read with a chill at her heart.

  She was wakened that night by the rattling of her bedroom window. She got up and wedged the sash and noticed that the gale came from the east, and for an hour she lay wondering in terror whether the typhoon had by now caught Jim. Next day, a Sunday, was calm and dull, and, feeling a sudden longing for Gard, she invited the Stedmans to drive there for the day. They found the place settled into its winter mood. The blue, the yellow, the sunshine were gone. Sea and sky were grey, even the sands were pale and dull, and the village and the great castle had shrunk to a huddle of grey rocks. But the calm, the beauty, the permanence were still there, and Sarah felt that she had returned to a place that was something more than home to her. Rain set in as they drove home, but Sarah felt, as she had felt before, comforted and reassured.

  It was at noon on the following day that the blow fell.

  With hands that trembled so violently that she could hardly see the words, Sarah read the telegram through again. ‘Regret to report William James Darby and Albert Punnett disappeared from R.M.S. Utopia between 11 p.m. last night and 7.30 a.m. this morning. No traces found despite careful search. Distance from Eutyca coast 6 to 9 miles. Further details follow by post.’

  When Lady Savershill rang her up on business an hour later, Sarah tried in vain to give her a coherent reply. ‘Is that Mrs. Darby?’ Lady Savershill asked, not recognising Sarah’s changed voice and believing that someone else was speaking.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s me, Lady Savershill,’ said the strange, halting voice. ‘Excuse me. I’ve just had … just had some terrible news. Jim … Jim, my husband’s … drowned. Yes, drowned this morning. A telegram came.’

  Chapter XXVII

  Mr. Darby On Board

  To the normal healthy gregarious boy—and Mr. Darby was all that—the pain of farewell to home and family at the end of the holidays is a brief one, soon eclipsed by reunion with friends and the improved status which each new term brings. So it was with Mr. Darby. When he had waved farewell to Sarah and dried his eyes and spectacles, it at once occurred to him that afternoon-tea followed by a cigar would provide a much-needed consolation. He therefore sought the lounge, and while Sarah took her desolate way back to London, Mr. Darby reclined in a deep chair very placidly drinking tea and surveying with a critical benevolence the furniture of the lounge and the people who were to be his fellow travellers. But for the smooth flowing past the windows of warehouses, chimneys and sometimes a church-tower or steeple; but for the strong, subdued rumble of the engines and the pulse of them in the floor beneath his feet, he might have been in an hotel. That pulse, with its faint suggestion of liveness, of instability, disturbed Mr. Darby deliciously, gave to him and kept active in him a small, stimulating sense of adventure. The whole great ship fascinated him: it was delightful to be living simultaneously the life of luxurious civilization and the life of adventure. For the rest of the day he spent a great deal of time in moving busily about the ship. After taking a few turns on the promenade deck, he wou
ld clap a hand to his pocket as though suddenly missing some indispensable trifle and hurry down to his cabin, losing his way several times in the process; and then, arrived at last in the privacy of his cabin he would abandon pretence and stand for a few moments surveying its rose-coloured luxury with bland satisfaction and then bustle back on deck. Or if he found Punnett in his cabin he would fumble again in his pocket and ask: ‘Punnett, have you by any chance seen my … ah … cigar-cutter? ‘and then, trying another pocket, would add: ‘Ah! here it is, to be sure!’

  That phrase ‘to be sure’ had begun to occur more and more often in Mr. Darby’s talk since he had heard it several times on the lips of a very grand old gentleman at the Savers-hills’ dinner-party. He pronounced it, ‘to be shaw,’ as the old gentleman had done. At times it became almost a nuisance to him, intruding itself at the most unexpected and inappropriate moments.

  The first-class passengers were not very numerous and Mr. Darby found at dinner that he had been allotted a small table to himself. He was hungry, the dinner was excellent, and to console himself for the pain of parting from Sarah and England he wisely allowed himself a half-bottle of champagne. Between the courses he examined once again his fellow-travellers. A few tables away sat another solitary, a man of medium height and medium age, somewhat thickset, brown-haired, brown-moustached, squared faced, and about his mouth and eyes an expression of subdued humour as if he were enjoying a secret joke. His manner was one of quiet self-possession, as if accustomed to this kind of life. Next to him sat a middle-aged couple, the lady very stout, very fashionably dressed, her husband, bald, red faced, and clean-shaven but for a close-cropped grey moustache. Mr. Darby did not like them. The trouble with the lady, he thought, was that, though stout, she dressed as if thin, so that she appeared as a collection of shocking redundancies. Even her face contrived to look indecent. Of the gentleman Mr. Darby felt himself vaguely afraid. His narrow mouth, his hot red face, his hot blue eyes, even his scanty, close-cropped hair and moustache looked brutal and overbearing. At another table within range of Mr. Darby’s inspection sat a very pretty, vivacious girl, a good-looking young man and a grey-haired, determined woman obviously their mother. The young people chattered and laughed and the mother smiled with amused tolerance and occasionally let fall a phrase. The lady and gentleman that came next under Mr. Darby’s scrutiny roused his curiosity more than any of the others. He had noted the lady as she came into the dining-saloon. She was very tall and slim and was dressed in rose-coloured silk. Diamonds flashed from her breast and there was a flash when she moved her fingers. Mr. Darby could see that she was very much made up. Her features were perfect: the perfectly arched eyebrows, the almond-shaped eyes, the straight, delicate nose, the large, beautiful, derisive mouth looked as if they had been carefully drawn in pencil and faultlessly coloured. Her close fitting hair was like shining black lacquer. Mr. Darby feared her, as he had feared Lady Savers-hill, for she had the same high-handed masterful manner as Lady Savershill. But she was much less human: indeed she seemed to Mr. Darby not human at all. Not human, and, despite her superficial youth, old; a woman who had had the life and youth frozen out of her. As Mr. Darby watched her, he caught her eye, and for a moment she inspected him with a gaze void of interest, hard as glass, as if he had been a bottle or a flower-pot, and then, finding him beneath notice, ignored him. But that brief gaze had been enough to make Mr. Darby feel extremely uncomfortable. His dignity and his self-esteem were annihilated. He blushed, cleared his throat and fell into a contemplation of his champagne glass. It was several minutes before he became his old self again. When he ventured to glance in the formidable lady’s direction again she was talking to her companion. Could he be her son? He was tall, athletic and young, with a moustache almost as wide as his face, tufted at the ends. He wore an eyeglass. Mr. Darby judged him to be very much a gentleman, an aristocrat perhaps, but rather a fop. ‘Rather like the Stedmans’ cat,’ thought Mr. Darby. ‘Yes, a … ah … tom-cat!’ And the lady too must be an aristocrat: that was why she had made him think of Lady Savershill. Mr. Darby, for the first time since he had come on board, felt a pang of loneliness. It seemed impossible that he would make friends with any of these people, except, conceivably, the quiet-looking solitary man with whom he had begun his inspection. Perhaps some of the others whom he had not yet seen at close quarters would be pleasanter.