Marcella lay afloat on a warm, buoyant sea of enchantment, her eyes
closed; life seemed in suspension; she had never, in her life, known
pain of any severity until a few hours before; it had appalled,
astonished her. She felt it unfair that a body which could quiver to the
swift tingle of frosty mornings on the hills, the buffetings and
dashings of the North Sea waves, the still glamour of an aurora evening
on a house-top, and the inarticulate ecstasy of love, should be so
racked. But as she put out her hand across the bed and felt the faint
stirrings of the child at her side she forgot those few nightmare hours
as a saint, bowing his head for his golden crown at the hands of his
Lord, must forget the flames of the stake, the hot reek from the lion's
slavering jaws. She looked across to Louis, who was sleeping heavily in
his hammock; he had found time to tell her that, for the first time, he
had held temptation literally in his hand and been able to conquer it.
And she felt that Castle Lashcairn was not big enough to hold all the
kindliness and happiness that seemed to be focussing upon it from all
the round horizon. Faith in the logical inevitability of good had
changed to certainty: it seemed to her, now, that faith was only an old
coward afraid to face fact. She was looking at the world from her
mountaintop that night; it seemed to her that it could never be the same
again for anyone in it, since she herself felt so different, so exalted.
The next two days brought complications. When Louis, coming in at noon,
all smelling of sunshine and wind and smoke, kneeled beside the bed for
a moment and, peeping underneath the folded sheet at the pink,
screwed-up face of his son, happened to touch her breast with his hand,
she was bathed in a sea of pain. Later in the day Mrs. Twist said he
would have to go to the township to get a feeding-bottle for the baby;
he was inclined to dispute the necessity for it, but he set off at once,
for the child, fed with sugar and water in a spoon, kept up a
dissatisfied wailing. Marcella forgot to be anxious about him, so
completely had she sponged fear from her mind. When, at breakfast-time
next morning, Jerry came in with the bottle, she guessed that Louis was
washing off the dust of his swift travel before he came to see her. In
the absorption of feeding the child and talking to Mrs. Twist she almost
forgot him; it was nightfall next day before she saw him, and then he
looked haggard and pinched, and she was almost frantic with fear; when
he was away from her she never thought he was drunk; always she thought
he had met with an accident. He told her, between sobs and writhings,
that once again he had failed, but he had been too ashamed to come to
her until he had slept off some of the traces of his failure. Seeing him
buying a baby's bottle at the store the men of the township had chaffed
him into "wetting the baby's head," and he had forgotten his recent
victory, his adoring love, his fierce resolves, and the little hungry
thing waiting to be fed. Once again she felt stunned, incredulous;
later, when she was up again and going about the cottage and Homestead,
she determinedly forgot. His passionate struggles made it impossible to
feel resentment against him, however much he made her suffer. Always she
was sure this particular time was the last time; always she thought
Louis, like Andrew, had been going along the Damascus road and had seen
a great light.
And so, for two years, they lived on at Castle Lashcairn; for long days
sometimes Louis went off to Cook's Wall, and she despaired. Most of the
time she hoped blindly. Much of the time they were incredibly happy in
small things. Some slight measure of prosperity came to Loose End. The
uncle who used to send the gramophone records retired from business and,
buying himself an annuity, divided his money between his few relatives
so that he could see what they did with it before he died. Quite a
respectable flock of sheep came to take the place of those drowned in
the flood and burnt in the fire; a horse and buggy went to and fro
between Loose End and the station; Scottie the collie got busy and two
shepherds came, building another hut at the other side of the run. A
plague of rabbits showed Mr. Twist the folly of putting off the
construction of rabbit-proof fencing any longer, now that he could
afford it, and the gorse was once more left uncleared for months in the
pressure of new things. Neighbours came, too--the deposit of manganese
at Cook's Wall was found cropping up on the extreme borders of Gaynor's
run, and a tiny mining township called Klondyke settled itself round the
excavations five miles from the Homestead. Marcella made friends with
everyone, to Louis's amazement. To him friendliness was only possible
when whisky had taken away his self-consciousness; the parties of
miscellaneous folks who turned up on Sundays, bringing their own food,
as is the way in the Bush where the nearest store is often fifty miles
away, worried him at first. He stammered and was awkward and ungracious
with them, but Marcella, dimly realizing that it must be bad for him to
be drawn in so much upon their _égoïsme à deux_, tried to make him more
sociable. When he forgot himself and was effortlessly hospitable, he was
charming. When he felt shy and frightened, and was fighting one of his
rhythmical fits of desire, he was difficult and rude.
