Signals of Distress

2. The Journey West

AYMER SMITH was taken to the inn in Wherrytown by George, the parlourman-cum-porter, whose job it was to bully custom from any ship that docked. George didn’t take to the Tar’s single passenger, the unpromising and unattractive Mr Smith. The man’s breath was foul. And his bookish jollity, his height, his thinness, his insistence that they shake hands like old acquaintances and then take turns to ‘bear the burden’ of his carriage bag on the short walk between the quay and the inn, were misplaced, misjudged, unbecoming. If they had to share the burden, would they also share the tip?

The night gale, which had lifted tiles and flung back doors in Wherrytown, had left the quayside scrubbed and clean. Aymer Smith remarked it was ‘a fresh and handsome town’, but, steady though he was in conversation, he had climbed awkwardly from the cabin to the deck. His shoulder was bruised, or worse, from the tumble from his bunk. His throat was sore and hot. His legs were still at sea. He was shivering, from cold and apprehension and timidity. George could only guess what business such a man could have in Wherrytown at that time of year, but what he knew was this, that Aymer Smith would not be an inspiring presence at the inn. Here was a moper. Here was a book snuffler. Here was a man who couldn’t sing.

Perhaps he couldn’t sing, but God the man could talk!

‘What kind of lodging are you taking me to?’ he asked George, in a voice that attempted informality but managed to be both teasing and condescending. ‘Tolerable, I hope.’

‘Ours is the only inn,’ George said. He could think of no better commendation. ‘It’s us or nowhere in this town.’

‘What is the name of this grand inn?’

‘It has no name — nor any need of one. It is the only inn.’

‘Indeed, but then this is the only ship in dock, and I its only passenger, and yet we both have names. It would not do, I think, to call me simply “Passenger” or this vessel “Ship” because we are, for the moment, unique.’ He allowed George a moment to keep pace with this Comedy of Wisdoms. ‘Names, it is true, are mostly useful should one need to distinguish one man, one ship, one inn from another. But they are helpful, too, for signifying character. So, were your inn known as the Temperance, then I could well imagine its mood and its sobriety. The Commercial has a more convivial ring, I think. And the Siren or the Venus? Well, I should not wish to take a room in such a place, unless that room had thorough locks on every door. What do you say?’

‘What should I say, except what I have said three times, and that is that there is no choice?’

‘Say it three hundred times and still you fail to reassure me. What phrase is there to best describe your inn?’

‘The only inn in town.’

‘Ah, yes. You are right to stand firm against my questioning. Refuse to yield to me!’

‘I don’t know enough to yield or not — but I’m the only one in Wherrytown’ll lead you to an empty bed. Except there’s plenty barnyards in the neighbourhood, so long as you like rats.’

‘The rat is much maligned …’ But Aymer Smith’s discourse on rats would have to wait another opportunity. The two men reached the lower entrance to the inn.

The inn was ideal for hide-and-seek. It was a warren, untouched by architects. The town rose steeply from the harbour front and the building had perplexing levels that placed the stable lofts scarcely higher than the scullery basement and meant that the attic box room looking south and the ground-floor parlour facing north were connected by a level corridor. An outside wooden staircase led from the seafront courtyard to a balcony and bedrooms, but there was no direct seafront entrance to the public rooms. There wasn’t any logic to the place nor, even, any regimental regularity to the shapes and sizes of the building’s bricks and stones.

‘Accommodation for man and beast. Victuals, Viands and Potations,’ said George. ‘It’s hay or cheese for supper.’

Aymer followed him up a narrow passageway of steep, pebbled steps that climbed through the heart of the inn. He didn’t like the smell of fish and urine, nor the meanness of the alley, nor the pinched and sea-damp wind which rifted at his back. They came out in a lane, and for a moment Aymer was relieved to think their destination was some other, better place. But George directed him towards a raised front door with a flat granite lintel, just to the right of the alleyway. It opened directly into a low-ceilinged parlour, empty except for a solid, black-haired woman on her knees, removing ashes from the grate. She was, she said, Mrs Yapp, the landlady, the innkeeper. She didn’t rise to greet her guest.

‘Give the gentleman a bed,’ she instructed George.

