It was at the beginning of September, 1906, that Maeve left us. We had a glimpse of her in the following April when the Mary Latter Comedy Company came for a week to Manchester. She had not yet set a foot upon the stage, but she was not the Maeve she had been. She had a calmness and confidence that were lacking when the theatre to her was no more than a dream. Now she was on the threshold. It was a matter no longer of contriving, only of waiting, and she was waiting with a fine self-reliance.
When August came she did not join the party at Heronwater. Mary Latter was going abroad for a month: France and Spain, Italy and Austria: “a regular gadabout,” she called it: and Maeve went with her.
But the party was made up from an unexpected quarter. It came about this way. Dermot and I had been making a round of the Easifix works in Hulme, and we were walking home together when he said: “I’m sorry, Bill, but we shan’t be joining you at Heronwater this year. You know what I mentioned to you some time ago—that night you met Kevin Donnelly—about Rory living in Ireland?”
I nodded grimly.
“Well, it won’t be so long now before he goes, and I thought it would be a good idea if he saw something of Donnelly—got to know him in a free and easy way. There’s a daughter, too—Maggie—a girl about Rory’s age. I’m going to ask them both to spend a holiday with me and Sheila and Rory.”
“And what’s wrong,” I asked, “with spending that holiday at Heronwater?”
Dermot’s eye brightened. “You wouldn’t mind? Or Nellie?”
“Nellie never minds anything. And as for me—well, if you’re determined to send Rory off on this damned silly business, let’s see him while we can. I’m fond of the little beggar.”
Dermot stopped in his tracks. “Silly business!” he exploded suddenly. “Let me tell you—”
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me. We don’t argue on this. That’s all there is to it.”
Dermot took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The touch of opposition had made him sweat. His grey-green eyes were glinting. He took a pull on himself, put on his hat, and said: “I won’t quarrel with you. Come on.” He took my arm.
“Gladly,” I said with a grin. “I’m proud to be seen walking down the street with so distinguished a figure. The lovely hat and all.”
I think Dermot was looking his best at about that time, when he was approaching his fortieth year. He was very tall and thin. His face was long and fleshless and aristocratic, finished off with that provocative point of red beard. His hands, too, seemed to have incredibly lengthened. He had the longest fingers I have ever known on a man, and his wrists were beautifully slender. He dressed the part. He had taken recently to an immense black sombrero, and that day he was wearing a loose grey suit and a green tie. I hadn’t seen Shaw then, but I think he and Dermot must have looked much alike at that time.
“There are two more things I want to tell you,” Dermot said, smacking the side of his leg with a silver-topped malacca cane. “I’m clearing out of Manchester and I’m chucking this Easifix business.”
“Clearing out of Manchester! But, my dear man—”
“And it’s only a matter of time before you do, too. I give you another two or three years at most.”
“But why—?”
“Because a good deal of my work’s in the south now, and I want to expand it. I shall keep on the place here and leave a manager in charge.”
He spoke with determination. Evidently he had worked out his details. “I’ve got premises,” he said, “in Regent Street. I can’t go in for a year. The lease isn’t up till then. I want Rory to be away first.”
He flicked a look at me, and his eyebrows flew up. “Comment on that, damn you,” he seemed to say.
“And look here,” he added. “This Easifix Company. You and I have drawn a tidy income out of it for years, and now I want to sell out and draw a lump of capital out of it. I advise you to do the same. It’s becoming a bore. Now the thing’s swimming along as it is, there’s no need for me. Anyone can design the toys.”
“What about your father?”
“Needless to say, it will be one of the terms of sale that he either retains his position or is retired on a pension. We can see that he gets a good holding of shares. And when I go he can have my house.”
“You’ve got it all fixed.”
“I have. Every point. What about you? Hadn’t you better chuck it? You’re doing very well out of your books.”
“Three thousand last year.”
“And your stock’s rising. When you start in on these plays you talk about, it’ll be five thousand before you know where you are. Oh, yes. You’d better chuck it. And go to London. And get yourself a car. They’re reliable things now. I’m buying one tomorrow. And that reminds me. Our little crew will come down to Heronwater this year by road. I’ve been taking some driving lessons.”
*
And so they did, but they took two days about it. Cars were, as Dermot said, getting reliable; but roads were not yet the glassy racing-tracks they were soon to become. Dermot wired from Bristol that the party had stopped there for the night and would reach Heronwater the next afternoon. I awaited them anxiously, for Heronwater was proving dull. That was the first time I had been there without a party. On the way down Oliver had missed his chattering companions, and was bored to distraction when we reached Falmouth at the end of the second day’s railway journey. The trouble was, he was imagining Rory enjoying the excitements of a new method of travel. “What if the tyres burst?” “What if they go into a ditch?” “What if they arrive with an old horse pulling them?”—though all those glories were already fading into the dim annals of motoring.
And then, there we were, Sam Sawle manœuvring the Maeve to the quay. Captain Judas respectfully handing Nellie ashore. Nellie shuddering away from his unusualness and disappearing up the path with hardly a greeting. Oliver went straight to bed. Nellie was no sooner washed than she was fussing off to the kitchen. Meals to arrange for. This and that. The truth was she hated Heronwater. She couldn’t swim and wouldn’t learn to swim; she disliked being on the water; she was sure the children would be drowned every time they went out sailing in the Rory or the Oliver. And especially, I knew, now that there was no one there but our two selves, she hated the thought of sitting in the inimical quiet of the great trees that surrounded us and the water below us.