Aunt Janet wrote every month: her letters varied little; they were
cynical though kindly; especially was she cynical about Louis, for,
though Marcella told her nothing about him, she guessed much from the
girl's description of their life. She was very cynical about Marcella's
breathless descriptions of her happiness: she was frankly despondent
about young Andrew, who, as yet, showed no signs of fulfilling her
gloomy predictions.
Dr. Angus wrote every mail. Though a world apart, he and Marcella seemed
to get closer together. He was growing younger with age, and she older.
He told her he had no friend but her letters, and wrote, sometimes
thirty pages of his small, neat handwriting to her--all about his
cases, his thoughts, his reading. And every book he bought he passed on
to her. Louis had had to put up three more shelves for them.
"I've been unduly extravagant, Mrs. Marcella," he wrote once, at the end
of the second year. "I've left the rheumaticky old woman to a sort of
patent rubbing oil very much in vogue just now, and I've resigned the
coming babies to the midwife at Carlossie, and been to Kraill's
Lendicott Trust lectures at Edinburgh. He seems, in my humble and very
uninstructed opinion, to have gone very far since 'Questing Cells.' The
lectures were on sex psychology. He admits that they are coloured by
what he learnt at Heidelberg last year. But he goes further than Germans
could possibly go. There's a gentleness, a humanity about him, and a
spirituality one doesn't expect from the author of 'Questing Cells' or
from those Lendicott lectures a few years ago. The thing that struck me
about him is that he's so consummately wise--wise enough, Mrs. Marcella,
to grasp at the significance of an amoeba as well as that of the Lord of
Hosts! I'm a small man--a little G.P. in an obscure Highland village in
rather shabby tweed knickerbockers and Inverness cape (yes, the same
ones--still no new clothes! What would be the use in wasting money on
adorning an old ruffian like me?) But I went up to him, sort of shaking
at the knees, after the second lecture, and discussed a point with him.
The point was not what I was wanting to know about. I was wanting, very
much, to have a 'bit crack' with him, as they call it here. Lassie, he
asked me to lunch with him the next day, and he talked to me as if I was
his long-lost brother. In fact, he seems to think that everybody is! He
came off the rostrum completely. Even when he's lecturing he seems to be
talking to you personally, with an engaging sort of friendliness. He
puts me a good bit in mind of Professor Craigie when I was a lad. I felt
as if I was a baby in arms beside him, but he seemed as pleased to see
me as I was to see him. No, he hasn't got a long white beard, and he
doesn't look a bit like Ruskin or Tennyson or Dickens. Do you remember
when you said you thought he had bushy eyebrows and a white beard, years
ago? He's not above forty-five, I should say; but I'm no judge of age
after folks are forty, I'm so afraid of putting my foot in it. He's much
bigger than me (I'm talking about appearance now). He gives one the
impression of quick blue eyes. I can't remember any more about him; I
remember every word he said, but not how he looked when he said it. And
now I suppose you want to know all he said; you have an Examining
Board's thirst for information, Mrs. Marcella! But I'm sending you the
printed lectures and some news. He told me he's going to Harvard this
year. In fact, he's there now; and after that he's on his way to
Australia. I gather that you're a wandering Jew's journey from Sydney,
but wouldn't it be worth your while to take that man of yours and go to
hear him? It isn't often one gets a chance of seeing in the flesh
someone who has got into your imagination as Kraill got into yours and
mine. I'd walk all the way from Carlossie to Edinburgh to hear him
again. It makes me sad, sometimes, to think how little chance we
doctors in practice, with all our responsibilities and opportunities,
have of getting this heaping up of wisdom that comes to men like Kraill.
