Green Dolphin Street Page 3

  Marianne so seldom cried that Marguerite’s laughter was abruptly checked by fright. She flung her arms round Marianne’s neck and kissed her wet, sallow face. “Where have you hurt yourself?” she demanded. “Where, Marianne? I’ll kiss the place.”

  But Marianne, abruptly choking down the sudden storm of tears, shrugged impatiently away from the kisses that a moment ago had been so sweet to her. She forgot that it had been Marguerite who had given her her moment. She thought she would not have lost it if she had been alone. “Of course I haven’t hurt myself,” she snapped. “I never cry when I hurt myself. Only little girls like you do that.”

  “Then why are you crying?” asked Marguerite, wide-eyed. For herself, she cried when she had hurt her body and at no other time. She knew nothing yet about other sorts of hurts.

  But Marianne did not answer. How could she say, “For a moment there was a key in my hand and then it was wrenched away”? Marguerite was too little and too happy to understand. She did not understand, herself, and the misery of her lack of understanding was almost as great as the misery of loss. “You look a sight,” she said to Marguerite. “Your bonnet is hanging right down your back.”

  “And your cloak is twisted nearly back to front!” said Marguerite, and she began to laugh again, as she retied her bonnet strings and shook out her pink skirts, and then turned to face the excitement of Green Dolphin Street swept by a gale from the sea.

  Marianne was facing it already, but it was not giving her the thrill of excitement she had hoped for, when she had stolen the key from its hook in the hall. That thrill had come earlier than she had expected, had come during the moment before the garden door had banged shut behind them, pushing them out into the world as Adam and Eve had been pushed out of the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, it was good to stand braced against a wind like this, for it gave one no chance to feel anything but its own power. It swept one’s mind clear of ecstasies that could not be retained and despairs that were unexplainable. Holding their ballooning skirts down with one hand and their bonnets on with the other, they made their way through the swaying and dancing delight of Green Dolphin Street.

  It was always a cheerful street, for the people who lived in it were the happiest sort of people: not too poor, the joy of life ground out of them by poverty, and not too rich, feeling burdened by possessions; and the dead had left some of their happiness behind them in the homes they had made, and the living were daily adding to it out of their own good cheer. Professional men who were not successful enough to aspire to Le Paradis lived in Green Dolphin Street, and nice maiden ladies who had seen better days but not better spirits, and retired seafaring men of every sort and kind who had laid by a little money. The population as well as the spirit of Green Dolphin Street was preponderantly of the sea. Today it was feeling jollier than ever. The wet cobbles were glistening, the smoke that curled up from the crooked chimneys was dancing over the roofs, the windowpanes of the old bulging bow windows winked in the fitful gleams of watery sunshine, and the old sign of the Green Dolphin, hanging before Monsieur Tardif’s inn, swung madly on its iron rod, its gyrations making it look as though it were really alive, rolling and tossing among the painted waves, grinning all over its face, whisking its tail in the white spray and winking its wicked blue eye. That dolphin was assuredly the genie of Green Dolphin Street. It expressed exactly the rollicking spirit of the place, its fun and good humor. And age did not weary it at all. Though its paint was cracked and dim and its shape archaic, the spirit of youth never left its whisking tail and its merry eye, any more than it left Green Dolphin Street, and never would while the wind blew from the sea and the sun shone upon the glistening cobbles.

  Down the whole length of itself Green Dolphin Street swayed and danced in glee. The packet was in harbor, safely gathered in out of the storm with no lives lost. A son of the Island had come home again after long exile, and in the empty house beside the Green Dolphin Inn, that had been dark and shuttered for so long, the firelight was leaping on the walls and the kettle singing on the hob.

  And the front door was wide open, so that when Marguerite let go of her bonnet, because her ballooning skirts were claiming both hands, it blew right off her head and down the dark passage inside. And Marguerite, of course, went impulsively after it, blown by the wind, and landed up at the end of a dark, musty passage in the arms of Dr. Ozanne.

  “God bless my soul!” he ejaculated, holding her with full masculine appreciation of her roundness and softness and warmth. “God bless my soul, here’s a piece of luck! Hey, William, look at this!” And he carried her, giggling with delight, into the room from which the firelight streamed, and banged the door shut.

