It was many years since I had been in Cambridge, but though the weather was misty, with windy curtains of mist that momentarily obliterated whole buildings, I immediately recognised the windows and stepped gables of the library. I had returned, for no reason I could think of, to Trinity Hall, my old college, and how delighted I was to see it again! I had, in fact, not greatly enjoyed my three undergraduate years, for they, as I have explained elsewhere, were the difficult years of my convalescence after the first war; but all unpleasantness was now forgotten, and I walked about in a trance of happiness, though it was very cold, and our fine Palladian court was quite deserted. I wanted to talk to someone—I longed to encounter some stranger, some American tourist, perhaps, to whom I could say that forty years ago I had lived in this gracious place, whose beauty and wisdom had helped to heal the wounds that were worse than physical.
Nothing but my loneliness marred the pleasure I felt, but loneliness may have been appropriate; for as a very debilitated young man I had often been lonely in those years—at that time of life, I mean—when I should have lived as one of a great cohort of friends. But all my friends were dead, and sometimes Cambridge had seemed heart-breaking in its beauty and its emptiness.
I turned up my collar against the cold, and from Trinity Lane walked to King’s Parade. That, too, was curiously deserted, and for a considerable time I stood, irresolute, at the entrance to King’s, incapable of deciding whether I wanted, or did not want, to go in and be awestruck, to be overwhelmed, by the intricate beauty and inordinate majesty of the Chapel. In my present mood, I thought, it would be too much for me, and with only a far-off memory in my mind of those stony fans which open with such ineffable grace to fill a celestial vault, I walked on towards Trumpington Street, and lost my way.
The mist, no doubt, was to blame, but it’s difficult to think how somewhere I made a right-about turn and came to that reach of the river, in the Backs, between Trinity and St. John’s. There, however, I discovered why the rest of Cambridge was deserted, and why I felt so cold. For the river was frozen over—as it had been in 1921 or 1922—and everyone was skating.
What an enchanting scene it was! Now the mist was sun-shot, and wintry gleams of light illumined hundreds of young, red, laughing faces, the silver curtains of the fog absorbed a thousand voices, but the steam of the voices went up like incense. I longed to join that myriad of young skaters—some darting expertly here and there, many of them clumsy and laughing as they fell—and suddenly a voice said, ‘Take my boots, I’ve had enough.’
I never saw my benefactor clearly, but eagerly I accepted his boots, with skates affixed, that were still warm when I put them on, and throwing aside my winter overcoat I joined the noisy crowd on the ice, and skated with such dexterity and ease as I had never known before. I circled in and out, I cut figures-of-eight, I exchanged words of foolish but heartfelt greeting with forty strangers who, I realised, would become my friends if we had time to talk a little more and establish friendship; and then I was seized with a desire to go farther.
I skated on, under the bridges—St. John’s Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs, the Great Bridge—and the frozen river lay before me like a grey road leading through mist and invisible fields to a remote and infinitely desired eternity. How long I skated—hands clasped behind my back, body bent forward, feet scything the ice—I do not know; but when I stopped and sat down to rest on a clump of frozen rushes, thrust like a footstool into the river, it was growing dark, and for a moment I wondered where I was.
But I had no cause to worry, for almost immediately a good, kindly, Cockney voice said, ‘The car’s here, sir, and I dare say you want to get back to London now.’
The unknown chauffeur gave me his arm—it was difficult to walk across a field on skates—and I told him, ‘No, I’m not going to London, I want to go to the docks.’
‘That’ll cost you £40,’ he said.
‘I can afford it,’ I said, and got into a tall, old-fashioned limousine where I found a pair of slippers, into which I changed, and a packet of chicken sandwiches that I ate with a schoolboy’s relish. And then I slept.
How long I slept I do not know, but the gentle movement of that ancient motor-car was very comforting, and from time to time I half woke to see the lighted streets of an empty town, or dim hedgerows that enclosed invisible fields; until at last we reached the docks, and there, to my infinite delight, lay the good ship Independence, with Roderick and Andrew standing attentively near the gangway.
My wallet, I found, was fatly stuffed with. £5 notes—though normally I carry very little money—and paying off my driver with a £10 tip I went thankfully aboard, and in my cabin was asleep again as soon as we had moved out into the stream.
Again time passed—who shall measure time against a clock of feeling, or a psychological clock?—and when I went on deck I saw, with some disquiet, that once more we were sailing through fog-bound waters.
This, however, I must make clear: I was happy indeed to be at sea with Roderick and Andrew. In our little ship I was assured of comradeship, and comradeship was what I had always wanted, and never known since 1918.
I knew very well that Roderick in some ways, and Andrew in others, had their faults and weaknesses, and a hostile observer with a gift of caricature could have made both of them look absurd. But I had found in them intrinsic qualities of kindliness, of sense and sensitivity, that were deeply established though they might not be invulnerable to cold reason; and in their chosen business they had a calm efficiency that was quite untroubled by the spur of competition that so horribly wounds too many in our modern world. In certain ways—some social ways, some mental ways—I was far removed from identification with the brothers; but in a way which I cannot define we were sympathetic. I liked them, as I had liked no other men for forty years, and to my great pleasure they had made it evident that my companionship was agreeable to them.
So, then, my trepidation, when I saw fog-banks still breaking upon us, was no more than superficial. I had full confidence in the brothers, and it was not of myself I was thinking when I first saw the little yacht bearing down upon us, and called to Roderick, ‘Here’s someone running into danger.’ It was of danger to the yacht I thought, not of danger to us.
I was standing on the weather side of the deck-house, and Roderick at once came out to see what the matter was. The wind, a fresh breeze, was squarely on the beam, and the little sailing-boat, goose-winged, was coming out of the mist and heading straight for us at considerable speed. ‘Some young fool who thinks he’s clever,’ said Roderick, and going to the rail stared anxiously at the oncoming boat. I saw Andrew, equally concerned, looking out from the open, weather window of the wheel-house.
