The Narrow Corner (20 page)

“Come off it, doc. Don’t pull that stuff on me. It
don’t go with you at all. If a girl’s easy a chap likes to know. If someone else ’as been there, well, there’s a chance for ’im, ain’t there? Stands to reason.”

“You know, you’re one of the dirtiest tykes I’ve ever met, skipper,” said the doctor in his detached manner.

“That’s a compliment in its way, ain’t it? Funny part is, you don’t like me any the less if I am. Seems to me to prove you ain’t exactly a saint yourself. And I don’t mind tellin’ you I’ve ’eard as much in various quarters.”

Dr. Saunders’ eyes twinkled.

“Digestion troubling you to-night, skipper?”

“I ain’t exactly comfortable, and it would be a lie if I said I was. I don’t say I’m in pain, mind you, but I just ain’t comfortable.”

“It’s a long business. You can’t expect to be able to digest a pound of lead after a week’s treatment.”

“I don’t want to digest a pound of lead, doc, and I don’t pretend for a minute I do. Mind you, I ain’t complaining. I don’t say you ain’t done me good. You ’ave. But I got a long way to go yet.”

“Well, I’ve told you, have your teeth out. They’re no use to you, and God knows, they don’t add to your beauty.”

“I will. I give you me word of honour. The minute I’m through with the cruise. I don’t see why we can’t pop over to Singapore. Sure to be a good American dentist there. The kid wants to go to Batavia now.”

“Does he?”

“Yes, ’e got a cable this mornin’. I don’t know what it was all about, but ’e’s all for stoppin’ on ’ere a bit and then goin’ to Batavia.”

“How d’you know he got a cable?”

“I found it in the pocket of ’is pants. He put on a clean suit to go ashore in, and ’e left his pants lyin’ about. Untidy little blighter. That shows you ’e’s not a sailor. A sailorman’s always tidy. Has to be. It was all Greek to me. The cable, I mean. In cypher.”

“I suppose you didn’t notice that it was addressed to me?”

“You? No, I can’t say I did.”

“Well, have another look at it. I just gave it to Fred to decode.”

The doctor found it highly diverting thus to throw Captain Nichols off the scent.

“Then what’s the reason of all this changin’ around? He was always for keepin’ away from big places. Naturally, I thought it was on account of the cops. Anyhow, I mean to get to Singapore or sink the ruddy boat in the attempt.” Captain Nichols leaned over impressively and looked with deep emotion into the doctor’s eyes. “I wonder if you realise what it means to a chap not to ’ave ’ad a beefsteak and kidney puddin’ for ten years. Talk of girls. You can ’ave all the girls in the world you like. There’s not one I wouldn’t give
if I could only eat a suet puddin’ with plenty of treacle and a good wallop of cream all over it. That’s my idea of ’eaven and you can put your golden ’arps where the monkey put the nuts.”

E
RIK
, with his deliberate stride that seemed to measure the earth as a man might measure a cricket pitch, walked down to the beach. He was unmoved. He dismissed the skipper’s shameless innuendo from his mind. It had left a nasty taste in his mouth and as though he had drunk a nauseous draught, he spat. But he was not devoid of humour and he gave a little low chuckle as he thought of the innuendo’s absurdity. Fred was just a boy. He could not imagine that any woman would look at him twice; and he knew Louise much too well to suppose even for an instant that she could give him even a thought.

The beach was deserted. Everyone slept. He walked along the pier and hailed the
Fenton
. She was anchored a hundred yards out. Her light shone like a little steady eye on the smooth surface of the water. He shouted again. There was no answer. But a muffled, sleepy voice
rose from below him. It was the blackfellow in the dinghy waiting for Captain Nichols. Erik went down the steps and found it tied to the bottom rung of the rail. The man was still half asleep. He yawned noisily as he stirred himself.

“Is that the
Fenton’s
dinghy?”

“Ye’. What you want?”

The blackfellow thought it might be the skipper or Fred Blake, but seeing his mistake was irritable and suspicious.

“Just row me on board. I want to see Fred Blake.”

“He ain’t on board.”

“Sure?”

“If he ain’t swum.”

“Oh, all right. Good night.”

