Green Dolphin Street by Elizabeth Goudge
“Isn’t she living to the full now?” demanded the outraged Octavius. “Look at all her good works. She’s never at home.”
Marianne’s long pent-up resentment suddenly shot out as white-hot command.
“William’s letter must be answered, Papa, and now! Now, at once! The packet leaves in the morning, and the letter must be on it. Pierre must go down to the harbor with it tonight, for the Green Dolphin may have been delayed, and the Good Hope sailing perhaps this week. Write now, Papa. Dictate the letter to Mamma. No, not Marguerite, Mamma. He must recognize the handwriting of one of my parents. The ink, Marguerite, the paper and the wax. Quickly! Quickly!”
Deafened and bewildered, Sophie and Octavius gave themselves into the hands of their daughters. The cards were swept from the table, ink and wax and paper spread out instead. It was, in the end, Marguerite who dictated the letter, for Octavius’ wits seemed to have deserted him. It was a kindly, courteous letter, calculated to rejoice the heart of any prospective son-in-law. The only odd thing about it was that from first to last the Christian name of the lady was not mentioned. She was referred to throughout as “my daughter.” For Marguerite had not yet absolutely grasped the truth of what had happened. When a blow falls suddenly, the human mind quickly wraps itself in protective layers of unbelief lest the shock prove more than can be borne. They peel off one by one, and it was the last one left that kept Marguerite, although unconsciously, from giving the name “Marianne” to William’s bride.
Sophie finished writing the letter, Octavius signed it, and Marguerite sprinkled the sand to dry the ink. “Will you not write him a little note?” she asked Marianne.
It seemed that Marianne in her exaltation had not thought of this, and was quite incapable of composition. All she could do, when Marguerite pushed a piece of paper toward her, was to write the three words “I love you” in a shaky unrecognizable handwriting. Then she took the little bunch of primroses that Marguerite had given her from her dress, kissed them, and folded them within the sheet. At that, with a wholly unprotected mind, Marguerite knew. Her primroses were going to William, but she herself would never see him again.
4
At last she was alone in her room and, her common sense still reigning supreme, taking off her corsets. Never weep in corsets. Hearts break with less pain if there is no restricting band of whalebone clamped upon the top of them. It is also wiser, if you are about to fall into an abyss of misery, to get into bed first, for once you have fallen it will not be easy to get up and clean your teeth and brush your hair and tie on your nightcap. Marguerite was wise, and she did all these things with punctilious care before she locked her door, blew out the candles, crept within the shadows of her blue-curtained bed, lay down and knew that she had believed a lie. It wasn’t true that William loved her. Either he had never loved her, and she had deceived herself from the very beginning, or else he had once loved her a little and then her cowardice when Dr. Ozanne had been taken ill, that shrinking from illness that she had since learned to overcome, had come between them and turned him to Marianne, who had been so brave and had helped him so wonderfully through those last days. She remembered now how William had clung to Marianne at that time, and how his last look had been for her. In either case that perfect union in which she had believed had never existed. It was a lie, and she had been the most conceited idiot ever born to imagine that she had it in her to inspire it. Why should any man love her in that way? Why? She saw now that there was nothing in her to merit such a love. She was nothing, a nonentity with a pretty face, a weak, conceited, self-deceiving fool; and what she had believed had been a lie.
And if that was a lie, was there any truth anywhere in her life? Her union with the earthly love had stood to her as a sort of symbol of another union. If she had deceived herself in the matter of this earthly union, had she not also deceived herself in the matter of the heavenly one? Was it really true that she had rested in the presence of God, and come from it to strengthen and comfort, or had she merely imagined it? “I’ve imagined it,” she said, and fell immediately into a pit of darkness so terrible that she thought she would go mad. “Why should I think that I could be so used by God?” she kept asking herself. “Why should I be? What is there in me to use? I am nothing—nothing—nothing.”
