"I'm running up a bosker hotel soon's I can get a bit of weather-boarding and a few nails along," he said hopefully.

"That doesn't solve th-th-the immediate problem," said Louis.

"Let's sleep with half of us in the hotel and half on the platform," said Marcella, delighted with the authentic lack of civilization.

"Be et up with h'ants," the driver informed them. "Look here, chum, if I was you I'd sleep in the train. She don't set off till between seven and eight to-morrow."

They jumped at the idea, and the stationmaster, suddenly helpful, offered them the loan of his hut, his spirit lamp, his kerosene tins and his creek which was half a mile away among a few trees, low-growing, stunted blue gums.

"Have to have a wash," the stationmaster told himself unhappily, and suggested the same course to the driver and guard as there was a lady to dinner. Then he piloted Marcella and Louis to his hut.

It struck a homely note in several ways. The name of Rockefeller came to them in the flattened out kerosene tins which, nailed to supports, formed the roof; boxes stencilled with the names of well-known proprietary English goods formed the walls. Inside was a bed in shape of a frayed hammock; upturned boxes formed the chairs and there was an incongruous leather-topped, mahogany-legged writing-table. A kerosene tin was the toilet apparatus: another, cut in two, was used for boiling water. Given a supply of kerosene tins in the Bush, one can make a villa and furnish it, down to cooking utensils and baby's bath.

"Next time's yous happen along, I'll have a bonser hotel," he said, and leading Marcella outside showed her, under the shade of a tree, a cache of dozens of eggs laid by the hens that ran wild, and buried in the earth; half a sheep wrapped in canvas, surrounded by great clouds of flies gave evidence that it had been long dead.

"Help yourself, missus. We'll all kip together. You'll find a bag o' flour in the hammock," said the stationmaster, and wandered off to get on with his hotel and his station.

Marcella looked at Louis and laughed.

"What luck! Here's a chance to experiment! If we get to the station where they want a cook, to-morrow, I'll be able to say I gave every satisfaction in my last place."

"Always supposing we're aren't all dead before then," said Louis.

The first job was to boil water and wash the plates on which she amused herself by tracing the remains of quite half a dozen different meals. She felt sickened by the sight of the dead sheep; Louis seemed unmoved as he ran an anatomical eye over it and hacked off slices with a blunt knife. He became very wise on the subject of flapjacks and felt that Marcella was not quite playing up to him when she preferred to make omelets. The meal was quite a success in spite of the fact that, when it was ready Louis had difficulty in beating up the host and the other guests, and there was nowhere to keep warm the mutton which congealed and stuck hard on the plates. But no one troubled about such a detail. They ate with enjoyment and drank vast quantities of tea with much sugar and no milk.

They had an unbearably stuffy night in the breathless railway carriage; once Marcella went out on the platform and sat down for awhile listening to the echo-like barking of dingoes out on the ranges. In less than five minutes she was back again, her feet and hands prickling and sore with the bites of ants and sandflies. She was not at all sorry when dawn came at half-past three. She was disappointed in the creek; it had sounded luxuriously moist from the note of pride in the stationmaster's voice when he mentioned it. It turned out to be a suncracked water-course with a little muddy water lying in hollows, and one or two deeper holes from which the manganese miners got their water. She had been hoping for a swim: she had to be content with dipping a handkerchief in one of the hollows and wiping her face with it, since all the rest was needed for drinking.

"Next time yous come along we'll have had a drop o' rain, an' then you can drownd yourselfs if you want to," said the stationmaster.

They started out at four o'clock with the information that Gaynor's Station was a collection of weather-board huts, a homestead put together by five lads from England who were trying to make a fortune each. They had not yet made a living between them. Loose End was owned by an elderly squatter with many children. Five big gums, which could be seen for miles, stood sentinel over the homestead on a rising knoll of ground.

"But if yous ain't lucky, don't hit up Loose End. Old Twist has lots o' luck, but it's mostly bad luck. A kid every year, an' eether a bush fire or a flood or something to make up for it. His eldest is going on for ten, I think—an' how's he to pay for labour to clear his land?"

Neither of them knew, but they decided to make for Loose End and see what was going on under the five gums.

That day was the strangest experience to them both. Louis had tramped before in the cooler New Zealand summer; Marcella had walked miles on Lashnagar. But this walking through the dry, sun-scorched scrub, on which their feet slipped and slid was an experience quite unique. The heat rose from the ground to meet that blazing down from the sky of Prussian blue. At eight o'clock they were both tired, but Marcella, who plodded on, calm and unworried, was not nearly so tired as Louis who made himself hot and dissipated much energy in wondering when they would get there—wherever "there" might be. He had started the day whistling and gay; by ten o'clock he was in the depths of despair and took Marcella's attempts to chaff him as insults and injuries. As soon as they reached a patch of stunted bushes she decreed a halt and a rest. They filled the billy from their water-bottles and, making a fire with the scorched scrub, had it boiling in a few moments. Louis, though he was revived to interest by the pannikin of tea and a cigarette and biscuits, sank back into deep depression after a few minutes, saying that their coming into the Bush had been the act of lunatics, that they would die of starvation and thirst—until she made him take out his map and find out where they were.

Together they pored over it. After much wrangling they located Loose End beside a small lake and decided that they would reach there to-morrow with considerable effort.

"Anyway, we'll have to, because of our water," said Louis. "Otherwise we'll die." But Marcella found that, by going a few miles west, they would catch up the creek that drained into the little lake.

"It'll only be a dried water-course," said Louis miserably.

"No it won't. It's sure to be a foaming torrent if I say it shall. Didn't you know I was a witch?" she told him, and she was certainly more right than he, for that night they camped under great eucalyptus trees beside a water-course which ran deep and still at their feet. The first thing they did was to gather wood and make a great fire. After the day's anxiety about water it was intoxicating to know that unlimited quantities were to be dipped up and made into tea. While the water boiled they splashed about in the water, shaking sand out of the folds of their underclothes and their hair.

They had brought eggs and flour and salt. Louis, looking pleased with himself, produced a tin of Eno's Fruit Salt.

"Always take this stuff into the Bush," he explained. "If you can only get muddy water, this makes it more possible. And it's dashed good stuff for making damper less damping."

He put in too much and the damper was so light that it crumbled and got mixed up in the wood ashes. But they were both too hungry to notice whether they were eating damper or wood ash, and much too blissful to care.

They spread the blankets against the roots of a great tree, over a bed of heathery scrub, very soft and springy; they had no axe or any means of chopping wood, but there was a thick carpet of dead stuff under the trees. Noticing dead branches hanging by thin strips of bark Marcella made a lasso with the swag straps and pulled them down. As far as warmth went, there was no need for fire at all as soon as the meal was cooked: but out there in the vast purple-blackness of the night with pin-points of starlight in the illimitable loneliness the rose and gold of the spurting flames was comforting and comradely. They piled the dead wood upon it before they lay down; as one resinous branch after another caught fire the trees danced round in giant shadows, as though they were doing a death-dance for their limbs on the funeral pyre. The silence was a complete blank except when a flapping of wings beat the air where some bird changed its night perch, or a parrot squawked hoarsely for a moment, causing a fluttering of smaller wings that soon settled to silence again.

Louis rolled over; like Marcella he had been lying on his back, staring through the trees at the stars. His hand sought hers and held it, quivering a little.

"You know, it's going to be a hell of a fight, Marcella," he said.

"Oh my dear, do you think so?" she asked, surprised that he was confirming her opinion.

"Yes. In the city, you see, I only have to fight myself. I know, there, that I can always get the stuff—even if I've no money I can beg or pinch it—All I've to fight there is the accessibility of it. Here I've to fight the inaccessibility...."

"I don't quite understand that, Louis."

"I don't suppose you do. You see, dearie, out here it's quite on the cards that I shall go completely off my rocker." He spoke quietly, rather wistfully and sadly.

"Louis!" she cried, sitting up and looking down at him.

"I know I can't get whisky, you see. It's probably a hundred miles away. And I've no money. You must keep it all. This craving comes on and simply eats me up, dear. It's like a cancer, gnawing through bone and flesh and muscle. In the city when the gnawing gets too awful there's always an anesthetic in the nearest pub. In a way, to conquer it in the city is more noble. I said 'noble' in inverted commas, dear. I don't think it is particularly noble. But it's going to be the devil of a fight."

She did not know what to say or think. It seemed, at any rate, better that he should be removed from whisky, however hard it was going to be for him.

"I've thought a lot about it," he went on, speaking more impersonally than she had thought he could. "It's going to be so awful for you. I'll be a fiend to you, I expect, when the hunger comes on. I suppose this is one of the advantages of an inebriates' home. They'd shove me in a straight jacket or give me drugs when I got like that. Out here, you see, there's only you. I can't control myself. I may hurt you."

