After her father's death Marcella had more time to become aware of the
really tangible shadows about the farm. In fact, she wakened to a
general awareness about the time of her eighteenth birthday, rather
later than most girls.
She was extraordinarily young; she was inevitably romantic. Living what
amounted to the life of a recluse, it was only to be expected that she
should live her illusions and dreams. Her mind was a storehouse of
folklore, romance, poetry and religion; her rationalistic readings had
not in any way become part of her, though facts and ratiocinations, by
mere feat of memory, were stored in her mind as irrelevances and
unrealities that came elbowing their way through her dreams just as
fantastic thoughts come as one falls asleep.
Never, in all her life, had she known what physical pleasure was; her
bed was hard and very thinly covered--one night her father had taken
away and locked up a blanket because he said she must be hardened. It
had never occurred to her that food could be a pleasure; it was just
something that happened, a recurrence of potatoes, porridge, oatcake and
broth. Only when she had been swimming in the fierce waves or battling
in the winds on Ben Grief with Wullie did she realize the pleasure of
hunger, and that was easily satisfied in the smoking hut when the
Hunchback raked aside the ashes and brought out roast potatoes or
toasted fish that he took down from the roof.
Not knowing other girls she had no one to talk to her about clothes.
Before Rose Lashcairn was ill she had taken great pleasure in dressing
her little girl; soft things, woven of silk and wool, came from London
for her, soft shoes and stockings and frocks of fine texture and
beautiful colour that seemed strange and exotic on Lashnagar. But these
were worn out and never replaced--except for her mother's funeral she
never wore shoes, summer or winter. Her feet and legs were brown and
quite invulnerable to stones or brambles. Her father did not realize
that she needed clothes; her aunt was too much sunk in shadows to notice
the child's appearance. And, reading her legends and romances, it was
natural that Marcella should live them and dress them. In a press in her
mother's room were clothes brought from the old grey house, the
accumulation of days when fabrics were made as heirlooms. There were
plaids and brocades and silks: there was lace from Valenciennes and
linen from Cambrai, yellow with age. There were muslins that a Lashcairn
had brought when he adventured to India with Clive. Rose often wept over
them. Several times Marcella's dreams nearly cost her her life, for,
living them so utterly, she became detached from the physical world. One
time, when a stormy golden sun went down behind black clouds, shining on
an ancient pile of grey stones that stood on a little spit of land near
the bar of the river, she was reminded of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur."
She heard the ripples lapping on the reeds and, with an imaginary Sir
Bedivere at her elbow, hurried back to the farm to dress herself as a
Scottish edition of King Arthur in kilts that had belonged to her
grandfather. She worshipped the shine of the moon on the great jewel at
her breast as she stepped into the little frail boat, very tired after a
long day's wandering on Ben Grief without food. To a Kelt death is a
thing so interpenetrating life that thought of it brought no fear;
there was a sort of adventurous anticipation about it. She cast a
stick--her sword Excalibur--into midstream and waited for the arm "clad
in white samite, mystic, wonderful." That it did not appear meant very
little to her. It certainly did not mean that it was not there. Rather
it meant that she could not see it. So she lay in the little boat and
quite certainly she saw the grave Queens at the head, leading her to the
Island Valley of Avilion. Watching the moonlight glittering on her jewel
she was hypnotized to sleep, rocked by the soft motion of the little
boat. The current of the stream took her out to sea, the turn of the
tide washed her back again, and she wakened at dawn famished with
hunger, drenched with the icy water the little boat had shipped. She was
too good a swimmer to drown and, after a valiant struggle, she came to
land two miles from home.
Her romance was never killed by misadventures. The very next day she
climbed Ben Grief and lighted a ring of fire round his wrinkled brow by
carrying up loads of dried heather and grass through which she fought
her way to the rescue of a dream Brunnhilde, sleeping within the fire.
She reached home that night with scorched clothes and hair, and
smoke-smarting eyes. But such mishaps were only part of the adventure,
as inevitable as storms in winter and wounds in battle. These dreams
were in the days before her father's Rationalism kept her chained
indoors: his evangelism sowed seeds that took root and flowered into a
desire that she might be a wild-eyed, flame-tongued John the Baptist,
making straight the way of the Lord. When this dream came to her it
transmuted all the other dreams; from so deep down inside her that it
seemed a voice of someone autocratic standing beside her came the
conviction that to be a John the Baptist meant to be a martyr and an
anchorite. For days after her father's death she wandered on the hills,
preaching deliverance to the screaming gulls, who would not be quiet
like St. Francis' birds when he preached. Many days she took food with
her and deliberately refused to eat it, walking miles after she was worn
out in a considered attempt at the subjection of the flesh, after the
manner of saints of old. Sometimes she preached peace to the desolate
ghosts on Lashnagar, but they did not seem to listen.
