But the doctor's letter generated hope. She respected the doctor's opinion. For him to be enthusiastic about anyone was very wonderful; there was something wistful and very beautiful in this deferring of an old man to one much younger, something very touching in his frank pride in the big man's friendliness. Always Kraill had been a hero to her, since the days when his cynical early book of lectures had come like revelation to her, even though she had had to take the help of a dictionary on every line. That evening Louis went off to the township after three days' restless nerviness on his part, and three nights' valiant love-making on hers. Taking young Andrew she went down by the lake and leaving him to splash joyously in the ripples at the edge, she read the last lectures.

She read for an hour, gorging the book as a child gobbling sweets before his nurse's return. She was devouring understanding—it seemed to her that the lectures were being written expressly for her. It seemed, with one half of Kraill's wisdom she could save Louis. The child got hungry and she fetched milk and biscuit for him. His crawler was soaked by the water in which he lived half his life. She changed it in a dream and took him back to the lake again, where the shadows were getting long and cool. It was possible to think with detachment there, in the serenity of the evening.

She saw, as she usually saw things, very clear and stark, that all through she had been wrong about Louis. Once only she had come within touching distance of the right, when on the Oriana she had told him that his only hope was to throw up the sponge, as people say—acknowledge himself beat to the earth as Saul of Tarsus had done on the Damascus Road. Andrew Lashcairn had done it that night with the little pale cousin; he had made himself "at one with God": fighting and struggling had ceased; his life, a battle-ground of warring forces, had become, in a mighty flash of understanding, the chamber of a peace treaty, and God—a big man—God outside himself—had taken hold of him and kept him. To Louis that could never happen; he was too unloving, too self-centred, too unimaginative ever to see lights from heaven. Indeed, she thought hopefully, Louis might, in the end, go further than Andrew. He might stand up in the strength of a man without the propping of a God at all.

"I've weakened him. All along I've weakened him. I've fussed over him like a hen after her duckling when it takes to the water. I wouldn't let him swim for fear he'd get drowned. And so—he just flops about and looks disgusting. I've made him run away from temptation. That was because I couldn't keep on being disappointed in him. Because I couldn't face the disgust of him coming home dirty and smelly and saying filthy things to me—and sleeping close to him. Andrew," she called to the baby, who looked at her solemnly and went on playing with the little pebbles at his feet. "Listen, darling, what mother's telling you. 'He that fights and runs away lives to fight another day.' I made him run away from whisky, and all the time it's throwing down challenges to him, putting out its tongue at him, pulling rude faces at him. I've been protecting myself from the things drunkards' wives have to put up with—Oh, but I was trying to protect him, too!"

The last words were wrung from her in self-defence.

"What I ought to have done was to take the whisky, make him look at it all round and tell it, with his own conviction and not mine, to go to hell. I ought never, never to have protected him, and made him a hothouse plant."

As she said it she knew, incontrovertibly, that she could never do anything but protect people. It was the way she was made. And she became very frightened that, some day, she might make Andrew a hothouse plant, too.

She looked at the thin, grey-backed book again and more light came to her. She flung herself on the ground, her face on the soft grass. The baby, looking at her wonderingly, crawled towards her, and snuggled up to her, his wet little hands on her neck.

"Oh make me weak!" she cried as though praying to the earth and the air and the water to batter her. "Make me weak—smash me and tear me up, so I'll have to be taken care of. Then I'll let him be strong instead of me! Oh but it's cruel! Why should one person be weak to make another strong? Why can't we march on in armour, shoulder to shoulder?"

And then came the thought that, perhaps, had not her father and Louis been the men they were she would never have learnt to wear her armour. The wisdom of nature that made the protective coverings of birds and beasts had given her her armour—made her grow her armour out of her surroundings. This thought made her gasp. She sat still a very long time letting it sink in.

"I wonder," she said slowly, looking out over the lake, a pool of fire in the setting sun, "if that's why Jesus died. He didn't want to, I think. He loved the quiet things of the world, little children and talking to friends, and doing things with his hands. I wonder if he had to die, when his teaching was finished, so that those others he loved might not get to depend on him too much? We're so fond of getting propped. I don't think people ought to have a Good Shepherd. Unless they only want to be silly sheep all their lives. And here I've been Good Shepherding Louis all this time till now he can't get along without my crook round his arm."

It was many years since she had consciously prayed, but now she thought of her father's prayers, and whispered:

"God—You know all about this muddle of mine. You gave Louis to me so that, in the end, he might be a path for You to walk along. I've tried to be a path for You towards him, but I thought I'd better help You along. I couldn't keep quiet. Oh how silly of me! God, I see now that I've been all wrong. I've been keeping him out of the world when I ought, all the time, to have been making him brave enough to face the evil in the world. Please God, let me be quiet now—and not keep tripping You up with my own ideas, my own strength when You walk along my life."

Her quick imagination, the imagination of a savage or a child, saw pictures where other people would have seen ethical ideas. She went on, softly:

"Walk over me with burning Feet. Oh don't worry, please, about how much it hurts, so long as You get to him in the end. Because I love him—and because he is the one You gave to me—the man I needed."

She stood up slowly, and felt that, at last, she had given in. The poor baby lay blissfullly asleep beside her on the ground. She took him in her arms and carried him home Then she sat down with pen and ink and wrote a letter. She was not sure when it would be posted, but she decided to get it written, at any rate. She felt fey—she felt that she was being led, now that she had asked to be kept quiet at last.

She wrote:

"'CASTLE LASHCAIRN' (It isn't really a castle. It's a hut).

"DEAR PROFESSOR KRAILL,

"Ever since I was fifteen you have been the very heart of my imagination. I used to read your lectures to my father, and because I've never been to school I had to get a dictionary to two words on every line. You enlightened me, and depressed me, and shocked me and annoyed me all at once in those days. But in your last Edinburgh lecture it seems to me that the spirit of God has come upon you to lead captivity captive. (I think that is such a beautiful sentence I can't help putting it in a letter to you, because I would like to write to you in beautiful words.) I would like to quote some more of the Bible to you, but you can read it for yourself. The fifth chapter of the second book of Kings—the story of Naaman the leper. I am the servant maid in that story, and I've just discovered that I've been trying to cure my lord's illness with lumps of cotton-wool. There is someone at home in Scotland who sends me all your lectures, and when I read the last ones I felt that you were the prophet in Samaria. I hear that you are lecturing in Sydney soon. I would come to hear you, but I can't leave my little kingdom here. And I don't think they'd approve of my small son at a University lecture. He is only two, and very busy always. I feel that, if I could talk to you, I should see a great light; you seem such a very shining person to me. And I'm a duffer. A well-meaning duffer with a task before her that needs brains. You talk of the socialization of knowledge—will you begin the socialization on my behalf? I wonder if you would like to see what life in the Bush is like, you who are a student of life? Then you could show me where Jordan is nowadays.

"This is very sincere, this request. I shall not be offended if you think it isn't, but I shall feel that there is no more light in the sky. I'd got resigned to failure when I read your lectures, and they wakened me to hope again, because they showed me that I've done every possible thing wrong. If you do come, please write a very long time in advance because we are thirty miles from the station and only go in for letters occasionally. If you can't come, I'll go on worrying with the lectures until I understand without you.

"Yours sincerely, MARCELLA LASHCAIRN FARNE."

She fastened the letter up in between two books. It was three months before she read in a week-old Sydney "Sunday Times" that Professor Kraill, the eminent biologist, "whose fame in his newer field of research had preceded him to the Antipodes," was to lecture at Sydney University during the next three months. Marcella did not open the letter; she posted it to Sydney University and left the issue in the hands of the forces that had made her write it.

Professor Kraill got it when he was being bored to death in Sydney and he rather discredited the sincerity of it for he was being wearied to death by lion-hunters. Eminene men from the Old Country either get feted or cut in the Colonies. He was feted because he happened to arrive at a time when "culture" was fashionable, and Shakespeare Societies, Ibsen Evenings, History Saturday Afternoons and Science Sundays were the rage. Foreign legations and Government officials gave him dinners as deadly as any in England. He saw that he was to appear in character at these dinners. He was expected to wear a phylactery on his forehead inscribed "I AM A BIOLOGIST." He was expected to talk biology to the government ladies, who hoped he would say things that were "rather daring" but quotable. In fact, they hoped that he himself would be "rather daring"—but quotable! They talked about Shackleton's expedition, which was the affair of the moment, and thought that they were being flatteringly and intelligently biological when they asked him how seals lived under ice. There was a dance on the flagship which, thanks to the snotties, was quite alive. Then came a month's interim in the lectures when more festivities were threatened. Professor Kraill read Marcella's letter and thought she was probably a rather emotional, rather intense and rather original lion-hunter. But she had the redeeming feature of living in the Bush, thirty miles from anywhere. Conceivably, thirty miles from anywhere, there would be no festivities. He tossed up between the City and the Bush, and the Bush won. Giving out that he felt very unwell after the round of gaieties, he basely deserted, got into the most uncomfortable train in the world and, two days later, threw himself on the hospitality of the landlord of the bosker hotel at Cook's Wall, entirely omitting to let Marcella know that he was coming.