  Marianne stood at the open front door a prey to conflicting emotions. For all her passion, and her unscrupulousness in pursuit of her desires, she was nevertheless a little prudish, and she was horrified at Marguerite’s behavior. If that wasn’t just like Marguerite! To let her bonnet be blown into a strange house, to plunge in after it, to permit herself to be precipitated into the arms of a total stranger of the opposite sex and to be carried off by him with every appearance of enjoyment! Of course Marguerite was just a little girl, but she was quite old enough to know better. Indeed she did know better, but the fatal ease with which she enjoyed herself led her to enjoy things which no well-brought-up child should enjoy. . . . Heaven knows, thought Marianne in outrage, what she’ll enjoy before she’s done. . . . And then came a pang of jealousy. It was always like this, Marguerite was always running forward to enjoyment and leaving her behind. Arms were outstretched to Marguerite but not to her. When people had caught Marguerite to them, they shut the door in Marianne’s face.

  She put one foot over the sill and then hesitated, trembling with outraged sensibility, and jealousy and pain. Should she go in and fetch out Marguerite herself or should she go back and tell Mamma, so that deserved retribution should fall upon the erring child? She was still hesitant when a peal of laughter sounded from within the room where the firelight was. It was not Marguerite’s laughter, though she could hear that, too, as an undercurrent of rippling mirth below the clear ringing peal. Nor was it the laughter of the man into whose arms Marguerite had flown. It was a boy’s laughter, and the joy of it called to the unhappy Marianne as nothing in her life had ever called to her before. She ran down the passage with an eagerness which outstripped Marguerite’s, turned the handle of the closed door, and went in.

  He was standing on the hearthrug as a lord of creation should, his legs straddling arrogantly, his arms above his head as he stretched himself, his laughter caught up upon a prodigious yawn. He was broad-shouldered, strong, yet possessed of an elegance that was strangely mature, taller than she was but much younger. The last clear shining of the dying day and the leaping gleam of the fire, that had been newly lit from a smashed-up packing case, seemed to gather about his gay figure in a nimbus of light. The brilliance of it was entangled in the wildly untidy shock of red-gold curly hair, and there seemed sparks in his tawny eyes. His face was round and ruddy, with freckles on the nose, but finely featured. He had full red lips and a deep cleft in his chin, and he showed a great deal of pink tongue as he yawned. His coat and waistcoat of vivid emerald green cloth were stained with sea water, and torn linings protruded from the pockets. His white cravat was soiled, the straps that should have fastened his long peg-top trousers beneath his instep had snapped, so that they coiled round his legs like delirious green snakes, and his shoes needed a polish. Never was a male so much in need of female attention or so blissfully unaware of his need. He finished his yawn, dropped his arms and smiled at Marianne with lazy good humor. “Here’s another of ’em,” he said. “Come in, if you please, ma’am, and make yourself at home.”

  But Marianne could not. She stood with her back against the door, stiff and ungainly, staring at him with great dark eyes that seemed to devour his face with the intensity of her gaze, and she could not move or speak because her heart
was beating so madly that it made her feel sick and faint. Her figure might have delayed to plump itself out into the womanly roundness proper to her age, but her heart did not delay to claim this male creature for her own. She was in love, in love at sixteen, desperately in love, as Juliet was, and with a boy who for all his height and strength and maturity was only a child of thirteen years. It was absurd. But then Marianne was never at any time in the least like other girls.

  But she could not go to him, she could only gaze at him while he went to her, moving with a lazy animal grace like a leopard’s, stifling a second yawn with the back of his hand. “It’s a purple sort of one this time,” he said, his eyes taking indolent stock of her. “The other one’s pink, like a rose. Are there any more of you outside? A yellow one or a blue one?”

