Captivity Part 30

"Not a bit of it! Men have to do the work of the world. Women are just the softness of life."

"Cushions for men to fall on?" she said mischievously.

"No, half-holidays when he's fed up with work." He looked at her, laughing at her indignant face. "Why be superior, Marcella? You're just as bad as anyone else, only you're not used to it and haven't thought of it before. Who likes being kissed?"

"Oh, but it wouldn't get in the way of my work," she cried, flushing hotly.

"Wait till you try it, dear child. The first time I ever got the fever taught me a lot. It wasn't love, of course."

"When you loved Violet?" she asked in low tones.

"Oh Lord no! This was a little French girl who picked me up when I was squiffed after I'd pa.s.sed the First. About twenty of us--all from St.

Crispin's--had been up for the First. We all pa.s.sed but two, and we all had to get drunk to buck those two up. We went to the Empire and kicked up such a gory din that we were helped out. A little mamzelle from the Promenade took charge of me. I--I hadn't thought about those things much before. At home they were taboo. I'd always been terrified of girls--If I hadn't been drunk then I'd never have done it. I thought it unutterably beastly. For months after that I was afraid to look the Mater in the face. I thought she was unutterably beastly, as well, just because she was a woman. It made a tremendous dint on me."

Marcella grasped about a tenth of what he meant. The rest sank into her mind to puzzle her later. But something sprang to the top of her consciousness and raised a question.

"Louis," she said quickly, "That night at Naples--when you were naughty.

You talked French to me. I don't know what you said, but the schoolmaster looked shocked."

He flushed.

"Yes, I've been told that before. I always do talk French if I meet a girl when I'm boozy. I used to, to Violet, and she was--oh frightfully disgusted. And once I did to my sister! She, unfortunately, understands French. I suppose it's a good thing you don't."

"Louis, do you say--_wrong_ things in French" she whispered.

"Things--you know, beastly things?"

He hesitated a moment and an impulse of honesty made him tell her the truth.

"Yes, I believe I say perfectly appalling things. You see--it's like this. I'm a queer inhibited sort of thing, dear. I'm always--till you took me in hand--fighting drink. I'm in a state of fighting and inhibiting. I've always been like that. Even when I was a little kid I was afraid to be natural because I was taught that the natural impulse was the wrong one. I sometimes want to say something frightfully charming to you, and don't for fear it's silly. I'm always wondering what people will think of me--because I'm so often wrong, you know."

"I just don't care what anyone says or thinks," she broke in.

"There's the difference between us, then. Well, you see, being an ordinary, average sort of human being, I think a lot about girls and all that. Only deep down is the puritanical old idea that it's wicked to do so. Really, honestly, Marcella, I'm not pulling your leg--when I first started dissecting at the hospital, I felt horribly indecent. It was a female thigh! I felt as if it ought to be clothed, somehow--I sort of kept thinking the Pater or someone would come into the lab, and round on me for being immoral. If it had been a male thigh I wouldn't have cared a bra.s.s tanner!"

"It must be awful to have barriers in your mind," she pondered.

"It was just the same with booze. If I had a beer or a whisky in the club as all the others did, I saw the Pater disembodied before me, and had another to give me the courage necessary to face him. Everything, you see, everything--girls, drink, curiosities, courtesies, kindness--all got lumped together as things to keep in hand. I got in a fever of self-consciousness. I do now. I think everyone is watching and criticizing me. Then, you see, when I'm drunk, the watch I set on myself is turned out to gra.s.s and I get a d.a.m.ned good rest. I let myself rip!

In my sober moments I daren't go and order tea for the Mater in a bunshop because I'm petrified with terror of the waitress. When I'm drunk I'd barge into a harem. That first affair--with the French girl--was a tremendous thing to me. Most boys have played about with that sort of thing before that age. They looked down on me because I hadn't. But it made such a deep dint on my brain that whisky and s.e.x and French are all mixed up together and the one releases the other."

She sighed.

"I do wish Dr. Angus was here, Louis," she said. "I wish I understood better."

"You understand better than Violet did. She used to stay at our place a good deal, you know, and go with us to the seaside and to Scotland. Even when I was right off whisky she used to drive me to it. Evening dress, you know. Oh, frightfully _evening_! And--in a queer old place we stayed in in Scotland once there were heaps of mice. She used to run out of her room in the middle of the night saying she was frightened of them. And then I had to carry her back, and rub her feet because they'd got cold.

She was rather a maddening sort of person, you know. She'd lead one on to biting one's nails and tearing one's hair and then she'd laugh and kiss her hand and run away with my sister into her bedroom. And they'd both laugh. She understood the value of being a woman, did Violet. And she didn't let herself go cheap--I used to get the key of the tantalus and cart a whole decanter of whisky to bed to get over it. If she'd just have let me kiss her--"

He paused, frowning reminiscently.

Marcella sighed, and laid a cool, firm hand on Louis's.

"Louis--I think I'm--cheap."

"So are air and water, dearie," he cried, with sudden pa.s.sion that surprised her.

"I don't think I'll ever understand men, though. Wine, women and song they seem to lump together into a sort of tolerated degradation."

