Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge
“Mamma’s sitting on it,” said Marianne.
“Here’s the picket boat,” said Octavius with a sigh of relief.
It was speeding toward them across the harbor, and it was time for the last embraces. Sophie got up and folded William, cold in the head and all, to her motherly bosom, brokenly murmuring the old Island blessing, “Allez en paix; vivez en paix, et que le Dieu du Paix vous bénisse,” and Octavius gripped him by the hand. Marguerite kissed him without a single word, for her misery was so great that she could scarcely breathe, let alone speak, and her lips against his cheek were cold. A day and a night. She had been so happy, but it had been so soon over, and William had said no word of love.
Marianne had turned away when the others said good-by to William, but she went down the steps with him and at the bottom she flung her arms passionately round him. “Don’t forget me,” she pleaded with a desperation that after Marguerite’s coldness was like a warm and living flame.
“As if I could ever forget you!” exclaimed William. “And I’ll never forget what you were to my father.”
It was at her that he looked last as the picket boat slid away, and his eyes were shining with his gratitude. . . . But he had said no word of love.
Marianne climbed back up the steps with dragging feet and stood with the others waving her handkerchief. William stood up in the picket boat waving his hat for as long as he could see them. As the boat slid out of the harbor, a pale gleam of watery sunshine lit up his tall figure and his bright hair, and then he was gone.
“China is so far away,” sobbed Sophie. “He’s never been so far away from us before.”
“Soon be home again,” said Octavius a little querulously. “Time passes. Nothing to cry about. Now for God’s sake let’s get home and have a hot drink.” And he offered his arm to his wife and hurried her away.
Marianne and Marguerite followed more slowly, queerly aware through their desolation of that love for each other that nothing seemed able to destroy.
“You’re an odd girl, Marguerite,” said Marianne wonderingly. “It seemed so strange to me that you were not watching for William to come home on the night his father died.”
“But I was,” said Marguerite. “I was watching from the schoolroom window. It was bright moonlight. I saw you bring him home.”
“Then why—why—” gasped Marianne.
“Why did I not come down? Because you were already there,” said Marguerite. “I knew that if you two were alone together you might be able to comfort him, but if I had been there too, your jealousy of me would have spoiled what you were trying to do for him.”
“You did yourself great harm,” said Marianne.
“I was just thinking of William,” said Marguerite simply.
Marianne let out a great sigh; something between exasperation, wonder, and relief.
“You are a saint, Marguerite,” she said. “But you are also a fool.”
BOOK II: The Second Island
Part 1 The Sailor
They that go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters;
These men see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.
For at his word the stormy wind ariseth which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man and are at their wits’ end.
So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble he delivereth them out of their distress.
For he maketh the storm to cease so that the waves thereof are still.
Then are they glad, because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.
PSALM 107.
Chapter I
1
William, hands in pockets, wandered through the strange streets as through the labyrinthine ways of some fantastic dream. He felt as though he were in a dream, and not only because of the queerness of this Eastern city, but even more because of the queerness of his own mental state.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded of himself. “This is China, you ass. For God’s sake look about you and take it in.”
But his will would not obey his commands. The strange shapes and colors continued to drift, and his mind and body drifted with them. He yawned, a great, cavernous yawn that showed all his strong white teeth, and it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was tired. This was a rather startling thought, for William with his herculean strength was not very well acquainted with fatigue. Well, if this was tiredness, it was a very odd sort of tiredness: no aching of the limbs, as after hard physical labor, no throbbing of the temples as on the morning of the night before; just this strange muffling of sensation, this heavy, leaden weight upon the will.
He would have been much astonished had he been told that he was utterly exhausted, and that not only physically but emotionally as well.
His grief bewildered him. He couldn’t understand it. After all, he had said to himself in sleepless tossings, his father had been getting on in years, and everybody had to die. And, after all, it wasn’t as though he saw a great deal of his father; if one was a sailor, one didn’t see much of home. And, if what people said was true and souls lived on beyond death, why make this fuss about it? But reason didn’t help at all. In the first glimpse of dawn, that had always brought him such uplifting of the heart because life renewed itself once more, came the thought, he’s dead, he’ll not see the dawn again. In the middle of clamping one’s great teeth enjoyably into a huge slab of ship’s biscuit and salt beef, in the middle of gulping a glorious drink of fiery grog, came the thought, he’s dead, and the food was dust in one’s mouth and the drink gall. One could forget for a few minutes, but always the grief came back, and the pain of it made one feel very muddled in one’s head.