CHAPTER XXVII

At Klondyke and Loose End they were great on celebrations. So very little except work happened that birthdays wedding-days, and anniversaries of all sorts wore greeted hilariously, and the various members of the community took it in turn to hold them at their various homesteads. A birthday happened to Mrs. Twist—her fortieth. She and Mr. Twist were the oldest inhabitants of the district and the birthday was a great occasion. Invitations were passed round from hand to mouth; about twenty grownups and twice as many children turned up one Saturday afternoon just before tea at the Homestead, which, decorated in branches of wattle and boughs of eucalyptus, looked very festive. The gathering had something of the nature of a surprise party in that most of the guests brought something to eat or drink. But most of them, in delicate compliment to the changed fortunes of Loose End, brought not necessities but luxuries. Jerry's gramophone was still hoarsely valiant; three Italians from Klondyke, manganese miners, brought mandolines; Jerry had recently acquired a mouth-organ with bells.

Marcella was always rather depressed about celebrations. Always Louis said, easily, that he would be safe; always he joined forces with the hard-bitten, hard-toiling miners who each brought his bottle of whisky and drank it without ill-effect. She could do nothing to help him: he resented her anxiety more and more as time went on.

The Homestead had grown. At the south side a big storeroom had been built: at one end of it flour-bags were stocked, both empty and full, to serve as seats for the dancers when they were exhausted. The guests sat long over tea, yarning, chaffing, gossiping and talking business; as it grew dusk the men sat on the verandah, smoking reflectively, talking little. In the living room the women all chattered at once. Louis had been working during the day on the gorse clearing again; until it was all burnt off it was a constant menace, for wind-blown seeds and underground leaders seemed to spring up spitefully in the midst of growing lucerne and wheat. Marcella's beloved garden had had a struggle against it: so had Mrs. Twist's patch of vegetables, so they were all making a gigantic effort to uproot the whole thing and get rid of it. Across the clearing the fire crackled and blazed and died down to a ruddy glow; in the storeroom Jerry's gramophone led off with "Oh Dry those Tears," and the youngsters started to dance. A new record was put on, because "Oh Dry those Tears" was not conducive; the sound of rhythmically beating feet drew the others towards the ballroom, and Marcella was left on the verandah listening to the barking of some half-dozen dogs, brought by the guests and tied up behind the Homestead. She knew that the massed force of cups and tumblers was not quite sufficient and decided to wash them before they would be needed for relays of coffee.

She was feeling very wretched; it was the end of the month; in two days Louis, already nervy and restless, would get the month's money, either by persuasion or force, and either vanish for a week or, coming home every night from Klondyke, reduce her to a state of inarticulate wretchedness. She was on the point of losing hope entirely. Sometimes it seemed to her that he drank deliberately now that the first flush of gratitude and love for her, the first zest of having a son, had worn off. He lied until she was sickened of the sound of his stammering voice—for never once did he lie without stammering. If he had not struggled and been so pitiful she would have given up, then, and been content to take three weeks' strained peace to one of blank horror. But his despair when he came out of his hell goaded her to keep on hoping.

She was washing the cups out on the verandah. Those of enamelled tin Andrew was trusted to carry indoors as she wiped them. She heard a horse coming along in the distance and guessed that it was a delayed reveller from Klondyke as she saw a tall man whom she did not recognize make for the storm centre of things in the ballroom. Clouds of dust and flour were eddying out of the door in a stream of light from the kerosene lamp. He dismounted and stood in the haze for a moment. Then he looked round in bewilderment and caught sight of her. The gramophone was playing "Rock of Ages."

"Can you tell me what is going on in there? Is it St. Vitus' Dance?"

Marcella looked at him and gave a little shout of laughter.

"No, it's Mrs. Twist's birthday. Didn't you know?"

"How could I? Never heard of her. I'm looking for Mrs. Farne. They lent me this animal at Klondyke. It seems days ago. They said she knew the way blindfold. They didn't think to tell me she didn't know it unless she was blindfold."

Marcella laughed again, and knew who he was.

"If it hadn't been for those fires I should never have got here. But, perhaps you can tell me where Mrs. Farne lives? They all seemed to know her at Klondyke."

Marcella pointed towards the glowing gorse.

"That's where I live. I'm Marcella Farne," she said. "But why didn't you say you were coming? Mr. Twist would have fetched you in his buggy. He loves meeting people at Cook's Wall because he tries to convince them that it's a real road he's driving them along. And it isn't, you know."

He sat down on the edge of the verandah, looking distastefully at the mare, who shook her head impatiently. Marcella gave her water and let her wander, when she had taken off her saddle and bridle.

"Suppose you hadn't been able to ride. I didn't think Professors had time for that sort of thing."

"Neither did I till a few hours ago," he said, with a short laugh, taking out a cigarette-case and offering it to her. She sat down rather trustfully on a verandah rail Louis had carpentered. Andrew stared at them both and made off silently towards the noise. "But how did you know who I was?"

"I only know one other man in the world, you see, and he's an old doctor in Scotland."

He was watching her as she spoke.

"I see," he said. "And you think you know me?"

"Yes. I know you like I know St. Paul and Siegfried and Parsifal—people living in my mind all the time. I've talked to you for hours, you know—hours and hours—"

"It was very good of you to ask me to come. But—embarrassing, you know! I simply had to come, out of curiosity. To find someone reading one's lectures right in the heart of the Bush!—"

"I thought you would come," she said, staring at him gravely, "when Dr. Angus told me what you said about the socialization of knowledge. But I can hardly believe it's you, even now. Yet somehow you look as if you could think those last lectures of yours. Before I read those you seemed tremendously clever and—and rousing. To speak biologically—"

"Oh, please!" he said, smiling. "They've been doing that in Sydney—out of encyclopedias—!"

"I was going to say that your thoughts always fertilize my brain. But you must be hungry, so I'll not tell you what I want to about the lectures yet."

She slipped off the verandah rail and went indoors, leaving the Professor rather amazed. He was not quite sure whether to think she was a serious and dull young person, absolutely sincere and very much a hero-worshipper, or one of the lionizing type he had met in the city. He was deciding that she was too young for the latter role when she called him inside the candle-lit room.

"I hope you drink tea. We drink quarts of it here."

He nodded reassuringly.

"There's some beer, too, but the shepherds and old Mike from Klondyke will have to drink that. It was put into a kerosene tin that hadn't been boiled and it smells terrible. But they won't notice."

"They'll probably be dead," he remarked.

"Mike drinks methylated spirit and the shepherds have a bottle of squareface each on Sunday afternoons when Betty and Andrew and I look after the sheep. Nothing hurts us. We're hard people out here."

"What made you write to me like that?" he asked, still puzzled. "I still have no idea—"

"I wanted to see you, for one thing. But that's only a small thing. I can't tell you now. I'm the cook to-day, you see, and they'll be wanting their supper in a little while. I must go and find somewhere for you to sleep, too. How long can you stay?"

"I'm not sure," he said guardedly. "I don't want to embarrass you, however much you embarrass me."

"I'd like you to stay for months," she said simply. "I—we're very lonely."

The gramophone groaning out the "Merry Widow" waltz seemed to contradict her words, with its accompaniment of tramping feet, laughter and talk. "This only happens on birthdays and things. Even then, it's lonely."

"I don't believe you're any more lonely than I," he said.

"I can understand that. I've felt it in your lectures. You're so much wiser than most people."

"What rubbish!" he said with a laugh, wondering again if she were sincere. "Much less, very much less wise than most people."

"If you tell me that I'll be wishing you'd not come. I'm counting everything on your being wiser than other people—and shining—like your lectures. But Louis once said that people usually think much better than they can do—"

"That was very penetrating of Louis," he said. Then—"I hope I don't disappoint you. I do—most people. Women especially—"

"Do you? Why?" she said with her puzzled frown.

"I suppose it's because I'm what you called, in your letter, a student of life. I like to understand things—and people. Particularly do I like to understand women. But one finds it impossible to take them seriously, as a rule."

"I don't know many women—" she began.

"And how many men did you say? Two?" he said, smiling. She shook her head.

"I'm afraid I take everyone rather seriously."

"It's a mistake," he said. "I used to. But they disappoint one. When I stopped taking people, women especially, seriously, and made love to them, I found them quite adorable—"

"It seems silly."

"It's quite a delightful pastime."

They had gone out on the verandah again now, and she looked across at the lake that glimmered red in the fire-glow.

