Green Dolphin Street

by Elizabeth Goudge

  The little boy found it as difficult to follow her precise and exquisite French as she found it to follow his patois, but he burrowed his tousled head against her and sniffed appreciatively at the sweet smell of lavender that came from her lovely clothes.

  The surgery door opened and a cadaverous old fisherman with a sad and rheumy eye came rolling forth clasping a large bottle full of a whitish liquid.

  “And what’s the matter with you, m’sieur?” asked the blue-eyed girl.

  “Les côtais bas,” said the old fisherman sadly, referring to a complaint much suffered from on the Island and described as “all-overness.” “Les côtais bas most cruel.”

  “Les côtais bas!” snorted the old dame, getting up with the help of her stick and the pop-eyed granddaughter. “It’s the drink, my good m’sieur, and too many shellfish to your supper!” And she disappeared chuckling into the surgery as the fisherman disappeared into the street, where he could be seen standing in the gutter and taking a pull at the bottle.

  “Too many lobsters and crabs do make you feel all-overish,” the blue-eyed girl confided to Marianne. “But the Doctor’s peppermint drink is very tasty. Yet it’s the Doctor himself who does you most good when you’re feeling low.”

  “Yes,” said Marianne, and she remembered the welcome that Dr. Ozanne had given her when she had first come to Green Dolphin Street. “He’s kind.”

  And then for a long time she sat silent, the small boy still held within her arm, while the old dame came out and went away and the young girl took her place in the surgery. Immense joy came to her from the small warm body pressed against hers. There seemed a hollow in her shoulder just made for his tousled dark head, and the feel of his beating heart against her bare arm sent a tremor of delight through her body. . . . It suddenly came to her that she liked the poor. . . . When the blue-eyed girl came out of the surgery, bade her good night and went her way into the sunset, she watched her go toward her travail almost with love.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said to the little boy. “I’ll come with you. What’s your name? Jean? Remember, Jean, that if it hurts it will be fun not to let the Doctor know how much.”

  They went into the surgery together, Jean holding her hand.

  “Hullo? Hullo?” said Dr. Ozanne. “This young man a protégé of yours, Marianne?”

  “We have made friends in the waiting room,” said Marianne. “He comes first. He has hurt his wrist.”

  The surgery was a small room looking on the garden. It was wildly untidy and none too clean, and its atmosphere of whiskey and anaesthetics and unwashed humanity was enough to knock you over. The shabby frock coat that Dr. Ozanne wore for work in the surgery was none too clean either, and there was a slight tremor about his hands, as he tried to bring a little order into the litter on his desk, that Marianne had not noticed before. . . . She had been right. His practice was not going to improve. He would never be a successful doctor.

  Yet the moment he turned his attention to the boy, she had to admit that there are two ways of being a successful doctor. As he took the child on his knee, and pushed up the ragged sleeve to examine the wrist, she lost all consciousness of the dirt and stuffiness of the room and was aware only of the huge warmth of this man’s kindness. He was talking quickly and easily to the boy in the patois that he had learned in his youth, his whole attention centered upon him as though to have this child on his knee were the thing that he wanted most in the whole world. And the fear had gone out of the child’s eyes and the dimples were showing in his cheeks. It was just so, Marianne remembered, that he had welcomed her when she had first come to Green Dolphin Street. . . . He had seemed to want her. . . . And he had wanted her, just as he wanted this child on his knee. Only in contact with humanity could the lover-like hunger of his kindness find satisfaction. That’s what makes people wait in his surgery with such a sense of rest and trust, she thought. One is at rest with people who want one; they are like a warm house with the door wide open. And one trusts an open door, for trust begets trust, and if the people inside didn’t trust you they wouldn’t leave it open.

  “There’s a bone broken,” said the Doctor’s voice, cutting across her thoughts. “Would you like to help me, Marianne?”

  “Yes,” she said with eagerness.