And there was another thing that was confusing him, and that was a new and desperate longing for Marguerite. In the past, whenever he had left Marguerite, he had always missed her for a while and then been completely comforted in the thought of her, secure and content in her island, counting away the happy days that should bring them together again. But it wasn’t like that now. His first experience of death had struck all sense of security from under him, and it had not been a happy girl whom he had left standing buffeted by the wind on the sea wall at St. Pierre. Always he seemed to see her standing there, bent to the wind, bewildered, sorrowful, denied, while he like an ass had been more taken up with Marianne because she had been good to his father. That was it—denied. They were in love, and fate or his stupidity had kept him from saying what he should have said to bring them together. He wanted to go straight back home and save her from the sorrow in which he had left her; and the width of the world was between them. “I’ll write,” he had said to himself, as he lay in his bunk in the roaring, stuffy darkness. “I’ll write and tell her I love her, and we’ll be married when I go home.”
But he hadn’t written yet, and the decision to do so had not very much eased him, for in his restless longing there was something more than just the longing for Marguerite, something huge and primeval and thirsty that had come alive in him when he had held La Môme in his arms, and which he did not in the least understand. It was in him even in this dreamlike, exhausted state when all things drifted by like petals on the wind and his will did not answer to the helm.
For even in dreams the wraith that we are thirsts for the drifting beauty, and on awaking weeps for it, and sometimes through long years remembers it. So did William long vaguely for the beauty all about him to take concrete form and come alive as something that he could take in his arms and save from sorrow, as he would have saved Marguerite if she had been here. And so to the end of his life was he to remember this Eastern city, recalling its beauty correctly, when the horrible thing that had happened in it was so blurre
It looked as though it had been carved out of a flower. The beautiful high-arched stone bridges, forming with their reflection in smooth water a perfect circle, the pagodas with their curly roofs and projected eaves, even the curve of the streets and the shapes of common things like the lintels of doors, or the steps leading to water that flowed beneath the bridges like uncoiling lengths of silk, had a beauty that William could not reconcile with the clumsy hands of men. The lines of this city sprung and flowed and radiated like the veinings of a flower, and the colors of it, bright and haphazard though they were, struck no discordant note. The blue roof tiles, the sedan chairs of scarlet and green, the bright trappings of the donkeys, the gay garments of the people, and the smoldering colors within the shadows of the shops were a shifting kaleidoscope of brilliance that was never still long enough for any one color to clash with another, or for any shape of beauty to eclipse another.
The Orion was anchored in the wide estuary, a tall, aloof, self-conscious presence among the lemon-sailed craft of the fishermen, and a party of young officers had come ashore with strict injunctions to be back by sunset, for at dawn they would sail again. William had kept with the others for a little while, and then had slipped away by himself. Solitude was not a thing that he usually craved, but he wanted to buy pretty things for Sophie and Marianne and Marguerite, and he did not want to do it to a running commentary of jokes and laughter.
“Yet I was a fool to come alone,” said William to himself. He was hopelessly lost in this strange city. And he was somehow afraid; not of physical violence, for the right hand that he had thrust into the pocket of his monkey jacket held his gun, and in his left trouser pocket was the Maori knife that Captain O’Hara had given him long ago.
Suddenly the beauty that was all about him took concrete form in the person of a slip of a girl, seeming scarcely more than a child as she swayed along in front of him. Her green coat was worn over long green trousers, and he saw to his surprise that she was not a tottering, lily-foot girl but walked with easy grace upon unbound feet shod in little peach-colored shoes with golden heels. Her small head was dark and sleek, the hair braided into a pigtail that hung to her knees, and behind each ear she wore a bunch of jessamine blossoms. The skin of her neck was white, not olive-tinted, and flawless as the flowers she wore. She looked back over her shoulder and her eyes met William’s; not narrow, slanting eyes but wide and innocently opened, full of childlike wonder and sorrow, not black but a deep, soft pansy brown with curling, fanlike lashes. The eyes smiled through their sadness, though the demurely folded and poignant lips did not move, and then she looked away again. For how long had she been drifting along like this in front of him? Was this the first time that she had looked back over her shoulder with that pathetic, childlike glance? He could not be certain, for it still all seemed like a dream. It was in a dream that he saw her pause on the threshold of a doorway, looking back once more over her shoulder; and this time her lips as well as her eyes were smiling. It was in a dream that she drifted away into the shadows and in a dream he followed her.
He found himself in just the sort of shop he had been looking for. Beautiful things were all about him; boxes of carved rosewood, little figurines of clear green jade, strips of silk embroidered with flowers and butterflies, exquisite china bowls, tasseled necklaces, and shoes of colored brocades. The shop was shadowed and fragrant, with sticks of incense burning before a shrine, and he saw the beautiful things in it only dimly. But the girl, standing facing him in the shaft of yellow sunlight that struck through the open door, he suddenly saw so clearly that he might have been the first man ever created, gazing in stupid astonishment at the first woman God ever made.