"You didn't seem to think women a pastime in those lectures of yours three years ago. You said then that they were man's heel of Achilles. You seemed rather in a panic about them—"

He nodded his head and, meeting her intent eyes, decided that she had to be taken seriously. He was just going to speak when she went on:

"But you've got past that now—the panic stage, the pastime stage, the cynical stage—"

"I suppose you're thinking of those last Edinburgh lectures? They're the furthest I have got yet. I believe they are a very clever piece of work, a sort of high-water mark. But there are so many pulls to jerk us back from the high-water mark, don't you think? And as Louis—wasn't it?—said, we most of us think better than we do—"

They had reached the haze of the ballroom by this time. People sitting on the flour-bags sent up white auras which mingled with the dust and the smoke of strong pipes to make an effective screen. Kraill looked astonished. Marcella smiled.

"They say Englishmen take their pleasures sadly," he whispered confidentially. "I don't think they could say the same for Colonials."

"They work so hard, and they like to let off steam sometimes," she said. "By the way, I must simply say you are a friend from England. If I say you are someone very wise they'll either be rude to you or frightened of you. And all the girls will want to dance with you if I say you're from London. They're mad on dancing, and they'll take it for granted that you are. They'll expect you to teach them all the new things."

He looked startled as he watched the swaying crowd. It certainly looked dangerous, if it was not difficult. The gramophone was playing the "March of the Gladiators"; the mandolines were tinkling anything and the mouth-organ had given it up entirely, merely punctuating the first beat of every bar with a thin concussion of the bell. Betty had sprinkled the floor with a slippery preparation she got from the store, called "ice-powder."

"Be careful when you cross the floor. It's worse than ice, to make it easy for those who can't dance. You just cling to someone and slip if you don't know any steps. Some of them say their slip is a waltz: others call it a gavotte, and some say it's the tango. Old Mike's very definite that it's a jig. The great thing is to make the slip coincide with a groan from the gramophone. Just watch a minute, and you'll see that there is quite a lot of method in it."

She looked round for Louis, who was in a corner with some of the miners. By his flushed face, his high voice and hysterical laugh she guessed that she must try to keep him from seeing Kraill that night. She never could be quite sure what he would do or say.

Mrs. Twist was pathetically honoured that the "gentleman from England" should have chosen her birthday for his visit, and Marcella left him with her.

"It's a pity to be Martha to-night, Professor Kraill," she said in a low voice. "I want to be Mary—"

She was gone before he could answer.

The noise had made Andrew cross and tired, and she put him to bed in the hammock under the gum trees, and hitched up her own hammock in the bedroom next to Louis's. She knew that he would be drunk to-night; experience had given her a plan of action. She had to pretend to go to bed with him and stay with him until he was asleep. Then she crept out into the open air beside the boy.

She tried to transform the storeroom into the semblance of a bedroom, but it did not occur to her to apologize for discrepancies; she would not have done so had the king come to visit her: indeed, she considered that he had, for Kraill had always taken his place in her imagination, as she had told him, with heroes of romance.

When she got back to the Homestead everyone was ready for supper. They had to get away early, for most of them had to walk the five miles to Klondyke. The Professor seemed to be at home with the miners. His air of intense interest that had so won Dr. Angus' heart had immediately flattered and enslaved them all. Before they said good night he had committed himself to visiting them all. Marcella won a good deal of reflected glory by possessing him as friend.

"Are you tired of us?" she asked him after a while.

"I am very glad I won that toss!" he said.

"Which?"

"I tossed up whether to stay in Sydney or come here"—he stopped sharp, for it seemed to him that she looked hurt. He decided that, with Marcella, it would be better to be honest than pleasant.

"As a matter of fact, your letter completely puzzled me. I'm a modest sort of person, you know. To be asked to help anyone seemed such a wonderful thing to me that I scarcely believed it. If a man had written the letter I should have believed it more. But as I told you, I can't take women seriously—"

"Before you've finished with me you will," she said, and laughed.

She was just going to suggest to him that he was tired and should go to bed: she was so anxious to get him out of the way before Louis came out of his corner that she could scarcely talk coherently. But just at that moment Louis came up to her. He took no notice of Kraill or Mrs. Twist, who was quite used to him by this time. At the back of Louis's mind was the obsession that in two days he would draw his pay; half of him was a blazing hunger for whisky after three weeks' abstinence and hard work and peace; the other half of him was fighting the desire desperately; he wanted to win over one of these warring halves to the other; the fact that he had been drinking all the evening had weakened the finer half; his brain worked quickly. If he could find some grievance against Marcella he would be able to excuse himself to himself for getting drunk, for taking the money that he knew she needed. He wanted peace—unity within. So he raved at her because the tag had come off his shoelace, and it was her wifely duty to see that a new lace had been put into the shoe that morning. From that he went on to the usual gibberish of French, the usual accusation against men in the neighbourhood, the usual melange of Chinese tortures and gruesome operations. From Kraill's horrified face Marcella saw that he understood more than she did. She had never been sufficiently morbid to ask anyone to translate his words for her, even after more than three years of them.

She wondered weakly what would happen. Judging Kraill by her father and Dr. Angus she knew that his ordinary code of convention could not let him disregard Louis as the others did, as being merely a rather weak, silly young man, who "went on the shikker" every month and made many varieties of a fool of himself. Everyone gave him the mixture of disgusted toleration and amusement given to a spoilt child who kicks his nurse in the park, and pounds his toys to pieces. Marcella never talked about him to anyone; she cut off ungraciously the attempts at sympathetic pumping made by the women at Klondyke. They concluded that she did not feel anything since she never cried out. But, looking at Kraill's face for one fleeting instant Marcella knew that he understood how sore and shamed she was.

"He's very ill, really," she said in a low voice. "But no one believes it. They think he's just wicked. I'll tell you all about it to-morrow. I expect you know without my telling you. But I didn't want you to see him like this. I've fixed up a bed for you at home. Will you let Jerry show you the way?"

He decided instantly that she knew her own business better than he did, and that his desire, both natural and conventional, not to leave a woman to see a drunken man to bed, was not going to help her.

"Shut your door up tight, please," she said. "He may not go to sleep for a long time."

He nodded, looked at her to show her that he had begun to take her seriously, and turned away with Jerry, rather astonished to find himself dismissed so coolly from the scene. She turned to Louis, forgetting Kraill. Jerry, who adored Marcella, became very voluble on the subject of Louis; Kraill listened mechanically to all he was saying as they crossed the paddock.

It was one of Louis's bad nights; he had been drinking both whisky and squareface. A letter from his mother, saying how she was longing to see her grandson, had roused him to great deeds. His fall after such resolutions was always the more bitter; always it needed more than usual justification; always Marcella was the scapegoat. She had forgotten Kraill in the intensity of her misery until, worn out by his ravings, Louis fell asleep. She knew, then, that he was safe for the rest of the night and she crept out silently into the cool cleanness of the garden, closing the door softly. Only his loud, stertorous breathing came to her with mutterings and groans. The moon had risen and little mist-wreaths walked in and out among the wonga-vines on the fence: Marcella's golden flowers with which she had planted the clearing all round the house—nasturtiums, sunflowers, marigolds and eczcoltzias—shone silvery and ethereal. The smoke from the dying fires rose in thin white needles, plumed at the top: out in the Bush a dingo barked shrilly and some small beast yelped in pain. Andrew stirred and she tucked the clothes round him, kissing his brown, round arm and fingers, wishing he were awake so that he could be crushed in her arms and let her bury her aching head on his wriggling little body for an instant—he was never still for longer.

She sat down on the edge of the verandah, her arm round the post; her eyes were aching; she felt too tired and helpless to go on living and yet the relief of having got Louis to sleep was really very great. She was trying to decide to write to Dr. Angus, asking him to give her some sort of sleeping draught she could give Louis when he had one of his bad times; she had forgotten that, in a week's time, all the money would be spent again and they would be happy for another period: but to-night's misery, more and more each time, was beginning to shut out pictures of a peaceful to-morrow, a vindication of faith.

A faint sound behind her made her start in horror, afraid lest he had wakened. But it was Kraill who was standing quite still looking down at her.

"Does this sort of thing happen very often?" he said with an air of intimate interest that reassured her.

"I'd forgotten about you," she said jerkily. "I'm so sorry—if I'd known you were coming I'd have arranged for you to stay at the Homestead to-night."

"But does it?"

"He can't help it."

"It can't go on, you know," said Kraill, lighting a cigarette and throwing it down impatiently.

"I know. That's why I wrote you that letter. He is so unhappy."

Kraill made an impatient gesture. Marcella stood up slowly.

"Are you tired? You must be," she said.

"No. I want to see this thing settled," he said. She felt very hopeful to hear him speak so determinedly.

"It's queer that you think as I do about that, Professor Kraill," she said with a faint smile. "People say other's troubles are not their business. But I think that's a most wicked heresy. I always interfere if I see people miserable. I can't bear to be blank and uninterested."

"Neither can I. I often get disliked for it, however," he said with a quick, impatient sigh. "And they don't often accept one's interference."

