Part 21 (1/2)

”No, I'm not. It's Mr. Farne in Number 8. He hasn't had a meal since he came aboard.”

”Sea-sick?” he said sympathetically.

”Well--” she began, and realizing that she could not explain, nodded.

”He's better now, anyhow.”

”I'll make him some tea if you like, miss,” went on Knollys. She waited until he had made it, and ten minutes later she tapped on Louis's door, took the tray in, laid it on his bunk and came out.

”I won't stay to keep you company. When I'm very hungry I like to gobble, but I don't like anyone to watch me,” she said.

As she came out Ole Fred opened the door of Number 15 and stood watching her until her door closed. Then he hurried on deck.

CHAPTER IX

For the next few days Marcella and Louis were inseparable. They were up very early each morning and did the usual march--seven times round the deck before breakfast. Afterwards she went up on the fo'c'sle and waited for him; for the rest of the day there was nothing to do but talk and read, and there was only a very limited library. Sometimes Louis talked of medicine; he told her things that had happened, that he had seen at the hospital; he explained cases to her, quoted lectures, and she, with all a layman's rather morbid interest, was fascinated. He, with the aura of travel, of learning, of experience in the ways of men, began to play Oth.e.l.lo to her Desdemona. Feeling at his ease with her, and getting strength every day from the fact that yet another day had gone by without a victory to his enemy, he lost his shyness; she began to feel very humble as he talked largely, and her pa.s.sion for understanding, enlightenment, that had led her to read books she could not understand, to talk to everyone and even to talk to herself, now enveloped him. She opened her mouth to be fed from his stores. Sometimes he would talk of London, a marvellous fairyland to her; tell her of ”rags” in which he had played the leading part; of things he had done when he was in Rio for three months--Rio! the very name enthralled her! It smacked of buccaneers and Francis Drake--of his life in New Zealand two years ago, when, s.n.a.t.c.hing himself from the outcasts of Christchurch and Auckland he had flung himself valiantly into the prohibition district of the King Country and lived with the Maoris for six months in the hope of finding the tribal cure for cancer; of the time when, on a girl-chase, he had toured with a theatrical company for a few months while his father thought he was at the hospital working. Her sponge-like eagerness for all the Romance, the Adventure he could give her was insidious in its effect on him; she was flattered that he, with all his cleverness, his ”grown-up-ness” that went so queerly with his babyishness, should have so thrown himself on her mercy; to her nineteen years it seemed a wonderful and beautiful thing that a man of twenty-seven should find in her an anchor. Of the three men she had known before, her father had been, even in his weakness, her tyrant; Wullie had been her playmate all her life; the doctor, all alone and friendless in a small, remote village, had found in her an intelligent listener, and had talked quite impersonally to her, as a safety-valve for his own loneliness. To them all she had been just a girl in certain circ.u.mstances; her circ.u.mstances and not herself had really been the thing that impressed them; she was just someone who happened to be there. But to Louis she was obviously a very tangible, defined person. She could not forget the wonder of that.

And Louis, flattered by her admiration, her wonderment, fell into a very human sort of weakness; he tried to make himself even more interesting; with the same quite amiable weakness that makes the witness of a street accident spill more blood, bear more pain in the telling than the victim could possibly have done, he began to lie to her. She was so easy to lie to. He scarcely realized, at first, that he was lying; a description of an operation he had witnessed, as a student, with Sir Horsley Winans playing the chief part, had won her horrified, s.h.i.+vering admiration; ten minutes later he was describing how he himself had done trephining (which he was careful to a.s.sure her was the most difficult operation possible) on an injured dock labourer; how the patient had wakened from the anesthetic in the middle of it; how Louis had immediately dropped his instruments and gone on administering the anesthetic because the anesthetist was actually flirting with a nurse who was Louis's pet annoyance in the wards; how the electric light had failed at the crucial moment; how only Louis's iron nerve had prevented tragedy and horror.

”You may think, seeing me such a bundle of nerves as I am now, that I couldn't have done it,” he said. ”But when I'm doing the doctor job I'm a different being; I lose myself. I just gave him another whiff of A.C.E., called to the nurses to fetch candles and got on with it. He's walking about London to-day--as right as nine-pence.”

She knew nothing about hospitals, had never seen one in her life; he called most things by their bewildering technical names and she listened respectfully as a layman will always listen to technicalities. She did not know that the whole thing was a fabrication; in spite of his warning about his lying she had naturally thought that, if he should lie to her at all it would be about drinking and not about everyday affairs. And he, carried away by his imagination and his desire to impress her, scarcely realized what he was doing.

Marcella was very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously ”tall” as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to Marcella's Keltic imagination there was nothing incredible in his gory, gorgeous exploits; was not she, herself, the daughter of a faraway spaewife who could slide down moonbeams and ride on the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of snowflakes? And was not she herself a fighter of windmills? To her Romance could not come in too brightly-coloured garb, and so her Romance wove a net about him. Sometimes it flattered: sometimes it amused: sometimes it gave a sense of kins.h.i.+p that made him think that, unless she were a liar she would never have so sympathized with him. He was unable to trace the fine distinction in veracity between describing a perfectly fict.i.tious operation performed by oneself, and in recounting the messages given by the screaming gulls, the whining winds on Lashnagar.

On one or two things she was certainly caught up sharp. His taste in books showed a width of divergence between them that nothing could ever bridge; seeing her with ”Fruit Gathering” which the schoolmaster had lent to her, he asked what it was.

”It's by Tagore,” she ventured.

”Tagore? Never heard of him,” he said dismissively.

In the fly-leaf of the book was a beautiful portrait of Tagore. She showed it to him, remarking that he was the Bengali poet.

”Oh, a n.i.g.g.e.r!” he cried contemptuously, pus.h.i.+ng the book on one side.

She frowned at him and shyly suggested that Christ, in that case, shared Tagore's disadvantage. He laughed loudly. Then she opened the book at random. She had been impressed with something before going to bed the night before.

”Listen to this, Louis. I thought I'd like to read it to you,” she said, and read, ”'Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. And this--listen, 'Let me not look for allies in life's fight, but to my own strength'; and here's the best bit of all, 'Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.' I wish so much I could have found that before father died and read it to him.”

”Oh--poetry,” he said contemptuously; ”a lot of high falutin'

nonsense--and by a n.i.g.g.e.r too! What's that someone said? 'Intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.' That's a good description of a poet.”

Another time she spoke of St. Brigid, the Bride of Christ.

”Who's she?” he asked contemptuously.

”The Irish saint.” He interrupted with a long tirade against Home Rule which proved, to his satisfaction, that St. Brigid was also ”high-falutin' nonsense.” A pamphlet of Shaw's she found in the saloon he told her not, on any account, to read.

”A d.a.m.ned Socialist--a vegetarian--a faddist,” he said excitedly, and she led the conversation away from books, though he brought it back several times to explain to her the jokes in ”Punch” which he said would have to be put into her head with a hammer and chisel, since she was a Scot.

But in spite of puzzlement and divergences she was intensely happy.