For nearly five months peace stole round Castle Lashcairn. Marcella was
almost incredibly happy and so was Louis. Mrs. Twist and Marcella held
long consultations about the baby, but Marcella, afraid of worrying
Louis, tried to make him forget all about it. Even when, as time went
on, she really began to feel tired and unable to work with him, she
fought her tiredness indignantly; she was terrified lest he should get
"raked up" and go along to the hotel for solace. So she hid everything
from him, arranging all details with Mrs. Twist who promised to "see her
through it." There was no nurse within a hundred miles; there was a
dreadful old woman who had brought several bottles of squareface with
her when she attended Mrs. Twist at Millie's birth. They decided to
dispense with her services.
Marcella sent money to Mrs. King to buy things for her in Sydney. They
spent a whole Sunday evening making out the list. Many of the things he
had learnt, from textbooks, to associate with babies, Mrs. Twist thought
unnecessary, but Marcella, with no basic opinion of her own, let him
have his way, and one day in May he took Gryphon, the Twist pony, to
fetch the packages from the station.
He was to be away one night--starting at four in the morning he would
rest at the hotel for the night and start back next morning. That night
Marcella lay long awake, thinking about him. She was vaguely anxious;
when she fell asleep she dreamed that he came home to Castle Lashcairn
drunk. He was talking French--his eyes were wild, his mouth loose and
slobbering, his tongue bitter.
She started up in fright and rolled out of the hammock.
"No--no. It couldn't happen again. It couldn't. We could never live now,
if we were to get miserable like that after we've been so happy. He's
so--so clean, now. He can't get dirty again."
She could not sleep after that, and walked down to the lake in the
moonlight. She was really feeling ill. Louis's lectures and diagrams and
descriptions of "midder" cases at the hospital sickened and frightened
her. Mrs. Twist, with the average woman's unscientific and morbid
interest in such illness, sickened her still more.
The moonlight was very bright; the weather was warm, for May. Louis had
begged her not to swim now. She had given in to him rather than worry
him, but a sudden impulse to do what she thought pleasant without
troubling him came to her, and she slipped out of her nightgown quickly.
The lake lay at her feet, a shimmering pool of silver, almost without
ripples. It lapped very gently against her feet, bringing back the
softly lapping waters of Lashnagar on spring mornings. It was adorably,
tinglingly cold; she forgot the dream in the exhilaration and gave a
little cry of rapture as she waded further out. Then, without warning, a
ghost was in the water beside her. She stared, and knew that it was her
own reflection. With a little cry she hurried back to land, her heart
thumping wildly as she pulled on her nightgown over her wet body with
trembling hands.
"How horrible I look!" she whispered. "He mustn't know I look as awful
as that!"
The next day she waited for him, anxious to unpack the thrilling parcel
from Sydney, but he did not come, and all the night she sat waiting,
afraid that he had met with some accident. If someone had come, then,
and told her he was drunk she would not have believed it. It seemed to
her just as unreal a thing as last night's dream.
But at four o'clock in the morning as she sat on the verandah, half
nodding with red-rimmed, heavy eyes, she saw him come stumbling along,
holding on to the pony's neck.
She went out to meet him, knowing just exactly what she was going to
meet. And she felt frozen with horror. The average man coming home drunk
is not a tragedy. He is merely amiably ridiculous. To Louis, after all
his fights and all his hopes, tragedy had certainly come, but he was too
drunk to know it yet. He began to bluff and lie just as usual.
"Ought be 'shamed, sending a chap thirty--thirty--thirty miles f'r lot
fem'--fem'--fripp--fripp--fripperies! Sick an' tired, stuck in with a
wom' day an' night f'r months. 'Nough make any man k-k-kick."
She did not speak, and he went on in the same old way, French words
peppering the halting English; she could have shut her eyes and fancied
she was back in the city again, or on the ship.
