He was the best man of them all. He too looked vigilant, far-seeing and courageous, but there was no ruthlessness about Christopher Martyn. His face was clear-cut and sensitive; his figure spare, held very upright with the shoulders braced. There was something taut about his whole bearing, like a rope that is stretched too tightly. One felt that no strain would break his courage but that it might snap that difficult balance of mind and nerves that is beyond control. For this man the point beyond which a human creature can suffer and be sane would come sooner than with the majority. . . . And he looked absurdly young to be a sea captain.
David left him abruptly and went back to the engravings of the carvings and presently his cry of delight moved the placid Hilary not only to move in his chair but to inquire mildly what the matter was. David unhooked a drawing from the dark corner where it hung and sweeping some empty cups and saucers to the floor laid it on the tea table.
“There!” he cried. “Look at that!”
Hilary, observing it, said of it as he had once of Little Village and the harbour, that it was rather pretty. David could have slain him.
“But, Uncle Hilary, don’t you see what it is?”
“I should say it was the design for the carved prow of a ship, or the poop, or something of that kind,” said Hilary, pleased with his perspicacity.
“But don’t you recognize it?” demanded David.
“No,” said Hilary. “I don’t come here often, you know, and hung over there in that dark corner I can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”
“All we Eliots are a lot of damn fools,” said David hotly, forgetful of his language in his worked-up condition. “We’ve lived at Damerosehay for donkey’s years, amiably wondering how that carving in the drawing-room got here, and never even thinking of comparing it with these drawings at the Hard.”
“Why should we?” asked Hilary, placidly reading out the lettering beneath the engraving. “ ‘Detail of the carving about the prow of the East-Indiaman Blue Bird. Designed by Captain Christopher Martyn, executed by Jonathan Cleeves, Master-carver at the Hard.’ I don’t see,” he continued, puffing clouds of gentle smoke, “what it has to do with the carving at Damerosehay.”
“But, Uncle Hilary,” shouted David. “It’s it!” and his excited finger traced the lovely leaping spirals of the wood that swirled upwards like waves tossed by the wind.
“It is a little like,” agreed Hilary thoughtfully. “But not the same, surely?”
“Of course it’s not the same!” said the exasperated David. “What we have at Damerosehay is not the whole prow, it’s just bits of it pieced together. But, my God, how marvelously done; I bet you he did it himself.”
“Who?” asked the bewildered Hilary.
David fetched the picture of Captain Martyn from the wall, removed a sugar basin and a vase of flowers from the table to the floor with the cups and saucers, and laid it beside the other. Hilary compared the two inscriptions beneath the two engravings and intelligence dawned. He even went so far as to be deeply interested. “Could this Christopher Martyn have lived at Damerosehay?” he wondered. “Martyn. The same name as old Jeremy. Was he Jeremy’s father? But Aramante? Where does she come in?”
“That’s what I’d give a twelve-months’ income to know,” said David. He paused while an indignant waitress came in, restored the engravings to their proper place and the crockery from the floor to the table, gave them the tepid tea which was all they deserved, and departed. “Obadiah says she was Jeremy Martyn’s mother; yet she does not seem to have been Captain Martyn’s wife. . . . You would say that was rough luck on poor Jeremy.”
He allowed this to sink into Hilary’s slow mind with a rather wicked pleasure. It looked to him as though Christopher and Aramante had been guilty of a love affair rather after the style of his and Nadine’s. It was not only in this generation, as Hilary had implied, that the welfare of the children was disregarded for the sake of love.
But Hilary was not disconcerted. He looked across the room at the portrait of Captain Martyn, lit by the westering sun, and said, “No. That man would not have done such a thing.” Then he stirred his tea thoughtfully. “Is it possible that the story of the wrecked grain ship is not a legend after all, but true, and that it was Captain Martyn’s ship?”
“But of course,” said David.
“Why of course?” asked Hilary.
