The Ginger Tree (2 page)

The dolphins seemed to be waiting for us just where the sunlight
began, and Mr Davies told me that they like ships and like being watched by the people on them. A few minutes later I had to believe him, the dolphins began to jump back and forth across the
Mooldera
’s bow, all of them going much faster than we were, coming curving in with
new-moon
arc leaps out of the water and then an even bigger leap right across the ship’s course which put them only a few feet from us. One of them, and I think it was the same one coming back again and again, turned on his side in the jump and I saw in that shiny black shape a small shining black eye which seemed to be looking straight at me. This sounds silly when put down in writing but suddenly then it was as though things that had been frightening me, and I had not written down in this notebook, or even thought about except far back in my mind, were all right now. That dolphin seemed to be saying that I didn’t need to be uneasy about what was going to happen to me in the East. The breeze on the sea was making quite a noise by then and I almost wanted to shout into it, wildly. Of course I didn’t. Mr Davies would have thought I had gone mad. When I turned to him with a question he had not been watching the dolphins at all, but staring at me. I wish he wouldn’t do that.

The ship moved into sunlight and it was very hot, even with the breeze. Mr Davies said ‘Oh my G—!’ Of course he is a sailor but I was still very startled he would say that in front of a lady. It made me look to where he was now looking. On the open piece of the bridge I could make out the Captain from his whiskers and he seemed to be watching us through binoculars, while the First Class cross deck beneath him was lined with passengers who must have been wakened from their naps by stewards and stewardesses telling them about the dolphins. I couldn’t see Mrs Carswell but I was sure she would hear about me being up at the bow of the ship alone with Mr Davies. However, I am writing this in my bunk by the light of the little lamp here and Mrs Carswell has not said anything so perhaps her being so aloof from most people on board will keep her from getting the news.

SS
Mooldera
, at sea
January 17th, 1903

Mrs Carswell and I are not speaking. She heard about Mr Davies and me from the Malacca Judge making one of his jokes at dinner. Mrs C never laughs at his jokes and this time she looked like thunder. Later in our cabin she said I had behaved like a
fast
woman and had I forgotten that I was betrothed to a gentleman of a very distinguished English family? I was cheeky, I suppose, I said yes I knew I was engaged but I was travelling to be married and not to enter a
nunnery
. She said she did not know what was to become of me after she left this ship at Hong Kong, for there was no one on board she could put in charge of me to Shanghai. I was very angry. I am twenty years old, if only just, and can look after myself, so I said why not get the whiskery Captain to look after me for the last part of the voyage? For a minute I thought Mrs Carswell was going to strike me. If she had I would have left the cabin and gone straight to the Purser to demand some other place to sleep. Maybe she saw in my eyes what I was thinking for she seemed to check the words that had been coming and said instead that her report to my mother on my behaviour on board the
Mooldera
would bring sorrow into an Edinburgh home. I said talking of reports made her sound like a headmistress. After that we both went into our bunks and drew the curtains. She did not begin to snore soon after the noise she makes moving about getting out of her clothes, so I expect that anger kept her awake as it did me.

In the morning I felt uneasy about our quarrel and worried that she really would write Mama, which I did not want because things like I am a fast woman would be terribly hurtful. Mama is proper, too, though not nearly so strict in her thinking as Mrs C, to whom breathing is almost a sin. I wonder what she would think of her own snoring if she knew about it? Perhaps Mr Carswell has always been afraid to tell her?

I got up and washed and so on with the curtains on the lower berth still drawn but with the feeling that I was being watched from behind them. Well if Mrs C was doing that now she knows about my corsets. However, she can’t say anything because if she does I will know she was peeping. It
would be a little like someone watching to see if you close your eyes through prayers, if they see you don’t they haven’t closed their own, so they are unable to mention the matter. I only close mine when I am serious about my prayers, but not for the Minister’s prayers. In our church there were some people who kept their eyes shut for the blessing on King Edward and all the members of the Royal Family, but after that opened them.