Measles and rheumatics, confinements and bronchitis take up all our
time, and when we get a man like poor Andrew your father, something out
of the ordinary, appealing to us for healing, we give him digitalis or
Epsom-salts for the elixir of life. We do our best, but it's bad--very
bad. When I talked to Kraill that day I kept thinking of your father. I
kept thinking he'd have been alive to-day if he could have caught on to
Kraill's philosophy. I feel small, Marcella. I honestly hadn't the
brains, the knowledge, to do anything for your father. I talked to
Kraill about it. He said something very kind and very queer about the
socialization of knowledge. I didn't quite catch on to it at the time,
but thinking it out afterwards it seemed to me that he meant knowledge
was not to be a Holy of Holies sort of thing, a jealous mystery, an
aristocratic thing, any more; but be spread broadcast, so that everyone
could have wisdom and healing and clear thinking. And after all, isn't
healing, more than anything else, merely clear thinking? I hate the
waste of people, you know. I hate that people should rot and die. I feel
personally affronted when I think about your father, and some days--I
strongly suspect it's when my liver's out of order--I worry about your
young son. But by the time he's grown up maybe Kraill's socialization of
knowledge will have begun."
Marcella was having an argument with Mrs. Beeton that day when Jerry
brought the letter in. Mrs. Beeton seemed to think it was necessary to
have an oven, a pastry board, a roller and various ingredients before
one could attempt jam tarts. Marcella felt that a mixture of flour,
fruit salt, and water baked in the clay oven heaped over with blazing
wood ought to beat Mrs. Beeton at her own game. She and young Andrew,
both covered in flour because he loved to smack his hands in it and
watch it rise round them in curly white clouds were watching beside the
fire for the sticks to burn down. When she read the doctor's letter she
sat down immediately to write to him. She knew so well that sense of
inadequacy that trying to help Louis always gave her, and she wanted to
cure him of it. The jam tarts got burned; she forgot about them. It was
only when she remembered that the letter could not go to the post for
three days that she decided to write it again at greater leisure.
The two years had aged Marcella; the doctor's letters were manna in the
desert to her spirit, his books the only paths out of the hard, tough
life of everyday. Sometimes she felt tempted to take the cheap thrills
of purely physical existence with Louis as she realized more and more
that, though his schooled and trained brain was a better machine than
hers, his soul was a weak plant requiring constant cossetting and
feeding while his body was the unreasoning, struggling home of
appetites. She had the torturing hopefulness that comes from alternating
failure and success in a dear project; she was getting just a little
cynical about him; her clear brain saw that she was his mother, his
nurse and, perhaps, his mistress. He loved her. She knew that quite
well. But he loved her as so many Christians love Christ--"because He
died for us." His love was unadulterated selfishness even though it was
the terribly pathetic selfishness of a weak thing seeking prop and
salvation. She faced quite starkly the fact that her love was a love of
giving always, receiving never; also she faced the fact that she must
kill every weakness in herself, for, by letting him see her hardness,
she gave him something to imitate. Hunger of soul, the black depression
that comes to a Kelt like a breath from the grave, weariness of body
must all be borne gallantly lest he be "raked up." Once or twice, when
Louis had slipped and failed and was fighting himself back again, she
felt that she was getting bankrupt. One could never treat Louis by rule
of thumb. He might get drunk if she inadvertently spoke coolly to him.
