Captivity Part 39

"Oh, come and see. You'll love it," she urged and, though he said it was "a beastly f.a.g," she got him at last into his dressing-gown and slippers and sitting beside her on the coping.

She was happier than she had been for months; she felt that there was enough breath up here for her, and not even his laughing at her for being "such a kid" could damp her enjoyment. Presently a new idea occurred to her.

"Let's sleep up here!" she cried, and once again over-ruled his objections, and dragged up the mattress and blankets.

The shadows of the chimneys were long across the roofs as she laid the mattress down by the coping. The day had been hot with the clear, bright heat of early summer. They sat on the mattress, smoking--an accomplishment Marcella had learnt from him and practised rather tentatively. She talked to him of Lashnagar, pouring into his ears legend after legend of her people, until she came to the tale of the spaewife and the coming of the ruin upon Lashnagar.

"Do you mean to have the cheek to say this is an ancestor of yours?" he asked as, with glowing eyes and quickened breaths, she told him of the twins born on Flodden Field and wrapt in their foemen's trappings. Had he been less self-centred he could not have tried to hurt her by making fun of her legends.

"Yes. She is my great, great, goodness knows how great grandmother. I'm rather proud of her, but she takes some living up to. I often feel I disappoint her. But if ever I feel flabby or lazy or tired of hard things I switch my mind on to her. Fancy her, sick and weak, tramping after her man to the battle, and then leaving him dead as she took his heirs and his shattered pennant back to the ruins of his home. I feel ashamed of myself for ever daring to think I'm ill-used when I think of my spaewife grandmother! We're not brave and hard like that now--But I'd rather like to get her here to settle you and people who talk about 'limiting' women. She wasn't much of a pa.s.senger."

"Oh, that witch story comes in lots of mythologies, and old family histories!" he said, teasingly. "I don't suppose she ever existed at all, really, or if she did it was because she'd been tarred and feathered and took refuge at that out of the world show because she was afraid of being burnt."

"Afraid!" she cried, and began to tingle all over just as she had tingled when Mactavish played the pipes at her father's funeral. Just for an instant she wanted to push Louis over the roof, hear him smash far below on the street for daring to say the spaewife was afraid. Then, just as swiftly, she remembered that he was weak and must not be annoyed because he could not stand it. It came to her in a flash how impossible it was for him, with no pride but self-love, no courage but Dutch courage, to understand fearlessness and endurance. Her tingling smart of madness and anger pa.s.sed, leaving her penitent and pitying. She put her arm round his neck and kissed him behind his ear. He, not knowing the swift processes of her thought, imagined that he had "knocked a bit of the silliness out of her" effectively.

"Poor little boy," she whispered, and he liked it.

The waters of the harbour began to deepen to indigo: the sun went down behind the roofs of the city at their side. There was a faint faraway crackling in the air as of straw and twigs burning in a fierce fire; the sky was flooded with streamers of mauve and green, gold and rosy light that flickered over the bed of the sinking sun for an hour or more instead of leaving the sky suddenly grey as it usually was after the rapid twilight. The sundown bugle called down the flag on the masthead of the flagship, and the headlights twinkled out. Marcella and Louis grew very quiet as the streets quietened and only an occasional car clanged by in George Street, an occasional band of singing sailors went back rollicking down the street, a solitary ferry glided along in the water, with brilliant reflections and blaring German band. She crept a little closer to him; when he did not speak she forgot, for the while, the chasm between them. It is so easy not to criticize anything seen through veils of glamour. People socially, spiritually and mentally worlds apart can love violently for a while when there is physical attraction. And they are very happy, breathlessly, feverishly happy.

Then they wake up with a memory of mutual giving-way that embitters and humiliates when the inevitable longing for something more stable than softness and breathlessness sets in.

Louis had not been drunk for three weeks; so many things had happened to her, new things, charming things, adorable things and sad things since they left the ship that she had almost sponged the memory of it from her mind. The faculty that had been forced upon her in self defence during her childhood, of forgetting hunger, hardness and repression the moment she left the house and got out on to the wild hillside in the sun and the wind came to her now with a kind of rapture. She had never, in her childhood, dared to resent anything that hurt herself. This spirit of non-resentment had become a habit of mind with her. She forgot--if she ever realized--that Louis had hurt her, in the soft beauty of the aurora, the silent fall of the night, the exhilaration of the roof with its loneliness, its romance.

