Marcella was wakened several times during the night; she was cold and
stiff, but only apprehended her discomfort vaguely as she listened to
Louis muttering--mostly in French. Each time she spoke softly to him as
she used to speak to her father when he was ill. To her he suddenly
became an invalid; as the days went on she accepted the role of mother
and nurse to him; only occasionally did a more normal love flame out,
bewildering and enchanting as his kisses on the _Oriana_ had enchanted
and bewildered her. She felt, often, contemptuous of a man who had to
stay in bed and have his clothes locked up to save him from getting
drunk; at the same time she admired him for attempting so drastic a
cure. It was a wholly delightful experience to her to have money and
spend it on buying things for him; she would, at this time, have been
unrecognizable to Dr. Angus and Wullie; they would never have seen their
rather dreamy, very boy-like, almost unembodied Marcella of Lashnagar in
the Marcella of Sydney, with her alternate brooding maternal tenderness
that guarded him as a baby, or with the melting softness of suddenly
released passion. All her life she had been "saved up," dammed back,
save for her inarticulate adoration of her mother, her heart-rending
love of her father and her comradeship with Wullie and the doctor. Louis
had opened the lock gates of her love and got the full sweep of the
flood. But he gave nothing in return save the appeal of weakness, the
rather disillusioning charm of discovery and novelty.
For the first few weeks in Sydney she walked in an aura of passion
strangely blended of the physical and the spiritual. She knew nothing
about men; what she had seen on the ship made her class them as
nuisances to be put in the sea out of hand. Her father was the only man
she had known intimately before. Her father had been a weak man, and yet
a tyrant and an autocrat. Logically, then, all men were tyrants and
autocrats. The women in Sydney whom she saw in Mrs. King's kitchen,
where she went to learn how to cook, talked much of their husbands,
calling them "boss." Hence she meekly accepted Louis's autocratic
orderings of her coming and going. Again, her father had been gripped,
in the tentacles first of the whisky-cult, and later of the God-cult.
Therefore, she reasoned, all men were so gripped by something. It was a
pity that they were so gripped. It seemed to her that women must have
been created to be soft cushions for men to fall upon, props to keep
them up, nurses to minister to their weakness. She slowly came to
realize that the age of heroes was dead--if it had ever been, outside
the covers of story-books. It seemed that Siegfried no longer lived to
slay dragons, that Andromeda would have to buckle on armour, slip her
bonds and save her Perseus when he got into no end of entanglements on
his way to rescue her. By degrees she came to think that men were
children, to be humoured by being called "boss" or "hero" as the case
may be. Reading the extraordinary assortment of books sent to her by the
doctor, as time went on, it seemed to her that John the Baptist of
to-day had gone aside from making straight the pathway of the Lord to
lie in the tangles of Salome's hair. In all the great names she read
there seemed to be a kink; some of them were under a cloud of drugs or
drink; de Quincey hurt her terribly; sitting one day on the side of
Louis's bed reading "John Barleycorn"--she had discovered Jack London in
the "Cruise of the Snark" and loved his fine adventurousness--she felt
that she could not bear to know a thing so fine, so joyous and so
dashing as he should have so miserable a neurosis.
Dr. Angus, among other things, sent her Kraill's Lendicott Trust Autumn
lectures in the form of six little grey covered pamphlets. They were
much coloured by recent inspiring German and American sex psychology.
But she did not know that. She thought that they began, continued and
ended in Kraill and, though she fell down in adoration before his
uncanny wisdom, his cynicism made her miserable. They showed her
humanity in chains; particularly did they show her man in chains; she
read them all--six of them--in one afternoon and evening; students and
trained scientists had taken them in doses of one a fortnight. Naturally
she got mental indigestion that was not helped by the fact that, six to
a dozen times on every page, she had to find the meaning of words in a
dictionary she had bought to look up the meaning of Louis's remark the
first night they were married. He was amused and tolerant about the
dictionary. He seemed to think girls need not trouble to understand what
they read. He was particularly superior about "little girls trying to
take strong meat when they were at the milk-for-babes stage of
development."
"But you know, Louis," she said, looking up from her pamphlet with a
perplexed frown, "He seems to think that if a man wants a cup of tea and
a piece of bread and butter, it's sex!"
"Well, so it is," said Louis calmly, puffing at his cigarette and
watching her through the smoke. "Every hunger on earth is sex, right at
bottom--every desire is generated by the sex force; drinking, love of
parents and children, love of God, the artist's desire for beauty and to
create beauty--just sex, old lady!"
He laughed at her horrified face.