  Bone-setting was a new experience for her, as had been the contact with humanity in the waiting room, and her spirit leaped to meet it. She did what the Doctor told her without fumbling or hesitation, as though she had been doing it all her life, eager and interested, giving the business her whole attention. Dr. Ozanne was not surprised. He knew her for a clever, capable girl, with just that touch of hardness that would keep her from being unnerved by pity. Yet she had feeling. Now and then she glanced at the child and smiled at him, and the boy smiled back at her as though they had some secret understanding together. And when it was all over, and the Doctor was hunting in one of the drawers of his desk for the toffee he kept for the consolation of the gallant among his smaller patients, she took the child on her knee with a mature tenderness she had not known she possessed. He was again touched and troubled by her personality, as he had been when he first saw her. If life gave her scope for her powers and emotions, she would make a great success of life, but if it denied her, the disaster might be equally great. A nature as passionate as hers would never make a fine thing of frustration. It took a saint to do that, and Marianne was none of your saints.

  “Well, my dear, do you want a salve for those sore ears?” he asked her jovially when the child had gone.

  “No, thank you,” said Marianne a little tartly, “I am perfectly capable of dealing with my own ears.”

  “So I see,” chuckled the Doctor. “You took a hatpin to the job, I gather. It’s not so badly done either. You’d make a fine doctor, my dear, if you were a man. You’ve clever hands and a good nerve. You helped me well with that child.”

  Marianne swung round in her chair and faced him across his desk, her dark eyes blazing. “If I only could be a doctor!” she cried. “I believe it would be even better than being a sailor. Couldn’t I be a doctor?”

  “Certainly not!” said Dr. Ozanne with twinkling eyes. “You’re a woman, my dear, and women are not doctors, and never will be, thank God. A woman’s place is in the home, doing needlework and enjoying delicate health. What’s the trouble this time? Palpitations? Sensibility? All-overness? Grippe? Migraine? Headache? Take your time. Delicate females have plenty of choice.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with me, thank you,” said Marianne. “There’s never anything the matter with me. It’s not about myself I’ve come, it’s about William.”

  “About William?” said the astonished doctor.

  “Yes, I’ve come to tell you that Papa will pay for him to go into the Navy.”

  “What?” shouted the Doctor, and the blood rushed to his forehead, and his hands clenched themselves upon the litter on his desk. “What’s that? What’s that?”

  Marianne repeated herself.

  “The cheek!” growled Dr. Ozanne. “The damned cheek, by Gad! Can’t I pay for the education of my own son?”

  “No,” said Marianne. “You can’t, and you know you can’t, and it’s not a bit of use getting in a temper like that. And why shouldn’t you give Mamma and Papa the pleasure of helping William? They love helping people. They are the most generous couple on the Island.”

  She herself was very cool and precise now, sitting very upright in her chair, her hands folded quietly in her lap, her small elfin face very pale and cold within the shadows of her bonnet. Only the little pulse beating in her temple, that the Doctor could not see, gave evidence that she was advancing now with hidden passion upon the warpath.

  “And what the devil induced your father to send you along with such an outrageous proposition?” stormed the infuriated Doctor. “The suggestion is infernal cheek in any case, but if it was to be made at
all it should have been made by himself, not by you.”

  “Papa did not send me along,” said Marianne sedately. “He’ll be waiting upon you himself presently, after you’ve had your dinner, to make the suggestion in his own person; only I thought I’d better come and warn you beforehand in case you behaved to him as you’re behaving to me now.”

  The doctor glared at her, tried to speak and failed.

  “I think, sir, that you’d better give yourself a dose of something,” Marianne continued. “I’ve never seen anyone so red in the face as you are now. I’m afraid you’ll have a seizure. You get angry much too easily. That’s because you drink too much, you know, sir. I expect you’ve been told that before, but I’m telling you again. It’s for your good I’m telling you. I’m very fond of you.”

  The mask of anger that had been clamped down upon Dr. Ozanne’s face suddenly split into fragments, and he flung himself back in his chair and laughed till it seemed that the room shook. The solemnity and sedateness that had taken possession of the elfin creature in the chair opposite tickled him mightily. She was as variable in her moods as an April day, and had the same enchantment.

