Captivity

It was a bare room, up three flights of stairs. Marcella watched while the men carried him in and laid him on the bed. Mrs. King seemed inclined to stay and gossip in whispers, but, after thanking her, and saying they would talk to-morrow, Marcella shut the door and locked it.

Then she looked round. There were three candles burning. With a little cry of superstitious fear she blew one out and pinched the wick. Through the two big windows she could see the ships in the harbour with rows of shining portholes: ferries were fussing to and fro like fiery water beetles. From the man-of-war she saw the winking Morse light signalling to the Heads. Trams clanged by in the distance; in a public-house near by men were singing and laughing. In the room Louis was snoring gustily. She turned from the open window and looked at him.

"There! I'm married to him now," she said, and looked from him round the room. The walls were whitewashed: there was a good deal of blue in the make-up of the whitewash, which gave the room a very cold impression. There was a text "God Bless Our Home," adorned with a painted garland of holly, over the door. Above the mantelpiece, which was bare save for the two candles, was a Pears' Annual picture—Landseer's "Lion and Lioness," fastened to the wall with tacks driven through little round buttons of scarlet flannel. There was a table covered with white oil-cloth on which stood a basin and jug and an old pink saucer. Two chairs leaned against the wall; one of them proved to have only three legs. A small mirror with mildew marks hung on the wall. Under one of the windows was a small table covered with a threadbare huckaback towel. The floor was bare except for a slice of brown carpet by the bed; Marcella liked the bare clean boards. They looked like the deck of a ship. She liked the room. Its clean bareness reminded her, a little, of rooms in the farm after the furniture had been sold.

Her baggage lay in a forlorn heap with Louis's, all jumbled together just as the Customs Officers had left it. Taking off her shoes she put on her bedroom slippers and began to move about quietly, unpacking things, hanging her frocks on a row of pegs in the alcove, for there was no cupboard of any description—putting some books on the mantelpiece, her toilet things on the table. She was doing things in a dream, but it was a dream into which outside things penetrated, for when she had arranged the table beneath the window as a dressing-table it occurred to her that it would have to be used for meals and she packed her things away on the shelf above the row of pegs. Quite unthinkingly she had accepted this place as home; after the tiny cabin it did not seem very small; she was too mentally anxious to feel actual disadvantages. It was days before the cramping influence of four walls made her stifle and gasp for breath.

She had a vague idea that Louis ought not to be wakened, but, looking at him, she saw that his neck was twisted uncomfortably and his collar cutting it. Raising him gently she tried to take his coat and collar off; he half wakened and made a weak motion as though to strike her. She noticed that his hands were very dirty.

"Louis, you're so uncomfortable," she whispered. "Let me help you undress and get into bed."

"Le' me lone," muttered Louis, lying heavily on her arm. "Aft' my blasted papers. Blast' German—even if you did play Marsh—laise! Marsh—laise! Marsh—shella!"

His voice rose in an insistence of terror and she laid her face against his soothingly.

Then she drew back, sickened by the smell of the various mixtures he had been drinking.

"Ugh—he is horrible," she whispered, and bit her lip and frowned.

Then his frightened eyes sought hers and she whispered softly.

"Poor boy. Don't be so frightened. Marcella is here."

"Marsh—Marcella," he said, making a desperate effort to sit up and look round. He looked at her, bewildered, at the room, and then his eyes focussed on the lion over the mantelpiece.

"Bri'sh line, ole girl! Shtrength! I'm a line—fi' f'r you when we're married."

"We are married, dear," she said. "Can't you remember it?"

He stared at her again and dragged himself on to his elbow, looking into her face, his brain clearing rapidly. After a moment's desperate grasping for light he burst into tears.

"Married! And drunk! Oh, my God, why did you give me that money, little girl?"

She was crying, too, now, holding his damp, sticky hand.

"I thought—if I trusted you—to-day—"

"You mustn't trust me. Oh, damn it all, I'm a chunk of jelly!"

"I thought—Oh Louis, if someone loved me and trusted me to make myself a musician, I'd do it somehow—and I've about as much music in me as a snail!" she cried passionately. "You know I trusted you! It seems to me that if you can't remember for ten minutes, and try to be kind the very hour we're married, the whole thing is hopeless—"

He was getting rapidly sobered by his sense of shame, and looked at her with swimming eyes. He struggled off the bed, lurched a little and nearly fell.

"Don't you see I'm not like you? We're intrinsically different. I might have been like you—once. It's too late now. If I'd been trusted before this thing gripped me so tight—Marcella, the thing that makes other people do hard things is missing in me! I've killed it by drinking and lying! I'm without moral sense, Marcella! Can't you see? I'm castrated in my mind! There's lots of people like that."

"I don't understand you, Louis," she said weakly. "And—and I haven't got a dictionary to look up things." He was not listening to her. He went on raving.

"You mustn't trust me! Do you hear? If a doctor got hold of me, he'd lock me up! And that would do no real good! Nobody wants to help a drunkard, nobody tells him how to get a hold on himself. They're barbarous to us—like they were to the lepers and the loonies in the Bible."

"I'm not barbarous, Louis. Oh, my dear, my dear—you know I'd do anything."

"No, but you're a fool and don't understand! Why can't some wise person do something for me? Marcella, you're a fool, I tell you. You don't know. You don't understand when I'm lying to you. God, why aren't you sharp enough—or dirty enough yourself—to see that I'm brain and bone, a liar? You didn't know that I was drinking champagne at lunch to-day, did you? Violet would have known! You didn't know I'd two flasks of whisky in my pockets, and kept getting rid of you a minute to have a swig, did you? If only you were a liar yourself, you'd understand that I was!"

She sat back against the foot of the bed, feeling as though all her bones had melted away.

"Then what am I to do?" she said weakly, letting her hands drop. "I've no one to tell me but you."

"And I lie to you! God knows what we're going to do. I've lied again about the money. I never wrote and told the Pater be damned to his money! There'll be two weeks waiting for me at the G.P.O. now. Why did you believe me?"

"Louis—listen to me. I thought you were giving yourself a bad name and hanging yourself. I thought if you sponged out all thought of drink from your mind you'd be cured."

There was a gloomy silence. At last he burst out impatiently.

"Why aren't women taught elementary psychology before they get married? That is very good treatment for anyone who has a scrap of moral fibre in him. But I haven't. It won't work with me. You mustn't trust me. I'm a man with a castrated soul, Marcella. I've killed the active part of me by drinking and lying and slacking. You've got to treat me like a kid or a lunatic. I am one, really—there, don't look frightened, but it's true—Listen, old girl. Keep me locked up. I mean it, seriously. If I can be forcibly kept off the blasted stuff I'll get some sort of perspective. Now everything looks wobbly to me. Then, when I've got the drink out, you've to graft something on to me. Why in hell's name didn't I marry a girl who knew medicine? Don't you know that if a great chunk of skin is burnt off anyone, more is grafted on?"

She nodded, her eyes wide with terror.

"Well, I'm telling you this now honestly. Presently I'll be lying again. Marcella, I've to have will-power grafted on to me, and until I have, I'm going to stay in bed. See?"

He was fumbling for his keys in his pockets. He gave them to her with trembling hands. There was a flask of whisky untouched in his pocket, and two empty ones. He threw them through the window regardless of passers-by.

