Grand Canary (5 page)

Tranter, at whose plate the butter-dish stood, made an effusive movement of apology.

‘I'm deeply sorry, ma'am,' he murmured, passing the dish with a little flourish.

She turned her head, stared through him with her large blue eyes, then deliberately looked away.

For some moments Mary Fielding had been gazing abstractedly at the unoccupied chair, and now, as on an impulse, she turned towards Renton.

‘That empty chair, captain.' She smiled and gave a little shiver with her shoulders. ‘Isn't it unlucky – so early in the voyage?'

The captain straightened the napkin upon his knee.

‘I am not superstitious about chairs, my lady. It is simply a place, that chair, set apart for one of my passengers. And if the passenger in question does not choose to occupy it, I infer simply that he has his own good reasons for not occupying it. And so I go on with my lunch.'

‘You are too heartless, captain,' said Mrs Baynham languidly.

‘But you intrigue us. Didn't we see this – er – passenger in question as we came on board? That wretched-looking man standing in the alleyway. You did see him, Mary?'

There was a tiny pause.

‘Yes, Elissa,' said Mary, ‘I did see him.'

‘He looked teed up – all gaunt and burning you know. Delightfully intense,' said Elissa. ‘Let us hear more about him, captain.'

‘Some more of this omelette, Mrs Baynham,' said Renton abruptly. ‘We make a speciality of this dish on the
Aureloa.
It is from my own receipt. Made with pimentos. I got it from a Spanish cook in Palma. Or would you care to have some hash?'

Elissa smiled gently.

‘We were talking of the missing passenger, weren't we? Who is he, what is he, where is he?'

There was a short pause. The situation, for some reason, took on an edge of sharp discomfort. From beneath his bushy eye-brows Renton surveyed Elissa, then he answered very shortly:

‘His name is Leith, ma'am. Dr Harvey Leith.'

Instantly there fell upon the table a dead silence. Everyone stopped eating and looked up.

‘Leith! Dr Leith!' Elissa seemed to meditate, and her glance strayed from the captain to the empty chair. ‘ Just too extraordinary.'

Then Dibs gave his little nickering laugh and exclaimed:

‘Why, the papers have been full of a fellow called Leith – Harvey Leith. And I'm hanged if it wasn't a doctor, too. You know, the fellow who …'

Renton stared straight in front of him with a face which appeared carved from wood.

Suddenly Mother Hemmingway giggled.

‘Blimey if it ain't funny. The syme name as our absent friend! Wot a joke! I can tell from the captain's face it's the syme man. You can paint me pink if it ain't.'

There fell another silence, during which Renton's features remained impenetrable and unrelaxed; yet, stealing a quick look at him, Mary could see that he was vexed.

‘Confounded scandal,' declared Dibs excitedly. ‘Nothin' short of murder, don't you know.'

Unexpectedly, Jimmy Corcoran laid down his knife and fork which he had been holding upon their ends. His large seamed face was quite impassive as he said gently:

‘Ye know what yer talkin' about, don't ye? Ye know a lot. Science. Everything.'

‘Eh, what?' said Dibs; he was a little deaf on one side. ‘ What was it?'

‘Nothin',' Jimmy said calmly. ‘Just plain nothin' at all. I'm not a talker, ye see, but I've been listenin' to ye since we come in. And I'm just thinkin' how much ye must know. It's marvellous. Sure, it's marvellous. Ye've devoted yer life to study. Playto was a child beside ye.' He blinked at the skylight and took an enormous bite at his roll.

‘You read the papers,' said Dibs, bridling like an old woman. ‘You know I'm speaking the truth.'

Jimmy went on chewing stolidly, then he said:

‘Uh-huh! I read the papers an' I read Playto. There's a difference.'

A faint shred of colour stole into Dibs' toughened skin. His eye-glass glinted agitatedly.

‘But you can't get away from this thing,' he exclaimed. ‘It's hitting you in the eye. The Press shrieked about it. The fellow's inhuman.' His voice finished on a high note which made Renton frown and abruptly lift his head. In a firm tone he said:

‘I think that is enough. I don't like scandal. And I won't have it in my ship. This Dr Leith is the man you speak of. There is an end of it. Gossip has ruined many a man. And it's ruined many a ship. When I'm afloat I won't have it. You understand. That's all.'