Then he would get drunk out of pique. He might get drunk if she had been
especially loving. _Then_ it would be because he was happy and wanted to
celebrate; if she were ill he would get drunk to drown his anxiety: if
she got better, he would drink to show his relief; if she died, he would
drown his grief. Sometimes she felt that it was quite impossible to
safeguard him: she literally had not the knowledge. Such knowledge was
locked away in a few wise brains like Kraill's--and meanwhile people
were rotting. Once she wrote a long letter to Carnegie asking him to
stop giving money for libraries and spend some on helping to cure
neurotics. But she destroyed the letter, and went on hoping. Sometimes
she felt that her body would either get out of hand as Louis's did, or
else crack under the strain put upon it by her temperament, Louis and
her work. Sometimes she thought her capacity for happiness would atrophy
and drop off if she so defiantly kept it pushed into a dark corner of
her being every time it protested to her that it was being starved.
Sometimes she hoped that the time would come quickly when she would have
killed desire for everything as Aunt Janet had done, and would be going
about the world a thing stuffed with cotton-wool, armoured in
cotton-wool. And all the time she was fighting the insidious temptation
to kill the unconscious aristocracy of her that had, after the first few
weeks in Sydney, set a barrier between her and Louis--a barrier of which
he was never once conscious. Other people, on a lower range of life,
seemed quite happy with a few thunder flashes of passion in a grey sky.
Louis did. Except when the end of the month brought pay day, and set him
itching to be off to the township, he seemed happy. At these times she
deliberately made love to him to hold him from the whisky, loathing the
deliberateness and expediency of a thing which, it seemed to her, ought
to be a spontaneous swelling of a wave until it burst overwhelmingly.
She did not realize until long afterwards what good discipline this was,
as her brain and spirit refused to follow her body along a meaner path.
Louis never guessed how she thought out calmly whether to be hurt or not
by him, and decided that it was better to be a wounded thing hiding her
wounds under a coat of mail, rather than a dead thing in
mummy-wrappings, in cotton-wool.
But the doctor's letter generated hope. She respected the doctor's
opinion. For him to be enthusiastic about anyone was very wonderful;
there was something wistful and very beautiful in this deferring of an
old man to one much younger, something very touching in his frank pride
in the big man's friendliness. Always Kraill had been a hero to her,
since the days when his cynical early book of lectures had come like
revelation to her, even though she had had to take the help of a
dictionary on every line. That evening Louis went off to the township
after three days' restless nerviness on his part, and three nights'
valiant love-making on hers. Taking young Andrew she went down by the
lake and leaving him to splash joyously in the ripples at the edge, she
read the last lectures.
She read for an hour, gorging the book as a child gobbling sweets before
his nurse's return. She was devouring understanding--it seemed to her
that the lectures were being written expressly for her. It seemed, with
one half of Kraill's wisdom she could save Louis. The child got hungry
and she fetched milk and biscuit for him. His crawler was soaked by the
water in which he lived half his life. She changed it in a dream and
took him back to the lake again, where the shadows were getting long and
cool. It was possible to think with detachment there, in the serenity of
the evening.
She saw, as she usually saw things, very clear and stark, that all
through she had been wrong about Louis. Once only she had come within
touching distance of the right, when on the _Oriana_ she had told him
that his only hope was to throw up the sponge, as people
say--acknowledge himself beat to the earth as Saul of Tarsus had done on
the Damascus Road. Andrew Lashcairn had done it that night with the
little pale cousin; he had made himself "at one with God": fighting and
struggling had ceased; his life, a battle-ground of warring forces, had
become, in a mighty flash of understanding, the chamber of a peace
treaty, and God--a big man--God outside himself--had taken hold of him
and kept him. To Louis that could never happen; he was too unloving, too
self-centred, too unimaginative ever to see lights from heaven. Indeed,
she thought hopefully, Louis might, in the end, go further than Andrew.
He might stand up in the strength of a man without the propping of a God
at all.
