Captivity Part 50

"I know I can't get whisky, you see. It's probably a hundred miles away.

And I've no money. You must keep it all. This craving comes on and simply eats me up, dear. It's like a cancer, gnawing through bone and flesh and muscle. In the city when the gnawing gets too awful there's always an anesthetic in the nearest pub. In a way, to conquer it in the city is more n.o.ble. I said 'n.o.ble' in inverted commas, dear. I don't think it is particularly n.o.ble. But it's going to be the devil of a fight."

She did not know what to say or think. It seemed, at any rate, better that he should be removed from whisky, however hard it was going to be for him.

"I've thought a lot about it," he went on, speaking more impersonally than she had thought he could. "It's going to be so awful for you. I'll be a fiend to you, I expect, when the hunger comes on. I suppose this is one of the advantages of an inebriates' home. They'd shove me in a straight jacket or give me drugs when I got like that. Out here, you see, there's only you. I can't control myself. I may hurt you."

"You won't. If you do, I'll fight you, so you needn't worry on my account. I think it's all a silly convention that says a man in a temper mustn't thump a woman! If you want to thump me, do! But you'll probably get a much worse thumping than you give."

He tried to be cheered by her, but could not. After awhile, she said:

"Besides, if you do get well here--and you're going to. I don't doubt that for a moment--think how splendid it will be to know you've done it without the sort of restrictions, and treatments you'd get in a Home.

Doing it just by your own strength is great, Louis."

He saw that, and was happier, but he could not break out of his morbid introspection. Even after they had said good night and she was in the hinterland of sleep, he wakened her by sitting up and lighting a cigarette.

"Can't you sleep?" she murmured drowsily.

"I'm thinking about you," he said gloomily. "Marcella, I was a cad to bring you out here into the backblocks, just because I wanted to escape temptation. You need civilization just now--you need all the comforts of civilization--care and--Oh the million things a woman needs."

"Oh, Louis, do be quiet!" she said, "all I need at this moment is a good sleep."

He lay down again for ten minutes. Once more he started up, dragging the blanket right away from her.

"How can you expect me to sleep? Marcella, what right had I to make you have a child? We've no money."

"They don't cost anything," she said wide-awake now.

He made a gesture of impatience.

"We've no home--you've no attention."

She sighed.

"Listen to me, Louis, and then, my dear, for ever hold your peace. If the Lord, or whoever it is that's responsible for babies, had meant them to make women invalids, they'd never have been invented at all. Because there's no real room in the world for invalids. They'd have been grown on bushes, or produced by budding, wouldn't they? So just you forget it!

The baby is my affair. It's nothing to do with you, and I positively refuse to be fussed over. I call it indecent to talk about ill-health.

It's the one thing in life I'd put covers on and hide up. You must just think you've been to a factory and ordered a baby, and they said, 'Yes, sir--ready in six months from now, sir.' And then you walk away and call again in six months!"

"Oh Lord!" he groaned, "why _did_ I marry a kid?"

"You can talk about him as much as you like," she went on calmly, "the finished article. But I simply won't have you fussing about the details of his manufacture, and all his tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. And that's final."

"But he's my child," protested Louis.

"Not yet! In six months' time, perhaps. But you've enough worries, real worries, without making them up. There, dear heart, I don't mean to be cross with you. But you're such an idiot, and I'm so sleepy."

They said good night once more, and she was falling asleep when he pulled her hair gently. He was frowning, with deep lines on his forehead.

"But look here, old lady. If we're going right away from everywhere without any home, where's the child going to be born?"

"On the battlefield," she murmured sleepily.

He groaned, and once more his impatient twistings s.n.a.t.c.hed the blanket away.

"Oh d.a.m.n the Keltic imagination! Why can't you get a grip on things and be practical?"

Once more she was wide-awake, laughing with intense enjoyment.

"I can't see what there is to laugh at," he protested. "Marcella, has it occurred to you what sort of heritage this kiddy of ours has?"