  But at the sound of his voice Marianne came to herself. She was suddenly the huntress full of guile. She smiled at him and then lowered her eyes. Yet even with her eyes on the ground she was painfully aware of Marguerite in her pink frills perched upon the knee of the man who had captured her in the passage. . . . William had said Marguerite was like a rose, but he had found no flower name for her. . . . It was Mamma’s fault for dressing her in maroon. Why was she always dressed in those horrid drab colors? It was hateful of Mamma. Tears pricked behind her eyelids. But the change-over from intense experience to mere irritation had made her a child again, and it was as a gawky, prim, undersized yet somehow arresting little girl, with tears on the dark lashes that shaded the hungry, intelligent eyes, that Dr. Ozanne saw her as she moved hesitantly forward into the light.

  Something about her touched him to the quick. He had the experienced doctor’s keen sight into human character, and he knew women only too well. Plain, clever, passionate, hungrily desirous of life, this one would not have an easy time. He plumped Marguerite down on the footstool by his chair (no need to worry over that one), jumped up, and went to Marianne; for William, drugged with fresh air, was proving a rather sleepy and dilatory host.

  “Come in, my dear,” he boomed in his rich, fruity voice, a little husky now after the sea voyage, and marred by a slight slurring of the consonants due to the whiskey with which he had fortified himself against the inclemency of the weather. “Did I bang the door on you and not know you were in the passage? Holy Moses, that was a crime indeed, and you so small and dainty in that pretty gown, and the split image of the Queen, God bless her! God bless you, my dear. What’s your name? Marianne? And this is Marguerite. Marianne and Marguerite. Two pretty names for two pretty ladies. I don’t know that I ever heard two prettier names, did you, William?”

  “Too much alike,” said William on another yawn. “Damned confusing.”

  “Mind your language in the presence of the fair sex, William,” cautioned his father. “Sit down, my dear. Take your cloak and bonnet off. William and I, we’re just off the packet and about to have a dish of tea to make us forget it. Damned stormy weather for a man’s homecoming. But if you will join us in the dish of tea, Marianne, then, bless my soul, it will be the sweetest welcome that ever a man had.”

  “You’re talking to Marguerite. You’ve mixed them up,” said William.

  “No, he hasn’t,” piped up Marguerite. “She is Marianne. I’m Marguerite.”

  “Then it’s you who are mixed up, my lad,” triumphed his father. “And without a drop of anything stronger than salt water inside your stomach for the last twelve hours, either. You be careful, William, or weakness of memory and confusion of brain will land you in a nice mess one of these days. . . . Now, my dear, sit down.”

  His great hand enveloped hers, and his laughing brown eyes, that looked startlingly young above their heavy, weary pouches, looked down at her with all the warmth of his enormous kindness. Never before had she had such a welcome. Never before had anyone seemed to want her so much. She almost forgot William as she looked up into the face of his father.

  For most of his life people had forgotten other things when they looked at Edmond Ozanne, but of late years, as his girth increased and the great beauty that he had had in his youth began to crumble into ruin, they had not been so forgetful and he had not been without a humorous chagrin at the change. So it was touching, as well as comic, to have this changeling of a little creature gazing at him with such wholehearted admiration. And in the firelight, beaming with kindliness, amused and touched, he was still worth looking at. He was of a great height, though slightly bent now about the shoulders, stalwart and strong like his son, but without William’s elegance. He had never had William’s elegance, even in the days when he had been as slim and straight as William, for that had come from his mother. But his tawny eyes were William’s, and his untidy shock of greying hair had once been as bright and riotous as his son’s, and in his florid, red-veined face one could still see something of William’s fine features. By drawing the line somewhere between William’s immaturity and Edmond’s decay one could find again the glorious young man with whom Sophie du Putron had strolled up and down upon the harbor wall.

  Edmond was as flamboyant and untidy in his style of dress as was his son, though he kept to the style of some years back, with torn white ruffles beneath the immense cravat that propped up his double chin, and a quantity of seals dangling from beneath his nankeen waistcoat. His coat was of peacock blue, with padded sleeves that increased his already considerable bulk, and long flowing tails. A fine figure of a man was Edmond still, full of hospitality and benevolence and a pitiful kindness that knew no bounds, a coarse man, a self-indulgent man, but a man capable of keeping the flag of his unconquerable good humor flying until the bitter end; it was only in his rare moments of silence, when his face fell into repose and the laughter died out of his eyes and his full lips drooped one upon the other, that one observer in a thousand might have known him for a man who dared not think. In those moments he looked like a mangy, sad old lion looking out upon the splendor of the grand old days from behind the bars of his prison cell.

