A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

With the tremulous daring of a man who has caught a glimpse of a woman's face once, swiftly, by night, and has feared to see it the morning after, in case it should prove less lovely—yet longed to gaze upon it and gaze upon it, that each subtle curve, each fleck of colour, might at last grow familiar to him as the sunshine, so Gareth set out, the morning after arrival at Rapparee House, to explore minutely that harbour which Heaven had dumped for his delight beneath his attic window. The streets were washed in gold, under a sky of stark cobalt; and the space between sky and street was wind-tumbled and uproarious. A fine jolly day for a landsman to prowl about among quays and ships and mariners ... and dream that he too had raced through scudding seas and anchored in strange ports....

Gareth Temple, who would have made a poorer seaman than any who had ever doubled the Cape of Storms, found himself slouching along the cobbled streets, and looking ahead with that peculiar scrutiny, keen yet distant, which—the sea novelist assures us—is the inevitable result of perpetual communion with the far horizon; and that peculiar chin, dogged yet steadfast, which—he omits to tell us—is the inevitable result of the perpetual crunching of ship's biscuit.

Ever and again he muttered words like "cargo" or "chanty" or "lagoon" ... and imagination never failed to return its quick picture....

Great muscular men stripped to the waist, toiling up a gangway, with loads of silk stuffs and elephant tusks and spices....

The same tanned fellows singing, now lustily, now mournfully, in the lamplit glow of a little waterside inn-parlour, with sanded floor, and smoked ceiling, and a ship-model on the chimney-piece....

Strip of warm firm sand, white-shining in the moon, sloping down to the black polished mirror of deep water....

Spinner of words. Idle spinner of word-magic.

But he was going to write a book about a man who brought word-magic to its rounded completion by fulfilment! A man who would indeed carry the cargo, roar in the chanty, swim the lagoon. A man who was like himself turned conqueror. And the creation of such a man, in such a book, should be his conquest; conquest of adverse fate, of acquiescent inertia—conquest of other people's books....

The harbour, like all enchanted spots, though so distinctly seen from a window on the hillside, was difficult to find when plunged into the maze of streets that formed the old part of the town. At last, at the end of a narrow alley, one of the leaning houses flung out a room to meet the house opposite; he stepped under this square archway and on to the harbour. From the blistered pink wall above his head, an ancient iron lamp jutted at right angles as though from an arm outthrust.

His first impression was of the dark clumsy hulks of trawlers embedded crookedly in the mud; while the lighter floating craft, miscellany of broad gaily-painted rowing-boats, and fishing-boats with ragged brown sails, were already beginning to lurch lazily from side to side, as the incoming waves lifted their keels, lifted and dropped the slimy ropes which, hung with green weed, sagged from deck to staple. Then he noticed the soft rise of green and fawn hills beyond the harbour mouth; and at the end of the quay, the queer little isolated mount crested by a ruined chapel, some forlorn relic of pagan faith, enshrining perhaps a grim old sea-god to whom the sailors prayed ... once—long ago.