"Oh, you're an idiot," cried Marcella, her eyes full of tears, and decided that this was an occasion for her father's favourite epithet. "A double-distilled idiot! How have you managed Mr. Peters except by never leaving him alone for a minute?"

"I am a woman of the world, and understand men," she said airily. "I wove a net about him—in ways you would not understand, my child."

"Don't want to," snapped Marcella. "I'm not a spider!"

They anchored out in the stream in Sydney Harbour, going ashore in tenders. Marcella scanned the quay anxiously to find Louis, though Knollys told her that he would, most probably, be in by train to-morrow at noon. But she had an idea that he might have got through earlier, and hurried up to the General Post Office, which he had told her was his only address in the Colonies, to which his letters were sent. But it was a fruitless errand. Enquiry at the station told her that, as Knollys had said, the next train possible for Louis would be in at noon to-morrow. She turned back through the streets that were so extraordinarily like London in spite of Chinese, German and Italian names. As she passed the Post Office for the second time it occurred to her that there might be letters for her there, and found quite a bundle of them in a little pigeonhole high up. There was also a cablegram that had been waiting two days. She opened that first. It was extravagantly long; the name "Carlossie" at the head of it gave her a sickening pang of homesickness for a moment. She read:

"Letter from Port Said arrived. Very anxious. Only way you treat drunkard is leave him alone. Impossible cure. Above all do not marry him or shall blame myself. Writing. Await letter I implore you.—Angus."

It was extraordinary extravagance for Dr. Angus. She felt guilty at having worried him.

"But I never mentioned marrying Louis! I simply said he was one of the passengers I was interested in."

There was a letter from Aunt Janet written after the Oriana had sailed and sent overland to Marseilles.

"I certainly miss you," she wrote, "but I shall get over it in time, I expect. One gets very used to everything in time. I wonder if you will ever come back? I expect so. Wullie the Hunchback came along with fish for me twice. He misses you badly. You were always a great deal with him."

Letters from Mrs. Mactavish and from Wullie, dictated to and written by Bessie, said that she would be back soon; standing under the portico of the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself back again in her own sphere among her own people. She tried to picture Louis there, too, and realized horribly that he would never fit into the picture. Against Wullie and the doctor and her aunt he would look so vulgar, so pretentious, so tinsel-coloured. And how they would laugh at a man who could not master himself, a man who cried!

"Why, I'm a snob! I was hurt when he thought I'd disgrace him by my bad manners. And now I'm being just as cruel!"

Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last letter in her hand, afraid to open it. It was postmarked Melbourne and had come in that morning. It was in Louis's writing, and gave her an acute sense of distress. She stood still by a shop window, looking into it blindly until she realized that she was looking at a crocodile and some snakes squirming about in tanks in a naturalist's window. The straggly writing reminded her of the ugly snakes: it told her that he was drunk more or less when the letter was written; she looked from the letter to the snakes. One of them crawled writhingly over the others, lifted its head and put out its tongue at her: shivering, she opened the letter.

"MY OWN DARLING,

"Wasn't it a sell? That damned captain's had a down on me all the trip. I reported him to the shipping company and I'm trying to get a free pass from them by rail. Otherwise I should come by the train that has brought this letter. By great luck I ran into an old girl I knew in New Zealand. She's a nurse who saved my life once when I was in hospital there. She's a dear—Oh quite old; don't get jealous, my pet! I'm staying the night at an hotel in Little Collins Street. The landlord has lent me a fiver, so don't worry about me. One thing I've to tell you—a terrible confession. I lost your father's ring in my haste the other night, but never mind. I'll buy you another. I hope your Uncle stumped up. Australia's a damnable place to be hard up in. Will you tip my stewards for me and see my things through the Customs? Give Knollys and the other chap ten shillings each. They haven't killed themselves on my behalf, or it would have been a quid. Tell them I sent it. I don't want them to know I'm hard up. If I hit up that railway pass I should be through before lunch on Saturday. And then, old girl, there'll be doings! I hear you can get hitched up in Sydney for about twenty-seven bob, without waiting for notices of any sort. Till then, all my love and all my thoughts are for you.

"Your own Louis.

"P.S. (Just like a woman) You'd better get something decent and not Scotch to wear if your uncle came down decently. And book us rooms at the Hotel Australia. They do you very well there."

It was her first love letter. She felt, vaguely, that it lacked something though she did not quite know what. She hated the talk about money and about her uncle. She hated that he could borrow money so casually from a nurse who had been good to him. She wished that terrible hunger he had predicted had not happened to her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man like Louis.

