Three months later they were aboard a P. and O. steamer, calling their
good-byes to Mrs. King and half a dozen of the boys, and Mr. and Mrs.
Twist who had come all the way from Loose End to see them off.
Marcella had stayed in hospital for two months; for another month she
had been struggling with inability to begin life again in a nursing home
overlooking the thunders of the Pacific. Louis had gone back to the
Homestead. He would not explain what he was going to do. He merely
fetched Andrew, and put him in charge of Mrs. King, who brought him
every day to see her. And then he vanished. But she had no fears for
him. They had vanished; her sudden yielding to the chloroform in the
hospital had been symbolical of a deeper yielding; she felt that these
strong, wise forces of her life, if pain became unendurable, would
either cure it or find an anesthetic for it.
And one day, towards the end of the three months, Louis had come to the
nursing home to see her. His hands, as he seized her passionately, felt
hard and stuck to her thin silk blouse.
"Louis!" she cried, taking one of the hands in hers, which had grown
very soft and white, "I've seen them pretty bad before with the gorse.
But whatever have you been doing? Where have you been? They're like a
navvy's hands!"
"Were you worried about me, old girl?" he asked.
"No, but dreadfully curious," she began. He took a roll of dirty notes
out of his pocket and threw it in her lap.
"Look! Alone I did it! Monish, old girl! Filthy lucre! Just enough to
take us home. I meant to do it off my own bat, without asking your
uncle!"
"But how on earth could you, in the time?" she asked.
"Navvying! That bally railway cutting at Cook's Wall! Lord, Marcella, if
I don't get the Pater to pay for me to go to the hospital, I'll do a
year first on the music-halls as the modern Hercules. I should make
millions! My hands were blistered till they got like iron; my back felt
broken; I used to lie awake at nights and weep till I got toughened. I
had a few fights, too."
"Why? Didn't they like you?"
"No, they're not so silly as you. They resented my English
particularly, and they resented my funking whisky when they were all
boozing. They thought I was being superior. Lord, if they'd known! One
night, when they were calling me Jesus' Little Lamb and Wonky Willie, I
saw red and tackled an Irishman. Of course, he knocked me out of time. I
knew he would. And just to show them that I wasn't wonky, and wasn't a
Cocoa Fiend--that was another name they had for me--I downed a tumbler
full of whisky neat."
She drew a deep breath.
"Oh, don't worry! It made me damned sick! Lord, wasn't I bad! There's
something in my brain so fed up with the stuff that my body won't give
it house-room."
"Good thing too," said Marcella.
"I'm not so sure," he said reflectively. "In a way, it's weak. Whisky
still beats me, you see. There ought not to be anything on earth one's
afraid of."
"I think that's a bit morbid. I'm very much afraid of snails, and I
certainly don't think I'm called upon to go and caress snails."
"Ah, this is different. This isn't physical. It's psychological. Just
as, once, I hungered for whisky, now I loathe and dread it. The ideal
thing would be to be indifferent to it. That may come in time."
Marcella asked him nothing about herself. What the doctors had told him
she did not know: she was content to wait. All she wanted, now, was to
get home.
They stayed a week in London with Louis's people. It was pathetic to see
the mother's wistful anxiety and the father's open scepticism change to
confidence as the week went by.
"He's a changeling, my dear," said Mrs. Fame to Marcella when, in spite
of the old lady's wish to keep them in London, they told her they must
go North.
"Louis has always been a puzzle to me," said his father. "Even as a
little chap he did things I couldn't understand--selfish things,
crooked things--I don't understand what has happened to him."
"If I told you you would think General Booth had been getting at me,"
said Marcella. "But Louis will explain it all to you, some day."
From the slowly dawning pride on the father's face and the pathetic
hope of the mother Marcella guessed that Louis would not have to raise
his fees on the music-halls.
The winds were black and wintry already round the station at Carlossie
as the train drew in. Marcella had wired that she was coming, giving no
explanations. Andrew had been very fidgety. He was wearing his first
small suit and what he gained in dignity from knickers and three pockets
he lost in comfort. At last he fell asleep. Marcella looked from him to
Louis and felt that it was very childish of her, but she was really
anxious to get them both home, put them on exhibition, as it were. She
had never got over the feeling that Andrew had not merely happened, but
was a voluntary achievement. Lately she had had the same idea about
Louis. She wanted to see the effect of them both upon the people at
home.