"Get out of here, Marcella, or look through the window a bit. I'm going to get undressed and lock up all my things. I'm a filthy object. You mustn't look at me till I've cleaned myself up. Then you must see that I stay in bed till this hunger goes off. If I do that every time it comes on—Lord, you always make me feel I want to wash myself in something very big and clean, like the sea."

She turned to the glimmering window, feeling very humble. She felt that she had let him down, somehow, in not being more wise. And yet she knew very certainly that she was going to grope and grope now, hurting herself and him until she did know.

"Why am I such a fool?" she asked, helplessly. The Morse lights winked at her from the flagship and she got back the memory of a night many years ago, when she had walked on Ben Grief with her mother just before she was too ill to walk out any more. They had seen a ship winking so that night, far out at sea, and it had passed silently. That night her mother had talked of God's Fools and how they were the world's wisest men.

"If you are not very wise, darling," her mother had said, "God has a chance to use you better. It is so very hard for clever people to do things for God, humbly—which is the only way—because they are egotists wanting to show their own cleverness and not His all the time."

That night she had told Marcella the story of Parsifal, the "pure fool" and how he, too big a fool to know his own name properly, had come to the court of the king who was too ill to do anything, God's work or man's.

"You see, this king had been given the sacred Spear. So long as he had it no enemy could hurt him or his kingdom. But when he forgot, and pleased himself just for a moment, the enemy got the Spear and wounded him with it. No one could cure him till poor Parsifal came along—a poor simpleton who had been brought up in the desert. And the only reason he could win back the Spear, and cure the king, and bring back the symbol of God's Presence on earth again, was that he was so sorry for the king. He wanted so much to heal him that, whenever he got tired and sick, and whenever he got into temptations he was able to conquer them. It was his pity made him conquer where wiser people, more selfish and less loving, had failed."

Marcella let the far-off, gentle voice sink into her mind, then. She saw herself very consciously as Parsifal; he, too, had been a fool. She felt she could take heart of grace from the fact that another fool had won through to healing and victory. When, presently, Louis's voice came to her, she turned with a swift vision of him as King Amfortas with the unstaunchable wound.

He had washed and brushed his hair, and changed into pyjamas. He looked very pitiful, very ill. He was standing in the middle of the room with the two candles flicking in the light night breeze, making leaping shadows of him all over the walls.

"My head's damn bad," he groaned. "It feels as if it's going to burst."

He swayed and almost fell. She helped him over to the bed. He sunk on it with a sigh of relief.

"I feel damn bad," he said again, and burst into tears.

"Don't cry, Louis. I'm going to make you better now," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and stroking his damp hair gently.

"Light me a cig-rette—light me a cig-rette," he said, rapidly, shaking his hands impatiently. "In my coat—find my cigarette-holder. Be quick—be quick—There, I'm sorry, old girl. I felt so jumpy then. It seems as if there are faces watching me. Marcella—I'm sure there are Chinks about."

"You're quite safe with Marcella," she said, soothingly, as if she were speaking to a child. He puffed at the cigarette but his hands shook so much that she had to hold it for him. It soothed him considerably. She registered that fact for future reference. Presently he threw the cigarette across the room into the grate and turned over.

"Lord, I'm tired. Not had a decent night's sleep for centuries. Those damn bunks on the Oriana were so hard! Marcella—I want to go to sleep. If I don't get some sleep I shall go mad. Let me put my poor old head on your shoulder and go to sleep. I—dream—of your—white shoulders."

She sat quite still, trembling a little until his heavy breathing told her that he was asleep. His hair, which he had soaked in water to make it lie straight, felt wet and cold on her neck. After a long while she laid his head on the pillow and stood up, stretching herself because she was so stiff.

"Don't leave me," he murmured, without opening his eyes. She laid a cool hand on his head again. When she took it away he was fast asleep. She stood with her hands clasped behind her, watching him for a long time. Then she turned away with a sigh, to gaze through the window, trying to locate her position by the stars, only to be puzzled until she remembered that, for the last three weeks, the stars had been different from those that kept their courses above Lashnagar. She would not have felt so lonely had she been able to turn towards home as a Mahommedan turns towards Mecca. After awhile, chilled and hungry and aching in her throat, she turned back into the room.

"Being married is horrible," she whispered. "I thought it was such an adventure."

Going across to the bed she stood looking at him, her eyes filled with tears and, bending over him, she touched his forehead with her lips.

"Oh, my dear, my dear," she whispered. "I wish you weren't drunk."

He stirred, and his hand made a little, ineffectual movement towards her, and dropped again.

Something in its weakness, its inadequacy, made her impatient; she felt it impossible to come near to anything so ineffectual as that futile hand and, taking the pillow from the other side of the bed, laid it on the floor. She started to undress and stopped sharp.

"I can't get in my nightgown—in case he wakes up and sees me," she said. A moment later, rolled in her old plaid travelling rug she lay on the floor. It did not seem uncomfortable; it did not seem an extraordinary thing to her for a girl to go to sleep on the floor; she had her father to thank for immunity from small physical discomforts.

Marcella was wakened several times during the night; she was cold and stiff, but only apprehended her discomfort vaguely as she listened to Louis muttering—mostly in French. Each time she spoke softly to him as she used to speak to her father when he was ill. To her he suddenly became an invalid; as the days went on she accepted the role of mother and nurse to him; only occasionally did a more normal love flame out, bewildering and enchanting as his kisses on the Oriana had enchanted and bewildered her. She felt, often, contemptuous of a man who had to stay in bed and have his clothes locked up to save him from getting drunk; at the same time she admired him for attempting so drastic a cure. It was a wholly delightful experience to her to have money and spend it on buying things for him; she would, at this time, have been unrecognizable to Dr. Angus and Wullie; they would never have seen their rather dreamy, very boy-like, almost unembodied Marcella of Lashnagar in the Marcella of Sydney, with her alternate brooding maternal tenderness that guarded him as a baby, or with the melting softness of suddenly released passion. All her life she had been "saved up," dammed back, save for her inarticulate adoration of her mother, her heart-rending love of her father and her comradeship with Wullie and the doctor. Louis had opened the lock gates of her love and got the full sweep of the flood. But he gave nothing in return save the appeal of weakness, the rather disillusioning charm of discovery and novelty.

For the first few weeks in Sydney she walked in an aura of passion strangely blended of the physical and the spiritual. She knew nothing about men; what she had seen on the ship made her class them as nuisances to be put in the sea out of hand. Her father was the only man she had known intimately before. Her father had been a weak man, and yet a tyrant and an autocrat. Logically, then, all men were tyrants and autocrats. The women in Sydney whom she saw in Mrs. King's kitchen, where she went to learn how to cook, talked much of their husbands, calling them "boss." Hence she meekly accepted Louis's autocratic orderings of her coming and going. Again, her father had been gripped, in the tentacles first of the whisky-cult, and later of the God-cult. Therefore, she reasoned, all men were so gripped by something. It was a pity that they were so gripped. It seemed to her that women must have been created to be soft cushions for men to fall upon, props to keep them up, nurses to minister to their weakness. She slowly came to realize that the age of heroes was dead—if it had ever been, outside the covers of story-books. It seemed that Siegfried no longer lived to slay dragons, that Andromeda would have to buckle on armour, slip her bonds and save her Perseus when he got into no end of entanglements on his way to rescue her. By degrees she came to think that men were children, to be humoured by being called "boss" or "hero" as the case may be. Reading the extraordinary assortment of books sent to her by the doctor, as time went on, it seemed to her that John the Baptist of to-day had gone aside from making straight the pathway of the Lord to lie in the tangles of Salome's hair. In all the great names she read there seemed to be a kink; some of them were under a cloud of drugs or drink; de Quincey hurt her terribly; sitting one day on the side of Louis's bed reading "John Barleycorn"—she had discovered Jack London in the "Cruise of the Snark" and loved his fine adventurousness—she felt that she could not bear to know a thing so fine, so joyous and so dashing as he should have so miserable a neurosis.

