Now that I had broken the ice with Captain Judas, we knew no more of the mock ferocity with which he had greeted our arrival. Throughout that holiday the children were to be seen swarming like monkeys up the Jezebel’s rope ladder and making the ship their own. To live in a house however near the water is not the same thing as to live in a ship whose timbers are laved by the tide, and once old Judas had given the children a footing, they were soon all over him.
He had a telescope on a tripod fixed to his deck, and though the twistings of the river confined the view to our own reach, you would see Oliver, Rory or Eileen sitting at all times of the day on the chair which allowed the telescope to be used without fatigue.
It was Oliver who discovered that the old man could be coaxed beyond mere acquiescence. He invented the great game of the careened ship. The Jezebel had been sailing the seas for month after month. Judas, as Captain Morgan, had had a high old time, seizing treasure, causing captured crews to walk the plank, showing a clean pair of heels when a King’s ship hove in sight. And now she had become so foul that she dragged through the water like an old dish-clout, and sailing her to a quiet beach, Morgan had run her ashore for a clean-up and overhaul.
I had not known how deeply Oliver had been reading in the annals of buccaneering, but he was all excited as he instructed us in our parts. He was a Greek hailing from Tiger Bay, Morgan’s right-hand man, and Eileen must be an English heiress who has been spared, on some occasion when the decks ran blood, because she was worth a ransom. She had fallen in love with the handsome Greek, and was now ready to follow him to the ends of the earth.
“Why do you always have to be someone handsome?” Maeve asked sullenly.
Usually we left the games on the Jezebel to the three younger children, but that afternoon we were all there except Nellie. Captain Judas had invited us to tea. Nellie had not come because, she said, she had dinner for a regiment to look after. As a fact, it was because she distrusted anything so unusual as Captain Judas.
The tea had been a spartan affair, but Judas presided in his great room with considerable dignity. He lapsed occasionally. He regarded me now as a fellow conspirator, pledged to the ruin of Rome’s pretensions, and mystified the other guests by occasionally tipping me a wink with his sound, fiery eye, pointing darkly in the direction of the bilge, and forming with his lips the words: “Whoosh! Bang! Wallop!”
And now tea was over, the girls had washed up, and we were all sitting on the deck above, listening to Oliver extemporising his game.
“Why do you always have to be someone handsome?” Maeve demanded.
Oliver flushed. “I can’t help it. I am handsome,” he declared.
Captain Judas clapped him on the back. “Of course he’s handsome,” he shouted. “The handsomest young cock that ever strutted on a deck.” He caught hold of the boy and stood him between his knees. He gazed at him long and earnestly, ruffled the close golden curls of his head, and seemed to drink in an extraordinary pleasure from the steady glance that Oliver directed upon him from his blue, candid eyes. “Don’t you be surprised,” he said at length, “if you see this young man walking home some day. Yes—walking. Not rowing. Walking home from here across the water.”
The children all looked baffled by this queer remark. Sheila, Dermot and I were embarrassed. We didn’t know which way to turn. We felt that Judas was going too far; but he spoke with such simplicity and matter-of-factness that we could do nothing about it. In a moment he ended the difficult situation himself. He pushed Oliver from him gently, and said: “Well, get on with your game. Play while you can. They’ll get you at last. So play now, play.”
And we played. Morgan, his Greek, and the heiress remained aboard the Jebezel, with Sheila as an Indian girl of great beauty whom Morgan had picked up in the sack of a city. The praam, with Dermot and Rory aboard, the dingy with Maeve and me, were a couple of frigates that had come into the bay. It was our business to board the Jebezel and clap Morgan into irons.
It was a glorious engagement. From opposite points of the river the frigates converged upon the ship. Dermot was there first, and as he set foot upon the rope ladder old Judas leaned over the rail and yelled for a party to repel boarders. Rory tied the praam to the hulk’s side and swarmed up the ladder behind Dermot. Blows from rolled-up newspapers rained on Dermot’s head and shoulders, and above the shrill falsetto of Judas’s shout rose a kind of Red Indian yodel which the Greek from Tiger Bay thought appropriate to the occasion.
While the battle at that point seemed likely to end in stalemate, Dermot firmly repulsed and Rory unable to get any higher on the ladder, I rowed the dinghy to the bows of the Jebezel. Keeping close in to the timbers, I was hidden from observation by the bulge of the ship’s side. Once at the bows we were out of sight. We had a spare painter in the dinghy and there wasn’t much difficulty in throwing an end over the figurehead that now loomed above us: the head and torso of a repellent woman with bulging eyes and flowing hair. When the two ends of the rope were fastened together, we had a practicable means of entry to the Jezebel. I swarmed up first, and found it easy to proceed from Jezebel’s back to a point whence I could jump aboard. I raised a yell which caused the defenders to turn for a moment from their belabouring of Dermot. The brief respite enabled him to clamber through the open port in the bulwarks and drive the enemy towards me. A moment later he was joined by Rory and I by Maeve. We herded the whole crew towards the stairway and drove them safely below decks.
