Winter's Tales (3 page)

The three sailors were conscious, from his silent, attentive attitude, of the young man’s reverence and wonder. They took him for a student, and were content to divulge their experiences to him. They also thought him a good host, for he steadily filled their glasses, and ordered a fresh bottle when the first was empty. Charlie,
in return for their stories, gave them a couple of songs. He had a sweet voice and tonight was pleased with it himself; it was a long time since he had sung a song. They all became friendly. The captain slapped him on the back and told him that he was a bright boy and might still be turned into a sailor.

But as, a little later, the captain began to talk tenderly of his wife and family, whom he had just left, and the supercargo, with pride and emotion, informed the party that within the last three months two barmaids of Antwerp had had twins, girls with red hair like their father’s, Charlie remembered his own wife and became ill at ease. These sailors, he thought, seemed to know how to deal with their women. Probably there was not one of them so afraid of his wife as to run away from her in the middle of night. If they knew that he had done so, he reflected, they would think less well of him.

The sailors had believed him to be much younger than he was; so in their company he had come to feel himself like a very young man, and his wife now looked to him more like a mother than a mate. His real mother, although she had been a respectable tradeswoman, had had a drop of gypsy blood in her, and none of his quick resolutions had ever taken her by surprise. Indeed, he reflected, she kept upon the surface through everything, and swam there, majestically, like a proud, dark, ponderous goose. If tonight he had gone to her and told her of his decision to go to sea, the idea might very well have excited and pleased her. The pride and gratitude which he had always felt towards the old woman, now, as he drank his last cup of coffee, were transferred to the young. Laura would understand him, and side with him.

He sat for some time, weighing the matter. For experience had taught him to be careful here. He had, before now, been trapped as by a strange optical delusion. When he was away from her, his
wife took on all the appearance of a guardian angel, unfailing in sympathy and support. But when again he met her face to face, she was a stranger, and he found his road paved with difficulties.

Still tonight all this seemed to belong to the past. For he was in power now; he had the sea and the ships with him, and before him the young man with the carnation. Great images surrounded him. Here, in the inn of La Croix du Midi he had already lived through much. He had seen a ship burn down, a snowstorm in the North Sea, and the sailor’s homecoming to his wife and children. So potent did he feel that the figure of his wife looked pathetic. He remembered her as he had last seen her, asleep, passive and peaceful, and her whiteness, and her ignorance of the world, went to his heart. He suddenly blushed deeply at the thought of the letter he had written to her. He might go away, he now felt, with a lighter heart, if he had first explained everything to her. “Home,” he thought, “where is thy sting? Married life, where is thy victory?”

He sat and looked down at the table, where a little coffee had been spilled. The while the sailors’ talk ebbed out, because they saw that he was no longer listening; in the end it stopped. The consciousness of silence round him woke up Charlie. He smiled at them. “I shall tell you a story before we go home. A blue story,” he said.

“There was once,” he began, “an immensely rich old Englishman who had been a courtier and a councillor to the Queen and who now, in his old age, cared for nothing but collecting ancient blue china. To that end he travelled to Persia, Japan and China, and he was everywhere accompanied by his daughter, the Lady Helena. It happened, as they sailed in the Chinese Sea, that the ship caught fire on a still night, and everybody went into the lifeboats and left her. In the dark and the confusion the old peer was separated from his daughter. Lady Helena got up on deck late, and found the ship
quite deserted. In the last moment a young English sailor carried her down into a lifeboat that had been forgotten. To the two fugitives it seemed as if fire was following them from all sides, for the phosphorescence played in the dark sea, and, as they looked up, a falling star ran across the sky, as if it was going to drop into the boat. They sailed for nine days, till they were picked up by a Dutch merchantman, and came home to England.