"But he's wrong about there being no cure. When he is with me every minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won't be able to do it. I'll be a gaoler to him—I'll be his providence, his mother, his nurse, his doctor. Oh everything—I'll be what God was to father."

Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet. In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis's letter again she went on rather blindly through the wharves, reading it. A Japanese boat was loading; smells of garlic and of spice and sandalwood were wafted to her from the holds and weaved into her thoughts of Louis; a little further along there was a crowd of stevedores clustered in the roadway round a violent smell of whisky. She turned away, sickened by her memories of that smell, with her father's ghost and Louis's at her side, but uncontrollable curiosity made her press on again. A great barrel—like the barrel at Lashnagar—had been broken by falling from the top storey out of the clutch of a derrick; there was a pool of blood, dreadful and bright in the roadway and men were lifting the crushed body of a man into an ambulance; quite close to the pool of blood was one of whisky that was running into the gutter. Two big, bronzed, blue-shirted men were kneeling beside it, dipping their hands in it and licking them greedily; trembling at the same time and looking sick with the fright of sudden death. From a warehouse near by came a heavy smell of decay—sheep skins were stored there in great, stiff bales. She went on, feeling as though horror happened wherever she went. But along by the sea wall it was very peaceful; only the soft lapping of the landlocked tide against the stone, the slow gliding of ferry boats, the lazy plash of oars and the metallic clanking in the naval dockyard on Garden Island came to her. On a man-of-war out in the stream the sailors were having a washing day; she could hear their cheery voices singing and laughing as they hung vests and shirts and socks among the rigging, threw soapy water at each other and skated about the decks on lumps of soap.

A little further along by the wall was a great garden; she went in in a dream; unfamiliar flowers covered unfamiliar bushes with pink and scarlet snow; a bed of cactus looked like a nightmare of pincushions and tumours. She sat down beside them, under a low, gloomy leaved eucalyptus and dreamed. The champagne quality of the air, the sunlight dancing on the blue water, the great banks of dark green trees on the opposite shore, with prosperous, happy-looking little red houses nestling among them brought about an effect of well-being that soft weather and beautiful surroundings always gave her. She had, all her life, been able to escape from unhappiness by the mere physical effect of going into the sunshine and the wind—and then unhappiness and grief seemed impossible, incredible. Sitting there with half-closed eyes she dreamed of the future; the disgust of Melbourne had gone; the disillusionment of Louis's letter had gone, and yet she had very few delusions about what was going to happen to her.

She wished she had the courage to run away now, to her uncle, or anywhere away from Louis. And she knew quite well that nothing on earth would make her leave him. She was beginning to realize, vaguely, what marriage to him might mean; she had flashing visions of him, drunk, dirty, foolish and—beastly. She shrunk from him fastidiously; even thinking of him made her heart thump in sheer horror; she felt that, to be shut up in a room with him when he was drunk would be an indignity, a disgust too horrible to contemplate. And he had hinted things that frightened her, about her "having her work cut out" about her "not realizing what she had taken on." Next minute the soft sunlight and the fluttering leaves made her think of him when he was not drunk, and she frowned; she so hated his air of superiority, his calm pushing aside of her opinions as not worth notice, his cool insistence on her inferiority as a woman.

"Still, he's awfully clever," the dancing water told her. But she knew that he was not more clever than very many other people and that his cleverness had never been of any use except in getting money.

"He's grown up—a big, grown up man, and you're only a girl," said the soft, exhilarating breeze that sang in her hair. And that thought allowed no answer, it was so flattering, so satisfying.

"And—he needs me. He says he'll die without me," she told herself, and that was unanswerable.

Suddenly she stood up and looked over the sea wall. There seemed to be two Louis in her hands, being weighed and, all at once, she felt a little helpless and leaned rather heavily against the sea wall.

"It isn't a bit of use. I don't honestly believe any of these things are the real reason I'm going to marry him. I honestly believe I want to, so what's the good of lying to myself about it? But—oh what an idiot I am! It seems to me—there's something a bit degrading—in marrying a man like Louis—simply because—because—you want to."

She walked round and round the big eucalyptus as though she were in a cage. Then she came back and stood against the wall again, watching the sailors on the man-of-war with unseeing eyes. She felt hot and flushed and a little ashamed of herself. She felt that there was something rather disgraceful in wishing Louis were there to kiss her; something a little humiliating in longing so utterly that to-morrow might come when they could be together.