"I shall," she said gently. "I shall do whatever you tell me if it will make Louis well. I think that is really all I care about in the world. Sometimes, even, I think I care more about Louis than Andrew. I've a feeling that he's much more a little boy than Andrew is. You know, all my life, since I saw my father very unhappy and ill, I've wanted to save people—in great droves! And now I'm beginning to think I can't save one man."

"And you think I can?"

"I'm quite sure of it. People are not wise like you are just for fun. But will you come along the clearing with me a little way? I'm afraid our voices will waken Louis, and then he won't get any sleep. That is, if you're really not tired."

They went through the moon-silvered grass down to the lake. She sat under the big eucalyptus which clapped its leathery hands softly.

"I was sitting here when I read your lectures—the last ones—and decided to write to you. It is like—like Mount Sinai to me now. Will you talk to me out of the thunders, Professor Kraill?"

He looked at her for a moment, recalling the rather heart-breaking calmness and common-sense with which she had soothed Louis a while ago; he remembered her cool, patient logic in the midst of the drunken man's ravings—and he decided in a flash of insight that this rather rhetorical way of talking to him was very real to her. She saw him with the dream-endowed eyes of the Kelt and, embarrassing though it might be to him, and unreal though it made him feel, he had to accept the fact that, for her, he was clothed in a sort of shine. He saw, too, that she could not do without some sort of shine in her life.

"Tell me all about it," he said. "You don't mind talking to a stranger about these things?"

"You have never been a stranger to me, Professor Kraill. And I don't believe there is such a thing as a stranger, really. I like to think of the way the knights always went about ready to interfere with a good stout sword when they saw anyone in trouble."

And so she talked to him, and as she talked his quick mind gained an impression of her going about sordid ways and small woman tasks in knightly armour. After awhile he said something unexpected. It made her impatient for it showed that he was thinking of her. She was thinking only of Louis.

"You know, you make the years slip away," he said. "I have dreamed that women might go shoulder to shoulder with men, standing up straight and strong."

"Yes, I know," she said softly. "I think many a time I've very deliberately stood up straight when I wanted to lie down and cry my eyes out, just because I got the idea of a woman knight from those lectures of yours. And your talk about the softness of women rather goaded me. I wouldn't be soft."

"Soft! You're not soft," he interrupted.

"But think how expensive it is!" she said with a voice that shook a little. "It took a lifetime of discipline and two weak men to make me hard. I know now, very well, that Louis has been softened, weakened by me. To save him I think I must crumple up."

She caught her breath sharply.

"And I don't see how I can," she added.

"One might pretend," he said slowly, looking reflectively at her face.

"I couldn't. I can't pretend anything. That's the worst of me. And it seems so wrong to me that, to make one human being strong, another must be weak. And it seems to me that the weak thing kills the strong in the end. Like ivy, you know, choking out the life of an oak."

"I don't think he is likely to kill you."

"I very much wish he would, except that I dare not leave him. I have weighed it all up very carefully, and I feel it would be better to die than live this way. Sometimes I feel I shall get unclean—right inside. I can't explain it. There are things in Louis I can't bear—little meannesses, and selfishnesses. He locks things up—even here, where no one ever comes. That's a horrible spirit of selfishness, isn't it?"

She told him calmly, uncomplainingly, impersonally as one talks to a doctor, of his locking up his cigarettes, his tobacco, his writing paper; of how he carried the only pencil about in his pocket and hid away the papers from his mother, the books from Dr. Angus until he had read them. One day last week they had been short of milk, and Marcella had been anxious about the boy's food. The breakfast was on the table; she had to run to her bedroom for a bib for Andrew. When she got back Louis had already poured all the milk into his tea, saying that he had done it by accident. Another time she had thrown away the boy's tablet of soap by accident, and could not find it anywhere. Louis had his own tablet, locked away; there was no other nearer than Klondyke except the home-made stuff composed of mutton fat and lye, very cruel to tender skin. And he had made a scene when she asked him for his soap for Andrew and, when she, too, made a scene threw it away into the scrub where she could not find it. Little things—little straws that showed the way of the hurricane.

"You see," she said calmly. "It wouldn't do for me to die, and leave Andrew to that sort of love, would it? I knew a little boy once who had to look after his father," and she told him of Jimmy Peters on the ship. "I think if it came to dying, the only thing would be to take Andrew along too."

"Don't you think you're being rather conceited?" he said suddenly. "Has it occurred to you that you're taking too much on yourself? You admit that you're keeping your husband a parasite. Are you going to do the same to your child? Are you the ultimate kindliness of the world? You tell me of your own stern childhood. Has it hurt you? You must be logical, you know!" he added, smiling at her.

"I think I want Andrew to be happy rather than heroic. Heroism is such a cold fierce thing. I'm only just realizing what a coward I've been, and how utterly unheroic my hope in Louis has been. But it's so natural, isn't it? I didn't dare face the rest of life without the belief that some day we should be happy. Every time he gets drunk I've told myself, very decidedly, that this was the last time. And I know I've been lying to myself because I daren't face the truth."

Kraill smoked thoughtfully for a few minutes.

"I suppose it never occurred to you that, without the drink to consider, you would not be happy with him?" he said at last.

"Oh yes. We are quite happy in between," she said with a sigh.

"On the edge of things? Always with reservations?" he said quickly.

"Only on the edge of things," she said slowly. "How well you know!"

"I know all about it. I have never been past the edge of things myself. But always I think I shall be some day. I suppose I am quite twice your age, and still I am romantic, still I think there's a miracle waiting for me round the corner of life."

"I used to think that until just a little while ago. I used to think there would be a day when I should shine. Now I daren't think of it because I know I never shall. After all, stars and suns and things must be lonely, don't you think?"

"I don't know."

The moon sank, the dawn wind ruffled the grass and whispered in the tops of the rustling trees, making soft, eerie sounds.

She stood up suddenly. Unconsciously she held out her hand to help him up. Then she laughed bitterly, and twisted her hands in each other behind her.

"I'm sorry. I forgot you didn't need helping up," she said. He looked at her curiously.

"This is an appalling way to treat a guest," she said as they walked slowly towards home. "To sit out with him in the middle of the night and keep him awake. You make me selfish. I've never talked about Louis to anyone before. You make me dependent, Professor Kraill."

"And that, you say, is what you need."

Louis was calling out thickly, wildly, as they came within distance. She started and began to hurry. "I wouldn't go in there!" said Kraill sharply.

"It doesn't worry me now. If I don't go in, he's too frightened to sleep, and then he'll wake Andrew. And if he doesn't sleep he's very ill next day. Sleep gets rid of the effects of whisky, you know. Oh just listen to him! Why can't I do something? You will help me—you must!" she cried, clutching at his hands for a minute. To his intense distress he saw her eyes full of tears, and saw her cover them with her hands as she ran into Louis's room. He stood on the verandah watching her shut the door. Through the trellis window came sounds of a soft voice and a wild one mingling.



CHAPTER XXVIII

Louis, when he had got over his amazement at hearing that Kraill was his guest, tried frantically to pull himself together. He was indignant with Marcella for asking Kraill to stay in a hut, but he realized that it was only another evidence of what he called the "Lashcairn conceit" and that, if Marcella had thought it desirable to ask the Governor-General to tea, she would have done so unhesitatingly. When he met Kraill he was very nervous and shaky, unable to think coherently because of the fight that was going on within him. When she came back from her work at the Homestead, where the relics of the party had to be cleared away, the two men had vanished. They walked round the rabbit-proof fences and came back in time to welcome a "surprise party" from Klondyke drawn by the magnetism of the "gentleman from England" who had won them the night before. Marcella thought several times of Dr. Angus and wished that he could have been there to see Kraill "getting off the rostrum" as he had done in Edinburgh. But she got no chance to talk to him all that day; there was too much miscellaneous chatter.

"He's great, isn't he?" said Louis at bedtime. Marcella was startled. She had never heard him praise anyone but a few doctors at the hospital before.

"I wish I could be like that—not frightened of people," he said. "I've worn my nerves to shreds, now. You don't understand nerves. You don't possess any."

He turned over in his hammock ready to go to sleep. She came across to him and bent over him.

"Louis, what's going to happen to-morrow?" she asked presently.

"Gorse-grubbing. We've to get it all cleared now without delay."

"You know what I mean, dear. Can't you—won't you try not to go to Klondyke at all? Louis, it would be so splendid if we could save all the money for a few months and go home to England so that your mother can see Andrew. Wouldn't it?"

He sighed.

"Shall I ask Mr. Twist to keep the money, and not give us any for six months? That would be a good plan. We are always so happy except on pay days, and you are so wretched after you've been to Klondyke."

He agreed absolutely, with such alacrity that she was a little doubtful of him. Next morning when she went over to the Homestead at eight o'clock she learned that he had come to Mr. Twist with a tale about wanting the money for a visit to the store, and had gone off at six o'clock. It was three days before he came back, dirty and haggard and despairing almost to the verge of suicide.