"You won't. If you do, I'll fight you, so you needn't worry on my account. I think it's all a silly convention that says a man in a temper mustn't thump a woman! If you want to thump me, do! But you'll probably get a much worse thumping than you give."

He tried to be cheered by her, but could not. After awhile, she said:

"Besides, if you do get well here—and you're going to. I don't doubt that for a moment—think how splendid it will be to know you've done it without the sort of restrictions, and treatments you'd get in a Home. Doing it just by your own strength is great, Louis."

He saw that, and was happier, but he could not break out of his morbid introspection. Even after they had said good night and she was in the hinterland of sleep, he wakened her by sitting up and lighting a cigarette.

"Can't you sleep?" she murmured drowsily.

"I'm thinking about you," he said gloomily. "Marcella, I was a cad to bring you out here into the backblocks, just because I wanted to escape temptation. You need civilization just now—you need all the comforts of civilization—care and—Oh the million things a woman needs."

"Oh, Louis, do be quiet!" she said, "all I need at this moment is a good sleep."

He lay down again for ten minutes. Once more he started up, dragging the blanket right away from her.

"How can you expect me to sleep? Marcella, what right had I to make you have a child? We've no money."

"They don't cost anything," she said wide-awake now.

He made a gesture of impatience.

"We've no home—you've no attention."

She sighed.

"Listen to me, Louis, and then, my dear, for ever hold your peace. If the Lord, or whoever it is that's responsible for babies, had meant them to make women invalids, they'd never have been invented at all. Because there's no real room in the world for invalids. They'd have been grown on bushes, or produced by budding, wouldn't they? So just you forget it! The baby is my affair. It's nothing to do with you, and I positively refuse to be fussed over. I call it indecent to talk about ill-health. It's the one thing in life I'd put covers on and hide up. You must just think you've been to a factory and ordered a baby, and they said, 'Yes, sir—ready in six months from now, sir.' And then you walk away and call again in six months!"

"Oh Lord!" he groaned, "why did I marry a kid?"

"You can talk about him as much as you like," she went on calmly, "the finished article. But I simply won't have you fussing about the details of his manufacture, and all his trimmings. And that's final."

"But he's my child," protested Louis.

"Not yet! In six months' time, perhaps. But you've enough worries, real worries, without making them up. There, dear heart, I don't mean to be cross with you. But you're such an idiot, and I'm so sleepy."

They said good night once more, and she was falling asleep when he pulled her hair gently. He was frowning, with deep lines on his forehead.

"But look here, old lady. If we're going right away from everywhere without any home, where's the child going to be born?"

"On the battlefield," she murmured sleepily.

He groaned, and once more his impatient twistings snatched the blanket away.

"Oh damn the Keltic imagination! Why can't you get a grip on things and be practical?"

Once more she was wide-awake, laughing with intense enjoyment.

"I can't see what there is to laugh at," he protested. "Marcella, has it occurred to you what sort of heritage this kiddy of ours has?"

Purposely misunderstanding him she flung out both arms wide, to embrace the whole of Australia, bush and forest, mountain, river and desert from sea to sea.

"You know what I mean," he said desperately. "Me, his father, a drunkard, with drink in his family, and you the descendant of dozens of drunkards. And what's more, though you are not a drunkard, you're as mad as a hatter. What the devil is the poor little beggar going to do?"

She was suddenly awake and very serious.

"Listen, Louis," she said, holding his hands very tight. "I got that jerk-back most dreadfully in Sydney. Mrs. King was saying that the crowning mercy of her life was the fact that she hadn't any children. But it's a mad, bad, heretical sort of fear, the sort of heresy against nature that people ought to be burnt at the stake for believing! This child is no more your child and mine than Jesus was the child of Joseph the carpenter, or—or Romulus and Remus were the children of the wolf-mother. We've given him his flesh. We're his foster-parents, if you like. But God and Humanity are his father and mother. I found all this out one night on the roof in Sydney. He's a little bit of the spirit of God incarnate for awhile."

"Keltic imagination," he said tentatively.

"Very well, then. If you don't like it my way, I'll put it in the scientific way. You twitted me once for forgetting that biology applied to us two. Doesn't it apply here? Biology shows that nature's pushing out, paring down weaknesses and things that get in the way. If a drunkard—who is a weakness, a scar on the face of nature—was going to have drunkard babies, nature would make something happen to drunkards so that they can't have children at all...."

"She does—in the last stages," murmured Louis.

"That's a good thing, perhaps. But I don't believe in inheriting things like drinking. I don't believe my people inherited it at all. They inherited a sort of temperament, perhaps—and it was the sort of temperament that was accessible to drink-hunger. People talk about drinking, or other weaknesses being in their families. Drinking seems to be in most families nowadays, simply because people are slack and lazy and drinking is the easiest and least expensive weakness to pander to. But I certainly believe most hereditary weakness comes from legend or from imitation. It's idiotic nonsense. When you're a kiddie you hear all sorts of family talk about family characteristics; it becomes a sort of legend and you live up to it unconsciously. You see your parents doing things, and because you're with your parents a great deal just at the time when you're soft, like a jelly just poured into a mould, you get like your parents. And then it's too late—too late to alter, I mean, unless you take a fork and beat the jelly up again, or warm it on the fire and make it melt. I've read a lot about this, and I believe it's at the bottom of half the morbid stuff people write and talk about hereditary drunkards and criminals...."

"But statistics," began Louis.

"The worst of statistics is that people only quote the statistics that will prove their argument. They don't quote those for the other side. If drunkards' children become drunkards it's probably because their lives are so desperately miserable that they take the most obvious way of drowning the misery. Anyway, Louis—"

"Lord, you are getting dictatorial, Marcella," he said.

"Yes. I know. I mean to be, on this subject. I'll tell you this much, my dear. If you tell this child of ours that you're a drunkard, I'll shake the life out of you and then run away with him where he'll never see you again. And if he sees you drunk—! But he won't. Anyway, you won't be any more. And now, seriously, after all that speech, let's go to sleep."

It was his turn to lie awake for hours this time, thinking and listening to her quiet breathing.



CHAPTER XXII

They started awake at dawn to the discordant laughter of a jackass in the gum tree above their heads. After a moment's struggle to locate herself Marcella sprang up and, running over the little plot of grass that fringed the creek, had another joyous swim. The morning was very still—uncannily still, and already hot. When they started out along the bank of the creek about six o'clock they felt the oppression almost unendurable, but in the motionless air the five trees that marked Loose End were very distinct, though rather like toy trees in a child's model garden.

The depression of the night had gone; neither of them mentioned it; they talked of trivialities until they halted for lunch and drank a billy full of lukewarm tea.

Louis had built a tent by spreading two of the blankets over bushes to keep off the sun-glare. But there was not much rest in the gasping heat and at last Marcella stood up, stretching her arms which the pack on her back was making stiff.

"I wonder if it would matter if I took all my things off?" she began reflectively. Then she gasped out: "Why Louis, where are the five trees?"

He sprang to his feet, staring about in bewilderment. The sun was above their heads, red and leaden; all round stretched the scorched scrub; the creek lay to their right but the five trees had vanished, swallowed up in a thick, dun-coloured fog.

"Lord, we're in for a dust-storm, old lady!"

"Will it hurt us?"

He dilated on the horrors of dust-storms, and how they buried people and choked the water-holes. It grew dark, not a breath of wind stirred the scrub, not a bird moved or twittered in the few trees fringing the creek.

"It may pass us by," said Louis. "They're often very localized. But if it gets us, be sure not to speak, or your mouth will be full of dust, and keep your eyes shut tight."

They plodded on. Once Marcella started violently as a parakeet flew by with a brilliant flash of pink and green wings and a screaming cry. They found it difficult to breathe. It seemed as though all the air had been sucked up behind the advancing wall of dust and sand. One moment they were walking in clear, though breathless air; the next the storm was upon them, stinging and blinding and burning as the particles of dust were hurled with enormous velocity by the wind.

Marcella gave a little cry of fear, and in the process got her mouth filled with dust as Louis had prophesied. Groping out blindly she found his hand, and they clung together. She would have given anything to be able to speak, for the horror of the ancient doom of Lashnagar rose up all round her and gripped her. But for more than an hour they battled in silence, unable to go either backwards or forwards. When finally the storm passed over, leaving them with parched throats and red-rimmed, aching eyes and blistered skin, it was dusk—the swift dusk of the sub-tropics.