"I've weakened him. All along I've weakened him. I've fussed over him
like a hen after her duckling when it takes to the water. I wouldn't let
him swim for fear he'd get drowned. And so--he just flops about and
looks disgusting. I've made him run away from temptation. That was
because I couldn't keep on being disappointed in him. Because I couldn't
face the disgust of him coming home dirty and smelly and saying filthy
things to me--and sleeping close to him. Andrew," she called to the
baby, who looked at her solemnly and went on playing with the little
pebbles at his feet. "Listen, darling, what mother's telling you. 'He
that fights and runs away lives to fight another day.' I made him run
away from whisky, and all the time it's throwing down challenges to him,
putting out its tongue at him, pulling rude faces at him. I've been
protecting myself from the things drunkards' wives have to put up
with--Oh, but I was trying to protect him, too!"
The last words were wrung from her in self-defence.
"What I ought to have done was to take the whisky, make him look at it
all round and tell it, with his own conviction and not mine, to go to
hell. I ought never, never to have protected him, and made him a
hothouse plant."
As she said it she knew, incontrovertibly, that she could never do
anything but protect people. It was the way she was made. And she became
very frightened that, some day, she might make Andrew a hothouse plant,
too.
She looked at the thin, grey-backed book again and more light came to
her. She flung herself on the ground, her face on the soft grass. The
baby, looking at her wonderingly, crawled towards her, and snuggled up
to her, his wet little hands on her neck.
"Oh make me weak!" she cried as though praying to the earth and the air
and the water to batter her. "Make me weak--smash me and tear me up, so
I'll have to be taken care of. Then I'll let him be strong instead of
me! Oh but it's cruel! Why should one person be weak to make another
strong? Why can't we march on in armour, shoulder to shoulder?"
And then came the thought that, perhaps, had not her father and Louis
been the men they were she would never have learnt to wear her armour.
The wisdom of nature that made the protective coverings of birds and
beasts had given her her armour--made her grow her armour out of her
surroundings. This thought made her gasp. She sat still a very long time
letting it sink in.
"I wonder," she said slowly, looking out over the lake, a pool of fire
in the setting sun, "if that's why Jesus died. He didn't want to, I
think. He loved the quiet things of the world, little children and
talking to friends, and doing things with his hands. I wonder if he had
to die, when his teaching was finished, so that those others he loved
might not get to depend on him too much? We're so fond of getting
propped. I don't think people ought to have a Good Shepherd. Unless they
only want to be silly sheep all their lives. And here I've been Good
Shepherding Louis all this time till now he can't get along without my
crook round his arm."
It was many years since she had consciously prayed, but now she thought
of her father's prayers, and whispered:
"God--You know all about this muddle of mine. You gave Louis to me so
that, in the end, he might be a path for You to walk along. I've tried
to be a path for You towards him, but I thought I'd better help You
along. I couldn't keep quiet. Oh how silly of me! God, I see now that
I've been all wrong. I've been keeping him out of the world when I
ought, all the time, to have been making him brave enough to face the
evil in the world. Please God, let me be quiet now--and not keep
tripping You up with my own ideas, my own strength when You walk along
my life."
Her quick imagination, the imagination of a savage or a child, saw
pictures where other people would have seen ethical ideas. She went on,
softly:
"Walk over me with burning Feet. Oh don't worry, please, about how much
it hurts, so long as You get to him in the end. Because I love him--and
because he is the one You gave to me--the man I needed."
She stood up slowly, and felt that, at last, she had given in. The poor
baby lay blissfullly asleep beside her on the ground. She took him in
her arms and carried him home Then she sat down with pen and ink and
wrote a letter. She was not sure when it would be posted, but she
decided to get it written, at any rate. She felt fey--she felt that she
was being led, now that she had asked to be kept quiet at last.
She wrote:
"'CASTLE LASHCAIRN'
(It isn't really a castle. It's a hut).