Dr. Angus, among other things, sent her Kraill's Lendicott Trust Autumn lectures in the form of six little grey covered pamphlets. They were much coloured by recent inspiring German and American sex psychology. But she did not know that. She thought that they began, continued and ended in Kraill and, though she fell down in adoration before his uncanny wisdom, his cynicism made her miserable. They showed her humanity in chains; particularly did they show her man in chains; she read them all—six of them—in one afternoon and evening; students and trained scientists had taken them in doses of one a fortnight. Naturally she got mental indigestion that was not helped by the fact that, six to a dozen times on every page, she had to find the meaning of words in a dictionary she had bought to look up the meaning of Louis's remark the first night they were married. He was amused and tolerant about the dictionary. He seemed to think girls need not trouble to understand what they read. He was particularly superior about "little girls trying to take strong meat when they were at the milk-for-babes stage of development."

"But you know, Louis," she said, looking up from her pamphlet with a perplexed frown, "He seems to think that if a man wants a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter, it's sex!"

"Well, so it is," said Louis calmly, puffing at his cigarette and watching her through the smoke. "Every hunger on earth is sex, right at bottom—every desire is generated by the sex force; drinking, love of parents and children, love of God, the artist's desire for beauty and to create beauty—just sex, old lady!"

He laughed at her horrified face.

"And you're such a bally little Puritan you think that's terrible, don't you?"

She nodded, flushing.

"You aren't a Puritan, really, Marcella," he said, watching her face. "It's your upbringing has made you a Puritan."

"Louis," she burst out, "I'd rather be a Puritan, I think—and be all dead and dried up like Aunt Janet, than—than—what you call bowled over. I'd loathe that anything should have me; put me in chains; make me do things! Louis—" her voice dropped to a meek whisper, "it isn't that—that—beastly sort of thing makes me love you, is it? Makes me love to buy flowers and books for you, and make food for you, and be near you? Louis—just because you're a man and I'm a girl?"

"Of course it is, you little silly," he said complacently.

"Then I won't!" she cried hotly. "I won't do a thing because something inside me, over which I have no control, says I've got to! I hate it! It's a chain—I'm—a thing with a will, not just a bundle of instincts."

He looked at her queerly, laughed a little and said nothing. She got the terrible idea that he knew more than she did, that something was weaving a net which all the while she thought was beautiful devotion when it was really something that was getting entangled in her arms and legs so that she could not move as she wished.

"I resent it!" she cried, suddenly, starting up as though she would push the wall through and escape into the street. "I can't bear chains, Louis."

"Then commit suicide," he said, stretching his hand out to her. "Even then some of these mad psychics say that that doesn't kill the thing you're escaping from. They say you die with an appetite and are so earthbound that you come to life again with it still about you. Lord, if I died now I'd come back and be the bung of a whisky barrel—and you—"

"Louis, don't," she cried, staring up wildly. "It's beastly. Oh it's better not to understand anything at all! Do you know, I believe lots of people who stop to think resent these tyrannies of the body, only they don't mention it because it's the sort of thing that makes people blush! In this last lecture Professor Kraill says the same thing you told me once."

"Considering I've already told you quite a million things—" he began in the tone one uses to a child. She broke in passionately, turning the pages of Number Six of the Lendicott Lectures swiftly.

"Listen. This is what he says."

"We are loaded with sex and sex tradition, which the body and its burdens have imposed upon humanity. Poets have written and dreamed of the delights of wine, woman and song; priests and prophets have written and thundered and dreamed of the world, the flesh and the devil. It is only a difference of terminology. Poet, artist, priest and anchorite alike thought all the time of the tyranny of the body until it became a million-horse-power steam hammer crushing out his microscopic pin-head of a soul. To man, woman is still the siren tradition made her; she likes to be. She likes to think hers is 'the face that launched a thousand ships and fired the topless towers of Ilium.' She insists that man shall set out on his high adventure in quest of her. But he is beginning to see through her. He has her fate in the test-tube of his scientific laboratories to-day. She has refused to join him as a comrade in armour; she has preferred to remain the vehicle of reproduction, the prize of his play-times, his allurement, his passenger. Then let her remain so. Man is going to keep her under. Think what has been done in plastic surgery, what is being done in what I call plastic psychology! Think what selection has done in the breeding of lower forms of life. And then let woman tremble! If she is perpetually going to chain man in the meshes of her hair, the curves of her fingers, he is going to get rid of her—except as a thing for pleasure and for use. Most of the time he hugs his chains. One day he will get clear vision, realize that woman has got too much for him and—limit her! It is, to some extent, being done unconsciously already. Why is it a disgrace to be the mother of a girl-child in certain Oriental countries? Why do they drown girl-babies in the Ganges? It is simply that they realize the danger of this softness, this overlordship of women! Clearer thinking than we, they see the menace of femininity. We of the West will soon see that woman has been the passenger in the rather frail life-boat of the world. And in self defence we shall put her overboard before long—unless—unless—she takes an oar."

"Lord, he does lap into them, doesn't he?" said Louis, gleefully.

She frowned and pondered.

"I think you are ungenerous, all of you," she said softly. "Men seem such unbalanced children to me. Wanting to put women overboard."

She looked at Louis, and they both broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter as they recalled that that was exactly what she had literally done with an annoying man.

"Perhaps we're all ungenerous," she said presently. "I believe we are ungenerous towards the thing that chains us. It's only natural. But I don't think that you or the author of 'John Barleycorn' or poor de Quincey ought really to put drugs and drink and all that out of the world at all. You ought to live with them in the world, and not let them chain you. Don't you think so? And—poor Professor Kraill! Isn't he wistful about the stuffiness of women's hair? Oh Louis, do you know what it reminds me of?"

He lit a cigarette, watching her with amused tolerance.

"Knollys put a horrible sticky fly-paper in the stewards' pantry one day. I was looking at it, and wishing flies needn't be made at all. Then I wished I could let the poor things all loose, no matter how horrible they are. There was one big bluebottle that had got stuck there on his back with his wings in the sticky stuff. He struggled and struggled till—Oh, horrible!—his wings came off. Then he crawled and crawled, over other dead flies till he got to the edge of the paper. And he went all wobbly and horrible because nearly all his legs had got pulled off."

"Lord, what a mind you've got!" he said.

"Can't you see that's how people are—most of them. Oh, poor things! If I'd stopped to think I'd have been sorry for Ole Fred instead of putting him in the sea for the sharks."

He looked at her amusedly again, and then at the kettle boiling on the little spirit-stove.

