The Widow's Lantern (Short Story)

The Widow's Lantern

It was upon a Wednesday - the sort that arrives sodden and salt-bitten, with a reluctant pallor of daylight like milk dashed into tar - that we stood in to Winter Quay and let go the anchor with a clank that rang in my bones. Three weeks of rough weather had scoured our faces to leather and soaked our speech in oaths, so that even good mornings had the sound of maledictions. Yet land, however mean, softens even a coppered heart; and Winter Quay - huddled as it is beneath a black shoulder of cliff, its houses crouched like sheep against the wind - was, to my eyes at least, a kind of mercy. 

I am not a gentleman; I am a sailor of five years’ standing, perhaps six if one counts the miseries of boyhood as a kind of apprenticeship to worse miseries after. I am in my middle twenties, old in weather and young in wisdom, and my name is of no account to this relation. Let it suffice that I have hauled brace and sheet in both Indies, reefed in squalls that went through a man like knives, and watched the phosphorescence write blasphemies in our wake as if a hand below delighted in penning wickedness upon black water. I have seen, too, the soft decencies of shore leave; a bed with sheets, a window with a latch, a hand that is neither calloused nor cruel. I confess that the last is rarer than the first. 

Our captain - an orderly soul who believed in charts and catechism with equal fervour - allowed three days in harbour for the discharge of cargo and the repair of trifles that had grown in the mind of the carpenter into necessities. The crew were warned (we are always warned, as men are warned against winter) to husband their pay and their tongues. The bosun’s eye was to be upon us; the mate’s eye upon the bosun; and the captain’s upon God. I promised myself an evening of moderation: a mug of ale, a crust, a pipe, and then to my hammock aboard, where the sway of the ship would reassure whatever part of me had begun to suspect the ground of untoward firmness. 

Moderation, like a thin rope in a gale, parted at once. 

The tavern by the quay goes by the sign of the Widow’s Lantern - a red glass hung in a rusted bracket, which shows at night like a clot of blood with a candle at its heart. It is the sort of house to which fishermen repair in their tarred boots, and townsmen, wanting to be thought courageous in the face of weather, hunch beside the fire and speak of storms they have endured with their shutters closed. There I fell into talk with three fellows who smelt of fish, salt, smoke, and a certain blunt piety that attends those who lay their livelihoods in the mouth of the sea. They asked, as such men will, what waters we had crossed of late; whether the weed rode heavy in our wake; whether any bird had flown with us in nights so black that a lantern seemed an indecency. It is singular how quickly the tongue multiplies what the hand has only barely handled. I found myself telling, with more grandeur than truth permits, of a water-spout like a church steeple, of a whale that sounded under our very keel, of a light upon the horizon that, though no ship, kept pace with us for three hours. Ale is the great enchanter; it makes of memory an instrument like a fiddle, and draws from it any tune the player desires. 

I remember the firelight making islands on the table; I remember the landlord’s daughter setting down a plate with her eyes cast at the floor in that practised modesty which is really vigilance; I remember the men crossing themselves when the wind pressed at the casement and whined there like a dog excluded. I remember, too, a story told by one of them - a big man with lashes clotted by brine - of a pool in the wood above the quay, where the land makes a little fold before the cliff stoops to kiss the sea.  

I had meant to keep one eye upon the door, for my captain has a clock in his head and displeasure in his hand. But ale multiplied itself. Fishermen are generous when speech goes well, and the landlord was in that mood which taverns breed in men when the money of sailors thrums the till like fingers on a drum. The end of the evening is a curtain that is always drawn too soon. At some moment undiscoverable in recollection the crew of my ship dwindled away like the tide from flats, and I, abandoned at my island, watched the red glass of the Widow’s Lantern swim before me like a low star. At last the landlord struck the room with the blunt bell of closing - no malice in it; the law is the law because it is - and flung open his door to the night, which had grown very clear and cold, as if the sea had sharpened it upon a stone. 