During those three days Marcella deliberately left her work; she went to the Homestead in the mornings, and fired some gorse in the afternoons; dense clouds of smoke rose into the windless air. For the rest she made Kraill talk, listening to him with an air of sitting at his feet. She felt more despairing than ever. Kraill seemed to share her pity for Louis and she, feeling in a way that Jove had spoken from the thunders and the earth had not trembled, was dulled and dead. She knew that he would go back to Sydney soon; she wondered how she would bear her aching loneliness, her bankruptcy of spirit when he was gone.

The night Louis came back was even more dreadful than ever. His talk with Kraill had made him bitterly jealous. It hurt him like a wound to see an Englishman there, and an Englishman who could come and go about the world as he liked, unchained. Like Kraill he had tossed up for his chance that morning he went to Klondyke—whether to finish the whole miserable business in the lake and leave Marcella and the boy to go their way to England in peace, or whether to get drunk as usual. And tails had won. Cussedly he paid the cost.

And that night, sore and aching at heart, longing beneath the whisky madness to sob out all his penitence and misery into her ear, with her hair over his face, her arms around him, he raved at her all the foul things he could think, in sheer self-excuse. She had been to bed for hours. It was about two o'clock when he came home and, afraid that he should waken Kraill, she led him away from the house until he was quietened by her sudden turning on him and shaking him until he could not find his breath for awhile. That always sobered him; her kisses and caresses and forgiveness soothed him to sleep afterwards.

The next morning Kraill said that he must go to Sydney. He bade her good-bye and went without a word of kindliness, of hope. Louis took him to Cook's Wall. When he came back he said nothing in answer to all Marcella's enquiries about what they had said on the long drive. Louis went back to the gorse-grubbing and worked feverishly for almost a month, as he always did after being drunk. And it seemed as though Kraill had never been except that in all the little things that used to be a joy she now could find no joy at all. The shine had gone from her golden flowers, the softness from the wind rustling in the scrub, which now was an irritating crepitus; there was no music in Andrew's laugh, no ecstasy in the words he was learning every day, words that, at first, she had written proudly on a sheet of paper to send to his grandmother. The gentleness seemed to have gone even from Mrs. Twist's kindly face, and the negative peace of three moneyless weeks to come brought no healing. She felt that she would welcome strife.

One day she found it impossible to work; she felt fey, restless. She wrote a letter to Dr. Angus but tore it up, dissatisfied. Taking down the little grey book of the Edinburgh lectures, which she had not had the heart to touch, she read the last one again. Into it she read Kraill's voice, pictured his gesture, saw how his quick eyes would look friendly, interested, arresting as he talked. On the last page was a paragraph that someone had marked in pencil. In the margin was "J.R.K." written faintly. She read the paragraph hungrily. Evidently he had meant it as a message for her.

"One of the greatest of human triumphs is to read the need in another's eyes and be able to fulfil it. The difficulty lies in comprehending the need. Most of us have rich storehouses, but to the man who needs of us a crutch we give dancing shoes: to him who needs a spur we offer wrappings of cotton-wool. ... We ask tolerance and sympathy for our failings, patience for our inadequacies ... we give and get only disappointment.... Partly this is because our needs are the things we hide most jealously from each other, partly because we only see needs subjectively ... this is the explanation of most of the sex muddles that tangle life."

As she read Kraill's message she thought again of her prayer for weakness down by the lake. As she stood there, with all the lights of her life burning dim, all the virtue gone out of her, it was forced upon her that her prayer was being answered. She was getting weak! Never before had she felt despairing about Louis; never before had she felt so dull, so unable to help him, so unable to care that he should be helped.

As this thought came and held her, making her feel that something stronger than herself had taken possession of her and was merely using her as it would, she felt quietened. She had prayed for the blazing Feet of God to walk along her life to Louis. Perhaps this dulness, this weariness was their first pressure.

She turned to go out of the room and saw Kraill standing in the sunlight. He looked tired.

"You've come back, then?" she said, and laughed suddenly at the futility of her words. "It's a very long way for you to come."

"I went away for a whole month to think about it," he said in a low voice. "And all I can think is that I must take you away. You'll have to leave him."

She shook her head hopelessly.

"I've thought that too, very often, when I felt I couldn't bear it. But always I have borne it. And he would die without me."

"The best thing is for him to die," he cried harshly. "In a decent community he would be put in a lethal chamber. But I'm not thinking of him. I'm thinking of you. And I'm thinking of myself."

He threw his hat on the ground, and turned away from her.

"You've got into my imagination," he began almost indignantly.

"You've been in mine years and years," she said.

He came back then, and she was frightened of him.

"Let's get out of this," he said impatiently. "I can't talk to you here in his house. Let us get off into the Bush somewhere. Where's the boy?"

"He's playing with Betty."

"You'd better fetch him along," he said unevenly.

She shook her head.

"Louis would be worried if he came in and found me out at tea-time," she said. "It made him very unhappy to see you, you know. He can't bear to think that you are free while he is a slave."

She walked before him to look at the distant smoke of the fires. The clearing was almost finished.

"Damn Louis!" he cried. "He is a slave because he lets himself be! And you're a slave because he's one. I shall not let you stay here, chained. Armour suits you better."

"Whatever do you mean?" she gasped.

He strode along without her, knowing that she would follow; it was so good to follow instead of leading always.

"You know quite well what I mean," he said at last when they were out of sight of the house and only faint pungency of burning wood reached them, with the crackle of wind in the scrub. "I've made a woman like you, in my dreams. I never thought to see her in the flesh—yet—. One who could march along by me shining—not wanting to be carried over rough places—getting in a man's way, stooping his back—"

She tried to speak, but his eyes silenced her. She stared at him, fascinated.

"Oh I'm so sick of pretty, pathetic, seductive little women. Always I have to make love to them. It's the only meeting-ground between a man and most women. You—I couldn't make love to you! You're not seductive, in the least. You're hard and quick and taut. There's a courage about you—"

"Please, Professor Kraill," she began, but he silenced her by an impatient gesture.

"Listen to me, Marcella. You listened to me before, like a little meek girl on a school-bench. I'm sick, sick, sick of women! Soft corners and seduction!—Narcotics—when what a man needs is a tonic. Miserable, soft, uncourageous things. I want the courage of you."

"Can't you see that you're all wrong about me?" she said at last. "I'm not hard, really—only a bit crusted, I think. See what I've done to Louis!"

"Louis!" he cried contemptuously. "You're not going to be wasted on that half thing any longer. I'm not saying it isn't fine to save a man's life. It is. It's very fine and splendid. But you've to be honest with yourself, Marcella, and think if it's worth while. He's not worth it. If you save him from drinking there's very little to him, you know."

"Don't tell me that, because what you say I believe," she cried in a stricken voice. "It's all my life you're turning to ashes."

"I shall give you beauty for ashes, Marcella. You and I together, we can go marching on in seven-league boots! There's a kingliness about you. Listen to the things I say to you unconsciously! I can't say the pretty, graceful, soft things we say to women! There's a kingliness, Marcella—not only about you, but about me too. We're not the common ruck. You're not happy, are you?"

"Sometimes," she said softly.

"No, you're not—not honourably! Kings can't be happy with commoners! They don't speak the same language. If you're happy it's because you let yourself consciously come down. And—wallow. As I have—"

Her face flamed to think how he had seen through her. He saw it, and cried triumphantly:

"I knew it! In the higher parts of you you're always adventuring, always lonely, always hungry. As I am. You never find a harbour, a friend, a feast. Do you? No, I don't need you to tell me. I know all about it. I have known it for more years than you have lived yet."

"But really, I am happy sometimes," she protested. He caught her hands and held them so that she had to look at him.

"With Louis? Is your brain happy with Louis? Do you ever come within touching distance of each other? Is your spirit happy with Louis? Isn't it always hungry, holding out begging hands? Are your brain and your spirit not always calling you back and scorning you when you let your body wallow—slacken and take cheap thrills?"

"Oh, it's wicked that you should know these things about me," she cried.

"No. It isn't wicked at all. I know the same about myself. I've taken cheap things. Biology got me on the wrong tack at first; with a biological mind I saw everything via the body. Biology's a dragon one has to slay; that's why, in my work, I've taken to psychology instead. Love-making! I told you, right at the first, I always made love to women—. I always have done it, and always should have gone on doing it if I had never met you."

"But why—if you despise it?"

"I wasn't doing it as an end. It was a means. All the adorable, tender prettiness of love-making leads to physical love inevitably, and I always thought and hoped and believed that after it I'd arrive at some Ultima Thule of understanding, of comradeship, of equality. Never! Ugh, they were soft! Soft flesh, soft spirit, tricky brain! Sometimes I have a nightmare of trying to get to heaven up mountains of woman-flesh—soft, scented stuff, sucking one in like quicksands. You're the only woman I've ever thought much about and not made love to! To you I couldn't make love—"

"Whatever is this, then?" she asked faintly.