He muttered and shouted alternately all the way to the cottage; there
was a meal waiting but he could not eat; sitting on the edge of the
verandah, he ordered her to light him a cigarette. She knew there were
none in the house and felt in his coat pocket, guessing he had bought
some. She was not really unhappy. She was too sick, too frozen to feel
yet at all.
"Come out my pock'," he growled, hitting her arm away fiercely, his
teeth clenched. "Aft' my money, eh? Think you're winning, don't you? In
league with the Pater against me. Think you'll always have me under your
thumb, nev' giv' free hand. There's not a man on God's earth would stand
it, damned if there is--tied to wom' apron strings all the time!"
"Very well, get your own cigarette. I'm going to bed."
"Y-you w-w-would," he said, and laughed shrilly. "Think you've got me in
blasted bush, work like blast' galley slave while you skulk in bed."
"Oh don't be such an idiot, Louis. You'd better go to bed. I'm tired of
you," she said, going past him into the bedroom.
"Ta' my boots off," he grunted, trying to reach his feet and
overbalancing. "If you can't make yourself 'tractive to a man, you can
be useful. Nice damned freak you are f'r any man t' come home to! Nev'
trouble to dress please me--like Vi'let."
Marcella began to laugh hysterically. It was uncanny how his opinion of
her appearance coincided with her own.
"Wom' your condish' no damn goo' t' any man!" he mumbled. She went past
him, into the room and left him. It was the first time she had made no
attempt to soothe and sober him and bring him back. She felt impatient
with him, and horribly lonely and frightened of being with him, horribly
longing to run to someone and be comforted. But she was just as anxious
to hide the trouble from the Twists and knew that she must bear it
alone.
She cried for hours, completely disheartened, longing passionately to go
to him and ask him to assure her it was only a dream, and he really was
cured as she had imagined. But at last she fell asleep, too proud to go
and ask him to come to bed again, guessing that he would sleep in the
living-room.
She wakened early and started up with full recollection of what had
happened. In the light of morning, after a sleep, she was sick with
herself for having forgotten her theory that he was an ill man; she had
let personal annoyance stop her from trying to help him. Brimming over
with love and pity and self-disgust she ran out to find him, for she
guessed he would be penitent now, and in black despair.
He was not there. On the verandah was a "squareface" bottle, empty.
Wakening from a drugged sleep in the grey morning, his mouth ablaze, his
brain muddled and full of resentment against her, he had remembered the
gin he had brought home with him; there was not much left in the bottle.
He drank it, full of resentment against it for making him so unhappy. He
knew that ten pounds--two months' pay--was in the cigarette-box on the
shelf. It was Mr. Twist's birthday next Sunday and they had decided to
give it back to him to buy tools. Louis remembered it; fighting every
inch of the way across the floor with the strength that the last few
months had put into him, he took it out of the box. Then, a thousand
devils at his heels, he dashed off into the Bush on his thirty-mile mad
tramp.
It was a week before she saw him again, and all the time she was aching
to follow him. But she knew she could not walk so far and, with a stern
cussedness typical of her father, she went on with Louis's work, not
mentioning to the Twists that he was away, though they all wondered what
had happened to him. She burned the gorse as though it were whisky,
almost savagely. She tore at the roots in the ground as though they were
the fierce desires of life to be ruthlessly uprooted, smashed out, burnt
to ashes. She was scarcely conscious of emotion; the smoke got into her
eyes and blinded her; stooping to dig made her feel faint and ill, but
in her desperate misery she attacked the work as even Louis in his best
days had never done. It was not until she had been at it nearly a week
that Mrs. Twist found her out, and came across the clearing to her,
looking indignant.
"Want to kill yourself, and have the child killed too kid?" she cried
before she reached her. "What the nation do you think you're doing?"
"I won't be paid for work that isn't done," said Marcella ungraciously.
She was so sore, so aching that she knew to her disgust, that she would
be crying weakly on Mrs. Twist's shoulder if she let herself be even
commonly polite.
"Come on, kid, and have a cup of tea with me," said Mrs. Twist gently.
