There were things to be endured the next few days. The purser came
along, got Knollys to pack Louis's things and then sealed them. This
meant that Marcella was shut away from all association with him; it
seemed an unwarrantable interference with what she considered her
property. The schoolmaster was surprisingly comforting and kind; he went
out of his way to entertain her: Knollys brought unexpected tea in the
morning in an attempt to make up for the loss of Louis. A young
Scotsman, a sugar planter going out to the Islands, to whom she had
talked until the fact that she was "another man's girl" had put a taboo
upon her, insisted that she should, in the cold evenings on deck, wear
his fur coat which he had brought rather unnecessarily; Jimmy tried to
comfort her with apples. Mrs. Hetherington, whom the end of the voyage
had left nervy and cross, said cattish things. She thought Marcella had
shown very little tact in throwing herself at Louis; she advised her,
with the next man, not to tire him out.
"Oh, you're an idiot," cried Marcella, her eyes full of tears, and
decided that this was an occasion for her father's favourite epithet. "A
double-distilled idiot! How have you managed Mr. Peters except by never
leaving him alone for a minute?"
"I am a woman of the world, and understand men," she said airily. "I
wove a net about him--in ways you would not understand, my child."
"Don't want to," snapped Marcella. "I'm not a spider!"
They anchored out in the stream in Sydney Harbour, going ashore in
tenders. Marcella scanned the quay anxiously to find Louis, though
Knollys told her that he would, most probably, be in by train to-morrow
at noon. But she had an idea that he might have got through earlier, and
hurried up to the General Post Office, which he had told her was his
only address in the Colonies, to which his letters were sent. But it was
a fruitless errand. Enquiry at the station told her that, as Knollys had
said, the next train possible for Louis would be in at noon to-morrow.
She turned back through the streets that were so extraordinarily like
London in spite of Chinese, German and Italian names. As she passed the
Post Office for the second time it occurred to her that there might be
letters for her there, and found quite a bundle of them in a little
pigeonhole high up. There was also a cablegram that had been waiting two
days. She opened that first. It was extravagantly long; the name
"Carlossie" at the head of it gave her a sickening pang of homesickness
for a moment. She read:
"Letter from Port Said arrived. Very anxious. Only way you treat drunkard
is leave him alone. Impossible cure. Above all do not marry him or shall
blame myself. Writing. Await letter I implore you.--Angus."
It was extraordinary extravagance for Dr. Angus. She felt guilty at
having worried him.
"But I never mentioned marrying Louis! I simply said he was one of the
passengers I was interested in."
There was a letter from Aunt Janet written after the _Oriana_ had sailed
and sent overland to Marseilles.
"I certainly miss you," she wrote, "but I shall get over it in time, I
expect. One gets very used to everything in time. I wonder if you will
ever come back? I expect so. Wullie the Hunchback came along with fish
for me twice. He misses you badly. You were always a great deal with
him."
Letters from Mrs. Mactavish and from Wullie, dictated to and written by
Bessie, said that she would be back soon; standing under the portico of
the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of
exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she
let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the
green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt
winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last
six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself
back again in her own sphere among her own people. She tried to picture
Louis there, too, and realized horribly that he would never fit into the
picture. Against Wullie and the doctor and her aunt he would look so
vulgar, so pretentious, so tinsel-coloured. And how they would laugh at
a man who could not master himself, a man who cried!
"Why, I'm a snob! I was hurt when he thought I'd disgrace him by my bad
manners. And now I'm being just as cruel!"
Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last
letter in her hand, afraid to open it. It was postmarked Melbourne and
had come in that morning. It was in Louis's writing, and gave her an
acute sense of distress. She stood still by a shop window, looking into
it blindly until she realized that she was looking at a crocodile and
some snakes squirming about in tanks in a naturalist's window. The
straggly writing reminded her of the ugly snakes: it told her that he
was drunk more or less when the letter was written; she looked from the
letter to the snakes. One of them crawled writhingly over the others,
lifted its head and put out its tongue at her: shivering, she opened the
letter.
"MY OWN DARLING,
"Wasn't it a sell? That damned captain's had a down on me all the trip. I
reported him to the shipping company and I'm trying to get a free pass
from them by rail. Otherwise I should come by the train that has brought
this letter. By great luck I ran into an old girl I knew in New Zealand.