The quay was emptying. A rope thumped; a gull uttered a lazy blasphemy from a post; the black line of the cliff hung behind the houses like a curtain dropped by one who has grown tired of spectacle. I took two steps and discovered that the world had lengthened a fraction and that my legs, faithful fellows hitherto, had adopted a difference of opinion as to cadence. I steadied myself with a hand upon the lintel and saw, between the roofs and chimneys, the feather-white of the moon hung nearly full, with that insolent innocence which the cold always adopts when it comes to make us suffer. I saw, too, water. The tide lay out beyond the harbour mouth like a beast resting with its chin on its paws; it shone along the dark with the draggled light a coin has when it lies deep in a pocket and will not be found. If I could see water, I told myself, I could find the ship. If I could find the ship, I could escape the lecture that is the mother of all others. It was only necessary to go by the shortest way. 

The shortest way lay, they say, by the path that mounts the slope behind the tavern and dodges the kitchen gardens, then enters a patch of wood that has always seemed to me an afterthought of creation: as if, having made a country of downs and cliffs, God - or whosoever keeps the books - had shaken the bag and a handful of trees had fallen there and taken root out of embarrassment. The fishermen, earlier, had crossed themselves when they spoke of that wood. I crossed my buttons now, which is a sailor’s version of the same sacrament but cheaper. 

The first hundred yards are bramble, nettle, and old fences. I went among them carefully, for I have learnt that zeal does not prevent scratches. The air had that iron taste it takes when frost is considering the land, and each breath felt like a polite theft. Beyond the gardens the wood received me with the sulky welcome of a place that has not asked for visitors. The moon threw down a pale; the branches took it and broke it into small currency and scattered it. My boots were not made for such ground. The roots are like a conspiracy - ach, separately, harmless; together, excellent. Still, the sea lay off to my right, and the path of it shone between trunks whenever the trees recollected themselves and permitted me a glimpse. I have never feared woods; I fear, if anything, the places between; but this was no great forest, only a belt - an arm clasping the shoulder of the town. I told myself I should be through it in ten minutes. 

It was in my nature to talk to myself when alone; it is a vice that has the appearance of courage. Perhaps this is why I did not, at first, remark that the whispering I heard was not the whispering of my own breath in a scarf or the small noise trees make when they adjust their bones against the cold. It came in fits, like stitches in cloth; I turned my head, and it went; I turned again, and it returned, a touch nearer. “Ale,” I said aloud (which convinces nothing and no one), and the word left my mouth absurdly warm in that thin air. Then, all at once, I understood that what I had taken for whispering was not speech but that thing which sometimes takes the place of speech in women when they are content: a low humming, with no tune that any choir would own and yet with a shape too sure to be called idle. I thought absurdly of my mother, whose voice would hum over the washing with the tide of it rising and falling in her throat until one could not tell whether it was tune or labour that made the sound. 

The humming came from my left, where the ground dipped and the wood folded downward upon itself as a blanket folds on a cot. The moon, which had been an officious companion, stepped aside as if at a door and looked down. I followed its gaze. The trees ended in a small amphitheatre - a cup made by a hand that had pressed the earth there for the pleasure of it. In the cup lay water, black in most lights but now silvered, and so still that one might think it had been polished. Ferns stood like listening girls. A rock jutted from the pool as a pew-joint juts from a carpenter’s bench. Upon that rock, her back to me and her head lifted as if to present her throat to the moon’s cool hand, sat a woman. 

I have seen mermaids in sailors’ drawings and angels upon church walls; I have seen women who make a holiness of their loading of a table, and women who make a theatre of walking across a room. This woman was none of these and all. Her hair hung heavy, dark with wet, and the strands, though they clung to one another, parted where the moonlight pressed between them and made of them a veil fixed with silver pins. The whiteness of her shoulders was not the whiteness of chalk or paper; it had the grain of a thing that has known both sun and brine. Her breast - pardon me; I am neither poet nor priest - rose and fell with the humming, and the water made small agreements with it in a hundred little glitters. The sight took from me a step and then returned it with interest. I made that foolish sound that is not a word and not silence. The woman started, like a deer when an acorn falls near its ear; then she turned her head and, in one motion smooth as thought, slid into the pool as a fish will do when it would pretend to be a shadow. 