"I never, never, never thought I'd be such an idiot! I thought I'd fall in love with a king, or something—Oh my goodness, what a mess!" Her father came into her mind, striding giant-like over Ben Grief in his shabby old tweeds; she frowned and bit her lips and told herself, in bewilderment, that if only Louis had been like him she would have married him without any feeling of humiliation. And she had the uncomfortable feeling that, had her father been alive, she would never have dared to marry Louis. Andrew would have put him in the sea, or something equally final and ignominious.

She stared fixedly at the rippling water, with tight lips, and nodded her head at it.

"Yes, it's perfectly disgusting. It's degrading—it's—it's beastly to be shutting myself up like this with a drunken man. I believe I'd be better dead—from a selfish point of view—"

Next minute her eyes softened.

"But think how eager he is—what a boy he is—like Jimmy! And how he trusts me not to let those awful miseries happen to him any more."

She turned round, shook herself together and began to march back to the ship, her father's eyes shining through hers for a while.

"Marcella Lashcairn," she said solemnly, "you're going to stop asking yourself rude questions for ever and ever, Amen! You haven't time to waste on introspection. You love him. That's a good thing, anyway. Never mind how you love him, never mind if it's a John the Baptist love or a mother love or a fever produced by the tropics, as Wullie said, you've to do things as best you can and understand them afterwards, just trusting that God will burn out all the beastliness of them in the end. And—" she added, as an afterthought, "If he gets drunk I'll shake the life out of him."

If Louis had seen her just then he would probably have shied at marrying her.

She went on board to a deserted ship, hating to stay ashore without Louis. Even the passengers who were going on to Brisbane had gone to sleep ashore. Knollys told her that Jimmy had cried desperately because he was being taken away from her, and that Mr. Peters was drunk in his grief at ending his acquaintanceship with Mrs. Hetherington. Later, seeing her standing lonely on deck, watching the lighted ferries go by, Knollys came up to her.

"I beg your pardon, miss," he said, deferentially, "but it occurred to Jules and myself that you might possibly care to join us in a game of dominoes?" and, rather than appear unfriendly, she played with them for an hour. She was very glad when morning came.



CHAPTER XIV

Marcella hurried to her field of Philippi that day. She went up to the station to meet Louis at half-past eleven in alternating moods of trembling softness and militancy, softness to welcome him, belligerency for Ole Fred and the gang, and strange gusts of helpless, blazing, hungry joy at the thought of getting him away from them, all to herself. Almost she wished she could snatch him from life itself. As the train came in she caught sight of him, laughing foolishly, dirty and dishevelled from the long journey. She ran down the clanging platform on feet of wind to meet him. He tumbled out of the carriage with half a dozen draggled men after him.

"Oh—my dear," she cried, clinging to his hand, her face flushed, her eyes shining.

He stared, his eyes glassy and pale, almost startled.

"Hello, ole girl," he stammered. "G—g—good of you to mm—mm—meet me."

He stood awkwardly, undecided, the others edging round him.

"Louis, you'll never guess how awful it's been without you! I know what you meant, now, about not being able to do without each other—Uncle gave me the money—let's get away and talk—" The words all tumbled out breathlessly.

He gazed at her again, as though he scarcely knew her.

"These chaps have been awfully good to me," he said thickly. "We must—must—s-say good-bye. They s-sail for New Zealand this—safternoon."

"That's good. Then say good-bye now, and come away. We've a lot to do."

He stared moodily.

"Look here, where's my baggage? Did you g-get it th-through the Customs for me?"

She explained about it, and said that he must go aboard for it when the Oriana came alongside during the afternoon.

"Right-o, then. I'll say good-bye. Wait a minute."

He went down the platform and stood talking to the others for a few minutes. They looked towards her and laughed several times, and at last trooped off together.

"I think a wash is indicated, don't you?" he said, looking at himself. "Lord, don't I want a drink! And don't I just want to be alone with you a few minutes! What shall we do? Did you book rooms?"

"No. I was so busy thinking that I forgot. There's plenty of time. I'll tell you what. Let us go back to the boat and get your things, and then you can get cleaned up and—change—" she added hesitatingly, for he was still wearing the suit in which he had fallen on the jetty at Melbourne. It was splashed with mud and rain; it had been obviously slept in, and smelled of tobacco and spilled whisky.

"Right. We'll have a cab and then we can talk on the way," he said. "By the way, I haven't a penny in the world. Broke to the wide! What did your uncle give you?"

"Fifty pounds."