Marcella wanted to stay and wash the dust away in the creek; Louis, remembering the food shortage, insisted on pushing on. But when darkness fell they were going blindly in the direction they guessed to be right for they could see nothing of the five trees. Louis got depressed. Marcella felt tired enough to be depressed too, but had to keep his spirits up. She was just going to suggest that they should give up and rest supperless for the night when they heard a faint "coo-ee," and even more faintly the plodding sound of a horse's steps. Louis excitedly gave an answering shout, and in a few minutes they saw a horse looming through the darkness.

"What a good job I've found you," came a boy's voice, and they saw a small figure standing beside them, reaching about to the horse's shoulder.

"Were you looking for us?" said Marcella. "And are we found? We don't seem to be anywhere."

"I was looking for the sheep. I came across twenty back there, suffocated with the dust. I don't know what he'll say when he knows! But it's a good thing I found you, else you'd have gone on all night."

He turned then, and they followed him. He said nothing more until after about two miles of silent tramping they turned the corner of a high fence threaded with wonga-vine, and saw the lights of a homestead. Marcella felt she understood fire-and sun-worshippers. She could cheerfully have worshipped the twinkling light.

A dog began to bark excitedly; half a dozen children, with one unsexed garment shaped like a bathing-dress each, turned out to stare at them. A man of fifty or thereabouts, with a thin, rather tragic face came along the low verandah built all along the front of the Homestead, and looked at them enquiringly.

"Were you in that storm, chum?" he asked. Louis nodded.

"Come right in! What, got a girl with you, too? Enough to finish you off! Mother!" he added, raising his voice, "Here's a young woman come to see us."

A little meek woman in a faded blue frock came out on to the verandah.

"Wherever have you come from?" she asked. They explained, and she seemed to do ten things at once, while they were speaking. Louis was irresistibly reminded of a music-hall prestidigitateur. She was giving directions for more chops to be put into the frying-pan, clean water to be fetched from the creek and put in a kerosene tin in "Jerry's room," a cloth laid over the bare boards of the already prepared table, and a tin of jam found from the store. Marcella felt at home at once. It was the simple, transparent welcome of Lashnagar again.

The architecture of Loose End was entirely the invention of John Twist. It consisted of a chain of eight rooms. As the family grew, another room was leaned against the last one. One of the boys at Gaynor's had been heard to express the opinion that Loose End would, some day, reach right across the Continent.... The middle and largest room had two doors at opposite sides. It was the living-room. The others, which were either stores, bedrooms, or fowl-pens, had a window in one wall—glassless, formed of trellis—and a door in the other. A boarded platform ran right round the house to a depth of nine feet and the roof of the rooms, projecting over the platform, kept out rain and heat. There was much corrugated zinc and rough wood, many kerosene tins and boxes in the make-up of Loose End, but all the rooms were miraculously watertight. The room into which Marcella was shown was a sleeping-room and nothing more. There were three hammocks slung from wall to wall and one camp-bed still folded up. But while she was apparently talking to Marcella, Mrs. Twist whisked open a tin trunk, put a white linen cloth on the little table in the corner and, running out of the room, came back with a small, cracked mirror she had borrowed from her own room.

When she came into the living-room, after strenuous work in removing the dust of travel, Marcella found that Louis had been taken possession of by some of the children, and been to the creek for a bathe. One of them—apparently a girl, since she was called Betty—had filled a jam tin with water and put in a bunch of bush roses; the big kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling shone upon seven cropped heads, seven brown faces and fourteen bare, brown legs swinging from the bench on which the children sat. Fourteen bright eyes shining in faces polished with soap divided passionate interest between Marcella and the epoch-making pot of jam on the table. Mr. Twist told the guests to sit down; he made the tea while Mrs. Twist dished up an enormous tin full of chops and fried eggs, placing a china washing-basin full of potatoes beside them.

"We need such a lot," she said with a laugh. "I did have an enamelled soup tureen I used for the potatoes, but the enamel chipped off a bit and I thought it might hurt the children if they swallowed it. So now we put the potatoes in the washing-basin and wash up in the tureen."

While the meal was in progress they all talked at once. The children after their first shyness had worn off were entranced when they learnt that their guests had, only a few months ago, been in a real ship on the real sea. Marcella, in turn, was fascinated in watching the manoeuvre with which Jerry concealed the fact that there were not enough knives and forks to go round. He, being ten, was old and tactful; he cut up his meat and ate a few swift mouthfuls frowning into quietness the nudging and protesting brother at his side who wanted his innings with the knife.

"We seem to be a bit short of usables," said Mrs. Twist, complacently drinking tea out of a jampot. "It's all along of that bush-fire last year, when we lost everything."

"We ought to have got out our pannikins," said Marcella, "but we were so tired and hungry I couldn't think of anything but how nice it was to get here."

"You can't think how glad I am to see you," said Mrs. Twist. "I haven't seen a woman since little Millie was born two years ago."

There seemed a million things to talk about. When the last scrap of jam was satisfactorily disposed of, the seven children scattered in seven directions. Mrs. Twist and Marcella washed the dishes; Mr. Twist and Louis smoked on the verandah. A great collie walked sedately into the room and looked at the cleared table reproachfully. Betty appeared with an air of magic and found him a plateful of food. The children seemed to be attached to their mother by invisible wires. At one minute their voices could be heard, shrieking and calling to each other. The next, when she went along the verandah with Mrs. Twist, most of them were in their hammocks, falling asleep.

"I wish they were a bit older," sighed the mother, at the door of their room. Two merry voices giggled in the darkness.

"That makes you older, too," said Marcella softly.

"They're so many to feed, and there's only Jerry can do much to help father yet. We've thirty acres of gorse to clear—and it seems impossible to get at it. It ought to have been done two years ago, but the Government have given us grace when we explained about the bush-fire. We lost a thousand sheep then, you know. And the Homestead was mostly burnt down."

They went along towards the men.

"It's a hard life," said Mrs. Twist uncomplainingly. "But the children are well and happy."

That night they talked, sitting out on the verandah, the black wall of the darkness in front of them, the fire-glow behind. A hot, steaming rain had begun to fall, following on the wind of the dust-storm. It dripped softly and gently, bringing no coolness with it. Mr. Twist talked of the slices of bad luck that had bowed his shoulders, lined his face, and all but broken his spirit. The two women talked softly. Jerry, who, being almost a man, had been allowed to stay up, brought out his old gramophone. Many notes were merely croaks; but "Oh, Dry those Tears" and "Rock of Ages" were quite recognizable. He was very proud of the "Merry Widow" waltz that had been sent to him from his uncle in England, and kept repeating it until he was ordered off to bed. Presently, in the darkness, Marcella found herself telling Mrs. Twist about the coming child.

"Where are you making for, kid?" asked Mrs. Twist, who seemed sorry for her.

"Anywhere. We were told there was a lot of clearing going on up here, so I thought we might both get a job. I didn't want my baby born in the city."

They talked no more that night, for Mr. Twist said it was bedtime. They slept dreamlessly in their hammocks until five o'clock, when they were wakened by Scot the collie who, planting his forepaws on each window-sill barked furiously until he was answered by a shout from within.

The sky was grey and sullen, the hot rain was still falling; grass seemed to have sprung up from the sun-baked soil in the night and the slant-set leaves of the five gums smiled as they slid big drops on to their roots. The leaves of the wonga-vine that sheltered the rather scanty beds of the food-garden looked riotously alive and green; nasturtiums and sunflowers sent out by the uncle in England glowed like little gold lamps seen through a fog.

Breakfast was a repetition of fried mutton and flapjacks and tea. As soon as the children had cleared it away the smallest ones settled down to write on slates long lines of pothooks and hangers. Two of the boys spelt words laboriously from ancient "readers," and Jerry set out to look for the lost sheep again. Marcella was packing her swag a little sadly. She wished they could stay at Loose End. Obviously it looked as though Loose End could not support its own family without the burden of another. But Mr. Twist thought differently.

"What do you say to stopping here, ma?" he said, looking at Marcella through the trellis. "I've been talking to your boss and he's willing if you say the word."

Marcella straightened herself up and looked at him.

"I'd like nothing better," she told him simply.

"Right-o, then. That's settled," he said, and they discussed details. Rather shamefacedly he offered them five pounds a month and rations. He said they were worth more, but he could not afford it. If they liked to throw in their lot with his and try to make Loose End's run of bad luck change, he would share the good when it came. They accepted his offer without discussion. Then he asked if they would live at the Homestead or in a shepherd's hut about half a mile away, near the lake.

"It's not a bad little place. I had two shepherds before the sheep got drowned. Then it was no use them staying. I don't think there's much in the way of furniture—"

They looked at each other. In each other's eyes they saw a plea to be alone together in their new world, and said, in a breath, that they would live in the hut.

"Oh kid, I'm so glad," said Mrs. Twist when the men went off to see what damage the dust-storm had done. Marcella was extraordinarily happy as she was taught what to do in the Homestead.



