The hut was on the edge of a great patch of gorse that Mr. Twist said
stretched for twenty acres or more, right to the limit of his holding.
It was giant gorse, quite unlike the mild edition of it found in
England. In many places it towered above the hut and the stems were
almost as thick as tree-trunks, while the spines played havoc with
clothes and skin. It was burnt dry now, by the sun. In the cooler
weather, Mr. Twist said, the whole place was a golden blaze of bloom.
The cottage consisted of three rooms, built on the same plan as the
Homestead. The middle room was a sort of kitchen. There was a big table
and a bench of planed wood.
"There isn't a grate," said Mr. Twist, "they got their rations up at the
house, you see." The absence of a fire-place did not trouble Marcella.
She had often cooked on Wullie's open fire at Lashnagar, and Louis
quickly explained that he would make a bush oven outside. Neither of the
rooms leaning against the kitchen had any furniture, but Mrs. Twist
seemed to have laid in a whole ship's stores of navy hammocks, which she
said they could have until Louis had carpentered bed for them. There
were hundreds of very fat, furry spiders who crawled about solemnly and
fell with heavy bodies down swift silken threads as Marcella opened the
door of the bedroom.
For the next few days they certainly did not earn their wages. They were
like two children with a new doll's house, and at the end of the week
the hut was unrecognizable. Louis, unskilfully busy with saw, hammer and
nails put up a shelf for the box of books they were going to get from
Mrs. King's as soon as someone went into Cook's Well to take a letter.
Marcella wished a little that she had some money to buy things for her
house, but it was the sort of wish she found it easy to conquer and
when, in a spirit of mischief she took the tar brush with which Louis
had been caulking the sides of the hut, and tarred CASTLE LASHCAIRN on
the corrugated roof, she _saw_ Castle Lashcairn rising there.
"After all, imaginary castles are the best," she told Louis after two
days spent in clearing away dust and spiders, and limewashing the
interior. "It only needs imaginary cleaning."
He was surveying his new white shelf on which the matronly Mrs. Beeton
seemed to incline towards the sober black New Testament and give a cold
shoulder to the lean-looking "Questing Cells" and the slim "Parsifal."
He had made and patented a very wonderful reflector for their little
lamp by cutting and bending a kerosene tin in such a way that it
mirrored six times the light inside. Sitting out on the verandah he
thought out the details of an arm-chair to be made out of a barrel Mr.
Twist had given him. They sat on the edge of the verandah, their legs
swinging. He was smoking--very distastefully--a pipe because there was
plenty of strong shag at the Homestead but no cigarettes. Marcella had
been watching him; it had amazed her to see how much more calmly he had
taken the cigarette famine than she had guessed possible.
"If I can go on like this, dearie," he said at last, "there'll be no
more bogeys. I've been busy--and very happy this last week. If I'm kept
busy--"
"You'll be kept busy," she said, smiling. "When we've cleared the twenty
acres of gorse it's all to be ploughed and planted. And when that's done
and there isn't a single other thing to do, we'll start to tunnel a hole
through the middle of the earth to Lashnagar, like they did in Jules
Verne's book."
"I'm keeping my body occupied," he went on slowly. "The point is, will
that satisfy my brain, and all of me?"
She looked down the little slope on the top of which Castle Lashcairn
stood. The five gum trees stretched up to the cloudless night sky; a few
hundred yards away the lake glimmered, star-reflecting and still. To the
left the lamp of the Homestead glowed, and "Oh Dry Those Tears" started
to groan out. Marcella waited for the line that almost sounded like a
collection of bass "brrrrrs" and then she spoke.
"If you can forget yourself, my dear--get swallowed up," she said
gently, and a silence fell between them.
The days drew into weeks. Castle Lashcairn grew more and more beautiful;
the books arrived from Sydney and kept sentry on the white shelf.
Several of her unnecessary frocks Marcella made into cushions stuffed
with dried lucerne which made a most interesting crackling noise when
one leaned against them. Louis spent most of his Sundays in making a cot
for his son but his fatal lack of thoroughness was a drawback, for it
seemed to come to pieces as quickly as he got it together. Marcella
looked after the fowls and the cows; she did most of the cooking at the
Homestead; she got the children beyond the hanger and pothook stage of
writing and filled their minds, hitherto worried by family cares, with
legend and fairy-tale. She wrote often to Dr. Angus, and he sent her
books and garden seeds. All the time she and Louis never found a moment
in which to be idle; about eleven o'clock every day she took his lunch
across the clearing to him; she collaborated a good deal with Mrs.
Beeton in making various ambitious dishes for him, but as they were
almost entirely made of mutton, "standard" flour and eggs, there was not
much variety. When the fried sheep had lived too long before being
killed, or been kept too long after death, they spent considerable time
looking at the pretty pictures in the cookery book: Marcella told of
Wullie's feasts in the beach-hut. Louis remembered restaurant
celebrations. But they were always too hungry to care much what they
ate; the most leathery damper, the most difficult mutton was pleasant
eaten out of doors in the faint smoke of the gorse fires.
During the afternoons she helped with the gorse grubbing. Before the
great bushes could be approached they had to be fired, and she loved to
watch the golden blaze flare swiftly to the sky, leaving a pall of grey
smoke through which the carbonized gorse branches shone gold for a
moment in a fairy tracery before crumbling to white ash on the ground.
Then they had to take pickaxes and mattocks, chisels and spades to chop
down the parent stem and uproot the smallest leader from the roots.