"I know what it is to feel as if you could chew anyone's head off. It
always takes me like that the last few weeks. Where's your boss?"
"He--Oh, I don't know. I've got to do his work. I daren't let him think
he can shirk like this! He'll never get back again if I make him think
it doesn't matter. Mrs. Twist, I'm tired of it!" she cried with sudden
fierce intensity. "Never, never, never for a minute dare I be tired and
weak; why I daren't even _think_ tired for a minute. Always I've to be
strong for him! Oh--" she suddenly choked and, flinging her spade aside,
sat down clumsily on the ground, her face buried in her hands. "If only
Father could come alive for a few hours--and thump him!"
Mrs. Twist made no enquiries about Louis; she had guessed a good deal
and, by excessive tact, got Marcella to go across to the Homestead with
her and rest for the remainder of the afternoon. But she was back at her
work again next morning grimly determined to show Louis that if he
shirked his job she would do it for him.
That night he came home--pale and haggard, unshaven and unwashed. He had
spent the ten pounds until he had just enough left to buy two bottles of
whisky. With these he had wandered off on the home road, to sink to
sleep when he could go no further and waken to another solitary orgy.
She had been working till after dark, in spite of Mrs. Twist's
remonstrances, to which she answered rudely and impatiently. At last the
elder woman thought it less wearing to the girl to leave her alone; she
guessed that she would faint with physical weariness before she had got
over her mental misery. Louis could see the red glow in the sky for the
last two miles of his dazed tramp; it led him homewards, muttering to
himself about a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. He looked into the
house and saw that she was not there. He had not known, till he saw the
empty rooms, with her frock hanging over the hammock, her nightgown
neatly folded on the shelf, her books and a pannikin half full of cold
tea in the kitchen, how much he had counted on seeing her, how he had
hungered for her, deep down, during all the nightmare week. He felt too
ashamed to go to the Homestead to look for her; then it occurred to him
that she would be across the clearing.
And he met her, half-way. She was coming along in the dull glow of the
dying fire, the pickaxe over her shoulder. She looked different to him;
perhaps his eyes were distorted, perhaps the fire-glow making leaping
shadows caused the difference; but she walked heavily, wearily, without
the thrilling, young spring of swift movements that made her such an
exhilaration to him. He wanted to run across the clearing, lift her in
his arms and charm away the tiredness; swiftly on top of that emotion
came the realization that she was walking wearily partly because she had
been doing his work, partly because her spirit was heavy and sick. He
felt sick with himself for having hurt her; he resented the misery his
conscience was causing him: swiftly he found himself resenting the
ungainliness of her figure which, in his morbid mood, seemed his fault
too. He hated the unconscious reproach she gave him as she came along,
stumbling a little, carrying the pickaxe.
He had finished his last spot of whisky at noon and had not slept since;
he was worn and tired and frayed, even more than she was. He was acutely
uncomfortable for want of soap and water and food.
He dashed across the space between them, his eyes blazing madly, and she
looked up, hearing his steps, seeing the blaze of his eyes, the
tenseness of his clenched hands.
"Damn you--damn you!" he cried, "playing the blasted Christian martyr.
Walking like that, to make people think I've made you tired!"
She stared at him, and her eyes filled with tears. She had got to the
stage of longing to see him so much that she did not care whether he
were drunk or sober. Then the ridiculousness of playing a role in the
Bush at ten o'clock at night, struck her, and she laughed--a rather
cracked laugh. He came close to her, all flaming with hate. He noticed
the blue shadows under her eyes, smelt the fire on her clothes. She
recoiled from the whisky on his breath, which, from association with
her childhood's horrors, always reduced her to a state of unreasoning
terror.
"Oh blast you--too fine to come near me, are you? You were damned glad
to pick me up, anyway--and so you ought to be, with your drunken old
scab of a father!"
She, in her turn, blazed and tingled; murder was in the ends of her
fingers that quivered towards him. Luckily she had dropped the pickaxe.