"And you're such a bally little Puritan you think that's terrible, don't
you?"
She nodded, flushing.
"You aren't a Puritan, really, Marcella," he said, watching her face.
"It's your upbringing has made you a Puritan."
"Louis," she burst out, "I'd rather be a Puritan, I think--and be all
dead and dried up like Aunt Janet, than--than--what you call bowled
over. I'd loathe that anything should have me; put me in chains; make me
do things! Louis--" her voice dropped to a meek whisper, "it isn't
that--that--beastly sort of thing makes me love you, is it? Makes me
love to buy flowers and books for you, and make food for you, and be
near you? Louis--just because you're a man and I'm a girl?"
"Of course it is, you little silly," he said complacently.
"Then I won't!" she cried hotly. "I won't do a thing because something
inside me, over which I have no control, says I've got to! I hate it!
It's a chain--I'm--a thing with a will, not just a bundle of instincts."
He looked at her queerly, laughed a little and said nothing. She got the
terrible idea that he knew more than she did, that something was weaving
a net which all the while she thought was beautiful devotion when it was
really something that was getting entangled in her arms and legs so that
she could not move as she wished.
"I resent it!" she cried, suddenly, starting up as though she would
push the wall through and escape into the street. "I can't bear chains,
Louis."
"Then commit suicide," he said, stretching his hand out to her. "Even
then some of these mad psychics say that that doesn't kill the thing
you're escaping from. They say you die with an appetite and are so
earthbound that you come to life again with it still about you. Lord, if
I died now I'd come back and be the bung of a whisky barrel--and you--"
"Louis, don't," she cried, staring up wildly. "It's beastly. Oh it's
better not to understand anything at all! Do you know, I believe lots of
people who stop to think resent these tyrannies of the body, only they
don't mention it because it's the sort of thing that makes people blush!
In this last lecture Professor Kraill says the same thing you told me
once."
"Considering I've already told you quite a million things--" he began in
the tone one uses to a child. She broke in passionately, turning the
pages of Number Six of the Lendicott Lectures swiftly.
"Listen. This is what he says."
_"We are loaded with sex and sex tradition, which the body and its
burdens have imposed upon humanity. Poets have written and dreamed of
the delights of wine, woman and song; priests and prophets have written
and thundered and dreamed of the world, the flesh and the devil. It is
only a difference of terminology. Poet, artist, priest and anchorite
alike thought all the time of the tyranny of the body until it became a
million-horse-power steam hammer crushing out his microscopic pin-head
of a soul. To man, woman is still the siren tradition made her; she
likes to be. She likes to think hers is 'the face that launched a
thousand ships and fired the topless towers of Ilium.' She insists that
man shall set out on his high adventure in quest of her. But he is
beginning to see through her. He has her fate in the test-tube of his
scientific laboratories to-day. She has refused to join him as a comrade
in armour; she has preferred to remain the vehicle of reproduction, the
prize of his play-times, his allurement, his passenger. Then let her
remain so. Man is going to keep her under. Think what has been done in
plastic surgery, what is being done in what I call plastic psychology!
Think what selection has done in the breeding of lower forms of life.
And then let woman tremble! If she is perpetually going to chain man in
the meshes of her hair, the curves of her fingers, he is going to get
rid of her--except as a thing for pleasure and for use. Most of the time
he hugs his chains. One day he will get clear vision, realize that woman
has got too much for him and--limit her! It is, to some extent, being
done unconsciously already. Why is it a disgrace to be the mother of a
girl-child in certain Oriental countries? Why do they drown girl-babies
in the Ganges? It is simply that they realize the danger of this
softness, this overlordship of women! Clearer thinking than we, they see
the menace of femininity. We of the West will soon see that woman has
been the passenger in the rather frail life-boat of the world. And in
self defence we shall put her overboard before long--unless--unless--she
takes an oar."_
"Lord, he _does_ lap into them, doesn't he?" said Louis, gleefully.
She frowned and pondered.
"I think you are ungenerous, all of you," she said softly. "Men seem
such unbalanced children to me. Wanting to put women overboard."
She looked at Louis, and they both broke into an uncontrollable fit of
laughter as they recalled that that was exactly what she had literally
done with an annoying man.
"Perhaps we're all ungenerous," she said presently. "I believe we are
ungenerous towards the thing that chains us. It's only natural. But I
don't think that you or the author of 'John Barleycorn' or poor de
Quincey ought really to put drugs and drink and all that out of the
world at all. You ought to live with them in the world, and not let them
chain you. Don't you think so? And--poor Professor Kraill! Isn't he
wistful about the stuffiness of women's hair? Oh Louis, do you know what
it reminds me of?"
