Captivity

After her father's death Marcella had more time to become aware of the really tangible shadows about the farm. In fact, she wakened to a general awareness about the time of her eighteenth birthday, rather later than most girls.

She was extraordinarily young; she was inevitably romantic. Living what amounted to the life of a recluse, it was only to be expected that she should live her illusions and dreams. Her mind was a storehouse of folklore, romance, poetry and religion; her rationalistic readings had not in any way become part of her, though facts and ratiocinations, by mere feat of memory, were stored in her mind as irrelevances and unrealities that came elbowing their way through her dreams just as fantastic thoughts come as one falls asleep.

Never, in all her life, had she known what physical pleasure was; her bed was hard and very thinly covered—one night her father had taken away and locked up a blanket because he said she must be hardened. It had never occurred to her that food could be a pleasure; it was just something that happened, a recurrence of potatoes, porridge, oatcake and broth. Only when she had been swimming in the fierce waves or battling in the winds on Ben Grief with Wullie did she realize the pleasure of hunger, and that was easily satisfied in the smoking hut when the Hunchback raked aside the ashes and brought out roast potatoes or toasted fish that he took down from the roof.

Not knowing other girls she had no one to talk to her about clothes. Before Rose Lashcairn was ill she had taken great pleasure in dressing her little girl; soft things, woven of silk and wool, came from London for her, soft shoes and stockings and frocks of fine texture and beautiful colour that seemed strange and exotic on Lashnagar. But these were worn out and never replaced—except for her mother's funeral she never wore shoes, summer or winter. Her feet and legs were brown and quite invulnerable to stones or brambles. Her father did not realize that she needed clothes; her aunt was too much sunk in shadows to notice the child's appearance. And, reading her legends and romances, it was natural that Marcella should live them and dress them. In a press in her mother's room were clothes brought from the old grey house, the accumulation of days when fabrics were made as heirlooms. There were plaids and brocades and silks: there was lace from Valenciennes and linen from Cambrai, yellow with age. There were muslins that a Lashcairn had brought when he adventured to India with Clive. Rose often wept over them. Several times Marcella's dreams nearly cost her her life, for, living them so utterly, she became detached from the physical world. One time, when a stormy golden sun went down behind black clouds, shining on an ancient pile of grey stones that stood on a little spit of land near the bar of the river, she was reminded of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur." She heard the ripples lapping on the reeds and, with an imaginary Sir Bedivere at her elbow, hurried back to the farm to dress herself as a Scottish edition of King Arthur in kilts that had belonged to her grandfather. She worshipped the shine of the moon on the great jewel at her breast as she stepped into the little frail boat, very tired after a long day's wandering on Ben Grief without food. To a Kelt death is a thing so interpenetrating life that thought of it brought no fear; there was a sort of adventurous anticipation about it. She cast a stick—her sword Excalibur—into midstream and waited for the arm "clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful." That it did not appear meant very little to her. It certainly did not mean that it was not there. Rather it meant that she could not see it. So she lay in the little boat and quite certainly she saw the grave Queens at the head, leading her to the Island Valley of Avilion. Watching the moonlight glittering on her jewel she was hypnotized to sleep, rocked by the soft motion of the little boat. The current of the stream took her out to sea, the turn of the tide washed her back again, and she wakened at dawn famished with hunger, drenched with the icy water the little boat had shipped. She was too good a swimmer to drown and, after a valiant struggle, she came to land two miles from home.

Her romance was never killed by misadventures. The very next day she climbed Ben Grief and lighted a ring of fire round his wrinkled brow by carrying up loads of dried heather and grass through which she fought her way to the rescue of a dream Brunnhilde, sleeping within the fire. She reached home that night with scorched clothes and hair, and smoke-smarting eyes. But such mishaps were only part of the adventure, as inevitable as storms in winter and wounds in battle. These dreams were in the days before her father's Rationalism kept her chained indoors: his evangelism sowed seeds that took root and flowered into a desire that she might be a wild-eyed, flame-tongued John the Baptist, making straight the way of the Lord. When this dream came to her it transmuted all the other dreams; from so deep down inside her that it seemed a voice of someone autocratic standing beside her came the conviction that to be a John the Baptist meant to be a martyr and an anchorite. For days after her father's death she wandered on the hills, preaching deliverance to the screaming gulls, who would not be quiet like St. Francis' birds when he preached. Many days she took food with her and deliberately refused to eat it, walking miles after she was worn out in a considered attempt at the subjection of the flesh, after the manner of saints of old. Sometimes she preached peace to the desolate ghosts on Lashnagar, but they did not seem to listen.

Then, just after this, several things happened to bring her thoughts away from dreams to a realization of herself as a concrete, circumscribed being. Wullie had warned her of this.

"Ye're up in the clouds, now, Marcella, like a wraith. Some day ye'll come down to airth. And it'll be with sic' a bang that ye'll find ye're very solid." She had not understood him.

For six weeks after her father's funeral she had almost maddening neuralgia. One day, meeting Dr. Angus in the village she stopped to speak to him. Indeed, it was impossible to pass him, for he had bought Rose Lashcairn's little mare who, even after six years, remembered Marcella and stood with eager, soft eyes while the girl stroked her velvet nose and satin sides. This was the first time the doctor had seen Marcella since the funeral and she had been weighing on his mind: he guessed at more than the Lashcairns would ever have told him of their circumstances; he had sent in no bill for Andrew's illness and, out of his own pocket, had paid the Edinburgh specialist. Marcella knew nothing of this—if she thought of it at all, she would have thought that the doctor just happened, as everything else in her life, by chance.

"Marcella, you're not looking the thing," he said. "Hop up beside me. I've not seen you for ages. Let us have a talk. I've to drive along to Pitleathy and I'll drop you here on my way back."

She sprang in beside him and told him about the neuralgia.

"I had it first when I used to sit up with father. Now I have it all the time—and dreadful headaches. I never knew what aches meant before. I'm afraid when Jean used to say she had the headache I wasn't so kind to her as I expect her to be to me."

"We never are," said the doctor bluntly. "But have you not told Aunt Janet about the headaches?"

"Oh no—she'd think it was silly."