CHAPTER XXIII

The hut was on the edge of a great patch of gorse that Mr. Twist said stretched for twenty acres or more, right to the limit of his holding. It was giant gorse, quite unlike the mild edition of it found in England. In many places it towered above the hut and the stems were almost as thick as tree-trunks, while the spines played havoc with clothes and skin. It was burnt dry now, by the sun. In the cooler weather, Mr. Twist said, the whole place was a golden blaze of bloom.

The cottage consisted of three rooms, built on the same plan as the Homestead. The middle room was a sort of kitchen. There was a big table and a bench of planed wood.

"There isn't a grate," said Mr. Twist, "they got their rations up at the house, you see." The absence of a fire-place did not trouble Marcella. She had often cooked on Wullie's open fire at Lashnagar, and Louis quickly explained that he would make a bush oven outside. Neither of the rooms leaning against the kitchen had any furniture, but Mrs. Twist seemed to have laid in a whole ship's stores of navy hammocks, which she said they could have until Louis had carpentered bed for them. There were hundreds of very fat, furry spiders who crawled about solemnly and fell with heavy bodies down swift silken threads as Marcella opened the door of the bedroom.

For the next few days they certainly did not earn their wages. They were like two children with a new doll's house, and at the end of the week the hut was unrecognizable. Louis, unskilfully busy with saw, hammer and nails put up a shelf for the box of books they were going to get from Mrs. King's as soon as someone went into Cook's Well to take a letter. Marcella wished a little that she had some money to buy things for her house, but it was the sort of wish she found it easy to conquer and when, in a spirit of mischief she took the tar brush with which Louis had been caulking the sides of the hut, and tarred CASTLE LASHCAIRN on the corrugated roof, she saw Castle Lashcairn rising there.

"After all, imaginary castles are the best," she told Louis after two days spent in clearing away dust and spiders, and limewashing the interior. "It only needs imaginary cleaning."

He was surveying his new white shelf on which the matronly Mrs. Beeton seemed to incline towards the sober black New Testament and give a cold shoulder to the lean-looking "Questing Cells" and the slim "Parsifal." He had made and patented a very wonderful reflector for their little lamp by cutting and bending a kerosene tin in such a way that it mirrored six times the light inside. Sitting out on the verandah he thought out the details of an arm-chair to be made out of a barrel Mr. Twist had given him. They sat on the edge of the verandah, their legs swinging. He was smoking—very distastefully—a pipe because there was plenty of strong shag at the Homestead but no cigarettes. Marcella had been watching him; it had amazed her to see how much more calmly he had taken the cigarette famine than she had guessed possible.

"If I can go on like this, dearie," he said at last, "there'll be no more bogeys. I've been busy—and very happy this last week. If I'm kept busy—"

"You'll be kept busy," she said, smiling. "When we've cleared the twenty acres of gorse it's all to be ploughed and planted. And when that's done and there isn't a single other thing to do, we'll start to tunnel a hole through the middle of the earth to Lashnagar, like they did in Jules Verne's book."

"I'm keeping my body occupied," he went on slowly. "The point is, will that satisfy my brain, and all of me?"

She looked down the little slope on the top of which Castle Lashcairn stood. The five gum trees stretched up to the cloudless night sky; a few hundred yards away the lake glimmered, star-reflecting and still. To the left the lamp of the Homestead glowed, and "Oh Dry Those Tears" started to groan out. Marcella waited for the line that almost sounded like a collection of bass "brrrrrs" and then she spoke.

"If you can forget yourself, my dear—get swallowed up," she said gently, and a silence fell between them.

The days drew into weeks. Castle Lashcairn grew more and more beautiful; the books arrived from Sydney and kept sentry on the white shelf. Several of her unnecessary frocks Marcella made into cushions stuffed with dried lucerne which made a most interesting crackling noise when one leaned against them. Louis spent most of his Sundays in making a cot for his son but his fatal lack of thoroughness was a drawback, for it seemed to come to pieces as quickly as he got it together. Marcella looked after the fowls and the cows; she did most of the cooking at the Homestead; she got the children beyond the hanger and pothook stage of writing and filled their minds, hitherto worried by family cares, with legend and fairy-tale. She wrote often to Dr. Angus, and he sent her books and garden seeds. All the time she and Louis never found a moment in which to be idle; about eleven o'clock every day she took his lunch across the clearing to him; she collaborated a good deal with Mrs. Beeton in making various ambitious dishes for him, but as they were almost entirely made of mutton, "standard" flour and eggs, there was not much variety. When the fried sheep had lived too long before being killed, or been kept too long after death, they spent considerable time looking at the pretty pictures in the cookery book: Marcella told of Wullie's feasts in the beach-hut. Louis remembered restaurant celebrations. But they were always too hungry to care much what they ate; the most leathery damper, the most difficult mutton was pleasant eaten out of doors in the faint smoke of the gorse fires.

During the afternoons she helped with the gorse grubbing. Before the great bushes could be approached they had to be fired, and she loved to watch the golden blaze flare swiftly to the sky, leaving a pall of grey smoke through which the carbonized gorse branches shone gold for a moment in a fairy tracery before crumbling to white ash on the ground. Then they had to take pickaxes and mattocks, chisels and spades to chop down the parent stem and uproot the smallest leader from the roots. Gorse is very tenacious of life. A root of only a few inches will spring up to a great tree in an incredibly short time, especially on virgin soil fertilized by many burnings.

They had faces perpetually blackened by smoke. Marcella worked with an oilskin bathing-cap sent by Mrs. King, over her hair; she wore an old blue overall on which the spines of the gorse had worked havoc. And still she would not be ill to fall in with Louis's preconceived notions; living an absolutely normal, rather tough life, hardened by her father's Spartanism, she found that a natural process made very little difference to her. To Louis's real distress she swam in the lake every morning; what he could not understand was that she had scarcely, even yet, awakened to consciousness of her body. Once or twice in her queer ecstasies, once or twice in Sydney the sleep within her had stirred and stretched and opened her eyes; from the force of the stirring and stretching she had gathered an impression of something immensely strong. But it had not yet risen and walked about her life yet.

One day she went across the clearing to Louis, through the smoke wreaths that were being gently swayed to and fro by a soft wind. In a blue shirt open at the neck, shewing a triangle of brown chest, he looked very different from the effeminate Louis of the Oriana. Just as she reached him, looking at him instead of the rough ground, all rutted with uptorn roots, she slipped and almost fell. In an instant his arm, taut and strong, was round her. She laughed and drew away from him.

"I was looking at you coming along here, Marcella," he said. "Do you know what you remind me of?"

"Dinner?" she said, sitting down to unpack the basket of food.

"No—a Maori woman."

"Louis! A savage?"

"They aren't savages. But after all, savage doesn't mean anything but wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King Country in New Zealand—You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought it a bit overdrawn."

"What is it?" she interrupted, pointing to the food imperiously.

"It's about a girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a baby without turning a hair. Remembering my nerve-racking experience of maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without his book. But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble apologies by wireless. The tribe was trekking. I was with them for months, you know, in the Prohibition Country. My diagnostic eye had foreseen a birthday and, as a matter of fact, I was getting rather funky and wishing I had Hermann's 'Midwifery' to swot up. I saw myself the hero of the occasion, don't you know, dashing in to save her life, miles from civilization. One morning we were camping by a hot spring for the women to do some cooking and washing. My patient disappeared with an old thing we called Aunt Maggie. Presently we trekked again, and I was feeling horribly uneasy about her, when I nearly dropped. There she was, sailing along in the midst of the other women, with the kid in her arms, looking as cool as a cucumber! Lord, I did feel small!"

He laughed reminiscently, and lighted his pipe.

"It seems right to me," she said, looking away through the drifting smoke. "Why should the coming of life mean pain for someone?"

"Don't know, old lady. But it does. I say, how do you think I'm getting on?"

They looked across the clearing and felt rather proud.

"I love it," he said simply, "taking nature in hand a bit—she's a wicked old harridan, isn't she? A naughty old lady gone wrong! Look at that gorse! We'll have spuds here in no time, and then, in a few years, wheat. I feel I'm making a dint on the face of the earth at last. In a hundred year's time, when I'm forgotten, the effect of these few months' work will be felt. I say, am I talking hot air?"

"Not a bit. But let's do a bit more—Jerry calls it scene-shifting."

She tossed the last piece of cake to an inquisitive kookaburra who had been watching the meal optimistically, with bright eyes and nodding head. It was a triumph, this cake—in several ways. The stationmaster at Cook's Wall had built his "bosker hotel" at last, and had made it a store at which one could buy fruit, jam, sugar and various luxuries. Louis had been in twice to the store lately, and had actually remembered the seed-cake on the Oriana when he saw caraway seeds in the store. He volunteered the information that there was whisky for sale at the store, but did not mention whether he had wanted to buy it or not.