‘Assure me that you have sheets,’ demanded Aymer, gripping his carriage bag and coat.

‘There’s sheets for those that ask,’ said Mrs Yapp.

‘And good, hot food that’s fit for eating?’

‘There’s nowhere else,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to stop with Mr Phipps, the preacher, who has a room for Christian travellers. Sinners and repentants catered for. The bill will be repented, that’s for sure. It’s good, hot food he dishes up, and fit for eating, except it’s Buttered Tracts and Bible Soup and Psalm Tea.’

‘… and Hebrewed Ale,’ said George. He’d said the same a hundred times before.

‘… and the Word Made Flesh,’ added Aymer, after a short moment’s silence.

Aymer had meant to make a good impression in Wherrytown. He knew that he would never have a reputation for vivacity, and that he was more comfortable with documents than company, but still he’d meant to be amusing and relaxed, putting George at ease, demonstrating to Mrs Yapp that he, though firm and businesslike, was happy to be informal. But once he had been taken down two short flights of steps and left alone inside one of the balconied rooms above the courtyard he almost wept. He had, he felt, been treated with hostility. The woman hadn’t even stood to greet him. That was not behaviour to admire. And George the parlourman had seemed to find his conversation comic, except when he attempted jokes. He hadn’t even shown gratitude when Aymer had presented him with a bar of white soap by way of thanks.

His room was on two levels and had four curtained beds, none of which was welcoming, and none of which had sheets. There was no other furniture nor any draping on the windows. There was a chamber pot, a water jug and two small tin basins. The walls and floorboards smelled of fresh lime wash. At least the bedbugs had been treated. Aymer couldn’t imagine spending a single night in any comfort there. Perhaps he could conclude his business in one day and take the Sunday return passage on the Tar, home again. He went out on to the balcony and looked across the courtyard and the harbourfront to where the Tar was docked amongst some smaller fishing boats that had been damaged by the gale. The cold, the breeze, the brightness of the sky, his shoulder pain, the dislocation that he felt from being far from home, brought water to his eyes. It didn’t help that he had travelled all this way with nothing but bad news.

He chose a bed close to the windows, where there was light enough to read and write. He took a quill, some paper and a pinch of ink from his bag. He mixed sufficient ink with spittle and began to write, unsteadily, using his knees as a desk. He put the title of the family firm in capitals at the top of the page:

HECTOR SMITH & SONS

Manufacturers of Fine Soap

And then he added his address:

The Only Inn

Wherrytown

Saturday, 19th November

Sir, he wrote, I am this morning arrived on the coastal packet in Wherrytown and lodged at the inn. I would be obliged if we could meet at your soonest convenience. I have disclosures that concern our business interests and that I wish to communicate with some urgency.

He added his own signature and then, on the reverse of the folded sheet, the name of the agent who at that very moment was riding in the shallows to haul a Yankee from the sea where the Belle of Wilmington had beached: Walter Howells, Esq.

Now he wrote a second letter, to his younger brother:

My dear Matthias, I am safely come to Wherrytown and have survived the worst of storms at sea. Already I have summoned Mr Howells and am awaiting his reply. I write this letter for the return of the coastal packet which will depart tomorrow, Sunday, in case my business does not allow a swift departure from this place. Despite my deprivations I am convinced of the propriety of my coming here, and hope that in my brief absence you will come to recognize that our responsibilities to these people could not be satisfied by pen and ink and paper but only by the presence of at least one son from Smith & Sons.

He read the last line several times aloud. He hoped his brother would detect reproof but not the coldness that he felt. Matthias was a businessman who had no moral code. But Aymer? He was moral code and little else.

Aymer, at forty-two, was senior to Matthias by nineteen months — yet he was the younger, lesser man in everything but age. Matthias had a city and a country house, a wife, two daughters and a son, a carriage and six servants. Matthias was a Justice of the Peace. He was obese. He sang, a decent baritone. And since his father died he’d been the acknowledged master of Hector Smith & Sons. He had transformed the business. The city works employed ninety adult hands, as well as twenty children, and produced forty thousand bars of soap a week. Smith’s Finest Soaps were used by royalty, but there were cheap, good-looking soaps for working people too. Soon the company would be renamed: MATTHIAS SMITH & SON.