The man gave a discontented grunt and settled down again to sleep. Erik walked back along the silent road. He thought that Fred had gone to the bungalow and Frith had kept him talking. He smiled as he wondered what the boy would make of the Englishman’s mystical discourse. Something. He had taken to Fred. Beneath his pretence of worldly wisdom, and behind all that idle chatter about racing and cricketing, dancing and prizefighting, you could not but be conscious of a pleasant and simple nature. Erik was not altogether unaware of the lad’s feelings towards himself. Hero-worship. Oh, well, there was no great harm in that. It would pass.
He was a decent kid. One might make something of him if one had the chance. It was nice to talk to him and feel that, even if it was all strange to him, he was trying to understand. It might be that if you cast a seed on that grateful soil a fair plant would spring up. Erik tramped on, hoping to meet Fred; they would walk back together, they might go on to his house, and they could rout themselves out some cheese and biscuits and have a bottle of beer. He did not feel at all sleepy. He had not many people to talk to on the island, with Frith and old Swan he had mostly to listen, it was good to talk deep into the night.

“Had tired the sun with talking,” he quoted to himself, “and sent him down the sky.”

Erik was reticent about his private affairs, but he made up his mind to tell Fred of his engagement to Louise. He would like him to know. He had a great desire to talk about her that night. Sometimes love so possessed him that he felt if he did not tell somebody about it his heart would break. The doctor was old and could not understand; he could say things to Fred that it would have embarrassed him to say to a grown man.

It was three miles to the plantation, but his thoughts so absorbed him that he did not notice the distance. He was quite surprised when he arrived. It was funny that he had not met Fred. Then it occurred to him that Fred must have gone in to the hotel during the time he had
gone down to the beach. How stupid of him not to think of that! Oh, well, there was nothing to be done about it. Now that he was there he might just as well go in and sit down for a bit. Of course, they’d all be asleep, but he wouldn’t disturb anyone. He often did that, went up to the bungalow after they’d gone to bed and sat there thinking. There was a chair in the garden, below the verandah, in which old Swan sometimes rested in the cool of the evening. It was in front of Louise’s room and it reposed him strangely to sit there quite quiet and look at her window and think of her sleeping so peacefully under her mosquito curtain. Her lovely ash-blond hair was spread on the pillow and she lay on her side, her young breast rising and falling softly in deep slumber. The emotion that filled his heart when he thus pictured her was angel-pure. Sometimes he was a little sad when he thought that this virginal grace must perish and that slim and lovely body at last lie still in death. It was dreadful that a being so beautiful should die. He sat there sometimes till a faint chill in the balmy air, the rustle of the pigeons in the trees, warned him that day was at hand. They were hours of peace and of enchanting serenity. Once he had seen the shutter softly open, and Louise stepped out. Perhaps the heat oppressed her or a dream had awakened her and she wanted a breath of air. On her bare feet she walked across the verandah and with her hands on the rail stood looking at the
starry night. She wore a sarong round her loins, but the upper part of her body was naked. She raised her hands and shook out her pale hair over her shoulders. Her body was silhouetted in wan silver against the darkness of the house. She did not look a woman of flesh and blood. She was like a spirit-maiden and Erik, his mind full of the old Danish stories, almost expected her to change into a lovely white bird and fly away to the fabled lands of the sunrise. He sat very still. He was hidden by the darkness. It was so silent that when she gave a little sigh he heard it as though he held her in his arms and her heart were pressed to his. She turned round and went back into her room. She drew the shutter to.