But her movements were slow, and his quick, and he got behind her in an
instant. Next moment, without realizing what he was doing, he pushed her
violently. She stumbled a few steps and fell heavily against the blunt
end of the pickaxe. For an instant he stood looking at her; the next
moment with a hoarse cry he was kneeling beside her.
"Oh my darling," he cried. "I told you I'd kill you in the end! I told
you the damn stuff was making a madman of me."
The whisky vanished from him like the flashing of lightning. Lifting her
in his arms he carried her homewards and laid her down on the verandah.
Frantic with fear he was going to fetch Mrs. Twist when she sat up
rather shakily and looked at him.
"I suppose that's what you've been expecting me to do--faint all over
the place--swounds and vapours," she said, laughing faintly. "Louis, it
was a horrible feeling."
"Marcella," he sobbed, kissing her hands, kneeling beside her desperate
in his self-abasement. "I thought I'd killed you."
"You're not much of a doctor if you don't know I'd take much more
killing than that," she said. "And I wanted to kill you for a minute, so
we're equal."
In a torrent all his explanations came pouring out. He had thought the
whisky hunger was killed; he had tried to test his certainty and had
failed.
"I got cocky, old girl. I swanked to myself! I thought I'd got it beat
and I'd just go and have one whisky at the Station Hotel to satisfy my
own conviction. But when I'd had one I couldn't help it. I seemed to be
outside myself, watching myself for the first two or three. I was
interested. I kept thinking 'I'll tell Marcella she need not be
frightened any more. I can drink two or three whiskies and not be a
bally Blue Ribboner any more. We need not be banished to the Bush for
the rest of our lives to keep me out of danger.' Then I got muddled and
quite lost grip. It had a sort of chemical effect, you know. I hated you
for keeping me from whisky that was making me feel so fine and jolly
again. I felt I'd been a bit of a prig lately. I loved the stationmaster
and a few manganese miners who came in. In fact, I just wallowed again.
I came home hating you. I didn't come to see you. I came for money. And
that's all. The whole thing's hopeless."
"It was my fault this time, Louis. I went to bed and left you. If I'd
not been so proud and so huffy I'd have kept you."
"Yes, but only for a time, dear. I saw it all in a flash to-night when
you lay there and I thought you were dead. Marcella, no savage would
have done that--hurting you just now."
"What rubbish! If you hadn't done it to me I would have done it to you,"
she said easily.
"Don't you see how hopeless it is? The very first time I go near whisky,
I want it. And this happens. I was a madman to-night. It means that
we've got to stick here for the rest of our lives. I daren't even go to
the store to fetch things for you when you're ill. I have to hide in a
hole like a fox when the dogs are after it."
"After all, is it so very horrible here, Louis?" she whispered. "I think
it's been heaven. Our Castle, and the clearing--and next month my seeds
that Dr. Angus sent will be coming up. And the baby, Louis! Just think
of the millions of things we've got!"
But he knew better than she did the torment of his weakness and refused
to be comforted. He was near suicide that night; he too had been happy,
happier than ever in his tormented, unfriended life before. He had the
terrible torture of knowing that it was he who had brought the cloud
into their sky; he had the terror before him, with him, of knowing that
he would keep on bringing clouds, all the more black because they both
so loved the sunshine.
And she, when she undressed, sick and faint but comforted with the
thought that once more a fight was over, blew the light out quickly so
that he should not see the ugly purple mark of the pickaxe.
She usually slept with her nightgown unfastened so that the cool winds
should blow over her through the trellis of the window. To-night she
muffled herself up tightly, and when he came in from a strenuous ten
minutes in the lake, feeling once more as though she had sent him to dip
in Jordan, she pretended to be asleep. Seeing her so unusually wrapped
up, he thought she was cold, and fetched a blanket to cover her. She
dared not yield to her impulse to hold out her arms to him and draw his
aching head on to her breast for fear the bruise should grieve him.