We ate a wordless dinner, and then I took a dinghy and pulled across to the Jezebel. It was nine o’clock and the light was fading. Judas’s windows glowed. To my surprise, the rope ladder had been pulled indoors. That was something new. I let out a yell. “Jezebel ahoy!”
One of the windows above me opened cautiously and Judas’s white mop came into sight. “Who’s there?” he demanded.
“Bill Essex. Are you too busy to be bothered with me?”
“No, no!” he cried anxiously. “Oh dear no! One moment. One moment.”
The window was shut, and a moment later Captain Judas peered over the rail. The rope ladder came down and I went aboard. Then the ladder was pulled in again. Judas took me affectionately by the arm and led me below decks, locking the door behind him. “Worse and worse,” he muttered. “Don’t think me inhospitable, Mr. Essex, but I’ve got to draw that ladder in now, for things are getting worse and worse. Sit down.”
He pointed to a comfortable chair under one of the swinging lamps. “Smoke,” he said, and when I had filled and lit my pipe he said, leaning towards me mysteriously: “It’s leaked out!”
I lifted my eyebrows in interrogation and pointed with my pipestem down to the bilge. He nodded. “Believe this or not,” he said. “A week ago I was upon deck when a dinghy came along. A woman sitting in the stern. A parson rowing. What d’you think of that for barefaced impudence! Not even bothering to disguise himself. There he was, collar and all. ‘That’s a nice-looking place,’ he said to the woman. ‘How’d you like to live there?’ She shuddered. ‘Probably full of rats.’ Rats! Think of that, Mr. Essex—rats on the Jezebel! But, of course, that was all part of the plant. ‘Looks all right to me,’ said the parson, ‘like a new pin.’ See the cunning of the man! Flattery! Then he shouts: ‘I wonder if you’d mind our having a look over your boat, sir?’ Can you imagine anything more elementary in the way of a plot? Once have ’em aboard and where am I? Woman! A disguised man, I’ll bet. My answer was to haul in the ladder, shut the door and go below, and the ladder’s been hauled in ever since when I haven’t been about to keep my eyes open.”
“Quite right,” I said. “Take no risks.”
“No risks. That’s the motto. And hurry on with the work. Finish. Publish. And then—Whoosh! Bang! Wallop!”
His face glowed. He beamed over the papers spread upon his littered table. “This is getting near the bone,” he said, tapping the sheet he had been writing upon. “I’m sorry I can’t let even you read it just yet. You forgive me?”
“By all means.”
“There’s one thing holding me up. I must learn Greek.”
“But my dear Captain Judas, that’s going to take you a long time.”
“That has nothing to do with it,” he reproved me. “Greek is necessary. I feel there are many clues hidden away in the original Greek, and therefore I shall learn it. I have sent to London for the necessary books.”
He looked at me calmly, combing his long whiskers with his fingers. I knew that he would do it. His mania could overcome obstacles that, I realised with shame, I could never face in my sanity.
“I see now,” he said, “that I was bigoted in my youth. I despised the wisdom of this world, not knowing how it might help me to the wisdom of the world hereafter. But it is not too late. I am only seventy.”
He slipped his writing into a drawer and turned the key. “Now let me make you a cup of tea,” he cried gaily. “Let us forget the wiles of the Pope and the President of the Wesleyan Conference and that poor fool who rowed by the other day. A Particular Baptist, I dare say. They’ll all go up when the big wallop comes. What a sight! What a sight! Triple tiaras, mitres, birettas, silk hats, shovel boards and Salvation Army caps! All up in the air together. Ha, ha, ha!”
He pattered out into the galley and came back with cups and saucers and his inevitable biscuits. A few moments later the tea was on the table and we were talking sanely of sane things. He wanted to know whether I had heard anything of Maeve and his daughter, when Dermot was coming, how my own work was getting on. It was not till we were on deck again and he had let down the ladder, that he took my arm and whispered nervously, pointing across the river to Heronwater, where a single light showed amid the trees: “Is that the Master’s room?”
“The Master’s? Let me see: whose room is that? Why, it’s Oliver’s.”
“I shall watch it every night,” he said. “The Master’s room! Some night he will come walking to me across the water.”
I ran down the ladder and unfastened the boat. I was hardly aboard before the ladder ran up and the sound of locking doors came to my ears. It was a dark night. I rowed across the inky river, looking now and then over my shoulder towards the crack of light in Sawle’s shack. The Master! The old man was beginning to give me the creeps. I was glad when Sawle, hearing the creaking rowlocks, came down to the water’s edge with a lantern.
*
There was nothing to be done the next day till Dermot and his party arrived. Oliver was on edge for the unusual sight of a motor-car stopping at our gate. Nellie was in the depressed condition that always came upon her when she had to meet people she did not know. If Donnelly and his daughter had been visitors from Mars, she could not have been in a state of more acute apprehension.
Oliver and I spent the afternoon loafing near the gate, and at tea-time a cloud of dust and the honking of a large bulbous horn announced the coming of the party. The car was a big open one. It and everybody in it were whitened like the flour-workers on the Truro quays. Dermot sat at the wheel, his beard extinguished, with Donnelly, smiling quietly, at his side. Sheila, wearing a hat tied down by one of those great lawny scarfs that were all the go at the time, sat behind amid what looked like an immovable jam of children. When Dermot brought the car to a standstill and saluted with grave triumph, they unknotted themselves and were resolved into Rory, Eileen, and, appearing as it seemed from the floor of the car, the girl I knew must be Maggie Donnelly. If I had had any doubt in the matter, it would soon have been ended, for Rory, emerging out of the incredible confusion of that gregarious arrival, and ignoring everybody else, led the child straight up to me, holding her hand, and announced with a sort of shy pride: “This is Maggie, Uncle Bill. She’s just as old as me.”