"I say, old lady, theories are all very nice—after tea," he suggested.

"Oh, is it tea time?" she said, with a little sigh. Then, brightening, she hummed a little tune all wrong as she cut bread and butter, laid a little spray of bush roses round his plate and went down to the kitchen to ask Mrs. King's advice about what treatment she could give to eggs to make them nicer than usual for him.

At the door she turned back.

"You know, Louis—they've such lovely, shining wings—all beautiful colours—"

"What?" he said. He had already dismissed the "silly little girl's" arguments from his mind.

"I'm thinking about people and bluebottles! Lovely iridescent wings all sploshed down in sticky stuff. And swift legs—it seems such a pity to cripple them so that they can't fly or run."

"I do so want my tea," he said, pretending to groan.

She ran down the stairs with a laugh.

That day she discovered the possibilities of the roof.

At the end of the landing on which their big top room opened was a short iron ladder. She decided to explore and, climbing up the iron ladder, pushed up the trapdoor. A cry of delight escaped her as she thrust her head through the opening. It was a great, flat roof, separated from the next ones by low copings of stone work, flat topped and about two feet high. The town, as she climbed out and stood on the roof, lay beneath her like a plan. People looked like flies in the streets, the tramcars like accelerated caterpillars. The water of the harbour was still and smooth and as incredibly blue as the water she had seen Mrs. King using in her laundry work that morning. Wharves or trees ran right down into the blueness. The big ships lying at anchor made her heart beat fast with their clean beauty and romance; the bare, clean roofs running along for perhaps fifty houses gave her a breath of freedom that brought back Lashnagar and Ben Grief. She thought, with a pang of pity, about Louis, the product of suburban London, chained to streets and houses almost all his boyhood, knowing nothing of the scourge of the winds, the courage of wide, high places. She tumbled down the ladder, her eyes bright.

"Louis—Oh Louis, come up on the roof! It's perfectly beautiful! I've been so worried about you shut up here like this, and I've felt so choked myself with this one room. But up there I'll make you shut your eyes, and I'll tell you all about Ben Grief, and you'll think you're there. I'll make you hear the curlews and the gulls and see Jock and Tammas come in with the boats."

"But on the roof!" he protested. "Whatever next?"

"Oh, come and see. You'll love it," she urged and, though he said it was "a beastly fag," she got him at last into his dressing-gown and slippers and sitting beside her on the coping.

She was happier than she had been for months; she felt that there was enough breath up here for her, and not even his laughing at her for being "such a kid" could damp her enjoyment. Presently a new idea occurred to her.

"Let's sleep up here!" she cried, and once again over-ruled his objections, and dragged up the mattress and blankets.

The shadows of the chimneys were long across the roofs as she laid the mattress down by the coping. The day had been hot with the clear, bright heat of early summer. They sat on the mattress, smoking—an accomplishment Marcella had learnt from him and practised rather tentatively. She talked to him of Lashnagar, pouring into his ears legend after legend of her people, until she came to the tale of the spaewife and the coming of the ruin upon Lashnagar.

"Do you mean to have the cheek to say this is an ancestor of yours?" he asked as, with glowing eyes and quickened breaths, she told him of the twins born on Flodden Field and wrapt in their foemen's trappings. Had he been less self-centred he could not have tried to hurt her by making fun of her legends.

"Yes. She is my great, great, goodness knows how great grandmother. I'm rather proud of her, but she takes some living up to. I often feel I disappoint her. But if ever I feel flabby or lazy or tired of hard things I switch my mind on to her. Fancy her, sick and weak, tramping after her man to the battle, and then leaving him dead as she took his heirs and his shattered pennant back to the ruins of his home. I feel ashamed of myself for ever daring to think I'm ill-used when I think of my spaewife grandmother! We're not brave and hard like that now—But I'd rather like to get her here to settle you and people who talk about 'limiting' women. She wasn't much of a passenger."

"Oh, that witch story comes in lots of mythologies, and old family histories!" he said, teasingly. "I don't suppose she ever existed at all, really, or if she did it was because she'd been tarred and feathered and took refuge at that out of the world show because she was afraid of being burnt."

"Afraid!" she cried, and began to tingle all over just as she had tingled when Mactavish played the pipes at her father's funeral. Just for an instant she wanted to push Louis over the roof, hear him smash far below on the street for daring to say the spaewife was afraid. Then, just as swiftly, she remembered that he was weak and must not be annoyed because he could not stand it. It came to her in a flash how impossible it was for him, with no pride but self-love, no courage but Dutch courage, to understand fearlessness and endurance. Her tingling smart of madness and anger passed, leaving her penitent and pitying. She put her arm round his neck and kissed him behind his ear. He, not knowing the swift processes of her thought, imagined that he had "knocked a bit of the silliness out of her" effectively.

"Poor little boy," she whispered, and he liked it.

The waters of the harbour began to deepen to indigo: the sun went down behind the roofs of the city at their side. There was a faint faraway crackling in the air as of straw and twigs burning in a fierce fire; the sky was flooded with streamers of mauve and green, gold and rosy light that flickered over the bed of the sinking sun for an hour or more instead of leaving the sky suddenly grey as it usually was after the rapid twilight. The sundown bugle called down the flag on the masthead of the flagship, and the headlights twinkled out. Marcella and Louis grew very quiet as the streets quietened and only an occasional car clanged by in George Street, an occasional band of singing sailors went back rollicking down the street, a solitary ferry glided along in the water, with brilliant reflections and blaring German band. She crept a little closer to him; when he did not speak she forgot, for the while, the chasm between them. It is so easy not to criticize anything seen through veils of glamour. People socially, spiritually and mentally worlds apart can love violently for a while when there is physical attraction. And they are very happy, breathlessly, feverishly happy. Then they wake up with a memory of mutual giving-way that embitters and humiliates when the inevitable longing for something more stable than softness and breathlessness sets in.

Louis had not been drunk for three weeks; so many things had happened to her, new things, charming things, adorable things and sad things since they left the ship that she had almost sponged the memory of it from her mind. The faculty that had been forced upon her in self defence during her childhood, of forgetting hunger, hardness and repression the moment she left the house and got out on to the wild hillside in the sun and the wind came to her now with a kind of rapture. She had never, in her childhood, dared to resent anything that hurt herself. This spirit of non-resentment had become a habit of mind with her. She forgot—if she ever realized—that Louis had hurt her, in the soft beauty of the aurora, the silent fall of the night, the exhilaration of the roof with its loneliness, its romance.

After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and granadillas, and four candles. Louis looked disappointed: he would have preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted them. They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.

It was the setting of romance. Dreams, play-acting came back. Breaking off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said:

"This is a roof garden in Babylon. You're a king. Oh no, it's Jerusalem. I'm Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you're King David. You've got to fall in love with me."

Louis was too self-centred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him: he had never, consciously, loved anything on earth: his desperate pleadings with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker rather than for a lover. His gross suggestions when he was drunk—the relics of his boyish first sex adventure—she did not understand. Nor did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears; why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes. Had Louis not roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical passion which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning, bewildered self-analysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies. She did not realize that all her dreams of a splendid Lover had become mixed up with the family legend about "taking the man she needed" and had crystallized round Louis, the first man to waken physical passion for her.