The hours of her humiliation passed slowly and leadenly in the darkness. Once she heard her mother come to her door and knock softly, and for some moments she lay trying to force herself to get up and admit the companionship she did not want; but just as she was lifting herself up, Sophie went away again, and she thanked her mother in her heart for her understanding. I am nothing—nothing—nothing. She was clinging to that, she found, as to a sort of anchor, because it kept her from having to face the terrible possibility that God Himself was not, and the realization of God’s nothingness would be the final horror that could not be borne. Yet as time passed she knew that that possibility, too, must be faced. She must let go of the very last thing left her, the knowledge of her own nothingness, and face it. And she let go, and looked around for God and did not find Him; and then there was nothing, except the dark night.
But there was the dark night Very slowly she became conscious of it, and then she found that she was hugging it to her, wrapping herself in it as though it were a cloak to hide her in this hour of her humiliation. For a long while the night was all that she had, and then suddenly, like a sword stabbing the darkness, came a trill of music. It was a bird welcoming the dawn. That, too, was added. She drew back one of the curtains of her bed and saw a patch of grey light where the window was. That also. During the hours of the night she had been completely stripped, and now one by one a few things were being handed to her for the clothing of her naked, shivering, humiliated soul. For a few things one must have to make one decent if one was to step forth again upon the highway. For that, obviously, impossible though the task seemed to her at this moment, was what she had to do as soon as the full day came, because there wasn’t anything else that she could do. She had to go on living and serving, with the living and serving stripped of all pleasure now that she could no longer enjoy the delight of knowing herself the bringer of God’s gifts. But there would be something. There would be darkness and light, night and day, both sweet things, and music linking them together. The full glory of the dawn chorus seemed all about her as she dragged herself out of bed and set to work with slow, laborious movements to wash and dress herself. In her exhaustion she was so long over her toilette that it was full day by the time she pulled back the muslin curtains that covered her window and flung it wide and leaned out, the scent of the spring earth rushing up to meet her. That also was given back. . . . By whom?
Chapter II
1
Marianne sat bolt upright in the hackney coach, jogging through the cobbled streets of London toward the West India Docks. Incredible though it might seem, she, who had never left the Island in her life, had performed the whole amazing, stupendous journey to London entirely by herself. Her family, Sophie and Octavius and Marguerite, had implored her to let them come with her and see her on board the Green Dolphin, but she had curtly refused. From the moment when the packet left the harbor of St. Pierre she had wanted to perform alone this epic journey to the man she loved.
“My darling,” had run his little cocked-hat note to her; “have you the courage to leave your little Island and come out to me quite alone? It will be a great undertaking for you, and I know it. Indeed it amazes me that I can even ask such a thing of you; only I know that you and I are one, that we always have been and always will be. I have known that increasingly through all these years of parting. There have been times when you have felt so near that I could have put out my hand and touched you. And so I know that though it must be alone and through much danger, yet you will come. William.”
And so she was coming, with all the haste that could be achieved by the rickety old hackney coach with its stumbling, broken-down horse and i
The hackney coach gave a great jolt over a heap of garbage, and with one hand she held tightly to Old Nick in his cage on the seat beside her, while with the other she clutched her reticule. It held her money and her jewels, and she had scarcely let go of it day or night since she left the Island. When she was in bed she hugged it to her breast, and when she ate she sat on it. It was a pretty reticule, made of bottle-green velvet with a very strong clasp. It matched her new green merino traveling dress trimmed with bands of velvet, with a matching cloak lined with orange satin, and her green velvet bonnet with an orange feather in it, and a thick green curtain veil whose green silk cord had a little gold bobble on the end. She had a green umbrella, too, with a golden ring at the top that fitted over her arm, and of course she wore her green earrings. Altogether it was the most fetching costume she had ever had, and she intended to put it on when she landed in New Zealand, with her green umbrella hung on her arm, Nick in his cage in one hand and her reticule in the other.