“She’s just as old-fashioned as you, anyway,” I thought to myself; and there was, indeed, something remarkably alike about those two children. They had the same serious friendly faces, the same straight eyes, grey and one might almost have said prematurely shadowed by thought, the same dark careless hair and pleasant irregular features. They stood there holding hands, very hot and dusty and excited, and Oliver swung carelessly on the gate, looking out of the corner of his eye at the little girl who had apparently this tremendous power of making Rory forget his friend. Then he leapt down from the gate, and, taking no notice of Rory, went straight up to Maggie. He planted himself before her, fresh and undusty, his hair golden in the sunlight. He offered her his hand and smiled radiantly. “I’m Oliver,” he said. “Oliver Essex. Let me show you where to get a wash.”
Maggie followed him politely, and Rory stood in the road, with a frown between his brows, kicking at the dust.
“Hi, Oliver!” I shouted. “Rory wants a wash, too,” and at that Rory set off with a run and went into the house with the others.
*
Kevin Donnelly was a remarkable man. Everybody knows that now: everybody, that is, who knows anything of the recent history of Ireland. His name is on the page, among the martyrs.
But we, who could not foresee what was to come, had to accept into our midst a plain-seeming man who was not equipped with any halo of destiny or, indeed, with anything that we could see beyond a boundless good humour and wholesomeness. The most remarkable thing to us about him then was the way in which self-consciousness died in his presence. I have already described his short, thick-set appearance, the thin hair that was combed carefully across his skull, the big ragged moustache that adorned his homely face. But I had not till now seen the smile that was for ever breaking out, creasing little fans of laughter alongside his eyes, or heard his voice raised in song. There was something about him that instantaneously broke down, not your dignity, but any second-hand armour that had been pretending to be dignity. I have never known any man who could more decidedly, simply by being nothing but his unpretentious self, sweep away pretentiousness from his companions.
I had dreaded his meeting with Nellie, but there was nothing to fear. Donnelly was, among other things—among so many other things!—a simple artisan; and that was something Nellie understood. They shook hands, looked in one another’s eyes, and I had an instant conviction that all was well between them.
Dermot had told me that Donnelly was a silver-tongued orator. His speaking voice was sweet and moving, and ever and again he would break into song. Unself-consciously as he did everything else, he would lift up his voice and sing a song through from beginning to end. If Maggie were by, she would join in and he would leave the main business to her, himself elaborating the harmonies.
And so I remember that holiday not least because it was a holiday of song. It began that night after dinner. We were all sitting in front of the balustrade, looking down upon the water, five grown-ups and four children, when suddenly Donnelly began to sing. He had a rich tenor voice, and he opened his throat and let the music flow out into the night. It was a comic song about an Irish horse-fair. It took us all by surprise and we listened a little uneasily, then with growing appreciation and finally with delight. When he had finished, we applauded, and he smiled, pleased that his efforts were well seen.
“Now then!” he cried. “Something we all know. Open your throat, Maggie, and the rest of you, too.” And he led off into “Annie Laurie,” and soon had us under his spell.
That was how the concert began, and before long we were wrangling like children to have our favourite tunes. Dermot started “On Ilka Moor baht ’at,” and if you can’t join in the marvellous harmonies of Ilka Moor, then you don’t deserve a sing-song like the one we had that night. We were on the last glorious absurd verse—“That’s ’ow us gets wer oan back”—when I was suddenly aware of a rustling in the shrubs that lined the path to the river. The next moment, the white hair and beard of Captain Judas showed ghostlike against the gloom. He stood still, watching us breathlessly; and hardly had the last harmony faded across the river than, to my surprise, and to the consternation of those who had not seen him, he suddenly began to sing in a high cracked voice: “When I survey the wondrous Cross.”
It was a dreadful moment, charged with the possibility of fiasco, but Donnelly whispered “Maggie!” and those two trained voices struck together into the hymn, strongly supporting and carrying forward the trembling reed of Captain Judas. Then Nellie began to sing, and then Dermot’s bass threaded powerfully into the harmony. Soon we were all singing, the captain, pale still against the gloom of the tunnel, solemnly beating time with his skinny hand. The words rolled through the woods and across the water.
When I survey the wondrous Cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
Donnelly knew the hymn and led majestically into the beginning of each verse. We sang it through to the end:
Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were an offering far too small.
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my life, my soul, my all.
The words died away in a falling cadence. Judas remained for a moment with his hand upraised, his head lifted to the dark sky; then suddenly he was there no more. Donnelly rose. “That was beautiful,” he said. “That was the most beautiful of all.”
The party split up, drifted away to the house, Sheila and Nellie rounding up the children for bed. Donnelly remained, his elbows on the balustrade, his chin on his hands. I stood for a moment at his side. He seemed to be deeply moved. “Sorrow and love flow mingled down,” he murmured. “Sorrow and love—mingled—always.”
I think that, whatever had happened, I should have remembered that night and the disturbing irruption of Captain Judas, turning so suddenly the thoughts of all of us to that emotional key which broke up the party and sent us scattering this way and that, as though nothing further were now to be said. But I remember it the more poignantly because the hymn we then sang was the one which, years later, Donnelly’s gaolers heard him singing the night before they led him out and shot him against a wall. It is now part of the Irish legend, Donnelly’s hymn in the prison; and I have often wondered whether in his loneliness that night he thought, and perhaps gained some strength from the thought, of us sitting with him in friendship, and the quiet night, and the trees, and the river running to the sea.