"Then I'd tell Jean, Marcella," said the doctor hurriedly. "If you're not feeling well, just tell Jean, and maybe she'll be bringing you along to see me." Then he added. "But to-night I'll send the lad along with medicine for the neuralgia."

They talked about her father, then, and presently she surprised him by saying earnestly:

"Doctor, why is it that people get ill?"

He laughed and chuckled at her puzzled frown.

"Well! There's a question to ask a man after his dinner. Do you know it took me the best part of seven years at the hospital to learn the answer? And even now my knowledge is not what you might call exhaustive."

"It seems so queer—mother being ill, and father; then Jean's headaches and my neuralgia. And Wullie all twisted up."

The doctor let the reins drop on the horse's neck and lighted a very old pipe. He had very little chance of a talk, and was glad to talk, even to a girl.

"Just in those people you've mentioned, Marcella, you've almost every cause of illness." He paused, puffed at the pipe and went on, "Wullie—he was born like it."

"Yes. I know. It seems all wrong."

"It is wrong. It's a mistake," said the doctor slowly.

"Whose mistake?" she asked quickly.

"Ah, there you have me, Marcella. It was to answer questions like that that men invented the devil, I believe; they like to say he put the grit in the machine that turned out Wullie, and made him like that out of perversity."

"But what do you say?" she said, looking into his face.

"I don't know. I think several things. For one thing, I like to imagine that God, or Nature, whichever you like to call it—isn't a perfect machine yet, and that we human beings can step in to help a bit."

"But how?"

"Wullie's father, I've heard, was drowned before he was born, and his mother was too proud to tell when she was hungry. She used to go out every night and take his place with the fishing boats, rowing, sitting cramped, drawing the nets. We can help there by stopping that sort of thing."

Marcella watched him, wide-eyed. She was completely mystified but so full of questions that she could not find which one to ask first.

"That's what I'd have said when I was at the hospital, a young man. In those days I dealt much more with cells and bodies than—than I do now. Queer thing, Marcella—youngsters go for physiology mostly. When they get older they see that there's more in psychology. I'm old now. Maybe I'm more foolish, but I've a feeling, right down at my marrow, that I'm wiser. I like to think that Wullie's an example of the law of compensation and, by losing physical strength and beauty, has gained a beautiful soul. But for the Lord's sake don't go telling anyone I—a doctor—talked such arrant nonsense," he added with a laugh as he puffed at his pipe.

"It seems wrong to me," said Marcella slowly. "I can't see why a beautiful mind and body shouldn't be part of each other."

"You've never been introduced to your body yet, Marcella, nor shaken hands with it. It's never popped up and made faces at you. When it does you'll find folks like Wullie have a good deal to be thankful for. Your father, for instance—"

He stopped short, coughed loudly and pulled up the horse to a sharp trot.

"Yes. The barrel," she said gravely.

"Who's been telling you that?"

"Wullie. I asked him."

"I wouldn't have told you, yet. But it's right you should know. You saw how it was with your father. Whisky ruled him. It rules all your menfolk like that. It wasn't till his body grew weak with sickness—and sickness, mind you, caused by the whisky—that he got it in hand. Then, you see, it was too late. He conquered a wounded foe. And, of course, he died. If he'd got religion earlier, perhaps—and, after all, that's only another obsession."

"Poor father," she whispered.

"If your father, without religion or anything, could have conquered, Marcella, he'd have been a very heroic figure. He'd have left footprints in the sand of time, as the poet said."

Marcella nodded. This was the first time the idea of conscious heroism came to her. She said rather breathlessly:

"But are bodies wicked, doctor? Lots of people seem to think so. Aunt Janet thinks people's bodies are wrong. All saints seem to think that too."

"They're very splendid and bonny if you can keep them in hand. Christ taught that bodies—Humanity, that is—are the veils of God. It's only when bodies get out of hand that they go wrong and put a man in hell. I expect the idea of Trinity-worship that we get in most religions was an unconscious aiming at this truth, that to be a perfect human being you must be the Trinity—body, brain and spirit. But we're not up to that Trinity yet, lassie, by a long chalk."

"When I used to read those scientific books, and those queer philosophies to father, it seemed to me that bodies were all that mattered. That was when I was reading biology books and lectures. It seemed so useless to me—just living, and handing on life, and living no more."

"That was the idea when I was at the hospital. At a hospital, of course, bodies do count tremendously. But in my day more than now because we were in the reactionary stage from blood-letting, incantations and so on. I remember how Biology came to me with a sense of crystal precision and inevitability in those days."

He paused. Marcella asked rather doubtfully:

"But do you think that Biology is wrong?"

"Oh, Marcella, your 'rights' and 'wrongs' are so funny, if you only knew it! You might as well say, 'Is fire wrong?' It's there. There's no getting away from it. When I was a wee laddie at home I had to write copy-book lessons on Saturday afternoons to keep me out of mischief. One I wrote so often that it keeps coming into my mind in the most foolish way often. 'Fire is a good servant but a bad master.' That was the sentence. The times I've written it, thick down strokes, thin upstrokes! Well, that's like any of these ologies—biology especially. It's a good teacher. You don't have to let it be a taskmaster."

"I'd like to learn ologies, doctor. I'd like to learn to the roots of things. All the things I know—legends, history, poetry, haven't any roots at all. Professor Kraill's a biologist, isn't he?"

"Well, yes—rather a heterodox one, but he's getting believed now. But how on earth did you know?" he said, turning on her in surprise.

"There was an advertisement of a book of his lectures. It was called 'Questing Cells' and father got it. I had to read it to him—with a dictionary at almost every line, because I didn't understand it. It showed me that, though I am muddled now, there is such a thing as clearness in the world. It seemed to me that if I knew all the things Professor Kraill knows things might be like a crystal ball—all the things in the world, you know, beautifully clear and rounded off. I read a lot of books to father after that and got muddled again. But I never lost the feel of Professor Kraill's book. I couldn't tell you a word of it now, but it's like the memory of a most beautiful music. I love him. I'd love to hear him—to see him. He's the wisest man in the world."

"Heaven forbid!" said the doctor, laughing a little.

"Why? Don't you admire him?"

"Immensely, though he's heterodox. But he's just what I was saying to you just now—an example of a man who isn't the Trinity. Being a biologist, he's run all to body and brain. He's let his spirit get famished a bit. Queer things—one hears, too—inevitable things."