Aymer had little interest in soap. He was a Sceptic, a Radical and an active Amender. But, still, he was the junior partner in Hector Smith & Sons. It provided him with income, and notionally it was his task to help his brother at the works. Matthias, though, had no faith in Aymer. He thought he was a waster and a fool, best left alone to read his riotous pamphlets and his volumes of verse than let loose amongst the company’s order books and ledgers. Yet Aymer went to work each day. He had a sense of duty. There was dignity in labour. The task he took upon himself was not to help his brother but to check him. If Aymer could rename the company it would not be MATTHIAS SMITH & SON or SMITH BROTHERS, but SMITH BROTHERHOOD or EMANCIPATION SOAPS. He didn’t have an easy manner with the factory hands. He wasn’t even liked. But he could fight on their behalf. To no avail he pressed his brother to provide gloves and leather aprons to protect the soapmakers from the boiling fat. He bullied for a shorter working day. He argued that the works should not employ children under twelve. He recommended profit-sharing schemes, and factory schools, and rights of Combination. He was, as Matthias said to Fidia, his wife, ‘half-boiled, half-baked and half a man’.

‘He’s hell set on damaging his one true brother in the selfish interests of fraternity,’ was Fidia’s practised opinion.

At Aymer’s instigation, three factory hands had formed a Works Committee and should be (Fidia again) ‘sacked before they do some harm’. Matthias wished his brother were elsewhere, so that the sackings could take place without commotion. As in everything, his wishes would come true.

It was the plight of kelpers such as Rosie and Miggy Bowe in their rough cottages at Dry Manston that would provide Matthias with some respite from his brother’s quarrelsome philanthropy, and bring Aymer on the journey west. For forty years Hector Smith & Sons had bought supplies of soda ash for soapmaking from the kelpers on the coast beyond Wherrytown. Walter Howells and Walter Howells’s father before him had been Smith agents there, purchasing the kelp ash from the Dry Manston families and arranging wagons to deliver it to the manufactory, five days’ journey overland to the east. Now thanks to Nicolas Leblanc, a French surgeon with a taste for chemistry, a simple process was established to extract sodium carbonate from common salt. It was pure; it was cheap; and when the railway was complete it could be delivered within a day. ‘What is the point,’ Matthias asked Aymer, ‘in using Mr Howells when we have Leblanc?’

‘The point,’ said Aymer, ‘is our Duty. The Smiths and Howells have been partners since we were young. Our fortunes have been interlocked. And Mr Howells has contracts — moral ones at least, if not legally established — with families who rely on stooping in the sea for kelp for their small incomes.’

‘Well, let them give their backs a rest and let them dry their feet. We have no further need of kelp. I cannot argue further.’

‘I will not let this rest.’

‘Aymer. The choice is mine, not yours. You well know the stipulations in Father’s will. Besides, my letter to Mr Howells is already written and ready for dispatch. I will not go back on my word.’

‘You cannot break their trust by letter! What friends are we to hide behind the mail?’

‘You would prefer, perhaps, to write a sonnet?’

‘I would prefer that you and Mr Howells would sit down face to face …’

‘You want me then to take an empty wagon back to Wherrytown to tell a man whose face we do not know that we desire to purchase better, cheaper soda somewhere else? The man will take me for a fool, as, Aymer, I take you.’

‘What of your duty, then? What of your conscience?’

‘And what of yours?’

‘My conscience remains clean.’

‘Then you can take the wagon west. Why don’t you? Or take the coastal boat, for all I care. Our father might have left the running of this works to me, but I do not think he stipulated how Duty and Conscience should be divided.’

‘Well, then, if it cannot be you it must be me. I will travel to see Mr Howells with this bad news.’

‘Then do so, sir. And do as little mischief as you can.’ And may you break a leg en route.

Now Aymer was ensnared. He had no appetite for such a long and testing journey. He wasn’t suited to the countryside. He’d never travelled far from home. But once arrangements had been made for his departure for Wherrytown he found himself aroused and impatient. Perhaps when he was away from the city and in a place where surely he might count on some respect, he could find for himself what more than Justice and Reform he had desired for all his adult life, a loving country wife.