"Lord! What a decent sort of uncle to have about. I haven't a relative who'd let me raise a fiver. Well, you'd better lend me some, old girl, till I get mine through."

"You can have it all if you like," she said quickly. "I don't want it if I'm with you." She was thinking that he had told her not to let him have money; but if they were to be together all the time there could be no possible danger, and something told her that it would be good for him to be trusted with all her worldly goods.

In the cab, as soon as it started its two-mile crawl, she handed it to him solemnly. He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together as he put the money into his notecase.

"I say, Marcella," he jerked out, "you'll not let me out of your sight, will you, darling? It's no end risky, with all this money."

"Poor little boy," she whispered softly. "You couldn't be naughty to-day, could you? Besides, you've me to look after now, as well as yourself. You've been here before. I've never been away from home in my life."

He caught at her hand and held it tightly.

"I'm just dying to kiss you, darling," he whispered. "Oh, I wish we needn't waste time on that bally rotten ship. I want us to get away from everywhere."

On the ship they found that he could not get his things until the purser came aboard at seven o'clock in the evening, as he had them sealed up. But Knollys provided him with clothes brush and toilet apparatus while Marcella waited.

"I've found out all about getting married," he explained when they got outside on the quay again. "It's frightfully simple. Knollys has just told me where the Registrar's place is. Lord! Marcella, do you feel frightened?"

"No," she said, rather faintly.

"It's worse for me than for you, after all. It's fun for a girl to get married. But I've all the ordeals to go through, facing the Registrar, buying the ring—"

"Well, I'll do it," she said resignedly, "if you're frightened."

But as they passed the first jeweller's shop he dived in suddenly without speaking to her. After a few minutes he emerged, his face flushed and damp, his hand shaky.

"Look here, come up a side way somewhere, old thing! They've given me a chunk of cardboard with little holes in it. You've got to poke your finger in till you see which fits. Lord, I'm glad you don't get married more than once in a lifetime."

"Don't you like it, Louis?" she asked, as she fitted her finger into the little holes and found that she took the smallest size ring. "I do. I think it's frightfully exciting."

"I know you do. Women love getting married. They're cock of the walk on their wedding days, if they never are again. On her wedding day a woman is triumphant! She's making a public exhibition of the fact that she has achieved the aim of her life—she's landed a man!"

"Louis!" she cried indignantly, and next minute decided to think that he was joking as they reached the jeweller's shop again. She had been looking at the jewellery in the window: it was her first peep at a jeweller's shop, and she thought how expensive everything was. She noticed the price of wedding rings. When Louis came out with the ring in a little box which he put into his pocket, he told her casually that it cost something three times more than the prices in the window.

As they walked up the street he told her that he was tired to death, that he had not been to bed since the Oriana left Melbourne.

"I thought you stayed at an hotel that night," she said.

"No, as a matter of fact, my pet, we got run in, all of us. I don't know, now, what we did when we found the boat had gone without us, but we made up our minds to paint the town red. So we got landed in the police's hands for the night and locked up."

"Oh Louis!"

"It was a great game! The funny old magistrate next morning was as solemn as a judge. He read us a lecture about upholding the prestige of the Motherland in a new country. Then he made us promise him faithfully not to have another drink as long as we were in the state of Victoria. We promised right enough, and kept it—because we knew we were leaving Victoria in a few hours. Ole Fred was as solemn as the judge himself about it. But when we got to Albury—that's on the borders, you know—my hat, how we mopped it! I haven't got over it yet. But after to-day I'm on the water-wagon, Marcella. Lord, here's the marriage shop!"

It looked like a shop, with green wire shades over the glass windows, not at all a terrifying place. But Louis took off his hat, mopped his forehead and looked at her desperately.

"Look here, old girl, I shall never get through this without a whisky-and-soda. I'm a stammering bundle of nerves. I'll never get our names down right unless I have a drink to give me a bit of Dutch courage. If it hadn't been for that Melbourne madness I'd have been all right. But look at me"—and he held out a trembling hand. "Marcella, for God's sake say you'll let me—"

She felt she could not, to-day of all days, preach to him, but she could not trust herself to speak. She merely nodded her head, and without waiting another instant he darted into the nearest hotel, leaving her standing on the pavement. Her heart was aching, but every moment, every word he said made her all the more cussedly determined to see the thing through, and he certainly looked better when he came out ten minutes later.

"That saved my life, darling," he said feelingly. "Now for it."

He vanished behind the green windows and came back in a few minutes looking jubilant.

