The Ginger Griffin Read online

  As she rode down the lane now she remembered with tormenting clearness the day when those veils had been removed—when intimacy had first spilled over into tenderness, and happiness had wakened into bliss. Riding home together after a day’s hunting, something he had said, something he had done, had wakened in her a new piercing certainty. Oddly enough, she remembered far less vividly what had evoked it than the feeling itself. They had parted at his gate—he had pressed her to go in for a hot drink, and she had resisted; she felt such an urgent need to be alone with her joy, to let it show itself, fill her. Down the valley the road passed through a marshy place, where the stream expanded on either side into reedy stretches of water, masked and fringed with thickets of alder and sallow. In the soft February starlight she had stopped here, deliberately; she wanted to hear the silence, to smell the damp leafy smell of the sedgy pools, to see the stars shine back from the dark water, and watch the young moon low between the dim tracery of slender twiggy branches. These things, she felt, could somehow express for her this new flooding sensation—could make the inexpressible wonder visible, audible. She suffered her bliss to possess her, as it were, in their shape; in this vision of familiar things felt and seen as she had never seen or felt them before. In those moments when she sat motionless on the valley road they stamped her emotion indelibly with their image, made it ring with their hidden universal harmony. Tremulous, over-brimmed with realised rapture, she had at last ridden slowly home. And the next day her father died of a stroke.

  It seemed to Amber that everything had gone forward swiftly after that night. That pause by the marsh had been a pause in her life, really—a moment of suspension between two epochs. In her loss and sorrow she had turned to Arthur Griffiths for support and consolation—more blindly, more directly than perhaps she would otherwise have done. But she felt quite sure of him—her father had liked him, her mother approved; his feelings for her he had shown. It was all right, it was safe, even for her, uncertain as she usually was. Her idea of him seemed perfectly watertight this time. And so, innocently and simply, she had precipitated her disaster—her theory of safety and comfort to be found from him, had forced Captain Griffiths, presently, to the admission of the secret of his outwardly cheerful life. He was married, and his wife, a hopeless drug-fiend, was in a police asylum in the Antipodes, on a charge of opium smuggling. He had meant to be guarded—he had been guarded, up to a point: but he had fallen honestly in love with Amber, and had given himself ever so slightly away on that ride home. Her sorrow and her simplicity had done the rest.

  Pityingly, honestly, as the admission was made, the shock for Amber was fearful. All that he left unsaid of her share in the business, her own consciousness lashed her with, searingly, when she went over it in her mind. In honesty she could not blame him more than a little—his one slip he would quickly have rectified, she could guess, by a sheering off, if her grief had not made this seem impossible. To guard his secret, she could not wholly and suddenly sever relations with him, and the poor child passed some weeks in a misery hard to exaggerate—meeting him in public with an air of cheerfulness that consorted ill enough with a face white with strain, meeting him in private not at all.

  She was driven at last to the first really independent action of her life. Her father had left her £300 a year for herself—perhaps the most perspicacious thing Tom Harrison ever did. And she presently announced to the horrified Lady Julia that she was going out to Peking to spend a year with Uncle Bill and Aunt Bessie.