Gorse is very tenacious of life. A root of only a few inches will spring
up to a great tree in an incredibly short time, especially on virgin
soil fertilized by many burnings.
They had faces perpetually blackened by smoke. Marcella worked with an
oilskin bathing-cap sent by Mrs. King, over her hair; she wore an old
blue overall on which the spines of the gorse had worked havoc. And
still she would not be ill to fall in with Louis's preconceived notions;
living an absolutely normal, rather tough life, hardened by her
father's Spartanism, she found that a natural process made very little
difference to her. To Louis's real distress she swam in the lake every
morning; what he could not understand was that she had scarcely, even
yet, awakened to consciousness of her body. Once or twice in her queer
ecstasies, once or twice in Sydney the sleep within her had stirred and
stretched and opened her eyes; from the force of the stirring and
stretching she had gathered an impression of something immensely strong.
But it had not yet risen and walked about her life yet.
One day she went across the clearing to Louis, through the smoke wreaths
that were being gently swayed to and fro by a soft wind. In a blue shirt
open at the neck, shewing a triangle of brown chest, he looked very
different from the effeminate Louis of the _Oriana_. Just as she reached
him, looking at him instead of the rough ground, all rutted with uptorn
roots, she slipped and almost fell. In an instant his arm, taut and
strong, was round her. She laughed and drew away from him.
"I was looking at you coming along here, Marcella," he said. "Do you
know what you remind me of?"
"Dinner?" she said, sitting down to unpack the basket of food.
"No--a Maori woman."
"Louis! A savage?"
"They aren't savages. But after all, savage doesn't mean anything but
wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by
motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's
handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King
Country in New Zealand--You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought
it a bit overdrawn."
"What is it?" she interrupted, pointing to the food imperiously.
"It's about a girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a
baby without turning a hair. Remembering my nerve-racking experience of
maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without
his book. But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble
apologies by wireless. The tribe was trekking. I was with them for
months, you know, in the Prohibition Country. My diagnostic eye had
foreseen a birthday and, as a matter of fact, I was getting rather funky
and wishing I had Hermann's 'Midwifery' to swot up. I saw myself the
hero of the occasion, don't you know, dashing in to save her life, miles
from civilization. One morning we were camping by a hot spring for the
women to do some cooking and washing. My patient disappeared with an old
thing we called Aunt Maggie. Presently we trekked again, and I was
feeling horribly uneasy about her, when I nearly dropped. There she was,
sailing along in the midst of the other women, with the kid in her arms,
looking as cool as a cucumber! Lord, I did feel small!"
He laughed reminiscently, and lighted his pipe.
"It seems right to me," she said, looking away through the drifting
smoke. "Why should the coming of life mean pain for someone?"
"Don't know, old lady. But it does. I say, how do you think I'm getting
on?"
They looked across the clearing and felt rather proud.
"I love it," he said simply, "taking nature in hand a bit--she's a
wicked old harridan, isn't she? A naughty old lady gone wrong! Look at
that gorse! We'll have spuds here in no time, and then, in a few years,
wheat. I feel I'm making a dint on the face of the earth at last. In a
hundred year's time, when I'm forgotten, the effect of these few months'
work will be felt. I say, am I talking hot air?"
"Not a bit. But let's do a bit more--Jerry calls it scene-shifting."
She tossed the last piece of cake to an inquisitive kookaburra who had
been watching the meal optimistically, with bright eyes and nodding
head. It was a triumph, this cake--in several ways. The stationmaster at
Cook's Wall had built his "bosker hotel" at last, and had made it a
store at which one could buy fruit, jam, sugar and various luxuries.
Louis had been in twice to the store lately, and had actually remembered
the seed-cake on the _Oriana_ when he saw caraway seeds in the store. He
volunteered the information that there was whisky for sale at the store,
but did not mention whether he had wanted to buy it or not.
He got up, taking the mattock. Marcella began to fight a great stem
running along the ground.
"Devilish stuff," he said, turning back to look at her. "See that little
patch over there?"
She nodded, following his eyes. A brisk little gorse bush was bursting
from the ground. A few feet away another was keeping it company.
"Devilish stuff!" he repeated. "Just like a cancer--in pathology. You
chop the damned thing out, root and branch, and there it pops out again,
miles away from where it started. Look at that piece there."
He attacked the little plant with rather unnecessary severity and dug up
a thin, tough, cord-like root which he threw on the fire savagely.
"Louis, do you remember that schoolmaster on the _Oriana_?" she asked
suddenly, staring thoughtfully at the long, thin leaders.
"Oh, that ass who sat in my chair? Yes. Why?"
"He told me a fearful thing about cancer."
"He would--blighted idiot. What was it?"
She hesitated a minute.
"He said he'd read in some book--he was always reading queer books--that
cancer was an elemental that had taken possession of one's body. A
horribly preying, parasitic life--feeding on one's body--Ugh, it made me
feel sick! And it's so cruel, really, to say things like that. He seemed
to suggest that elementals were something unclean that could not come
except to unclean people. And--mother died of cancer. And mother was
very beautiful."
"Well, you can tell the footling ass from me that he's a thumping liar.
Elemental grandmother! Let me tell you this much--cancers come from one
thing only, and that's irritation--injury, often. Corsets, sometimes--or
a blow--If I were to thump you--"
He laughed, and turned away.
"Yes, I know," she said quietly. She was thinking of that stormy scene
between her father and the two doctors when the faint smell of
chloroform crept round her at the farm while she waited outside on the
landing.