*
With wraps over our bathing-suits and towels thrown like mufflers round our necks, we ran down the path to the quay the next morning. When Donnelly threw off his wrap I noticed the great depth of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, the solid moulding of his legs. We all stood there on the edge of the quay, waiting to leap together. The sun rained down in a diamond sparkle on the water. “Now did you ever see a prettier sight than that?” Donnelly shouted. “The colours of ’em—like jockeys waiting for the flag.”
Certainly we had come out very colourfully. Oliver was in the lightest blue, Rory in dark red, Eileen, who was standing there arm-in-arm with Maggie, was wearing green, and Maggie was wearing white. Sheila’s bathing-dress was bright canary yellow and Dermot’s maroon. Mine was a vivid scarlet, and Donnelly’s was barred in red and white.
“Sure, we all look grand,” Donnelly shouted. “But where’s Mrs. Essex?”
“Don’t worry about her,” I said. “She doesn’t bathe.”
“In you go,” said Donnelly, and as I leapt I was aware of the coloured figures leaping on either hand. I came up from the dive and lay over on my back. Then I saw that Donnelly had not dived. With his wrap once more about him, he was disappearing up the path. We were still in the water when he came back. He was dressed in flannel bags and an old white sweater. He went to Sam Sawle’s shack and banged on the door. I came out and dried myself and joined them. “Mrs. Essex has no bathing-dress,” Donnelly said, as though that explained everything. “She’ll go in to Truro with Maggie this afternoon and buy one.”
“But she doesn’t swim,” I said.
“There’s fun to be had in the water without swimming,” he said. “We’re just going into that.”
Sam Sawle managed to produce four barrels, and he and Donnelly tinkered about on the quay for the rest of the day. By sundown they had fabricated a fine raft, with rope loops scalloped upon its edge and a cocoanut matting floor. The next morning I was with them when they considered the question of mooring it. “There’s a great chunk of concrete down there, with an iron ring in it,” Sam said, pointing to the water just off the quay. “There used to be a mooring-buoy fixed to it.”
Donnelly got into his bathing-suit, and we took out a long thin rope in a dinghy. It was coiled to run out easily after him when he dived. He filled his gorgeous chest, stood erect on the stern seat for a moment, then went down like an arrow. We could see his white limbs, ripple-distorted and as if themselves fluid in the water, fumbling about on the bottom. Then he shot up. His fingers splintered the surface. He hurled the end of rope aboard. Sawle caught it and knotted it quickly round a thwart. Donnelly took a great gulp of air and lay over on his back. Then with finny motions of the hands he paddled himself ashore. Sawle watched him with admiration. “I’d never worry about the children if they were out with ’e,” he said.
Dermot had rowed up in the praam. “Hear that, Bill?” he grinned. “Lay it to heart, my boy; lay it to heart.”
Sam Sawle fastened the thin rope to one that was as stout as a cable, and we hauled that with difficulty through the ring in the concrete. Then that stout rope was attached to the bottom of our raft, which we had launched with shouts of delight and which the children had christened the Kevin. And the Kevin made a glorious diving raft for the rest of the holiday. Donnelly himself rowed Nellie out to it, wearing the first bathing-dress she had ever put on in her life. She sat for some time on the rocking raft, looking at once pleased and distrustful. With infinite patience, Donnelly, swimming round and round the raft as confidently as a porpoise, with his sparse wet hair in thin black streaks upon the white of his skull, persuaded her to grip the scallops of rope, to lower herself into the water, to hang on, and to kick. Soon she was off and on the raft with confidence. But, more wonderful than that, before the holiday was over she had made the transit from raft to quay steps with a rapid anguished breast stroke, Donnelly at her side covering the distance with one powerful clip of the legs and reach forward of the arms. He was on the steps to help her ashore, to put a wrap about her, and to send her to the house with an encouraging word. Then with a leap like a buck, he dived far out, came up and trudgeoned across the water. Oliver and Rory watched him worshipfully. “Teach us that, Mr. Donnelly,” they shouted. “Teach us!”
“Come on, then,” he said, blowing the moustache away from his lips. “Dive in now, and come here to me.” They flashed together from the raft, eager and emulous.
Dermot and I, tousle-headed, standing on the quay, looked at one another, towels in hand.
“All right, Bill?” he asked, quizzing me.
“Yes,” I said. “It seems to be all right. Yes, I think so.”
And I felt a bit ashamed that I had never bothered to teach Nellie that rudimentary breast stroke that had filled her with pride, that Donnelly had so easily dragged her out of the kitchen. I went up to the house wondering whether in a great many things I had not given up too soon with Nellie. But it was too late to start bothering about that now. I looked back across the river, and saw Oliver and Rory patiently following the shouted instructions of Donnelly. Leaning on the rail of the Jezebel, Captain Judas was watching them through a pair of glasses.
*
It was part of the Heronwater tradition that people came down to breakfast when they felt like it. Dermot was there, sitting at the long refectory table that he had himself made, and Donnelly, Nellie and Rory had appeared too. “Nellie,” Dermot was saying as I entered the room, “I am an ambassador, charged by this sprig”—he waved his long hand towards Rory—“to make a request which he is afraid to make for himself. Namely, luncheon sandwiches for two.”
“That’s easy,” said Nellie. “Why didn’t you ask me, Rory?”
Rory slowly coloured. “Because there’s a woman in the case,” said Dermot.
“I know a good place for blackberries,” said Rory, keeping his face down to his plate. “I’ve promised to take Maggie there. It’s a long way. You have to take lunch,” he added defensively.