He lit a cigarette, watching her with amused tolerance.
"Knollys put a horrible sticky fly-paper in the stewards' pantry one
day. I was looking at it, and wishing flies needn't be made at all. Then
I wished I could let the poor things all loose, no matter how horrible
they are. There was one big bluebottle that had got stuck there on his
back with his wings in the sticky stuff. He struggled and struggled
till--Oh, horrible!--his wings came off. Then he crawled and crawled,
over other dead flies till he got to the edge of the paper. And he went
all wobbly and horrible because nearly all his legs had got pulled off."
"Lord, what a mind you've got!" he said.
"Can't you see that's how people are--most of them. Oh, poor things! If
I'd stopped to think I'd have been sorry for Ole Fred instead of putting
him in the sea for the sharks."
He looked at her amusedly again, and then at the kettle boiling on the
little spirit-stove.
"I say, old lady, theories are all very nice--after tea," he suggested.
"Oh, is it tea time?" she said, with a little sigh. Then, brightening,
she hummed a little tune all wrong as she cut bread and butter, laid a
little spray of bush roses round his plate and went down to the kitchen
to ask Mrs. King's advice about what treatment she could give to eggs to
make them nicer than usual for him.
At the door she turned back.
"You know, Louis--they've such lovely, shining wings--all beautiful
colours--"
"What?" he said. He had already dismissed the "silly little girl's"
arguments from his mind.
"I'm thinking about people and bluebottles! Lovely iridescent wings all
sploshed down in sticky stuff. And swift legs--it seems such a pity to
cripple them so that they can't fly or run."
"I _do_ so want my tea," he said, pretending to groan.
She ran down the stairs with a laugh.
That day she discovered the possibilities of the roof.
At the end of the landing on which their big top room opened was a short
iron ladder. She decided to explore and, climbing up the iron ladder,
pushed up the trapdoor. A cry of delight escaped her as she thrust her
head through the opening. It was a great, flat roof, separated from the
next ones by low copings of stone work, flat topped and about two feet
high. The town, as she climbed out and stood on the roof, lay beneath
her like a plan. People looked like flies in the streets, the tramcars
like accelerated caterpillars. The water of the harbour was still and
smooth and as incredibly blue as the water she had seen Mrs. King using
in her laundry work that morning. Wharves or trees ran right down into
the blueness. The big ships lying at anchor made her heart beat fast
with their clean beauty and romance; the bare, clean roofs running along
for perhaps fifty houses gave her a breath of freedom that brought back
Lashnagar and Ben Grief. She thought, with a pang of pity, about Louis,
the product of suburban London, chained to streets and houses almost all
his boyhood, knowing nothing of the scourge of the winds, the courage of
wide, high places. She tumbled down the ladder, her eyes bright.
"Louis--Oh Louis, come up on the roof! It's perfectly beautiful! I've
been so worried about you shut up here like this, and I've felt so
choked myself with this one room. But up there I'll make you shut your
eyes, and I'll tell you all about Ben Grief, and you'll think you're
there. I'll make you hear the curlews and the gulls and see Jock and
Tammas come in with the boats."
"But on the roof!" he protested. "Whatever next?"
"Oh, come and see. You'll love it," she urged and, though he said it was
"a beastly fag," 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 passenger."
"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 passed, 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 sex 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 passion
which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning,
bewildered self-analysis 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 passion 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 passionate 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-embarrassed
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 god 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--_crêpe de Chine_!"
She had seen _crêpe 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 _crêpe 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.
"I wonder if that queer remark in Genesis, 'Adam knew Eve, his wife,'
means this strange understanding that has happened to me to-night? I've
often been puzzled by what it could mean. Did it mean that he became
aware, in a flash as I did, of what this sex business might mean in his
life--how it might be a chain to him as it has been to so many people?
It's queer--it's like waking up from a dream that's been over you all
your life, and suddenly seeing things very clear. I see them clear now."
She looked out across the shining sea. "Either it can be a chain, or it
can be a Spear of Deliverance as it was to Parsifal."
She looked from the sea to Louis, unconscious, untroubled by problems
now that she had taken his burdens upon herself. She realized that she
had even more battles to fight now. She had her own; there was an enemy
within her own camp. Even as she stood there watching him her nails
gripped the stone coping fiercely because half of her was wanting last
night's tornado back again.
"No, I won't put up with chains. I'll carry a Spear," she said, and
tumbled down the ladder to dress ... tumbled because her feet were
unsteady.