Then, just after this, several things happened to bring her thoughts
away from dreams to a realization of herself as a concrete,
circumscribed being. Wullie had warned her of this.
"Ye're up in the clouds, now, Marcella, like a wraith. Some day ye'll
come down to airth. And it'll be with sic' a bang that ye'll find ye're
very solid." She had not understood him.
For six weeks after her father's funeral she had almost maddening
neuralgia. One day, meeting Dr. Angus in the village she stopped to
speak to him. Indeed, it was impossible to pass him, for he had bought
Rose Lashcairn's little mare who, even after six years, remembered
Marcella and stood with eager, soft eyes while the girl stroked her
velvet nose and satin sides. This was the first time the doctor had seen
Marcella since the funeral and she had been weighing on his mind: he
guessed at more than the Lashcairns would ever have told him of their
circumstances; he had sent in no bill for Andrew's illness and, out of
his own pocket, had paid the Edinburgh specialist. Marcella knew nothing
of this--if she thought of it at all, she would have thought that the
doctor just happened, as everything else in her life, by chance.
"Marcella, you're not looking the thing," he said. "Hop up beside me.
I've not seen you for ages. Let us have a talk. I've to drive along to
Pitleathy and I'll drop you here on my way back."
She sprang in beside him and told him about the neuralgia.
"I had it first when I used to sit up with father. Now I have it all the
time--and dreadful headaches. I never knew what aches meant before. I'm
afraid when Jean used to say she had the headache I wasn't so kind to
her as I expect her to be to me."
"We never are," said the doctor bluntly. "But have you not told Aunt
Janet about the headaches?"
"Oh no--she'd think it was silly."
"Then I'd tell Jean, Marcella," said the doctor hurriedly. "If you're
not feeling well, just tell Jean, and maybe she'll be bringing you along
to see me." Then he added. "But to-night I'll send the lad along with
medicine for the neuralgia."
They talked about her father, then, and presently she surprised him by
saying earnestly:
"Doctor, why is it that people get ill?"
He laughed and chuckled at her puzzled frown.
"Well! There's a question to ask a man after his dinner. Do you know it
took me the best part of seven years at the hospital to learn the answer?
And even now my knowledge is not what you might call exhaustive."
"It seems so queer--mother being ill, and father; then Jean's headaches
and my neuralgia. And Wullie all twisted up."
The doctor let the reins drop on the horse's neck and lighted a very old
pipe. He had very little chance of a talk, and was glad to talk, even to
a girl.
"Just in those people you've mentioned, Marcella, you've almost every
cause of illness." He paused, puffed at the pipe and went on,
"Wullie--he was born like it."
"Yes. I know. It seems all wrong."
"It is wrong. It's a mistake," said the doctor slowly.
"Whose mistake?" she asked quickly.
"Ah, there you have me, Marcella. It was to answer questions like that
that men invented the devil, I believe; they like to say he put the grit
in the machine that turned out Wullie, and made him like that out of
perversity."
"But what do you say?" she said, looking into his face.
"I don't know. I think several things. For one thing, I like to imagine
that God, or Nature, whichever you like to call it--isn't a perfect
machine yet, and that we human beings can step in to help a bit."
"But how?"
"Wullie's father, I've heard, was drowned before he was born, and his
mother was too proud to tell when she was hungry. She used to go out
every night and take his place with the fishing boats, rowing, sitting
cramped, drawing the nets. We can help there by stopping that sort of
thing."
Marcella watched him, wide-eyed. She was completely mystified but so
full of questions that she could not find which one to ask first.
"That's what I'd have said when I was at the hospital, a young man. In
those days I dealt much more with cells and bodies than--than I do now.
Queer thing, Marcella--youngsters go for physiology mostly. When they
get older they see that there's more in psychology. I'm old now. Maybe
I'm more foolish, but I've a feeling, right down at my marrow, that I'm
wiser. I like to think that Wullie's an example of the law of
compensation and, by losing physical strength and beauty, has gained a
beautiful soul. But for the Lord's sake don't go telling anyone I--a
doctor--talked such arrant nonsense," he added with a laugh as he puffed
at his pipe.
"It seems wrong to me," said Marcella slowly. "I can't see why a
beautiful mind and body shouldn't be part of each other."
"You've never been introduced to your body yet, Marcella, nor shaken
hands with it. It's never popped up and made faces at you. When it does
you'll find folks like Wullie have a good deal to be thankful for. Your
father, for instance--"
He stopped short, coughed loudly and pulled up the horse to a sharp
trot.
"Yes. The barrel," she said gravely.
"Who's been telling you that?"
"Wullie. I asked him."