Nick, of course, was a dreadful nuisance, but she had not for one moment contemplated leaving him behind. He had been a part of William’s childhood, and beloved of Dr. Ozanne, and she was sure that William would be pleased to see him. Evidently Old Nick thought so too, for he had spruced up in an amazing manner since they set sail from the Island and had made nothing at all of the toils of the journey. He had, indeed, been all impatience. “Up aloft, lad,” he now adjured the driver. “Get for’ard, you tripe hound! What the blue, blazing hell—”
Marianne pulled over his cage the covering of dark green plush, shaped like a bell, that Marguerite had made for occasions like this, and he was silent. It was a handsome covering, worked with the parrot’s initials—O.N.O.—in scarlet crewelwork. It had been Marguerite’s own idea to make it, knowing how embarrassing Old Nick Ozanne’s outspoken comments could prove. Marguerite had been full of these merry jokes during those hurried weeks of preparation on the Island. Marianne wondered what she would have done without her, for Sophie and Octavius, feeling that they would never see their elder daughter again, had been plunged in gloom, and friends and neighbors had done little to hide their dumbfounded astonishment that any man in possession of his senses could plead across hundreds of miles of sea, after an absence of ten years, for Marianne Le Patourel to come to him as the companion of his bed and board. But Marguerite had resolutely kept before the minds of them all that weddings are occasions for joy and festivity. The trousseau, the good-by parties, even the final farewells, had been lifted out of the doldrums by her gift of laughter. Marianne would never forget how good she had been, even though she hadn’t looked at all well during those weeks. Had Marianne not been so self-absorbed, she would have been full of consternation at the exhaustion that every now and then had seemed to submerge Marguerite’s gaiety. But as it was, she had just thought it natural that Marguerite should look tired, when they were working day and night at the trousseau, and she had thanked God that her sister had outgrown that childish infatuation for William. Dear Marguerite! Never had she felt so full of love for her as when, the victor in the fight for William, she had stood upon the deck of the moving packet and waved to her where she stood in the spring sunshine upon the harbor wall. Marguerite had seen her off alone, for Sophie and Octavius had been too upset to leave Le Paradis. That was Marianne’s last memory of the Island—her tall sister standing in her blue cloak in the sunshine against the background of the tumbled roofs of St. Pierre, waving her lace handkerchief gaily over her head.
From St. Pierre to this jolting hackney coach—what a journey it had been! She had left the Island in fine weather, with a fair wind, and the long day’s voyage to England had been sheer joy. She had sat enthroned upon the pyramid of her trunks upon the deck, keeping her eye upon them, Old Nick beside her, her umbrella in one hand and her reticule in the other, her food for the day in a neat parcel upon her lap, and looked out exultingly upon the sparkling sea. At last! The years of her frustration were behind her, she had thought, and she was setting sail for adventure, for love, for battle, for pain, for that full measure of experience of which she was capable.
England! She had abandoned her trunks and Old Nick and run to the bulwarks, jerking eagerly at the little gold bobble at the end of the cord that pulled her veil aside, that she might see this almost legendary country as clearly as possible. At first it had been just a smudge on the horizon, blue against the rose-colored sky, but how immense a smudge! This was not an island that could be walked around in a day, and the thought of its immensity had touched her soul with awe. And New Zealand, so she and Marguerite had discovered from studying the old globe that they had used in their schoolroom days, was just as large. “How wonderful are Thy works, O Lord,” she had whispered reverently. “In wisdom hast Thou made them all.”