"How do you mean?" she cried, quick to defend her hero, but eager with curiosity about him.

"Oh, things you wouldn't understand. He's given up his chair at the University."

There was a long silence. Then Marcella said definitely:

"Anyway, he's splendid. I love him." The doctor laughed and told her it was a good thing she wasn't a student if she fell in love with professors from their lectures.

"Well, go on with what you were saying," she said imperiously, and the doctor began to think that he had not quite reckoned with Marcella's passion for getting to the roots of things. But he expounded his theory to her, telling her that before many years things that were miracles in the time of Christ would be scientific bagatelles in the hospitals.

"We've been having a materialistic time, Marcella, ever since Huxley and Darwin. Now we're coming to the swing of the pendulum. The body and its appetites have got very strong. Soon we'll have them beat by the mind."

There was a long silence. Then, with a suddenness that disconcerted the doctor, she asked him what Wullie had meant by saying that the Lashcairn women took the man they needed, and went on strange roads.

He filled and lit his pipe before he answered her.

"If I told you you wouldn't understand. You'll come to it in time. When you do, remember what I said to you. If you don't keep your body in hand it's going to run away with you, like it ran away with your father into yon barrel. See?"

"No," she said doubtfully. "Do you mean be like Aunt Janet?"

"God forbid! No, not like Aunt Janet. You'll see when you come to it, Marcella. But remember that the nearest most of us ever get to the perfect Trinity is a thing of shreds and patches. People don't manage to be perfect."

"Christ?" ventured Marcella.

"No. He was brain and spirit without a body."

"Why, doctor, how about when He fasted in the wilderness—and the pain on the cross?"

"Bodily pain is much easier to bear than bodily desire, Marcella. Your poor father would have found it easier to be crucified than to bear his longing for whisky. And Aunt Janet—ask her."

"She wouldn't tell me."

"No, I suppose she wouldn't. When she was young she saw a man she wanted. And he was a man she couldn't have. Until she got dead as she is now I expect she'd have thought crucifixion a thing easier to bear. No, there's no one perfect. All we are, any of us, is either a soul or a body or a brain developed at the expense of all the rest. We get great holes torn in us, just as if wolves had been clawing at us. And it's the body that makes the most dreadful tears. Most people don't see this. You see, the body's hungers are the most appeasable—and being the most appeasable one can't see why they shouldn't be yielded to."

He stopped talking as they drove into the main street of Pitleathy, and while he was with his patient at a little house in the middle of the street Marcella sat thinking. Loose ends of his talk floated about in her grasping mind and she collected them to make him fasten them down when he came back.

"Do you know, doctor, you've muddled me," she said as they turned homewards in the teeth of the wind.

"I'm sorry for that, Marcella. You'd better forget what I've said. Sitting alone so much I talk to myself, and I forgot I was talking to a bit lassie like you. Forget things you don't understand."

"And then get more puzzled later on, when they crop up?" she said. "No. I want you to tell me, now. I want to know, now, why mother was ill—and why Jean and I have headaches."

"Your mother was ill through an accident," he said gravely. "I don't wish to talk about that. And as for Jean and you—well, it's what we expect of women. Man has made his women-folk invalids."

"Doctor!" she gasped.

"Women are always getting ill more or less. Their natural place in the scheme of things makes them weaker. In the beginning of things they were in a dangerous world; as the vehicle of the new life it was not well that they should take their place amidst the same dangers as the men. Otherwise the race might have died out. So they were adapted by nature to a softer life. Their brains are smaller, their nerves more sensitive. If they'd been made as strong as men, physically, nothing would have kept them from fighting and exploring and getting killed."

"But—but—how awful! And you mean I'll have headaches and things always because I'm a woman?"

"Because you're a woman and, to quote your Professor, biologically important. Important to the race, that is—not intrinsically important. To keep you out of dangers and hardships—and mischief," he said, chuckling as he watched her indignant face.

"Well, then I won't be a woman! Coddled! I never heard anything so disgusting! Doctor, I'm going to be a Siegfried, a John the Baptist! I'm going to be a man!"

The doctor laughed loudly and told her to wait awhile, when she would laugh at this Marcella who was so eager, so impatient now.

That conversation marked an epoch for Marcella. To use the doctor's phrase, it made her shake hands with her body. His medicine cured the neuralgia, though it would probably have cured itself now that the strain of her father's illness was over. But the headaches persisted right on until the springtime, bringing gusts of impatience and strange demands and urgencies that made her begin to get tired of the farm and Lashnagar and set her feet longing to be away on strange roads.

One sunny dawn she came down to the beach and, throwing off her clothes, ran across the strip of shingle, and then, with rapture in the softness of the air after the sharp bite of winter and spring mornings, she flew as if on wings over the yellow sand and into the water that was sliding in gently, almost motionlessly. She danced in the little lazy waves. They seemed playmates to-day, though usually they fought and buffeted her; she had her usual swim out to the islet where the fishermen kept their nets and it seemed very splendid just to be alive. Then she swam back to the shore where her clothes lay in a little heap, and it occurred to her that she had brought no towel.

"I'll have to dry like washing does—in the sun," she laughed, wringing her hair in her hand as she stood in a motionless little rock pool. The drops sparkled round her and, looking down at their little splashes, she caught sight of her reflection in the pool as she stooped forward to shake her hair. For a moment she stared, as Narcissus once stared. But unlike Narcissus she did not fall in love with herself. From the reflection she let her eyes travel over her body, and noticed that curves and roundnesses were taking the place of boyish slimness.

"Oh—how horrible!" she cried and dimly realized that the change in her appearance had something to do with the doctor's prediction of physical disability. She loathed and resented it immediately. Suddenly conscious of her bare legs she ran home, horrified at the tightness of her frock that showed the roundness of her figure. As she passed the Mactavish cottage the mother sat in the doorway, suckling the newest baby. Instead of staying to talk as usual Marcella flew by, her cheeks crimson. As soon as she reached home she ran up to her mother's room to find a frock that was not so tight; tearing an old linen sheet into strips she wound it round her body like a mummy wrap, so tightly that she could scarcely breathe, and then, putting on a blouse of her mother's that was still too tight to please her, she surveyed herself in the mirror with supreme dissatisfaction.

