She had never set foot on a ship, yet she seemed to be conversant with nautical terms, with sea routes. She had never been to Tyre or Carthage or Alexandria, yet she knew as much about them and a dozen other places as he who had visited them all. He was astonished and enchanted and at the same time humbled. She was so lovely, so clever, that she seemed to him almost like a goddess, and at first the idea of using her as he had used other women here and there was inconceivable. Later his astonishment and enchantment grew at finding her just like other women, but infinitely sweeter, infinitely more skilled. She said, “What are you doing in a place like this?”
“You mean that this is no place for a common sailor?” She laughed.
“Don’t be so touchy. That isn’t what I meant at all. I meant that you are so young and so handsome. Why should you pay for what any girl would gladly give?”
He said, “After tonight there will never be another girl for me.”
“I should have added a flattering tongue when I listed your attractions,” she said.
After that his sea-going life, hitherto his whole life, his chosen life, his achieved ambition, meant nothing but enforced absence from what he loved. The voyages were vast desolate stretches between brief joys. He fretted incessantly. To whom was she talking, now? To whom, at this moment, was she opening Paradise? It was terrible to have set the private mark of one’s heart upon a public thing. But he had done so, and there was no help for it.
There came a time when he could bear it no longer; he asked her to marry him.
He was not surprised that she should look amazed: he was amazed at his own audacity.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he begged her.
“That I couldn’t bear. I’ve nothing to offer you except my love. I
know..But don’t laugh.““Why should I laugh? Ephorus, how old are you?”
“I’m not certain. If the old woman reckoned rightly, and she’s all I have to go by, I’m about twenty-one.”
Dorcas said, “I’m thirty. Eight years from now you will be in your prime and I shall be an ageing woman, with no beauty left:
He had never thought of her as being of any age and by this time he was not particularly conscious of her looks. There was the beautiful facade, but that was largely artificial; hair elaborately curled, white skin that the sun never touched, eyes made to look large and languorous. The real Dorcas, the woman he loved, lived inside this pretty shell and was a different person altogether. He often caught glimpses of her behind all the decoration. He tried to put this into words and failed.
He said, “If you went bald, or were pitted by pox, you’d look the same to me. I love you.”
She didn’t say what he yearned to hear—that she loved him, though he had sensed the possibility that she did, otherwise he would never have dared to mention marriage.
She said, “I think you are a poet, Ephorus. And that means you could be dangerous to yourself. You make statements like this inside your head, and they sound well. But you mustn’t believe them.”
“But it is true. Let me prove it.”
“By losing my hair and getting pox-pitted? Dear Ephorus, what a thing to ask.”
“I’m asking you to marry me.”
She moved, restively.
“Nobody marries women like me. Well, now and then perhaps; some old man, already provided with heirs. You see, we are barren. The precautions we take, the draughts we drink if they fail, offend the gods of fertility and we become barren.”
“I don’t want children,” he said with great vehemence.
“I want you.”
“But, my dear, you can’t afford me. I am a plaything, a toy. I can neither cook nor sew. I have never in my life been in a market. Until I have it on a plate before me I can’t tell a melon from a cucumber or beef from mutton. I sleep till midday. Just imagine what a wife I should make.”
She spoke with sincerity, honestly hoping to dissuade him. In her life he struck almost as strange a note as she had struck in his, and for the first time in many years she was unsure of herself. He was young and handsome, his devotion was very touching; it would, she knew, be all too easy to love him; but what then? Poverty, ugly in itself and with an infinite capacity for making everything it touched ugly too. Could love compensate? Would it last? Could a woman of thirty, reared and trained as specially as a chariot horse, make the necessary adjustments? She didn’t know; she wished he had not disturbed the nice balance of their relationships by his simple forthright question.
Ephorus said, narrowing his eyes, “Suppose, just suppose, that I made some money. Not a lot, but enough. Enough to hire a little white house, and to buy you a slave who could tell melon from cucumber. What then?”
Why must he mention a little white house? A lifetime ago, when she was young, thirteen, fourteen, rebellious against her lot, a little white house had been visible from the window of the room that had been allotted to her. It was gone now, torn down to make room for a great tenement building; but she remembered it. A small white house, a woman, several children, a man who came home every night. The woman was always busy, cooking, washing, wiping a child’s nose, picking up one that had fallen, occasionally dealing out smacks all round; but the girl Dorcas, busy then with mastering the Latin tongue and the playing of the lute and how to look, how to speak, how to arrange her hands and feet, had watched, often with envy, the simple domestic life in the little white house. A lifetime ago.
Now she said, “Ephorus I do not know. I was taught early to avoid four things: obesity, pregnancy, boredom and sentiment. It may be that on the last I have failed my teacher. I do feel for you what no woman of my kind should feel for any man. But I am afraid. It could so easily be as it was when Psyche lit her lamp. For us the lamp would be the light of common day; in that light what should we see? I should see a
young man andcount my years and be sad. You would see an ageing sloven and feel defrauded. Leave it as it is, for a time at least. Visit me when you can. And look about for a girl of your own age and kind. Teach her, if you wish, something of what I have taught you, so that kneading her dough and chopping her onions she will think of the night’s joy and feel her bones melt. That way you will have a faithful wife and may remember me with gratitude. Better still, forget me altogether.”
Ephorus said, “That is nonsense, and you must know it. I could never forget you. I told you, on that first night, that there would never be another girl for me. And it is true. You know how sailors are welcomed, set upon, wherever they go. I swear that for me they might be apes or goats or stone statues for all I care.”
And that was how she had been trained to look at men. Not as people. Her indifference had been cultivated, but she understood exactly what Ephorus meant. Out of a world populated by shadows, one person emerged, whole, real, as real and as dear as oneself. So easy to give in, to let oneself be carried away, to say yes, and yes, and yes, to pledge oneself with a kiss and begin to make plans. But there was this eight years gap which poverty would only emphasise. Oh dear, she thought, I was taught so much, but never how to deal with such a situation.
“I know,” he said, ‘how to make some money. Real money.”
“You’re not to do anything dangerous, or illegal. Please, Ephorus, I have to live with myself, and if I thought that because of me you had run into trouble, I should never sleep easily again.”
He said, “It isn’t dangerous .. .” and whether that were truth or a lie he couldn’t tell; the whole thing was so shrouded in mystery and in silence that nobody knew.
“And it isn’t illegal. It is the one way in which a sailor can make money.”
And although he had, from the first, appreciated her sharp intelligence and wealth of information, he was startled, somewhat displeased, when she said :
“The tin trade! Ephorus, no! That is suicidal. Do you want to saddle me with the responsibility for your death?”
He asked, truculently, “What do you know about it?”