Captivity Part 7

"No," she said doubtfully. "Do you mean be like Aunt Janet?"

"G.o.d forbid! No, not like Aunt Janet. You'll see when you come to it, Marcella. But remember that the nearest most of us ever get to the perfect Trinity is a thing of shreds and patches. People don't manage to be perfect."

"Christ?" ventured Marcella.

"No. He was brain and spirit without a body."

"Why, doctor, how about when He fasted in the wilderness--and the pain on the cross?"

"Bodily pain is much easier to bear than bodily desire, Marcella. Your poor father would have found it easier to be crucified than to bear his longing for whisky. And Aunt Janet--ask her."

"She wouldn't tell me."

"No, I suppose she wouldn't. When she was young she saw a man she wanted. And he was a man she couldn't have. Until she got dead as she is now I expect she'd have thought crucifixion a thing easier to bear. No, there's no one perfect. All we are, any of us, is either a soul or a body or a brain developed at the expense of all the rest. We get great holes torn in us, just as if wolves had been clawing at us. And it's the body that makes the most dreadful tears. Most people don't see this. You see, the body's hungers are the most appeasable--and being the most appeasable one can't see why they shouldn't be yielded to."

He stopped talking as they drove into the main street of Pitleathy, and while he was with his patient at a little house in the middle of the street Marcella sat thinking. Loose ends of his talk floated about in her grasping mind and she collected them to make him fasten them down when he came back.

"Do you know, doctor, you've muddled me," she said as they turned homewards in the teeth of the wind.

"I'm sorry for that, Marcella. You'd better forget what I've said.

Sitting alone so much I talk to myself, and I forgot I was talking to a bit la.s.sie like you. Forget things you don't understand."

"And then get more puzzled later on, when they crop up?" she said. "No.

I want you to tell me, now. I want to know, now, why mother was ill--and why Jean and I have headaches."

"Your mother was ill through an accident," he said gravely. "I don't wish to talk about that. And as for Jean and you--well, it's what we expect of women. Man has made his women-folk invalids."

"Doctor!" she gasped.

"Women are always getting ill more or less. Their natural place in the scheme of things makes them weaker. In the beginning of things they were in a dangerous world; as the vehicle of the new life it was not well that they should take their place amidst the same dangers as the men. Otherwise the race might have died out. So they were adapted by nature to a softer life. Their brains are smaller, their nerves more sensitive. If they'd been made as strong as men, physically, nothing would have kept them from fighting and exploring and getting killed."

"But--but--how awful! And you mean I'll have headaches and things always because I'm a woman?"

"Because you're a woman and, to quote your Professor, biologically important. Important to the race, that is--not intrinsically important.

To keep you out of dangers and hardships--and mischief," he said, chuckling as he watched her indignant face.

"Well, then I won't be a woman! Coddled! I never heard anything so disgusting! Doctor, I'm going to be a Siegfried, a John the Baptist!

I'm going to be a man!"

The doctor laughed loudly and told her to wait awhile, when she would laugh at this Marcella who was so eager, so impatient now.

CHAPTER V

That conversation marked an epoch for Marcella. To use the doctor's phrase, it made her shake hands with her body. His medicine cured the neuralgia, though it would probably have cured itself now that the strain of her father's illness was over. But the headaches persisted right on until the springtime, bringing gusts of impatience and strange demands and urgencies that made her begin to get tired of the farm and Lashnagar and set her feet longing to be away on strange roads.

One sunny dawn she came down to the beach and, throwing off her clothes, ran across the strip of shingle, and then, with rapture in the softness of the air after the sharp bite of winter and spring mornings, she flew as if on wings over the yellow sand and into the water that was sliding in gently, almost motionlessly. She danced in the little lazy waves.

They seemed playmates to-day, though usually they fought and buffeted her; she had her usual swim out to the islet where the fishermen kept their nets and it seemed very splendid just to be alive. Then she swam back to the sh.o.r.e where her clothes lay in a little heap, and it occurred to her that she had brought no towel.

"I'll have to dry like washing does--in the sun," she laughed, wringing her hair in her hand as she stood in a motionless little rock pool. The drops sparkled round her and, looking down at their little splashes, she caught sight of her reflection in the pool as she stooped forward to shake her hair. For a moment she stared, as Narcissus once stared. But unlike Narcissus she did not fall in love with herself. From the reflection she let her eyes travel over her body, and noticed that curves and roundnesses were taking the place of boyish slimness.

