Captivity Part 10

"Wait till you see London," he said. "You'll wonder more then."

She got up from the table suddenly and stood in the window while the doctor went on eating philosophically and smiling at her as he wished he could go all the way to Australia with her and watch her growing wonderment at the world.

"You know," she said doubtfully, "it seems so queer--all these people, and then that monument. I don't see the connection, somehow."

"I see you standing there, and a lump of congealing mutton on your plate here," said the doctor, and she sat down and ate a mouthful hurriedly.

"But what is the connection? What are they for?"

The doctor watched her in his precise way with his eyes twinkling at her over his gla.s.ses, which he wore on the end of his nose.

"I thought you were such a learned biologist, Marcella. Kraill would tell you they were the caskets of questing cells--seeking about for complementary cells that some day will themselves become the caskets of cells."

"Ugh! That reminds me of all the clouds of flies on the dead fish in summer," she said, pushing her plate away. "Flies--then maggots."

"Exactly!" said the doctor, chuckling.

"But--" she began, and broke off, frowning.

"Don't you see any connection between all yon little people and the monument, though? A crawling ma.s.s of folks--and one or two stand out.

The others show they realize how these big ones stand out by making monuments for them. It infers, I think, that they'd all like to tower if they could."

"Ah, that's better. But so few tower."

"And that, Marcella, is just what I told you yon day we drove to Pitleathy. They're all patched--or I should say _we're_ all patched.

Either bodily, mentally or spiritually there are holes torn in us, and we've to be so busy patching them up from collapsing that we've no time to grow. As time goes on and we learn better there'll be less patching.

There'll be more growing up tall and straight--everyone--there'll be giants in those days, Marcella."

"Yes," she said slowly, and saw herself as one of them some day as she drew on her gloves rather awkwardly, for they were the first pair she had ever possessed. "Oh, well--I'm not going to be patched at all, doctor. I simply won't have things tearing holes in me."

London, of course, was even more amazing than Edinburgh. They had a day to spend there, and the doctor took her to Regent Street and Bond Street in the morning. He was enjoying himself in a melancholy sort of fashion.

Marcella was _tabula rasa_. It was interesting to watch the impressions registered on her surface.

The shops gave her none of the acquisitive pleasure he had expected. To her they were interesting as museums might have been. She could not, she did not see the use of them. The women thronging the windows and departments of a great store through which they walked roused her to excited comment.

"What are they buying them all for?" she said, looking at the hats and frocks and the purchasers. "They have such nice ones already."

The doctor asked her if she did not think they were very pretty when he had got over his amus.e.m.e.nt at the idea of women only buying things because they needed them.

"Oh beautiful!" she cried rapturously. "But you couldn't do very much in frocks like that."

"That's the idea, of course," said the doctor, watching her quizzically.

"If you only knew it, Marcella, all these shops are built upon a foundation of what your professor calls 'questing cells.' You see--but let's get out into the air. You've started my bee buzzing now."

They faced about and elbowed their way through an eager-eyed, aimless-footed throng by the doorway.

"Now go on," said Marcella when they were in the street, walking down beside Liberty's. She had one eye on the windows and one ear for the doctor.

"You see, all these women here--they're doing something quite unconsciously when they buy pretty clothes and spend so much time and money on making themselves look so bonny," said the doctor, striding along in his Inverness cape, quite oblivious that he was a very unique figure in Regent Street. "They'll worry tremendously about what colour suits them, what style sets off their beauty best. I don't think that it's really because they like to see something bonny every time they look in their mirror. I don't think it's even that they want admiration, or envy. It's simply that they're ruled by the law of reproduction, if they only knew it. Inside them is new life--these same questing cells.

These cells can only find separate existence through complementary cells. So they urge these women on to make themselves charming, capturing--married or single, they are the same, deep down, for natural laws take no count of marriage laws, you know. The men are the same, too. They beg and placate--and all the time deep down, they think they are the choosers, the overlords. And the women tempt them and then run away. Last of all they yield. These cells have it ingrained in them that the woman-thing is only ready to yield after a chase. Very few people do this consciously. A few do--people who have been let into the secret of studying natural laws. Then they either do it for the fun of the chase, or else because they're too morally lazy to fight the urge of the cells.

That's when they get holes torn in them."

He walked on for a few steps, and then turned to laugh into Marcella's puzzled face.

"All of which, I'd like to point out, I take no credit for, Marcella. I got it out of Kraill's Edinburgh lectures that have just been published in book form."

"I hate that way of talking," said Marcella abruptly. "I like Wullie's way best. He says lives are the pathway of life, just as you do. But he says it's not just life, it's either G.o.d or beasts that walk along it and we've to help G.o.d kill the beasts so as to leave the pathway clear for Him. It means the same, but your way of saying it is so--so unG.o.dly."