“I meant no harm,” I said at once, because men always say that when they have done harm and promising otherwise is easier than recompense. “Forgive me. I am lost, is all. The ship -” I moved my hand in that small sailor’s map that shows, in three inches of air, the whole coast of a man’s predicament. 

I could not see the bottom of the pool; the moon mapped only the uppermost thing - the small crown of ripples that had closed over the woman’s entry. The humming ceased. Water speaks when it is not spoken to; it made, now, a whispering of its own at the edges of the cup, where reeds and grasses combed it. Then the woman rose, nearer than she had been before, her chin just under the surface and her mouth, when she spoke, pressing the water like a glass laid upon a table. “You are a sailor,” she said, and turned the last word as if to test its ripeness. Her voice had the clarity that water has when it has travelled under stone for a long time. 

“I am,” I said, and felt all at once the poverty and pride of it. 

She regarded me as a cat will regard a thing that moves just enough to be interesting. Her eyes had that colour which is not any colour until the light chooses it. “And lost,” she said, with a small frown that made a dimple upon one cheek, which was absurdly human, like a fault in a well-made plate. “How far are you bound?” 

“No more than the harbour,” I answered, and told her the ship’s name, as if such names hold power, which they sometimes do - for the shipwright who christened her, if for no one else. “I had companions; I have mislaid them, as one mislays coins in a pocket with a hole.” 

Her mouth - set, until then, in that gravity which some women wear as if it were a cloak lent to them - softened. “Poor sailor,” she said, and I felt, against reason, an affection rise in me for that pity. Then she smiled, and her teeth showed white as the shells boys press into the seams of a wall by the lane down to the sea. “You stared,” she added, with mirth in it, not accusation. “I am not offended. The moon makes flatterers of us all.” 

Shame is a small, hot thing, like a coal one juggles until one can contrive to drop it. “Forgive me,” I said again, and she laughed, and the laugh ran out across the surface as a bird runs along the crests of waves, touching them lightly with its feet. 

“You may come nearer,” she said, and lifted one hand from the water and beckoned. The hand was small and pale and showed, in the moon, the jealous blue of veins. “Only your boots will be wet. It is no sin to wet a sailor’s boots.” 

It is astonishing how quickly the soul, having been chastened a moment before by shame, recovers itself when kindness is indicated. Besides, there was in me, under all, that loneliness which men who swing their beds to the movements of the world acquire at the joints; the loneliness which is not cured by song, nor by drink, nor by the proximity of other men who stink of tar. I stepped closer to the lip of the pool. The ground there was soft with rotted leaf and reed; it gave under my weight with the pious submission of a pew cushion. She had sunk again to her chin. Her hair lay like a cloak about her neck. The water beaded upon the curve of her shoulder and did not, for a moment, run. 

“I shall not hurt you,” she said, and I believed her completely because she said it as a child says that it will show you a secret: with delight that anticipates complicity. The moon struck her eyes and made of them two coins which the water could not dim. “You look as if you have sailed a long way for a kiss.” 

“I cannot deny it,” I said; and if you think this confession makes me less, then you have not been long at sea. 

She drew herself nearer, slowly, and the surface gathered itself about her like cloth. Her breath smelt faintly of salt and something colder - like the inside of a cave in which the tide has left its echo. She raised her hand and set it lightly at the back of my neck, and the heat of her palm surprised me, for the air bit. Her lips met mine. They were warm, so warm that it seemed to me the pool steamed by the gift of them. I had time to think only of the oddness - that her mouth could be summer when the rest of her, pressed against my coat, was cold as stone shaded all day - and then the kiss deepened, and thought, which is a poor swimmer, went under. 