"I look horrible! It's beastly for people's bodies to show like that," she cried, and, sitting down on the floor, put on the shoes and stockings she had had for her father's funeral, that hurt her feet. She ran down to the beach to discuss it with Wullie. Half-way there she discovered that she could not possibly mention it to anyone. This puzzled her. She could not understand things one could not mention.

"We're very grand the day, Marcella," he said, watching her curiously. "Where are ye gaun?"

"I've come to see you," she said, sitting down in a shadowy corner.

"Have ye had breakfast? I saw ye, hours ago, swimming oot by the nets. There's seed cake in yon box that Jock's wife's sent doon, and buttermilk in the can."

Even indignation with her figure could not conquer her appetite, and she divided the cake between them, eating her share before she spoke.

"Seed cake's the nicest thing in the world," she said at last. "I love the wee blacks in it, don't you, Wullie? Wullie, when I'm dying I'll come here and Bessie shall make seed cake. Then I shall never die. I love the smell of it, too—it makes me think of the Queen of Sheba bringing spices and gold to King Solomon."

"Ye seem to be having a fine queer lot of thoughts the day, Marcella," said Wullie, eating slowly and looking at her.

She flushed and looked away from him.

"I have, Wullie, horrible thoughts. About getting old."

"So old, lassie—ye're nearly a woman now," he said gently.

"Wullie, I won't be a woman! I hate it! The doctor's been telling me disgusting things about being a woman. And so has Jean. Why should they be weak and get ill? Oh, I won't! I'll do as I like."

"Ye're too young tae understand yet," began Wullie.

"I'm not. I'm not too young to understand that I won't be weak—tied down. The doctor said women were all weaker than men, and I thought perhaps most women might be. But not me. And then—Wullie, I want to be like a lion or a tiger, and kill things that get in the way, and—oh, I'll hate being a human being with a body that gets in the way."

"My poor old carcass has always been in the way," said Wullie wistfully, and she ran out of the hut, unable to bear the pity of that, right up on Ben Grief. But before she reached the top she had to take off the tight bandages, for she found she could scarcely breathe, much less climb in them, and her shoes and stockings she hid under a bush until she came back, for they crippled her feet.

For three days she did not bathe and undressed in the dark every night. But after that the water called her insistently, and she went back to it, swimming in a deliberately unconscious way, as though she had promised someone she would not notice herself any more.

But insensibly her dreams changed; instead of being a Deliverer now she dreamed, in spite of herself, of a Deliverer with whom she could go hand in hand; as the mild May days drew along to a hot June the dreams varied strangely. Up on Ben Grief all alone in the wind, hungry and blown about she would see herself preaching in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey, clad in the roughest sheep-skins. At home, or on Lashnagar, or in the water she saw herself like Britomart in armour—always in armour—while a knight rode at her side. When they came to dragons or giants she was always a few paces in front—she never troubled to question whether the knight objected to this arrangement or not. At feasts in the palace, or when homage was being done by vast assembled throngs of rescued people, he and she were together, and together when they played. She had definitely dismissed the doctor's talk of natural weakness. Not realizing all its implications she had nevertheless quite deliberately taken on the man's part.

Then came a gipsy to the kitchen door one morning when Jean was in the byre. It was a good thing Jean was not there or she would have driven her away as a spaewife. She asked for water. Marcella gave her oatcake and milk and stood looking at her olive skin, her flashing eyes, her bright shawl curiously.

As she drank and ate slowly she watched Marcella without a word. At last she said in a hoarse voice:

"You will go on strange roads."

"I wish I could," said Marcella, flushed with eagerness. "This place is—"

"You will go on strange roads and take the man you need," said the gipsy again.

Marcella glimpsed her splendid knight riding in at the gate with her, and the farm-yard ceased to be muddy and dirty and decayed; it became a palace courtyard, with glittering courtiers thronging round. It did not occur to her that the gipsy had heard the Lashcairn legend in the village—the most natural thing for a legend-loving gipsy to hear—she was accustomed to believing anything she was told, and that the gipsy's words confirmed her own longings made them seem true.

"I'm afraid there's not much chance of strange roads for me," she said, looking out over the sea with beating heart to where a distant ribbon of smoke on the horizon showed a ship bound for far ports.

"When were you born?"

Marcella told her and, taking a little stick from under her shawl, the gipsy scratched strange signs in the mud.

"You were born under the protection of Virgo," said the gipsy, and Marcella's eyes grew round and big. "You will go by strange paths and take the man you need. There will be many to hurt you. Fire and flood shall be your companions; in wounding you will heal, in losing you will gain; your body will be a battle-ground."

"Oh, but how can you know?" cried Marcella, and suddenly all those stern Rationalists she had read, Huxley and Frazer, Hegel and Kraill, all very bearded and elderly, all very much muddled together, passed before her eyes. "It seems so silly to think you can see from those scratchy marks what I am going to do in years and years and years."

But as the gipsy went away, smiling wisely, and asking none of the usual pieces of silver, all the Kelt in Marcella, which believed things had no roots, came rushing to the surface and sent her indoors to write down the gipsy's prophecy. Later, with a sense of mischievous amusement she rummaged in the book-room to find one of the Rationalist books. But they had been sold, most of them. Professor Kraill's "Questing Cells" was there and she copied the prophecy into it, on the fly-leaf.

"Talk about a battle-ground!" she said, smiling reflectively. "Professor Kraill and a gipsy!"

She turned several pages, and once more got the feel of the book, though still much of it was Greek to her. Then she got down from the window seat, for her aunt was calling her to tea, and she was hungry.

There was an unusual pot of jam on the table. She looked at it in surprise as she sat down.

"That is some of Mrs. Mactavish's bramble jelly that she sent up for the funeral; I thought we'd not be needing it just then. But now I see it's beginning to get mildewed. So it'll need to be eaten before it's wasted," said Aunt Janet, peeling off the top layer of furry green mould and handing the pot to Marcella.

"Oh I do love bramble jelly," she cried, passing it to Jean, who always ate with them in the good old feudal fashion, right at the foot of the long table. Jean took a small helping and so did Aunt Janet. After a while Marcella peered into the pot again.

