Lying in the palm of her hand, the beautiful green earrings lay and looked at Marianne. They were a clear, almost transparent green, with beautiful markings in them like ferns and fishes. Gazing at them, Marianne thought there would be nothing you could not see in them if you wanted to. You would be able to see visions in them, as fortunetellers do in crystals. Yes, they were her favorite color, elfin green, the green of a curving wave on a grey day, undismayed though the sky is clouded, a brave color; not the sort of exciting brave color that scarlet is, flashing and flaming and soon burned out, but cool and keen, quiet, the color that even in midwinter is never quite banished from the earth and that shows first through the melting snow, the best and most tenacious color in the whole world. Her brown fingers closed over the treasures, and her black eyes looked straight into Captain O’Hara’s. “I’ll have my ears pierced this morning,” she said with finality.
The old man chuckled with appreciation. Not tomorrow, not next week, but this morning. It would hurt, but she wouldn’t care. A plain piece, but plucky, and she knew her mind. That was a possessive, determined look she’d given him! Few women could meet a man’s eyes with as direct a glance as that. Mostly they hid what they were after with veiled, coquettish glances, as though they were ashamed of it. This girl would never be ashamed of going straight for what she wanted. She was after those earrings, and she’d said so with that look.
“But, sir, are these for us?” gasped William.
“If you want ’em, son.”
“But you don’t know us!” cried William.
“You’re the first of me own sort I’ve set eyes on for many a long, dreary week, son,” explained Captain O’Hara. “An’ it was a pretty sight ye were, surely, rockin’ there on the waters of your harbor, with your pretty town in the sunshine behind ye, an’ it was good rest an’ shelter I had in this harbor of yours. Now here’s me jackknife. Sit ye down an’ carve your initials on me old teak table. There’s never a friend of mine but I have his initials on me table. Sit ye down now.”
They did as he asked, and it amused him mightily that Marianne needed no assistance but wielded his big jackknife with a greater skill than William did.
“No, ye won’t forget me, nor me you,” Captain O’Hara announced in stentorian tones as they went up the companion ladder together. “There’s much that goes to the makin’ of a man or woman into somethin’ better than a brute beast, but there’s three things in chief, an’ them three are the places where life sets us down, an’ the folk life knocks us up against, an’—what damn fool left this bucket here, right across the companion way, to trip me up like a drunken tinker on me own deck? Nat! Nathaniel! Nat, ye old divil, who put this bloody bucket—”
Nat popped up at his elbow and quickly removed it.
“What’s the third thing, sir?” asked Marianne, to distract his wrathful attention. “The things we own?”
“Ah, you’ve an acquisitive nature, you have,” chuckled Captain O’Hara. “No, me dear, not the things ye get but the things ye don’t get. Ah, you’ll learn, you’ll learn!”
They were at the rope ladder now, and Nat was waiting in the boat below to help them down. Captain O’Hara seized them like small puppies, first one and then the other, and swung them over the bulwarks. The powerful grip of his hands was the last experience they had of him, for when they were in their boat again, and looked up, he had gone. But Nat, after he had climbed on deck, lingered a moment as they rowed away, and they saw his lips twisting as he essayed to smile.
“Good-by, Nat!” they called. “Good-by, Green Dolphin! Good-by! Good-by!”
As they rowed home their backs were to St. Pierre and their faces to the clipper. To the last they could see the glorious shape of her, the long, lovely lines, the masts and spars against the sky. Marianne caught her breath and then folded her lips on something that was rather like a sob. Oh, to be aboard her when she went to sea again! To feel the great lift of the ship as the sea took her and see the sails blossoming like flowers upon the masts.
“I shall be a sailor,” said William suddenly from behind her. Though she could not see it, his face was as soft and pink as hers had been when in Captain O’Hara’s cabin she had discovered why she had been born. “Papa said it would be a pity to waste my steady stomach on a shore job. But I shan’t take my wife to sea as some men do.”