"Nice, fatherly old chap. Asked me if I realized the gravity of the step I was taking and if you were twenty-one, because if you weren't I'd have to get the consent of the State Guardian. And by the way, Marcella, that reminds me. You'll simply have to do something to your hair."

"Why?" she asked, flirting it over her shoulder to see what was wrong with it. It was tied very neatly with a big bow of tartan ribbon.

"You'll have to do it up, somehow—stow it under your hat, don't you know—hairpins, old girl, smokers' best friends. You can't be married with your hair down, or they'll think it isn't respectable."

"Oh," she said meekly.

"By the way, I got the religion wrong. I simply couldn't think what you were, so I said an atheist, and he said as the Congregational clergyman hadn't a full house to-night we'd better go to him. Lord, what would the Mater say? She wouldn't think it legal unless you were married in church with the 'Voice that breathed o'er Eden' and a veil."

"But—to-night?" she questioned.

"Yes, half-past six. And I got our father's professions wrong. I couldn't remember what the Pater was for anything, so I said they were both sailors! Lord, I was in a funk—and at half-past six to-night I'll be married and done for. It's the biggest scream that ever was!"

They went to a restaurant for lunch. She was very hungry; he could eat nothing. He ordered lemonade for her, adding something in a low tone to the waiter who went away smiling faintly. She thought he was drinking lemonade too, but he began to laugh a good deal, and his eyes glittered queerly all the time.

She was a little overawed by the magnificence of the Hotel Australia when they went to book rooms; she wished very much that they could be at the farm; there were so many people about, so many servants quite inhumanly uninterested in them. At home Jean would have been fussing about, making them welcome.

It was the queerest, most unromantic wedding. The streets were full of the Saturday night crowd of pleasure seekers. The chapel was next to a Chinese laundry; glancing in at the door through the steam she got a swift vision of two Chinamen ironing collars vigorously. Outside the chapel door stood a gawky-looking group—a young sailor, very fat and jolly-looking was being married to a rather elderly woman. Both had short white kid gloves that showed a little rim of red wrist; their friends were chaffing them unmercifully; the bride was giggling, the sailor looking imperturbable. Louis edged towards Marcella.

"I don't want those two Chinks to see me," he whispered nervously.

She stared at him.

"I wish they'd open the door," whispered Marcella.

"So do I. My hat, I wish Violet could come past. She'd kill herself with laughing. She was married at St. George's, Hanover Square."

That conveyed nothing to Marcella. She was watching a German band composed of very fat, pink Germans who, on their way to their nightly street playing outside various theatres and restaurants, had noticed the group and scented a wedding. They began by playing the "Marseillaise" and made her laugh by the extreme earnestness of their expression; then they played the Lohengrin "Bridal March" and had only just reached the tenth bar when the chapel door opened with a tremendous squeaking and creaking. The conductor paused with his baton in mid beat and his mouth wide open as he saw his audience melting away inside the door. Marcella, laughing almost hysterically, whispered to Louis:

"Give them a shilling or something. They look so unhappy!"

"They're spying on me," he whispered, tossing them a coin which fell among them and received the conductor's blessing.

Marcella and Louis sat on a bench in a Sunday-school classroom, looking at "Rebecca at the Well" and a zoological picture of the millennium while the sailor got married. Both were subdued suddenly. She found herself thinking that, if ever she had children, she would never let them go to such a dreary place as Sunday-school.

"Isn't this awful?" she whispered at last. "People ought to be married on the tops of hills, or under trees. But it makes you feel solemn, and sort of good, doesn't it—even such a fearful place?"

He nodded. They heard the sailor and the bride chattering suddenly and loudly in the next little room and guessed that they were married. A bent little woman—the chapel cleaner—came along and asked them where their witnesses were. Her dark eyes looked piercingly among grey, unbrushed hair; her hands were encrusted with much immersion in dirty water.

"Witnesses?" said Louis anxiously.

"Two witnesses," she said inexorably. "Haven't you got 'ny?"

"We didn't know—" began Marcella. The old woman looked pleased.

"Well, I was wondering if yous 'ud have me an' my boss. We often make a couple of bob like that."

Louis nodded, and she shuffled off, appearing a few moments later with an old man who had evidently been waiting about for the chance of earning a few shillings.

"It isn't a bit like Lochinvar," whispered Marcella, "or Jock of Hazeldean."

"Poor old lady," he whispered, suddenly gentle.

The two old people sat down on the form beside Louis, who edged a little closer to Marcella.