After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and granadillas, and four candles. Louis looked disappointed: he would have preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted them. They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.

It was the setting of romance. Dreams, play-acting came back. Breaking off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said:

"This is a roof garden in Babylon. You're a king. Oh no, it's Jerusalem.

I'm Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you're King David. You've got to fall in love with me."

Louis was too self-centred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him: he had never, consciously, loved anything on earth: his desperate pleadings with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker rather than for a lover. His gross suggestions when he was drunk--the relics of his boyish first s.e.x adventure--she did not understand. Nor did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears; why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes. Had Louis not roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical pa.s.sion which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning, bewildered self-a.n.a.lysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies. She did not realize that all her dreams of a splendid Lover had become mixed up with the family legend about "taking the man she needed" and had crystallized round Louis, the first man to waken physical pa.s.sion for her.

In a warm rapture up here on the house-top in the still night air her conscious mind went to sleep; she lived her dreams. And Louis did not understand; out of the reach of temptation for three weeks, he felt very strong; her tenderness, her pa.s.sionate love flattered him: he became a very fine fellow indeed in his own eyes as he lay there, half asleep, under the silver and purple of the midnight sky. He must be a very fine fellow--so he argued--if she could love him. She had won his reluctant admiration long before she had wakened his love.

"She's a queer stick," he told himself drowsily, "and a perfect darling.

Lord, the way she shook the life out of me that night at Naples! Just because I mentioned her bally old father. I believe--I really believe, in spite of her being in the steerage--that she's pretty well born! And the way she stuck Ole Fred in the water without turning a hair. And got fifty quid out of her uncle as easy as falling off a log! Lord, I've never raised more than a fiver out of an uncle in my life--and that on a birthday."

He felt for her hand and held it drowsily. It was a very cool, hard hand--not in the least like Violet's pretty little product of creams and manicure.

"She's _some_ girl," he thought. "And what a blazing wonder that she'll look at me. Yet I can twist her round my little finger--on occasions like to-night."

By a very humanly understandable metempsychosis she became just a little less shining because more reachable; some of her shine transferred to him. His conception of the whole thing was physical; hers was not consciously physical at all. But as she lay, long after he was asleep, watching the candles fade one by one, leaving a fainter purple in the sky, she felt vaguely disappointed; all this business of love-making seemed to mean so much less to Louis than it did to her; he did not take it seriously, or rather he did not make it the high feast she found it.

He could be flippant about it. For her it broke down every barrier, every reservation. Louis was able to come down immediately from ecstasy to everyday things. This, she argued, meant that he had not flown so very high after all. He was able to make a laughing, half-embarra.s.sed remark to the effect that he hoped no one else was on the roofs round about. She would not have cared if everyone in Sydney was on the roofs.

For her no one existed just then but Louis. That had jarred a little.

Then there were no more cigarettes and he had, quite petulantly, complained of the trouble of going down into the room for a new tin. She had gone cheerfully, as she would have fetched things for her father.

She did not realize that, by waiting on his whims, she was lowering herself in his esteem. He had taken the cigarettes without a word of thanks. It was only when she lay awake for hours afterwards, with a vague discomfort that was certainly not physical, that she remembered and was amazed that he could have remembered cigarettes just then. It did not square at all with her Lover dream. And the Southern Cross as she lay with unblinking eyes staring into the great, still dome above her, was disappointing. She had heard so much about it; she had thought it would be a group of flaming suns in the night sky. And its separate pointers were not even so big and bright as Venus. She felt, somehow, that she had been cheated a little; and immediately told herself that it was not so really--either she had expected too much, or else she was not clever enough to see what was really there all the time.

She did not go to sleep all the night. It was at four o'clock that she crept quietly from underneath the blankets and sat on the coping, perilously near the edge of the outer wall, with the dawn wind from the sea blowing deliciously cold through her thin nightgown. Daybreak came like the rolling up of a blind; thoughts and memories chased each other in her mind. She looked across at Louis, fast asleep. Her impulse told her to waken and ask him to kiss her good morning. And then she stopped dead. Her feet were carrying her, very uncomfortably, over the rusted corrugated iron of the roof towards him. Her brain signalled to them to stop, and they would not! She felt herself being carried by them quite against her will, and in another moment she knew that her lips would be on his eyes, kissing him to waken him. And at that moment her foot caught on a nail that the weathering of the iron had exposed. She gave a little, repressed cry of pain and saw her foot bleeding.

