Grand Canary by A. J. Cronin Read Free Book Online

had a fancy to come – a strange sort of fancy.’
    It was true. Often she had strange fancies – of a place hauntingly familiar, of a perfume lingering, elusive, of a garden, sweet-scented and profuse, set in the shadow of a snow-capped peak, bathed in clear moonlight, hushed by the whisper of a distant sea. Often this garden came to her in sleep and she would run gladly and wander there, fingering the flowers, lifting her face to the moon, feeling a lovely inner joy which irradiated her like light. Next day she would be sad and quiet and alone; she would feel herself odd, strangely out of key, separated from the ordinary things of life. Once she had told Michael about her garden. He had laughed kindly, after his fashion, with the calm precision of possession.
    â€˜Still a child, Mary,’ he had said. ‘You must learn to grow up.’
    It was all so unsatisfactory. She did not understand. It worried her, this strange fantasy which struggled secretly, like a plant reaching from a dark place towards the sunshine. And sometimes she feared it, because in reaction it had brought her so much pain.
    She looked up suddenly. Elissa was staring at her.
    â€˜You’re a funny little sprat, Mary,’ she laughed. ‘You’re like a child looking at a rainbow. Exactly that. Hand me a chocolate. And for heaven’s sake put something on the gramophone. For I’m bored – oh, so terribly bored.’

Chapter Six
    One bell had sounded in the second dog watch, and the echoes still jangled in Harvey’s ears as he lay half undressed upon his bunk staring fixedly at the row of bolts which ran across the ceiling. Nineteen white-enamelled bolts, round-headed and symmetrical, all neatly in a row; he had counted and recounted them as a man half crazed by lack of sleep might vainly number sheep. Sometimes, amid the creaking and sighing of the ship, he heard the clink of hammers on these bolts, and sometimes that hammer-beat was in his brain. His hands clenched, his face pale and haggard, he had a look strangely persecuted. Clearly he suffered; but he endured that suffering with a stoic bitterness. At times the thought flashed into his mind: a few steps to the ship’s side and then cold darkness – the end of everything. But that was too easy; he always recoiled from the impulse. At other times, with a self-analysis almost grim, he made attempt to trace the morbid pattern of his sensation. He had always had this impulse: a curious instinctive searching, the burning desire to strike into the heart of reason.
    It was the motive which had actuated his life.
    His upbringing had been austere. His father had been a schoolmaster: no comfortable tutor at an expensive establishment but an ill paid, hard-driven teacher of science in a Birmingham Board School. Yet William Leith had a mind; he was ambitious, a man far before his time; and far above the soul-destroying task of thrusting reluctant youths through the crude elements of chemistry and physics. But for him the task was a necessity. Julia, his wife, was one of those women whose whole existence might be epitomised in the word: Demand. Insatiably she demanded clothes, money, and his affection. She taxed his slender income to the uttermost; she complained of that income’s insufficiency; she harassed him; she exhausted him in mind and body, then with sublime bathos she ran off with a commercial traveller. Neither her husband nor her son heard of her again.
    When she deserted him, William Leith was already suffering from an early phthisis lesion – his cough had been the crowning inadequacy which thrust Julia into the travelling salesman’s arms – and now the condition rapidly advanced. He did not seem to care. He let ambition slip, turned his gaunt and brilliant mind upon his son, named in a whim of early arrogance, for the great Harvey. Thus there germinated in the boy a forward passion for scientific research and, incredibly –