In a warm rapture up here on the house-top in the still night air her conscious mind went to sleep; she lived her dreams. And Louis did not understand; out of the reach of temptation for three weeks, he felt very strong; her tenderness, her passionate love flattered him: he became a very fine fellow indeed in his own eyes as he lay there, half asleep, under the silver and purple of the midnight sky. He must be a very fine fellow—so he argued—if she could love him. She had won his reluctant admiration long before she had wakened his love.

"She's a queer stick," he told himself drowsily, "and a perfect darling. Lord, the way she shook the life out of me that night at Naples! Just because I mentioned her bally old father. I believe—I really believe, in spite of her being in the steerage—that she's pretty well born! And the way she stuck Ole Fred in the water without turning a hair. And got fifty quid out of her uncle as easy as falling off a log! Lord, I've never raised more than a fiver out of an uncle in my life—and that on a birthday."

He felt for her hand and held it drowsily. It was a very cool, hard hand—not in the least like Violet's pretty little product of creams and manicure.

"She's some girl," he thought. "And what a blazing wonder that she'll look at me. Yet I can twist her round my little finger—on occasions like to-night."

By a very humanly understandable metempsychosis she became just a little less shining because more reachable; some of her shine transferred to him. His conception of the whole thing was physical; hers was not consciously physical at all. But as she lay, long after he was asleep, watching the candles fade one by one, leaving a fainter purple in the sky, she felt vaguely disappointed; all this business of love-making seemed to mean so much less to Louis than it did to her; he did not take it seriously, or rather he did not make it the high feast she found it. He could be flippant about it. For her it broke down every barrier, every reservation. Louis was able to come down immediately from ecstasy to everyday things. This, she argued, meant that he had not flown so very high after all. He was able to make a laughing, half-embarrassed remark to the effect that he hoped no one else was on the roofs round about. She would not have cared if everyone in Sydney was on the roofs. For her no one existed just then but Louis. That had jarred a little. Then there were no more cigarettes and he had, quite petulantly, complained of the trouble of going down into the room for a new tin. She had gone cheerfully, as she would have fetched things for her father. She did not realize that, by waiting on his whims, she was lowering herself in his esteem. He had taken the cigarettes without a word of thanks. It was only when she lay awake for hours afterwards, with a vague discomfort that was certainly not physical, that she remembered and was amazed that he could have remembered cigarettes just then. It did not square at all with her Lover dream. And the Southern Cross as she lay with unblinking eyes staring into the great, still dome above her, was disappointing. She had heard so much about it; she had thought it would be a group of flaming suns in the night sky. And its separate pointers were not even so big and bright as Venus. She felt, somehow, that she had been cheated a little; and immediately told herself that it was not so really—either she had expected too much, or else she was not clever enough to see what was really there all the time.

She did not go to sleep all the night. It was at four o'clock that she crept quietly from underneath the blankets and sat on the coping, perilously near the edge of the outer wall, with the dawn wind from the sea blowing deliciously cold through her thin nightgown. Daybreak came like the rolling up of a blind; thoughts and memories chased each other in her mind. She looked across at Louis, fast asleep. Her impulse told her to waken and ask him to kiss her good morning. And then she stopped dead. Her feet were carrying her, very uncomfortably, over the rusted corrugated iron of the roof towards him. Her brain signalled to them to stop, and they would not! She felt herself being carried by them quite against her will, and in another moment she knew that her lips would be on his eyes, kissing him to waken him. And at that moment her foot caught on a nail that the weathering of the iron had exposed. She gave a little, repressed cry of pain and saw her foot bleeding.

She sat down exactly where she was; her foot went on bleeding, but she did not notice it. The slight pain had done its work in jerking her to an awareness of her body.

"Oh, my goodness," she said out aloud, "I'm caught! I'm chained! Louis was right when he said I didn't understand about these hungers. Oh, my goodness, it's like Louis's feet take him to a whisky bottle. My feet were simply coolly walking me off to waken him up."

She sat motionless, scarcely breathing. Her heart began to thump unpleasantly and she felt a flush tingling down to her feet and to the tips of her fingers.

"If I hadn't torn my foot then I'd have given way to that blaze—and each time you give way to a thing it chains you a bit more! I'd never have had a chance to sit cool and think it out, because I'd have forgotten, before I knew where I was, that it needed thinking out at all. I'd have wakened him by now."

This jerked her, wakened her, widened her. Swiftly she was able to see that Louis, on his whisky chase, de Quincy on his opium chase, King David, Solomon, Nelson, Byron and Kraill on their woman chase were not perhaps so fortunate as to get a nail jabbed in their feet, pulling them up sharp and giving them time to think.

"There I've been blaming them a bit—pitying them a lot! Heavens, I was superior!" she said.

The sun came up out of the sea and looked at her.

"Because I didn't know," she told it. "I was superior! Because I'd never felt the pull of a chain."

She thought the sun took on a horribly knowing, superior expression.

Another rather shaking thought came. Since her recollection of the blameless fool that first night in Sydney she had sought the bookshops for the text of "Parsifal" and had found it, a ragged copy for twopence, in a second-hand bookshop near the station. She had been puzzled when Parsifal, trying to free himself from the enchantment of the witch-woman's embrace, had suddenly been confronted by her exultant:

"And so then, with my kiss,
The world's heart have I shewn thee?
In my soft arms enfolded
Like to a god thou'llt deem thee."

"Yes, that's it," she cried. "Oh, you old sun, listen to the speciousness of it all! Listen—I mustn't let Louis hear, because he'd be hurt. He isn't my Lover, my Knight at all. He's just the same thing to me as women used to be to the Knights—he's something to rescue, to deliver from bondage. And—just like those beautiful, soft women, he's—he's a sort of seduction to me. Oh—it's horrible!"

She waited a minute tensely. Thought always came to her in flashes.

"And so are all men. They're all in bondage."

The sun seemed to have a big, fat, knowing face. One of his eyes winked at her.

"Here am I getting myself into a chain that's going to drag at me every time I'm fighting for him. This—this softness, this love-making and all the thrill of it—it's going to make holes in my armour and stuff them up with—crêpe de Chine!"

She had seen crêpe de Chine yesterday for the first time; Mrs. King was making a blouse of it. Marcella had loved its fine sheen and delicacy. But it did not seem much use as armour.

"Here's this thing happened to wake me up, give me insight. There is the plausibleness of it, the temptation of it. I know last night taught me things, millions of things. It promises to teach me more each time it's repeated. And each time it's repeated I get more and more crêpe de Chine patches on my armour. I get bowled over like a ninepin. How am I to know I'll not be permanently bowled over—till I get—like—like—" A long line of those people she had pitied for their weakness came to her. "I nearly was this morning. If it hadn't been for that nice kind nail in the roof! Wagner knew all about this when he made the witch-woman realize that her kiss had unlocked all the world's wisdom for the fool. And one can't help wondering how it is that a thing so natural and beautiful can be bad for one—"

She began to bite her thumb-nail fiercely and stopped, disgusted with herself, as she realized how she had often condemned Louis for exactly the same habit when he got perplexed.

"You see!" she told the sun desperately, "even a little thing like that! I do think we're censorious and cruel to each other."

She began to walk about the roof. Her foot was bleeding neglected; at every step she left a little, red print unnoticed.