I fancy we came together like that for a count of nine, perhaps ten - enough for the heart to form a hope and the mind to shape its little speech to it. I remember her nose pressing mine like a small bell rung gently for Vespers. I remember her eyes so near that I could see the little star-flowers the moon had planted in them. I remember, too, a sense (absurd at the time and now a cruelty) that I had been recognised; that I was not only a man but the man upon whom a certain prophecy, made long ago in a room without a roof, had condescended to alight. 

Then she took me by the lapels and drew me with a sudden ease that belonged to neither woman nor child. It was not insistence; it was decision. The ground tilted, or I did. The world rose like a bucket from a well and tipped. Cold struck my shins like a blow from a flat hand. I had a moment to say her name - if I had known it, I would have said it - which is to say I said nothing, and the water took my mouth and made it silent. 

The cold was a doctrine. It entered my lungs and revised them. It set its fingers into the sockets of my knees. My heart, that stout fellow, took two offended thumps and then went carefully, as if asking whether this were indeed to be the new law. She held me. Her hands, still warm, pressed my ribs. I struggled, because flesh is foolishly attached to its old arrangements; I kicked, and my boot struck stone, and the sound wrote a brief, bright line in my head and went out. She drew me down; the light above shrank into a small silver disc that popped and remade itself as a coin does in a conjurer’s hand. 

We are taught - if we are taught at all - that to be pulled beneath water is to be defeated. But there was in her grip something not like conquest. It had the gravity of a star drawing a thing it has always owned. I broke the surface once more, because I am not a poet and prefer air, and spat, and howled a word that had no mother, and saw her, close, her hair streaming behind her like weed stirred by tide. The moon made of her shoulders a small hill with snow upon it. Her mouth opened upon mine again and gave me a breath that was not breath; it felt of summer; it felt of apples; it felt of the first day a boy walks alone in a lane and believes himself a man. I took it and was at once ashamed of taking it. I flailed. My arm struck her flank. It was not, then, soft as the flank of an ordinary woman is, but had under it a firmness like to wet silk drawn tight over a living thing that had never, till now, been named to me. My foot found nothing. The pool widened below us as if the earth had been scooped out by a spoon, and a passage opened there, not down, exactly, but away - away towards a blackness I knew too well from nights at sea when the wind fails and the swell lifts and drops a ship like a toy. 

We went along that passage as toys go along a string when a child’s hand draws them. Rock went past my skin; kelp combed my coat with a politeness that made me fear the opposite. I had a moment’s lucidity and thought of the fishermen and their signs, if any there were, and of their rough cross-making, and of their wives who will not hang washing upon a south wind lest it smell of the weed that has never seen the sun. The pool curved, folded, and then opened. Above was a roof of rock hung with teeth of stone, where drips fattened and fell. The moon still sent down its penny of light, but it lay now upon the surface of a broader chamber of water that moved without moving, as the breath moves in a sleeping child. 

She released one hand and pointed. The motion was as gracious as if she indicated a view she was proud to share. I followed the line of her finger. Upon the floor of that chamber lay the relics of men’s impatience and desire: the ribcage of a boat, white as a cage hung long in a winter tree; a coil of rope that had learnt to be stone; a brass-hilted hanger, the blade spotted as if a bad fever had passed over it; a shoe, still buckled, with no foot to rebuke it. I saw, too, what we do not say aloud in places where other men drink, for fear of laughter that is only fear’s defence: I saw the long grin of skulls, the small collapse where a temple had yielded, the flayed geometry of bones untied from their flesh. They lay not with violence but with that courtesy the sea extends to those it keeps; everything there waited with the patience of objects which have been relieved of times. 

I struck at her then. It was a poor strike. Water makes clowns of us all. My heel found the hard of her once; she turned her head slightly, as a girl turns her head when a strand of hair has caught on a button, and smiled again, not unkindly. It is not in me to vilify her. She was neither malign nor merciful. She was an arrangement of purpose older than the word purpose. If there are laws under the wind, she was one of them in her appointed district. 