The boat was within twelve or fifteen yards of us before the helmsman hauled his sheets, flattened his sails, and with a great lurch to leeward turned on a course parallel to ours. ‘He’s smart, he can handle a boat,’ said Roderick, and as the little yacht drew ahead—we were at half-speed only—we could see a figure, clad in bright-yellow oilskins and sou’wester, sitting up on the weather side.
‘He’s all alone,’ I said.
‘And mad as a hatter,’ said Roderick, for when the yacht was only a little way in front of us the man in yellow put up his tiller and headed across our bows. We hurried to the lee side, and Roderick said, ‘He’s made it.’ The little yacht was still running before the wind, and before the mist engulfed her we saw the helmsman neatly gybe and go off on a course opposite to ours.
Andrew from the wheel-house called to us, and for some little time we stood talking in shocked tones of the unknown sailor’s reckless folly. Then Roderick, incredulous, exclaimed, ‘And here he is again! But how in hell does he do it? He’s sailing like a witch.’
Again the little yacht came tearing down upon us, luffed and left us behind, and with foolhardy dexterity turned again to cross our bows. But this time he gybed as soon as he was clear, and when he had gathered in his sheets—in one movement, as it seemed—he looked up and waved as he sped past. We could see him clearly—the face small between yellow sou’wester and upturned collar—and Roderick said, ‘It’s no’ a man, it’s a lassie!’
‘It’s Mary Armstrong,’ I said, and realised in the very moment of utterance what nonsense I was talking. For if she was still alive—and I had lately heard a rumour of her death—Mary Armstrong was now an old woman. But there had been something hauntingly familiar in that face within a glistening yellow frame, and for an instant, as she looked up with a mocking smile, I had felt certain that I knew her. But that, of course, was sheer delusion, and without stopping to give Roderick an explanation of my inane remark, I walked away to the after deck and for a long time stood there, watching the disappearance of our white wake and the motionless flight of a fulmar that kept station astern.
There is no real measurement for time, but it was, perhaps, an hour later when Roderick shouted, ‘She’s here again!’ By then the weather had worsened, and the wind blew strongly from the west. The sky was still overcast, the nearer view was patched with fleeces of grey mist, and the high-ridged sea was streaked with livid white. Out of obscurity rushed the little yacht, her white sails a leaping triangle above the foam creaming from her bows. She was not, as before, pointing straight as though to bisect us, but on a course to take her very narrowly in front of us. She was trying to cross our bows, and though she was coming fast, she was not moving fast enough.
We swung to starboard as Andrew tried to give her room—tried to avoid her—but she struck with a great crash, and her broken mast fell aboard us in the midst of wildly billowing canvas. Roderick, who had run forward to help if he could, was hit by the falling mast and disappeared under the sail. The yacht, with her bows crushed, filled at once, and as she sank she pulled down, across our broken rail, her torn mainsail; and Roderick, entangled in sheet or halliards, went with it.
The girl in the yellow oilskins, thrown overboard and apparently stunned, was carried by a lifting wave past our port side. I seized a long boat-hook that lay beneath the rail, and from near the stern caught her under one arm. I heard Andrew coming to help me, but he was too late. Our ship rolled violently, the weight of the girl was too much for me, and all asprawl I fell into the white-veined, iron-grey sea. It met me with a fearful buffet, but near me I saw the lifebuoy that Andrew had thrown. I had lost the boat-hook, and the girl was floating face down. But Andrew, swimming strongly, was coming towards me….
I woke suddenly as a splash of cold water hit my face, and saw that the large porthole on the weather side had been blown open. Because we lay at anchor, in what I thought was sheltered water, I had not bothered to make it fast, and a fierce wind was blowing. I got up to look at a bay whitened by the rising gale, and as if with cold, contemptuous fingers another fan of storm-tossed spray whipped my cheeks.
I closed the port and went back to bed. But not to sleep. I re-enacted the scenes of my dream, from the first appearance of the little yacht to the catastrophe which drowned us all. As if on a film run at slow speed I watched every moment of that imagined drama, and with a sort of consternation—with something like dismay—I realised that, in the very moment of reaching with my boat-hook to grasp the girl in the yellow oilskins, I had recognised Lindy. Not Mary Armstrong, as I had first thought, but Lindy. It was Lindy in the beauty of her reviving youth I wanted. It was Lindy I had lost.
The shock of that discovery seemed to obliterate the horror of its circumstances. I felt no great unhappiness for the loss of Roderick and Andrew, or the loss of my own life. I still saw that drifting, yellow body, and knew I had lost her.
I am not sure what catalepsy is, or rather what it entails for the sufferer; but for a long time I lay in something like a trance—in a quite unnatural stillness—and broke it, at last, with wilful decision. With, as it were, a deliberate repudiation.
I got up, shaved, and dressed—I put on thick blue trousers and a heavy grey jersey—and on deck found Andrew in a very apologetic mood. In the early morning the weather had changed suddenly, and he was afraid it must have spoiled my sleep. There was now nearly half a gale blowing, and though we were in no danger—our anchors held securely—he proposed to move farther in among the Summer Isles and shelter under Tanera Mor, the largest of them. ‘It’s no day for going to sea,’ he said, ‘when sea-going’s intended for pleasure.’
I applauded his suggestion, for a peaceful day at anchor under Tanera Mor would suit me very well. I had been writing a short account of our little voyage, and I needed time to finish it. I needed, above all, time to set down my latest dream while its impact was still fresh, its colours as vivid as my remembered emotions. I had to admit, I suppose, that it was resurrection I wanted. A resurrection in Lindy.