He got up, taking the mattock. Marcella began to fight a great stem running along the ground.

"Devilish stuff," he said, turning back to look at her. "See that little patch over there?"

She nodded, following his eyes. A brisk little gorse bush was bursting from the ground. A few feet away another was keeping it company.

"Devilish stuff!" he repeated. "Just like a cancer—in pathology. You chop the damned thing out, root and branch, and there it pops out again, miles away from where it started. Look at that piece there."

He attacked the little plant with rather unnecessary severity and dug up a thin, tough, cord-like root which he threw on the fire savagely.

"Louis, do you remember that schoolmaster on the Oriana?" she asked suddenly, staring thoughtfully at the long, thin leaders.

"Oh, that ass who sat in my chair? Yes. Why?"

"He told me a fearful thing about cancer."

"He would—blighted idiot. What was it?"

She hesitated a minute.

"He said he'd read in some book—he was always reading queer books—that cancer was an elemental that had taken possession of one's body. A horribly preying, parasitic life—feeding on one's body—Ugh, it made me feel sick! And it's so cruel, really, to say things like that. He seemed to suggest that elementals were something unclean that could not come except to unclean people. And—mother died of cancer. And mother was very beautiful."

"Well, you can tell the footling ass from me that he's a thumping liar. Elemental grandmother! Let me tell you this much—cancers come from one thing only, and that's irritation—injury, often. Corsets, sometimes—or a blow—If I were to thump you—"

He laughed, and turned away.

"Yes, I know," she said quietly. She was thinking of that stormy scene between her father and the two doctors when the faint smell of chloroform crept round her at the farm while she waited outside on the landing.



CHAPTER XXIV

For nearly five months peace stole round Castle Lashcairn. Marcella was almost incredibly happy and so was Louis. Mrs. Twist and Marcella held long consultations about the baby, but Marcella, afraid of worrying Louis, tried to make him forget all about it. Even when, as time went on, she really began to feel tired and unable to work with him, she fought her tiredness indignantly; she was terrified lest he should get "raked up" and go along to the hotel for solace. So she hid everything from him, arranging all details with Mrs. Twist who promised to "see her through it." There was no nurse within a hundred miles; there was a dreadful old woman who had brought several bottles of squareface with her when she attended Mrs. Twist at Millie's birth. They decided to dispense with her services.

Marcella sent money to Mrs. King to buy things for her in Sydney. They spent a whole Sunday evening making out the list. Many of the things he had learnt, from textbooks, to associate with babies, Mrs. Twist thought unnecessary, but Marcella, with no basic opinion of her own, let him have his way, and one day in May he took Gryphon, the Twist pony, to fetch the packages from the station.

He was to be away one night—starting at four in the morning he would rest at the hotel for the night and start back next morning. That night Marcella lay long awake, thinking about him. She was vaguely anxious; when she fell asleep she dreamed that he came home to Castle Lashcairn drunk. He was talking French—his eyes were wild, his mouth loose and slobbering, his tongue bitter.

She started up in fright and rolled out of the hammock.

"No—no. It couldn't happen again. It couldn't. We could never live now, if we were to get miserable like that after we've been so happy. He's so—so clean, now. He can't get dirty again."

She could not sleep after that, and walked down to the lake in the moonlight. She was really feeling ill. Louis's lectures and diagrams and descriptions of "midder" cases at the hospital sickened and frightened her. Mrs. Twist, with the average woman's unscientific and morbid interest in such illness, sickened her still more.

The moonlight was very bright; the weather was warm, for May. Louis had begged her not to swim now. She had given in to him rather than worry him, but a sudden impulse to do what she thought pleasant without troubling him came to her, and she slipped out of her nightgown quickly. The lake lay at her feet, a shimmering pool of silver, almost without ripples. It lapped very gently against her feet, bringing back the softly lapping waters of Lashnagar on spring mornings. It was adorably, tinglingly cold; she forgot the dream in the exhilaration and gave a little cry of rapture as she waded further out. Then, without warning, a ghost was in the water beside her. She stared, and knew that it was her own reflection. With a little cry she hurried back to land, her heart thumping wildly as she pulled on her nightgown over her wet body with trembling hands.

"How horrible I look!" she whispered. "He mustn't know I look as awful as that!"

The next day she waited for him, anxious to unpack the thrilling parcel from Sydney, but he did not come, and all the night she sat waiting, afraid that he had met with some accident. If someone had come, then, and told her he was drunk she would not have believed it. It seemed to her just as unreal a thing as last night's dream.

But at four o'clock in the morning as she sat on the verandah, half nodding with red-rimmed, heavy eyes, she saw him come stumbling along, holding on to the pony's neck.

She went out to meet him, knowing just exactly what she was going to meet. And she felt frozen with horror. The average man coming home drunk is not a tragedy. He is merely amiably ridiculous. To Louis, after all his fights and all his hopes, tragedy had certainly come, but he was too drunk to know it yet. He began to bluff and lie just as usual.

"Ought be 'shamed, sending a chap thirty—thirty—thirty miles f'r lot fem'—fem'—fripp—fripp—fripperies! Sick an' tired, stuck in with a wom' day an' night f'r months. 'Nough make any man k-k-kick."

She did not speak, and he went on in the same old way, French words peppering the halting English; she could have shut her eyes and fancied she was back in the city again, or on the ship.

He muttered and shouted alternately all the way to the cottage; there was a meal waiting but he could not eat; sitting on the edge of the verandah, he ordered her to light him a cigarette. She knew there were none in the house and felt in his coat pocket, guessing he had bought some. She was not really unhappy. She was too sick, too frozen to feel yet at all.

"Come out my pock'," he growled, hitting her arm away fiercely, his teeth clenched. "Aft' my money, eh? Think you're winning, don't you? In league with the Pater against me. Think you'll always have me under your thumb, nev' giv' free hand. There's not a man on God's earth would stand it, damned if there is—tied to wom' apron strings all the time!"

"Very well, get your own cigarette. I'm going to bed."

"Y-you w-w-would," he said, and laughed shrilly. "Think you've got me in blasted bush, work like blast' galley slave while you skulk in bed."

"Oh don't be such an idiot, Louis. You'd better go to bed. I'm tired of you," she said, going past him into the bedroom.

"Ta' my boots off," he grunted, trying to reach his feet and overbalancing. "If you can't make yourself 'tractive to a man, you can be useful. Nice damned freak you are f'r any man t' come home to! Nev' trouble to dress please me—like Vi'let."

Marcella began to laugh hysterically. It was uncanny how his opinion of her appearance coincided with her own.

"Wom' your condish' no damn goo' t' any man!" he mumbled. She went past him, into the room and left him. It was the first time she had made no attempt to soothe and sober him and bring him back. She felt impatient with him, and horribly lonely and frightened of being with him, horribly longing to run to someone and be comforted. But she was just as anxious to hide the trouble from the Twists and knew that she must bear it alone.

She cried for hours, completely disheartened, longing passionately to go to him and ask him to assure her it was only a dream, and he really was cured as she had imagined. But at last she fell asleep, too proud to go and ask him to come to bed again, guessing that he would sleep in the living-room.

She wakened early and started up with full recollection of what had happened. In the light of morning, after a sleep, she was sick with herself for having forgotten her theory that he was an ill man; she had let personal annoyance stop her from trying to help him. Brimming over with love and pity and self-disgust she ran out to find him, for she guessed he would be penitent now, and in black despair.

He was not there. On the verandah was a "squareface" bottle, empty. Wakening from a drugged sleep in the grey morning, his mouth ablaze, his brain muddled and full of resentment against her, he had remembered the gin he had brought home with him; there was not much left in the bottle. He drank it, full of resentment against it for making him so unhappy. He knew that ten pounds—two months' pay—was in the cigarette-box on the shelf. It was Mr. Twist's birthday next Sunday and they had decided to give it back to him to buy tools. Louis remembered it; fighting every inch of the way across the floor with the strength that the last few months had put into him, he took it out of the box. Then, a thousand devils at his heels, he dashed off into the Bush on his thirty-mile mad tramp.

It was a week before she saw him again, and all the time she was aching to follow him. But she knew she could not walk so far and, with a stern cussedness typical of her father, she went on with Louis's work, not mentioning to the Twists that he was away, though they all wondered what had happened to him. She burned the gorse as though it were whisky, almost savagely. She tore at the roots in the ground as though they were the fierce desires of life to be ruthlessly uprooted, smashed out, burnt to ashes. She was scarcely conscious of emotion; the smoke got into her eyes and blinded her; stooping to dig made her feel faint and ill, but in her desperate misery she attacked the work as even Louis in his best days had never done. It was not until she had been at it nearly a week that Mrs. Twist found her out, and came across the clearing to her, looking indignant.