A full minute passed, then Robert Tranter made a gesture of generous assent.

‘I guess I'm with you, captain,' he gushed. ‘ That's the true spirit of human brotherhood. There was a question asked, “Who will throw the first stone?” Well, I reckon it'll be none of us. My sister and I saw this man on the tender. And, believe me, he looked so afflicted I felt right there I wanted to offer him my sympathy.'

Susan Tranter, with her feet pressed close together and her eyes upon her plate, felt herself glow at her brother's words. Harvey Leith – Dr Harvey Leith! – to think that it should be he whom she had read about with such distress. Even before she had known she had noticed him upon the tender, observed his air – like a man who has lost his faith – and marked especially his eyes. They suffered, those eyes, like the eyes of the wounded Christ. An impulse of compassion quickened within her. Oh, how he must have suffered! Instinctively she aligned herself upon his side against the hard indifference of the Baynham woman. Her pity flowed; and born of that pity – for surely it was pity – came the happy thought: I may help him. Yes, I feel that I shall help him. Stealthily almost, she raised her eyes.

The meal was ending. No one, apparently, had very much to say.

And Mary Fielding, who had said so little, was now, like Susan, completely silent. Her face wore once more that sad and puzzled look as though again she strove to capture something both elusive and obscure. Her eyes were still troubled as she rose from the table and went with Elissa upon deck. For a moment they stood balanced to the gentle pitching of the ship, their skirts wrapped tight about them by the wind, regarding the cheerless prospect of the following sea. Land had faded, and the waves came swinging down astern – long, grey, crestless billows which seemed to urge the vessel inexorably upon her course. Forward upon her fixed, predestined course. Forward, evoking a curious sense of recollection. Forward – to what? The thought confused her as the bleak discomfort of the scene broke over her.

Her husband, who viewed always with half-humorous distrust her impulse towards simplicity, had not wished her to take this most fantastic trip. She could see his face now as, approaching him, she had resolutely declared:

‘I must get away, Michael. By myself. On some little ship.

Anywhere – so long as it is quiet and away. I really must. You'll let me go.'

Why should she have wished to get away? Surely it was inexplicable. She was happy at Buckden; she loved, at least, the mellow Tudor place set in its rolling oak-studded parks, loved the odd things that one could do there: to ride alone in the hidden glades, to bathe unseen at early dawn in the pool, to feed the timid nuzzling deer by the silver birches, all by herself.

And she was happy with Michael. Happy? Oh, yes, happy enough. She was fond of Michael. She liked him; she had always liked him. He it was who mildly pointed out a dozen reasons which might deter her; and then, with that graciousness which was his charm, who had consented. A delight to humour her caprice – that was his attitude; he did not really understand. But inevitably he showered consideration upon her, arranging that Elissa should accompany her, that Dibdin should escort them both. Poor Dibs – no money for all his name – had leaped at the job. Dibs was like that; he lived on people, subsisted on invitations, so that his two rooms in Davis Street saw him little. Poor Dibs! All manner, front, nothing inside! He had never read a book in his life, never done anything. No! she was wrong. He had shot, also by invitation, a large number of birds and animals.

She was sorry for Dibs. Yet she would have preferred to come alone; but that, of course, was quite impossible.

Oh, why was her mind running on like this? She was confused, evading something – yes, evading that meeting … that strange meeting of the morning.…

Suddenly Elissa moved.

‘I'm cold,' she said, tapping her feet upon the deck. ‘Let's go into my cabin.'

In the cabin she switched on the tiny electric heater, tucked a rug round her knees, remarked sulkily:

‘It'll take a lot of sun to make up for this agony you've landed me into, Mary – cramped on this wretched little ship with no maid and those ghastly – oh, those most ghastly people. Why, oh, why did you ever want to come?'

‘I don't know,' said Mary hesitatingly. ‘I felt all screwed up inside. And somehow I had a fancy to come – a strange sort of fancy.'