Oliver was dancing with excitement. “How did you get aboard?” he kept on asking; and Maeve twitted him: “That was one up on the handsome Greek! Brains are better than beauty.”
“But how did you do it?” he persisted, so I took him up on deck and showed him.
“I’d like to try that,” he said.
I climbed out first on to the figurehead and returned to the dinghy hand over hand down the rope. Oliver followed, unknotted the rope, and pulled it down. Then with the gravest concentration he did the whole thing for himself: swung the rope’s end over the figurehead, knotted the ends, and swarmed aboard. He went through the process three times.
“You seem very keen on this,” I said. “What’s the idea? Are you thinking of burgling the captain some night?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t look at me. He coiled the rope swiftly but neatly. “That’ll do,” he said. “Let me row you back.” And all the way across the river he didn’t look at me or speak.
*
It was very hot that day. After dinner we sat on deck-chairs on the lawn. You could just see the water darkling below, and the black curtain of trees hung before the opposite bank. Two orange squares bloomed silently down there on the darkness. Captain Judas, his boyish day-time relaxations behind him, would be toiling under lock and key upon his fantastic documents.
Nobody spoke. Farther along the terrace Dermot’s cigar made a red spot in the dusk. Nellie and Sheila, doing nothing, leaning back, were between him and me. The children were gone to bed. We didn’t think of Maeve any more as one of the children. She came out from the house now, soft-footed across the lawn, and leant for a moment against the back of my chair. I could feel the fragrance of her breath on my head, and I put up my hand and stroked her hair.
“It’s beautiful,” she said in a voice that was part of the quiet loveliness of the moment. She took my hand and held it between both of hers. “Take me on the water,” she said.
I got up, and we slipped together into the darkness of the trees. The rough, downward twisting path was invisible. She had put on a thick white coat and seemed to glimmer like a little ghost at my side. She put both her hands through my arm and linked her fingers. Her whole weight came on to me once or twice when she half-stumbled. The wood was full of the damp secret smell of ferns and of maturing things.
“I don’t like the games—the sort we played this afternoon. I’m growing up.”
“You’re a sweet child,” I said.
She protested eagerly. “No, no. I’m fourteen, and there’s so much to do.”
She clung to me rather desperately over a rocky bit of the path. “It’s because no one cares,” she said. “That’s what makes me anxious. Nobody’s starting me on anything. You said you’d speak to father about my being an actress. Have you done it, Uncle Bill?”
We came with a little rush out from the woods on to the flatness of the quay. It was lighter there. Her pale oval face, in which at night the eyes seemed quite black, looked appealingly into mine.
“Why, bless my soul, you tragic young woman,” I said, “at your age I was chopping wood for a country parson, not bothering about a career. Don’t fret, my dear. I’ll speak to your father when the right moment comes.”
Sam Sawle was sitting on the coping of the quay, smoking a pipe. He got up and came towards us. “You going out, Mr. Essex?” He spoke very quietly. It was the sort of night when a voice raised above a whisper sounded offensive. I nodded.
“What’ll you take?”
“What about the motor-boat? We could run down to the Carrick Roads.”
Maeve shook her head. “No. Not tonight. I hate the sound of a motor-boat at night up here where the river is quiet. Let’s take the dinghy. I’ll row if you get tired.”
Sawle pulled the dinghy to the steps. “There’ll be plenty of water for a long time,” he said. “The tide’s hardly full.”
He fetched some cushions from his shack and arranged them behind Maeve as she sat in the stern. He pushed the boat out. The rim of the full moon, yellow and enormous, was just edging up above the woods and seeming to dim the radiance of Captain Judas’s windows. A sprinkle of silver fell across the river in a trembling cord between him and us.
I pulled with leisurely strokes, listening to the musical fall of drops from the blades, the soft suck and gurgle as the boat nosed into the water.
“That’s better,” said Maeve. “That’s the sort of sound to hear at night. I don’t mind the old Maeve’s roaring when the sun’s shining, but I hate it under the moon.”
She trailed her fingers through the water and withdrew them quickly. “Cold! Cold!” she said, and tucked her hand inside her coat. She shivered slightly, and I asked whether I should return for a rug. “No, no,” she said. “It’s lovely. Don’t talk.”