“She might make you take her,” said Marianne darkly.
“Not if I was in the Royal Navy,” said William.
“You’re going into the Merchant Service,” said Marianne, and her voice was as rasping and dry as a grasshopper’s.
William, a peaceable creature, did not argue the point, especially as the keel of the boat was now grating upon the cobbles beneath the archway of Pipet Lane. He tied the painter to its iron ring, jumped out into the shallow water, seized Marianne in his arms and carried her, staggering and chuckling with glee, to dry land.
“That was a better way than the plank,” he said. “You nearly fell off the plank. You’re not a bit heavy, Marianne. I can carry you easily.”
The tears suddenly rushed into Marianne’s eyes as she looked at the beautiful flushed face so close to hers. At that moment she loved him, neither as tool for her purpose nor as satisfaction for her longings, but simply because he was William.
“And what the devil are you two doing here?”
They looked round, and there was Dr. Ozanne coming out of one of the old tumbledown houses. Pipet Lane was not so attractive now. People were stirring. Raucous voices sounded from within the doors, hungry dogs were nosing about in some garbage. And Dr. Ozanne was not at his most attractive either. He had had an appalling night of it delivering a poor woman of a lusty man-child, and he was unshaven and haggard.
“I’ve a good mind to thrash you, William,” he said angrily to his son. “What do you mean by bringing Marianne to a place like this? You know perfectly well that this is a bad quarter of the town. And you, Marianne, you’re older than William, you know as well as I do that such junketings early in the morning are unseemly. By gad, you both deserve a thrashing! Take my arm, Marianne, and try to behave like a lady. Look at your skirt! Sopped with sea water! Get along with you, William. Pull your trousers down. You’re not fit to be seen. . . . And you’ll be less of a beauty than ever when you’ve had that thrashing that’s coming to you.”
But William was not abashed. His father’s threats of thrashing never materialized. He scurried along up Pipet Lane ahead of his father and Marianne, hopping and jumping over the cobbles like the child that he still was at heart. “I’m going to be a sailor!” he sang. “I’m going to be a sailor and sail all round the world.”
“In the Merchant Service,” said Marianne.
But Dr. Ozanne unexpectedly sided with his son. “Merchant Service be damned,” he said angrily. “What would his poor mother say? If it’s a sailor he’s to be, his mother’s son shall go in the Royal Navy. . . . If I can afford it.”
Chapter III
1
The next evening, after six o’clock dinner, Marianne in her maroon dress stood at the schoolroom window twisting two little gold rings round and round in her pierced ears. They must be kept continually on the move, keeping the holes open, until the sore places had healed. She made a wry face as she turned them, not because it hurt but because her memories of the last two days were not pleasant. It had been late when she got home yesterday morning, and she had had the worst row with her parents that she had ever had. . . . And little Marguerite had been stricken to the heart, and with reason, at having been left out of the morning’s adventure. She should have been awakened and taken too, she had said, and her reproachful sobs had been harder to bear than the parents’ scolding. . . . Altogether yesterday had been a vile day, and as her request to be taken to the jeweler’s to have her ears pierced had been brusquely refused, she had had to pierce them herself with her mother’s hatpin; a nasty, messy
business. Confronted with bleeding ears and a fait accompli, Sophie had relented sufficiently to produce the little gold rings, but she had not spoken to her erring daughter; and though today things had been pleasanter, Marianne had nevertheless withdrawn into solitude once dinner was over.
But the escapade had been a thousand times worth it, and from the parlor window one could only see the garden, while from up here one could see the harbor and the Green Dolphin. It was a perfect autumn evening, blue and crisp and lovely. The gale had not risen again, and the sea had moderated.
Suddenly her hands dropped from her ears, she gave a cry of delight, opened the window wide, and leaned out. The Green Dolphin was moving. The wind was favorable and she was bound for the port of Bristol.