"Oh--how _horrible_!" she cried and dimly realized that the change in her appearance had something to do with the doctor's prediction of physical disability. She loathed and resented it immediately. Suddenly conscious of her bare legs she ran home, horrified at the tightness of her frock that showed the roundness of her figure. As she pa.s.sed the Mactavish cottage the mother sat in the doorway, suckling the newest baby. Instead of staying to talk as usual Marcella flew by, her cheeks crimson. As soon as she reached home she ran up to her mother's room to find a frock that was not so tight; tearing an old linen sheet into strips she wound it round her body like a mummy wrap, so tightly that she could scarcely breathe, and then, putting on a blouse of her mother's that was still too tight to please her, she surveyed herself in the mirror with supreme dissatisfaction.

"I look _horrible_! It's beastly for people's bodies to _show_ like that," she cried, and, sitting down on the floor, put on the shoes and stockings she had had for her father's funeral, that hurt her feet. She ran down to the beach to discuss it with Wullie. Half-way there she discovered that she could not possibly mention it to anyone. This puzzled her. She could not understand things one could not mention.

"We're very grand the day, Marcella," he said, watching her curiously.

"Where are ye gaun?"

"I've come to see you," she said, sitting down in a shadowy corner.

"Have ye had breakfast? I saw ye, hours ago, swimming oot by the nets. There's seed cake in yon box that Jock's wife's sent doon, and b.u.t.termilk in the can."

Even indignation with her figure could not conquer her appet.i.te, and she divided the cake between them, eating her share before she spoke.

"Seed cake's the nicest thing in the world," she said at last. "I love the wee blacks in it, don't you, Wullie? Wullie, when I'm dying I'll come here and Bessie shall make seed cake. Then I shall never die. I love the smell of it, too--it makes me think of the Queen of Sheba bringing spices and gold to King Solomon."

"Ye seem to be having a fine queer lot of thoughts the day, Marcella,"

said Wullie, eating slowly and looking at her.

She flushed and looked away from him.

"I have, Wullie, horrible thoughts. About getting old."

"So old, la.s.sie--ye're nearly a woman now," he said gently.

"Wullie, I won't be a woman! I hate it! The doctor's been telling me disgusting things about being a woman. And so has Jean. Why should they be weak and get ill? Oh, I won't! I'll do as I like."

"Ye're too young tae understand yet," began Wullie.

"I'm not. I'm not too young to understand that I won't be weak--tied down. The doctor said women were all weaker than men, and I thought perhaps most women might be. But not me. And then--Wullie, I want to be like a lion or a tiger, and kill things that get in the way, and--oh, I'll hate being a human being with a body that gets in the way."

"My poor old carca.s.s has always been in the way," said Wullie wistfully, and she ran out of the hut, unable to bear the pity of that, right up on Ben Grief. But before she reached the top she had to take off the tight bandages, for she found she could scarcely breathe, much less climb in them, and her shoes and stockings she hid under a bush until she came back, for they crippled her feet.

For three days she did not bathe and undressed in the dark every night.

But after that the water called her insistently, and she went back to it, swimming in a deliberately unconscious way, as though she had promised someone she would not notice herself any more.

But insensibly her dreams changed; instead of being a Deliverer now she dreamed, in spite of herself, of a Deliverer with whom she could go hand in hand; as the mild May days drew along to a hot June the dreams varied strangely. Up on Ben Grief all alone in the wind, hungry and blown about she would see herself preaching in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey, clad in the roughest sheep-skins. At home, or on Lashnagar, or in the water she saw herself like Britomart in armour--always in armour--while a knight rode at her side. When they came to dragons or giants she was always a few paces in front--she never troubled to question whether the knight objected to this arrangement or not. At feasts in the palace, or when homage was being done by vast a.s.sembled throngs of rescued people, he and she were together, and together when they played. She had definitely dismissed the doctor's talk of natural weakness. Not realizing all its implications she had nevertheless quite deliberately taken on the man's part.

Then came a gipsy to the kitchen door one morning when Jean was in the byre. It was a good thing Jean was not there or she would have driven her away as a spaewife. She asked for water. Marcella gave her oatcake and milk and stood looking at her olive skin, her flashing eyes, her bright shawl curiously.

As she drank and ate slowly she watched Marcella without a word. At last she said in a hoa.r.s.e voice:

"You will go on strange roads."

"I wish I could," said Marcella, flushed with eagerness. "This place is--"