“The Blue Bird. The ship’s mascot. Don’t you remember that according to Obadiah’s grandfather it was carried ashore singing lustily?”
“That might have been sheer coincidence,” said Hilary.
But David shook his head. He knew it wasn’t. And he knew, too, why the character of the drawings in Captain Martyn’s book had changed. His mind as well as his body had been injured by that appalling storm. A little hesitantly, as though it were a friend’s confidence that he did not like to betray, he told Hilary about those drawings.
Hilary was very interested and very pitiful. There had been a time in his own life when he had wondered how much longer his mind would stand the strain of physical pain. He had never forgotten the horror of that time. He too, as well as David, felt that Christopher Martyn was his friend. “I wonder,” he said, “if the old Vicar’s diaries would throw any light on the story?”
“The old Vicar’s diaries?” echoed David.
“Yes. My old predecessor. He was at Fairhaven for years, you know. He must have known Jeremy Martyn well. I found a lot of his old diaries in a cupboard. They’d been overlooked when his things were cleared out of the house after his death.”
“Didn’t you read them?” asked the astonished David. Really, old Hilary’s lack of curiosity was beyond all words.
“Only here and there,” confessed Hilary. “They seemed to be mostly jottings about his garden and what he had to eat. But I kept them. I thought I would go through them thoroughly one day when I had nothing better to do. . . . But the state in which the old boy left his parish has given me something better to do for the last twenty years.”
“I’ll go through them,” said David. “I’ll pick them up on my way home tonight.”
Tea finished, David asked the present owner of the Master-Builder’s House if he might buy the engraving of Captain Martyn for any price he liked to mention. The offer was refused. These sea captains belonged to the Hard and at the Hard they must stay. David understood the refusal. He would have said the same himself.
They walked on up the hill to the chapel that formed the ground floor of one of the rose-red cottages. Once there must have been a church at the Hard. On Sundays, when the noise of the busy yards was stilled, its bell would have rung out across the quiet river, above the crying of the gulls and the lapping of the water, and masters and workmen with their wives and children, sea captains visiting the Master-Builder, of whom no doubt Christopher Martyn was often one, and seamen waiting for the launching of their ship, would have gathered there to sing their psalms, pray for the safety of those at sea and listen to an hour-long sermon from the chaplain of the Hard. That church had disappeared now but a present-day lover of the Hard had made one of the loveliest chapels in the country, the chapel of Saint Mary, to perpetuate its memory. Outside the door that led to it, on the cottage wall, hung a bell, and fastened to the door was a crucifix. These were the only outward signs of the chapel’s existence.
They lifted the latch and went in and Hilary, happily and unselfconsciously, knelt at once to his prayers. David, his arms outstretched along the back of a seat, sat at the back of the chapel and looked about him at the well-remembered details that yet always touched him afresh with their beauty. He liked the dark panelling, the faint smell of incense, the lamp burning before the altar, and the beautiful old altar-frontal embroidered with roses and carnations. Above all he liked the statue of the Madonna carved out of very dark wood. She was an unusual Madonna for she had the broad plump comfortable face of a country woman, just t
he sort of face that must have been seen years ago at the Hard, the face of a buxom wife and mother going about her business in the busy town or kneeling Sunday by Sunday, her children clinging to her skirts, saying her prayers in the shipwrights’ church. Her homeliness contrasted oddly but delightfully with her crown, with the lily in her hand and the cherubs at her feet. She did not look of English workmanship but David knew nothing of her history. He would have liked to think that some English sea captain had brought her home from abroad in one of the ships built at the Hard; but that would have been too much to hope for. Anyway, wherever she had come from, the crown upon her homeliness seemed to glorify common labour just as the stillness and peace of the Hard glorified the busy days that once had been and now were over.
What in the world, thought David, could Hilary be praying about or for? He hoped it wasn’t for him. He disliked being prayed for. He didn’t think it was fair. For all you knew, under the compulsion of it, you might find yourself doing something heroic that you didn’t in the least want or intend to do.