“I know it,” said Oliver, who had come into the room. “I know a short cut. I’ll show you.”
“We’re going the river way,” Rory said, his earnest pug face puckered. “We don’t want a short cut.”
“I’ll take some lunch and go the short cut and meet you,” Oliver promised.
Rory looked up, with the frown on his face deepening. “I’m showing her, not you,” he said.
Oliver stood by the door, very tall for his age, beautiful with the golden brown of sun and sea on him, and a flush spread up his face to the very roots of his weather-bleached fair hair. Rory didn’t want him, and had said so. “Very well,” he said, and came and sat at the table, lordly and self-possessed. Rory looked at him with anguish in his ugly face, affection in his straight eyes; but Oliver’s eyes were aloof. Rory’s grappling for a contact came to nothing.
Oliver was on the quay when Rory and Maggie set off in the dinghy. He made it appear that he was there by accident. He kept his back to the departing boat and skiddled flat stones across the water. “Now, Oliver,” said Donnelly when the dinghy was out of sight. “What about that trudgeon? Undivided attention. You’ll beat Rory at it yet.”
Oliver picked up another stone and skiddled it across the water. “I don’t think I’ll bother, thank you,” he said, and didn’t look round.
*
I had not yet done any writing at Heronwater. It had been simply a holiday place; but that day I found my mind in the jumping dithery state that meant I must sit down and sort out my ideas. Fortunately, I was deserted. Oliver and Eileen went off with Sam Sawle in one of the sailing dinghies, taking food, a kettle of water and a teapot with them. They would have a good day. Sam would land them on some beach where there was plenty of dry driftwood; they would make a fire, which was always a satisfactory thing to do; they would bathe, and then have one of Sam’s “nice hot cups of tea,” and altogether they would have the sort of generally-messing-about day that the district could so excellently provide.
Dermot and Sheila, Donnelly and Nellie went off in the Maeve, intending to make a day of it, too, with the Helford River for their destination. You see how Nellie was flowering? Nothing I could have said or done would have prevailed upon her to spend a day in the motor-boat; but there she was, and there was Donnelly, his rich voice rolling back over the water, as the boat disappeared round a bend, upraised in The Wearing of the Green. He certainly had a way with people.
I walked slowly up the path to the house. Never before had I had Heronwater to myself. I told the maids not to bother me with lunch, and sat down at my table in the long room that looked out on the lawn and the balustrade. I always enjoyed the actual physical business of writing, and I was in full enjoyment of the delightful process that morning, pipe going, mind easy, thinking how good a place Heronwater was proving for that sort of job, when a shadow crossed the window. I did not look up. I thought perhaps one of the maids had passed. But the shadow came again, and when I raised my head with some annoyance I saw that Captain Judas was pacing the lawn, his hands clasped behind his back, his whiskered chin sunk in meditation upon his chest.
I did my best to ignore him. Let him think I had not seen him. I went on with my work. But to and fro the shadow went. There was no putting it aside. I looked up with a frown, but though Judas must have seen me, I could not catch his eye. He was evidently determined to play the part of infinitely patient waiter; but my own patience was exhausted and my mind thrown off the track. I got up and went to the open window.
“Good-morning,” I said crossly. “I was trying to get a bit of work done.”
“I hope I haven’t disturbed you,” he said politely. “Not for worlds—”
“You seem to want to speak to me.”
He combed his white fingers through the glossy white silk of his beard. “I want you to come to the Jezebel and see something,” he said, looking nervous, like a child who fears its request will be refused.
“Very well. I must leave this now till after lunch. But look, Captain Judas, you must promise me: when I’m writing you mustn’t hang about,” I smiled as pleasantly as I could. “We’re both writers—eh? How would you like to be interrupted just when the ideas are beginning to bubble—eh?”
The thought flattered him, and he began at once effusively to denounce his own dreadful manners. “Unpardonable, Mr. Essex. I’m going—at once. Some other time, when neither of us is in the divine grip—” And he began to make off swiftly on his tiny feet.
I climbed through the window, caught him up, and put my arm through his. “So long as we understand one another for the future,” I said, “that’s all right. Now what is it you want me to see?”
We were at the water’s edge, and he waved me into his dinghy. “Wait,” he said mysteriously. “I came this morning,” he was all apology again, “because I saw everyone go but you. I can’t often get you alone, and this is between you and me. Understand? I suspected it. Now I know.”
We climbed aboard and went down to his big sitting-room. There was a litter of packing paper on the table. His long-expected Greek primer and lexicon had arrived. He stood me in front of the fireplace, cocked his head expectantly, and said: “Well?”
I was puzzled. I didn’t understand what the bother was about. All I could see was that the picture of the crucifixion which had been over the fireplace was gone, and in its place was another picture, unframed, held to the wall, with drawing-pins. Upon this the old man’s gaze was fixed. “Well?” he said again, rather impatiently. “Don’t you recognise him?”
I looked more closely. It was a reproduction of a painting by Holman Hunt or Millais—I forget which—showing the boy Jesus in the workshop of Joseph the carpenter. The child stood there with his arms outstretched, and behind him on the wall was the shadow of the cross.
“Guard him well,” Judas said solemnly. “And remember I am at your side. They’ll see,” he said in a sudden rising fury, “they’ll see if I’m a betrayer.”
“I don’t understand,” I said rather coldly, though I knew at once what shape the old man’s mania was taking now.