"Of course it's natural and beautiful—and abominably instructive! Where the wrong comes in is that it gets you down, beats you, takes hold of you. Eating bread would be wrong if you made an orgy of it. So would religion, or anything. All this time I've been posing as something so splendid, wanting to save Louis from Drink; I've been deceiving myself. I've been in love with him. And it's the sort of love that would soon degenerate into an orgy—if I let it!"

She felt that she was so full of ideas that she was getting muddled, but one thing was very clear.

"I wonder if that queer remark in Genesis, 'Adam knew Eve, his wife,' means this strange understanding that has happened to me to-night? I've often been puzzled by what it could mean. Did it mean that he became aware, in a flash as I did, of what this sex business might mean in his life—how it might be a chain to him as it has been to so many people? It's queer—it's like waking up from a dream that's been over you all your life, and suddenly seeing things very clear. I see them clear now." She looked out across the shining sea. "Either it can be a chain, or it can be a Spear of Deliverance as it was to Parsifal."

She looked from the sea to Louis, unconscious, untroubled by problems now that she had taken his burdens upon herself. She realized that she had even more battles to fight now. She had her own; there was an enemy within her own camp. Even as she stood there watching him her nails gripped the stone coping fiercely because half of her was wanting last night's tornado back again.

"No, I won't put up with chains. I'll carry a Spear," she said, and tumbled down the ladder to dress ... tumbled because her feet were unsteady.

As she was dressing she became aware of sounds of violent scrubbing going on in the next room—she had often heard such sounds almost before dawn. She had noticed, too, the almost painful cleanliness of the rather bare, big house. She knew that no servants were kept; she never saw Mrs. King scrubbing; most of her time was spent in cooking and washing clothes. Mr. King had never, yet, put in an appearance.

Presently the scrubbing stopped and shambling steps came along the landing as someone slopped along, dragging his slippers into which he had merely thrust his toes. There was a scratching sort of tap at the door. Marcella opened it quickly.

A man stood in the doorway, a man with bent shoulders, grey hair and bent back. His face was yellow and unhealthy-looking; his eyes were filmed and colourless. He seemed half asleep as he looked round over his shoulder suspiciously.

"Missus—have you got a tray bit?" he whispered.

"What's that?" she asked.

"A tray bit, missus—just thruppence—a mouldy thruppence to get a livener."

"Oh, you want some money?" she said hurriedly, and realizing the impossibility of offering a grown up man threepence gave him half a crown. He shambled off without a word and she saw no more of him. Later, when Louis came down from the roof, he slid along the landing on the soap the scrubber had left there. When Marcella went down to the kitchen where Mrs. King was already busy ironing, the mystery was explained.

"My boss has gone off for the day," she complained. "I went up into Dutch Frank's room just now, and found the pail of water left there! He'd hardly begun his scrubbing. I don't know where he got his money from."

"Was that your husband?" cried Marcella, stopping short in her toast-making.

"Oh, he's bin at you, has he?" said Mrs. King resignedly.

"I gave him—a little money. I didn't know he was your husband," said Marcella apologetically.

"I ought to have warned you, but there, you can't think of every blooming thing at once. Don't you worry, kid. I'm not blaming you. He would have been at you sooner or later. It's all the same in the long run, but it means I've got to scrub the floors. And my back's that bad—I do suffer with my back something cruel."

"Where has he gone, then?"

"Oh, beer-bumming. He goes off every day, and comes in every night after closing time, shikkered up."

"I've never seen him before," ventured Marcella.

"He's a lad, Bob is. We had a bonser hotel once, kid—a tied house, you know. He was manager, on'y he drunk us out of it. So then I took on this place on my own—got the furniture hire system, else he'd raise money on it, and sell it up under me. He's no damn good to me, you know, kid—only I do manage to get a bit of scrubbing out of him, of a morning."

"Does he scrub floors?" asked Marcella in awestruck tones.

"It's all he's good for. He never earns a penny. He goes and tacks on to any fellow he sees looking a bit flushed with money and boozes with him all day. He often meets a fellow that knew us when we had the hotel, and he gets a beer or two out of him."

"Oh, I am sorry, Mrs. King," began Marcella, but Mrs. King laughed a little harshly.

"I don't mind so much now, kid—got past it. So long as my back don't trouble me too much. The boys are very good to me—they put him to bed if he's dead drunk. If he isn't dead drunk I won't sleep with him, because he's always forward and vulgar when he's only half there. Then he haves to sleep on the sofa in the dining-room. Next day he gets up and cleans the grates and scrubs for me. If he didn't he wouldn't get any money out of me—and well he knows it."

"But do you give him money for drink?"

"Yes. But not till he's done his scrubbing. You see, being in the hotel business all his life, he can't get started of a morning till he's had a dog's hair. So he'll scrub all three storeys down for thruppence. When he's had one drink, and is safe inside a hotel, he's got sauce enough to raise drinks out of anyone. But you know, whenever there's a new chum about that he can get thruppence out of, it's poor Ma for the scrubbing. And my back's just as bad as bad can be!"

The fire was not very bright. Marcella wished Louis's chops would cook more quickly. She wanted to get upstairs.

"It's dreadful being married to a man like that," said Marcella.

"It is," said Mrs. King, planting her iron viciously on Mr. King's shirt that she was ironing. "I used to try to stop him once. Only you get disheartened in time, don't you, kid? The times I've started a new home and had it sold up under me! Six homes I've had and this is the seventh. And the times I've trusted him, only to get laughed at for being a soft. Now all I do is to feel damn glad to get him off my hands for the day. We've made that a hard and fast rule. I'll do for him, and give him a meal of a Sunday when the hotels are closed and see to his washing, and let him sleep in my bed when he's drunk enough not to get vulgar. In return he does the scrubbing and the grates, and I find him in liveners—"

"Oh, my goodness—do you love him?" asked Marcella, staring at her.

It was Mrs. King's turn to stare.

Then she laughed loudly, a little hysterically, until tears came into her eyes as she stood with her iron poised.

"Love him? By cripes, no! I'd as soon think of loving one of them bugs the Dagoes leave in your bed when they have a room for the night."

"Why did you marry him, then?"

Mrs. King put down her iron and stared out through the door into the sun-baked courtyard where washing flapped and bleached and hens scratched in the dust. It seemed as though she had never thought about it before.

"I suppose I married him for the same reason as you married your chap, kid. I suppose I was took with him, once."

Marcella gathered her plates and teapot on the tray and stood at the door for an instant, visioning last night's glamour ending in loathing, or in dull acceptance of misery and disappointment.

"I do feel sorry, Mrs. King," she said, her eyes damp.

"I'm sorrier for you, kid," said Mrs. King, attacking the shirt again. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"And I'm nearly forty-nine. I've got through thirty years of my misery, and you've all yours to come. I've learnt not to care. I go and have a bit of a splash at the Races when I'm pretty flush with money, and I have a glass or two of port with the boys sometimes, and get a laugh out of it. You've got to learn these things yet, poor little devil. But don't you make the mistake I made and be too soft with him."

Marcella shook her head.

"And—I say, kid. I go down on my bended knees every day and thank God I've got no kids of his—"

"I think it's a pity. You must be so cold and lonely," she said, seeing a resemblance between Mrs. King and Aunt Janet.