And Marianne’s spirit was with her as she went. Though she was too far away to see the clipper as anything but a beautiful toy at a distance, yet in imagination she could hear and see it all. She could see Captain O’Hara upon the poop, red-faced, magnificent, bellowing his orders. She could see the sad monkey face and the twisted smile of Nat beneath his red cap, and hear the men singing at the capstan as they wound up the anchor. And she could hear the creaking of the cordage and the ripple of water along the ship’s side, and see the arrow-shaped white water speeding away from the proud curve of the moving prow. And now the clipper was outside the harbor, and Marianne felt in her own body the great lift of the ship as the sea took her.
She hung out of the window and watched till her eyes ached, her pulses leaping as one sail after another blossomed like flowers on the masts. Ah, but she was lovely, that ship, the loveliest thing in all the world! And now she was running swiftly before the wind, a wake of white foam behind her. She was like a bird now, like a speeding gull, her wings alight in the sunlight, alive from prow to stem, in every fiber of her, a creature spun out of sun and air, free and indestructible, the spirit of the sea.
Marianne watched for a long while, yet it seemed but a moment. Now the clipper was hull down over the horizon, and now, like petals falling, her sails dropped one by one from sight. A mast-tip gleamed in the sunlight and then she was gone, a dream, an immortal memory, the loveliest that earth could give.
Marianne found that she was sobbing almost hysterically. She was tired after all the excitements and agitations of the last two days; and because she was a woman, it might never be her lot to sail over the rim of the world in a sailing ship. William would. William was a man and was to be a sailor if his father could afford it.
Her sobs stopped abruptly. “If I can afford it.” She could hear Dr. Ozanne’s angry voice saying the words as he had said them yesterday in Pipet Lane. Unless his practice improved, he would certainly not be able to afford it, and Marianne was shrewd enough to know that Dr. Ozanne’s practice was not going to improve. She was also shrewd enough to know that he would never compromise with the Merchant Service for William. He had got the idea into his head that for his wife’s son it must be the Navy or nothing, and with the obstinacy of his weakness he would cling to the idea as a limpet to its rock. And his laziness, combined with his pride, would prevent him from searching for some other man who would be able to do for William what he could not do himself. . . . Why, he had not even yet bestirred himself to send William to school, though there was a good boys’ school on the Island. . . . And William was as bad. William, however much he longed for anything, would be far too indolent to set to work and encompass it for himself. No, it was she who must win his heart’s desire for him, she who must make life for him and through him find life herself. And there was no time to waste, either. If William was going into the Navy, he must go now. He was the right age. Later on he would be too old.
When Marianne decided to do anything, she was in an agony unless she could do it at that very moment. Luckily at this moment she was free as air, free as a bird. She sped to her room, seized her green cloak, flung it round her and ran down the stairs, through the garden and down Green Dolphin Street to the Ozannes’ door. It stood wide open, and in the little waiting room to the right of the passage, that opened into the doctor’s surgery, a row of patients still sat on the hard bench. Evidently the evening surgery hour had stretched long past its appointed limit and the Doctor had not yet had his dinner. Marianne hesitated, then slipped in and sat down quietly at the end of the bench. After all, I’ve come on business, she thought, the most important business in the whole world, William’s future.
It was very quiet in the little room with its bare scrubbed floor and whitewashed walls and gay checked curtains of red and blue. The evening light filled it, and one could hear the sea. The waiting patients spoke to each other in low murmurs. They were poor folk, heavy with weariness at the end of a hard day, anxious, burdened with their pain. Yet they leaned back against the hard wall behind the bench restfully, as though the peace of the bare room had laid a hand upon them, and the grownups among them seemed to have no dread of what might await them beyond the surgery door. What is it in him that gives them this sense of rest and trust? wondered Marianne. Perhaps I’ll know when I get to the other side of the surgery door. She leaned back, too, against the wall, for she was tired, and began once more to twist the gold rings round and round in her ears. The poor folk cast a few curious glances at the dainty little lady in her fine maroon silk dress and green cloak, her bare head leaning back against the wall, her thin hands twisting away at the gold rings, her dark eyes observing them with the bright curiosity of a little bird, and then they went back to their own thoughts and murmured confidences, and thought no more about her.