"It's forty years since we was married, my boss and me," began the old woman. "Forty years—and brought up twelve—"

"Buried six," mumbled the old man, shaking his head and wiping a watery eye on his coat sleeve.

"I say, I feel no end of an ass, don't you?" whispered Louis. "Tell the old idiots to shut up."

"Poor old things—forty years ago they thought it was all going to be so shining," she whispered.

"It isn't as if he's had very good work," went on the old woman, "but you must take the rough with the smooth."

A small old man with a black suit and a long white beard came to the door and beckoned them. They suddenly realized that he was the priest and followed him meekly.

"I've often been the officiating surgeon," whispered Louis, giggling nervously, "but I never understood the point of view of the man on the operating table before."

"Oh hush, Louis. I feel so solemn," whispered Marcella. She wished very much that Wullie was there. She felt that he would have understood how she felt as she repeated mechanically the words the old man told her; she did not hear them really. She was making an end of all her doubts of Louis; she knew, quite definitely, that whatever misery or degradation might come to her in the future, whatever wild or conceited or cussed or tropical thoughts had brought her to this dull little chapel to-night, God was quite surely making her His pathway, walking over her life with shining feet, burning out all the less fine things that did not belong to Him. She woke up to feel Louis fumbling with her hand to put the ring on; she had been miles and years away, through fires and waters of consecration.

The old clergyman looked at her; he looked at Louis. The actual service according to the book was over. He gave a little sigh, turned to lead them to the vestry to sign their names, and then quite suddenly came back and asked them to kneel down. He talked to God very intimately about them. Marcella got the queer idea that he was talking to her all the time.

"He must have thought a lot of you," whispered the old woman. "It isn't like him to make up a extry bit like that. Well, I'm sure I wish yous luck, both of you. Mind not let him have too much of his own way, my dear."

Smiling she led away her toothless old man. Marcella handed Louis the marriage certificate, which he put in his pocket. Out in the street it was quite dark.

"Phew, wasn't it an awful experience? Lord, we're married! Married! Do you really believe it, darling? And I haven't given you a kiss yet. I couldn't with those old dodderers about. Oh, Marcella, isn't it great? And isn't it a lark? But if anyone had told me I'd have got married in a tin tabernacle, slobbered over by a lot of Non-bally-conformists I'd have had hysterics. We'll simply have to tell the Mater and Violet! It'll be the joke of the century to them."

She drew a deep breath.

"Louis, can't we run right away into the Bush? I do wish we were at home on Ben Grief in the wind—the thought of that great, big hotel terrifies me. I feel sort of—like I used to feel when I went to church with mother on Easter Sundays, when everything was cool and white and smelt of lilies. Oh, Louis, I do so love you!"

Suddenly he stood still and looked at her.

"Let's find a cab and get down to that bally boat for the baggage. Oh, bother the baggage! My darling, I want you alone. You stood there so quiet and still, looking just like a little girl being very, very good. Oh, my dear, you're a damned sight too good for me. Lord, I'll feed myself to the sharks in the harbour if ever I hurt you! What luck to find you! What amazing, gorgeous luck! Me—the waster, the unwanted, the do-nothing. Marcella—Lord, what's the use of words? I'm getting your trick of not being able to find words for what I mean. But you wait. Just you wait. There's a new Louis born to-night, in a funny little Nonconformist chapel. Look at him, girlie—can't you see he's different?"

They found a cab and drove down to the quay again. Heedless of the people in the streets he kissed her again and again and did not stop talking for an instant.

"You know, the very fact of being married alone is going to do wonders for me. It's going to give me a grip on things. I've been an outcast, dear—I've never known, when I've been this side of the world, where my next bed or my next meal is coming from. But to have a wife—and we'll have a home and everything—why, you can't think what it means."

When they reached the quay he left Marcella in the cab, telling her he would only be two minutes. She watched him vanish in the shadow of the Customs shed. A moment later he was back.

"I hate to leave you, even for a minute. I must have one more kiss. Oh, my darling, if you could only guess what it means to me to know that you love me, that you are waiting here for me. You've never been a throwout, a waster, or you'd realize just what you mean to me."

Then he was gone, and she lay back, her eyes closed, dreaming. She felt very safe, very secure.

It seemed a long time that he was gone, but she was accustomed to going thousands of miles in her dreams, only to find, wakening suddenly, that the clock had only measured five minutes. But at last she realized that it really was a long time. The horse began to paw and fidget; the driver, smoking a very reeking pipe, looked in at the window.