"Shall we finish it up, Aunt?" she asked, and Aunt Janet shrugged her shoulders.

"To-day or to-morrow, what's the difference? Do you really like it so much as that?" she added, watching the girl curiously.

"I love it! Bramble jelly and seed cake! What do you think, Aunt? When I get very old and die, Mrs. Mactavish and Jock's wife will be in heaven already, brought for the purpose by the Angel Gabriel, and they'll make bramble jelly and seed cake for the love feast for me!" she said, eating a spoonful without spreading it on oatcake, encouraged by her aunt's unwonted extravagance. "I can't be philosophical about bramble jelly!"

Aunt Janet watched the girl as though she could not believe in anything so sincere as this love of sweet things. Then she said a little sadly:

"There's not a thing on earth that I want or love."

"Because you've ruled yourself out of everything! I love to want things because always they may be just round the corner. And if they aren't, there's the fun of thinking they are. And always there's another corner after the last one. I'd rather die of hungriness than never be hungry."

"Oh, you'll die of hungriness, I expect. That is, if you're lucky," said Aunt Janet. "I shall just drop out of life some day."

Suddenly time gave a sharp leap forward and Marcella saw herself sitting there as Aunt Janet was sitting, a dead soul in a dulled body, waiting to drop out of life. The words of Wullie and the gipsy slid into her mind—"they go on strange roads"—and she got a swift vision of herself in armour riding out gaily along a strange road with her knight beside her. Elbowing that out came something she had seen that had amazed her a few days ago. In the evenings she and Aunt Janet sat in the book-room, into which they had taken a little table of Rose's and a few chairs. Beside the fire-place had been one of those ancient presses in which the old farmer had kept his whisky, his pipes and his account books. When the man from Christy's came to buy the furniture he had noticed the beautifully carved oak doors of the press and offered such a tempting sum for them that Aunt Janet had let them go, nailing a piece of old crested tapestry across the press to hide her books and needlework inside. They usually sat there together, Marcella reading or dreaming, Aunt Janet sewing or sitting listless, not even dreaming. But into Marcella's dreams had come frequent movements of her aunt's hand going in behind the curtain. Several times when she had spoken to her, Aunt Janet had waited a few seconds before answering, and then had spoken in a queerly muffled voice. One day, looking in the cupboard for needle and cotton, Marcella had seen a big paper bag full of sweets—a thing she had not seen at the farm since her mother died. They were acid drops; she took one or two and meant to ask her aunt for some in the evening when they sat together. But she forgot until, falling into one of her dreams and staring in the fire, she noticed her aunt take something almost slyly from the cupboard and put in her mouth behind the cover of her book, glancing at her furtively as she did so. The amazing fact that she was eating the acid drops secretly came into her mind and she sat trying to reason it out for some minutes.

"Mean thing—she doesn't want me to have any," was her first thought which she dismissed a moment later as she remembered certain very distinct occasions when her aunt had been anything but mean, times when she had deliberately stayed away from a scanty meal that the others should have more—little sacrifices that Marcella was only just beginning to understand.

"I don't believe she's mean—anyway, I know she isn't. I believe she doesn't have half enough to eat and these sweets make up for it! Or else—she likes sweets frightfully and doesn't want me to know she's so—so kiddish."

Quick tears had sprung into Marcella's eyes, tears of pity and of impotence as she wondered what on earth she could do for Aunt Janet. After a while, when she was quite sure the acid drop was swallowed, and no other had taken its place, she knelt down on the hearth and, after a minute, shyly drew herself over to her aunt's side.

"Aunt Janet," she said, taking one of the thin blue-veined hands in hers, "Auntie—"

"What is it, Marcella?"

"I—I don't know. Oh, Aunt Janet, I do wish there was something I could do for you."

"Marcella!" cried her aunt, almost shocked.

"Oh dear, you make me cry, Aunt Janet, to see you sitting here so lonely and so still. You seem like father—there's a wall all round you that I can't get inside. Oh and I do love you! I'm simply miserable because I want to do something nice for you."

She stared at her aunt with swimming eyes, and Aunt Janet, quite at a loss to understand the outbreak, could not get outside her wall.

"You will find it's much better to rule love out, Marcella," said Aunt Janet gently, holding the girl's hand in hers, which was cold. "It is better not to pity anyone or love anyone. Oh yes, I know you pity me, child. But love and pity have exactly doubled the pain of the world, because, in addition to the tragedy of the person you love is your own tragic desire to do something for them. You take my advice, Marcella—don't love. Rule love out—"

"Oh my goodness—acid drops," whispered Marcella to herself as she sat down to think out this astonishing heresy.

From that day she had been filled with a choked pity for Aunt Janet—and now, suddenly, as she sat with the jam spoon full, poised over her plate she saw herself getting like that—slyly eating acid drops because she was ashamed to admit so small, so amiable a weakness, having conquered all the big ones.

She dropped the spoon with a clatter and pushed the pot away from her.

"Acid drops," she whispered to herself.

"You may as well eat it up, Marcella. It only means you won't have any to-morrow. Neither Jean nor I want it—and the pot can be washed and put away then."

"No—no. I don't want it," cried the girl passionately. "Aunt Janet, I want to go away."

Her eyes were sparkling, her breath coming fast and short.

"Go away?"

"Yes. I can't stay here. What's to happen to me if I do? Oh what's to happen to me?"

"You'll be happier staying here till you drop out of life," said the woman, looking at her intently.

"Oh no—no! I'd rather be smashed up and killed—like grandfather was," cried Marcella passionately.

"Yes, I suppose one would—at eighteen," Aunt Janet mused reminiscently. "But where can you go?"

"Oh anywhere—I don't care. I'll go anywhere—now—to-night. Aunt, I'm not cruel and unkind, am I, to want to go away? I'll come back to you. I'll be kinder when I come back," she cried anxiously. "I can't stop here and be petrified."