"I know. But there it is. The way I talk is the way Kraill and his school talk. Of course, there's something in it. There would be a great deal in it if we were only aiming at making bodies. All this tricking out--refinement--it may produce the people who tower over others--like the Greeks with their 'pure beauty' you know--"

He stopped speaking suddenly and they walked on in silence while Marcella looked eagerly from shop window to pa.s.sers-by and back again.

"It's all wrong, doctor," she said at last. "It's too one-sided."

"Yes. And look at the Greeks now--"

She turned to him with a quick, birdlike glance.

"Do you know what I think?" she said.

"Not quite all of it," said the doctor, watching her face, and thinking how incongruous it looked in Regent Street.

"Well, I think biology's one of the beasts we've to kill before G.o.d walks along us. So there! Tropical forests--maggots--women," she added, and the doctor laughed outright.

The chief impression she got of London was its aimlessness. It reminded her irresistibly of an ant-hill she had seen disturbed once. Myriads of tiny creatures had scurried pa.s.sionately, exhaustingly, after each other to and fro, no whence and no whither; the people thronging out of shops and offices at dusk frightened her: there seemed so many of them, and, looking at their tired, strained faces and their unkingly way of hurrying along, uninterested and uninteresting save in getting to their destination, it seemed to her that they were not thinking of ever "towering": when Dr. Angus reminded her that they were so busy keeping alive that they had no time to think how and why they were alive at all, she was plunged into black depression; at home she had only had less than a hundred people and a few beasts about the farm to pity. Now it came to her with sudden force that all these people, so driven by different forces, were to be pitied. But as soon as she saw the crowd of people at Fenchurch Street station and a chalked notice, "Boat train for the R.M.S. _Oriana_," she forgot abstract worries.

There seemed to be a good many children, small groups of five or six with father and mother, and piles of inexpensive-looking luggage; there were several young men who looked very much like the lads who worked about the farm at home; there were groups of girls and a more or less heterogeneous collection of people who might be pa.s.sengers, and might be friends seeing pa.s.sengers off. But what impressed her immensely was a pile of brightly striped deck-chairs with sun-awnings. They looked exotic, tropical on the grey, gloomy platform; they seemed so pleasantly lazy and luxurious among the piles of utilitarian-looking luggage. The doctor bought one for her and put it among her baggage.

The train was crowded; the doctor stood up to give his seat to a woman and Marcella sprang to her feet, talking incessantly about her impressions and her expectations. She thought London, seen from a railway carriage window, which gave only a view of back gardens, factories, little streets and greyish washing drying, was an appalling place. Three times she said to the doctor, "But what's the use of living at all in such miserable places?" and the second and third time he only smiled at her. The first time he had said:

"Why, either because they don't know there's anything better, or else because they're sure there's something better. Either is a good reason for going on with awful things."

At last they were in the tender, in a drizzling, greyish rain, ploughing through the coffee-coloured water of the Thames towards the _Oriana_, which seemed surprisingly small. She had several surprises during the journey from Fenchurch Street. To begin with, someone trod on her foot and did not apologize; several people elbowed her out of their way in their rush to get to their luggage; no one smiled at her or spoke to her; no one seemed to realize that she was Marcella Lashcairn, or, if they realized it, it made no impression on them.

"Don't people here seem bad tempered?" said she to the doctor. "They don't seem to care about each other in the least."

"There are so many of them, Marcella--at home, you see, there are so few that they are frightfully interesting and friendly and critical of each other. Among all these people n.o.body matters very much--"

"They matter to me. I want to be friends with them, take them under my wing," she said, looking round at them, most of them people who would not be very likely to be put under anyone's wing at all. "Don't you feel like that?"

"I don't. They come under my wing fast enough without being asked and lots of them come in the night just when I've got in bed," he said. "I'm a bit tired of people, Marcella. I've seen too much of them. I always get two views of 'em, you know--inside and out. And the inside view is very depressing."

He laughed at her grave face, but once again he had a sharp misgiving about letting her go away alone. It seemed dangerous to turn her, practically an anchorite, loose among so many people. He wished, now, that he had let her brave the freezings of the saloon rather than the thawings of the steerage. But she seemed so confident, so eager, that he could say nothing to damp her spirits, only he was very glad, on going with her to look at her cabin, to find that she was to have it to herself. That, at any rate, prevented a too close intimacy that he suddenly felt might be dangerous.

They found very little to say during the twenty minutes he had to spend with her before the tender took him back to the sh.o.r.e. He was feeling very saddened, and at the same time anxious to give her excellent, fatherly advice, for he suddenly realized her abysmal ignorance when he saw her standing smiling with an air of pleased expectancy among all these strangers, waiting, as she had said, to love them all and take them all under her wing. Twice he started nervously to warn her--and each time she interrupted him joyously.

"Doctor, just come and peep into this door! Look, millions and millions of shiny rods and wheels and things. Oh aren't engines the most beautiful things on earth? Look at them--not an inch to waste in them!

I wish I could be an engineer."