  But there was no hint of anything remotely resembling lowness of spirits of any sort or kind as the four sat enjoying an uproarious meal before the fire. Everyone was uproarious in the company of William and his father. It was impossible not to be. They were at all times out to enjoy themselves, without scruple or fastidiousness, their rollicking pursuit of pleasure curbed by nothing but their kindliness of heart. Their enjoyment was not like Marguerite’s, that was born of the love of the divine in life that is not far removed from holiness, it was an entirely pagan thing, partly animal high spirits, partly a defiant fire lit to frighten away the wolves in the dark. But they got no pleasure out of their fire if they sat at it alone. At their feastings beside it they invited the whole street in whenever possible, and the splendor of the subsequent rejoicings was unforgettable by those who experienced it.

  There was even a splendor about this meal of strong tea and bread and treacle eaten in an untidy room with a storm beating at the window, William and Marianne sitting together on one packing case and Dr. Ozanne overflowing the top of another with Marguerite still on her stool at his feet. If the glorious hospitality of the two hosts had permitted their guests to feel the influence of their surroundings, they might have found them depressing, for Dr. Ozanne’s furniture, that had arrived on a previous packet, was still stacked up around the walls all anyhow. Sheraton chairs with scratched, unpolished legs lay helplessly upon their sides, and the green parrot in the brass cage, that Sophie Le Patourel had seen from the schoolroom window, reposed in a silent depression of spirits upon a carved prie-dieu turned upside down over a glass case full of wax flowers.

  But what did the confusion matter? In the greathearted, vulgar, voluble company of William and his father what did anything matter? The leaping light of the fire lit everything with a golden glory, the hot, strong tea was the nectar of the gods, the bread and treacle the most delicious food ever eaten, that seemed rather improved than otherwise by the taste of wood smoke that had got into it. And W
illiam and his father looked utterly at home in this room. Rollicking Green Dolphin Street was the right place for them. Its spirit was their spirit. They had found their spiritual home.

  “Soon get it all shipshape,” boomed the Doctor cheerfully, cutting a great hunk of bread for Marianne with his jackknife. “We’ll be getting some Island body to come in and do for us, and then you won’t know it, young ladies. No women like the Island women for keeping a house shipshape. No women in any other part of the world to hold a candle to ’em. You remember that, William, my son, when your turn comes to wed. Pick her with beauty, William, and pick her strong, and with virtue if you like virtue, but above all, my son, pick her Island born.” And smiling at Marianne and Marguerite he plunged his hand into one of the enormous pockets of his coat, brought out a whiskey bottle, and poured a generous dram into his big blue china mug of hot, strong tea. “Best thing possible after a sea voyage,” he told the girls. “And a damned stormy voyage at that. William don’t need any. William suffered no inconvenience, the rascal. Took to the water like a duck. I’ll make a sailor of you, William, my lad. Pity to waste that fine steady stomach on a shore job.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being a sailor, sir,” said William thickly through an enormous slice of bread and treacle. “But I think it would be best for me to keep a tavern, so’s you can get your whiskey cheap.” And he winked one glorious hazel eye at Marianne and the other at Marguerite.

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort, you young rascal, you,” boomed his father in sudden, jovial wrath. “Your mother was a lady if ever there was one, poor soul, and she bred her son for a gentleman, and a gentleman you’ll be, though I have to take the cane to you. . . . My poor wife’s,” he said to Marianne and Marguerite, indicating the prie-dieu and the wax flowers with a flourish of his mug. “I keep ’em in memory of her. She was a very religious woman, poor soul. And artistic, too. She made those flowers with her own hands.” He spoke placidly. His grief for his wife did not seem very severe, Marianne thought, only kindly and pitiful. Perhaps he had found her too genteel. Perhaps she had patronized him and the patronage had been painful. He was not, Marianne realized, quite what her mother would have called a gentleman.