She sat down exactly where she was; her foot went on bleeding, but she did not notice it. The slight pain had done its work in jerking her to an awareness of her body.

"Oh, my goodness," she said out aloud, "I'm caught! I'm chained! Louis was right when he said I didn't understand about these hungers. Oh, my goodness, it's like Louis's feet take him to a whisky bottle. My feet were simply coolly walking me off to waken him up."

She sat motionless, scarcely breathing. Her heart began to thump unpleasantly and she felt a flush tingling down to her feet and to the tips of her fingers.

"If I hadn't torn my foot then I'd have given way to that blaze--and each time you give way to a thing it chains you a bit more! I'd never have had a chance to sit cool and think it out, because I'd have forgotten, before I knew where I was, that it needed thinking out at all. I'd have wakened him by now."

This jerked her, wakened her, widened her. Swiftly she was able to see that Louis, on his whisky chase, de Quincy on his opium chase, King David, Solomon, Nelson, Byron and Kraill on their woman chase were not perhaps so fortunate as to get a nail jabbed in their feet, pulling them up sharp and giving them time to think.

"There I've been blaming them a bit--pitying them a lot! Heavens, I was _superior_!" she said.

The sun came up out of the sea and looked at her.

"Because I didn't know," she told it. "I was superior! Because I'd never felt the pull of a chain."

She thought the sun took on a horribly knowing, superior expression.

Another rather shaking thought came. Since her recollection of the blameless fool that first night in Sydney she had sought the bookshops for the text of "Parsifal" and had found it, a ragged copy for twopence, in a second-hand bookshop near the station. She had been puzzled when Parsifal, trying to free himself from the enchantment of the witch-woman's embrace, had suddenly been confronted by her exultant:

"And so then, with my kiss, The world's heart have I shewn thee?

In my soft arms enfolded Like to a G.o.d thou'llt deem thee."

"Yes, that's it," she cried. "Oh, you old sun, listen to the speciousness of it all! Listen--I mustn't let Louis hear, because he'd be hurt. He isn't my Lover, my Knight at all. He's just the same thing to me as women used to be to the Knights--he's something to rescue, to deliver from bondage. And--just like those beautiful, soft women, he's--he's a sort of seduction to me. Oh--it's horrible!"

She waited a minute tensely. Thought always came to her in flashes.

"And so are all men. They're all in bondage."

The sun seemed to have a big, fat, knowing face. One of his eyes winked at her.

"Here am I getting myself into a chain that's going to drag at me every time I'm fighting for him. This--this softness, this love-making and all the thrill of it--it's going to make holes in my armour and stuff them up with--_crepe de Chine_!"

She had seen _crepe de Chine_ yesterday for the first time; Mrs. King was making a blouse of it. Marcella had loved its fine sheen and delicacy. But it did not seem much use as armour.

"Here's this thing happened to wake me up, give me insight. There is the plausibleness of it, the temptation of it. I _know_ last night taught me things, millions of things. It promises to teach me more each time it's repeated. And each time it's repeated I get more and more _crepe de Chine_ patches on my armour. I get bowled over like a ninepin. How am I to know I'll not be permanently bowled over--till I get--like--like--" A long line of those people she had pitied for their weakness came to her.

"I nearly was this morning. If it hadn't been for that nice kind nail in the roof! Wagner knew all about this when he made the witch-woman realize that her kiss had unlocked all the world's wisdom for the fool.

And one can't help wondering how it is that a thing so natural and beautiful can be bad for one--"

She began to bite her thumb-nail fiercely and stopped, disgusted with herself, as she realized how she had often condemned Louis for exactly the same habit when he got perplexed.

"You see!" she told the sun desperately, "even a little thing like that!

I do think we're censorious and cruel to each other."

She began to walk about the roof. Her foot was bleeding neglected; at every step she left a little, red print unnoticed.

"Of course it's natural and beautiful--and abominably instructive! Where the wrong comes in is that it gets you down, beats you, takes hold of you. Eating bread would be wrong if you made an orgy of it. So would religion, or anything. All this time I've been posing as something so splendid, wanting to save Louis from Drink; I've been deceiving myself.

I've been in love with him. And it's the sort of love that would soon degenerate into an orgy--if I let it!"

She felt that she was so full of ideas that she was getting muddled, but one thing was very clear.