The Tale of Triona

by William John Locke

“What are you going to do when you come out?” asked the dustman.

“About the same as you,” replied Triona. “What’s the good of a man with a game leg?”

The dustman sighed. “You’ve got education,” said he.

At first, aware of accent and manner of expression, the dustman had taken him for an ex-officer. Only the discharge-papers of John Briggs, able-seaman, convinced him of John Briggs lowly estate. Still, in the Barracouta they had an elderly stoker who had been at Cambridge College. Such a man might be his neighbour.

“I ran away to sea when I was a boy,” said Triona.

So had the dustman. He waxed more confidential. His name was Josh Bunnings, and he had sailed in every conceivable kind of craft from Alaska to Singapore. But he had found no time for education. How did his neighbour acquire it? Books? He shook his head. He had been cured of books on his first voyage, when the second mate catching him reading a tattered manual on gardening, when he ought to have been washing up in the galley, had kicked and cuffed him round the deck. Triona’s mind went back to his boyhood—to an almost identical incident. There was much in common between himself and Josh Bunnings. They had started on even terms. They had met on even terms in the foul fo’c’sles on the North Sea. They were on even terms, now, lying side by side, lamed, their life of free adventure a thing of the past. Each dreaded the future; Josh Bunnings condemned to cart refuse beneath the affected nose of a shrew of a wife for the remainder of his days; he, Triona, to deal with such refuse as the world would leave him, but away from the wife who abhorred him and all his works. On the other hand, between him and Josh Bunnings lay a great gulf. He had made himself a man of wide culture. Josh Bunnings had remained abysmally ignorant. But Josh Bunnings had lived his life an honourable man. If he told his story to Josh Bunnings he would be condemned by him, even as he had been condemned by his sister on the morning of his mother’s funeral. So, when the dustman, with another sigh, harked back to his former idea and said:

“If only I had education.”

“You’re a damned sight better man than I am, without it,” Triona replied bitterly.

When the three weeks’ comradeship came to an end, on the discharge of Josh Bunnings, he found himself lost again in a friendless world. The neighbouring familiar bed was occupied by an ancient man in the throes of some ghastly malady, and around him was stretched the horrible, death-suggesting screen. And behind the screen, a week later, the old man died. It was to relieve the nervous tension of this week that he began a correspondence with Josh Bunnings. The writing man’s instinct awoke—the mania of self-expression. His letters to the dustman, full of the atmosphere of the ward, vivid with lightning sketches of house-surgeons, sisters, nurses and patients, with here and there excursions into contrasting tempests, storms of battle, and everywhere touched with the magic of his queer genius, would, if sent to his literary agents, have gained him a year’s subsistence.

Josh Bunnings visited him occasionally, when freed from municipal, and escaped from domestic, obligations. The visits, he explained, were in return for the letters; for being no scholar, he could not reply. Then one day he appeared and sat on the chair by Triona’s bed, with the air of a man about to bring glad tidings. He was rather a heavy, pallid, clean-shaven man, with a curl of black hair sweeping down to his eyebrows. His small dark eyes gleamed. At once he disemburdened his honest soul. He was a Church of England man; always held with church-going—so did his wife; it was the great bond of union between them. So he was on friendly terms with the curate of St. Simon’s. And being on friendly terms with the curate, he had shewn him the letters.