The Narrow Corner (18 page)

“You make him out a wiser man than I thought he was.”

“He got a job here, there was more trade then than there is now; after that, he fell in love with old Swan’s daughter and married her.”

“Were they happy together?”

“Yes. Swan didn’t like him much. He was pretty active in those days and he was always concocting some scheme or other. He could never get Frith to get a move on. But she worshipped him. She thought he was wonderful. When Swan got too old, she ran the estate and looked after things and made both ends meet. You know, some women are like that. It gave her a sort of satisfaction to think of Frith sitting in his den with his books, reading and writing and making notes. She thought him a genius. She thought everything she did for him was only his due. She was a fine woman.”

The doctor reflected on what Erik told him. What a picture of a strange life this offered to the fancy! The shabby bungalow in the nutmeg plantation, with the immensely tall kanari trees; that old pirate of a Swede, ruthless and crotchety, brave adventurer in the soulless deserts of hard fact; the dreamy, unpractical schoolmaster, lured by the mirage of the East, who like—like a coster’s donkey let loose on a common, wandered aimlessly
in the pleasant lands of the spirit, browsing at random; and then, the great blonde woman, like a goddess of the Vikings, with her efficiency, her love, her honesty of mind, and surely her charitable sense of humour, who held things together, managed, guided and protected those two incompatible men.

“When she knew she was dying she made Louise promise to look after them. The plantation belongs to Swan. Even now it brings in enough to keep them all. She was afraid that after she was gone the old man would turn Frith out.” Erik hesitated a little. “And she made me promise to look after Louise. It hasn’t been very easy for her, poor child. Swan is like a cunning old monkey. He’s up to any mischief. His brain in a way is as active as ever it was, and he’ll lie and plot and intrigue just to play some silly little trick on you. He dotes on Louise. She’s the only person who can do anything with him. Once, just for fun, he tore some of Frith’s manuscripts into tiny fragments. When they found him he was surrounded by a snow-fall of little bits of paper.”

“No great loss to the world, I daresay,” smiled the doctor, “but exasperating to a struggling author.”

“You don’t think much of Frith?”

“I haven’t made up my mind about him.”

“He’s taught me so much. I shall always be grateful to him. I was only a kid when I first came here. I’d
been to the university at Copenhagen, and at home we’d always cared for culture; my father was a friend of George Brandes, and Holger Drachmann, the poet, used often to come to our house; it was Brandes who first made me read Shakespeare, but I was very ignorant and narrow. It was Frith who made me understand the magic of the East. You know, people come out here and they see nothing. Is that all, they say. And they go home again. That fort I took you to see yesterday, just a few old grey walls overgrown with weeds. I shall never forget the first time
he
took me there. His words built up the ruined walls and put ordnance on the battlements. When he told me how the governor had paced them week after week in sickening anxiety, for the natives, in the strange way they have in the East of knowing things before they can possibly be known, were whispering of a terrible disaster to the Portuguese, and he waited desperately for the ship that would bring news; and at last it came, and he read the letter which told him that King Sebastian, with his splendid train of nobles and courtiers, had been annihilated at the battle of Alcacer, and the tears ran down his old cheeks, not only because his king had met a cruel death, but because he foresaw that the defeat must cost his country her freedom; and that rich world they had discovered and conquered, those innumerable islands a handful of brave men had seized for the power of Portugal, must
pass under the dominion of foreigners—then, believe me or not, I felt a lump in my throat, and for a little while I couldn’t see because my eyes were blurred with tears. And not only this. He talked to me of Goa the Golden, rich with the plunder of Asia, the great capital of the East, and of the Malabar Coast and Macao, and Ormuz and Bassora. He made that old life so plain and vivid that I’ve never since been able to see the East but with the past still present to-day. And I’ve thought what a privilege it was that I, a poor Danish country boy, should see all these wonders with my own eyes. And I think it’s grand to be a man when I think of those little swarthy chaps from a country no bigger than my own Denmark who, by their dauntless courage, their gallantry, their ardent imagination, held half the world in fee. It’s all gone now and they say that Goa the Golden is no more than a poverty-stricken village; but if it’s true that the only reality is spirit then somehow that dream of empire, that dauntless courage, that gallantry, live on.”