For two days Aunt Janet thought and pondered while Marcella raged about Ben Grief with the wings of all the swifts and swallows on earth in her feet. She faced many things these two days—she planned many things. She was like a generalissimo arranging details of the taking of the enemy's entrenchments before ever the recruiting for his army had begun. She was full of thoughts and intentions as ungraspable and spacious as the Milky Way. She was not quite sure, up there with the winds lashing her face with her hair, whether she was going to save the world from whisky, materialism or dreams; she was not quite sure whether she was going to save women from having smaller brains and weaker bodies than men, or whether she was going to train herself out of being a woman. At any rate, she was going out on the battle-path, glittering in armour. As long as her eyes were on the stars and her hair streaming in the wind it did not seem to matter much where her feet were. They would, she felt sure, follow her eyes.

And then Aunt Janet announced, at the end of two days, that she should write to Australia, to a brother of Rose Lashcairn's who lived in Victoria on a big sheep run. He had written at Rose's death, offering to have the child—one little girl more or less on his many acres would not count. But Andrew had refused stiffly, insolently, and there the matter had dropped. Now Aunt Janet sat down, and, quite characteristically bridging six years of silence and rather rude neglect, stated that Andrew was dead, the farm was not prospering, and she was sending Marcella out to him, as he had expressed a wish for her before. She did not ask if this would be convenient. It did not occur to her that Uncle Philip might be dead, or have left Wooratonga; with Lashcairn high-handedness—to quote Wullie—she expected all the world to do her bidding.

She did not mention the letter to Marcella until it was written; she lived so much inside her wall that the interest the letter must necessarily have for the girl did not occur to her until she called her downstairs and put it into her hand.

"You'll need to take this letter to Carlossie, Marcella. Jean is too busy to-day. And ask about the postage to Australia. I believe it's only a penny."

"Who do we know in Australia?" asked Marcella.

"Your mother's brother Philip. I've written to tell him you'll be coming to him. He wrote when your mother died saying he would have you, but your father refused then. I've told him you'll be coming shortly, so we'll need to cable when we've looked up the boats and everything."

Marcella stared at her aunt in dead silence. She did not in the least resent this way of disposing of her. She was used to it—she would have disposed of herself in just the same high-handed fashion if it had occurred to her. But she was stricken silent with inarticulate joy at the prospect of going away—especially of going across the sea just as far as possible without getting over the edge of the world.

"But do you think he'll have me?" she said tremulously when she could speak again.

"He'll need to," said her aunt calmly.

"Anyway, if he doesn't someone else will," said Marcella casually. To her hitherto the world had meant Lashnagar, Pitleathy and Carlossie. She had never been as far as Edinburgh. She had lived in a world of friends—a world that knew her, barefoot and hungry as she was, for the last of the Lashcairns, a world that had open doors for her everywhere. And Aunt Janet knew about as much of life outside the wall that held her own smouldering personality as Marcella knew.

It was only years afterwards that Marcella wondered where her aunt got the money to buy her the clothes that came from Edinburgh—not many of them, but things severely plain and severely expensive. She knew that the man from Christy's came again—she knew that two great oak chests, one from the landing and one from her mother's room, went away. Later she missed the old weapons that used to be in the armoury at the old grey house and that had lain in her father's bedroom where he could see them ever since they came to the farm—great-swords and dirks and battle-axes—that had rung out a clear message of defiance on many a battlefield. But she did not associate their going with her own until she was out in mid-ocean, and then she felt sickened to think what it must have cost Aunt Janet to part from them.

In the midst of her preparations Jean told her one day that she was going away soon.

"Going away?" she cried. "Then what will Aunt Janet do? Why, Jean, I never thought you'd leave her," she added reproachfully.

"Ye're leavin' her yersel'," said Jean grimly. "But I'm not gaun of ma ain accoont. The mistress hersel' was tellun me she'll not be needin' me ony mair."

"Well! but what's she going to do, then?" said Marcella, arrested in her careful tidying of her father's old books on the shelves. "I'm going straight away to ask her."

But her aunt simply told her that it was no concern of hers, but that she was going to live very quietly now.

"But who'll look after you? Who'll do the work? What will you live on?"

"I am not accustomed to being cross-questioned," said Aunt Janet in a definite way that forbade questions. But Marcella lay awake worrying very late during her last few nights at the farm, picturing her aunt all alone, without Jean, without her, without even the beasts, for a butcher from Carlossie had come and slaughtered the last old tottery cow, Hoodie.

"What is she going to do?" the girl asked herself again and again as she tossed on her hard bed that night. She tried to imagine Aunt Janet bringing in wood for the fire, breaking the ice of the well in winter, cleaning and cooking as Jean did, and her imagination simply would not stretch so far. Then she saw the nights when she would sit in the big book-room with the ghosts walking about the draughty passages, up and down through the green baize door, looking for their swords and dirks, the beds and tables and chairs that had been sold while the rats scuttered about the wainscoting. And she got a terrible vision of her aunt looking round furtively as her hand went behind the curtain to a paper bag of cheap sweets.

"Oh, I can't leave her!" she cried. "Poor Aunt Janet!"

But even as her lips told her she could not go, her feet tingled like the swallows' wings in September and knew that, whoever suffered for it, she would have to go.

Ghosts and shadows crowded round her next day when she ran down to the beach to say good-bye to Wullie. On the gate of the farm was fixed a notice saying that Miss Lashcairn desired the villagers to come to the house next day if they wished a free joint of beef, as she had no further use for her cattle. "As the beast in question is old," went on the firm, precise writing, "the meat will be tough. But probably it is quite worth consideration by those with large families."

Marcella was crying as she banged open the door of Wullie's hut.

"I thought ye'd be coming, Marcella," he said, looking at her with mournful brown eyes that recalled Hoodie's. "Jock's wife's made ye a seed cake to eat the day, and anither tae pack in yer grip. She says if ye'll pit it intill a bit tin an' fasten it doon tight it'll maybe keep till ye're at Australia. But I'm thenkin' she doesna rightly ken whaur Australia is on the map."

"Oh, Wullie," cried Marcella, flinging herself down on the ground beside him. "I feel as if I can't bear it all. Hoodie killed, and going to be eaten, Jean going to Perth to live, and Aunt Janet all alone in the old farm, living with the rats."

"Ye're awa' yersel', Marcella, mind," said Wullie gravely.

"Wullie, I wish I could explain. I don't want to go, really, but if I don't I'm so afraid I'll get frozen up and dead. Oh, and acid drops," she added frantically.

"Eh?" he asked.

"Oh, that's nothing. Only something I was thinking," she said quickly. "But I've got to go; only I hate to think of things being uprooted here."