She had made the bed before she went down to cook the breakfast. Louis was reading the paper and smoking, looking very well. She hated to see him in bed now.

He ate his breakfast in silence, with the paper propped in front of him. She pushed the window wide and, perched on the window-sill with a cup of tea outside and a piece of toast in her hand, she decided on what she was going to say to him.

"Louis," she said at last, "I am a wretchedly dissatisfied sort of person, dear."

He looked at her enquiringly and smiled.

"Louis, can you get up to-day and come out with me?"

He hesitated for a moment. Then he sighed.

"My dear—I don't think it's safe," he said in a low voice.

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Well, then, it isn't. But I hate to see you lying here like this. I want us to go and explore. In that big garden by the waterside it's gorgeous. And—there's your work."

He flushed a little, struggling with himself. At last he said:

"After all, it's our honeymoon. We can afford to slack a little."

She laughed outright at that. He could not see anything to laugh at.

"It isn't enough for me—slacking. I hate it. I want to do things just all the time. I want to dig up fields and move hills about, and things like that. Louis, don't you think we might go up country and be squatters like uncle?"

"I wouldn't mind being a squatter like your uncle," he said, comfortably "with fifty quid notes to splash all over the shanty! But you're not getting tired of me, are you, darling—after last night?" he added gently. She flushed, and fidgeted perilously on the window-sill.

"No, Louis. But—after last night—I don't like to see you lying here like this," she began.

"I know it's boring for you, my pet. Marcella, come and sit on the edge of the bed. We can talk better if you're near me."

"No, I'll stay here," she said decidedly. "And it's not boring for me. It's—" She was going to say "degrading" but stopped in time.

"You know, I think I'd be all right," he went on, "if I got up and went out now. But I can't be sure. I don't want to hurt you again, darling."

"I know, my dear. But I can't help thinking this is a negative thing. If you had something to do—something that would interest you so much you couldn't even think about whisky."

"I've got that something in you, when you're as sweet as you were last night," he said softly. She felt sickened for a minute. The Spear in her hand wavered; it seemed to be turning to a chain again. A chain for her, a Spear for him—she said quietly:

"I like taking care of you, Louis. I'm not thinking of myself at all. Only I can't help wishing you'd got pneumonia, or a broken leg or something, so that you could stay in bed sort of—honourably."

"It's worth while, if I get better, isn't it, my pet?" he said, slowly.

"Anything's worth while—if you get better," she said.

And so the days wore on until they had been married six weeks. In all that time Louis never saw whisky. This, he confessed to her, was a miracle; except for when he was with the Maories in the Prohibition Country, and when he had been in hospital for various long stretches, he had never known three days to go by without his being drunk. So she felt that they had advanced steadily. Moods of depression came and went, charmed away by her. They spent a good deal of time on the roof. They had not many books to pass the slow hours, though Dr. Angus sent two every week. Louis began to lecture her on medicine; he really knew extraordinarily well what he had learnt: he was an excellent teacher of facts, but he had not one iota of deductive thought in his teaching and, like Andrew Lashcairn, was remarkably impatient if she did not understand or, understanding, ventured to express an opinion of her own about anything. They had many glamorous nights on the roof, nights that recalled the enchantment of those hours under the Aurora, nights of severe mental reservation on Marcella's part, all unsuspected by Louis. He confessed to her that his ideas were getting modified; a great confession for so crusted a conservative as he.

One night they were kept awake by a tropical downpour which lashed against the windows and poured through the ceiling. Three times they had to get up and move the bed round to escape the stream of water. Marcella seemed to be spending all the night mopping up water.

"If Mrs. King sees all this mess I expect she'll say we mustn't go up on the roof again," said Louis. "I suppose we cracked the rusty old iron by walking about on it."

"I love the roof," said Marcella, patiently mopping. It was three o'clock: the shrill hum of mosquitoes made them afraid to put out the light, since they had no mosquito nets. After a while they stood by the window watching the water running along the street as high as the kerb stones.

"I love the roof, too. A few months ago I'd have fainted at the thought of doing anything so unconventional as sleeping on a roof. You are changing me, Marcella. I'm getting your ideas of not caring what people think, of being my own censor. And—do you know something else, Marcella?" he added, looking at her with adoration. Her eyes asked questions.

"I believe I've got it beat at last."

"The whisky?"

"Yes. I don't want the bally stuff now. I want you instead. I hate you away from me for an instant. If you went away now, dearie, I'd be raving with d.t. next day!"

"Oh Louis!"

"I would! I worship you, Marcella. You're life itself to me. I can't get on two minutes without you."

"But just supposing I did die—seriously, Louis! People get knocked down in streets and all that. Why shouldn't it be me?"

"I shouldn't attempt to live. I know exactly what I'd do. I've got it all worked out! I shall just get blind, roaring drunk and then throw myself in the harbour. My life is useless without you."

To his amazement she wrung her hands hopelessly, and looked at him with tragic eyes.

"Can't you see, you utter idiot, that that's just all wrong? It's no use doing things for someone else! You've got to do them for yourself! What's the good of it? Do you think I want to make you a flabby thing hanging on to my apron strings all the time? You've got drunk on whisky in the past. Louis, I'm simply not going to have you getting drunk on me! What on earth's the use of conquering drink hunger and getting woman-hunger? It's only another—what you call neurosis, and what I call kink! If that's all the use my love and the whole wicked struggle is going to be, I might as well give up at once?"

He caught her wet face between his hands. In the light of the candle he looked at her earnestly.

"If, at the end of all this, I've to go on being a prop to you, we need not go on trying any more. Props are rotten and cowardly, whether they are props of love or not. I want to see you grow so that, if I go out of life, you'll stand up straight with your head in the sun and the wind. Not propped, my dear! Father was all wrong, I think now. When he'd killed the whisky he leaned on a great big man God outside him, a shield and defence. Can't you see that we've to stand up alone without God or anything except ourselves? Can't you see that unless our strength is in ourselves we'll never stand? That's what I'm trying to do—and I know how hard it is."

"You? You're not a drunkard, Marcella," he said.

She smiled a little as she looked at him.

"You know, Louis, you're an awful duffer!" she said, and turned away. But he lifted her over the wet floor into bed and, as he blew out the candle, told the mosquitoes to go to hell, and kissed her face and her hands, he thought he had effectually stilled her queer ethical doubtings. And she felt very much alone and unguided, and not at all able to stand up straight without a prop as she had preached to him.

For the next few days Louis was depressed and restless. She did not understand him. She was not yet aware that his hunger came on in periodic attacks and thought that she must have hurt him in some way to make him so wretched. She tried to be especially gentle to him, but he was rather difficult to please. He developed a habit of womanish, almost shrewish, nagging that astounded her; he grumbled at his food, he grumbled at the discomforts of living in one room; he made her feel cheap when she kissed him by turning away and saying, "There, that's enough, now!"; he found fault with her clothes and, one morning as she was dressing, said he was tired of seeing her cleaning the room; she seemed to think that that was all he needed—a nurse and a servant, since she never troubled to make herself attractive to him. Several times, coming from doing her cooking in the basement, she found Mr. King slinking along the top landing, but did not associate him with Louis. Several times she thought she smelt whisky, but told herself angrily that she was dreaming. Then, one day, coming in from the Post Office, she found Louis gone. One thing she noticed as she came along the landing was an empty bottle in the dark corner behind the door. As soon as she opened the door she saw three whisky bottles, empty, on the mantelpiece. On a piece of paper he had written:

"Get all the satisfaction you can out of these, old girl. I'm off."