But she thought a good deal about them. There was a very old country-woman bent almost double with infirmity, with knotted hands that one would have thought must be almost useless to her; yet the white frills inside her best black poke bonnet were beautifully goffered, her apron was snow-white, and the little scarlet crossover shawl that she wore over the bodice of her voluminous black dress was bright and gay. She had a beautiful merry old face, with unquenchable vitality in the dark eyes. By her side sat a little pop-eyed granddaughter with a front tooth missing, who held a basket with three brown eggs in it very carefully upon her lap. It was a present for the Doctor, Marianne guessed, probably the only payment they would be able to give him. She guessed that the old grannie lived with a married daughter, but she was quite sure that the old dame’s scrupulous cleanliness was her own achievement, won at immense cost of labor and pain, the last of her fights that would be fought to a triumphant finish. So that is what old age can be, thought Marianne, just a fight to be clean. Yet the old lady’s face was merry. Apparently one could enjoy it. Marianne dropped her hands to her lap and smiled a little. To some people fighting in itself is enjoyable, and she supposed that the fighters of this world can always get some sort of a kick out of things.
Next to the pop-eyed little granddaughter was a girl with a shawl slipping back from a small, beautiful, sleek gold head. She had a drained white face with half moons of darkness beneath her flower-blue eyes, a child’s face that looked oddly out of keeping above her distorted, swollen body. Marianne had never before seen a woman quite so near her hour as this one, for Sophie had taken very good care that she should not, and a flicker of fear went through her. So one looked like that, did one? And just how much did it hurt to have a baby? And how did one have a baby? Sophie belonged to a generation that gave to its daughters no explanation whatever of the very reason for their existence. Marianne was utterly ignorant, and sullen and angry at her ignorance, shamed somehow by the dignity of that girl and the proud carriage of her head. Though they were so near to each other in age, a whole world of experience lay between them. Yet when they looked at each other, Marianne did not drop her eyes before the unconscious patronage that was in the other’s glance. For she’d know too one day; she’d never acquiesce in ignorance of her own womanhood, in the lack of that pride and dignity, no, not whatever it cost, for there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessin
g with pain. Another girl’s fear would have undergone a change at this point, but Marianne’s died right out; for as yet her arrogance could entertain no doubts as to her ability to equal in experience a little girl out of the streets with a sleek gold head and flower-blue eyes. They smiled at each other, and suddenly there was neither patronage nor arrogance but a fusing of their youth and womanhood and a quick thrill of friendship.
Then their moment of intimacy was interrupted by the little boy with the swollen wrist who sat next to Marianne. He was a freckled, dirty urchin of some seven years, afflicted with a running nose and no handkerchief and clothed in a tattered jersey that smelled strongly of fish, and he suddenly dissolved into tears. Normally Marianne would have taken no notice, for she was not fond of children as children, but the sight of the pregnant girl, and the quick thrill of friendship that she had felt for her, had quickened her own dormant maternity, and she put her arm around him and pulled him close to her, his fishy jersey pressed against her silk dress. “What is it?” she asked.
“He thinks he’s broken his wrist,” said the blue-eyed girl. “I say he’s just sprained it. That’s all it is. Une veine trésaillie. A sprain.”
“I slipped getting into the boat,” sobbed the small boy. “I slipped and fell down with my wrist underneath me.”
They spoke in their Island patois, that Marianne found rather difficult to follow, but she gathered that the little boy, alone among the waiting patients, was afraid of what lay beyond the surgery door.
“Dr. Ozanne is kind,” she said comfortingly. “And if it hurts, you’ll enjoy fighting not to let him see how much. Fighting can be fun, you know; any sort of fighting.” And she looked across at the merry old dame who kept herself so clean.