"Then dinna think aboot it. I knew ye'd be awa' afore long. It's in ye, juist as it's in the birds. But ye'll come flying back like they do."

"Oh, Wullie, do you think I shall?" she pleaded, watching him as he stroked his beard and looked out across the sea.

"Ye'll be back, Marcella. Very glad ye'll be tae come back, an' ye'll find me here, juist the same. Things change little. It takes millions of years to change everything save folk's spirits. I'll never change, till His hand straightens me oot some day for a buryin'. But ye'll be changed, Marcella, like Lashnagar—things will have cropped out in ye, and things will have walked over ye."

Wullie's words comforted her, gave her a sense of security as she sat at his side toasting fish for the last time and eating the cake that somehow did not taste quite so good as usual. As she said good-bye to him before she went the round of the village bidding everyone good-bye, something impelled her to kiss his brown cheek. The last she saw of him was his bent figure silhouetted in the doorway of the hut with a fire glow behind it, and the setting sun shining on his eyes that were bright with tears.

But that night she was too excited to feel really unhappy as she looked at the boxes ready in the book-room, her little leather case lying open waiting for the last-minute things next morning. When, even, she blundered into the dairy to find rope and caught sight of a horrible red pile of meat that had been Hoodie, she could not cry about it. She was too busy thinking that, out of her adventuring, a day would come when the old place would be warmed and lighted again, and she told this to Aunt Janet, who was sitting, sunk in thought, by the fire in the book-room.

"I wouldn't be dreaming too much, Marcella," she said gently. "Even if dreams come true to some extent, they are very disappointing. A dream that you dreamed in a golden glow comes to pass in a sort of grey twilight, you know. And you'll never bring happiness here. Get the thought out of your head. There are too many ghosts. Could you ever kill the ghost of little Rose lying there with pain inside her, eating her life out? Or your father raging and hungering, like a pine tree in a window-pot?" She shook her head sadly. "No, Marcella, till you've killed thought you'll never be happy—till you've killed feeling—"

"Look here," began Marcella quickly, kneeling beside her aunt and suddenly holding her stiff body in her quick young arms. "Auntie," she said, using the diminutive shyly, and even more shamefacedly adding, "dear—I'm not going to listen to you. So there! I'm going away, and I'm going to come back and simply dose you with happiness, like we used to dose the old mare with medicine when she was ill. If you won't take it, I'll drown you in it. Or else what's the use of my going away?"

"You're going away because you feel it in your feet that you've got to go, Marcella," said Aunt Janet calmly. The wind roared down the chimney and sent fitful puffs of smoke out into the room. "If I tried to stop you, you'd go on hungering to be away."

It was the doctor who saw Marcella on to the Oriana at Tilbury. Aunt Janet had not suggested coming with her: it had not occurred to her as the sort of thing that was necessary, nor had Marcella given it a thought. Left to herself, she would have taken train blithely from Carlossie to Edinburgh and thence to London—imagining London not very much more formidable than a larger Carlossie. But the doctor made them see that it was quite necessary for someone to see her off safely, and naturally the job fell to him.

The booking of the passage had caused considerable discussion. Aunt Janet had written to the shipping company asking them to reserve a saloon berth by the first mail-boat after a certain date. That it took nearly all the money she had or was likely to have, as far as she could see, for the rest of her days, did not trouble her in the least. She could live on nothing, she told herself—and it was absolutely necessary that Andrew's child should go away, even though she was going to seek the once-refused charity of a relative, with the maximum of dignity and with flags flying. But the doctor had a talk with her about it. He had had three trips as ship's doctor to Australia on P. and O. steamers, and his imagination reeled at the prospect of Marcella in the average saloon on a long-distance liner.

"You see," he said, trying hard to be tactful, "if Marcella travels first class she'll need many clothes. There are no laundries on most of these ships, and it's a six weeks' trip. In the tropics you need to be changing all day if you care a brass farthing for your appearance." He did not tell her that Marcella's frankness and her lack of conventional training would ostracize her among the first-class passengers, half of whom were Government officials and the like going out to Australia or India, while the rest were self-made Australians going back home after expensive visits to the Old Country. They moved in airtight compartments. The exclusive Government folks would not have accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and assertive in self-defence. Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlecock. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest possible way.

"You shall go second class," said her aunt. "I quite see Dr. Angus's point about the first-class passengers."

"I'm going third, Aunt. I won't spend money that needn't be spent, and the third-class part of the ship gets there just as fast as the first! I'd be uncomfortable among rich folks. I only know poor people, and Dr. Angus—I'll get on better with third-class people."

The doctor laughed at the implication, and was forced to give in. He told Aunt Janet that the third class was quite comfortable, though he really knew nothing about it. He had never been on an emigrant ship in his life. He arranged for a share in a two-berth cabin quite blithely.

Marcella felt solemn when she finally saw the doctor's machine at the door waiting for her in the grey dawn light; Jean cried, and Tammas and Andrew, who were coming in with the tide, seeing the trap crawling along, ran up a little flag on the masthead to cheer her going. But Aunt Janet did not cry. She kissed the girl unemotionally and went into the house, shutting the heavy door with a hollow, echoing clang.

They had some hours to spend in Edinburgh, and got lunch in Princes Street. It all seemed amazingly big and busy to Marcella, who could not imagine the use of so many hundreds of people.

"I can't see what they're all here for, doctor," she said as they sat at a very white and sparkling table in a deep window opposite the Scott Monument, and the people went to and fro in the absorbed, uncommunicative Edinburgh way. "They don't seem to be needed."

The doctor laughed.

"Wait till you see London," he said. "You'll wonder more then."

She got up from the table suddenly and stood in the window while the doctor went on eating philosophically and smiling at her as he wished he could go all the way to Australia with her and watch her growing wonderment at the world.

"You know," she said doubtfully, "it seems so queer—all these people, and then that monument. I don't see the connection, somehow."

"I see you standing there, and a lump of congealing mutton on your plate here," said the doctor, and she sat down and ate a mouthful hurriedly.

"But what is the connection? What are they for?"

The doctor watched her in his precise way with his eyes twinkling at her over his glasses, which he wore on the end of his nose.