The station at Carlossie was just the same: it looked much smaller, and
the people, too, seemed smaller. Dr. Angus was there in his Inverness
cape, smiling with the same air of conscious achievement as Marcella
felt.
"So ye're back again, Mrs. Marcella? I knew we'd be getting ye back
soon. And bringing two men with ye!"
He shook hands gravely with Andrew and gave Louis a swift, appraising
look that seemed to satisfy him.
"Your aunt's getting a wee bit frail, Mrs. Marcella! So I brought the
old machine along."
They climbed into the machine--his old, high dog-cart, and drove along
through tearing winds which were like the greeting embraces of friends
to Marcella. The doctor told her all the news; all about the new babies,
and the few deaths and illnesses while she had been away. The dashing of
the water on the beach came to them. He told her that Jock had been
washed from his little boat one rough night, and his body had never been
found. The reek of the green wood fires came to them on the salt breeze.
"What's that remind you of, Louis?" she asked him.
"Gorse!" he said with a grimace.
"I love it!" she said simply.
The door of Wullie's hut stood open. He was silhouetted dark against the
light within. The doctor drew up.
"Must stop and speak to Wullie," he said rather apologetically, to
Louis. The old man came out and stood looking at Marcella. He did not
seem a day older.
"So ye're back again, Marcella?" he said. "I knew ye'd be back! I knew
ye'd soon wear the wings off yer feet! But ye're not well?"
"How could I be, away from home?" she said gently. "I'll be well again
here."
Tammas came up then, with his wife and the six big children Marcella
knew, and two littler ones she had never seen. Jock's Bessie came out
and put a small bundle on the floor of the machine.
"Juist a cookie for the bit laddie," she explained.
They all stared at Louis and then spoke to him: he got the idea that
they were sizing him up, calling him to account for how he had dealt
with Marcella, who belonged to them. They claimed young Andrew whom they
coolly called "Andrew Lashcairn." As they drove on through the village
they took on something of the nature of a triumphal progress, for
everyone came out, and talked. And everyone seemed to be Marcella's
owners.
Aunt Janet was on the step when they reached the farm: her eagle face
was thinner, quite fleshless; in her black silk frock, shivered at the
seams, and the great cairngorm brooch, she looked quite terrifying.
"So you're back, Marcella? I knew you would be coming back," she said.
Louis wondered if this were the stock greeting at Lashnagar.
"I wonder what you've got for going across the world?" she said. "You're
not well."
"I've got my two men," laughed Marcella, as she kissed the old lady.
"Humphm!" said Aunt Janet. "He'd have found you out if you'd stayed here
all the time."
"Do you know, Marcella," said Louis, as they went along the windy
passages to her father's room in which Aunt Janet had elected to put
them. "I've an extraordinary feeling that I've nothing to do with you
any more. All these people--they seem to own you! You're an elusive
young beggar, you know. First Kraill--I had to ask his permission to
keep you. Now a whole village full!"
She shook her head and put her hand in his.
"Who's got me most, do you think?"
He answered as he thought.
There was a great spurting wood fire on the hearth in the book-room. As
she looked round Marcella saw that most of the furniture left in the
farm had been brought in. Jean came in, carrying a dish of scones.
Andrew ran straight to her, just as Marcella used to. She explained that
she had come back because the mistress was lonely without her, and she
could not get used to any ways but those of the farm.
The doctor stayed to the meal. There was no bread on the table. Louis
seemed surprised to see the oatcakes and the cheese and the herrings. To
Marcella they were a feast of heaven. They put young Andrew in old
Andrew's chair beneath the dusty pennant. He sat with his fat brown legs
swinging, exceedingly conscious of their manly appearance which he
compared with his father's and the doctor's, delighted to see that the
doctor's old tweed knickerbockers were very much the same shape as his.
"There's bramble jelly for the boy," said Aunt Janet, who scarcely took
her eyes from him for a moment. "Mrs. Mactavish sends me some every
year--one pot. There's been four pots since you went away. And I've
never been minded to open one. Maybe it's mouldered now."
