Captivity Part 28

CHAPTER XI

Looking back in after years on the six weeks of the voyage Marcella saw them as days and nights coloured by madness and storms through which Jimmy went like a little wistful ghost, hanging on to her hand, the only thing in grey tones amidst splashes of wild colour. Many a time in the sun-drowned days and windless nights Marcella was reminded of those old tales she had heard on Lashnagar from Wullie's lips, of the hot summer when the witch-woman came and men went mad just before the destruction came on the village. It was as though the _Oriana_ went on ploughing through the waters, with the Dog-Star hitched to her masthead inflaming men's blood. Marcella was in a state of puzzlement. She was puzzled at herself, puzzled at Louis, puzzled at the people round her. Men went about barefoot in pyjamas, women in muslin nightdresses all day after Suez; in the Indian Ocean, one blazing day, they ran into the tail of a monsoon; the lower decks were swamped and the steerage pa.s.sengers were sent on to the upper decks, where Marcella and Louis sat surrounded by half a dozen forlorn children whose parents had succ.u.mbed to the pitching of the ship and the heat. Great walls of green, unfoaming water rose sullenly and menacingly higher than the ship, which tossed like a weightless cork; seas came aboard with an effect of silence; down in the saloon gla.s.ses, crockery and cutlery crashed to the deck with a momentary fracture of the deadly quiet which seemed all the more silent afterwards: occasionally a child screamed in fright and was hushed by an almost voiceless mother, while stewards went about with trays of iced drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the pa.s.sengers. To Marcella everything seemed cruel and mad and preying. The pa.s.sengers were cruel--to each other and to the stewards; one day, going into the saloon by chance, she found Knollys leaning over a table looking white and sick, as he tried to polish spoons and forks.

"Are you ill?" she asked him.

"There's only two of us--including me--that haven't crocked up," he said; "people don't seem to think it's hot for us, or that we feel fed up at all. That Mrs. Hetherington seems to think I'm a private sort of lady's maid to her alone. All these women do--sitting about in deck chairs calling 'Steward' all day long! In the third cla.s.s alone there's six stewards in hospital! And only yesterday I caught it from the Chief because the cutlery hadn't been polished--not that that's my job at all, really--"

The next moment Knollys fell over in a dead faint, and copying what she had seen him do when pa.s.sengers fainted, Marcella fetched a pillow from her cabin, laid it under his back on the floor and left him while she polished the cutlery. Louis found her there and they came near to fighting about it.

"What on earth are you doing?" he asked in amazement.

"Poor Knollys has gone down," she said, thinking that adequate explanation.

Louis looked at him casually. Marcella was coming to understand that he looked upon illness with a certain hardness and lack of pity that surprised her; he was immensely interested in it, he liked to dabble in it, but not from a pa.s.sion of healing nearly so much as from curiosity and technical interest. To him, in illness, curing the patient mattered infinitely less than beating the disease. He had a queer sn.o.bbishness about illness, too, that amazed her. To him Knollys, a steward, ill meant infinitely less than the illness of a member of his own cla.s.s would have meant. This struck Marcella as illogical. To her it seemed that, in illness at least, all men were brothers.

"There's a stoker just died of heat apoplexy: there'll be a funeral presently," he said coolly. "What on earth are you doing?"

"People are so unkind. Knollys got into trouble yesterday because these silly things were not clean," she said, polishing away furiously.

"But you can't do the work of a servant," he said, aghast.

"I can. Of course I can. I often have. I've worked in the fields with the men, and I've milked the cows and made the b.u.t.ter. Oh, lots of things--"

"Oh well, I suppose a farmer's daughter can do those things, Marcella.

But, look here, old girl, when we're married you'll have to be on your dignity a bit."

She flushed a little and the storm light came into her eyes. Louis did not see it. He sat on the edge of the table, and expostulated with her for a long time. But she went on until the last spoon was polished.

"Don't you think we'd better get something for Knollys? Sal volatile or iced water, or something?" she said at last, looking at her black hands.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, leave him alone. It's typical of the servant cla.s.s to be bowled over on the slightest provocation. I expect, as a matter of fact, he can hear what we're saying now. He's got you taped pretty well and knew that if he worked on your sympathies you'd do his work while he miked about.

The working cla.s.s is always like that--no backbone."

She wondered if he were joking, but she saw from his solemn face that he meant it all, and she gathered that he considered himself very much better than Knollys. He did not see the contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt in her face, and went on, stammering a little because he had at last brought himself to say something that had been on his mind for days.

He lit a cigarette nervously, fumbled with a bunch of keys in his trousers pocket and then, looking at her dirty hands, said:

"L-l-look here, old girl. I d-don't w-want to quarrel with you. But I w-want you to f-face things a bit. Y-you s-see--you've been used to a cla.s.s of society quite different from mine. You know--look here, I say, I don't want you to go making _faux pas_."

"What do you mean?" she asked ominously.