He got up and went outside and wandered up and down the grass verge of the steep little road between the cottages. The wind had risen a good deal and the sky was packed with hurrying grey clouds. The smoke from the cottage chimneys was tossed and torn as soon as it emerged and the donkey’s fur was blown up edgeways. David noticed that the sun, seen now and again between the hurrying clouds, had a halo or wheel round it. At Little Village they had a saying,
The bigger the wheal,
The stronger the geal.
“There’s a gale coming,” thought David. “Curse it. The end of our fine weather.” A blight fell upon him and he shivered. He felt horribly alone.
Hilary, by contrast, emerged in an irritatingly cheerful mood. David looked at him suspiciously as they got into the car.
“I have every right to pray for whom I like,” said Hilary placidly, answering the look.
“I suppose you have,” said David gloomily, and started the car for home. On the top of the moor a drenching shower of rain caught them, and they had to put up the hood. After that he drove as fast as he dared, the grey car travelling so quickly that it might have been one of the storm clouds racing before the wind. Yet however fast you travel, thought David, braking violently at the Vicarage gate, you cannot outdistance your own thoughts.
He went with Hilary into the study and was given half-a-dozen small shabby calf-bound volumes. “There you are,” said Hilary. “If you can find anything of interest in that welter of green peas and early strawberries, and the consequent indigestion, you’ll be lucky. The old man was very much taken up with his own affairs. Good night, David. Thanks for the drive. I enjoyed it. One can’t go to the Hard too often.”
The lane from Big Village to Little Village rose a little before it dropped down to the Harbour and from its crest one got that sudden view of the Island and the sea that David and Lucilla had seen on the day they found Damerosehay. As David topped the rise the sunset burst upon him and once more he violently braked the car. The wind, that had been raging up out of the south-west for an hour past, had torn the clouds apart and then suddenly dropped at the turn of the tide. The great mass of banked cumulous clouds behind the Island was a glory of gold and orange, violet storm-clouds passing slowly across it. Overhead the rent grey sky showed patches of cold blue and green. As David watched there was a slow wonderful intensification of colour. The white cliffs of the Island flushed apricot, the Island itself seemed all built of gold. The water reflected the colours of land and sky and the painted hulls of the boats glowed as though at any moment they would burst into flame. Even the old Castle, crouched like an animal upon the water, took on a strange soft bloom of violet colour that melted its grimness into momentary beauty. Then there was as gradual a fading. The cumulous clouds slowly changed to mother-o’-pearl against a sky of pale lavender, while the Island, the Castle and the ships slipped away into rose-coloured mists. Then it was all grey as a dove’s wing and only the Island lights, shining out across the darkening Estuary, told of the glory that had been. David started the car again, aware that he had been watching for a very long time, for what he had seen had been not so much a sunset as a writing on sky and sea whose meaning was beyond the power of mortality to grasp. “If one had not seen it one would not have believed it,” he said to himself. “If that could be true anything could be true.” He still felt very desolate but mixed with his desolation was a queer feeling of excitement and expectation. Beyond the confines of this earth there was surely something to be known that could not be known now but one day would be clear as daylight.
Nadine met him at the hall door. “What a sky!” she said. “Did you see it? Obadiah’s gone home muttering. He says there’ll be the devil of a storm before long.”
In the darkness of the hall they clung to each other and Nadine, for the first time since David had known her, was crying. They clung as desperately as though they were being dragged apart; yet there was no one with them in the hall but the shadows.