  Old Bill Harrison had been in England and paid a visit to Riddingcote during the last year of his brother’s, life. He had taken greatly to Amber, and Amber to him. He looked like her father, except for his queer, liverish, far-eastern complexion; he had the same shrewdness and impatience with mere cleverness, and an even greater obsession with horses. They had gone to the Grand National together, and old Bill had been hugely tickled by his niece’s determined backing of a rank outsider simply on his looks and on his remembered form three years previously in some obscure West Country point-to-point. The outsider had come in first at fifty to one, and Amber-had made a hundred pounds. Uncle Bill’s heart was hers, after that. “Whenever you feel like it, you come and stay in Peking with me and Bessie,” he said more than once. “I’ll show you some riding there. China ponies look like pigs—no necks, you know, and no withers—but they’re as honest as gold. You come out to us.” Amber had remembered this, and without a word to anyone, in her extremity, she wrote and proposed a visit to Uncle Bill. His answer was even warmer and kinder than his original invitation; she was to come, and come at once—they would love to have her, they would give her the best time they could. And Aunt Bessie put in a few lines of pleasure at the prospect of “a young thing in the house to cheer up us old fogies.” Thus armed, Amber had tackled her mother. She met all Lady Julia’s. objections and questions with a new and immovable stubbornness. She wanted to go, and she was going—going to see the world and to be with Uncle Bill, whom she liked. She was twenty-two, and she had the money—and no one could really stop her. Lady Julia tried appeals to her affection. Amber was affectionate in return, as she had always been; but not, as always hitherto, compliant. Astonished, hurt, Lady Julia at last accepted defeat, and turned her energies to putting a good face on it at home, and making the visit as much of a social success as possible abroad. She bothered the Foreign Office, where she had friends, about an escort; she wrote to Sir James Boggit, whom she knew, engaging his good offices in Peking. “Such a chance for the dear child to see that marvellous civilisation!” she told Gloucestershire. “The most intellectual people on earth,” she told the Vice-Chancellor, smelling a rose as they strolled in the garden. Meanwhile Amber, indifferent and unhappy, but resolute, set about collecting her kit and selling her hunters with a certain gloomy practicality. And to-day she had sold the horse Major. In five weeks, she reflected, as she completed her detour and started up the further ridge towards home, it would be over and she would be gone. Suddenly the idea seized upon her with intolerable force—gone! and that house no longer within her reach, either for sight or avoidance. Urged by an uncontrollable impulse of misery, she swung the astonished Major round in his tracks, clattered down the hill again, and galloped furiously back across the heavy sodden pastures to a small thorn-crowned knoll which commanded a view of the low grey garden-front, the lawn and the pretty gates of Captain Griffiths’ home. There she drew up, and sat, staring through tear-blurred eyes at the house the sight of which she had just ridden three miles round to avoid.

  Chapter Two

  AS Amber drove through the unfamiliar dark and rainy streets to Fenchurch Street Station, and assembled her authoritatively labelled luggage in its lowering yellow gloom, on the day of her departure, she felt the very minimum of enthusiasm for her coming adventure. To take ship and go East may well be—almost certainly is—one of the best remedies for a broken heart, but from the point of view of the heartsick it is nevertheless a pity that the start should be so depressing. Anything more gloomy and unappetising than Fenchurch Street and Tilbury, particularly in January, it would be hard to imagine. Pale and chilly, she stood beside her mother on the platform, and went through the introductions to the Grant-Howards with a sort of neutral resignation. Lady Julia had tried hard to bring about a meeting—indeed a whole series of meetings—before the actual start, but she had been defeated by Joanna’s most reasonable plea of not having a moment, really; and a bare ten minutes, without Amber, in Brown’s Hotel was all she had achieved.

  To the girl’s confused eyes they presented an immense crowd, these people who were to be her companions for the next six weeks. Mr. and Mrs., by an effort of attention, she got firmly placed, but there was a whole troop of boys and girls; there were female attendants, apparently, of all sorts; there were numbers of people coming up with books, with flowers, with boxes of chocolates and magazines; men who drew Mr. Grant-Howard aside and talked to him in low tones and with absent expressions which suggested State secrets,
women in pearls and furs who kissed Mrs. Grant-Howard and told her she really must write this time. Lady Julia, with Gemma and her husband, seemed a very modest lot by comparison—sofew as to be almost negligible, Amber thought. Except Gemma. Gemma was never negligible. Even the men who stood talking to Mr. Grant-Howard with their eyes on their boots, in the approved diplomatic manner, if they happened to look at Gemma looked a second time and a third. Amber drew a curious momentary consolation from this fact—she was feeling diminished and isolated, about to be plunged into this group of important strangers, and Gemma’s inevitable effect somehow reinforced her. Then looking at her brother-in-law’s face of chronic devotion, she experienced such a sharp pang of desolation that she could hardly bear it. If only Arthur had been there, could have been there! If only she had had his face to hold to. She turned into the carriage for a moment, and rearranged her coat, her book—simply to get a few seconds to hide her face, to pull it together; she was disconcerted, when she emerged, to find Mr. Grant-Howard’s eyes suddenly fixed on her intently.

  The train chugged out. Hats were raised, hands and handkerchiefs waved, the Grant-Howard children shouted and capered on the platform. There ensued a cold and smoky interlude of journey, like the pause between pulling out one tooth and the next.