They talked quietly; out on Lashnagar the winds began to howl; in the
passages they shrieked and whined, and whistled and groaned in the
chimney sending out little puffs of smoke. Up above their heads
something scuttled swiftly. The little boy forgot his dignity and drew
nearer to his mother.
"That's the rats, Andrew," said Aunt Janet, watching him. His mother
explained that rats were a pest, to be hunted out like rabbits in
Australia.
He drew away from her then and stood with his back to the fire, his
hands behind.
"Andwew kill wats," he announced. "Wiv a big stick."
The doctor and Louis smoked and talked together of days forty years ago
in Edinburgh, of days seven years ago at St. Crispin's. Marcella and
Aunt Janet spoke softly, sitting by the fire.
"I wouldn't be sitting so near the fire, Marcella. You'll have all the
colour taken out of your skirt. Not that it matters particularly," said
Aunt Janet.
"It's lovely by the fire," murmured Marcella.
Aunt Janet reached over suddenly and spread an old plaid shawl over the
girl's knees. She suddenly felt that Louis and Andrew and the last four
years were unreal and dreamlike. They had happened to her, but now she
was back home again, being told what to do.
Andrew began to rub his eyes.
"Yell be getting away to your bed now, Andrew," said Aunt Janet.
Jean stood up, waiting for him. He hugged his father and mother, shook
hands with the doctor and looked searchingly at Aunt Janet before he
kissed her. She put her hand behind the curtain, rustled a piece of
paper and gave him an acid drop.
"I used tae pit Marcella, yer mither, tae her bed when she was a wee
thing," said Jean, taking his small brown hand. He put the sweet into
his mouth and trotted off beside her. At the door he stopped to kiss his
hand to his mother. The rats scuttled across the floor above; one in the
wainscoting scratched and gnawed. Andrew hesitated and came back a few
steps. They were all watching him.
"Mummy!" he began in a very thin little voice. Marcella started as if to
go to him, and sat back suddenly.
"Andwew will kill wats--wiv a big stick," he said, and marched out of
the room before Jean.
Before a week had gone by it seemed to Marcella that she had never been
away from Lashnagar. The place wrapped her round, took possession of
her. She took Louis down to the huts to see Wullie; she toasted herrings
over the fire, and Louis was unexpectedly friendly; the only difference
was that Jock was not there any more when the fishing boats came in; and
where she had left girls and boys she found young men and women and
little babies: they grew up quickly on the hillside. Louis went with her
on Ben Grief and saw the old grey house. He wandered on Lashnagar and
looked down the terrifying chasms, and heard the screaming of the gulls;
and he was unutterably wretched and out of it all.
On Lashnagar he said to her, one day:
"Marcella, it ought to be made compulsory for people, before they think
of being married, to find out all about each other's youth."
"Like that poem of poor Lamb's?" she said. "Oh thou dearer than a
brother! Why wast thou not born within my father's dwelling? So might we
talk of the old familiar faces--Yes, I believe there's a lot in it."
"Since I've been here and seen things, I've understood you better.
Seeing your home, and mine, and thinking how we were the products of
those homes! I'm glad young Andrew is here, till it's time for him to go
to school. I see where you get your friendliness that used to shock me,
and your hardness. I'd like him to get it all."
"I was hoping to protect him from it," she said. "But I know you're
right, really," she said slowly.
That was the day before he went south to Edinburgh to join the hospital.
His mother wanted him in London, and his father wrote saying that his
old room was ready for him. But Louis told them that Marcella must be at
Lashnagar, and Edinburgh was nearer Lashnagar than London was. Dr. Angus
felt personally responsible for the resources of Edinburgh when he heard
the news and once again he made a pilgrimage, taking Louis to his old
rooms in Montague Street, and doing the honours of the city with a
proprietorial air. He took to running down to Edinburgh quite
frequently; he said he was brushing up his knowledge.