"Want to kill yourself, and have the child killed too kid?" she cried before she reached her. "What the nation do you think you're doing?"

"I won't be paid for work that isn't done," said Marcella ungraciously. She was so sore, so aching that she knew to her disgust, that she would be crying weakly on Mrs. Twist's shoulder if she let herself be even commonly polite.

"Come on, kid, and have a cup of tea with me," said Mrs. Twist gently. "I know what it is to feel as if you could chew anyone's head off. It always takes me like that the last few weeks. Where's your boss?"

"He—Oh, I don't know. I've got to do his work. I daren't let him think he can shirk like this! He'll never get back again if I make him think it doesn't matter. Mrs. Twist, I'm tired of it!" she cried with sudden fierce intensity. "Never, never, never for a minute dare I be tired and weak; why I daren't even think tired for a minute. Always I've to be strong for him! Oh—" she suddenly choked and, flinging her spade aside, sat down clumsily on the ground, her face buried in her hands. "If only Father could come alive for a few hours—and thump him!"

Mrs. Twist made no enquiries about Louis; she had guessed a good deal and, by excessive tact, got Marcella to go across to the Homestead with her and rest for the remainder of the afternoon. But she was back at her work again next morning grimly determined to show Louis that if he shirked his job she would do it for him.

That night he came home—pale and haggard, unshaven and unwashed. He had spent the ten pounds until he had just enough left to buy two bottles of whisky. With these he had wandered off on the home road, to sink to sleep when he could go no further and waken to another solitary orgy.

She had been working till after dark, in spite of Mrs. Twist's remonstrances, to which she answered rudely and impatiently. At last the elder woman thought it less wearing to the girl to leave her alone; she guessed that she would faint with physical weariness before she had got over her mental misery. Louis could see the red glow in the sky for the last two miles of his dazed tramp; it led him homewards, muttering to himself about a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. He looked into the house and saw that she was not there. He had not known, till he saw the empty rooms, with her frock hanging over the hammock, her nightgown neatly folded on the shelf, her books and a pannikin half full of cold tea in the kitchen, how much he had counted on seeing her, how he had hungered for her, deep down, during all the nightmare week. He felt too ashamed to go to the Homestead to look for her; then it occurred to him that she would be across the clearing.

And he met her, half-way. She was coming along in the dull glow of the dying fire, the pickaxe over her shoulder. She looked different to him; perhaps his eyes were distorted, perhaps the fire-glow making leaping shadows caused the difference; but she walked heavily, wearily, without the thrilling, young spring of swift movements that made her such an exhilaration to him. He wanted to run across the clearing, lift her in his arms and charm away the tiredness; swiftly on top of that emotion came the realization that she was walking wearily partly because she had been doing his work, partly because her spirit was heavy and sick. He felt sick with himself for having hurt her; he resented the misery his conscience was causing him: swiftly he found himself resenting the ungainliness of her figure which, in his morbid mood, seemed his fault too. He hated the unconscious reproach she gave him as she came along, stumbling a little, carrying the pickaxe.

He had finished his last spot of whisky at noon and had not slept since; he was worn and tired and frayed, even more than she was. He was acutely uncomfortable for want of soap and water and food.

He dashed across the space between them, his eyes blazing madly, and she looked up, hearing his steps, seeing the blaze of his eyes, the tenseness of his clenched hands.

"Damn you—damn you!" he cried, "playing the blasted Christian martyr. Walking like that, to make people think I've made you tired!"

She stared at him, and her eyes filled with tears. She had got to the stage of longing to see him so much that she did not care whether he were drunk or sober. Then the ridiculousness of playing a role in the Bush at ten o'clock at night, struck her, and she laughed—a rather cracked laugh. He came close to her, all flaming with hate. He noticed the blue shadows under her eyes, smelt the fire on her clothes. She recoiled from the whisky on his breath, which, from association with her childhood's horrors, always reduced her to a state of unreasoning terror.

"Oh blast you—too fine to come near me, are you? You were damned glad to pick me up, anyway—and so you ought to be, with your drunken old scab of a father!"

She, in her turn, blazed and tingled; murder was in the ends of her fingers that quivered towards him. Luckily she had dropped the pickaxe. But her movements were slow, and his quick, and he got behind her in an instant. Next moment, without realizing what he was doing, he pushed her violently. She stumbled a few steps and fell heavily against the blunt end of the pickaxe. For an instant he stood looking at her; the next moment with a hoarse cry he was kneeling beside her.

"Oh my darling," he cried. "I told you I'd kill you in the end! I told you the damn stuff was making a madman of me."

The whisky vanished from him like the flashing of lightning. Lifting her in his arms he carried her homewards and laid her down on the verandah. Frantic with fear he was going to fetch Mrs. Twist when she sat up rather shakily and looked at him.

"I suppose that's what you've been expecting me to do—faint all over the place—swounds and vapours," she said, laughing faintly. "Louis, it was a horrible feeling."

"Marcella," he sobbed, kissing her hands, kneeling beside her desperate in his self-abasement. "I thought I'd killed you."

"You're not much of a doctor if you don't know I'd take much more killing than that," she said. "And I wanted to kill you for a minute, so we're equal."

In a torrent all his explanations came pouring out. He had thought the whisky hunger was killed; he had tried to test his certainty and had failed.

"I got cocky, old girl. I swanked to myself! I thought I'd got it beat and I'd just go and have one whisky at the Station Hotel to satisfy my own conviction. But when I'd had one I couldn't help it. I seemed to be outside myself, watching myself for the first two or three. I was interested. I kept thinking 'I'll tell Marcella she need not be frightened any more. I can drink two or three whiskies and not be a bally Blue Ribboner any more. We need not be banished to the Bush for the rest of our lives to keep me out of danger.' Then I got muddled and quite lost grip. It had a sort of chemical effect, you know. I hated you for keeping me from whisky that was making me feel so fine and jolly again. I felt I'd been a bit of a prig lately. I loved the stationmaster and a few manganese miners who came in. In fact, I just wallowed again. I came home hating you. I didn't come to see you. I came for money. And that's all. The whole thing's hopeless."

"It was my fault this time, Louis. I went to bed and left you. If I'd not been so proud and so huffy I'd have kept you."

"Yes, but only for a time, dear. I saw it all in a flash to-night when you lay there and I thought you were dead. Marcella, no savage would have done that—hurting you just now."

"What rubbish! If you hadn't done it to me I would have done it to you," she said easily.

"Don't you see how hopeless it is? The very first time I go near whisky, I want it. And this happens. I was a madman to-night. It means that we've got to stick here for the rest of our lives. I daren't even go to the store to fetch things for you when you're ill. I have to hide in a hole like a fox when the dogs are after it."

"After all, is it so very horrible here, Louis?" she whispered. "I think it's been heaven. Our Castle, and the clearing—and next month my seeds that Dr. Angus sent will be coming up. And the baby, Louis! Just think of the millions of things we've got!"

But he knew better than she did the torment of his weakness and refused to be comforted. He was near suicide that night; he too had been happy, happier than ever in his tormented, unfriended life before. He had the terrible torture of knowing that it was he who had brought the cloud into their sky; he had the terror before him, with him, of knowing that he would keep on bringing clouds, all the more black because they both so loved the sunshine.

And she, when she undressed, sick and faint but comforted with the thought that once more a fight was over, blew the light out quickly so that he should not see the ugly purple mark of the pickaxe.

She usually slept with her nightgown unfastened so that the cool winds should blow over her through the trellis of the window. To-night she muffled herself up tightly, and when he came in from a strenuous ten minutes in the lake, feeling once more as though she had sent him to dip in Jordan, she pretended to be asleep. Seeing her so unusually wrapped up, he thought she was cold, and fetched a blanket to cover her. She dared not yield to her impulse to hold out her arms to him and draw his aching head on to her breast for fear the bruise should grieve him.



CHAPTER XXV

Once more came peace, so sunlit and tender that it seemed as though they had wandered into a valley of Avilion where even the echoes of storms could not come, and doves brooded softly. They talked sometimes now of the coming of their son; Louis, once he had got over his conventional horror of such a proceeding, said that she would be as safe in Mrs. Twist's care, with him hovering in the background, as though she had gone to the nursing home in Sydney, as he had suggested at first.

"I shall funk awfully to know you're going through it, old lady," he told her. "You know nothing about it yet. I've seen this thing happen dozens of times, and it's much worse than you imagine."