We went down. I do not know how far. The pain in my chest sharpened into that clear thought which the lack of air gives a man for a moment, as if in exchange: I remembered the look of the Widow’s Lantern as it swings when the door opens and the red glass flares like a wound; I remembered the parish bell that had rung for evensong while we drank; I remembered - this last with an astonishment that had time to smile at itself - my mother’s hands at a wash-tub, the steam making a veil about her, and the way she would hum under her breath with the work, not to charm it but to honour it, as one honours a beast that has carried one far without complaint. The humming returned then, not from me, not from her entirely, but from the water, which, being set in motion by long custom, will sometimes sing. 

The chamber opened again; we passed under an arch of rock cut by hands that had not the decency to be called hands; and at last she settled us in a place where the water stilled, like air in a closed church after a congregation has gone. We two hung there a foot above the bottom, and she, with that neatness I had already begun to think of as her signature, set her palm once more to my cheek. There was affection in it, or the appearance of affection, which is often enough for men. Her hair dallied across my eyes. Her mouth touched mine for the third time - the holy number, which men are fain to credit - and gave me again the summer breath, sweet as a lie told for kindness. I took it. We made a bargain without speech: I would accept all she offered for the measure of a minute, and she would keep the rest. It is the bargain we all make, with women and with seas. Then the gift ceased. The cold came in as the tide comes in, without anger. I flailed once more, with less conviction. My hands rose to my throat, which had become too small to manage the world. She watched me with an attention that had in it neither pity nor its opposite. It was the attention of a star regarding a field. 

There is a moment in drowning - I commend it to those who have no interest in sermons - when the pain, having insisted upon its importance for as long as it can, yields to a mildness which, if it were not the herald of death, might be praised as a philosophy. I felt it then. The world retracted to a smallness I could forgive. The black rings that had gathered at the edge of my vision came together like obedient servants and made, between them, a lid. In that shuttering I saw again the sailors’ relics on the floor, and thought, not with fear now but with that vulgar curiosity which walks even into churches, of the history of each: which man had worn the shoe; which had carried the hanger; which had made a last oath, and to whom; whether any of them had kissed a woman with a warm mouth and a cold hand and called it mercy. 

Then - all this in the last shiver’s breadth of the last thought - she altered. It was not a transformation in the sense that fairy-tales use to comfort children: not a wand, not a bell, not a sudden cloud of smoke. It was rather that my sight became equal to the sight of water, which sees all things wrongly and therefore truly. The line of her waist blurred and lengthened; her knees, which had had the decency to exist for the purposes of my understanding, withdrew from the contract and gave themselves to a different geometry; her lower limbs - if that word can be used of a thing that would not own it - flowed together in a curve that was neither fish nor snake, though it borrowed insolently from both. It was not scaled, as pictures tell us such things are, but clothed in a slickness like to wet silk layered upon wet silk, faultlessly. It moved with the carelessness that belongs only to the well-born among beasts. The tail - oh, word of poverty - unrolled behind her and wrote its long S through the water like a pen that has not yet made up its mind what to set down. 

I do not know whether I made a sound; if I did, it was only a bubble which rose and caught a rim of light and burst without ceremony. She watched me watch her. In that exchange there was the intimacy of confession and the futility of it; a priest who has heard everything will not be astonished by anything. She set her palm once more upon my cheek, and her mouth - generous to the last - gave me a kindness I did not deserve and which therefore broke me. The world went kindly out. 