The winter passed; Louis spent Christmas at Lashnagar and then took
Marcella and the boy to London. Marcella was feeling very ill, but he
was too happy and too full of his work to notice it. She was very glad
to get back again, to sleep in her father's old four-poster bed looking
out on Ben Grief. When he had gone back to Edinburgh she spent many
wakeful nights, drawn in upon herself, thinking herself to nothingness
like a Buddhist monk until pain brought her to realization again. In
those hours she thought much of her father and heard his voice in her
ears, saw him standing there before her, clinging to the post as he
prayed for strength. Louis wrote her immense letters: sometimes in the
night she would light her candle and read them with tears blinding her
eyes and an unspeaking gratitude in her heart. She said nothing to Aunt
Janet about her illness in Sydney, or about her pain, but one evening
the old lady, looking across the firelit hearth, said quietly:
"I shall outlive you, Marcella. Seems foolish! You--young, all tingling
for life and joy, and people to care about you. I like a last year's
leaf before the wind, dried and dead. The one shall be taken and the
other left. It seems foolish."
"How did you know? Did Louis tell you?" asked Marcella in a low voice.
The pain had been unbearable all day but she had wrapt herself in a
great cape of her father's and taken it out on Lashnagar, where no one
could see her, leaving Andrew at the hut with Wullie. For a long time
she had lost consciousness, to waken very cold in the winter dusk.
"No, Louis said nothing. But I've eyes. You're marked for death. I saw
it when you came in at the door that night. Besides, you and I are very
much alike, so I understand you. And you're getting very much like your
mother."
"I think I'll see Dr. Angus to-morrow," said Marcella presently. "But I
don't think it's much use. That's the worst of being married to an
enthusiastic medical student! You know so much!"
The wood crackled for a while before Aunt Janet spoke.
"We are getting wiped out, Marcella! Only an old stick like me, who has
repressed everything, lives to tell the tale. I've ruled myself never to
feel anything."
"I'm glad I haven't. I'd rather be smashed up with pain than be dead.
You see, Aunt Janet, you repressed things and I took them out and walked
over them."
"Maybe I would if I had my time to go over again. But I don't know. It's
a blessing not to feel. I'm fond of you, you know, but I scarcely felt
your going away. And I don't suppose I shall feel your dying very much."
"You care about Andrew," said Marcella quickly.
"Yes, I care about Andrew," said Aunt Janet and gathered herself into
the past.
The next day Marcella went to see Dr. Angus who was horrified and
incredulous, and wired for a specialist from Edinburgh. Marcella knew it
was all useless, and when the specialist went away after talking to Dr.
Angus, without saying anything more about operations, she felt very
glad.
Louis suspected nothing; he was working very hard for his first
examination the week before Easter and she would not have him worried;
she wrote to him every day, though writing grew more and more difficult.
She fought desperately against being an invalid and staying in bed, but
at last she had to give way; Dr. Angus came every day and talked to her
for hours; sometimes he gave her morphia; once or twice when the pain
had stranded her almost unbreathing on a shore of numbness and
exhaustion she wished that she had died in the hospital in Sydney: but
not for long; in spite of the pain she wanted to live. Once or twice,
when all was quiet, and the pain was having its night-time orgy with
her, she cried out in the unbearable agony of it. She would have no one
with her at nights, but Aunt Janet's uncanny penetration guessed at the
pain and she made Dr. Angus leave morphia tablets for her. At first,
though they were at her hand, she refused them.
"I don't want to waste time in unconsciousness," she said once. Later,
she grew glad to waste time: she understood how her father used to pray
for drugs when he was too tired to pray for courage in those weary
nights of his. Another time she said that it was cowardly: Louis, in his
whisky days, had been seeking anesthesia from painful thoughts; she was
too proud to seek it for a painful body. She tried hard, too, to keep
shining Kraill's conception of her courage; she did not realize that he
would never know, however much she gave way: always, for her, he lived
just on the threshold of her consciousness.
One day when the doctor was sitting beside her and she had got out of a
maze of pain into a buoyant sea of bodily unconsciousness, she talked to
him about his letter in which he had grieved at his inadequacy. Then
she told him about Louis, and about Kraill, for she thought it might
encourage him to know how the miracle of healing had come about.
"He wrote to me this morning, doctor," she said. "Will you feel under my
pillow and get the letter? I know he wouldn't mind your reading it."
The doctor unfolded the thick bundle of pages and read--and as he read
he saw that the words were all blurred by tears, and guessed that they
were certainly not tears shed by the exuberant young man who had written
the letter.