  At Tilbury there were fewer people, but still some. By dint of following other passengers through a trackless waste of railway lines and station buildings, they found themselves at last on the dock-side, with the peculiar buff and black bulk of the P. & O. boat towering above them. Amber had never seen a liner before from close to, and was startled by its size, though in reality this was one of the smaller and older boats, and quite unimpressive to more experienced travellers. They went on board; with the help of an equable but abstracted chief steward and an openly harassed Goanese they found Amber’s cabin—a single-berth one, to herself, on the port side; and Amber got her first conscious prick of entertainment from the small ingenuities of the folding basin, the furniture, the nets above the berth, the port-hole. It seemed almost impossible that in such a minute apartment one should make a home for six weeks. She moved about, examining everything; reading the rubrics of regulations fastened to the bulkhead; trying to work the electric fan, while Lady Julia fussed because the luggage had not reached the cabin. “Presently! Presently! It will come soon. Don’t worry!” said the stewardess, professionally consoling and cheerful, and rustled starchily out, Lady Julia looking after her with marked distaste for her powdered nose and waved yellow hair under the stiff cap.

  There was a tap at the door, and Mrs. Grant-Howard appeared. “Oh, here you are—how nice. Port-side too—you are lucky!” Amber had no idea why she was lucky to be on the port-side, and was too shy to ask. “We’re starboard, alas,” Mrs. Grant-Howard went on, “come and see where we are!” They repaired to the other side of the ship, through passages with that strange smell of paint, steam heat and hot salt water peculiar to P. & O. boats, and found the headquarters of the other party. In Joanna’s cabin her maid was already fussing about; in the adjoining one Miss Carruthers, the governess, was cheerfully supervising Dickie Grant-Howard’s attempt to discover whether his body would really go through the port-hole. “He mustn’t do that—portholes are forbidden,” said Joanna with calm decision. “Dickie, come and say how-do-you-do to Miss Harrison.”

  “If I cam gep my heab through, I oughp po be able po gep my boby through,” said Dickie, reluctantly scrambling back. “How bo you bo?” he said, holding out a small and already filthy hand to Amber and Lady Julia. While Lady Julia murmured something amiable to Joanna about the comfort of having at least one child with her, Dickie studied Amber with a long steady stare. “I palk like this,” he finally said to her confidentially, “because of my plape.” He opened his mouth and projected horribly into view an object like a black plum, with screws in it. “Dickie!” Miss Carruthers deprecated.

  “Ip’s po emlarge my jaw,” Dickie pursued, unabashed. Amber laughed. “I cam palk quipe orbimarily withoup ip. I’ll show you.” He was about to implement this promise, but was prevented by Miss Carruthers. “Take him on deck,” said his mother easily—“the luggage won’t be here for ages.” She offered the services of her maid, Burbidge, to Amber. “Miss Harrison is in Number 114, on the port-side, Burbidge.” She was being kind, with a competent kindness which struck Amber as nearly as professional as the cheerfulness of the stewardess. Amber, however, didn’t mind this in the least—she was quite without the moral fads of more sophisticated people. The fact that Mrs. Grant-Howard talked to her rather as a vet. who knows his job talks to a strange horse she found engaging rather than otherwise. She studied her chaperone covertly as they proceeded on deck, rather approving of her smallness, her neat build and perfect finish, which reminded one of a very smartly turned-out Welsh pony. “My husband has a cabin up here, with his papers,” Joanna said to Amber, in a tone of amusement, and indeed in a moment they came upon Mr. Grant-Howard standing at the door of a deck-cabin into which a steward was carrying large black tin boxes which bore a variety of legends in white lettering: “Mr. N. L. Grant-Howard, Union of Socialist Soviet Republics,” “Mr. N. L. Grant-Howard, H.B.M. Embassy, Madrid”—and so on. The tin boxes impressed Amber deeply; they gave her quite a William le Queux thrill, a sense of moving in a larger world of mysterious and important affairs. Lady Julia entered into conversation with Mr. Grant-Howard, and Amber strolled off along the deck by herself. It was raw, rainy and foggy—the picture presented was of a rather blurred etching of shapes of ships, masts and funnels, across a foreground of brown dirty water, with straws and orange-peel and bits of paper floating on it. Amber’s momentary thrill died down—she felt chilly and homesick and depressed. She turned back towards the group, towards her mother. “’The Chinese dynasties—so restful, so impartial!”’ she heard Lady Julia say to Mr. Grant-Howard as she approached.