She's a nurse who saved my life once when I was in hospital there. She's
a dear--Oh quite old; don't get jealous, my pet! I'm staying the night
at an hotel in Little Collins Street. The landlord has lent me a fiver,
so don't worry about me. One thing I've to tell you--a terrible
confession. I lost your father's ring in my haste the other night, but
never mind. I'll buy you another. I hope your Uncle stumped up.
Australia's a damnable place to be hard up in. Will you tip my stewards
for me and see my things through the Customs? Give Knollys and the other
chap ten shillings each. They haven't killed themselves on my behalf, or
it would have been a quid. Tell them I sent it. I don't want them to
know I'm hard up. If I hit up that railway pass I should be through
before lunch on Saturday. And then, old girl, there'll be doings! I hear
you can get hitched up in Sydney for about twenty-seven bob, without
waiting for notices of any sort. Till then, all my love and all my
thoughts are for you.
"Your own Louis.
"P.S. (Just like a woman) You'd better get something decent and not
Scotch to wear if your uncle came down decently. And book us rooms at
the Hotel Australia. They do you very well there."
It was her first love letter. She felt, vaguely, that it lacked
something though she did not quite know what. She hated the talk about
money and about her uncle. She hated that he could borrow money so
casually from a nurse who had been good to him. She wished that terrible
hunger he had predicted had not happened to her. She knew, with absolute
certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited
anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a
drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she
knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man
like Louis.
"But he's wrong about there being no cure. When he is with me every
minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won't be
able to do it. I'll be a gaoler to him--I'll be his providence, his
mother, his nurse, his doctor. Oh everything--I'll be what God was to
father."
Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet.
In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be
walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis's letter again she
went on rather blindly through the wharves, reading it. A Japanese boat
was loading; smells of garlic and of spice and sandalwood were wafted to
her from the holds and weaved into her thoughts of Louis; a little
further along there was a crowd of stevedores clustered in the roadway
round a violent smell of whisky. She turned away, sickened by her
memories of that smell, with her father's ghost and Louis's at her side,
but uncontrollable curiosity made her press on again. A great
barrel--like the barrel at Lashnagar--had been broken by falling from
the top storey out of the clutch of a derrick; there was a pool of
blood, dreadful and bright in the roadway and men were lifting the
crushed body of a man into an ambulance; quite close to the pool of
blood was one of whisky that was running into the gutter. Two big,
bronzed, blue-shirted men were kneeling beside it, dipping their hands
in it and licking them greedily; trembling at the same time and looking
sick with the fright of sudden death. From a warehouse near by came a
heavy smell of decay--sheep skins were stored there in great, stiff
bales. She went on, feeling as though horror happened wherever she went.
But along by the sea wall it was very peaceful; only the soft lapping of
the landlocked tide against the stone, the slow gliding of ferry boats,
the lazy plash of oars and the metallic clanking in the naval dockyard
on Garden Island came to her. On a man-of-war out in the stream the
sailors were having a washing day; she could hear their cheery voices
singing and laughing as they hung vests and shirts and socks among the
rigging, threw soapy water at each other and skated about the decks on
lumps of soap.
A little further along by the wall was a great garden; she went in in a
dream; unfamiliar flowers covered unfamiliar bushes with pink and
scarlet snow; a bed of cactus looked like a nightmare of pincushions and
tumours. She sat down beside them, under a low, gloomy leaved eucalyptus
and dreamed. The champagne quality of the air, the sunlight dancing on
the blue water, the great banks of dark green trees on the opposite
shore, with prosperous, happy-looking little red houses nestling among
them brought about an effect of well-being that soft weather and
beautiful surroundings always gave her. She had, all her life, been able
to escape from unhappiness by the mere physical effect of going into the
sunshine and the wind--and then unhappiness and grief seemed impossible,
incredible. Sitting there with half-closed eyes she dreamed of the
future; the disgust of Melbourne had gone; the disillusionment of
Louis's letter had gone, and yet she had very few delusions about what
was going to happen to her.