“The old lord had believed his daughter to be dead. He now wept with joy, and at once took her off to a fashionable watering-place so that she might recover from the hardships she had gone through. And as he thought it must be unpleasant to her that a young sailor, who made his bread in the merchant service, should tell the world that he had sailed for nine days alone with a peer’s daughter, he paid the boy a fine sum, and made him promise to go shipping in the other hemisphere and never come back. ‘For what,’ said the old nobleman, ‘would be the good of that?’

“When Lady Helena recovered, and they gave her the news of the Court and of her family, and in the end also told her how the young sailor had been sent away never to come back, they found that her mind had suffered from her trials, and that she cared for nothing in all the world. She would not go back to her father’s castle in its park, nor go to Court, nor travel to any gay town of the continent. The only thing which she now wanted to do was to go, like her father before her, to collect rare blue china. So she began to sail, from one country to the other, and her father went with her.

“In her search she told the people, with whom she dealt, that she was looking for a particular blue colour, and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.’ Her father, when they had sailed for many years, suggested to her that perhaps the colour which she
sought did not exist. ‘O God, Papa,’ said she, ‘how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from the time when all the world was blue.’

“Her two old aunts in England implored her to come back, still to make a great match. But she answered them: ‘Nay, I have got to sail. For you must know, dear aunts, that it is all nonsense when learned people tell you that the seas have got a bottom to them. On the contrary, the water, which is the noblest of the elements, does, of course, go all through the earth, so that our planet really floats in the ether, like a soap-bubble. And there, on the other hemisphere, a ship sails, with which I have got to keep pace. We two are like the reflection of one another, in the deep sea, and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my own ship, upon the opposite side of the globe. You have never seen a big fish swimming underneath a boat, following it like a dark-blue shade in the water. But in that way this ship goes, like the shadow of my ship, and I draw it to and fro wherever I go, as the moon draws the tides, all through the bulk of the earth. If I stopped sailing, what would those poor sailors who make their bread in the merchant service do? But I shall tell you a secret,’ she said. ‘In the end my ship will go down, to the centre of the globe, and at the very same hour the other ship will sink as well—for people call it sinking, although I can assure you that there is no up and down in the sea—and there, in the midst of the world, we two shall meet.’

“Many years passed, the old lord died and Lady Helena became old and deaf, but she still sailed. Then it happened, after the plunder of the summer palace of the Emperor of China, that a merchant brought her a very old blue jar. The moment she set eyes on it she gave a terrible shriek. ‘There it is!’ she cried. ‘I have found it at last. This is the true blue. Oh, how light it makes one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full as I say not
what.’ With trembling hands she held the jar to her bosom, and sat for six hours sunk in contemplation of it. Then she said to her doctor and her lady-companion: ‘Now I can die. And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently, like a wake that sings, like the drops that fall from an oar blade.’ A little later she asked them: ‘Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?’ Shortly afterwards the old lady died.”

The party now broke up, the sailors gave Charlie their hands and thanked him for the rum and the story. Charlie wished them all good luck. “You forgot your bag,” said the captain, and picked up Charlie’s portmanteau with the manuscript in it. “No,” said Charlie, “I mean to leave that with you, till we are to sail together.” The captain looked at the initials on the bag. “It is a heavy bag,” he said. “Have you got anything of value in it?” “Yes, it is heavy, God help me,” said Charlie, “but that shall not happen again. Next time it will be empty.” He got the name of the captain’s ship, and said good-bye to him.

As he came out he was surprised to find that it was nearly morning. The long spare row of street lamps held up their melancholy heads in the grey air.

A thin young girl with big black eyes, who had been walking up and down in front of the inn, came up and spoke to him, and, when he did not answer, repeated her invitation in English. Charlie looked at her. “She too,” he thought, “belongs to the ships, like the mussels and seaweeds that grow on their bottoms. Within her many good seamen, who escaped the deep, have been drowned. But all the same she will not run aground, and if I go with her I shall still be safe.” He put his hand in his pocket, but found only one
shilling left there. “Will you let me have a shilling’s worth?” he asked the girl. She stared at him. Her face did not change as he took her hand, pulled down her old glove and pressed the palm, rough and clammy as fish-skin, to his lips and tongue. He gave her back her hand, placed a shilling in it, and walked away.