“You don’t understand,” he said sadly. “Even you.” He shook his head. “But I—I suspected it long ago, and when this came, wrapped round my books, I knew. Why should it have been sent to me?” he demanded, his excitement rising again. “It might have gone to anyone, but it came to me—to me. It confirms it. It confirms everything.”
I looked hard at the picture. There was no likeness to Oliver, save the likeness of youth and beauty. What could I do? How tell this poor crazy chap that his sustaining dreams were baseless and abortive? I simply shook my head. “I don’t understand,” I said again.
“Well,” he said, “guard his youth, Mr. Essex. Let him play. Let him be a child. Let him enjoy the happiness of this beautiful world. Now I know why I was sent to this place.” His one living eye brightened and burned and he took on the strange apocalyptic look that visited him from time to time. “Let him be happy,” he said. “His time will come again, his hour of darkness will descend, he will be betrayed. But this time they will know where Judas stands.”
I stumbled up the steps into the sunlight. I couldn’t listen to him any more. His was the only boat there. I got into it and rowed swiftly away. Let him stay there. He couldn’t reach me again today. He was beginning to give me the creeps.
*
I wasn’t in the mood to go on with my work. I went up to the house and got into a bathing-suit, then lay on the raft, sunning myself. Presently the sound of a propeller wove itself into the summer stillness, the gentle lapping of water, the rustle of leaves, the shrill cries of the oystercatchers darting in little orderly companies here and there. I rolled over and lay on my stomach, chin cupped in hands, watching the approaching ship. She was a small grimy-looking customer, carrying a high piled deck cargo of timber and flying the Danish flag. In a moment or two, as my raft began to rock in her wash, I saw her name, lettered on her black rounded stern: Kay Kobenhavn. On the bridge of the Kay of Copenhagen was an officer who with one hand was holding his white gold-braided cap and scratching a generous growth of the yellowest hair I have ever seen on man. It glowed in the sunlight like a great sunflower. The man was looking towards the Jezebel, and as he passed he pulled a string and a spout of steam projected itself into the still air and a hoarse scream, twice repeated, burst from the whistle.
I saw Judas rush on deck and wave frantically towards the Kay of Copenhagen. “Kay ahoy!” he shouted. “Jansen! Jansen!”
The yellow-headed officer waved his cap and replied, “Jezebel ahoy! Judas!”
“See you tonight,” Judas bawled, megaphoning through his hands to the retreating stern of the Kay.
“Ja! Tonight!” Captain Jansen answered. Judas watched the ship out of sight, twisting her way up the river to Truro. Then he began to walk the deck on his small springy feet, very swiftly, very excitedly.
*
Jansen had a soft place in his heart for Judas. So much we soon discovered; and when I say we I mean Dermot, Donnelly and myself. We had to meet Jansen. Nothing else would suit Captain Judas. As soon as Judas’s boat was returned that afternoon, he used it to come over and tell me what a great and wonderful man Jansen was. It was an incoherent narrative, and I could disentangle little from it except an impression that Jansen had known Judas in the days when the old man had all his wits about him, and had continued to treat him as a human being when a good many other people had ceased to do so. Jansen came once or twice a year to Truro with timber, and the friends then foregathered on the Kay and, I gathered with some surprise, dazzled Truro with the outrageous unconventionality of their conduct. I think it was the prospect of being present on one of these occasions, the opportunity to see Captain Judas painting Truro red, that made me accept the invitation at once and promise to bring Dermot and Donnelly.
We set off after dinner by road in Dermot’s car. Judas was looking unusually spruce. His small shoes twinkled, his hair and beard looked electric with brushing, and his navy-blue clothes were as neat as a midshipman’s. “You’ll see!” he chuckled, sitting next to me on the back seat. “A Norseman! A Viking! A mighty man of valour!”
“Come on, boys,” Donnelly shouted. “Get in tune for this nautical occasion.” And he began to sing “As I was a-walking down Paradise Street, with a way—hey—blow the man down.” We all sang as Dermot’s car raised the dust along the quiet road, even Judas, not given, I had imagined, to secular melody, coming in with a reedy line here and there.
We parked the car in the timber-yard at whose quay the Kay was lying. Judas danced excitedly before us up the gangplank. “Jansen!” he piped. “Jansen! Where are you? We’re here. I’ve brought my friends.”
“Goom in! Ja! Enter. Entrez,” Jansen’s deep voice boomed, and Judas made his way before us to the cabin. Jansen was shaving. A bit of looking-glass was propped against a jug on the cabin table. His yellow mop flared above a white mask of lather. He stood up when Judas entered, and then I saw why he had been sitting down to shave. He was a giant, and he advanced towards Judas doubled up, as though he were about to spring, suddenly gathered the little man in his arms and hugged him to his chest. I expected to hear Judas’s ribs snap, but Jansen put him gently back on to the ground as though he were something precious and stood there, bent over him, a grin splitting his frothy mask. “Ja,” he growled. “Mein frent Judas, mon ami—ja? Amigo. Yes, yes. Goom in, señores.”
He continued to growl in a variety of languages, as he grasped my hand and made the bones crack. “I resume now to shave myself. Asseyez-vous, messieurs.”
He finished off the business with a large cut-throat razor, and his face was revealed a gleaming pink, hale as a child’s, with a curling golden moustache, and with bright blue eyes, shining with extraordinary candour. He looked at Judas, sitting in a chair with his tiny feet barely touching the ground, grinned as though the spectacle pleased him, and began to growl: “Ah, mein frent Judas...” I thought he was about to rush to the little man and squeeze him again, but he merely punched him, saying: “You save my life? No?” He nodded to us: “Ja, he save my life. I relate to you cette conte-là. But not now. Nein. First, señores, we light—no?—ignite?—Truro. But now I wash. I give myself respectfulness.”