So Aymer Smith had taken the Ha’porth of Tar on the journey west in a fearful and a hopeful mood. He was surprised how travel unleashed him, how he could talk to sailors on the boat with a freedom absent from his home and city life. He was encountering, also, that other liberation which is the gift of travel and unfamiliar places. He — the virgin and the masturbator — was poised, engorged and shallow-breathed with expectations and desires. So now, in Wherrytown, his tears short-lived, his letters written, he left his cold room at the inn ostensibly in search of George, but mostly to sniff round like a dog, to poke his nose in rooms, to seek a friendly face, to find the margins of his new emancipation. He went up two flights of steps to reach the ground-floor parlour. George was sitting with a pipe.

‘Is there a boy to take these letters for me?’ Aymer asked.

‘There’s only me.’ George took the letters. ‘What a place! No boys, no boots, no chambermaids! No tips!’ he said, and walked out of the parlour without leave.

Aymer stood with his back to the grate which Mrs Yapp had cleaned and prepared, and waited for the lighting of the woods. He hadn’t been waiting more than thirty seconds when a young couple entered from the lane, a thin-haired man with spectacles and a woman without a bonnet but kept warm by a tiered shoulder-cape which fastened at her chin. She would have been a fool to wear a bonnet. Her hair was held in one loose tress by black ribbons. It was so sandy in colour and so buoyant that Aymer could not prevent himself from staring.

‘We were hoping for a bit of fire,’ the young man said, rubbing his hands at the empty grate.

‘Indeed, we all were hoping for some fire, but, it seems, our hosts do not subscribe to wasting warmth on guests,’ said Aymer, blushing. He held his hand out for the man to shake. ‘Aymer Smith. I’m rooming here. On business.’

He put his hand in Aymer’s. ‘And so are we, except it’s not on business that we’re here. We’re taking passage on a boat to Canada. If it ever comes! It was due two days ago, but there’s no sign of it. My wife and I have been walking on the quay and there are no sails on the sea except for fishermen.’

‘Then you are emigrants?’

‘We are. God Save Us. I’m Robert Norris. And this is Mrs Norris and has been for a fortnight now. Katie is her name.’

Aymer put his hand out once again and Katie put her hand in his. It was cold and smooth and dry, as flimsy and as modest as her hair was grand. ‘I’m happy to meet you, sir.’

‘A pity that our acquaintance will be so short.’

‘Well, not so short,’ said Robert Norris. ‘I must suppose that we are trapped here for a few days now. I can’t be sure if that is happy news or not.’

‘Don’t be so doubting, Robert.’ His wife was the teasing not the bashful sort. ‘They’ll not want dismals like yourself in Canada.’

‘It’s not the colonies that bother me, but what we might endure on the passage there. I’ve not the constitution for the sea.’

‘And nor have I,’ said Aymer. ‘But I have taken passage here by sea and I have ridden out the worst of storms.’ He remembered now the bruising to his shoulder which, truth be told, had stopped hurting the moment Katie had come in. ‘I tumbled from my berth and took a blow. But here you see me, well set up and only disembarked today. The observations to be made are these: on ship a passenger should have no fear of nausea if he stays off the deck and is not tempted by the portholes. Stay in your quarters. Let the wooden walls be the furthest horizons you allow. Let the deck above you be the sky. Take all your orientations from the space allotted you, and as the ship tips and rolls so you do too. Your body and your eye are in concord. But think to walk on deck to witness what a storm can do first-hand, and you will feel your body bucking like the ship. Your eye will sway between the still horizon or the stiller stars and battle with the masts and rigging of the boat so that your every step is like that of a drunken man. And thus seasickness will set in.’ A pleasing and a helpful lecture, Aymer thought.

‘It seems a pity to go so far and see so little,’ commented Katie.