  “You’ve shown great foresight, my dear,” he said, wiping his eyes with a large spotted handkerchief. “Without your warning I’d certainly not have given your Papa the welcome his good intentions deserve. But there’s no good purpose to be served by his waiting upon me. You run along home, my dear, and tell him to spare himself the trouble.”

  “I can’t do that, sir, because he’d not be pleased if he knew I’d been to see you,” said Marianne in the truthful tones of deep conviction.

  “I daresay not,” said the Doctor.

  “So don’t tell him, please, sir, that I’ve been here,” said Marianne. “And I think I’ll sit with you for a minute or two longer, for it’s been lonely at home all day. Papa and Mamma have not wanted to speak to me. They are angry that I went with William to see the clipper.”

  “So I should suppose,” said the Doctor drily.

  “Well, it was worth it,” said Marianne. “She was the loveliest ship I’ve ever seen. William loved her too. William was born for a sailor. I’ve never seen him look so happy as he did on board that clipper. He just seemed to belong there, as he belongs in happy Green Dolphin Street. Did he tell you the clipper was called the Green Dolphin? It seems more than a coincidence, doesn’t it? More like destiny. William ought to sail on that ship.”

  “His mother’s son shall never go in the Merchant Service,” said Dr. Ozanne obstinately.

  “He’d be just as happy in the Navy,” said Marianne. “What matters is that he should go to sea. It’s horrid not to be able to do what you want to do. It’s horrid to be frustrated.”

  She got up and retied her bonnet strings, her eyes gazing somberly out of the window, and the Doctor’s compassionate kindness, liberated by the cessation of his anger, flowed out to her again. “Horrid to have been born a woman when you would have liked to be a sailor or a doctor, eh?” he said.

  “I was not thinking of myself just then,” said Marianne. “I was thinking of William . . . and Mamma.”

  “Mamma?” ejaculated Dr. Ozanne in astonishment.

  “She loves William,” said Marianne. “She loves him very much. Mamma has always longed for a son, you know. When Papa waits upon you with his suggestion, it will be partly because he himself wants William to be happy, but even more because Mamma wants it. Mamma will be dreadfully distressed if you won’t agree. I hate dear Mamma to be unhappy.” Her somber eyes came back from the window and fixed themselves upon the Doctor’s. “Sometimes I think that Mamma was very unhappy when she was very young. I think she wanted something very much and didn’t get it. Perhaps she loved someone and he disappointed her.”

  For a moment more her eyes held the Doctor’s, then she walked slowly and demurely to the door. With her hand upon the handle she turned back to deliver her parting remarks in sad and dulcet tones.

  “No, I can never be a doctor,” she said. “It’s horrid being a woman. One does not ever seem able to have what one wants unless a man gives it to one. Papa will never give his permission for me to study the subjects that interest me; engineering and things like that; he says they aren’t ladylike subjects. That’s his pride. He’d rather I was ladylike than happy. It’s strange, isn’t it, how often parents ruin their children’s lives because of their pride? Good-by.”

  And she was gone, closing the door tranquilly behind her.

  But there was nothing tranquil about the mood in which she left the man upon the other side of it. He felt like the unfortunate Sebastian, stuck all over with arrows, each of them a sentence spoken very quietly by a demure elf in a green bonnet. “What matters is that he should go to sea . . . It’s horrid to be frustrated . . . It’s strange, isn’t it, how often parents ruin their children’s lives because of their pride? . . . Mamma has always longed for a son . . . Mamma was very unhappy when she was young . . . She loved someone and he disappointed her . . . It’s horrid to be frustrated . . . It’s horrid to be frustrated.”

  “Damn!” said Dr. Ozanne violently to no one in particular.