She wished she had the courage to run away now, to her uncle, or
anywhere away from Louis. And she knew quite well that nothing on earth
would make her leave him. She was beginning to realize, vaguely, what
marriage to him might mean; she had flashing visions of him, drunk,
dirty, foolish and--beastly. She shrunk from him fastidiously; even
thinking of him made her heart thump in sheer horror; she felt that, to
be shut up in a room with him when he was drunk would be an indignity, a
disgust too horrible to contemplate. And he had hinted things that
frightened her, about her "having her work cut out" about her "not
realizing what she had taken on." Next minute the soft sunlight and the
fluttering leaves made her think of him when he was not drunk, and she
frowned; she so hated his air of superiority, his calm pushing aside of
her opinions as not worth notice, his cool insistence on her inferiority
as a woman.
"Still, he's awfully clever," the dancing water told her. But she knew
that he was not more clever than very many other people and that his
cleverness had never been of any use except in getting money.
"He's grown up--a big, grown up man, and you're only a girl," said the
soft, exhilarating breeze that sang in her hair. And that thought
allowed no answer, it was so flattering, so satisfying.
"And--he needs me. He says he'll die without me," she told herself, and
that was unanswerable.
Suddenly she stood up and looked over the sea wall. There seemed to be
two Louis in her hands, being weighed and, all at once, she felt a
little helpless and leaned rather heavily against the sea wall.
"It isn't a bit of use. I don't honestly believe any of these things are
the real reason I'm going to marry him. I honestly believe I want to, so
what's the good of lying to myself about it? But--oh what an idiot I am!
It seems to me--there's something a bit degrading--in marrying a man
like Louis--simply because--because--you _want_ to."
She walked round and round the big eucalyptus as though she were in a
cage. Then she came back and stood against the wall again, watching the
sailors on the man-of-war with unseeing eyes. She felt hot and flushed
and a little ashamed of herself. She felt that there was something
rather disgraceful in wishing Louis were there to kiss her; something a
little humiliating in longing so utterly that to-morrow might come when
they could be together.
"I never, never, never thought I'd be such an idiot! I thought I'd fall
in love with a king, or something--Oh my goodness, what a mess!" Her
father came into her mind, striding giant-like over Ben Grief in his
shabby old tweeds; she frowned and bit her lips and told herself, in
bewilderment, that if only Louis had been like him she would have
married him without any feeling of humiliation. And she had the
uncomfortable feeling that, had her father been alive, she would never
have dared to marry Louis. Andrew would have put him in the sea, or
something equally final and ignominious.
She stared fixedly at the rippling water, with tight lips, and nodded
her head at it.
"Yes, it's perfectly disgusting. It's degrading--it's--it's beastly to
be shutting myself up like this with a drunken man. I believe I'd be
better dead--from a selfish point of view--"
Next minute her eyes softened.
"But think how eager he is--what a boy he is--like Jimmy! And how he
trusts me not to let those awful miseries happen to him any more."
She turned round, shook herself together and began to march back to the
ship, her father's eyes shining through hers for a while.
"Marcella Lashcairn," she said solemnly, "you're going to stop asking
yourself rude questions for ever and ever, Amen! You haven't time to
waste on introspection. You love him. That's a good thing, anyway. Never
mind how you love him, never mind if it's a John the Baptist love or a
mother love or a fever produced by the tropics, as Wullie said, you've
to do things as best you can and understand them afterwards, just
trusting that God will burn out all the beastliness of them in the end.
And--" she added, as an afterthought, "If he gets drunk I'll shake the
life out of him."
If Louis had seen her just then he would probably have shied at marrying
her.
She went on board to a deserted ship, hating to stay ashore without
Louis. Even the passengers who were going on to Brisbane had gone to
sleep ashore. Knollys told her that Jimmy had cried desperately because
he was being taken away from her, and that Mr. Peters was drunk in his
grief at ending his acquaintanceship with Mrs. Hetherington. Later,
seeing her standing lonely on deck, watching the lighted ferries go by,
Knollys came up to her.
"I beg your pardon, miss," he said, deferentially, "but it occurred to
Jules and myself that you might possibly care to join us in a game of
dominoes?" and, rather than appear unfriendly, she played with them for
an hour. She was very glad when morning came.