Erik walked up the earth road that led to the house and sat down in the chair that faced Louise’s room. The house was dark. It was wrapped in a silence so profound that you might have thought its inmates were not asleep but dead. But there was no fear in the silence. It had an exquisite peace. It reassured you. It was comfortable, like the feel of a girl’s smooth skin. Erik gave a little sigh of content. A sadness, but a sadness in which there was anguish no longer, befell him because dear Catherine Frith was there no more. He hoped that he would never forget the kindness she had shown him when, a shy and callow boy, he had first come to the island. He had worshipped her. She was then a woman of forty-five, but neither hard work nor child-bearing had had
any effect on her powerful physique. She was tall and full-breasted, with magnificent golden hair, and she held herself proudly. You would have thought she would live to be a hundred. She took the place for him of the mother, a woman of character and of courage too, that he had left in a farmhouse in Denmark, and she loved in him the sons that had been born to her years before and of whom death had robbed her. But he felt that the relation between them was more intimate than it ever could have been if they had been mother and son. They could never have talked to one another so openly. Perhaps it could never have been such a tranquil satisfaction just to be in one another’s company. He loved her and admired her and it made him very happy to be so sure that she loved him. Even then he had an inkling that the love he might one day feel for a girl would never have exactly the restful and comforting quality that he found in his very pure affection for Catherine Frith. She was a woman who had never read much, but she had a vast fund of knowledge, lying there like an un-worked mine, gathered, you would have said, through innumerable generations out of the timeless experience of the race, so that she could cope with your book-learning and meet you on level terms. She was one of those persons who made you feel as though you were saying wonderful things, and when you talked to her thoughts came to you that you had never dreamt you
were capable of. She was of a practical turn and she had a canny sense of humour; she was quick to ridicule absurdity, but the kindness of her heart was such that if she laughed at you, it was so tenderly that you loved her for it. It seemed to Erik that her most wonderful trait was a sincerity so perfect that it glowed all about her with a light that shone into the heart of all that had communication with her.

It filled Erik with a warm and grateful feeling to think that her life for so long had been as happy as she deserved it to be. Her marriage with George Frith had been an idyll. She had been a widow for some time when he first came to that distant and beautiful island. Her first husband was a New Zealander, skipper of a schooner engaged in the island trade, and he was drowned at sea in the great hurricane that ruined her father. Swan, owing to the wound in his chest unable to do any hard work, was broken by the accident that swept away almost all his life’s savings, and together they came to that plantation which with his shrewd Scandinavian sense he had kept for years as a refuge should all else fail. She had had a son by the New Zealander, but he had died of diphtheria when still a baby. She had never known anyone like George Frith. She had never heard anyone talk as he did. He was thirty-six, with an untidy mop of dark hair and a haggard, romantic look. She loved him. It was as though
her practical sense, her nobly terrestrial instincts, sought their compensation in this mysterious waif who spoke so greatly of such high things. She loved him not as she had loved her rough, downright sailor husband, but with a half-amused tenderness that wanted to protect and guard. She felt that he was infinitely above her. She stood in awe of his subtle and aspiring intelligence. She never ceased to believe in his goodness and his genius. Erik thought that, notwithstanding Frith’s tiresomeness, he would always feel kindly towards him because she had so devotedly loved him and he for so many years had given her happiness.

It was Catherine who had first said that she would like him to marry Louise. She was then a child.

“She’ll never be as lovely as you, my dear,” he smiled.

“Oh, much more. You can’t tell yet. I can. She’ll be like me, but quite different, and she’ll be better looking than I ever was.”

“I would only marry her if she was exactly like you. I don’t want her different.”

“Wait till she’s grown-up and then you’ll be very pleased she isn’t a fat old woman.”

It amused him now to think of that conversation. The darkness of the house was paling and for a moment he thought with a start that it must be the dawn that was breaking, but then, looking round, he saw that a
lop-sided moon was floating up over the tops of the trees, like an empty barrel drifting with the tide, and its light, dim still, shone on the sleeping bungalow. He gave the moon a friendly little wave of the hand.

When that strong, muscular and vigorous woman was inexplicably attacked by a disease of the heart, and violent spasms of agonising pain warned her that death at any moment might overtake her, she spoke to Erik again of her wish. Louise, at school in Auckland, had been sent for, but she could only get home by a roundabout route, and it would take her a month to arrive.

“She’ll be seventeen in a few days. I think she’s got a head on her shoulders, but she’ll be very young to take full charge of everything here.”

“What makes you think she’ll want to marry me?” asked Erik.

“She adored you when she was a child. She used to follow you about like a dog.”

“Oh, that’s just a school-girl’s
schwärmerei
.”

“You’ll be practically the only man she’s ever known.”

“But, Catherine, you wouldn’t wish me to marry her if I didn’t love her.”