"I don't know much about song, but women and wine are certainly to be lumped together. They're both an uncontrollable hunger. And they give you a thick head afterwards! You say that Professor chap in his lectures resents women. Of course he does. Don't you think I resent whisky?

Wouldn't any man resent the thing that makes dints in him, makes him undignified, body and soul, and gives him a thick head and a sense of repentance? I guess I look a pretty mucky spectacle when I'm drunk. I see myself afterwards, and can imagine the rest. Well, a man in the throes of a woman orgy is just as undignified--even if he doesn't lurch--oh and s...o...b..r! I've never heard that your Professor drinks. That doesn't happen to be his hunger, you see. But if he drank to the same extent as he has love-affairs he'd be in an asylum now; and if he were a woman he'd be on the streets! No woman--even if she were a Grand d.u.c.h.ess--would be tolerated with the same number of s.e.x affairs as a man can have. She'd just have to be a prost.i.tute out and out--without choice--or else keep herself in hand."

"Like Aunt Janet," murmured Marcella to herself, "and come to acid drops."

Aloud she said. "Louis--I wish you wouldn't tell me. I always think of clever men like Kraill as G.o.ds and heroes--I hate to think they have holes in them. They have such wonderful thoughts."

"That's the devil of it. I know they have. He has--Kraill. I've been to his lectures and felt inspired to do anything. They most of them think much better than they can do, that's about the size of it! I suppose we all do that more or less, but we don't put it on paper to be used in evidence against us. We think fine things and do smudged ones, and so the world goes on."

There was a long silence. She crept a little closer to him and put her hand into his. He held it tight. It was almost as if her world were shaking about her and even his unsteady hand seemed some support.

At last she said, as if talking to herself.

"Louis--can't something be done for us all? Can't we have these things cut out of us like cancers? Can't we get rid of these horrible desires as we've lost tails and hair and things we don't need? Then in time people would be born without them. Louis--you don't think--think of me like that, do you--as a--a hunger? As something you must have if you don't have whisky, or as something that will drive you to whisky if I go away as Violet did?"

"I'm--I'm afraid I do, old girl," he said. "It's natural--I say, Marcella--you're only a kid. I don't believe you quite realize what you've taken on--in that way."

She looked startled. Then she laughed gaily.

"I'm not afraid of my part of it, Louis," she said, "but I can't help thinking that if I'm to be--as you put it--a sort of hunger subst.i.tuted for whisky, we're all wrong. Suppose I died, for instance?"

"Marcella, if you die I shall die too. Anything else is unthinkable. I can't face life without you, now. I can't be a pariah again. You're a hunger to me. I'll admit it. But you're more. You're a saviour. And--you don't know anything about it, dearie. But when we're married you will, and I suppose I'll be just the same sort of hunger to you, then. It's no use blinking your eyes to it. And--be d.a.m.ned glad I love you, and am not like some sort of men. Otherwise--well, Lord knows what would have happened to you. You're so honest that you think everyone else is. And yet, transparent little fool that you are, in common-sense things, I know that you're going to keep me straight."

Back came trooping all the visions of Deliverance, a rich pageantry shutting away the footmarks of the beast she had just glimpsed.

As every beat of the engines brought them nearer and nearer to Sydney consideration of ways and means became even more anxious. Louis spent glowering days. Marcella was quite certain that everything would turn out well.

It was in the dull run between Colombo and Fremantle that they decided upon a plan of action. The nights were getting colder now; they had to sit in thick coats in the evenings. This particular evening it was raining greyly, but they could not sit in the saloon because Ole Fred and his gang had started a smoking concert, and Marcella and Louis would have been ejected forcibly.

"You're such a fatuous optimist, Marcella," he said impatiently. "Lord, I wish I'd never started on this business! Everything's against us--I knew it would be! We'll give it up. You go off into the back blocks where you will at least be sure of food and a roof. And I'll go to the devil in the same old way as quickly as possible."

"Oh, I could shake you!" she cried. "You know quite well I'm not going to leave you, if we have to live on eleven shillings for the rest of our lives. It isn't eleven shillings now, either. I gave Jimmy half a crown to spend at Colombo."

"Fool," he muttered gloomily.

"Who spent fifteen pounds?" she retorted.

"I say, I'm sorry, old girl, but my nerves are a bundle of rags! I've never had a wife to worry about before--and I can't see how I'm going to make enough money to make her my wife yet--"

Marcella knew nothing whatever about money. She had a few jewels of her mother, but it did not occur to her that they were worth money. Louis had absolutely nothing of value. Guided by past experience his mother had given him the barest necessities for clothes; his watch and most of his clothes he had sold before he sailed. What made him so irritable with Marcella was the knowledge that he could easily get the money by being drunk. Publicans are proverbially open-handed; most publicans would have lent him ten pounds to spend in their establishment if he had thoroughly and courageously drunk and pitched some tale about expecting money by the English mail. He certainly looked worth ten pounds and his father's name as a publisher was fairly well known even in the Colonies.

He had frequently "raised" twenty or thirty pounds in this way in New Zealand. Once or twice he had borrowed a few pounds from a doctor by telling him a pitiful tale, but most doctors recognized his symptoms and refused to help him to hurt himself.