He heaved the shirt off his back with one over-the-head pull, revealing a torso of golden bronze, rippling with muscle. Then he stepped outside the door, straightened, and we could see nothing of him from the shoulders up. I strolled through the door after him, and there he was, sluicing his face, neck and body from a bucket of water that stood on a tub. He turned to me, grinning: “Goot! Eh? To refresh the ideas! So!” His big white teeth gleamed in his ruddy face. He rolled the towel into a rope, slung it over his shoulders, and with an end in each hand sawed to and fro, grunting with pleasure.
He went back into the cabin and dressed, putting on a white shirt, a stiff white collar, a black tie, and a double-breasted navy-blue jacket. Finally he slapped his white, gold-braided cap at a slant upon his head. “Thus one is ready. Is it not, old captain?”
Judas beamed and nodded.
“Then we go.”
He walked before us, folded up, till we got out of the cabin, then he straightened to his great height, which must have been six foot four, filled his lungs with air on the deck, and drummed heartily on his chest with both fists. He looked round with his white-toothed grin at Judas. “I eat you—eh? One—two—fini!”
Judas smiled as if he would have been only too pleased to provide a morsel for Jansen. He tried to slap his friend heartily on the back, but it was as near as nothing a smack on the bottom, so that we all got ashore laughing and made our way in good humour through the timber-yard.
Jansen ashore after a voyage was clearly a man of one idea. He leaned his great shoulders against the first pub door we came to, and we all tailed after him: Dermot, Donnelly, myself, with Captain Judas in the rear. Jansen picked Judas up and sat him on a tall stool at the counter. “So, my hero, I see you better,” he said.
There was no one in the bar but a barmaid who looked like a clergyman’s daughter. She put down a novel and served us with reluctance. “For the love of God,” Donnelly whispered, “decide what you’re going to drink, and stick to it. This man’s dangerous.” And aloud: “A John Jamieson, miss, please.” Dermot and I ordered whiskey too, Jansen rum and Judas ginger-beer.
The barmaid murmured as though it were a litany: “One Jamieson, one Haig, one White Horse, one rum, one ginger-beer.” Donnelly paid; we took up our drinks and made for a table in the corner of the room. We were seating ourselves when Jansen banged his already empty glass on the counter, had it refilled, and then joined us. It was not that he wanted to dodge standing his turn; he stood his turn with the rest of us; but he drank twice for every drink of ours. In between rounds he would, as it were, stand himself one and throw it off at a gulp.
There were five rounds that night, in five different pubs, so that Jansen had ten rums, which, as I understand these things, is pretty good going. He drank them, too, and Donnelly drank his five John Jamiesons, which is more than Dermot and I did. After the first two, we developed the technique, which was cowardly but efficient, of leaving the greater part of the drink in the glass. Even so, the very atmosphere of the pubs, and the hilarity of Jansen, and the frequent song-bursts of Donnelly, gave the evening a somewhat unusual texture for me, and woven against that background was the epic which Jansen, after four or five drinks, began to develop.
The affair which made Judas a hero in his eyes had happened, it appeared, the best part of twenty years before. Jansen was a ship’s boy, making his first voyage. He insisted, in the pubs as we sat smoking our pipes, and in the quiet streets as we wandered from one bar to the next, on elaborating every detail: his boyish misery, the rotten food, the kicks and cursing, the gradual demoralisation of his whole being, so that when in the North Atlantic the gale burst upon his ship he had nothing left, no reserves, nothing but sheer funk, terror.
He certainly learned everything about the sea that first voyage. He took refuge in the galley at the height of the storm. “I am afraid. Ja. I shiver. There is nothing—rien du tout—but a few little bits of sail left up there; and I am afraid, sick in my guts, that the captain say: ‘Goddam you! Go and fix them sails.’ So I hide in the galley.”
The ship was wallowing, soggy, full of water. The galley floor was awash, and the galley walls shuddered under the thump of the waves. The next thing Jansen knew was that there were no galley walls to be thumped. The galley went, and he with it, choking and spluttering as though he were already done for. He was slammed by the rush of the wave against a hatch coaming, hung on, and when the wave had passed over, he saw the mainmast lying across the deck, snapped off at the foot, holding to its stump by a sinew or two and trailing its peak in the sea. It had smashed the captain and two men in its fall. The mate yelled to him to get a hatchet and help cut the wreckage free.
“And now, señores, I am not afraid. I am brave. Ja. I run to get the hatchet, and then I am in the water. Like that.” With an undulating motion of his huge outspread hand he swept a cork off the table and sent it spinning across the room.
So Jansen was spun into the North Atlantic, the only man of that crew to come out of it alive. He was washed against the floating galley, clung to it, and five minutes later saw the ship vanish in the grey water of the storm. “But my life, it is—how?—enchanted? charmed?—si, señores. I am a charmed life. There is the ship with my hero!”
He slapped Judas’s knee. The little captain looked at him affectionately, and kept his eyes modestly averted from the rest of us.
The floating galley, with Jansen clinging to it more dead than alive, was seen from the ship, but in the terrific weather no boat could be lowered. Jansen told his story well. Now he was down in the trough, gazing up despairingly at the glassy, dark-green, white-flecked wall whose tattered and toppling summit shut out from view all else that was in the world. Then the wall slipped its whole weight and bulk under him and his frail ark, and lifted him up and into and through that dither and surging of its crest. Thence, for a moment, he would see the ship, and wave with the last of his ebbing strength, then down again he would plunge into the black gulf flecked as if with snow by ten million bubbles.