  He had been saying to himself, before Marianne started shooting these arrows at him, that it takes a saint to make a fine thing of frustration, and here he sat convicted of frustrating through his pride three people who were not saints, and thereby courting disaster for them. William had set his heart on the sea, and Marianne had set her heart on William having what he wanted, and Sophie had set her heart on playing mother to William. . . . Sophie, who perhaps would have had a son of her own had her first love, Edmond Ozanne, not forgotten his tenderness for her in the proud excitement of a new life in a new land. . . . Dr. Ozanne was a sentimental as well as a credulous man. The strength of his sudden conviction that Sophie had loved him to distraction and that he had ruined her life by forgetting her was not shaken by any suspicion of guile in Marianne. No, the innocent child’s thoughtless little remarks, dropped by a lucky chance just in the nick of time, had revealed him to himself as an unfeeling monster whose pride had caused him to trample alike upon the tenderest hopes of a loving woman and a trusting child. He was tired and befuddled after a long day of hard work and hard drinking, and the tears stood in his eyes. Beautiful Sophie! How adorable she had been in those days of their sweet youth when she had been as slim as Marianne, but much more graceful, and a featherweight upon his arm as they strolled up and down together upon the sea wall. If only he had known then how much she loved him! What a difference it would have made to both their lives. Darling Sophie. To think of her married to that pompous ass Octavius! He took out his large spotted handkerchief and blew a trumpet blast upon his nose. His mind was made up. Even though it meant humbling himself before that same pompous ass, he must make what reparation he could.

  2

  Marianne was meanwhile speeding back up Green Dolphin Street to Le Paradis. Her mood of pensive sadness had abruptly left her, and it would have astonished the doctor had he seen the fire in her eye, the set of her jaw, and her green cloak blown back from her shoulders by the wind of her going. She ran through the garden like a mad thing, but in the hall she paused to take off her cloak and bonnet, smooth her hair, and quiet her panting breath. Then she composed her features to a mask of penitence and slid like a shadow through the parlor door.

  Marguerite had already gone to bed. Octavius, his monocle adjusted in his left eye, was reading the Examiner and Sophie was embroidering. They looked up for a moment, regarding her more in sorrow than in anger, and then continued their employments.

  “I am sorry, Papa. I am sorry, Mamma,” said Marianne, standing before them with downcast eyes and hands demurely folded. “My behavior yesterday morning was most unladylike. I am sorry for it. I ask you to forgive me.”

  As a general rule it was not Marianne’s habit to apologize after domestic disturbance, for it was her invariable convictio
n that whoever was to blame, it was not herself, and this unwonted humility took her parents entirely by surprise. They gasped, and Octavius’ monocle fell from his eye and Sophie’s thimble rolled beneath the escritoire. Marianne retrieved them, kissed her parents, and sat down upon a very lowly stool.

  “Dear child!” murmured Sophie, tears in her eyes. “Dear, dear child!”

  “We’ll say no more about it,” said Octavius magnanimously, polishing his monocle. He had had several glasses of port after an excellent dinner and was in a mellow mood, tinged with sentimentality. “We’ll say no more about it. The matter is closed.”

  “Not quite,” said Marianne.

  “Eh?” said Octavius.

  “I mean not quite for poor William,” said Marianne. “Dr. Ozanne has threatened to thrash him.”

  “Quite right,” approved Octavius. “William is quite old enough to know that he should not take young gentlewomen upon the kind of escapade on which he took my daughter yesterday.”

  “Oh, poor William!” cried Sophie pitifully. “He’s only a child, Octavius. And motherless, poor lamb. His mother would have hated to see him running wild like a little hooligan in the way he does.”

  “Yes, it’s a shame,” agreed Marianne, “for he’s clever. He’d like to go into the Royal Navy.”

  “Then why not send him into the Navy?” asked Octavius over the top of the Examiner. “Excellent discipline.”

  “I believe Dr. Ozanne is thinking of sending William into the Navy,” said Marianne. “He is looking forward to consulting you about it.”

  “Consulting me?” asked Octavius. “What on earth has it got to do with me?”

  “I happened to tell him how fond Mamma is of William,” said Marianne. And then, her eyes roving innocently from one startled parental countenance to the other, she asked sweetly, “Did I do wrong? I know how much you and Mamma love to help people. I’ve heard it said that you are the most generous couple on the Island.”