"This is one king coming to another, asking his alliance, his comradeship! You there, with that man—that jelly thing! You sicken, nauseate me. It's like seeing a queen go on the streets! Marcella, you can't do these things, you know. You're letting down your spiritual caste. You and I—we've been along lower paths. There wasn't really any disgust in it then, because we were adventuring, finding each other. But if we go on the lower paths now we're doing a thing that's damnable. All my life I've waited for the wonder that should come round the corner. So have you. And here it is, for both of us—"

"How many love affairs did you tell me you had had?" she broke in, in a queerly casual voice.

"You're not going to be conventionally horrified, are you?"

"No. But I think you're muddled. I think this is satiety, you know."

"It's you who are muddled, Marcella. This is satisfaction, not satiety. I know I've got all I need in you. Body, mind and spirit. Most of all, spirit—and courage."

She dropped on to the crackling ground. He looked down at her.

"I don't believe you know anything at all about control, Professor Kraill," she said very quietly, so quietly that he dropped down beside her to listen as she kept her face averted. "Do you remember, once, you said 'Women have no inhibitions'?"

"I was young. And even now, it's true—" he cried.

"I'm a woman. But I've never deliberately wallowed—as you seem to have done. Once or twice, perhaps—I was sort of weak, or perhaps hopeful. I thought it might be very beautiful—"

"You were seeking, as I was," he said, suddenly gentle.

"And—it meant softness, being bowled over, loss of control and finally cynicism," she said.

"No, no. Not finally cynicism, Marcella. Cynicism half-way along, if you like. But finally—anchoring."

She looked at him, very slowly, all over: her hands were quite still on her blue print frock that smelt of fire: many and many a night and day of hard schooling and cold patience had gone to make them lie there so untremulous now. She reflected on that for a moment; she reflected that, in years to come, by enduring hardness, people would be able to school their hearts from beating the swift blood to a whirlpool, their lips from hungering for a kiss. She thought next of Aunt Janet, desiccated, uncaring, and knew that Aunt Janet's way of life was wrong because it shirked rather than faced things. Her long gaze had reached his beautiful eyes and stayed there; she seemed to see down into a thousand years, a thousand lives. She knew quite well that here was the place of dreams come true; here was the deliverer with whom she had thought to ride to battle, and he too had dreamed. He saw her armour. He did not see the chinks in it. And he never should. And—he had said women had no inhibitions!

"It's hard," she said, her eyes still resting on his, "to keep your thoughts brave as well as your actions, isn't it?"

"What do you mean, Marcella?"

She was sitting motionless and white; he thought he had never seen a live thing so still, so impassive. As she watched his lips, and heard his voice speak her name, blazing floods of weakness were pouring over her.

"There are things one mustn't do," she said slowly. "But they would be most beautiful to think about, right deep down and quiet inside—like Mary had to hide and ponder in her heart the things the angel told her. One mustn't. I mustn't even think about you—that way—"

"What? What do you mean?"

"Thoughts drag people down, down, don't they? Except for a minute or two I've thought clean and selfless about Louis. Always about you I've thought very shiningly. If I let go a minute the shine of you will be out of my eyes. Do you see? Then I'll be like—like any of the other women! All soft corners and seduction. Just while you've been talking to me I've understood that I want to be like that; that's why I've been so dead this last month since you went away. It seems a pity, doesn't it?"

He found that it was his turn to sit speechless, watching her.

"There, now I've told you," she said, and lifted her hands and let them drop again hopelessly. "And now I'm going back to Louis. You want my courage.... Oh God, you've got it!"

He still stared at her. Quick, understanding as he was, he had not quite understood yet. He only saw that she was still whiter, that the still hands were clenched.

"If we get any closer you'll see the chinks in my armour. I suppose I'll see little dark patches in your shine.... If you didn't think so well of me, I suppose I should just let Louis drop out—if I didn't think so well of you I'd give you the kisses and narcotics and seduction you're tired of."

"Marcella, I don't care—if I thought—" he began, almost savagely.

"Oh, thoughts, thoughts! They're cruel! Here we both are, thinking so much better than we can do. No—no! We can do it! Only—we can't do it happily. Some day, I think, shining thinking and shining doing will be hand in hand—"

She stood up slowly then, and turned away. He saw her going right out of his life. And it seemed to him just as it had seemed to her, that all he had ever done or had done to him had led up to that moment.

"Marcella," he cried, and seized her hands again. "I can't let you go. Whatever you have, whatever you are, I want you."

"I!" she cried. "I! Always I! What do you and I and any of us matter, really? What does it matter if we do get smashed up like this if only we manage to keep our thoughts of each other clean and free from slinking things—fears, and greeds?"

"I can't help thinking about you!" he cried.

"I know. I can't, either. That's why we've to be so careful what we think. And it's going to be a hard, austere sort of thing for us both. Once I saw you a beautiful thing with swift wings all torn off in a sticky mess. Now I see you very shining—"

She looked at him with blinded eyes.

"Always I'm going to make myself see you like that now. Never, never will I let a greedy or unclean thought of mine dull you. And—please—you'll try to—to—do the same for me, won't you?"

He could not speak yet. He realized how terribly right she was.

"It's harder for us both, that you've been here and this has happened," she said. "Harder! But better! Neither of us, for each other's sake, can have any more cheap thrills, slothful moments, thoughts without courage. Oh good-bye."

She turned towards him and saw that he was lying on the grass. His shoulders were shaking. She knew that he was crying. That seemed terrible to her. She had to run, then, very quickly away from him or she would have stayed—and been soft. As she ran she, too, was crying.



CHAPTER XXIX

Louis was on the verandah as she came round the fence. She saw his eyes blazing madly, his face distorted, his hands clenched. He came to meet her, raging.

"Where've you been?" he choked out.

She waved her hand over towards where Kraill was. She could not speak.

"Whose is this hat? It's that damned professor's!"

"Yes."

"Where is he? Why are you crying? He's come here after you!" he raved.

"He's gone," she said faintly. "Gone—for always. Except in my thoughts—inhibited thoughts—thoughts washed and boiled—thoughts—Oh—sterilized."

"What in hell are you talking about?" he cried, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her fiercely. "Why are you crying, I say?"

"Because he's gone," she said, and cried all the more.

"My God! The impudence of it—telling me," he shouted, and seemed to be strangling with rage.

"The—the—honesty of it, Louis. Oh and—the—the awfulness of it! I'm crying because I can't bear it!"

"You—you—" he gasped, and paused for a word.

"Louis," she said, raising wet, miserable eyes to his. "I've sent him away, but I daren't, daren't trust myself not to run after him. Oh and it would so spoil things for him and all of us if I did! Listen, Louis, can't you grab me and not let me go after him? I can't hold myself back, and I did promise him I wouldn't let my thoughts get greedy! He said I was in armour—Louis, my dear, I've tried to help you so often when you were being torn in two. Can't you—my dear—it's your turn now."

"You damned adulterer!" he gasped, finding the word at last.

She sobbed, and in her sobs he saw fear, guilt. He flung her to the ground, repeating the word.

"Oh you silly, silly fool," she cried. "He's better than that—if I'm not."

"Then what in hell are you crying about?"

"Because I'm not—not a damned adulterer!" the words were torn from her. "But I can't clean my thoughts of wanting to be. My dear—after so long—I've helped you and been patient. Can't you do something—now, to make me able to bear it?"

"Now you know what it is to—" he began with an ugly laugh. Then rage seized him. "I'll break his damned neck," he cried.

"That's no use! What will that do to me? You can't kill the love that's tearing me up, by smashing his body to bits! You see, Louis, I've got him, for ever and ever. The shining, knightly side of me has. But it's the greedy side of me—the side that makes you grab out for whisky—that's sticking teeth into me now. And you know how it hurts."

"God! I'll break his damned neck," he cried again, and raged off into the Bush.

She crept into the house. A wild thought came to her that, if there were any killing it would be Kraill who would do it. And he and she would run away for awhile, right into the Bush, before people came to hang them. She stopped breathing at the gloriousness, the primitive full-bloodedness of it, and then writhed in horror at the greed of such thoughts, and prayed passionately that a sentry might be put at the door of her mind.

And she knew, very well, that presently Louis would be back—that he would say once again all the foul things he had said before, now with some glimmering of truth in them: that he would get money from somewhere and be drunk to-night, for now, at least, he had excuse. Then he would grin foolishly, and cry weakly, and rage and be futilely violent, and she would have to take this quivering thing that housed her armoured soul and make it do his service; she would have to undress him and wash him so that Andrew, trotting in in the morning, should not see his father in bed dirty; she would have to kiss away his ravings, soothe his fears. Presently she shook her head many times. She knew that she could never do that any more.

An hour, two hours passed. She sat quite still. Then a shadow crossed the window and steps came on to the verandah. She did not move. Louis stood by the door. Kraill was beside him. Louis looked quite sane, and very unusually young and boyish. There was a queerly different look about him. She stared at him for a moment; almost it seemed as though she could see a shine about him for an instant. Then she looked at Kraill, and he at her. She did not move, but her soul was on its knees worshipping his beautiful, still eyes that were tragic no longer, but very wise and sad. He read all that she did not say.