Weymouth! Fashionable, salubrious Weymouth, beloved of the aristocracy, patronized by royalty, she had read of it often and at last her eyes had beheld it. As a Crusader looking upon the Holy Places, so had she looked upon the bathing machines of Weymouth. Hundreds of them, and all so brightly painted! Down those steps crowned and coroneted heads had stepped with courage and determination, and dipped up and down in the brine. And the fashionable folk—thousands of them, so it had seemed to Marianne—strolling up and down on the esplanade, and the chariots and phaetons and britskas rolling by in their millions on the road behind them, and the grey houses with their windows and door-knockers winking in the sun stretching on and on apparently forever, as though this magical town had got no end. It had been almost too much for Marianne. Like the Queen of Sheba, the half had not been told her. So overwhelmed had she been that it had been a matter for thanksgiving that when the packet had glided to its anchorage, and she sought for a hackney coach, she had been taken possession of by a fatherly driver who had daughters of his own at home, and conveyed her and her baggage to the Temperance Hotel beside the station without taking any further advantage of her exalted condition than charging her double for the fare.
Sophie did not know much about foreign travel; in fact the one and only thing she did know about it was that young females must always stay at Temperance Hotels if they do not want to be molested by the male. In Sophie’s opinion a desire for strong drink and a desire to molest young females are twin desires in the male breast, and if a young female avoided a bar she could also avoid being overtaken by the calamity of unwanted attentions. But when Sophie had insisted that Marianne stay always at Temperance Hotels, she had not known that those virtuous places are generally situated next to railway stations. She had not known that for the rest of Marianne’s life the two words Temperance Hotel would be a pseudonym for the condition known as ecstasy.
For her bedroom window at Weymouth had framed a view of the station. Steam engines! Marianne had read about them. She knew, perhaps, more about their internal affairs than any woman living, but never until the night at Weymouth had her eyes beheld them. She was thirty-two years old, and never before had she seen a steam engine. She had knelt at the bedroom window, her precious reticule clasped only mechanically to her bosom, and worship had filled her soul. She had not been able to tear herself from her window even to go down to the coffee room and have some supper. She had been kneeling by the window when the chambermaid brought her hot water at bedtime, and she had been in the same position when she was called next morning in time to catch the train that would carry her to London. Whether she had ever gone to bed at all the chambermaid had no idea.
She never forgot the subsequent marvelous journey. She had sat entranced, wearing an old grey cloak and bonne
What a land! What a vast and wonderful land! It had been so strange to go on and on and not to see the sea. The woods were so vast and the hills so high, and the rivers—she had not seen a river before—so gentle and yet so majestic as they flowed on apparently without end between high wooded banks and beneath the arches of beautiful old bridges, or through the lush water meadows of gentlemen’s estates. Those estates had filled her with awe. The lovely parklands, the herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, the vast mansions glimpsed between trees mightier than anything she had dreamed of on her Island rock, had lit her imagination to flame. Oh, to be mistress of vast acres! To live in a fine house and control obsequious servants, and have as many flocks and herds as Job in the days of his prosperity! Could one attain to that in New Zealand? Was it possible for the mistress of a wooden shack, the wife of a lumberman, to drag herself and him up to such dizzy heights? If it were possible, she had vowed then and there, she would do it. She had proved that she could attain to social eminence whenever she wanted it; she was about to experience love and marriage and adventure; she would get riches too, if riches could be got. She would not rest until existence was for her a sucked orange. When there was no drop of juice left, then she would fling away the rind and die content.
The journey had ended in the amazement and confusion of London itself. There she had stayed for three days with a friend of Sophie’s childhood, a woman who had left the Island as a girl and had married a wealthy London solicitor. She was a brilliant and polished woman of the world and had been fully prepared to patronize the middle-aged, plain, travel-stained and exhausted little woman who had been set down with a parrot and a pyramid of boxes upon the snowy steps of her Park Lane mansion. And so had the butler, the footmen, and the lady’s maid. And for the period of that one evening Marianne had submitted to patronage, so overwhelmed had she been by the hugeness, the magnificence, the crowds, the noise and the squalor of this city. Weymouth had been positively eclipsed. She had not known that so many people could live all together in any one city, or dwell in such a multitude of houses, or reach such extremes of poverty and grandeur, or make so much noise and dirt, and for just a few hours her spirit had quailed and sunk beneath the immense impact of the fact of London.