Part 30 (2/2)
Marcella sighed, and laid a cool, firm hand on Louis's.
”Louis--I think I'm--cheap.”
”So are air and water, dearie,” he cried, with sudden pa.s.sion that surprised her.
”I don't think I'll ever understand men, though. Wine, women and song they seem to lump together into a sort of tolerated degradation.”
”I don't know much about song, but women and wine are certainly to be lumped together. They're both an uncontrollable hunger. And they give you a thick head afterwards! You say that Professor chap in his lectures resents women. Of course he does. Don't you think I resent whisky?
Wouldn't any man resent the thing that makes dints in him, makes him undignified, body and soul, and gives him a thick head and a sense of repentance? I guess I look a pretty mucky spectacle when I'm drunk. I see myself afterwards, and can imagine the rest. Well, a man in the throes of a woman orgy is just as undignified--even if he doesn't lurch--oh and s...o...b..r! I've never heard that your Professor drinks. That doesn't happen to be his hunger, you see. But if he drank to the same extent as he has love-affairs he'd be in an asylum now; and if he were a woman he'd be on the streets! No woman--even if she were a Grand d.u.c.h.ess--would be tolerated with the same number of s.e.x affairs as a man can have. She'd just have to be a prost.i.tute out and out--without choice--or else keep herself in hand.”
”Like Aunt Janet,” murmured Marcella to herself, ”and come to acid drops.”
Aloud she said. ”Louis--I wish you wouldn't tell me. I always think of clever men like Kraill as G.o.ds and heroes--I hate to think they have holes in them. They have such wonderful thoughts.”
”That's the devil of it. I know they have. He has--Kraill. I've been to his lectures and felt inspired to do anything. They most of them think much better than they can do, that's about the size of it! I suppose we all do that more or less, but we don't put it on paper to be used in evidence against us. We think fine things and do smudged ones, and so the world goes on.”
There was a long silence. She crept a little closer to him and put her hand into his. He held it tight. It was almost as if her world were shaking about her and even his unsteady hand seemed some support.
At last she said, as if talking to herself.
”Louis--can't something be done for us all? Can't we have these things cut out of us like cancers? Can't we get rid of these horrible desires as we've lost tails and hair and things we don't need? Then in time people would be born without them. Louis--you don't think--think of me like that, do you--as a--a hunger? As something you must have if you don't have whisky, or as something that will drive you to whisky if I go away as Violet did?”
”I'm--I'm afraid I do, old girl,” he said. ”It's natural--I say, Marcella--you're only a kid. I don't believe you quite realize what you've taken on--in that way.”
She looked startled. Then she laughed gaily.
”I'm not afraid of my part of it, Louis,” she said, ”but I can't help thinking that if I'm to be--as you put it--a sort of hunger subst.i.tuted for whisky, we're all wrong. Suppose I died, for instance?”
”Marcella, if you die I shall die too. Anything else is unthinkable. I can't face life without you, now. I can't be a pariah again. You're a hunger to me. I'll admit it. But you're more. You're a saviour. And--you don't know anything about it, dearie. But when we're married you will, and I suppose I'll be just the same sort of hunger to you, then. It's no use blinking your eyes to it. And--be d.a.m.ned glad I love you, and am not like some sort of men. Otherwise--well, Lord knows what would have happened to you. You're so honest that you think everyone else is. And yet, transparent little fool that you are, in common-sense things, I know that you're going to keep me straight.”
Back came trooping all the visions of Deliverance, a rich pageantry shutting away the footmarks of the beast she had just glimpsed.
As every beat of the engines brought them nearer and nearer to Sydney consideration of ways and means became even more anxious. Louis spent glowering days. Marcella was quite certain that everything would turn out well.
It was in the dull run between Colombo and Fremantle that they decided upon a plan of action. The nights were getting colder now; they had to sit in thick coats in the evenings. This particular evening it was raining greyly, but they could not sit in the saloon because Ole Fred and his gang had started a smoking concert, and Marcella and Louis would have been ejected forcibly.
”You're such a fatuous optimist, Marcella,” he said impatiently. ”Lord, I wish I'd never started on this business! Everything's against us--I knew it would be! We'll give it up. You go off into the back blocks where you will at least be sure of food and a roof. And I'll go to the devil in the same old way as quickly as possible.”
”Oh, I could shake you!” she cried. ”You know quite well I'm not going to leave you, if we have to live on eleven s.h.i.+llings for the rest of our lives. It isn't eleven s.h.i.+llings now, either. I gave Jimmy half a crown to spend at Colombo.”
”Fool,” he muttered gloomily.
”Who spent fifteen pounds?” she retorted.
”I say, I'm sorry, old girl, but my nerves are a bundle of rags! I've never had a wife to worry about before--and I can't see how I'm going to make enough money to make her my wife yet--”
Marcella knew nothing whatever about money. She had a few jewels of her mother, but it did not occur to her that they were worth money. Louis had absolutely nothing of value. Guided by past experience his mother had given him the barest necessities for clothes; his watch and most of his clothes he had sold before he sailed. What made him so irritable with Marcella was the knowledge that he could easily get the money by being drunk. Publicans are proverbially open-handed; most publicans would have lent him ten pounds to spend in their establishment if he had thoroughly and courageously drunk and pitched some tale about expecting money by the English mail. He certainly looked worth ten pounds and his father's name as a publisher was fairly well known even in the Colonies.
He had frequently ”raised” twenty or thirty pounds in this way in New Zealand. Once or twice he had borrowed a few pounds from a doctor by telling him a pitiful tale, but most doctors recognized his symptoms and refused to help him to hurt himself.
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