I could see the Island of Ceylon from the deck before I went down to breakfast but I wasn’t very interested in it. At the table I did not speak one word to the Malacca Judge and I think he knows why. I ate a good breakfast, for I am very hungry these days, the porridge lumpy, but excellent bacon and eggs, and they make lovely crisp hot rolls on board. I had three. Before I was finished Mrs C came in. We all said
good-morning
very politely. Afterwards I went up on deck and sat in my chair, on the side away from Ceylon. Mrs C came to me there and said she thought we had both been a little hasty last night and I said yes we had, and for a minute I thought she was going to bend down to kiss me, but she didn’t, maybe because she does not care to bend too much with her figure. Anyway, it was a reconciliation and I decided to do what she wanted in Colombo in spite of what Mr Davies had said about going down the coast a little way to a place called Mount Lavinia. He didn’t actually make this an invitation, perhaps because he knew he would have to take Mrs C with us in the train, or carriage, or whatever it is.

SS
Mooldera
January 18th, 1903

Well, we have now seen all we are going to of ‘India’s coral strand’. Perhaps Ceylon is not really India, I have never been very good at geography, though I am becoming more interested in it now. I have taken to carrying this notebook in my workbag and writing in it when I am pretending to write letters. I did try to write a letter to Margaret Blair in Aviemore, but I wanted more to write in this book so ended up with a postcard to her
showing the harbour of Ceylon. That is about all I saw. I went ashore with Mrs C and we had to wait for her friends’ carriage in a very hot shed with a tin roof. When it came the carriage was a rattly old four-wheeler with a black hood up that was smelly, I suppose to keep off the sun, though we had our parasols. The horse was all skin and bones. We drove through streets with white buildings and lots of dark-skinned people in variegated clothes that were quite pretty if too plain for my taste, the women draped like Greek statues in museums, only better covered of course. After that we came to a part with gardens, very thick plantings, but not much colour, or at least not that I saw, mostly some kind of lily. Then the horse pulled us slowly up a sloping drive with palms on each side that reminded me of the pineapples with their tops left on you see in that expensive Princes Street fruit shop sometimes.

Mrs C’s friends were waiting for us on the steps of a white bungalow with huge verandahs furnished like rooms. Their name was Johnson. Mr Johnson didn’t speak much, but his wife did, all the time, mostly to Mrs C. She wasn’t interested in me except to ask Mrs C about whom I was marrying, and she seemed quite surprised when she heard, staring at me rather rudely, I thought. Luncheon took a very long time. Whenever she wanted service Mrs Johnson didn’t ring a bell, she clapped her hands and a manservant came in. I think there must have been plenty of servants in that house, I saw three men working in the garden. I wondered if I would soon be clapping my hands when I wanted anything to have people come running. It is rather a strange thought. At home we have only Cook and Jessie, though of course quite a lot of people in South Edinburgh have a good many servants. One of Mama’s friends has a page who wears a uniform when he opens the door to ladies on the ‘At Home’ Thursdays, but the page is really the under gardener. We had tea at the Johnsons’, then drove back to the jetty for the last launch out to the
Mooldera
and that was all I saw of Colombo. Mr Davies had not gone to Mount Lavinia alone, he was waiting at the top of the gangway.

SS
Mooldera
January 19th, 1903

There has been terrible trouble. Tonight at dinner the dessert was very good because the ship had taken on a lot of fresh fruit and we had to taste many strange things, though most of them seemed insipid to me. The stewards brought us finger bowls for the first time on this voyage, perhaps because in this calm sea there was no danger of them spilling. Even Mrs C tried a fruit, though she had said when she saw the selection that they might be poison to Western stomachs. In Hong Kong she does not touch anything raw that comes from China, only vegetables which must be cooked. She was talking of servant trouble when the Judge, rather
suddenly
, leaned over the table to say to me that there was to be a concert that night in the men’s smoking-room and that Mrs Price had agreed to sing, but she had no one to accompany her on the piano, and would I oblige? Before I could say anything Mrs C spoke for me, saying: ‘Miss Mackenzie has never been in the smoking-room since we left Tilbury docks and she has no intention of entering it.’ The Judge was looking at me as though he had not heard Mrs C at all. I took a deep breath, then said yes I would certainly accompany Mrs Price if she had the sheet music for her songs. The Judge thanked me, never looking at Mrs C, and then added that it would be quite a large attendance because an invitation had been issued to the Second Class passengers to attend. At this Mrs C put down her napkin, stood, and without giving any of us a glance, went out of the dining-room. The news that the Second Class would be at the concert made me a little uneasy. I had thought they were only allowed up on our deck for Divine Service, which only three or four of them attend. This is a Church of England service read from a book by the First Officer. They say the Captain is without God. The responses from the congregation are very poor and the singing dreadful, and usually I don’t really take part for the Church of England service is strange to me, though I suppose I shall have to get used to it when I marry Richard. After the service they serve beef tea on deck if it is calm, and in the hallway if it is rough.