That’s what she had said that night in Manchester—the first time I took her to the theatre—when the curtain came down after the first act, and everybody but she seemed to want to chatter. More and more Maeve must have her silences.
The moon had climbed quickly. We could see the whole circle, softly effulgent, resting with its lower rim on the heads of the trees. Judas’s lights were hidden by a bend of the river. There was nothing but the water and the trees and the heavens swimming in misty radiance. From the banks there came an occasional cry: the throaty tremolo of an owl, the swift sharp piping of little coveys of oystercatchers darting along at the water’s edge. Here and there the wood thinned out, ran into bare patches of hillside upon which we could see the cattle couched in groups frozen to stillness beneath the dead light of the moon.
The river turned and twisted. Boring into the silent heart of enchantment we passed through cavernous glooms where the trees rose high and out again into moon-washed space, stippled with the dark shadows of bush and barn and rick.
Presently Maeve said in a low, thrilled voice: “Look! The swans!”
I allowed the oars to rest, and looked over my shoulder. I had thought we should soon be reaching the swans. I had seen them before, but not by moonlight. The bank on one side of the river dropped away, and there was marshy land threaded by runnels and pools and inlets that were now drawn in lines of burnished lead on the flat map of the land. On all that water the swans were resting: scores of them, some with their heads beneath their wings, some rocking sedately with their necks erect. There were large white birds, gleaming like icy figurings of beauty, and small brown cygnets that missed the superb transfiguration of the grown swans.
I took up the oars again, and slowly thrust the boat towards the fleet of birds. Some that were alert rose on the water, pressing down their black webs and reaching their splendid pinions up into the radiance of the moonshine. Then slowly they began to drift away before the approaching boat. Their unease communicated itself to the others, and long snaky necks were uncurled and raised above the rocking boats of the bodies. Soon all the swans that were near enough to have cause for fear were moving over the water. They seemed to glide without propulsion, mysterious beauty, slipping away through the moony texture of a dream.
Suddenly Maeve, who had been lying back, sat upright and clapped her hands in one loud explosive sound. Then the noise of wings broke the tranced quality of the moment. Some of the swans rose on the water and with trailing feet thrashed their way through the broken lights that quivered upon the ponds and inlets. Others rose above the water, and the creaking of their wings was a sound more thrilling than I had ever heard. It was astonishing, seeing them so close at hand, that such great bodies could be lifted clear; but soon six of them were up and climbing into the silvery luminescence of the sky. Instinctively Maeve and I lay on our backs to see a sight that was so unaccustomed. For a time we lost them, and then, when all other sound had faded away among the birds on the water, we heard far off but very clear the creaking beat of the pinions. We saw the swans, high above our heads, flying one behind another with necks rigid; and soon they passed, the incarnation of wild and inaccessible beauty, one by one before the face of the moon.
We lay there for a long time, not speaking, hoping that the miracle would recur; and at last Maeve said: “It doesn’t happen twice. Let’s go home.”
It was very late when we tied up at the quay. The moon was high, and brighter and smaller. The tide had turned. We stood for a moment and watched how everything was obeying the water: the boats all swung round at their moorings with their noses pointing to the west, the moonlight yellow upon the ripples of their dancing, leaves and twigs hurrying by, and the water itself, with hardly a murmur, deep, mysterious, timeless, swinging to the sea.
Across the water Captain Judas’s lights were burning yet, as though neither time nor tide could come between him and the spectres of his pursuit. Maeve with one hand pulled her coat closer about her. She placed the other within my arm and snuggled her body close to mine. “Thank you,” she said. “I shall never forget tonight. I shall never have a lovelier night. I shall never see the swans again flying across the moon.”
“Nonsense,” I said, urging her towards the path. “You’re going to see all sorts of lovely things, young woman. You talk to me in ten years’ time, and tell me whether you haven’t seen lovelier things than an old river showing a false face under the moonlight.”
She shivered a little. “Ten years!” she said. “What a long time! I shall be twenty-four! I wonder what will have happened to us all in ten years’ time: me and Rory and Oliver and you and Eileen.”
“Why, child,” I said, “that’s easy. You will be a famous actress, making me more conceited than is good for me because everybody will be coming to my plays just to see lovely Maeve O’Riorden.”
“Oh!” she whispered. “That would be beautiful.”
“And Rory will be—let’s see—probably his father’s right-hand man in the most famous decorating firm in the world.”
“Dear Ugly! His brain’s full of banshees. He makes me afraid.”
