There was a pause. Moray raised his head.
“If you must know, Drummond did say that I need a sea voyage—as a ship’s doctor of course. In fact, he insisted on ringing up the Kinnaird Line. . . . He knows someone there . . .”
Now there was a prolonged silence. Finally the baker said:
“That sounds like sense at last. And if it’s a question of your health, lad, that’s all important. We would keep you here gladly. But would you get better, with the winter coming on? No, no. Your professor’s advice is sound. Did he manage to find ye something?”
Moray nodded, unwillingly.
“There’s a boat, the Pindari, leaving next week from the Tail of the Bank—for Calcutta—a seven weeks’ round trip.”
Another pause followed, then Douglas reflected:
“A voyage to India. Ye’d get sunshine there.”
“Do you want to go?” the aunt asked.
“Good God, no. . . . Sorry, Aunt Minnie. It’s the last thing I want. Except that if I must go the pay is good, ninety pounds in all. We could furnish our house with it, Mary.”
All that evening the matter was threshed out and at last was definitely settled. Despite the divergence of opinion, all, even Mary, yielded in the end to the baker’s simple argument; health came before all other considerations.
“What good will ye be to anyone—to Mary, yourself, or to Glenburn—if ye don’t get yourself well? Ye maun go, lad, that’s all about it.”
On the following Tuesday he crossed to Greenock with Mary. It was a wet, stormy afternoon. He looked and felt ill, and the misery of the coming separation lay upon him. And upon her too, yet she was brave, resolved not to give way. Under her windblown tweed hat, raincoat buttoned to her chin, her face was set in a mould of resolute cheerfulness. The Pindari, which had arrived overnight from Liverpool to take on a cargo of woollens and mill machinery, lay in the estuary veiled by a driving mist. The wind swept in staggering gusts across the docks, but she insisted on coming to the pier end to see him off, her hand beside his, under the handle of his old leather suitcase, sharing its weight. As the tender plunged and bumped in the strong tide beneath, they held each other closely, passionately, under the grey and dismal sky. Rain, like tears, ran down her cold cheeks, but her lips and breath were warm. Sick at heart, he could not bear to part from her.
“I’ll take a chance and stay, Mary. God knows I don’t want to go.”
“But you must, dear, for both our sakes. I’ll write to you, and count every minute till you’re back to me.” Just before she broke away and ran back along the jetty, she took a small package from her raincoat pocket and pressed it into his hand. “Just so you’ll mind me, Davie.”
In the cabin of the heaving tender, on the way out to the ship, he undid the wrappings and looked at what she had given him, It was an old thin gold locket, smaller than a florin piece, that had belonged to her mother. Inside she had placed a little snapshot of herself and in the back, carefully pressed, a single flower of the bluebells he had picked for her at Gairsay.
Chapter Nine
He clambered up the swaying gangway and came aboard. The merchandise from Winton had already been loaded; he had barely time to report to the captain before the tugs were alongside and they began to nose cautiously down the Firth. He stood on deck, striving to penetrate the mist that shrouded the vague line of the shore where Mary would be standing, watching the departure of this spectral ship. His heart was filled with sadness and love. There were few people on deck—he knew they were returning to Tilbury to pick up the main body of passengers—and the damp emptiness and dripping stanchions increased his melancholy. The deep, despondent sounding of the fog-horn gave him a strange sense of foreboding. As the mist closed down, obliterating the shore, he turned and went below to find his quarters.
His cabin was aft, on the starboard side, next to the chief engineer’s, furnished in polished teak wood with red curtains to the ports, a fitted locker and book rack, and a red-shaded bunk lamp, all particularly snug. A washstand with a metal basin that tipped up to let the water away stood in the comer, and above, on a guarded bracket, an electric fan. His consulting room and dispensary, conveniently situated across the alleyway, were both equally well equiped. Although the Pindari was an old ship, originally the Isolde of the Hamburg-Atlantic Line taken over after the war, she had been reconditioned from stem to stem and was now roomy, comfortable and notably seaworthy, capable of a modest seventeen knots, making a slow, sure run to India with cargo and passengers, touching en route at various ports.
When Moray had unpacked his suitcase, containing his own few things, all washed and ironed by Mary, and the two stock uniforms provided by the company’s head office in Winton, he felt completely done; his side was hurting too. A rough Irish Sea and a bad passage up the Channel did not help him. He had difficulty in carrying out his first duty, a medical examination of the native crew, and at nights his cough was so troublesome he got little sleep. Concerned not only for himself but for his engineer neighbour, an elderly Scot named Macrae, whom he must have disturbed, he dosed himself with codeine. However, at Tilbury, where they spent two days at the docks, a letter from Mary put fresh heart in him, and when they cleared the Nore and were actually on their way, he began to feel more himself. The ship had life in her now, the screws thrust forward with a stronger throb, voices and laughter echoed along the companionways.
In the dining saloon each officer took his place at the head of his own table. Moray, at his, was allotted only five passengers, all somewhat elderly and, he had to admit, dulclass="underline" two well-seasoned Scotch tea planters, Henderson and Macrimmon, returning to Assam, a Mr S. A. G. Mahratta, the Hindu manager of a cotton mill in Cawnpore, and an I.C.S. official and his jaundiced, severe-looking wife, Mr and Mrs Hunt-hunter. Except for the planters, who, particularly after a session in the bar, were inclined to jocularity, and Mahratta, a fussy, hypochondriacal little man with a bad stomach, who was sometimes unintentionally funny, the general tone of the conversation was restrained and promised to be difficult.
But now they were through the grey turbulence of the Bay, sunshine suddenly blazed, sky and sea were blue as they passed through the Straits and cruised up the south-east coast of Spain towards Marseilles, where more cargo was to be taken aboard. Deck games were being set out and Moray was advised by the first officer, a long, lean, goodnatured Irishman named O’Neil, that part of the doctor’s duty was to organise them. So Moray, taking paper and pencil, approached the task of rounding up the passengers, at first with a sense of his unfitness for large-scale social intercourse, yet, after some preliminary self-consciousness, with success. His official position made things easier than he had imagined. He need not seek, he was sought after—a ship’s surgeon was apparently a position of some consequence. When they arrived at Marseilles, lists of competitors for deck quoits, shuffle-board and table tennis had been drawn up and Moray, with a grimace, began to overhear himself referred to as “our nice young doctor.”
At Marseilles a long, five-page letter from Mary awaited him. In his cabin he read it eagerly, smiling at her little bits of news, touched by the simple record of all she had been doing, through which there breathed a constant solicitude for his health. She hoped that his pain was gone, his cough less, that he was taking good care of himself. She sent him all her love. Dear Mary, how he missed her. In the surgery, squaring up to his desk, he wrote his reply, telling of all his activities, and was able to catch the outgoing mail before the sack was closed. The Pindari was no more than twelve hours in port. Loading completed, the hatches were battened down; then, almost at the last moment—the night train from Paris was late—three new passengers came on board. Since most of the tables in the saloon were fully occupied they were seated with the doctor, and their names added to the passenger list: Mr and Mrs Arnold Holbrook, Miss Doris Holbrook. Surreptitiously, Moray examined them, as they sat down to lunch.