Louis coughed.

"Marcella—I'm sorry, old girl. Kraill has talked to me about it. He's been—or rather—we've been bucking each other up."

He coughed awkwardly.

"Bucking each other up—no end, old lady," he added, and ran his hand through his hair, making it wild, and rough.

She smiled faintly with her lips. For another moment she could not snatch her eyes away from Kraill's.

Then she said faintly:

"It's all very well, Louis. You're always being sorry! Aren't you?"

"This is the last time, Marcella, that there'll be any need to be very sorry," he said solemnly. "I was going to clear out for good, but Kraill made me come back."

"That's all very well, too. Professor Kraill is going away. He doesn't have to put up with you. He doesn't have to sleep with you. You will be drunk to-night, and every night when there's any money. And next day you'll be whining about it. I've lost hope now. I'm tired, tired of to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow."

Kraill's eyes were on her. The echo of a cock that crowed outside a door in Jerusalem nineteen hundred years ago came to her and her eyes filled with tears.

"Oh I'm so sorry! You asked me for my courage," she said to Kraill.

"There's no need for it now—on Louis's account, Marcella. You believe what I say to you, don't you?"

He smiled at her; he looked very friendly, very kindly.

"You know I believe you!" she cried.

"Then I tell you that Louis is quite better now. He is going to take care of you and Andrew. I can't prove it to you, yet. But you will see it as time goes on."

"I don't want him any more," she cried, "I want you—Oh no—no—!"

His eyes held hers again, tragic and terrible. Then again he smiled, and she felt that she had failed him.

"No, of course not, Marcella," he said gently. "These slinking greeds of ours—"

He turned to Louis.

"We'd better be getting along to the station, don't you think?" He stood looking at Marcella, who seemed stunned.

"Don't you think you could make us some tea before we go?" he said casually. She stared at him dully.

"Tea?" she said dazedly, and began to laugh shrilly. "Tea? Oh, men are funny! You're both so funny! 'The greatest of human triumphs is to read the need in another's eyes and be able to fulfil it.' Tea! Oh Louis, isn't it funny—making tea—now."

She laughed and laughed, and then Kraill and Louis began to dance about before her eyes most erratically, until a black curtain all shot with fires came down and hid them, and waves of cold, green water went over her. She felt someone lift her out of the water and then she went to sleep.



CHAPTER XXX

In the months that followed Marcella often tried to find out what had caused the Miracle—for Miracle it seemed to her. The desire for whisky that had obsessed him for ten years seemed to have died: he frankly admitted that it gave him no trouble now at all. When she seemed inclined to praise him for his bravery he laughed at her; there was no bravery in doing a thing that was perfectly easy and natural to him. He looked different: he was just as different as Saul of Tarsus after he saw the blinding light on the Damascus road. His nerves never cracked now; the little meannesses of which both she and the boy had been victims had disappeared; he gave her a kind of wistful, protecting love that proved to her, more even than his frequent safe visits to the township, that something radical had happened that day in the Bush—something so radical that, if it were taken from him, he would not be there at all. She felt that he was safe now; she felt that the boy was safe; she felt that in everyone on earth who was sick and sad and unhappy was the capacity for safety. But she did not know how they might come by it.

But she knew, incontrovertibly, that she could never love Louis again with any degree of happiness or self-satisfaction. That much Kraill had shown her. She and Louis had no part in each other's spiritual nights and days; the typhoon of physical passion that had swept her up for a few minutes she saw now as a very cheap substitute for the apotheosis Kraill had indicated. It was Louis's weakness that had been their strongest bond in the past: now that that was gone there was little left in him for her. But peace after pain was very beautiful.

It was not until after six months of sanity that he told her all about the miracle. One evening, after the child had gone to bed, they were sitting on the verandah. Louis had been talking of going home to start afresh in England.

"The voyage would do you good, Marcella. My diagnostic eye has been on you lately," he said as he lighted a cigarette and passed it to her. "You're looking fagged, and it's unnatural to see you looking fagged. You're getting thin. I don't want to see you suddenly evaporate, old girl."

She shook her head and stared unseeingly over the soft green of springing life that, before they came, had been devastating gorse.

"Yes, clearly a trip to England is indicated," he said. "You're alone too much. Marcella, I believe you're thinking every minute about Kraill."

"I—can't help it," she said in a low voice. "They're—good thoughts, now."

He looked at her, and something about the droop of her shoulders contracted his throat, made a pain at his heart.

"It's hard—" he began.

"It's a hunger, Louis. You understand it, don't you? But I can't buy it in a bottle!"

"Marcella!" he cried passionately. "I'll—I'll come into your thoughts in time. Lord knows I'm trying hard enough."

"Oh my dear, don't I know?" she said gently. "And has it occurred to you what a mercy it is for me that you're like this now? If I had to hide everything up, like I used to, I couldn't bear it—never seeing him again—if you didn't help me to."

"It's queer," he said slowly. "Most people—husband and wife—would not be able to talk about this sort of thing to each other. They'd hide and lie to each other."

"We've both been weak—and we've both been helped. And these demands we make of each other teach us so much. If Kraill had not demanded courage of me I'd—he'd have had me. It's no use lying about it, is it? Why should you be so frank about your whisky, and give yourself away to me every time about it, and I hide up my weakness from you?"

"You're—weirdly honest, old girl," he said with a short laugh.

"Yes. Even now, if I had not promised him courage of thinking, I suppose—he'd have me—but I had to live up to what he saw in me."

"And that, of course, is what saved me," he said quietly.

"I've often wondered," she said. "Are you going to tell me now?"

There was a long silence. He smoked two cigarettes as his mind went back to that hot, strange day.

"I went out," he began at last, "to kill him. I'd always been a coward before. But then I didn't know what fear was. In a crisis like that—Marcella, listen to me getting back the psychology I learnt at the hospital!—the ruling emotion comes on top. And my ruling emotion, I think, is selfishness. Brutally frank, old lady! Learnt that from you. But do you remember that soap, when young Andrew got his face skinned because I wouldn't let him have mine? And—heaps of times—about grub, and things. Oh yes," he went on, as she looked startled, "I've quite realized how selfish I always was to you. Well, don't you see how it worked? I thought Kraill had got you. You were my property. I just couldn't bear that. The only thing seemed to be to kill him."

"I didn't think you loved me," she murmured.

"I don't believe I did—till Kraill gave me a few tips! You see, I went roaring off to him, and he was standing by a tree looking stunned. I was flaring, frantic. I called him a damned adulterer. He laughed at me, and said just what you said, 'If I'm not better than that, she is!' Then he told me that I'd deliberately thrown you away. Mad as I was with him, I saw that he was quite right."

He paused, and puffed at his cigarette.

"Lord, it was a set-out, Marcella! He said quite calmly, that he was going to take you. Then it was I saw what life without you would be. He gave me a thumb-nail sketch of myself—and of you and him. You both seemed rather fine. I seemed a stinking, grovelling, strawy sort of thing. To my amazement it seemed right that he should have you. Lord, it scorched! I stopped thinking about killing him, and wanted to kill myself."

She put out her hand to him silently and he took it in his.

"Then, quite unexpectedly, he asked me if I was happy. Happy! In that strife! I found myself telling him—and I'd just called him a damned adulterer, mind!—all about it, the awful fighting, the awful losing, and the hunger. And I knew he would understand all of it. He said he'd had just such hungers, and had got through with them. He said the getting through came to different people in different ways. He said something I want to have framed up in the sky for miserable neurotics to read, Marcella. He said, 'With you, Louis, it's got to be drastic. It's got to be an earthquake. There's more than the drink in you that's got to be rooted out. All the foundations of you, all the structure of you, have to crumble, to fall together in a heap. Your spiritual centre of gravity has got to shift. Do you see?' I didn't see. But that's the very most important thing, Marcella—about the centre of gravity."

She nodded. She thought she understood.

"Then he gave me another, gentler picture of myself—a fight here, a failure there, a hunger somewhere else, and Lord knows how many old shreds of cynicism and belief, of selfishness and ambition and wantonness and pride, and just a little bit of love and desire for beauty. I told him that madness of mine, about the Mater's letters that I told you to take to King George. He was interested in that—said it was symbolical of my love for the Mater. I think I told him every bally thing in my life. And I never lied once to him. He was quiet a bit, and then he said I'd to be shaken up, smashed and crumbled, so that these old things would all go from me, and new things come in by the crevices and let the axis of me get changed. That seemed reasonable. What was so queer was how he treated me like a kid. Rather an intelligent kid, you know. He said: 'Did you, at school, Louis, have the lamp and orange and hatpin trick to explain night and day to you?' I said yes, and it all came back to me, being a kid in school and under orders, you know. And he said: 'Suppose your master had jabbed the hatpin just anywhere, nowhere near the centre—how the orange would have wobbled, wouldn't it?' I said it would, and he went on to say the hatpin wasn't jabbed through my centre, and that's why I wobbled so much. That was very reasonable, too—but I told him I didn't see how the hatpin was going to be pulled out. Yet all the time I listened to him, sort of fascinated by a charm he has—seems a ridiculous thing to say about a man, doesn't it?"