“And Oliver will be a curate with golden hair, and all the old ladies will love him so much that they’ll put sixpence in the bag instead of threepence. And so they’ll make him a bishop. Eileen, of course, will marry a nice man who keeps a newsagent’s and tobacconist’s shop in the corner of a village street. She’ll have lots of babies and she’ll steal sweets for them out of the shop when her husband’s outside sticking up the news-bill. And so they’ll go bankrupt and pay fourpence in the pound.”
“Oh, you dear old silly, you do talk nonsense. And yet—I—I—do love you so.”
And there was Maeve suddenly stopped dead in the path, in the pitch blackness of the wood, with both arms round me, and her head on my chest, which she could only just reach, sobbing her heart out! I let her stay there till the storm subsided, then, as we were near the house, I picked her up and carried her across the dew-drenched lawn. Everyone was gone to bed. I set her down under the light that was burning in the hall, and she raised to me a face that looked very small and white and tragic, tear-smudged. “Kiss me,” she said.
I bent down and kissed her and tasted the salt of her tears. Then without a word she went draggingly upstairs. I sat down and lit a cigarette. I had kissed Maeve many times, but I knew I must not kiss her again.
*
I gathered that the outside world did not mean much to Captain Judas, but from time to time he went to Truro to see if any letters were addressed to him there poste restante. I was going up in the Maeve to do some shopping the next day and took him with me. He talked very sensibly all the way, and was full of information about the craft we saw at the town’s quays, about their ports and cargoes. He had a word of commendation for the neat appearance of this ship and a growl of scorn for another’s slovenliness. Only when the Maeve was in the narrow water between timber-yards on one side and flour warehouses on the other did he begin to show his nerviness. The warehouses stood up sheer from the water, and at open doors two and three floors up stood men powdered with flour from head to foot superintending the pulleys that were swinging the loaded sacks up and down.
He looked at them with apprehension. “Keep her out, my boy, midstream, midstream,” he muttered. “A defective pulley, one of those sacks—whoosh! flop!—where am I then? Eh? An old game. They’re up to all the tricks. But I know ’em. I know ’em. And when we get ashore keep away from the cathedral.”
“Right you are, captain. I’m only doing a bit of shopping.”
“And I’m only going to the post office. Mind you, I know nothing against this bishop—nothing definite, that is—haven’t checked up yet. In the meantime, caution.”
“You know, captain,” I said, as we stepped ashore, “you’ve got a very noticeable appearance. Your long beard and long hair. Doesn’t that rather give you away to ‘them’?”
He chuckled knowingly. “You haven’t got to the bottom of me, my boy. No, not by a fathom or two. There’d be something in what you say if I had always been like this. But I was clean-shaven and had hair cropped like a convict’s when they—when—”
The old man stopped dead on the pavement. He turned to me a face that was blank save for the vivid light of his one sound eye. His mouth twitched. He tried several times to speak, and seemed to be tortured by an effort to remember something that escaped him. “It was—when—” he began again, and then leaned against a wall and passed his handkerchief over his brow. I saw that my remark had touched on something deeper than I had intended. I took his arm. “Tell me, captain,” I said. “That Norwegian timber ship we passed. D’you reckon she’ll get out on the tide tonight?”
“Tonight? Never! Lucky if they make it tomorrow, the rate they’re going on.” He was himself again.
There was one letter for Captain Judas. As we went chugging slowly homeward, he read it again and again. He had laid the envelope on a thwart, and I noticed that it was addressed to Captain Jude Iscott. I noticed, too, that printed across the top of the envelope was “The Mary Latter Comedy Company,” and it was strange to me to think of old Judas being in communication with the world of the theatre. The Latter Company was well known. Maeve and I had occasionally seen them in Manchester. They toured the provinces with contemporary comedies—what one might call the best of the second-rate stuff that was sure of good houses. I couldn’t help commenting on the envelope lying there under my nose. I prodded it with my finger and said: “I’ve seen these people, captain. They’re pretty good.”
He looked at me abstractedly, turning the letter in his fingers. Then he said: “She doesn’t know how difficult it is to get out here. She’s arriving at Falmouth this afternoon, but how on earth is she going to do the rest of the journey?”
“Are you having a visitor?”
“Yes, my daughter—Mary Latter.”
“Good Lord! She’s your daughter? I’ve seen her act.”
“I wish you hadn’t, Mr. Essex,” he said severely. “I don’t approve of it. Babylonish whoring.”
He continued to stare at the letter. “Flesh and blood,” he muttered. “That’s the trouble, Mr. Essex—flesh and blood. Strange deep things, your own flesh and blood. There’s no turning back on that. I settled that long ago.”