She must have known she was quite perfect or she would not have dared to stand like that in the full glory of the sunset light. Her small white face was heart-shaped, tapering to a rounded chin like a baby’s. Her poignant mouth was coral-colored, and the dark hair was drawn behind her ears to show their delicate shell-like curves beneath the jessamine flowers. Her green coat, he saw, was of silk, embroidered with magnolia blossoms. She held her hands demurely linked in front of her, and behind their sadness her pansy eyes were sparkling.
“Yes?” she said. “Yes, you English sailorman, what do you wish to buy?”
Her voice was sweet and light, and she spoke not pidgin English but the authentic language of his country, with an inflection that made of it something that was very nearly music.
“You speak English?” gasped William.
She nodded at him. “My father was English,” she said. “My father was an English sailor, like you, and he gave me my brown eyes and my white skin and taught me to speak English. But my mother was Chinese, and she gave me my little hands and feet and taught me to swing my pigtail and wear my trousers with an air.”
“Was it because I am English that you smiled at me like that?” asked William.
“Yes,” she said. “I always smile at the English.”
He stared at her like an astonished ox, his mouth slightly ajar, and it was not until a peal of rather mocking laughter broke from her that he remembered what he was here for. “I want to buy something,” he said, looking about him and scratching his head in perplexity.
“For a lady,” she said.
“For three ladies,” said William lugubriously.
She pursed her coral mouth and looked at him wickedly.
“Three ladies?” she mocked. “Then you want three somethings. What are they like, these ladies?”
William found it difficult to remember. When he tried to visualize Sophie and Marianne, and even his adored Marguerite, this other girl’s flawless face seemed to get in the way. She was standing very close to him now, and he felt half stupefied by the scent of the jessamine. “They are a mother and two daughters,” he got out at last. “The mother is fair and beautiful, with blue eyes, and her elder daughter is little and dark and smart, and the younger daughter—she’s a little like her mother,” he ended lamely.
The girl did not hesitate. “This for Mamma,” she said, and lifted from the wall a strip of pearly satin sprinkled with pale pink blossoms and butterflies of blue and gold. “And for the daughter who is small and dark, these little red shoes—when we have tiny feet we like to go brightly shod, you know, to draw attention to them. And for the other daughter, whom you could not describe to me—” She stopped and laughed. “For her you shall have this necklace of carved beads. The bottom bead is fashioned like Lung-mu who protects sailormen, and she will pray to it for you when the wind blows.” And standing on tiptoe she slipped it over his head. He lifted it and looked at it, for it was one of the loveliest things he had ever seen. The beads were large, made from some fragrant wood, and each one, while keeping its cylindrical shape, was exquisitely carved into the shape of some bird or beast, insect or flower or sacred figure of a god. There were strange little monkeys, with hands covering eyes or ears or mouths that they might see or hear or speak no evil, lotus flowers and chrysanthemums and apricot blossoms, swallows and robins and bees and goldfish; there was Buddha with his little dog in his arms; and swinging at the bottom, in the place where the cross would have hung on a rosary, was the figure of the dragon goddess who keeps mortals safe when they pass to and fro in boats upon the water. It was a perfect thing. William gasped and then, scarcely knowing what he did, thrust it away for secrecy beneath his coat. Then he stood staring dumbly again while the girl wrapped up the embroidery and the shoes and set them aside. She was laughing all the time now, laughter like a peal of bells that intoxicated him. She had a dimple in one cheek, and the tip of an absurd pink tongue showed between her teeth.
“There!” she said. “And now, sir, do you understand Chinese money? Do you know the value of the tael? If not, then show me your purse and I will take from it what you owe me.” It was something of a command, and though he understood the Chinese
“They grow like that at home,” he said, and touched the blossoms with his finger.
She came close to him and laid her hands on his great chest and looked up into his face. “You are homesick?” she whispered, and then, without wailing for his answer, “You poor boy! So am I. I am homesick for the house where I lived before my father and mother died. I weep at night for my father’s courtyards and my mother’s arms.”
The sadness that had been momentarily banished by her laughter had come back. Her eyes were swimming with tears, and her mouth drooped at the corners. She was so tiny that the top of her head did not reach his shoulder. She had lost not only her father, thought William, but her mother too, and his stupid heart ached to bursting for her. And then somehow she was in his arms so that he could comfort her better, a little bit of a thing who seemed to have no bones, an armful of soft silk and perfume and flower petals. Her skin was so cool and satin smooth that he was not quite sure if he was kissing her cheek or the jessamine flowers. And then her warm rosy mouth was on his, and it was as though he had been for a long time parched and tormented with thirst and heat, and now had flung himself into a cool, deep river of delight. It flowed through, the dream swift and strong, and he gave himself up to it with a sigh of relief. Just lately, for the first time, he had been finding life a painful business, and he knew now with what passion men will turn to anything at all that causes the waters of forgetfulness to close above their heads.