She decided, privately, to spare him the misery of it all by sending him off into the Bush on an errand for Mr. Twist as soon as she was taken ill. But her scheme fell through. All one day of blue and silver in June, a winter's day with keen exhilaration in the air, she stayed with him in the clearing, burning the branches as he hewed them down. She felt scarcely alive. Her body was a queer, heavy, racked and apprehensive thing down on the ground. She watched it slowly walking about, dragging faggots of gorse fastened together by the swag-straps which she loosened as she cast the branches cracking and creaking into the flames. Her mind was restless, a little fey. Louis, seeing something of her uncertainty, stopped work early, and they walked home slowly over the cleared land that was now being ploughed.

"I feel proud of it, don't you?" she said, looking back. He nodded, watching her anxiously.

As she was making the tea pain, quite unbearable, seized her. She got out on the verandah so that he should not see her. After a while it passed and, looking white, she came back into the room.

"I was going across to the Homestead to-night. Jerry's got a new record and wants to try it on us. But I feel tired. Will you ask Mrs. Twist to come and have a gossip?" she said casually.

The pain came back, quite astonishing her. She had heard that it was horrible, but had not expected it to be quite so horrible as this. Her mind had only room for one thought—that Louis must not suspect—or, in his anxiety; he would lose grip on himself and make away for Cook's Wall and oblivion. Going into her bedroom she took pencil and paper and wrote a note to Mrs. Twist, who understood the plot and was ready to invent some lost sheep for Jerry and Louis to hunt up.

"Can you come up? I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away," she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down. That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it against Louis. She heard his steps coming along the verandah and clenched her hands fiercely over her mouth.

"Did you cry out then, dear?" came his voice as he pushed at the door. Feeling an obstruction he pushed all the harder: she could not speak, but he took in at a glance her twisted figure and as he bent over her, shaking with fright, she caught at his hands.

"I thought I'd do it all by myself, but I can't bear it," she gasped.

"Oh my darling," he cried, lifting her in his arms and holding her tight. "How long has this been going on?"

It was some time before she was able to speak. In the bleak aloneness of pain she was very glad of his presence.

"All day—only I didn't want you to know," she said. He groaned.

"For fear it'd bowl me over? Oh God—"

"I'd a plot to send you away. But I'll be glad to know you're not very far! Will you go for Mrs. Twist, Louis? It will be back in a minute."

Kissing her, he ran out across the paddock. In that moment he felt he would cheerfully die for her; it was not her illness that made him so tender, so unusually exalted. He had not it in his nature to regard pain as other than interesting. But the rending thought that she had suffered alone rather than risk his getting drunk—that jerked him. He felt he could beat any weakness that night, as he recalled her eyes, trying to smile at him through pain, her hands as they clung to his for help. He lived a thousand lives during the next few hours until, at two o'clock, he heard the heart-stopping cry of a newborn child that brought stuffy London nights in the slums back to his mind for an instant until Mrs. Twist said, with an air of personal pride, that it was a boy.

And then Louis cracked again; kneeling beside Marcella, who was quite calm and very tired, he sobbed out his love and his penitence and his stern and frantic resolves for the future, his undying intention to be as good a man as she was until Mrs. Twist, who was not very used to emotional young men, packed him out of the way to take the news to Mr. Twist, who was sitting up waiting for it.

The two women had never told Mr. Twist of Louis's tragedy. He had guessed that he had been "on the shikker" that week he stayed away, but he took that as the ordinary thing done by ordinary men—he himself was past "having a burst," he had no heart for it now; but no young man was any the worse for it if it didn't take hold of him. And so, when Louis went there with his eyes shining, his hair wild and his hands shaking, he brought out a bottle of brandy.

"We must drink the young fellow's health," said Mr. Twist, pouring out a microscopic dose for himself and passing the bottle to Louis. "I got that bottle a bit ago, as soon as mother told me your missus was like that. You never know when a drop of brandy may save life."

Louis refused the drink, but Mr. Twist laughed at him—and Louis could not bear to be laughed at. He too poured a microscopic dose, and they solemnly toasted the unnamed son. Louis was fidgety, anxious to get back.

"Leave them alone—they're better alone for a bit. All sorts of things to see to," said the man who had weathered seven birthdays. "Have a pipe with me."

They smoked; Mr. Twist talked. Louis answered vaguely, his mind with Marcella; he had suddenly determined that he could not keep his son, as well as his wife, chained in the Bush with him. Visions of the boy growing up—going to school—going to the hospital to do what his father had failed to do—floated before him. He was making titanic resolutions for the future. His eyes strayed past the brandy bottle. Mr. Twist pushed it generously forward.

"Have another dose. You need it, lad," he said. Louis stood up, astonishing Mr. Twist. He was trembling violently, his forehead wet and shining, his eyes wild.

"Put the damned stuff in the fire!" he cried, and dashed off over the paddock as though a pack of devils was after him. It was an epoch; it was the first time he had refused a drink.



CHAPTER XXVI

Marcella lay afloat on a warm, buoyant sea of enchantment, her eyes closed; life seemed in suspension; she had never, in her life, known pain of any severity until a few hours before; it had appalled, astonished her. She felt it unfair that a body which could quiver to the swift tingle of frosty mornings on the hills, the buffetings and dashings of the North Sea waves, the still glamour of an aurora evening on a house-top, and the inarticulate ecstasy of love, should be so racked. But as she put out her hand across the bed and felt the faint stirrings of the child at her side she forgot those few nightmare hours as a saint, bowing his head for his golden crown at the hands of his Lord, must forget the flames of the stake, the hot reek from the lion's slavering jaws. She looked across to Louis, who was sleeping heavily in his hammock; he had found time to tell her that, for the first time, he had held temptation literally in his hand and been able to conquer it. And she felt that Castle Lashcairn was not big enough to hold all the kindliness and happiness that seemed to be focussing upon it from all the round horizon. Faith in the logical inevitability of good had changed to certainty: it seemed to her, now, that faith was only an old coward afraid to face fact. She was looking at the world from her mountaintop that night; it seemed to her that it could never be the same again for anyone in it, since she herself felt so different, so exalted.

The next two days brought complications. When Louis, coming in at noon, all smelling of sunshine and wind and smoke, kneeled beside the bed for a moment and, peeping underneath the folded sheet at the pink, screwed-up face of his son, happened to touch her breast with his hand, she was bathed in a sea of pain. Later in the day Mrs. Twist said he would have to go to the township to get a feeding-bottle for the baby; he was inclined to dispute the necessity for it, but he set off at once, for the child, fed with sugar and water in a spoon, kept up a dissatisfied wailing. Marcella forgot to be anxious about him, so completely had she sponged fear from her mind. When, at breakfast-time next morning, Jerry came in with the bottle, she guessed that Louis was washing off the dust of his swift travel before he came to see her. In the absorption of feeding the child and talking to Mrs. Twist she almost forgot him; it was nightfall next day before she saw him, and then he looked haggard and pinched, and she was almost frantic with fear; when he was away from her she never thought he was drunk; always she thought he had met with an accident. He told her, between sobs and writhings, that once again he had failed, but he had been too ashamed to come to her until he had slept off some of the traces of his failure. Seeing him buying a baby's bottle at the store the men of the township had chaffed him into "wetting the baby's head," and he had forgotten his recent victory, his adoring love, his fierce resolves, and the little hungry thing waiting to be fed. Once again she felt stunned, incredulous; later, when she was up again and going about the cottage and Homestead, she determinedly forgot. His passionate struggles made it impossible to feel resentment against him, however much he made her suffer. Always she was sure this particular time was the last time; always she thought Louis, like Andrew, had been going along the Damascus road and had seen a great light.

And so, for two years, they lived on at Castle Lashcairn; for long days sometimes Louis went off to Cook's Wall, and she despaired. Most of the time she hoped blindly. Much of the time they were incredibly happy in small things. Some slight measure of prosperity came to Loose End. The uncle who used to send the gramophone records retired from business and, buying himself an annuity, divided his money between his few relatives so that he could see what they did with it before he died. Quite a respectable flock of sheep came to take the place of those drowned in the flood and burnt in the fire; a horse and buggy went to and fro between Loose End and the station; Scottie the collie got busy and two shepherds came, building another hut at the other side of the run. A plague of rabbits showed Mr. Twist the folly of putting off the construction of rabbit-proof fencing any longer, now that he could afford it, and the gorse was once more left uncleared for months in the pressure of new things. Neighbours came, too—the deposit of manganese at Cook's Wall was found cropping up on the extreme borders of Gaynor's run, and a tiny mining township called Klondyke settled itself round the excavations five miles from the Homestead. Marcella made friends with everyone, to Louis's amazement. To him friendliness was only possible when whisky had taken away his self-consciousness; the parties of miscellaneous folks who turned up on Sundays, bringing their own food, as is the way in the Bush where the nearest store is often fifty miles away, worried him at first. He stammered and was awkward and ungracious with them, but Marcella, dimly realizing that it must be bad for him to be drawn in so much upon their egoisme a deux, tried to make him more sociable. When he forgot himself and was effortlessly hospitable, he was charming. When he felt shy and frightened, and was fighting one of his rhythmical fits of desire, he was difficult and rude.