It was true. Often she had strange fancies – of a place hauntingly familiar, of a perfume lingering, elusive, of a garden, sweet-scented and profuse, set in the shadow of a snow-capped peak, bathed in clear moonlight, hushed by the whisper of a distant sea. Often this garden came to her in sleep and she would run gladly and wander there, fingering the flowers, lifting her face to the moon, feeling a lovely inner joy which irradiated her like light. Next day she would be sad and quiet and alone; she would feel herself odd, strangely out of key, separated from the ordinary things of life. Once she had told Michael about her garden. He had laughed kindly, after his fashion, with the calm precision of possession.

‘Still a child, Mary,' he had said. ‘You must learn to grow up.'

It was all so unsatisfactory. She did not understand. It worried her, this strange fantasy which struggled secretly, like a plant reaching from a dark place towards the sunshine. And sometimes she feared it, because in reaction it had brought her so much pain.

She looked up suddenly. Elissa was staring at her.

‘You're a funny little sprat, Mary,' she laughed. ‘You're like a child looking at a rainbow. Exactly that. Hand me a chocolate. And for heaven's sake put something on the gramophone. For I'm bored – oh, so terribly bored.'

One bell had sounded in the second dog watch, and the echoes still jangled in Harvey's ears as he lay half undressed upon his bunk staring fixedly at the row of bolts which ran across the ceiling. Nineteen white-enamelled bolts, round-headed and symmetrical, all neatly in a row; he had counted and recounted them as a man half crazed by lack of sleep might vainly number sheep. Sometimes, amid the creaking and sighing of the ship, he heard the clink of hammers on these bolts, and sometimes that hammer-beat was in his brain. His hands clenched, his face pale and haggard, he had a look strangely persecuted. Clearly he suffered; but he endured that suffering with a stoic bitterness. At times the thought flashed into his mind: a few steps to the ship's side and then cold darkness – the end of everything. But that was too easy; he always recoiled from the impulse. At other times, with a self-analysis almost grim, he made attempt to trace the morbid pattern of his sensation. He had always had this impulse: a curious instinctive searching, the burning desire to strike into the heart of reason.

It was the motive which had actuated his life.

His upbringing had been austere. His father had been a schoolmaster: no comfortable tutor at an expensive establishment but an ill paid, hard-driven teacher of science in a Birmingham Board School. Yet William Leith had a mind; he was ambitious, a man far before his time; and far above the soul-destroying task of thrusting reluctant youths through the crude elements of chemistry and physics. But for him the task was a necessity. Julia, his wife, was one of those women whose whole existence might be epitomised in the word: Demand. Insatiably she demanded clothes, money, and his affection. She taxed his slender income to the uttermost; she complained of that income's insufficiency; she harassed him; she exhausted him in mind and body, then with sublime bathos she ran off with a commercial traveller. Neither her husband nor her son heard of her again.

When she deserted him, William Leith was already suffering from an early phthisis lesion – his cough had been the crowning inadequacy which thrust Julia into the travelling salesman's arms – and now the condition rapidly advanced. He did not seem to care. He let ambition slip, turned his gaunt and brilliant mind upon his son, named in a whim of early arrogance, for the great Harvey. Thus there germinated in the boy a forward passion for scientific research and, incredibly – though he had never loved his mother – a precocious contempt of women.

When Harvey was twelve years old, William Leith died of a pulmonary haemorrhage. It was a staggering blow. Harvey had loved his father and lived with him in close companionship.

He fell now to the care of his aunt – a nagging and impoverished spinster who, accepting him of necessity, regarded him thereafter solely as an incubus. But young Harvey had his ambition. His own brilliance and a dogged pertinacity of purpose sent him through the rest of his schooling, then, with three scholarships, to the provincial medical college. He had seen his father fail for lack of opportunity in a career purely academic; and he felt instinctively that medicine would give him surer chance of success. Besides, biology was his bent. At Birmingham he was regarded as the most distinguished student of his time. But after his graduation, which gave him every prize that could be won, he had refused an appointment to the City Hospital and abruptly taken himself to London. He had no aspirations towards a successful practice. No craving for a consultant's chair, no ambition to acquire a fortune in exchange for bedside condolences. His inspiration lay deeper, his ideal stood higher. He had that unique incentive which few men through the centuries have possessed – the genuine passion for original research.