“I’ll bring her from Falmouth,” I said. Instantly, he was all polite deprecation; but I bore him down. I was on holiday. To run the Maeve into Falmouth was as amusing a way of spending the afternoon as any other. And, anyway, I wanted to talk to Mary Latter alone. The captain wished to stay aboard the Jezebel, to make all ready. Despite his daughter’s Babylonish whorings, he understood the duty of hospitality. But he was full of old-fashioned notions about unprotected females. His daughter might not care to entrust herself to my hands. How was she to know that I was not some desperado, capable of anything. So I climbed aboard the Jebezel, and he wrote a letter which he gave me to read. My good friend William Essex... trustworthy... honourable... may safely entrust...
Armed with this introduction, I met Mary Latter at Falmouth Station that afternoon. A small trunk initialled “M.L.” was all the identification I needed. I declared myself and handed her her father’s letter. She read it and smiled. “The dear thing! Are you the novelist?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll shake hands again, just to say thank you. You’ve given me pleasure.”
“And you me.”
“Good. We’re getting on well. How do I get to this hulk of father’s?”
“You’ll see. First, you’d better have some tea.”
“I’d love it.”
She was a friendly and intelligent woman, easy to talk to, with no demure pose of femininity. I judged she was rather older than myself. She had strong regular features which missed good looks. Her dark, purposeful face gave the impression of difficulties met and overcome. She was dressed in the spartan fashion of the time, with a straw “boater,” a white high-necked blouse, and a dark skirt. Anything less suggestive of Babylonish whoring I had never seen. I smiled as I recalled the phrase.
“You are amused,” she challenged me.
I told her what her father had said. “The dear thing,” she smiled again.
We took a cab down to the Market Strand, left her small trunk there, and then walked back to some tea-rooms in the main street. It was a pleasant place, with a bay window from which we could overlook the harbour, full of steamers and little curtseying yachts and packets passing to and fro from Flushing and St. Mawes. She seemed tired. I poured her some tea.
“It’s pleasant here,” she said. “He should be happy. Is he happy?”
“I think so. I see him a good deal, and he seems to enjoy life—in his own way—you know?”
She sighed. “Yes. I know.”
“There’s a whole pack of us down there. I suppose we’re good for him. Especially the children. They keep him busy.”
“He always liked children,” she said, and drummed on the table with her finger-tips, looking out over the colour and animation of the water. “He still—writes—at night?”
I nodded. “He told me all about that. He showed me his papers.”
“We had a little house at Deptford,” she began irrelevantly, “a pretty place with a magnolia tree against the back wall—one of the biggest I’ve ever seen—”
Then she stopped, with almost a blush on her dark, somehow weather-beaten-looking face. “I’m sorry,” she said, again with that bright and kindly and courageous smile. “I was going to tell you the story of my life. So soon. Too soon.”
“Let it keep till we’re in the boat.”
“I suppose it’s the idea of seeing him again after so long. Five years.”
I picked up the story bit by bit while Mary Latter stayed on the Jebezel. It began with the little house in Deptford, and the garden, and the magnolia tree, and the mother who was always there, and the young father there between voyages. A harmonium played a large part in it. Mother played it every night, and they sang hymns; and when father was home he played it and they sang hymns. “And it was very beautiful,” Mary Latter said. “You know, I used to enjoy that exquisite sadness that only young children know anything about: the little dark parlour, with the window opening on to the garden where the magnolia tree was, and the blue summer dusk, and the melancholy hymns that made me think of father away on the sea. We always had the hymns last thing at night—just mother and I—I was an only child. Then I’d go up to my bedroom, and I could see the river, and in the winter there would be lights on it moving through the mist and the moaning of the sirens.”
But the exquisite sadness would turn to joy when father’s white cap with the bit of gold on it was on the harmonium, and father himself was there playing the hymns.
There was a mission chapel that they attended every Sunday, and sometimes on week-nights, too; and when father was home he often preached; and mother and Mary, sitting side by side, were uplifted into some incredible realm where God’s especial favour and protection were over and about them. And in the little house at Deptford there were great wrestlings in prayer, father and mother and Mary all on their knees and father’s voice ringing out into the dusk of the summer garden or filling the room when it was winter, and beyond the curtained windows the ships crawled bellowing through the mist.
“That’s how I grew up,” Mary Latter said, “in an atmosphere of hysteria and exaltation. When school was done with, such as it was, I just stayed at home and helped mother. We went on praying and singing our hymns, seeing hardly a soul except our two selves and on Sundays the people at the mission. She died when I was sixteen.”