Aunt Janet wrote every month: her letters varied little; they were cynical though kindly; especially was she cynical about Louis, for, though Marcella told her nothing about him, she guessed much from the girl's description of their life. She was very cynical about Marcella's breathless descriptions of her happiness: she was frankly despondent about young Andrew, who, as yet, showed no signs of fulfilling her gloomy predictions.

Dr. Angus wrote every mail. Though a world apart, he and Marcella seemed to get closer together. He was growing younger with age, and she older. He told her he had no friend but her letters, and wrote, sometimes thirty pages of his small, neat handwriting to her—all about his cases, his thoughts, his reading. And every book he bought he passed on to her. Louis had had to put up three more shelves for them.

"I've been unduly extravagant, Mrs. Marcella," he wrote once, at the end of the second year. "I've left the rheumaticky old woman to a sort of patent rubbing oil very much in vogue just now, and I've resigned the coming babies to the midwife at Carlossie, and been to Kraill's Lendicott Trust lectures at Edinburgh. He seems, in my humble and very uninstructed opinion, to have gone very far since 'Questing Cells.' The lectures were on sex psychology. He admits that they are coloured by what he learnt at Heidelberg last year. But he goes further than Germans could possibly go. There's a gentleness, a humanity about him, and a spirituality one doesn't expect from the author of 'Questing Cells' or from those Lendicott lectures a few years ago. The thing that struck me about him is that he's so consummately wise—wise enough, Mrs. Marcella, to grasp at the significance of an amoeba as well as that of the Lord of Hosts! I'm a small man—a little G.P. in an obscure Highland village in rather shabby tweed knickerbockers and Inverness cape (yes, the same ones—still no new clothes! What would be the use in wasting money on adorning an old ruffian like me?) But I went up to him, sort of shaking at the knees, after the second lecture, and discussed a point with him. The point was not what I was wanting to know about. I was wanting, very much, to have a 'bit crack' with him, as they call it here. Lassie, he asked me to lunch with him the next day, and he talked to me as if I was his long-lost brother. In fact, he seems to think that everybody is! He came off the rostrum completely. Even when he's lecturing he seems to be talking to you personally, with an engaging sort of friendliness. He puts me a good bit in mind of Professor Craigie when I was a lad. I felt as if I was a baby in arms beside him, but he seemed as pleased to see me as I was to see him. No, he hasn't got a long white beard, and he doesn't look a bit like Ruskin or Tennyson or Dickens. Do you remember when you said you thought he had bushy eyebrows and a white beard, years ago? He's not above forty-five, I should say; but I'm no judge of age after folks are forty, I'm so afraid of putting my foot in it. He's much bigger than me (I'm talking about appearance now). He gives one the impression of quick blue eyes. I can't remember any more about him; I remember every word he said, but not how he looked when he said it. And now I suppose you want to know all he said; you have an Examining Board's thirst for information, Mrs. Marcella! But I'm sending you the printed lectures and some news. He told me he's going to Harvard this year. In fact, he's there now; and after that he's on his way to Australia. I gather that you're a wandering Jew's journey from Sydney, but wouldn't it be worth your while to take that man of yours and go to hear him? It isn't often one gets a chance of seeing in the flesh someone who has got into your imagination as Kraill got into yours and mine. I'd walk all the way from Carlossie to Edinburgh to hear him again. It makes me sad, sometimes, to think how little chance we doctors in practice, with all our responsibilities and opportunities, have of getting this heaping up of wisdom that comes to men like Kraill. Measles and rheumatics, confinements and bronchitis take up all our time, and when we get a man like poor Andrew your father, something out of the ordinary, appealing to us for healing, we give him digitalis or Epsom-salts for the elixir of life. We do our best, but it's bad—very bad. When I talked to Kraill that day I kept thinking of your father. I kept thinking he'd have been alive to-day if he could have caught on to Kraill's philosophy. I feel small, Marcella. I honestly hadn't the brains, the knowledge, to do anything for your father. I talked to Kraill about it. He said something very kind and very queer about the socialization of knowledge. I didn't quite catch on to it at the time, but thinking it out afterwards it seemed to me that he meant knowledge was not to be a Holy of Holies sort of thing, a jealous mystery, an aristocratic thing, any more; but be spread broadcast, so that everyone could have wisdom and healing and clear thinking. And after all, isn't healing, more than anything else, merely clear thinking? I hate the waste of people, you know. I hate that people should rot and die. I feel personally affronted when I think about your father, and some days—I strongly suspect it's when my liver's out of order—I worry about your young son. But by the time he's grown up maybe Kraill's socialization of knowledge will have begun."

Marcella was having an argument with Mrs. Beeton that day when Jerry brought the letter in. Mrs. Beeton seemed to think it was necessary to have an oven, a pastry board, a roller and various ingredients before one could attempt jam tarts. Marcella felt that a mixture of flour, fruit salt, and water baked in the clay oven heaped over with blazing wood ought to beat Mrs. Beeton at her own game. She and young Andrew, both covered in flour because he loved to smack his hands in it and watch it rise round them in curly white clouds were watching beside the fire for the sticks to burn down. When she read the doctor's letter she sat down immediately to write to him. She knew so well that sense of inadequacy that trying to help Louis always gave her, and she wanted to cure him of it. The jam tarts got burned; she forgot about them. It was only when she remembered that the letter could not go to the post for three days that she decided to write it again at greater leisure.

The two years had aged Marcella; the doctor's letters were manna in the desert to her spirit, his books the only paths out of the hard, tough life of everyday. Sometimes she felt tempted to take the cheap thrills of purely physical existence with Louis as she realized more and more that, though his schooled and trained brain was a better machine than hers, his soul was a weak plant requiring constant cossetting and feeding while his body was the unreasoning, struggling home of appetites. She had the torturing hopefulness that comes from alternating failure and success in a dear project; she was getting just a little cynical about him; her clear brain saw that she was his mother, his nurse and, perhaps, his mistress. He loved her. She knew that quite well. But he loved her as so many Christians love Christ—"because He died for us." His love was unadulterated selfishness even though it was the terribly pathetic selfishness of a weak thing seeking prop and salvation. She faced quite starkly the fact that her love was a love of giving always, receiving never; also she faced the fact that she must kill every weakness in herself, for, by letting him see her hardness, she gave him something to imitate. Hunger of soul, the black depression that comes to a Kelt like a breath from the grave, weariness of body must all be borne gallantly lest he be "raked up." Once or twice, when Louis had slipped and failed and was fighting himself back again, she felt that she was getting bankrupt. One could never treat Louis by rule of thumb. He might get drunk if she inadvertently spoke coolly to him. Then he would get drunk out of pique. He might get drunk if she had been especially loving. Then it would be because he was happy and wanted to celebrate; if she were ill he would get drunk to drown his anxiety: if she got better, he would drink to show his relief; if she died, he would drown his grief. Sometimes she felt that it was quite impossible to safeguard him: she literally had not the knowledge. Such knowledge was locked away in a few wise brains like Kraill's—and meanwhile people were rotting. Once she wrote a long letter to Carnegie asking him to stop giving money for libraries and spend some on helping to cure neurotics. But she destroyed the letter, and went on hoping. Sometimes she felt that her body would either get out of hand as Louis's did, or else crack under the strain put upon it by her temperament, Louis and her work. Sometimes she thought her capacity for happiness would atrophy and drop off if she so defiantly kept it pushed into a dark corner of her being every time it protested to her that it was being starved. Sometimes she hoped that the time would come quickly when she would have killed desire for everything as Aunt Janet had done, and would be going about the world a thing stuffed with cotton-wool, armoured in cotton-wool. And all the time she was fighting the insidious temptation to kill the unconscious aristocracy of her that had, after the first few weeks in Sydney, set a barrier between her and Louis—a barrier of which he was never once conscious. Other people, on a lower range of life, seemed quite happy with a few thunder flashes of passion in a grey sky. Louis did. Except when the end of the month brought pay day, and set him itching to be off to the township, he seemed happy. At these times she deliberately made love to him to hold him from the whisky, loathing the deliberateness and expediency of a thing which, it seemed to her, ought to be a spontaneous swelling of a wave until it burst overwhelmingly. She did not realize until long afterwards what good discipline this was, as her brain and spirit refused to follow her body along a meaner path. Louis never guessed how she thought out calmly whether to be hurt or not by him, and decided that it was better to be a wounded thing hiding her wounds under a coat of mail, rather than a dead thing in mummy-wrappings, in cotton-wool.