‘The sickness is the price you pay for seeing,’ said Aymer. ‘I think there might be some general truth in that philosophy. To learn is to suffer. To suffer is to learn.’ He chuckled at his observation. And Robert and Katie Norris beamed at him with such indulgence and such attention that he felt glad to be in Wherrytown. Normally he didn’t welcome scrutiny. Not that he was the kind of man to command the stares of strangers. He liked to think of himself as a plain man, plainly spoken. He didn’t care for adjectives, or anything that was too ornamented. He liked the force of facts and objects, and he endeavoured to make his conversation instructional. ‘Still, such observations will not warm you from your walk,’ he concluded. ‘Our landlady is not at hand, it seems.’ He stepped across to the parlour sideboard, lifted the inn handbell and shook it. ‘That should bring our Mrs Yapp running.’

Mrs Yapp was not the sort to run. Anyway, she didn’t hear the bell. She wasn’t in earshot. She and George were in her sitting room with Aymer’s letters open on her table. Mrs Yapp had read them both out loud.

‘So that explains the soap,’ said George. ‘Take care he doesn’t pay for his lodgings here in bars of soap.’

‘And you take care to pay the gentleman some respect, George. He’s Smith & Sons. We’ll have to treat him sweet. I’d better see if I can find some bed sheets.’

‘What brings a man like that down here?’

‘To talk with Walter Howells, that’s what it said. Go on now, George. You’d better do as you’ve been bid and take these letters round.’ She shook her skirt and pinafore. She checked her stays and laces in the glass. She primped the jug-loops in her hair. ‘I’ll go and see if there is anything he wants.’

‘He’ll have no need of soap.’

When Alice Yapp and George came into the parlour, Aymer Smith and the Norris couple were sitting round the cold grate in happy conversation, or at least the Soap Man was in conversation and the other two were listening politely to his remarks about the beneficial freedoms of the colonies. Katie had loosed her hair and let it hang in one long bunch across her chest. Her husband had removed his boots and had his stockinged feet on a fireside settle, as if they could be warmed and dried by the memory of fire.

‘Mr Smith,’ said Mrs Yapp, as if it were the most aristocratic of names, ‘is it all pleasing to you?’ She made a genteel sweep of her hand.

‘We should like a fire.’

‘George! Lay a fire for Mr Smith. And sheets. I promised sheets.’

‘If that in’t hospitality,’ said George to no one in particular, ‘then what the Devil is?’

Aymer was cheered by the change in Mrs Yapp. So were Robert and Katie Norris. They’d been at the inn for three nights and Mrs Yapp had not so far expressed any word of welcome or shown any sign of hospitality. They had not lodged in inns before and took the Yapp indifference to be normal. But now with Mr Smith she displayed an accommodation to his comforts that was almost worshipful.

George put tinder in the grate and set off by the lane and alley to collect dry kelp and logs from the courtyard for the fire. He’d scarcely reached the courtyard when — happy chance — Walter Howells rode in, his yellow leather breeches, worsted stockings and high-lows caked in mud, his horse a little lame from galloping with a lost shoe. George ran to take the reins and pass on Smith’s letter.

‘Not now, not now!’ said Howells, brushing past George and stamping across the yard towards the alleyway of steps. ‘There’s been a wreck!’

‘What wreck?’

But Walter Howells was out of sight and at the inn’s front door. He didn’t remove his leather hat which, low at the crown and turned up at its eaves, revealed red shock hair and a redder face. Mrs Yapp and three guests whom he had not seen before were in the parlour — a fine-looking young woman and two clerkish men. He didn’t pause for pleasantries but broke into their conversation. ‘Alice. Bake some bread and pull some corks. You’ve got a full house for a night or two. That Yankee ship we were expecting has beached at Dry Manston and all the sailors on it are coming here and seeking beds.’

‘Dear Lord, how many beds?’

‘Oh, sixteen, seventeen. And a little dog! And they’ve got a Negro in a cart.’

‘You’re joking with me, Walter Howells.’

‘I am not.’

‘A Negro in a cart, you say? Well, we’ll see.’

‘You will indeed. You can expect them in the hour and, in that hour, I’ll have to find myself the smith. My horse has dropped a shoe.’

Aymer Smith — somewhat startled that this muddy, florid man should be Howells the kelp agent — stepped forward and offered his hand: ‘Please allow me to introduce myself. You say you need a smith. And I’m a Smith, but not much use with horses …’

‘Then, sir,’ said Walter Howells, ‘you’re not much use to me.’