It was a blow to the girl brought up trammelled and dependent; and she failed under it. Her father, who had just obtained his first command, decided to take her to sea with him. “It was terrible,” she said, “terrible. To think of it can still make me go hot all over.” She shuddered as she sat beside me on the look-out.
She saw the old man for the first time as a sheer religious maniac. They were on a big square-rigged sailing-ship with a tough and godless crew. The old man, not so old then, had had the harmonium put into his cabin, and the hymn-singing went on. Sailing through a tropic night with the cabin door open so that the crew might have the benefit of what was going forward, he would play upon the harmonium and sing “I’m not ashamed to own my Lord,” and “At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the Light.”
“And there was nothing perfunctory about the Sunday service,” she said. “All hands had to be there and stay the course: hymns and prayers, and one of his impromptu sermons. It was ghastly, the atmosphere of mockery, that he was never aware of. They would parody the hymns, using obscene and blasphemous words; and cry out in the midst of his sermons; ‘Alleluiah!’ ‘Glory to the Lamb!’ all in derision and cruelty. His name, you know, is Jude Iscott, and they began to call him Judas Iscariot. The atmosphere behind his back was horrible: the laughter and contempt, the filthy gestures they would make with the tracts he compelled me to hand to them, all the muttering: ‘Who sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver?’”
She pieced it together very vividly, and I could see the big ship dipping across the blue, white-ridged sea, with her full press of canvas, and the young girl sitting before the harmonium that had been dragged out of the cabin for the service, and old Judas standing bare-headed with his hair and whiskers, iron-grey then, she said, blowing in the wind as he testified to God’s love. And ranged below them would be the officers, decently sedate, and the ring of grinning faces, waiting for the chance to let go in a hymn. You can do anything with a hymn: I had heard the boys in Hulme. It must have been dreadful for the only woman aboard.
“You see, so long as I was ashore, I only met people who liked that sort of thing. Now, it was like being a missionary to cannibals. I was not heroic. I loved him and admired him, and he was a marvellous sailor, but I knew I could never make another voyage with him, and the thought of being all alone in the house at Deptford, for months on end, terrified me. I didn’t know what to do.”
That was settled for her. George Latter came aboard in Sydney and asked to be allowed to work his passage home. A couple of scoundrels had vamoosed, and old Judas took him on.
“Did you ever see George?” she asked. “We played together.”
I shook my head.
“He was very handsome then,” she said, “though he had been ill and was thin and white. He looked comically romantic. I was leaning over the rail when he walked up the gangway: a Byronic shirt showing the hollows under his neck, black ringlets, a tiny bundle on a stick over his shoulder. You never saw anything so Whittingtonian. The thought leapt to the mind. I remember the mate shouted: ‘Here! We don’t want hands for a bloody panto!’”
But the old man talked to Latter in his cabin, gave him a tract, and signed him on for the voyage home. Latter was the son of a wealthy mercantile knight who had already done all the Whittington business. George wanted to get away from it, and used the freedom from supervision that his first term at Oxford gave him to join a touring theatrical company. He had come with them to Australia, had fallen ill in Sydney and been left behind, penniless, to fend for himself. That was the whole of his brief and unremarkable story.
“And, of course, we fell in love on the voyage home,” said Mary Latter. “I had never met anyone like him. When his strength and colour came back, he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, and for that matter I’ve never seen a more beautiful person since—that is till—what d’you think?” She turned to me with her endearing smile.
“I know,” I said. “Oliver.”
“Yes. He’s going to kill ’em. Well, you know, that’s why I was moved to begin telling you things the other day in Falmouth, because The Firebird—that was father’s ship then—ended that voyage at Falmouth. We got in late one afternoon, and at night George and I came up on deck and found the whole harbour swimming under the light of a full moon. I can see it now, especially the grey slate roofs of the town that looked like burnished lead, and I can feel the extraordinary hush of all that canvas stowed, and ropes tied, after months of straining and groaning and flapping. It was heaven. We decided then to slip away together the next day. We did. We were afraid to say a word to father. And I never saw Falmouth again till this week.”
That was how Mary Latter learned the trade of the theatre—joining a travelling company with Latter, marrying him later, getting her experience as the old barn-stormers got theirs—not from academies but from doing the job.
“I have never been a very good actress,” she said modestly, “but I do claim to know the game.”
It was a thin life till Latter’s widower-father died, unreconciled but happily intestate, and George Latter himself, never, I gathered, a strong man, died soon after. And so Mary found herself possessed of a considerable fortune, a profound knowledge of the knockabout life of touring theatrical companies, and a determination to run a company of her own. That was how the Mary Latter Comedy Company came into being, and its founder, a sound business woman, had not diminished but increased her fortune.