In one of those seconds when he was uplifted by the water and was gazing with all hope and all despair in his eyes he saw a man poised for a second on the ship’s rail, then saw him drop off into the boiling of the waves.
“It is my little captain—ja—so small—so big a hero—eh? But he is not then a captain—no—he is no one—no long hair, no whiskers.”
Judas self-consciously combed his beard with his fingers and sipped his ginger-beer, as Jansen threw the eighth or ninth rum down his throat and reached the climax of his story. For a time, no sign of the rescuer. Upon the crest, his eyes searching the tormented water; down into the trough, with hope dying and his breath sobbing; and then Judas’s face breaking suddenly through the white fringe of a wave.
“Ah! Just so little a man, señores; but his face is like the sun coming out of the night. I lean over and grab him—so tight!—and pull him on to the galley. I feel I am saving him, for already I am so big, and already he is so little. Then he fastens his rope round a plank of the galley, and we are in tow. Ah, señores, just a little rope, no thicker than that”—he held up his thumb—“with all the Atlantic ocean rushing over it, but I am no longer sobbing, because the little rope is tied to the galley.”
“Praise the Lord,” said Judas suddenly, “and forget not all his benefits.” Then he began to sing:
Throw out the life-line, throw out the life-line;
Someone is sinking today.
He leaned back in his chair, with his eyes closed, holding his glass in his left hand and beating time with his right. The barmaid, who, here, was not so disdainful as the clergyman’s daughter, contemplated his performance for a while in silence, then said sympathetically: “You’d better be taking Dad home.”
“I think so, too,” said Dermot, dexterously concealing his full whiskey glass behind a jug; and we all clattered out into a night which was very dark though the sky was starry.
Jansen was as firm on the ground as an oak. “Now you all come back to the Kay—ja?—and we make some grog.”
We turned down this proposal with vigour.
“Then my hero will come and spend the night with me—eh, Judas, mon vieux?”
There could be no objection to that, since Judas would find the grog no temptation. We watched the tall figure of Jansen mount the gangplank, his head appearing for a moment among the stars. He stooped and took Judas under the arms as though he had been a child, and held him aloft for our inspection. “You see him—eh? Now you know why I shall do anything for him. Ja, anything. Now I make the grog. Buenos noches, señores.”
We saw him bend double and go into the cabin. Then Dermot started up the engine. The night air blowing in our faces was good, and Donnelly opened his throat and sang:
If you’re the O’Reilly men speak of so highly,
Gorblimey, O’Reilly, you are looking well.
The Maeve, with the luggage aboard, was ready at the quay to take us to Falmouth, and Oliver, Nellie and I were at the gate to see Dermot depart with his overcrowded car. They went off in a halo of dust. Donnelly, sitting on the back seat, had Rory on one side of him and Maggie on the other. One of his arms was round each.
We made our way down the path winding through the wood, which already was touched here and there with red and yellow, and got aboard. The Kay was going by, outward bound. Jansen, on the bridge, blew his whistle, and Judas came out to wave. They exchanged farewells across the water, and when the Kay was round the bend we, too, shouted good-bye. Judas fluttered his handkerchief and then rushed below, as though the sight of so many friends leaving him were more than he could bear.
All the way home that time Oliver nagged about motor-cars. When are we going to have a car? Can’t we afford a car as well as Uncle Dermot? Think how nice it would be to save all that journey into Falmouth and go straight to Truro by road.
“I like going in to Falmouth,” I said.
“So do I,” said Nellie. “For goodness’ sake, Oliver, give over whining for everything you fancy. How many boys d’you think get the things you have? Rowing-boats and sailing boats and I don’t know what. D’you think your father had these things when he was a boy?”
“There weren’t motor-cars when father was a boy.”
“And we got on very well without them,” said Nellie. “Nasty smelly things they are, anyway. I shouldn’t like to eat bread delivered in those things.”
Oliver flushed. No one had ever told him in so many words the story of the Moscrop bakery, but from things he had heard he had put the facts together, even to my inglorious employment as van-boy. I knew it was a topic he did not like. I watched his flush with amusement—a flush so beautiful on the skin that was golden brown like one of old Moscrop’s loaves. “You needn’t bring that up,” he said.
There! Now it was out! That was the first time he had allowed his resentment to escape in words.
“Bring what up?” Nellie asked sharply.
“You know what.” Oliver squirmed on his seat and looked desperately unhappy.
Nellie looked at him, the holiday colour draining from her face. “You little snob,” she said venomously. “If you’re referring to the work your grandfather did all his life and that your father did when he was a young man, then I only hope you’ll do something half as useful when you grow up.”
Oliver’s colour deepened. He did not answer, and Nellie went on, after a shocked, wondering silence: “Well, I never did? I never expected to hear that you were ashamed of your father. Let me tell you this, my boy; if you’re half the man your father is, then some woman will be lucky.”
This was very handsome of Nellie. She was not in the habit of paying me compliments; but also it seemed to me rather amusing. Oliver was being a little fool; no doubt about that; but Nellie, I thought, was taking it with rather a heavy hand.
“Well, Oliver,” I said, “you seem to have discovered that your grandfather kept a baker’s shop and that I drove his van. Tell me, honestly, d’you think that matters a damn?”
“William!” Nellie exclaimed.
“Do you, Oliver?” He looked slowly from Nellie’s outraged face to my amused and smiling one. He shook his head.
“Good!” I said. “Because there it is. If you don’t like it, you can lump it.”