"D'you think your boss'll be long?" he asked.

"How long has he been?" she asked.

"More'n half an hour. I've got some folks to take to the theatre, but I'm afraid I'll have to give them a miss if he don't hurry hisself."

"I wonder if you'd go and see, please?" she asked doubtfully. "You see, we've only just been married to-day and I feel so silly—the people on board are sure to start making a big fuss if I go—"

"Right-o, ma. I'll go," he said, and made off across the quay. He, too, was gone a long while; the horse got more fidgety, but at last he appeared, carrying two of Louis's bags.

He grinned as he came up to the cab.

"He's a lad!" he said genially. "Would make me stop an' wet the wedding. But it do seem hard to me for the bride to be out of all the fun. Why don't you go an' wet it, too, ma?"

"Where is—my husband?" she said, stumbling over the word and feeling sick with fright.

"Over there with his pals. They aren't half having a game. If I was you I'd go and rout him out! Not much use in a honeymoon when one's boozed and the other ain't. Now if you was to have a drop too—"

She did not hear what he said. She did not stop to think of dignity or anything else; the same panic that had almost made her jump overboard at Melbourne sent her running across the quay, over the gangway on to the ship. The voices of the men guided her towards them on the silent ship. Louis was sitting on the hatchway; two champagne bottles were overturned beside him; he was just pouring whisky from a bottle into a tumbler as he saw her.

His jaw dropped and he tried to stand up.

"Here's your missus," laughed Ole Fred, who was leaning against him.

Marcella looked from Louis to Fred.

"So you didn't go to New Zealand?" said Marcella quietly, looking at him with blazing eyes. He blinked at her and tried to smile affably.

"Of course I never thought you would, you horrible, wicked, idiotic old liar!" she said.

Ole Fred looked thoroughly startled. Louis gazed at Marcella and then at him.

"Now, ole man—I pu' it to you," said Ole Fred thickly. "Is tha' the sort of talk you le' your wife use to your bes' pals?"

Louis shook his head reprovingly at her.

"Marsh-shella! Naughty lil' girl! 'Pol'gize! Good Ole Fred! Bes' pal ev' man had, Mar-shella! Going t' Newze-eeelan'! All 'lone—way from 'smother—way from Ole Country! Give him kish, ole girl—no ill-feeling—"

Ole Fred got up unsteadily, grinning, and lurched towards her muttering, "No, no ill-feeling." She realized what he was going to do, and suddenly felt that she could not live any longer. But first—her father's temper came to her for a moment and she lost all responsibility. It was the first time the Lashcairn madness had seized her—and it was not the raging Berserk fury of her father. She stood quite still, very white. Ole Fred thought she was waiting passively for his kiss. But when he reached her on his unsteady feet she caught him by the shoulders, shook what little breath he had left out of him, and slid him deliberately along the deck. He was too surprised to resist effectively and the others had no idea what was in her mind. Reaching the rail of the ship, with the strength of madness she lifted him up—he was a thin little rat of a man—and dropped him calmly overboard. There was a heavy plonk and a rush of feet as Knollys, who had watched fascinated, ran down the companion-way with another man. She looked at her hands distastefully.

"You're very foolish if you rescue him, Knollys," she said, with an air of giving impartial advice. "He's not a bit of good. I knew quite well I'd put some of these idiotic men in the sea before I'd done with them."

She turned away towards Louis again. He cowered as she came near him. She smiled at him kindly and reassuringly.

"Poor little boy! You needn't be frightened of Marcella. She doesn't often put wicked ole men in the sea," she said gently, holding out her hand to help him to his feet. Before she had put Fred in the sea she had felt it would be much better to go herself than live with Louis any more. But the flood of madness ebbed; Louis's cowering as she came near him seemed to her so appalling, so appealing that she could not leave him, and her hatred of Fred made her set her teeth and determine not to let him have Louis.

No one spoke. The cab driver was looking at her with adoration in his eyes; looking round she guessed he was a friend.

"Have you all our luggage?" she asked him.

"Yes, ma—missus," he jerked, jumping and suddenly touching his hat—an epoch-making thing for an Australian to do.

"Will you help me get my husband to the cab then, please?"

"Aren't you going to wait and see if they fish him out, missus?" he asked hopefully, jerking his head over towards the companion-way, down which several sailors had vanished.