For the third time he walked along the street between the harbour and the Queen’s Hotel. The town was now waking up, and he met a few people and carts. The windows of the hotel were lighted. When he came into the hall there was no one there, and he was about to walk up to his room, when, through a glass door, he saw his wife sitting in a small, lighted dining room next to the hall. So he went in there.

When his wife caught sight of him her face cleared up. “Oh, you have come!” she cried. He bent his head. He was about to take her hand and kiss it when she asked him: “Why are you so late?” “Am I late?” he exclaimed, highly surprised by her question, and because the idea of time had altogether gone from him. He looked at a clock upon the mantelpiece, and said: “It is only ten past seven.” “Yes, but I thought you would be here earlier!” said she. “I got up to be ready when you came.” Charlie sat down by the table. He did not answer her, for he had no idea what to say. “Is it possible,” he thought, “that she has the strength of soul to take me back in this way?”

“Will you have some coffee?” said his wife. “No, thank you,” said he, “I have had coffee.” He glanced round the room. Although it was nearly light and the blinds were up, the gas lamps were still burning, and from his childhood this had always seemed to him a great luxury. The fire on the fireplace played on a somewhat worn Brussels carpet and on the red plush chairs. His wife was eating an egg. As a little boy he had had an egg on Sunday mornings. The whole room, that smelled of coffee and fresh bread, with the white
tablecloth and the shining coffee-pot, took on a sabbath-morning look. He gazed at his wife. She had on her grey travelling cloak, her bonnet was lying beside her, and her yellow hair, gathered in a net, shone in the lamplight. She was bright in her own way, a pure light came from her, and she seemed enduringly fixed on the sofa, the one firm object in a turbulent world.

An idea came to him: “She is like a lighthouse,” he thought, “the firm, majestic lighthouse that sends out its kindly light. To all ships it says: ‘Keep off.’ For where the lighthouse stands, there is shoal water, or rocks. To all floating objects the approach means death.” At this moment she looked up, and found his eyes on her. “What are you thinking of?” she asked him. He thought: “I will tell her. It is better to be honest with her, from now, and to tell her all.” So he said, slowly: “I am thinking that you are to me, in life, like a lighthouse. A steady light, instructing me how to steer my course.” She looked at him, then away, and her eyes filled with tears. He became afraid that she was going to cry, even though till now she had been so brave. “Let us go up to our own room,” he said, for it would be easier to explain things to her when they were alone.

They went up together, and the stairs, which, last night, had been so long to climb, now were so easy, that his wife said: “No, you are going up too high. We are there.” She walked ahead of him down the corridor, and opened the door to their room.

The first thing that he noticed was that there was no longer any smell of violets in the air. Had she thrown them away in anger? Or had they all faded when he went away? She came up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder and her face on it. Over her fair hair, in the net, he looked round, and stood quite still. For the dressing-table, on which, last night, he had put his letter for her, was in a new place, and so, he found, was the bed he had lain in. In the corner there was now a cheval-glass which had not been there
before. This was not his room. He quickly took in more details. There was no longer a canopy to the bed, but above it a steel-engraving of the Belgian Royal family that till now he had never seen. “Did you sleep here last night?” he asked. “Yes,” said his wife. “But not well. I was worried when you did not come; I feared that you were having a bad crossing.” “Did nobody disturb you?” he asked again. “No,” she said. “My door was locked. And this is a quiet hotel, I believe.”

As Charlie now looked back on the happenings of the night, with the experienced eye of an author of fiction, they moved him as mightily as if they had been out of one of his own books. He drew in his breath deeply. “Almighty God,” he said from the bottom of his heart, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are thy short stories higher than our short stories.”