— 2 —
After he had taken Lucilla to her room and said good night to Nadine and Margaret, David went back to the deserted drawing-room with the old parson’s diaries. He put them on the table beside Lucilla’s chair and went to the window, opening it wide. It was pitch dark outside, without a glimmer of moonlight or starshine, and ominously still. The quiet oppressed him. It was no settled peace but only the stillness before storm. He went back to the fireplace, kicked the logs into a blaze and turned up the lamp. The light flickered up over the dark woodwork above him. Just so, thought David, had the flung spray once rippled over its surface. Then he settled himself in his chair and turned his attention to the diaries. Pooh-Bah had long since gone off to his comfortable bed but the Bastard, with whom it was a matter of principle to offer companionship to any member of the family who looked a little lonely, settled down too and propped his hairy chin on David’s shoe. . . . David was sitting in Lucilla’s chair, the chair of the head of the family. The Bastard liked to have someone in that chair. It gave him a feeling of stability. Pinioning David’s foot to the floor with his chin and rhythmically thudding his tail on the parquet he signified that, please, he would like David always to be here when Lucilla was absent.
As Hilary had said, the diaries were mostly taken up with the old parson’s garden and interior, what he had put in them both and his subsequent sufferings, but there was a certain amount of parish gossip, notes about the weather and the habits of birds. The old parson had apparently been very interested in birds, as indeed dwellers between sea marshes and inland woods can hardly fail to be. “Saw a Black Throated Diver today,” said one entry, “and walked up to Damerosehay to ask Jeremy Martyn if he had also seen it. He had. Never can I see a rare bird but Jeremy Martyn sees it first. He tells me that on Wednesday last he certainly saw an Arctic Skua out on the marshes. I do not believe it. Nor do I believe that he sees Storm Petrels and Sabine’s Gulls so often as he says he does.” A little later came a much more exciting entry. “Jeremy Martyn declares he saw a Golden Oriole in his garden today. I have never seen one in mine. I am inclined to think that old Jeremy romances about his birds. Take, for instance, the ridiculous story about the Blue Bird, not a Kingfisher, which he declares he sees at rare intervals in his garden. It seems that Captain Christopher Martyn, his father, who died years before I came to Fairhaven, became possessed of an American Blue Bird during his travels. This he carried always with him as his mascot and the first—and last—ship which he commanded was named after it. In the wreck of this same ship at Fairhaven in the early years of the century, in the worst storm ever known in these parts, the bird was saved, but in the subsequent confusion, both Captain Martyn and the unfortunate lady who shared his fortunes being smitten with illness, it escaped into the Damerosehay garden and was never seen again until the day of the Captain’s death twenty years later. From that date onwards Jeremy Martyn vows he has occasionally seen it. Was the
re ever so nonsensical a tale? Jeremy is a charming old man, and his amazing generosity to the poor most praiseworthy, but undoubtedly he is a little touched. Not for a moment do I believe that he saw that Golden Oriole. I have never seen one.”
Then Jeremy and his birds momentarily disappeared from the diaries owing to a distressing rheumatic attack which seized the old parson to the exclusion of all other thoughts from his mind. It was in another volume altogether, apparently overlooked by Hilary, that he noted that he felt better with the appearance of warm and settled weather, and had walked up to Damerosehay to tell Jeremy that he had seen a Ring Ouzel. So had Jeremy. Much annoyed the old parson had refused an invitation to dinner but had thought better of it upon hearing that Jeremy had just fetched up from the cellar the very last bottle of his famous port, laid down in seventeen ninety-nine by Mr. Richard Martyn, the Captain’s uncle, who had built the house of Damerosehay.
“Whilst discussing our port, which I am told is bad for rheumatism but don’t believe it,” wrote the old parson, “Jeremy once more mentioned that he had seen his Blue Bird. I hope my smile was not too incredulous, for I am sincerely attached to the generous old gentleman and consider his foibles to be entirely harmless, but apparently it was slightly so, for he said to me, ‘Old friend, you don’t believe that tale. Never mind. But I’ll tell you a tale that is true, and if you don’t believe it then may God forgive you, for unbelief will show in you a most unchristian frame of mind.’ At this I gave him my best attention and accepted a second glass of port, for I am convinced that port, if it be truly excellent, is possessed of most medicinal qualities. His tale was the story of his father and mother and whether it be true or no I cannot say. I merely set it down here exactly as he told it.