"That's French for mistakes, don't you know--mistakes in--er--well, what one might call breeding, don't you know. Y-you know--a.s.sociating with stewards and--and--common people like Jimmy, for instance. He's the very lowest bourgeois type."

"Much lower, I suppose, than Ole Fred, and those drinkers in New Zealand, isn't he?" she said calmly, her eyes glinting. He flushed hotly and looked hurt. Immediately she was sorry.

"There, I'm sorry, Louis. I ought not to have said a thing like that. It was unforgivable. But you do talk like an idiot. How on earth can one make mistakes in breeding? Oh, you and I talk different languages, that's all, and it's not any use at all trying to think and talk the same."

"Well, I know more of the world than you do, and you must let me teach you, Marcella. Oh, I know you're--you're braver and stronger morally than I. But, you know, when we get to Sydney and are married we'll have to stay in hotels and--and--I don't want my wife making _faux pas_. It'd be just like you--you're such a dear, really--to go doing things servants ought to do--in public, I mean, and make a fool of me."

She looked at him and smiled reminiscently and rather cruelly. But he looked so solemn, so serious that, in sheer mischief, she told him that she would be very careful not to make him conspicuous by her blunders.

And then she asked him an unexpected question.

"Louis, did you write and tell your father you didn't want any more money?"

He took out his packet of cigarettes--he never possessed a cigarette case, such things were to be turned into money too easily. His hands were trembling as he struck a match.

"Yes--I--t-told him," he said jerkily.

"What did you say about me?" she asked curiously.

He pondered for a moment. At last he decided to be honest.

"I didn't tell him."

"Didn't you, Louis?" she said, looking hurt. "Why?"

"He'd only think you were a waster. He wouldn't think anyone but a waster would marry me. If I told him you were a Scotch farmer's daughter he'd picture something in short skirts, red cheeks and bare legs that talked like Harry Lauder. Or else he'd think I was lying, and had got off with a barmaid and wasn't married at all, and was living on some girl. They'd always think the worst of me, at home. I'm not even going to tell the Mater--"

She thought for some minutes.

"I don't much care," she said at last. "I think your father's rather a horrible man, but I may be wrong about him. My impressions of him are formed from yours, you see. It seems that no one but a most inhuman man could kick his son out. But then--well, I don't know just how much you worried him. But I'd have liked you to tell your mother. She looked so grieved that day on the tender, and she was crying so miserably. I'd have liked her to know you were taken care of."

"She wouldn't believe it, either, Marcella," he said gloomily. "And you don't know my Mater. The very fact that you were in the steerage would make her think you couldn't possibly be any good in the world. If I told her you cleaned spoons and forks for a steward she'd think you did it from habit because you'd been someone's servant. They've no imagination--"

"All mothers have, I'm sure," she told him. "I'd have liked your mother to be my friend. I'd have liked to write to her about you--"

"G.o.d forbid," he said fervently, and once more she gave way.

Later on that day they discussed ways and means. His definite picture of getting married and staying in hotels in Sydney had made the dream concrete. She had hitherto simply seen them both glittering along in an aura of Deliverance. Right at the back of her mind she still clung to pictures of knightly mail, obtained from she had not the slightest idea where. But that fitted badly with hotels in Sydney and conventions he was going to teach her. In the evening they went to their favourite seat on the anchor and watched the phosph.o.r.escence shimmering away in ghostly paths to the star-splashed sky.

"Louis," she said hurriedly, "how much does it cost you to get married in Australia?"

"Lord knows, I don't," he said, sitting up sharp. "There's a music-hall song about 'She cost me seven and sixpence; I wish I'd bought a dog.'

But that's in England. I've a hazy notion that it's much more expensive in Australia than England. Why?"

"I'm wondering how we're going to do it. We've about eleven shillings in the world--you see, uncle is meeting me in Melbourne. I had a cable at Port Said to say so. And I'm afraid I'll have to do a little evasion.

I don't know him at all, but he may think it his duty to see that I go with him to Wooratonga. Or he may enquire into your prospects like uncles do--"

"Good G.o.d!" he said, throwing his cigarette overboard and staring straight at her in horror. "I hadn't thought of that."

"Nor had I. It was all just romance till you mentioned it to-day, and then--probably because I was doing such a prosaic thing as cleaning spoons and forks, I saw all the details for the first time. Wedding rings are made of gold. They must cost a tremendous lot of money. And if being married is only seven and sixpence, I don't see how we are going to spare seven and sixpence out of eleven shillings--we've got to eat something, and live somewhere. You can't eat marriage licences, nor use them as shelter. I've seen one once, belonging to Mrs. Mactavish. She kept it sewed inside the lining of her bodice, all among the bits of whalebone that made her stand up straight. It's a crackly thing like a cheque--"

"Oh, do stop talking nonsense," cried Louis, suddenly desperate when faced with a problem. "Marcella, what are we going to do? Oh, why did I spend that money? Why were you such a fool as to pay it back to Fred?

He's drunk it all by now. It did him no good, and think how useful it would have been to us!"