“It was strong wine for a young head that our Mr. Frith gave you to drink,” murmured the doctor.

“It intoxicated me,” smiled Erik, “but that intoxication causes no headache in the morning.”

The doctor did not reply. He was inclined to think that its effects, more lasting, might be a great deal more pernicious. Erik took a sip of whisky.

“I was brought up a Lutheran, but when I went to the university I became an atheist. It was the fashion, and I was very young. I just shrugged my shoulders when Frith began to talk to me of Brahma. Oh, we’ve spent hours sitting on the verandah, up at the plantation, Frith, his wife Catherine and me. He’d talk. She never said much, but she listened, looking at him with adoring eyes, and he and I would argue. It was all vague and difficult to understand, but you know, he was very persuasive, and what he believed had a sort of grandeur and beauty; it seemed to fit in with the tropical, moonlit nights and the distant stars and the murmur of the sea. I’ve often wondered if there isn’t something in it. And if you know what I mean, it fits in too with Wagner and Shakespeare’s plays and those lyrics of Camoens. Sometimes I’ve grown impatient and said to myself, the man’s an empty windbag. You see, it bothered me that he should drink more than was good for him, and be so fond of his food, and when there was a job of work to do always have an excuse for not doing it. But Catherine believed in him. She was no fool. If he’d been a fake she couldn’t have lived with him for twenty years and not found it out. It was funny that he should be so gross and yet be capable of such lofty thoughts. I’ve heard him say things that I shall never forget. Sometimes he could soar into mystical regions of the spirit—d’you know what I mean?—when you couldn’t follow
him, but just watched dizzily from the ground and yet were filled with rapture. And you know, he could do surprising things. That day that old Swan tore up his manuscript, a year’s work, two whole cantos of ‘The Lusiad’, when they saw what had happened Catherine burst out crying, but he just sighed and went out for a walk. When he came in he brought the old man, delighted with his mischief, but a little scared all the same, a bottle of rum. It’s true he’d bought it with Swan’s money, but that doesn’t matter. ‘Never mind, old man,’ he said, ‘you’ve only torn up a few dozen sheets of paper, they were merely an illusion and it would be foolish to give them a second thought, the reality remains, for the reality is indestructible.’ And next day he set to work to do it all over again.”

“He said he was going to give me some passages to read,” said Dr. Saunders. “I suppose he forgot.”

“He’ll remember,” said Erik, with a smile in which there was a good-natured grimness.

Dr. Saunders liked him. The Dane was genuine at all events; an idealist, of course, but his idealism was tempered with humour. He gave you the impression that his strength of character was greater even than the strength of his mighty frame. Perhaps he was not very clever, but he was immensely reliable, and the charm of his simple, honest nature pleasantly complemented the charm of his ungainly person. It occurred to the doctor
that a woman might very well fall deeply in love with him and his next remark was not entirely void of guile.

“And that girl we saw, is that the only child they had?”

“Catherine was a widow when Frith married her. She had a son by her first husband, and a son by Frith, too, but they both died when Louise was a child.”

“And has she looked after everything since her mother’s death?”

“Yes.”

“She’s very young.”

“Eighteen. She was only a kid when I first came to the island. They sent her to the missionary school here, and then her mother thought she ought to go to Auckland. But when Catherine fell ill they sent for her. It’s funny what a year’ll do for girls; when she went away she was a child who used to sit on my knee, and when she came back she was a young woman.” He gave the doctor his small, diffident smile. “I’ll tell you in confidence that we’re engaged.”

“Oh?”

“Not officially, so I’d sooner you didn’t mention it. Old Swan’s willing enough, but her father says she’s too young. I suppose she is, but that’s not his real reason for objecting. I’m afraid he doesn’t think me good enough. He’s got an idea that one of these days some
rich English lord will come along in his yacht and fall madly in love with her. The nearest approach so far is young Fred in a pearling lugger.”

He chuckled.