Purposely misunderstanding him she flung out both arms wide, to embrace the whole of Australia, bush and forest, mountain, river and desert from sea to sea.

"You know what I mean," he said desperately. "Me, his father, a drunkard, with drink in his family, and you the descendant of dozens of drunkards. And what's more, though you are not a drunkard, you're as mad as a hatter. What the devil is the poor little beggar going to do?"

She was suddenly awake and very serious.

"Listen, Louis," she said, holding his hands very tight. "I got that jerk-back most dreadfully in Sydney. Mrs. King was saying that the crowning mercy of her life was the fact that she hadn't any children.

But it's a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing! This child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph the carpenter, or--or Romulus and Remus were the children of the wolf-mother. We've given him his flesh. We're his foster-parents, if you like. But G.o.d and Humanity are his father and mother. I found all this out one night on the roof in Sydney. He's a little bit of the spirit of G.o.d incarnate for awhile."

"Keltic imagination," he said tentatively.

"Very well, then. If you don't like it my way, I'll put it in the scientific way. You twitted me once for forgetting that biology applied to us two. Doesn't it apply here? Biology shows that nature's pushing out, paring down weaknesses and things that get in the way. If a drunkard--who is a weakness, a scar on the face of nature--was going to have drunkard babies, nature would make something happen to drunkards so that they can't have children at all...."

"She does--in the last stages," murmured Louis.

"That's a good thing, perhaps. But I don't believe in inheriting things like drinking. I don't believe my people inherited it at all. They inherited a sort of temperament, perhaps--and it was the sort of temperament that was accessible to drink-hunger. People talk about drinking, or other weaknesses being in their families. Drinking seems to be in most families nowadays, simply because people are slack and lazy and drinking is the easiest and least expensive weakness to pander to.

But I certainly believe most hereditary weakness comes from legend or from imitation. It's idiotic nonsense. When you're a kiddie you hear all sorts of family talk about family characteristics; it becomes a sort of legend and you live up to it unconsciously. You see your parents doing things, and because you're with your parents a great deal just at the time when you're soft, like a jelly just poured into a mould, you get like your parents. And then it's too late--too late to alter, I mean, unless you take a fork and beat the jelly up again, or warm it on the fire and make it melt. I've read a lot about this, and I believe it's at the bottom of half the morbid stuff people write and talk about hereditary drunkards and criminals...."

"But statistics," began Louis.

"The worst of statistics is that people only quote the statistics that will prove their argument. They don't quote those for the other side. If drunkards' children become drunkards it's probably because their lives are so desperately miserable that they take the most obvious way of drowning the misery. Anyway, Louis--"

"Lord, you are getting dictatorial, Marcella," he said.

"Yes. I know. I mean to be, on this subject. I'll tell you this much, my dear. If you tell this child of ours that you're a drunkard, I'll shake the life out of you and then run away with him where he'll never see you again. And if he sees you drunk--! But he won't. Anyway, you won't be any more. And now, seriously, after all that speech, let's go to sleep."

It was his turn to lie awake for hours this time, thinking and listening to her quiet breathing.

CHAPTER XXII

They started awake at dawn to the discordant laughter of a jacka.s.s in the gum tree above their heads. After a moment's struggle to locate herself Marcella sprang up and, running over the little plot of gra.s.s that fringed the creek, had another joyous swim. The morning was very still--uncannily still, and already hot. When they started out along the bank of the creek about six o'clock they felt the oppression almost unendurable, but in the motionless air the five trees that marked Loose End were very distinct, though rather like toy trees in a child's model garden.

The depression of the night had gone; neither of them mentioned it; they talked of trivialities until they halted for lunch and drank a billy full of lukewarm tea.

Louis had built a tent by spreading two of the blankets over bushes to keep off the sun-glare. But there was not much rest in the gasping heat and at last Marcella stood up, stretching her arms which the pack on her back was making stiff.