Some days after this conversation I brought Mary Latter’s mind back again to the question of Captain Judas. She briefly sketched in the story of his decline. His proceedings aboard ship became more and more eccentric, and reports of his fervent evangelical services began to disturb the owners. They had no complaint about his seamanship, for there were few men who could get more than he could out of a clipper, but when he began to see in every albatross that followed his ship the visible encircling presence of the Holy Ghost, they called him up in London to give some account of himself. This to him was Paul before Festus, and all the board got out of the quiet little man dressed in respectable navy blue was a sudden and vehement call to repent while the acceptable day was yet with them.
And so it was that Captain Jude Iscott, to whom the name of Judas Iscariot had now stuck like a burr, found himself for a long time without a ship, then found himself passing from job to job on the down grade, and at last was to be found among the islands of the East Indies. It was there that it became customary to call him quite simply Captain Judas, his name and antecedents falling away and leaving him adrift among the islands, a fantastic and legendary figure. His long hair and beard, the apocalyptic shining of his eye, his undismayed conviction of a call to bring seafaring sinners to repentance, made him half-loved, half-feared, but wholly beyond the pale of sane if sinful men.
“What finished him,” said Mary Latter, “was a mutiny.”
Her first tidings of the affair were from a newspaper. It recorded the picking up of Captain Jude Iscott and a ship’s cook in an open boat. The captain was unable to give an account of himself, but the cook had some garrulous tale of mutiny to tell. And then the little affair, which after all could not mean much to English newspapers, sank from sight. Mary did not even know what ship her father was commanding; it was not mentioned in the reports. It was merely recorded that the two men had been put ashore at Penang. So what did that woman do but resolve to go to Penang. You will begin to understand my admiration for Mary Latter.
“You see,” she said, sitting there in the stiff formal clothes that she didn’t change even for holiday, “I had just come into all that money. I thought a change would do me good. I was used to knocking about.”
In English lodging-houses, yes. But Penang!
She told in her matter-of-fact way how she arrived in Penang, as though it had been Bournemouth. It seems that there was a hospital of sorts, and she learned that the captain and the cook had both been patients but were now discharged—gone no one knew where, except that they were supposed to be hanging about pending an inquiry.
Mary had plenty of money, and from her hotel—“you never saw such a disgusting place—and the food!”—she sent out well-paid scouts who, before long, brought in the cook.
“I was rather frightened. I never like black men.” But the cook was a decent fellow, a Malay, not so black as Mary thought. His English puzzled her, but she wormed a story out of him. And, when all was said and done, it was a simple enough story of a piece of straightforward cut-and-dried villainy. It was a small steamship that Judas had been commanding. He had an engineer, a mate of sorts, two hands and the cook. They were all villains except the cook. Every one was in the plot to steal the ship. The cook was invited to join the party, pretended that he would do so, and warned the captain. The captain replied by singing on the bridge a hymn in which he informed the world that he was “strong in the strength which God supplies through His eternal Son.”
This did not prevent the plot from coming to a head that night. He was seized as he slept in his cabin, and was told to get into the boat. He resisted. He was frog-marched on deck. “Get in, Judas,” the mate ordered, “and take your thirty pieces of silver with you.” He tossed a contemptuous handful of coins into the boat. The cook attempted a diversion by the heroic method of rushing from the galley with a pan of boiling water which he threatened to hurl upon the mate. Before he could do this, he was knocked on the head by a member of the crew, and he knew nothing more till he woke in the boat. The steamer was out of sight, and, indeed, was never seen again under the name she had borne. There was no wireless in those days.
Judas was in the boat, too. He had been knocked on the head like the cook, and when he recovered he was raving. He picked up the coins from the bottom-boards and flung them into the sea, screaming to the dawn that was reddening the water that he had not betrayed his Master.
The poor Malay passed a few desperate hours. It was with difficulty that he prevented the captain from leaping overboard. There was no water in the boat and no protection from the burning sun. Both men suffered from the wounds in their heads, and it was only the odd chance of being picked up before that day was over that saved their lives.
Such was the Malay’s plain tale, and such were the circumstances that finally tipped Judas’s mind from extravagance to insanity. Mary Latter was taken to him that night by the Malay. The captain who had been teetotal all his life was in a dive behind the water-front, addressing an enthralled company on sin and salvation and denying that he had betrayed his Lord. He was very drunk.