  Something should really be done about the departure of ships from Tilbury. It is not suggested that there should be a band playing and coloured ribbons of paper to throw and to hold, as they have at Vancouver and Yokohama; that would merely be to add an element of the false and the grotesque to a situation which is already at once boring and poignant. But the situation itself should be cut short. An immense curtain, or a smokescreen, should be interposed between the quay and the ship from the moment that the last see-er-off has left the vessel, which would then steam rapidly away. It is intolerable, having embraced fervently, having murmured last words and taken farewells possibly heart-breaking, then to be called upon to stand, either on the quay-side or on deck, for half an hour, for an hour—looking up, looking down, shouting the hearty nothings suited to such a wide publicity; being cheerful, being amiable; calling one another’s attention to irrelevant details—the activities of the crane, the winch. And when at last the ship does move, the slowness, the unbearable deliberation with which she manœuvres herself out into the channel, while one still gazes, still shouts; and then at last waves, waves, waves the hand, the handkerchief, at the receding quay, at the diminishing figures, till gradually they diminish to vanishing-point, become indistinguishable, and one is free to go below and have lunch.

  Just such a protracted leavetaking occurred to fray Amber’s nerves. She was not passionately devoted to her mother as she had been to her father, but she was aware of a general painful emotion, of a sharp breach with the familiar and the homely, which focussed itself on the erect and fashionable figure of Lady Julia below on the quay, among the straw and paper and packing-cases. The one thing which lightened it all was Dickie’s interest in everything. “They’ve gop pwo mopors om boarb!” he shrieked to his own Grannie, who stood below. “They’re going po Porp Saib!” Nevertheless by the time they went below to lunch she was thoroughly overwrought.

  The saloon steward met them at their entrance and asked Mrs. Grant-Howard with a certain formality if she would like to sit at the Captain’s table? and disposed them there—Joanna on his right, Amber on his left, Nugent and Miss Ca
rruthers opposite. Dickie was to eat at the children’s meal-times under Burbidge’s supervision. The Captain was not there—his vacant swing-chair presided like an empty throne over the table. While the Goanese stewards brought course after course of an ample meal, the party, now fairly confronted, began the inevitable process of a mutual stock-taking.

  “Are you a good sailor?” Nugent asked of Amber across the table.

  “I don’t know,” Amber replied rather vaguely. “I’ve only been across the Channel and back.”

  “One can be quite as ill in the Channel as anywhere,” said Nugent, helping himself to curry. “Were you ill? Have some curry—it’s the best thing you get on these boats.”

  “No, thank you—I hate it. No, I wasn’t, but it wasn’t rough,” replied Amber.

  “I’m definitely bad,” said Mrs. Grant-Howard resignedly. “Miss Carruthers swears she’s not—don’t you, Miss Carruthers?”

  The governess blinked politely. “Oh, I call myself an average sailor, Mrs. Grant-Howard.”

  “Burbidge declares she’s a good sailor, but I’m sure she’ll be sick,” Joanna chattered on. “Servants think it so frightfully unrefined not to be sea-sick.” She continued to talk with competent amiability, with the kindly intention of putting Amber at her ease; while she talked she studied her with an expert eye. Pretty—yes, definitely pretty, with that skin and that mass of hair; not outrageously lovely like the sister, Lady Thingummy, of course, but that was really uncalled-for! Cleverly dressed, too—that would be the mother—and a good figure. She seemed very mousy and quiet; good style, thought Joanna, but the style of fifteen years ago—her manner didn’t match her modern finished appearance in the least. Well, all the better if she was mousy; there would be less likelihood of a need for exertions on the chaperone’s part. Joanna was painfully familiar with the idle flirtations incidental to travel by sea—her practised eye roamed over the saloon, trying to pick out the men who would be likely to flirt with Amber. It was only two-thirds full—the rest would come aboard at Southampton, of course, including the Navy; there were sure to be reliefs for the China squadron. Her eye lit on no one noticeable—the men were all either very old or incredibly young, she thought, as she concluded her brief survey.