"No—not a bit," she said faintly.

"He seemed to care a lot about me. No one but you ever had. And then he asked me if I realized what a thin time you had of it. 'Does it ever occur to you, Louis, that your wife has had a superhuman job? And she's only a girl after all. You know what women are,' he said. They pretend to us that they're so very strong and independent. Like a child trying to lift a great weight, and saying: 'No, no—you shan't help. I can do it,' and in the same minute dropping it on his toes with a smash and coming to be comforted! Marcella's like that. She's brave. But she's got to the cracking stage now. She's got to be taken care of. I didn't believe it. It seemed incongruous."

"After what I'd just told you?"

"Yes. I've always, even as a kid, been such a liar that when anyone was brutally honest I thought they were posing. Kraill said, 'You'll never be fit to take care of her. You're just a parasite. She's coming away with me now.' That squared with what I'd thought of your brutal honesty. I thought it was a blind, and that you were just coming back to fetch Andrew and then go. I wasn't cross with Kraill then. I simply crumpled up."

There was a long silence. When he spoke again he spoke as though sharing a secret with her.

"Do you know, I believe Kraill was playing with us both, Marcella? I believe he'd gauged you right, and me too. I believe he made love to you, knowing your cussed pride. He knew you'd turn to me, and that your turning to me would save me. I believe he was bluffing when he said he was going to take you. You never know, with men like that. Biology and psychology—! He's got people's bodies and brains and souls dissected, and nothing they can do is unaccountable to him! Men like that are beyond the ordinary human weaknesses, you know."

She did know, very much better than he, and hugged dear thoughts as she smiled faintly at him.

"Then he began to take whisky out and hold it up in front of me by its hind legs, kicking. And it looked pretty silly before he'd finished with it. I was sick of it, I tell you."

She started. She remembered how ashamed he had made her of those momentary cheap thrills of hers. What was it he had said—"Like a queen going on the streets?"

"He'd smashed me up, I tell you."

"And me," she said softly.

"Though I knew I'd lost you then, I knew I'd lost whisky too. All the striving things that had made me up, you see, were lying in ruins, and the whisky seemed such a disgusting, ridiculous thing it wouldn't fit in anywhere. Like one of those jigsaw puzzles—the whisky bit put all the rest out. I felt a most blissful peacefulness ... like, I suppose, when a cancer is taken away after months of hellish pain. You can't imagine it! It was just like those Salvation Army chaps you hear in the street sometimes talking about being at peace with God. You can see they are, they look so beaming! I felt like that. Only God didn't seem to come into it. I was just at peace with myself."

She nodded, and he went on slowly:

"I'm not clear about the rest. Having smashed me, you see, he began to put me together again. I felt I could worship him—that sounds rather like hot air, old girl, but it's quite true" he added, reddening a little. "He'd got rid of that bally cancer for me."

"But how did you know—?"

"How do you know the sun has risen, dear? How did that poor devil that was tearing himself in the tombs know that he need fear no more when Christ spoke to him? How did the blind man know he could see? I just don't know, but it happened. And Marcella, do you know what I did? Lord—it was awful. I cried like anything, and asked him to give you back to me. It came to me like a flash that I'd no right to you, that you and he were much righter for each other. But I just couldn't spare you. More selfishness! And it seemed I'd such a lot to make up to you. He said: 'Are you sure you can take care of her now, Louis?' I laughed. It seemed such cool, calm impudence the way our positions were reversed. He laughed too, and said: 'Queer how we still look upon women as goods and chattels, isn't it?'"

"You didn't seem to take me into account much," she said.

"Kraill answered for you in the surest possible way. And then we started to come back to you. He said an astonishing thing on the way back—asked me if I'd read a book on 'Dreams,' by a German chap named Freud. I said I left dreams and 'Old Moore's Almanac' to housemaids and old ladies. He laughed, and we talked about dreams. He told me some of his—rather racy ones. I told him lots of mine—those horrors I used to have, and all that. And he kept nodding his head, and saying: 'Yes, I thought so.' I've often wondered what he was getting at, or if he wasn't getting at anything at all, but just simply changing a difficult subject—like when he asked you to make that tea."

"So that's that," he said at last, and talked of England. Presently she surprised him by saying that she very much wanted to go to Sydney.

"Want to test me among pubs, old lady? Well—I am armed so strong in honesty that dangers are to me indifferent! I can't help swanking bits from 'Julius Caesar,' you know—my only Shakespeare play! But it'll be great to go to Sydney. Only—what are we going for? Shopping?"

She evaded his question, and in a flash he thought he saw the reason for the journey and became very tender and considerate of her. They made plans immediately; he was like a child being taken out for the day. He kept telling her how delightful it was not to be kept on a lead; and she could have told him how delightful it was not to be at the controlling end of a lead.

They left Andrew with Mrs. Twist; Marcella was very quiet during the drive in to Cook's Wall, though for some moments she was almost hysterically gay. Just beyond the station was a gang of navvies and a camp; the railway was pushing on to Klondyke; great Irishmen and navvies from all parts of Australia, drawn by the phenomenal pay, sweated and toiled under the blazing sun making the railway cutting. The sound of rumbling explosions came to them as the rocks were blasted: she watched the men running back with picks over their shoulders; she loved to see their enormous bull-like strength as they quarried the great boulders.

They stayed at Mrs. King's, and went to a theatre the first night. Louis grew more hungry for England every moment as he came into touch with civilization. Marcella sat in a dream; the music that would once have delighted her to ecstasy was muted; the people were things moving without life or meaning; she answered Louis every time he spoke to her, but her mind was drawn in upon itself by a gnawing anxiety.

The next day, leaving Louis to his own resources, she and Mrs. King went out.

He was a little inclined to chaff them about their air of mystery, but, taking Marcella's tiredness and whiteness into account, he was expecting them to say they had been buying baby clothes, though it was rather unlike Marcella to keep anything secret.

Her tragic face and Mrs. King's eyes, red with weeping, froze the gay words on his lips when they came in just before lunch, where he was playing a slow game of nap with some of the boys in the kitchen.

They went upstairs to their old room. When the door was closed she said to him: "Louis, I've been to a doctor. He says I'm not well."

"I knew it. I told you, didn't I? You want a change, my dear," he said anxiously.

"I'm afraid it's rather more serious than that, Louis," she said gravely. "He seems to think it—it may be—cancer. Oh, I wish they'd call it something else! I hate that word. It's such a hungry word."

She was feeling stunned, and very frightened.

"But Marcella, it's ridiculous! For one thing, you're too young—"

"That's what the doctor thought. But he says it's been known—in textbooks, you know. A girl of eighteen that he knew had it. I'm to see two other doctors to-morrow."

He began to pace about the room. Then he laughed a little shrilly.

"Oh, it's a silly mistake. Doctors are not infallible, you know! He's brutal to have suggested it even. Oh damn these colonials! No English doctor would have told you."

"I insisted," she said quietly, and he guessed that the doctor was not to be blamed.

"But," he went on, "it couldn't have happened except through an injury. You've had no injury that I can think of—"

"No, of course I haven't," she said rapidly. "But these things seem to happen without cause, don't they? Anyway, we won't believe it until we've got to. I've been ill for months, and noticed things. I've been an awful fool. But I didn't think it was dangerous, and—I don't think I'd have cared much if I had known."

The next day confirmed the first doctor's opinion. Marcella was a little incredulous. It did not seem to her that she was ill enough to be in danger. It was only when the doctors advised immediate operation that the horror and terror of it came flooding in upon her.

"Louis, we'll tell them what we think about it to-morrow, please," she said.

They went back to Mrs. King's almost in silence. Both of them seemed as creatures walking in a dream. With one accord they looked at each other when they got back in the room. Mrs. King, anxious-eyed, was talking to someone in the kitchen. To avoid having to talk to her they went up on the roof. The city rumbled beneath their feet, very, very much alive. Everything seemed to be blatantly alive, flaunting its bounding life at them. They sat down on the coping.

Without warning she clung to him and began to cry.

"Louis—please don't let me be chopped up," she sobbed. He held her as though he would snatch her out of life and pain and danger. But he did not know what to say.

"Louis, I hate my body to push itself into notice like this," she cried after awhile. "I always did—as a child, and when Andrew was coming, I hated you to see me—like that—Oh and Louis, I can't die—yet—"

"My darling, you're cracking me up!" he cried. "But don't think of dying. Surgeons don't let people die nowadays! You can't die. You're too much alive. You'd fight any illness—"

They sat trying to think some alleviation into their misery. Presently she snatched herself away from him.