Aliens Part 18

"Well, Rosa looked up and recognized me, smiled and went on praying as fast as she could. I bowed. Of course I had my hat in my hand, so I had to bow. I saw her go red, and I thought I'd done something she disapproved of. I stood there hardly knowing what to do, and she bent her head to finish her prayer. She told me afterwards that it was the first time anyone had ever bowed to her. She turned red because she thought I was mocking her, and then, I suppose, with pleasure. That was the beginning of our courts.h.i.+p.

"Of course, in one sense, it was an unusual courts.h.i.+p. It happened to come about by a number of accidents. If I hadn't hit old Croasan she would never have looked at me, for I'm not a very conspicuous figure at any time. If I hadn't met her in the church just as she was praying for my soul, because I'd acted kindly towards her, I might never have seen her again. And so on, if--if--if. It was in that sense unusual. But in another sense I don't suppose there was ever a more commonplace affair than this of Rosa and me. If we'd lived in Brixton we couldn't have been more respectable!

"For some mysterious reason or other Rebecca took a fancy to me. Mind, I was only third engineer of the oldest tramp in Genoa. If I'd been Chief, then I could have understood her making a fuss of me. But I was Third. I have an idea Rebecca had seen better days. Now and again she dropped hints that pointed that way. She had a manner too, when she was sober, and had been cleaned up. The men who drank in her bar little knew how she was transformed when she dressed herself to go up town. They little knew, either, how very like the house upstairs was to houses in Brixton or Hartlepool or the Paisley Road. Middle-cla.s.s people are the same all the world over. I expect they have fringes on their curtains even in Honolulu! Rebecca had, anyhow.

"The news made a bit of stir among the s.h.i.+ps for a while as might be expected, and gradually spread right through the Merchant Service. 'Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged to the Third of the _Corydon_!' By George, that _was_ a morsel of gossip. Miss Bevan had heard about it in Barry; Polly Loo in Singapore heard it, the girls in the Little Wooden Hut at Las Palmas heard it. It went round the world, that Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged.

"For three years we traded as regularly as a mail boat to Genoa with coal, then across to Cartagena in Spain for iron ore and back to the Tyne. I was Second, of course, and I pa.s.sed for Chief when my time was all in, just taking a few days off to go to s.h.i.+elds for the examination.

I might have got another s.h.i.+p, but I was pretty comfortable by now, I knew my Chief and my engines, and I naturally wanted to keep on the Genoa trade as long as I could. In those days they took weeks to discharge, and so I used to have quite a spell with Rosa. She was never bothered with 'men clawin' her,' as the Chief expressed it. I used to take her up to the Giardino D'Italia to listen to the band and to see the movies, or we'd take the Funicular up to Castellaccio and have a bit of dinner at a little trattoria near the Righi, where you can look out across the sea, I learned to speak the language pretty well, and it was my intention at first to settle in Italy. But Rosa would not hear of it.

She wanted to get away from the a.s.sociations of her childhood.

"Perhaps it was because of this desire of hers that we so often went up and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea.

And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think that the romantic surroundings had inflamed my imagination, and that I was apprehensive of a lurid story. Not at all. I had turned the matter over, in my prosaic way, for several voyages, and I put the question to Rosa in a direct and simple form. I asked her who she was. It is all very well, in novels, for shy damsels to run into the arms of some casual Prince Charming, or for heroic clean-cut young college-men with over-developed jaw-bones to marry strange girls for, I suppose, heroic reasons. All very well in novels. But you try that sort of thing in real life, and see where you land. I don't mean externals--parents, social sets or legal tarradiddles. Such things are very slight obstacles. I mean the tremendous obstacles inside you: the ma.s.s of your inherited shrinkings and shynesses and delicacy; a whole quickset hedge of brambles and nettles and thistles, behind which your naked soul is hiding in a sort of terror; and you can't do it! I was in that position, because, so far, Rosa had made no reference to her birth except to say that, although Rebecca wasn't her mother, she was as good as one.

"And Rebecca, when I had mentioned the matter to her one day, had said, with her chin resting on her knuckles, 'Ask Rosa.' I said.

"'Ask her what?'

"'Ask her if she wants you to know all about it.'

"'Why,' I said, 'is there so much to know?'

"'Little enough,' said she, 'but Rosa made Oscar and me promise to say nothing unless she gave us the word.'

"'So Oscar knows it as well,' I said. Oscar was the steward Rebecca had married a few years before, a Dutchman, who was nearly always at sea when I was in Genoa, so I saw very little of him.

"'Of course, Oscar knows,' said Rebecca. 'He knows a good deal of it first hand.'

"'All right, I'll speak to Rosa,' I said.

"And I did, as I was telling you. I asked her who she was.

"'You have a good right to know,' she said, looking up to where a sentry's head and bayonet were sliding to and fro above the wall. 'I have meant to tell you, but I know very little. So little!'

"I said I left the matter in her hands entirely.

"The sentry stopped above us, presented arms, grounded, looked round, and then took a peep at us over the corner. A pair of lovers! His yellow, livid face cracked a smile as I caught his eye. For another second or so we grinned at each other, and then he put on his professional mask again, as though he had drawn down a vizor, shouldered his rifle and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had pa.s.sed the further turret and then turned to me.

"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier like him'--she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and forwards--'in Abyssinia, you know.'

"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your----' Rosa interrupted me.

"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know.

Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'

"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms, and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one.

Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen.

Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courts.h.i.+p.