“I don’t mind waiting. I know she’s young. That’s why I didn’t ask her to marry me before. You see, it took me some time to get it into my head that she wasn’t a little girl any more. When you love anyone like I love Louise a few months, a year or two, well, they don’t matter. We’ve got all life before us. It won’t be quite the same when we’re married. I know it’s going to be perfect happiness, but we shall have it, we shan’t be looking forward to it any more. We’ve got something now that we shall lose. D’you think that’s stupid?”

“No.”

“Of course, you’ve only just seen her, you don’t know her. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Very.”

“Well, her beauty’s the least of her qualities. She’s got a head on her shoulders, she’s got the same practical spirit that her mother had. It makes me laugh sometimes to see this lovely child—after all, she is hardly more than a kid—manage the labour on the estate with so much common-sense. The Malays know it’s useless to try any tricks with her. Of course, having lived practically all her life here, she has all sorts of knowledge in her bones. It’s amazing how shrewd she is. And the
tact she shows with those two men, her grandfather and Frith. She knows them inside out; she knows all their faults, but she doesn’t mind them; she’s awfully fond of them, of course, and she takes them as they are, as though they were just like everybody else. I’ve never seen her even impatient with either of them. And you know, one wants one’s patience when old Swan rambles on with some story you’ve heard fifty times already.”

“I guessed that it was she who made things run smooth.”

“I suppose one would. But what one wouldn’t guess is that her beauty, and her cleverness, and the goodness of her heart mask a spirit of the most subtle and exquisite delicacy. Mask isn’t the right word. Mask suggests disguise and disguise suggests deceit. Louise doesn’t know what disguise and deceit mean. She is beautiful, and she is kind, and she is clever; all that’s she; but there’s someone else there too, a sort of illusive spirit that somehow I think no one but her mother who is dead and I have ever suspected. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a wraith within the body; it’s like a soul within the spirit, if you can imagine it; it’s like the essential flame of the individual of which all the qualities that the world sees are only emanations.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows. It seemed to him that Erik Christessen was getting a bit out of his depth. Still, he listened to him without displeasure. He was
very much in love and Dr. Saunders had a half cynical tenderness for young things in that condition.

“Have you ever read Hans Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’?” asked Erik.

“A hundred years ago.”

“That lovely flame-like spirit not my eyes, but my soul has felt in Louise seems to me just like that little mermaid. It’s not quite at home in the haunts of men. It has always a vague nostalgia for the sea. It’s not quite human; she’s so sweet, she’s so gentle, she’s so tender, and yet there is a sort of aloofness in her that keeps you at a distance. It seems to me very rare and beautiful. I’m not jealous of it. I’m not afraid of it. It’s a priceless possession and I love her so much that I almost regret that she cannot always keep it. I feel that she will lose it when she becomes a wife and a mother, and whatever beauty of soul she has then it will be different. It’s something apart and independent. It’s the self which is part of the universal self; perhaps we’ve all got it; but what is so wonderful in her is that it’s almost sensible, and you feel that if only your eyes were a little more piercing you could see it plain. I’m so ashamed that I shall not go to her as pure as she will come to me.”

“Don’t be so silly,” said the doctor.

“Why is it silly? When you love someone like Louise it’s horrible to think that you’ve lain in strange arms and that you’ve kissed bought and painted mouths. I
feel unworthy enough of her as it is. I might at least have brought her a clean and decent body.”

“Oh, my dear boy.”

Dr. Saunders thought the young man was talking nonsense, but he felt no inclination to argue with him. It was getting late and his own concerns called him. He finished his drink.

“I have never had any sympathy with the ascetic attitude. The wise man combines the pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the spirit in such a way as to increase the satisfaction he gets from both. The most valuable thing I have learnt from life is to regret nothing. Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.”

With that he got up and left.

N
EXT
morning, comfortably seated on the verandah of the hotel, with his legs up, Dr. Saunders was reading a book. He had just learnt from the steamship office that
news had been received of the arrival of a ship on the following day but one. It stopped at Bali, which would give him the opportunity of seeing that attractive island, and from there it would be easy to get to Surabaya. He was enjoying his holiday. He had forgotten that it was so pleasant to have nothing in the world to do.