On the stairs up from the dining-room I decided that if I was to
accompany Mrs Price before a lot of people I could not do it in the brown dress but would wear the voile with spots which needs a special petticoat. Mrs C always goes to the ladies’ drawing-room after dinner for a time before going to bed at half-past nine, but this time she was in the cabin, sitting very straight on the little sofa. As soon as I went in she said in a very loud voice: ‘Mary Mackenzie, do you consider yourself a true Christian?’ I was quite shocked. Even our Minister had not asked me
that
when I was accepted into the South Morningside Church after Infant Baptism. She went on to a lot more, about her duty as my chaperone which was a sacred trust to my dear mother and whose wishes with regard to me Mrs C knew very well indeed. From what she said and the way she said it the men’s smoking-room could have been a place of special wickedness, but I have looked in quite often through the glass doors and all there was to be seen was men reading with cigars in their mouths, or sometimes playing cards or chess. When I spoke I was a little surprised at the way my own voice sounded. I asked Mrs C if she would kindly go up to the
drawing-room
as usual because I had to dress for the concert and would like the cabin to myself. I thought for a minute she was going to refuse, but she got up and went through the curtain into the passage. A few seconds later she came back to say: ‘It may interest you to know that I have available, should I wish, the means by which to send a message to your intended husband.’ When she had gone I was shaking and had to sit down.

At quarter to nine, still feeling upset, I went up the stairs to the main deck and though I had a feeling that Mrs C would be watching from the drawing-room I did not look in there to see if she was. The doors to the smoking-room had been fastened back, the chairs arranged in rows as for Divine Service in the drawing-room. The piano was in a very bright light. Some of the chairs were already occupied and there were small tables to hold glasses, with two stewards already serving alcoholic drinks. The Judge was in charge and came over to me at once, calling on Mrs Price to join us. She was wearing a dress I had not seen before, green silk, very plain, but a good colour with her hair which is quite bright, not auburn, but with orange-seeming glints through it. Somehow I wasn’t so pleased with my voile, there is perhaps too much detail with those ruffles and the
colour not quite right, a sort of blue-mauve, the spots white. I couldn’t help thinking that with my face flushed pink, as I could feel it was, I was not looking my best. Usually my skin is like ivory, and I have never been threatened by rosy cheeks.

The Judge introduced me to Mrs Price to whom I had not spoken before and she smiled quite sweetly while we exchanged politenesses, after which she gave me her music. On top was ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, something of a surprise because when I have heard it once or twice it had always been a man’s song and I remember that at one Edinburgh musical evening some of the ladies said that it was rather unpleasantly suggestive. Her other song was the ‘Londonderry Air’ with the Danny Boy words, and her encore ‘Where the Mountains of Mourne’ etc., which made me wonder if she has Irish connections.

The Judge led us to seats which were not with the others but at an angle to them, so that the audience could look at us even while we were not performing, which I didn’t like. It was a surprise to see that one of the other performers was the First Officer who reads the Divine Service, a rather solemn-looking man who does not seem to preside over a very cheerful table in the dining saloon. There was also the ship’s doctor who sat down on the other side of me from Mrs Price and we spoke for the first time. He asked me if I was going to sing and I said I was just an accompanist and he told me that for his sins he gave humorous
recitations
, but did not have a large repertoire because there was no need to increase it, his audiences changing on every voyage. He is a gingery sort of man with almost greenish eyes and doesn’t look old when he smiles. Also, he has no moustache, which is a good thing, because I don’t like ginger moustaches. I think I would find it very embarrassing to go to him as a doctor, he has a way of looking that is too bold. His name is Dr
Waterford
. Perhaps Mrs C is right about something in his past, but if that is the case it seems to sit lightly on him.