"DEAR PROFESSOR KRAILL,
"Ever since I was fifteen you have been the very heart of my imagination.
I used to read your lectures to my father, and because I've never been
to school I had to get a dictionary to two words on every line. You
enlightened me, and depressed me, and shocked me and annoyed me all at
once in those days. But in your last Edinburgh lecture it seems to me
that the spirit of God has come upon you to lead captivity captive. (I
think that is such a beautiful sentence I can't help putting it in a
letter to you, because I would like to write to you in beautiful words.)
I would like to quote some more of the Bible to you, but you can read it
for yourself. The fifth chapter of the second book of Kings--the story
of Naaman the leper. I am the servant maid in that story, and I've just
discovered that I've been trying to cure my lord's illness with lumps of
cotton-wool. There is someone at home in Scotland who sends me all your
lectures, and when I read the last ones I felt that you were the prophet
in Samaria. I hear that you are lecturing in Sydney soon. I would come
to hear you, but I can't leave my little kingdom here. And I don't think
they'd approve of my small son at a University lecture. He is only two,
and very busy always. I feel that, if I could talk to you, I should see
a great light; you seem such a very shining person to me. And I'm a
duffer. A well-meaning duffer with a task before her that needs brains.
You talk of the socialization of knowledge--will you begin the
socialization on my behalf? I wonder if you would like to see what life
in the Bush is like, you who are a student of life? Then you could show
me where Jordan is nowadays.
"This is very sincere, this request. I shall not be offended if you
think it isn't, but I shall feel that there is no more light in the sky.
I'd got resigned to failure when I read your lectures, and they wakened
me to hope again, because they showed me that I've done every possible
thing wrong. If you do come, please write a very long time in advance
because we are thirty miles from the station and only go in for letters
occasionally. If you can't come, I'll go on worrying with the lectures
until I understand without you.
"Yours sincerely,
MARCELLA LASHCAIRN FARNE."
She fastened the letter up in between two books. It was three months
before she read in a week-old Sydney "Sunday Times" that Professor
Kraill, the eminent biologist, "whose fame in his newer field of
research had preceded him to the Antipodes," was to lecture at Sydney
University during the next three months. Marcella did not open the
letter; she posted it to Sydney University and left the issue in the
hands of the forces that had made her write it.
Professor Kraill got it when he was being bored to death in Sydney and
he rather discredited the sincerity of it for he was being wearied to
death by lion-hunters. Eminene men from the Old Country either get fêted
or cut in the Colonies. He was fêted because he happened to arrive at a
time when "culture" was fashionable, and Shakespeare Societies, Ibsen
Evenings, History Saturday Afternoons and Science Sundays were the rage.
Foreign legations and Government officials gave him dinners as deadly as
any in England. He saw that he was to appear in character at these
dinners. He was expected to wear a phylactery on his forehead inscribed
"I AM A BIOLOGIST." He was expected to talk biology to the government
ladies, who hoped he would say things that were "rather daring" but
quotable. In fact, they hoped that he himself would be "rather
daring"--but quotable! They talked about Shackleton's expedition, which
was the affair of the moment, and thought that they were being
flatteringly and intelligently biological when they asked him how seals
lived under ice. There was a dance on the flagship which, thanks to the
snotties, was quite alive. Then came a month's interim in the lectures
when more festivities were threatened. Professor Kraill read Marcella's
letter and thought she was probably a rather emotional, rather intense
and rather original lion-hunter. But she had the redeeming feature of
living in the Bush, thirty miles from anywhere. Conceivably, thirty
miles from anywhere, there would be no festivities. He tossed up between
the City and the Bush, and the Bush won. Giving out that he felt very
unwell after the round of gaieties, he basely deserted, got into the
most uncomfortable train in the world and, two days later, threw himself
on the hospitality of the landlord of the bosker hotel at Cook's Wall,
entirely omitting to let Marcella know that he was coming.