"It's no use," she said impatiently. "He isn't a bit of good. If he's dead all the better. He's a very, very wicked man, you know. He's not just weak and wobbly. He is so wicked and dreadful that he laughs at people when they try to be good, and fights the goodness. Naturally it's better to put him in the sea. If it was a few hundred years ago they'd burn him as a devil," she nodded reassuringly to the cabman.

"There are sharks in Sydney Harbour, too," she added reflectively.

"Oh cripes!" cried the cabman reverently. "Come on then, boss," he added, turning to Louis. "Heave hold of my shoulder. If old monkey face is drowned your missus'll hear sharp enough from the police."

Suddenly she ran back to the companion-way. She did not look to see where Ole Fred was. Keeping her eyes averted she called, "Good-bye, Knollys. Thank you for being so kind to me."

Then she took Louis's hand without a word. He stood immovable.

"Feel sh-shick, ole girl," he gasped.

She stood still, feeling sick, too.

"Go on, ma—I'll tend him," said the cabman. Marcella walked on with her head in the air, looking disgusted. After a few minutes she turned and saw the cabman struggling to drag him along. His legs lagged foolishly.

"Can't walk, ole girl. Legs all cross-nibbed, ole girl," he moaned.

"You're not to talk, Louis," she said calmly.

"Talk? Talk? Can't talk. Parlez-vous Franshay, Marsh-shella? Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? Baisez-moi, ma petite—!"

She faced him suddenly.

"Look here, Louis. If you talk French one of us goes in the harbour. I'd rather it was me. Either that or I'll take my hands and choke you. You know they're strong hands—made in Scotland, Louis—bony, not a bit wobbly. Now what do you think?"

He made a sudden effort, threw off the cabman's detaining hand, swayed a little and then steered a straight course for the cab, stumbling over the step and crawling in on his knees.

"Isn't he a lad!" said the cabman admiringly. "Pair of lads, that's what you are! By cripes, you are! Where are you making for, missus?" His eyes, full of curiosity, were on the ship as a babble of voices rose. "Listen, they've got ole monkey-face! That's him singing out now. We'd better put our best leg forward for fear he comes after you."

"If he does I shall put him back again," she said; "we were going to the Hotel Australia—but I don't think I'll take my husband there. I think they mightn't like him. Do you know anywhere else we could go—a house—where there are poor people who won't be rude to me about him?"

He thought for a moment. Then his face brightened.

"I know the very place, ma. It's quite near. The boss boozes, but Ma's a good sort. She'll have a room, sure. It's all among the Chows, if you don't mind that."

"Chows—what are Chows?"

"Chinese—Chinks—a good many white people won't live among them."

"If they don't object to us, I'm sure I shall not to them."

The next minute she was sitting beside Louis, but he was fast asleep.

"Louis," she whispered, shaking him gently. He stirred and muttered, but could not waken. She stared at him in the passing light of the street lamps. He looked so helpless, so much at her mercy. Quite unexpectedly she leaned over and kissed the tip of his ear. Next minute she was sobbing uncontrollably, leaning against his arm.

"Oh, why didn't I go in the water? I can't bear it—I can't! I'll never be able to go through with it! I'm making him no better—and no one can keep on being disappointed and disappointed and still keeping their faith. Even to-day, when I ought to have been so happy."

She sat up suddenly, and turned away from Louis, holding out longing arms for the softness of her mother, the autocratic strength of her father. But she had to dry her eyes quickly because the cabman had stopped and was speaking through the window.

"Here we are, ma," he said.

She wrestled with her voice.

"Do you mind—will you ask her, please? I've been crying, and I look such an idiot."

"Right-o, ma. But don't bother about that. Mrs. King has had her share o' crying in her time. She won't think nothing of that."

She realized that it was necessary to waken Louis as she heard the door open and a conversation between two people. A little figure of a woman came out to the cab and spoke to her.

"It's all right, my dear," she said quietly. "I've got a top room. I'll be glad to let you have it."

"It's very kind of you," said Marcella. "My husband is—rather—asleep. How on earth am I going to get him upstairs?"

"I'll get some of my young fellows to carry him up for you," said Mrs. King. "Don't you fret about it now, dear. Men often have a drop too much, and it's better to take no notice provided they don't get too noisy or too ready with their fists."

Marcella smiled faintly and stood stiff as a sentry while Mrs. King fetched out half a dozen of her lodgers who were playing cards in the kitchen. They carried Louis upstairs. He was so drugged that he did not waken.



CHAPTER XV

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.



CHAPTER XVI

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—crepe de Chine!"

She had seen crepe 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 crepe 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.



CHAPTER XVII

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.