"I thought you were such a learned biologist, Marcella. Kraill would tell you they were the caskets of questing cells—seeking about for complementary cells that some day will themselves become the caskets of cells."

"Ugh! That reminds me of all the clouds of flies on the dead fish in summer," she said, pushing her plate away. "Flies—then maggots."

"Exactly!" said the doctor, chuckling.

"But—" she began, and broke off, frowning.

"Don't you see any connection between all yon little people and the monument, though? A crawling mass of folks—and one or two stand out. The others show they realize how these big ones stand out by making monuments for them. It infers, I think, that they'd all like to tower if they could."

"Ah, that's better. But so few tower."

"And that, Marcella, is just what I told you yon day we drove to Pitleathy. They're all patched—or I should say we're all patched. Either bodily, mentally or spiritually there are holes torn in us, and we've to be so busy patching them up from collapsing that we've no time to grow. As time goes on and we learn better there'll be less patching. There'll be more growing up tall and straight—everyone—there'll be giants in those days, Marcella."

"Yes," she said slowly, and saw herself as one of them some day as she drew on her gloves rather awkwardly, for they were the first pair she had ever possessed. "Oh, well—I'm not going to be patched at all, doctor. I simply won't have things tearing holes in me."

London, of course, was even more amazing than Edinburgh. They had a day to spend there, and the doctor took her to Regent Street and Bond Street in the morning. He was enjoying himself in a melancholy sort of fashion. Marcella was tabula rasa. It was interesting to watch the impressions registered on her surface.

The shops gave her none of the acquisitive pleasure he had expected. To her they were interesting as museums might have been. She could not, she did not see the use of them. The women thronging the windows and departments of a great store through which they walked roused her to excited comment.

"What are they buying them all for?" she said, looking at the hats and frocks and the purchasers. "They have such nice ones already."

The doctor asked her if she did not think they were very pretty when he had got over his amusement at the idea of women only buying things because they needed them.

"Oh beautiful!" she cried rapturously. "But you couldn't do very much in frocks like that."

"That's the idea, of course," said the doctor, watching her quizzically. "If you only knew it, Marcella, all these shops are built upon a foundation of what your professor calls 'questing cells.' You see—but let's get out into the air. You've started my bee buzzing now."

They faced about and elbowed their way through an eager-eyed, aimless-footed throng by the doorway.

"Now go on," said Marcella when they were in the street, walking down beside Liberty's. She had one eye on the windows and one ear for the doctor.

"You see, all these women here—they're doing something quite unconsciously when they buy pretty clothes and spend so much time and money on making themselves look so bonny," said the doctor, striding along in his Inverness cape, quite oblivious that he was a very unique figure in Regent Street. "They'll worry tremendously about what colour suits them, what style sets off their beauty best. I don't think that it's really because they like to see something bonny every time they look in their mirror. I don't think it's even that they want admiration, or envy. It's simply that they're ruled by the law of reproduction, if they only knew it. Inside them is new life—these same questing cells. These cells can only find separate existence through complementary cells. So they urge these women on to make themselves charming, capturing—married or single, they are the same, deep down, for natural laws take no count of marriage laws, you know. The men are the same, too. They beg and placate—and all the time deep down, they think they are the choosers, the overlords. And the women tempt them and then run away. Last of all they yield. These cells have it ingrained in them that the woman-thing is only ready to yield after a chase. Very few people do this consciously. A few do—people who have been let into the secret of studying natural laws. Then they either do it for the fun of the chase, or else because they're too morally lazy to fight the urge of the cells. That's when they get holes torn in them."

He walked on for a few steps, and then turned to laugh into Marcella's puzzled face.

"All of which, I'd like to point out, I take no credit for, Marcella. I got it out of Kraill's Edinburgh lectures that have just been published in book form."

"I hate that way of talking," said Marcella abruptly. "I like Wullie's way best. He says lives are the pathway of life, just as you do. But he says it's not just life, it's either God or beasts that walk along it and we've to help God kill the beasts so as to leave the pathway clear for Him. It means the same, but your way of saying it is so—so ungodly."

"I know. But there it is. The way I talk is the way Kraill and his school talk. Of course, there's something in it. There would be a great deal in it if we were only aiming at making bodies. All this tricking out—refinement—it may produce the people who tower over others—like the Greeks with their 'pure beauty' you know—"

He stopped speaking suddenly and they walked on in silence while Marcella looked eagerly from shop window to passers-by and back again.

"It's all wrong, doctor," she said at last. "It's too one-sided."

"Yes. And look at the Greeks now—"

She turned to him with a quick, birdlike glance.

"Do you know what I think?" she said.

"Not quite all of it," said the doctor, watching her face, and thinking how incongruous it looked in Regent Street.

"Well, I think biology's one of the beasts we've to kill before God walks along us. So there! Tropical forests—maggots—women," she added, and the doctor laughed outright.

The chief impression she got of London was its aimlessness. It reminded her irresistibly of an ant-hill she had seen disturbed once. Myriads of tiny creatures had scurried passionately, exhaustingly, after each other to and fro, no whence and no whither; the people thronging out of shops and offices at dusk frightened her: there seemed so many of them, and, looking at their tired, strained faces and their unkingly way of hurrying along, uninterested and uninteresting save in getting to their destination, it seemed to her that they were not thinking of ever "towering": when Dr. Angus reminded her that they were so busy keeping alive that they had no time to think how and why they were alive at all, she was plunged into black depression; at home she had only had less than a hundred people and a few beasts about the farm to pity. Now it came to her with sudden force that all these people, so driven by different forces, were to be pitied. But as soon as she saw the crowd of people at Fenchurch Street station and a chalked notice, "Boat train for the R.M.S. Oriana," she forgot abstract worries.

There seemed to be a good many children, small groups of five or six with father and mother, and piles of inexpensive-looking luggage; there were several young men who looked very much like the lads who worked about the farm at home; there were groups of girls and a more or less heterogeneous collection of people who might be passengers, and might be friends seeing passengers off. But what impressed her immensely was a pile of brightly striped deck-chairs with sun-awnings. They looked exotic, tropical on the grey, gloomy platform; they seemed so pleasantly lazy and luxurious among the piles of utilitarian-looking luggage. The doctor bought one for her and put it among her baggage.