"Three cheers, old girl. The week of torture is past! I know I got
through. I simply sailed through. My brain is a fifty times better
machine than it was seven years ago. And they're accommodating at these
Scotch medical schools. I told 'em I'd got through part of my Final in
London before the bust-up came, and the Dean sent for me to-day and said
it seemed a pity for me to slog at the donkey-work again, when I knew
it. So we talked it over, and he says I ought to do the Final next year.
And then, Marcella, look out! I've told you I've laid down my challenge
to sickness! I'll have it whacked before I die. I can't see why anyone
should die except of senile decay or accident--and those we'll eliminate
in time! I feel that there's only a dyke of matchboarding between me and
the ocean of knowledge. One day it's going to break, and I'll be flooded
with it. It's a most uncanny feeling, old girl. One of the chaps here--a
rather mad American--says that there are people who've broken that dyke
down--Shakespeare, for instance. (But if I broke it down, I wouldn't be
such a footler as to write plays and poems, would you?) Corlyon--that's
the mad American--is the son of a big psychologist at Harvard; he gave
me some light on Kraill's remark about dreams that day. He says they're
being used a lot by some German and American alienists in curing all
sorts of neuroses. (By the way, old girl, next time you write, tell me
if you understand all these technicalities. I want you to understand
them, and if you don't I'll explain as I go on. One never can be sure
about you. Sometimes you seem no end of a duffer, and next minute you
come out with an amazing piece of penetration.) Well, these new
psychologists say that things like drinking, sex, drugging, kleptomania,
and all these bally nuisances that make people impossible members of a
community, come from repression. A man has a perfectly well-meaning
impulse to do something. His education, or his religion or his
convention tells him it's wrong, so he represses it. He fights it,
pushes it back. It gets encysted and, in time, forms a spiritual
abscess. It's got to break through. Of course, the idea is not to
repress things at all. I don't say let things rip, and go in for a whole
glorious orgy of wine, woman and song. But take the desire out, have a
talk with it, and make it look silly like Kraill made whisky look silly
to me. There, I thought that would interest you. (A bit more proof how
damnably clever he was!)
"Marcella, I told you then I'd be the same to you as Kraill was, didn't
I? I worshipped you; I wanted you; you were my saviour, and I'd have
picked up the Great Pyramid and walked off staggering with it if you'd
asked me. That was the path that carried me over my particular messy
morass (that, and my acquisitive spirit that objected to giving up part
of my goods and chattels!) And now--listen here, old lady! It's a thing
a chap couldn't say to most of his wives. I can say it to you and know
that you'll understand. (That's the heavenly safeness of you. You do
understand, and never judge resentfully) Marcella, I'm going to be the
sort of man Kraill is! And I'm going to be it not for you at all now!
I'm going to be bigger than he, even. And I know he'll be big enough to
be glad if I am. A good doctor's reward is in his patient's recovery,
and in a way, whatever the patient does afterwards counts to the doctor,
doesn't it? So now, old girl, if there was no you on earth, I'd still
keep my tail up! Put that in your pipe of peace and smoke it! Different
days, isn't it to the time when I couldn't be sent to buy a baby's
feeding-bottle without getting boozed? I knew you'd like to know that.
Oh, wasn't I a fool to think you wanted to tie me to your apron strings?
I've got to neglect you for a bit now. I've got to run on without you,
dear. Thank God you're not the sort to get huffy about it, and want me
dancing attendance on you. A man with a man's job to do can't have time
for the softness of women about him: he can't stop to look to right or
left! But when I'm in Harley Street--well there! No more decayed castles
or wooden huts for you!
"I'm aching to see you, Marcella. It's the Mater's birthday on Easter
Sunday, so I'm running down to see her on Saturday. I shall travel back
by that train that leaves Euston at midnight on Sunday. It's great to be
away from you, because it's so great to come back."
The doctor looked at her as he put the letter down, and blew his nose
and polished his glasses.
"Two or three years ago I'd have been sick to think I was only the
bridge to carry him over--to his job. But now--" She smiled a little,
wondering why he should talk to her of the softness of women, that he
must dispense with for a while; and Kraill had seen her hard, and asked
her to be courageous for him!
After the doctor had gone Andrew came in, warm and rosy from his bath.