Again her simple narrative gave me a clear picture of that extraordinary scene: the crowded, beer-stinking den, the buzz and ping of a myriad insects about the swinging oil lamps, the throng of evil faces catching the light as they pressed round the little wildly-bearded man with the blazing eye and burning tongue. Into the midst of this Rembrandt group strode without warning the stiff severe figure of the woman who had gone to Penang as though it had been Bournemouth. “They all looked struck silly.” That was her sole comment on what must have been a superb moment.
It seems that she went up to Captain Judas, took him by the arm, and said: “Father, you come with me.” He was helpless, and cried a little, and she and the Malay took him to her hotel and put him to bed. In the morning he was quiet and repentant and pliable. She told him he was going home on the next available ship. “But the inquiry!” he objected; and wherever she went she heard the same dismayed ejaculation: “But the inquiry!” “Damn the inquiry,” said Mary Latter. “Let ’em come and hold it in London.” And whether it was ever held, or what happened if it was, she never heard or cared.
“I couldn’t do any more for him, could I?” she asked anxiously. “For years he was in a little cottage in the Hebrides till he became convinced that a few Catholic priests who went there for a holiday were emissaries of Rome, spying out his doings. Then he became crazy to have a ship again and live up a creek. So I let him buy the Jezebel. Don’t ever mention money to him, will you? I’m sure you wouldn’t, anyway. I like him to write his own cheques. It pleases him to do that. I pay a bit into his account every month. He bought the Jezebel out of it.”
For the first time in all our talks together there was a slight break in the steadiness of her voice. “He keeps accounts,” she said. “It’s heart-breaking, you know. He has insisted on showing them to me. Every penny he owes me is down. It’s all going to be paid back out of royalties when his book’s published.”
The lights sprang up in the Jezebel’s dark side. “I must go,” she said. “If I don’t, he’ll start writing, and I want him to keep off that while I’m here.”
*
When we left Heronwater that time, Mary Latter travelled with us to London. Captain Judas came into Falmouth to see us off. Sam Sawle was there to take the old man back in the Maeve.
All the others being aboard, Judas walked for a while up and down the platform with me and his daughter. He had nothing to say, but pathetically held on to an arm of each of us, keeping us on the move within the space of a quarterdeck. We had to get aboard at last; and when I leaned out of the window as the train was moving away I saw the little man as no more than a bent back and dejected shoulders, already shuffling off the platform, a different figure from the bellicose bantam who had confronted us on our arrival. He would be lonely. It was years, Mary said, since he had “taken” to anybody at all. He would draw his curtains early and get down to work.
I sat in my corner. Opposite to me was Mary Latter, Maeve next to her, with a hand through Mary’s arm. That was a good piece of work! Mary had taken to the child, and I had allowed them to be much together before sounding Mary on the chances of her giving employment to Maeve. First there was the consent of Dermot and Sheila to obtain, and that was not difficult. They were both intelligent enough to know that a real bent, amounting almost literally to a calling, was rare in a child of Maeve’s age, and that to give her her head was the course of wisdom. My own admiration for Mary Latter as a practical, ruthless and dependable woman was able to convince them that Maeve could not be in better hands.
Mary herself talked the matter over with me and Maeve as we walked our little quay one evening. “I hope you’ve got no nonsense in your head,” she said severely to Maeve. “Don’t think you’re going to see your picture on post-cards. You won’t while you’re with me, anyway. Can you type?”
Maeve shook a frightened head. “Well, if you come with me you’ll have to learn to. And to write shorthand, too. You’ll have to write letters for me, and perhaps when I’m tired you’ll have to read to me, and now and then, if you behave yourself, I’ll let you come to the theatre and smell the place, and see how things are done, and get it in your bones. And perhaps in a year’s time we’ll put a little apron on you and a slavey’s cap, and let you go on and say: ‘The rector’s called to see you, ma’am.’ And if you can say that properly, perhaps we’ll let you say something else. See?”
Maeve nodded again, speechless but happy. “Very well, then. So long as you understand. You’ll have to learn as I did—just by doing it. How old are you?”
“Fourteen, madam.”
Mary frowned. “Good gracious! You’re younger than I thought. Never mind. I expect you’ve got more sense than I had at fourteen. Now run away to bed. You won’t get much sleep when you’re with me.”
When Maeve was gone, she said: “Thank you for bringing the child to me. I like her.”
“I think she’s lucky,” I said, “and—d’you mind my saying this?—I think you’re lucky, too. I’m glad she’s going to learn by knocking about. It’s the best way.”
“Yes,” she said, “it’s marvellous. They learn all we can teach them, and then leave us in the lurch.”