It is often the way with stories told in taverns that the teller cannot account for how he came again to the chair and the ale. I can account for nothing. I woke upon weed, my lungs burning as if a smith had had them to the anvil, my hands clawed at my throat as if to find a seam to let air in. I coughed water that tasted of the inside of a shell. The sky above me had the pallor that comes just before dawn shows its coin like a trick learned long ago. The cliff leaned over me like a man who suspects a thief. I lay, as children do, and gulped air with the greed that shames men only when others witness it. No one witnessed it. The beach was empty but for the black strokes of birds upon the sand where they had visited and rebuked it. My coat was torn; the lapels bore little crescents where fingers had clutched - not cruelly, but certainly. I sat up and retched and thought, absurdly, of soup. In the next breath I remembered the chamber, the hanger, the shoe with its humble buckle, the white geometry of patience, and I bowed my head over my knees for fear that my brains would spill with the knowledge. 

I shall not, to the end of my life (which may be long or not; I have ceased to petition for either), be sure by what indulgence I was returned. Perhaps I bored her. Perhaps she has her laws, and one in ten, or one in a hundred, must go back to make offerings for the rest. Perhaps it amused her to be remembered. It is not given to us to know the entertainments of those jurisdictions. I rose at last and went by the long road to the harbour, where my ship lay drowsing like a beast that has eaten too much salt. I climbed aboard with the care of a thief who intends to be a prodigal later. The bosun, whose tally never fails, laid an eye upon me and prepared his sermon. I took it. It is easier than the other. 

I have not told this tale to my shipmates. They speak, as sailors do, of women with tails and women with knives and women with hearts that can be stolen with the cheapest coin; they speak also of pools in woods and of songs heard when the tide is slack. I have nothing to add that would either confirm or improve their speech. I walk, now, of an evening, as far as the turn in the lane that leads towards the belt of trees, and there I stop. It seems to me I can smell there a cold that tastes of iron; it seems to me, too, that I can hear, very faintly, the humming that belongs to hands at labour. I go no farther. I take my hat off and stand for a moment with it in my hands, as one stands when a procession passes with a box upon shoulders. Then I turn back to the quay, where the Widow’s Lantern waits to flare red again when the door opens, and the men drink at tables worn smooth by elbows as sure as oars in oarlocks. 

There is a custom at Winter Quay, which the fishermen will not name, of leaving at the edge of the wood, where the path first stoops, a dish of milk, a coil of hair, a knife, a child’s toy, a length of ribbon, a tin soldier, a shaving from a mast, a twist of salt, a coin turned on its edge - each man what he has. They do it with that shy seriousness men adopt when they are caught in decency. Sometimes, when we return and when duty allows, I add to those offerings a small thing of my own: a hook I shall not miss, a button, the stub of a pencil, once a little book I had carried too long and knew too well. I do not, when I set these down, ask for anything. To ask is to presume jurisdiction. I lay them, rather, as a man lays flowers upon a grave for a person to whom he owes a complicated gratitude. 

The pool remains. The moon visits it with that impudent kindness she extends to ruin. The wood continues to refuse to be improved. The cliff leans; the sea licks it; the town crouches. I grow older in my middle twenties and beyond them. When we put to sea I stand by the rail and look down, and the green under us opens its eye. The wake writes, not blasphemies now, but a set of fair copy lines: be warned; be warmed; be wary; be willing. I read what I can. Then the wind catches and the canvas bellies like a woman’s laugh, and the ship, which is my only church, goes out from land and remembers its psalms. 

If ever you should come to Winter Quay, and the fog has left the harbour mouth for a day, and the cliff stands up like a black shoulder with a white collar upon it, and the tavern’s glass shines; if, too, you are young in weather and think yourself invulnerable to songs that are not set down in the hymn-book, and you should find yourself, late, with ale in you and the moon making a corridor between the chimneys and the sea - then go by the long way. Let the wood be what it is: a belt upon the town to keep its shirt close. Let the pool mind its own face. And if you hear humming, bless the woman in your memory who taught you to recognise it, take off your hat, and turn your boots towards home. For there are lips in the world so warm that they will forgive any coldness in a man, and hands so certain that they will draw him where he had not intended to go, and tails - if tail it must be called - so long they write your name in the dark where no one will read it.