He had had a glorious day on the beach with Wullie; he scrambled into
Jean's arms to be carried to bed, because they had forgotten his
slippers and his feet were cold.
"Night, night, mummy," he said. "Inve morning I shan't wake you up, 'cos
I'm going to see the boats come in at five! An' Jean's putting oatcake
in my pocket--like a man--!"
He went off, laughing. After he was in bed, she heard him singing for a
long time until his voice droned away to drowsiness.
She lay silent and motionless. Aunt Janet came in. She took up the
hypodermic syringe impassively. Marcella shook her head.
"No. I want to think to-night. Louis's coming on Monday. I've to think
of some way of not letting him know how ill I am, because of his work,"
she said. "But will you put pencil and paper where I can get it?"
"You'll not be writing letters to-night, Marcella?" said Aunt Janet.
"No. I'm going to make my will," she laughed. "I've only Louis and
Andrew to leave--"
Her aunt kissed her and turned away. Through the open window came the
soft roar of the sea. It was very still to-night; the moon shone across
it, but that she could not see: she had seen it so often that it was
there in her imagination. On Ben Grief the shadows lay inky in the
silver light. She looked at the syringe, and then at the tabloids, and
sighed a little; the pain was a thing tearing and burning; several times
she tried to begin to write and had to lie back with closed eyes
floating away on a sea of horror. Several times her hand quivered
towards the tabloids and came back to the pencil. The shadows seemed to
jostle each other about the room. Kraill's eyes shone out of them for an
instant, blue and impelling. She got a grip on herself and wrote, a word
at a time, making each letter with proud precision:
* * * * *
DEAR PROFESSOR KRAILL,
I am sending you a letter I had from my husband to-day. Have you
forgotten us, and that wonderful thing you did out in the Bush? You told
me then that you liked to interfere in other people's business, but that
they didn't always take the interfering nicely. I want you to know what
your interfering has meant to us.
You will gather from Louis's letter what you meant to him. It is more
difficult to explain what you meant to me. Can you understand if I say
you've been a constant goad to me? It would have been easier for me if I
had never seen you, because you have been the censor of my spirit ever
since. After you went away I was blazing with misery. I hadn't got so
far as you, you see. I was passionately wishing that I'd known you when
you were more on my level. And I saw that you had had a vision of me
that was very much better than I shall ever be now. As Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote, there are three Marcellas--the one Marcella herself knows,
the one the people round about know, and the one God knows. That was the
one you saw for a minute and, not to disappoint you, I've had to live up
to it. It hasn't been easy. As you will see from his letter, even Louis
doesn't need me now. And as for my boy--I know now, that though beasts
claw at his life and colds and hungers and desolations come to him, they
cannot put out the shine of him. But for me it has been very lonely. I
wanted to be the thing of soft corners and seduction that you were
sickened of. I had to rip myself to bits and make myself the rather
rarefied sort of thing you demanded. I didn't dare not to be brave,
because you were so much enthroned in my life that every thought was a
deliberate homage to you. I might have got considerably happy, and found
many thrills out of thinking about you softly, imagining kisses,
adventures, perhaps. Many women would, and I'm sure many men. I couldn't
do that because it would have made you less shining, though more dear in
my mind. And when I tell you that almost ever since you went away I have
been very ill, much of the time in horrible pain, you will see that you
gave me something to live up to when you said you needed my courage.
There's a fight going on all the time between my spirit and my body.
Sometimes, when the pain has been appalling, I have thought I would
write to you and ask you to release me from being brave. But I did not
want to seem to you a tortured thing--Sometimes, too, I have
deliberately pushed the morphia on one side and stuck it out. It was one
way of getting my own back on this bundle of nerves and sensations that
has played such havoc with me and that, as you scornfully told me, has
once or twice cheapened me to an unworthy pleasure--'like a queen going
on the streets.' I've been damned, damned, by this overlordship of the
body. Now I'm going to get rid of it, and even now I don't want to! I
know now I am dying, and there is morphia here under my hand. But I'll
be damned in pain rather than be beaten by it! I won't die a cow's
death, as the old Norsemen used to call it! I'll fight every inch of the
way.--But I wish Aunt Janet would come in and jab the needle in me,
forcibly. That would be quite honourable, wouldn't it?