She felt cold with horror, but there was nothing she could do. Mrs. King said that she had seen him go out at two o'clock. And that was all she could learn. For the rest of the afternoon and evening she was almost frantic with fear. But the money was not touched. She could not imagine what had happened until Mrs. King told her that Mr. King had confessed to getting letters containing money from the Post Office for Louis, and buying him whisky. Marcella ran out of the house, almost crazed with fright, to look for him. When she had only gone a few hundred yards she ran back, afraid he might come in and need her. It was not until after midnight that a violent knocking on the front door roused Mrs. King and sent Marcella down the stairs in a panic.

It was Louis. His eyes were wild, his clothes muddy. He lurched past Mrs. King and, making a great effort, managed to get upstairs.

In the room, instinct made Marcella shut and lock the door. He had thrown himself on the bed, his muddy boots on the coverlet. He lay there breathing heavily for awhile until he was violently sick.

"Oh, Louis—my poor little boy!" she cried, forgetting that he was drunk in her fear that he was ill.

"You think I'm drunk, ole girl—not drunk 'tall, ole girl."

"Well, get undressed and get into bed," she said, trying to help. He struck her hand away from his collar fiercely and, holding her arms twisted them until she had to beg him to let her go.

"Aft' my papers," he cried fiercely. Then he seemed to recognize her and began to rave about his duty to England, and how England's enemies had given him poison.

"I'm poisoned, ole girl. I knew what it would be. But when they sent for me I had to go."

"Who sent for you?"

"They sent a note by King. It came in by the English mail. Th-th-they have t-t-to b-be s-so c-c-careful," he said, and that was all he would tell her. Soon he was fast asleep, breathing heavily, and she was wrestling with a sick disgust at his presence, a fright that he really had been in danger from enemies and the conviction that he was drunk and not poisoned. She lay on the floor again this time because she could not bring herself to touch him or go near him. His hands and face were dirty and he had definitely refused to wash them or let her wash them. But in the middle of the night he woke up and began to shout for her.

"I wan' my wife. Where's my wife?" he raved and groping till he found the candlestick knocked on the floor with it. She sprung up hastily.

"Louis—hush, dear. You're waking up all the poor boys who have to go to work at six o'clock," she whispered.

"I wan' my wife," he cried, groping for her with his muddy hands. She stood trembling by the bed.

"Louis, I can't—it isn't a bit of use asking me. I can't be in bed beside you like this."

"Glad 'nough to las' night!" he said, laughing into her face. She felt the hot blood pumping to her skin until it seemed to her that even her hair must be blushing. Then she went very cold as she walked blindly towards the door, only conscious that she must get anywhere away from him.

"I wan' my wife. She is my wife, isn't she? Dammit! Wha's a man's wife for? Marsh—Marshlaise! Damn Germ's playing Marshlaise! They're aft' me—I knew they'd be aft' me! Marsh-shella? Where's my Marsh-ella?"

He pounded on the floor again, and she turned back, wrung by the terror in his voice. She lighted two candles and he saw that she was by his side.

"I thought you'd left me," he said, beginning to cry and streaking the tears about his face with his dirty hands. She was shivering as she bent over him, her tears mingling with his.

"I'm here with you, dear," she told him.

"Are you my wife? Wan' wom'n—beau-ful whi' shoulders! N'est ce pas? Parlez-vous Franshay, mam-selle? Ah oui, oui."

"Louis, you mustn't, mustn't talk that beastly French, please," she sobbed. He thumped on the floor, staring round wildly with glazed eyes. There was a tap at the door. Marcella, glad of any diversion, went and opened it.

"I say, kid, keep your boss quiet if you can," whispered Mrs. King. "My young chaps down below can't get their proper sleep for that row, and they've got a hard day's work before them if he hasn't."

"Mrs. King, whatever am I to do with him?" she cried frantically. "I don't believe he knows it's me. And he's so horribly dirty."

"Oh, go an' sit on his knee a bit, kid, and make up to him. That's the best way to make them go quiet. He's at the vulgar stage to-night, your boss is. But do keep him quiet. Not that I'm not sorry for you, kid," she added, as she turned away. "They're beasts, men are. Mine's asleep as it happens."

He was still raving, saying disgusting things that, unfortunately, were in English this time. Looking at him in the candlelight she felt terrified of him and utterly unable to treat him as a sick man and not a wicked one. As she stood there stiff, unable through sheer disgust to get any nearer to him, he clutched at her nightgown and drew her nearer. She felt frantic; her nails cut into her hands as she gripped them together as if for the comforting feel of a hand in hers.

"Why should I have this disgust happen to me? It's too dirty to ask women to get men to sleep like this."

Then, amidst all the searing things he was saying, came the memories of those cries in the night at the farm and she wondered breathlessly if this sort of thing could have happened to her mother. And, at that moment she knew that it had not. Her father might, quite possibly, have almost killed her mother by his violent rages. But he could never have been merely disgusting. She looked at him again and felt murderous; a passion to put him out of life, to stamp upon him and finish him flooded up and burst and died all in an instant. She realized in that quiet instant that this passionate disgust was utterly selfish; if he had been loathsome with any other disease than this she would have nursed and soothed him tenderly; if he had been clean and charming, as on the night of the aurora.

"Oh, what a hypocrite you are, Marcella Lashcairn!" she said. "With all your high-falutin' ideas of balance and coolness! You've been luxuriating in the thought of martyrdom all the time you've been fighting the enchantment of this wretched love-making! You've not been fighting it a bit, really! It's only now, when it's disgusting and beastly and—not a bit enchanting, that you're fighting it! What a liar you've been!"

"I wan' my wife," he muttered, quietened a little by Mrs. King's voice. "'Sall very well, ole girl."

"Be quiet, Louis, or I'll shake your head off!" she said, quietly. He stared at her, and cowered down in the bed. She watched him for a moment. Then she spoke softly.

"Now you're going to sleep—you're going to put your head down on Marcella's shoulder and go to sleep. You're quite safe with Marcella."

He shivered a little, and then lay still. She pinched out the candle with fingers that did not feel the flame.

For a whole fortnight he drank steadily, using remarkable cleverness in getting money. He joined forces with Mr. King: for the first week they obtained money from some unknown source and only came home at night when they were put out of the hotels at closing time, and even then they brought whisky or gin—which was much cheaper—home with them. Marcella had not known there were distinctions in alcohol; she found during that fortnight that whisky made him mad and then terrified, gin made him horribly disgusting and beer made him simply silly and very sick. The second week Louis tricked and lied to Marcella, using any excuse to get her out of the room. At the end of three days he had sold everything he possessed except his least reputable suit, which he had to keep to wear. The last day of the fortnight he came home without the waistcoat: whether he had sold that, or given it away in maudlin generosity, or lost it in some fantastic fashion she could never gather. He had not taken any of her money. On Mrs. King's advice she had gone up on the roof one day, crept along three other roofs and hidden it in a gully.