"I wouldn't have told you, yet. But it's right you should know. You saw
how it was with your father. Whisky ruled him. It rules all your menfolk
like that. It wasn't till his body grew weak with sickness--and
sickness, mind you, caused by the whisky--that he got it in hand. Then,
you see, it was too late. He conquered a wounded foe. And, of course, he
died. If he'd got religion earlier, perhaps--and, after all, that's only
another obsession."
"Poor father," she whispered.
"If your father, without religion or anything, could have conquered,
Marcella, he'd have been a very heroic figure. He'd have left footprints
in the sand of time, as the poet said."
Marcella nodded. This was the first time the idea of conscious heroism
came to her. She said rather breathlessly:
"But are bodies _wicked_, doctor? Lots of people seem to think so. Aunt
Janet thinks people's bodies are _wrong_. All saints seem to think that
too."
"They're very splendid and bonny if you can keep them in hand. Christ
taught that bodies--Humanity, that is--are the veils of God. It's only
when bodies get out of hand that they go wrong and put a man in hell. I
expect the idea of Trinity-worship that we get in most religions was an
unconscious aiming at this truth, that to be a perfect human being you
must be the Trinity--body, brain and spirit. But we're not up to that
Trinity yet, lassie, by a long chalk."
"When I used to read those scientific books, and those queer
philosophies to father, it seemed to me that bodies were all that
mattered. That was when I was reading biology books and lectures. It
seemed so useless to me--just living, and handing on life, and living no
more."
"That was the idea when I was at the hospital. At a hospital, of
course, bodies do count tremendously. But in my day more than now
because we were in the reactionary stage from blood-letting,
incantations and so on. I remember how Biology came to me with a
sense of crystal precision and inevitability in those days."
He paused. Marcella asked rather doubtfully:
"But do you think that Biology is wrong?"
"Oh, Marcella, your 'rights' and 'wrongs' are so funny, if you only knew
it! You might as well say, 'Is fire wrong?' It's there. There's no
getting away from it. When I was a wee laddie at home I had to write
copy-book lessons on Saturday afternoons to keep me out of mischief. One
I wrote so often that it keeps coming into my mind in the most foolish
way often. 'Fire is a good servant but a bad master.' That was the
sentence. The times I've written it, thick down strokes, thin upstrokes!
Well, that's like any of these ologies--biology especially. It's a good
teacher. You don't have to let it be a taskmaster."
"I'd like to learn ologies, doctor. I'd like to learn to the roots of
things. All the things I know--legends, history, poetry, haven't any
roots at all. Professor Kraill's a biologist, isn't he?"
"Well, yes--rather a heterodox one, but he's getting believed now. But
how on earth did you know?" he said, turning on her in surprise.
"There was an advertisement of a book of his lectures. It was called
'Questing Cells' and father got it. I had to read it to him--with a
dictionary at almost every line, because I didn't understand it. It
showed me that, though I am muddled now, there is such a thing as
clearness in the world. It seemed to me that if I knew all the things
Professor Kraill knows things might be like a crystal ball--all the
things in the world, you know, beautifully clear and rounded off. I read
a lot of books to father after that and got muddled again. But I never
lost the feel of Professor Kraill's book. I couldn't tell you a word of
it now, but it's like the memory of a most beautiful music. I love him.
I'd love to hear him--to see him. He's the wisest man in the world."
"Heaven forbid!" said the doctor, laughing a little.
"Why? Don't you admire him?"
"Immensely, though he's heterodox. But he's just what I was saying
to you just now--an example of a man who isn't the Trinity. Being a
biologist, he's run all to body and brain. He's let his spirit get
famished a bit. Queer things--one hears, too--inevitable things."
"How do you mean?" she cried, quick to defend her hero, but eager with
curiosity about him.
"Oh, things you wouldn't understand. He's given up his chair at the
University."
There was a long silence. Then Marcella said definitely:
"Anyway, he's splendid. I love him." The doctor laughed and told her
it was a good thing she wasn't a student if she fell in love with
professors from their lectures.
"Well, go on with what you were saying," she said imperiously, and the
doctor began to think that he had not quite reckoned with Marcella's
passion for getting to the roots of things. But he expounded his theory
to her, telling her that before many years things that were miracles in
the time of Christ would be scientific bagatelles in the hospitals.
"We've been having a materialistic time, Marcella, ever since Huxley and
Darwin. Now we're coming to the swing of the pendulum. The body and its
appetites have got very strong. Soon we'll have them beat by the mind."
There was a long silence. Then, with a suddenness that disconcerted the
doctor, she asked him what Wullie had meant by saying that the Lashcairn
women took the man they needed, and went on strange roads.
He filled and lit his pipe before he answered her.
"If I told you you wouldn't understand. You'll come to it in time. When
you do, remember what I said to you. If you don't keep your body in hand
it's going to run away with you, like it ran away with your father into
yon barrel. See?"
"No," she said doubtfully. "Do you mean be like Aunt Janet?"
"God 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 lassie 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.