* * * * *
The candle began to flicker and, turning, she saw that it was spending
its last dying flame. It was impossible to write. She lay still,
watching the glimmering dark square of the window. She could not see
another candle there. All she could see was the little phial of
tabloids. But she lay back and let the pain fasten on her. The blazing
needles that were piercing her, the blazing hammers that were battering
her, gathered in fury and for a few merciful hours she lost
consciousness.
When she wakened again the pain had completely gone and the first faint
cool light was struggling through the mists on Ben Grief. She groped
about the counterpane and found her pencil, and went on writing. This
time the letters were not so proudly neat. Many of them were shaky and
spindlelegged and she knew it.
* * * * *
The candle went out, then. Some hours have passed, and with them the
pain. A very beautiful thing has come to me;--the peace that passeth
all understanding until you've lost your body. I understand now, very
well. Our lives are just God's pathway, and we get in His way and have
to be hurt before He can get along us. I was, unconsciously, His pathway
to Louis until you came along--and you were a smoother pathway than I.
His feet have blazed along my life now, burning out all the
roughnesses--crushing me down. It's been a heavy weight to carry--the
burden of salvation. It is such a heavy weight that one can't carry
anything else. I tried to carry myself, and prides and hungers and love
for you. All of them had to be blazed out.--No--not the love. That could
not go. That and the courage will go on; pity perhaps will go, for only
our bodies are pitiful. But the love is deathless. God's banner over me
was love. I think I've read that somewhere His footmarks over my life
were love. I've not read that. I had to find it out--slowly, hungrily,
painfully, strivingly, because I've always been such a fool. But just
this minute I've seen that I've been God's Fool--and God is Love.
* * * * *
The sun came up behind the pines on Ben Grief, golden and silver in the
April morning. Very faintly came the voices of the fishermen; in the
next room she heard small, busy sounds; two faint falls made her smile.
Andrew had mechanically put on his shoes, thought better of it and
kicked them off again. She heard him creep along the landing to her door
and listen. When she tried to call him to come and kiss her she found
that her voice had died. She heard him say, quietly:
"Mummy's fast asleep," and smiled again as she felt that he was running
through the unbarred door shrieking and laughing in the delight of the
soft air, the dancing sea, the kindly sun. She knew that he had not
washed his face, and worried a little about it, and then smiled again.
His voice grew fainter. She tried to lift her hand to fold her letter.
It felt as though it were miles away from her, and too heavy to move.
"Why, I'm dying now," she thought, and was surprised to find it such an
ordinary, unvolitional thing to do. It was very good to do something
unvolitional, very restful.--Little snappings sounded in her ears, and
distant crashings and thunders as of a storm perceived by a deaf man who
can see and understand without hearing.
She thought very clearly of Death for a moment, and then of God. She had
often thought of Death and of God, and was surprised to find that she
had been wrong about both.
"I thought--He never gave you--anesthetics--" she told herself. "Why,
that's what death is--"
Then came the clear vision of God--not the Great Being with devastating
feet at all: He seemed to be like the surgeon in Sydney, for a moment,
very sure of His work, very strong, very much stronger and wiser than
she was. It was no use at all to fight a thing so wise and strong and
tender--
At that moment, as this most beautiful, most kindly thing came to her,
she wanted to tell Kraill about it, so that he should be filled with the
beauty of it without having to come to death to find it out. The pencil
was in her hand, resting on the page. Her brain willed her fingers to
conquer their heaviness, their farawayness, and write:
"God seems like you when you told me I needn't be frightened about Louis
any more--"
The crashings in her ears grew fainter. More light came.
"No. He is more than that. He is the sun that is shining and the soft
noise that is coming up from the sea--and Andrew's laughing--No--those
were only His robes that I was looking at!--God is the courage you
loved--God is the courage; His clothes are loving-kindness--"
In that moment that the structure of her life fell inwards she saw still
more.
"I know now that I need not regret all these greeds and hungers and
prides of mine that have been unfulfilled. They have been burned out by
the courage and the loving-kindness--"
The pencil rolled on to the floor; what her spirit had willed to tell
him her fingers had made a weak scrawl of straggling, futile marks.