"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's s.h.i.+p, the _Prinz Karl_, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her two big yellow funnels and top-heavy pa.s.senger decks blocking the view of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man who had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall, spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows in his cheeks, and a sharp, thin nose jutted out over one of those heavy grey moustaches that get into the soup and make the owner look like a hungry walrus. He might have been rich, as they said he was, and he might have been clever in days gone by; but as I knew him he was a faded, soiled ghost of a man, a man preoccupied with the dirty pickings of life, just as his wife, strong character as I knew her to be, was only a drunken parody of her real self, a shrewd, calculating, good-hearted, bad-principled old failure.

"Mr. Hank sat in his cabin, talking to a young fellow in American clothes and French boots, who was, I could see, one of those shady characters who tout for s.h.i.+p-chandlers, whose business makes them toadies, sycophants and pandars. There is something detestable about the s.h.i.+p-chandlering trade, somehow. You see them lick-spittling the old man, taking him ash.o.r.e if he is a stranger, bringing boxes of candy for his wife if he has her on board, sending a boat every day, for his convenience, and so on, and then, when the s.h.i.+p's stores are rushed on board at the last moment, and you put to sea, the stuff turns out to be bad or short. The flour is damp and won't rise, the potatoes are a scratch lot, the meat poor and the fruit rotten. And the Old Man says nothing, the steward says nothing, because they've been squared, and after all it's only the crew who really suffer, because the captain has his own private stock, which Mister steward shares, you may be sure. It is a dirty business and the sight of those sleek, cunning, pimple-faced young men, in their fancy vests and dirty cuffs, always sickens me, because I know the knavery in their hearts.

"'Come in, come in,' said Mr. Hank, as I turned away from his door.

"'No,' I said. 'I'll wait till you are through, Mr. Hank.'

"'Nonsense, come in,' said he. 'This is only Mr. Sachs, representing Babbolini's. He won't eat you,' he said.

"I came back at this, and stood at the door to let a crowd of bedroom stewards with sheets go by. 'It would take a better man than him to eat me, Mr. Hank.'

"Mr. Sachs smiled politely and made room for me on the settee, evidently having no cannibal intentions at the time, or at any rate disguising them. Offered me a cigarette, which I never smoke. Said it was a fine day.

"'It was a private matter I wanted to speak about,' I said to Hank, who looked at me with an expression of eternal anxiety in his prominent eyes.

"'I know,' he said. 'I know. I was ash.o.r.e this morning.'

"'We won't discuss it here, Mr. Hank,' I said, hastily. 'If you don't mind, I'll see you ash.o.r.e, since you're busy.'

"Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man I would never be very intimate with, however well I knew him. I'm not saying he was so bad, or that I was so virtuous myself, at all. It was simply, I suppose, a matter of temperament. To me it always seemed as though he had so many mysterious things in his mind that he was borne down by them; that the outward and visible world, in which I saw him and spoke to him, was only a thin mask behind which his real existence was concealed. I may have been wrong. It doesn't matter, for _Signore_ Hank is dead now, his long life of ingenious peculation is over, and the good and the ill of it, we'll hope, have balanced, anyway. But I couldn't possibly discuss Rosa with _him_, let alone have that smooth, dissipated little bounder of a Sachs sit by and hear it all. I had to call a halt. I was making up my mind to leave the mud alone and not stir it up at all, when Mr. Hank, sitting asprawl in his swivel chair at his roll-top desk, his big chin and nose and moustache buried in his hand, and staring at me with his hard-boiled eyes, remarked abruptly:

"'Do you know the Hotel Robinson?'

"'Certainly,' I said. 'What about it?'

"'What you want to do is to go to the Hotel Robinson and ask for Doctor West. He's the man. He'll tell you all about it. You know Doctor West?

Tall, big black beard, pale face. Flag's letter P. You know him?'

"'I've seen him some time or other, I dare say,' I said. 'Hotel Robinson, you say. All right and thank you.'

"'Just a minute,' sang out little Sachs as I made to go. 'I'll go with you. I know Doctor West. I'll introduce you.' And he went on discussing a paper he had, with Mr. Hank.

"I felt a little indignant and walked off, walked in the wrong direction, of course, and lost myself in interminable alleyways of pa.s.senger-cabins, hustled by stewards and stewardesses who were polis.h.i.+ng bra.s.s-work, rolling up carpets, was.h.i.+ng floors and so on. All about was that curious odour that seems inseparable from the corridors of steamers, hospitals, workhouses and the like--an odour which is a compound of cleanliness, antiseptic and cold enamelled iron. Such surroundings depressed me. I felt, more acutely than ever before, the distance between Rosa's environment and what I would have had it. I felt dissatisfied with _Signore_ Hank, and with myself too, if the truth be told. I had not taken hold of the situation. I had allowed him to impose on me. I suppose you have had the experience, when someone for whom you have no esteem, imposes his pinchbeck personality upon you. Save for the story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would have gone back to the _Corydon_ and forgotten it. I wandered about a good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was Mister Sachs at the gangway, looking about for me.

"'Why, where 'ave you been?' he asked. 'I thought you'd gone.'

"'Well, you needn't bother to wait if you're in a hurry,' I answered, testily, going down the shrouded gangway.

"Oh, that's not what I meant,' he said, coming after me smartly, b.u.t.toning up his coat and taking out his gloves. 'Fact is, Mister,' he went on, 'I'd take it as a favour--this is the quickest way up to Hotel Robinson--if you'd give me an introduction to your captain.'

"I looked at him astounded, all at sea.

"'Representing Babbolini's,' he added, feeling in his pocket for a card.

'Course, any business done's between ourselves. We have a big connection and can always give satisfaction.'

"So you see how the mere contact of these people contaminates. He was trying to make me his tout to the _Corydon_, me, the once future Prime Minister of England, the child of many prayers! You may say, how were the mighty fallen! Indeed, I was ashamed. I said nothing.

"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the Chief Steward....'