Part 32 (2/2)
”Don't want to,” snapped Marcella. ”I'm not a spider!”
They anch.o.r.ed out in the stream in Sydney Harbour, going ash.o.r.e in tenders. Marcella scanned the quay anxiously to find Louis, though Knollys told her that he would, most probably, be in by train to-morrow at noon. But she had an idea that he might have got through earlier, and hurried up to the General Post Office, which he had told her was his only address in the Colonies, to which his letters were sent. But it was a fruitless errand. Enquiry at the station told her that, as Knollys had said, the next train possible for Louis would be in at noon to-morrow.
She turned back through the streets that were so extraordinarily like London in spite of Chinese, German and Italian names. As she pa.s.sed the Post Office for the second time it occurred to her that there might be letters for her there, and found quite a bundle of them in a little pigeonhole high up. There was also a cablegram that had been waiting two days. She opened that first. It was extravagantly long; the name ”Carlossie” at the head of it gave her a sickening pang of homesickness for a moment. She read:
”Letter from Port Said arrived. Very anxious. Only way you treat drunkard is leave him alone. Impossible cure. Above all do not marry him or shall blame myself. Writing. Await letter I implore you.--Angus.”
It was extraordinary extravagance for Dr. Angus. She felt guilty at having worried him.
”But I never mentioned marrying Louis! I simply said he was one of the pa.s.sengers I was interested in.”
There was a letter from Aunt Janet written after the _Oriana_ had sailed and sent overland to Ma.r.s.eilles.
”I certainly miss you,” she wrote, ”but I shall get over it in time, I expect. One gets very used to everything in time. I wonder if you will ever come back? I expect so. Wullie the Hunchback came along with fish for me twice. He misses you badly. You were always a great deal with him.”
Letters from Mrs. Mactavish and from Wullie, dictated to and written by Bessie, said that she would be back soon; standing under the portico of the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself back again in her own sphere among her own people. She tried to picture Louis there, too, and realized horribly that he would never fit into the picture. Against Wullie and the doctor and her aunt he would look so vulgar, so pretentious, so tinsel-coloured. And how they would laugh at a man who could not master himself, a man who cried!
”Why, I'm a sn.o.b! I was hurt when he thought I'd disgrace him by my bad manners. And now I'm being just as cruel!”
Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last letter in her hand, afraid to open it. It was postmarked Melbourne and had come in that morning. It was in Louis's writing, and gave her an acute sense of distress. She stood still by a shop window, looking into it blindly until she realized that she was looking at a crocodile and some snakes squirming about in tanks in a naturalist's window. The straggly writing reminded her of the ugly snakes: it told her that he was drunk more or less when the letter was written; she looked from the letter to the snakes. One of them crawled writhingly over the others, lifted its head and put out its tongue at her: s.h.i.+vering, she opened the letter.
”MY OWN DARLING,
”Wasn't it a sell? That d.a.m.ned captain's had a down on me all the trip. I reported him to the s.h.i.+pping company and I'm trying to get a free pa.s.s from them by rail. Otherwise I should come by the train that has brought this letter. By great luck I ran into an old girl I knew in New Zealand.
She's a nurse who saved my life once when I was in hospital there. She's a dear--Oh quite old; don't get jealous, my pet! I'm staying the night at an hotel in Little Collins Street. The landlord has lent me a fiver, so don't worry about me. One thing I've to tell you--a terrible confession. I lost your father's ring in my haste the other night, but never mind. I'll buy you another. I hope your Uncle stumped up.
Australia's a d.a.m.nable place to be hard up in. Will you tip my stewards for me and see my things through the Customs? Give Knollys and the other chap ten s.h.i.+llings each. They haven't killed themselves on my behalf, or it would have been a quid. Tell them I sent it. I don't want them to know I'm hard up. If I hit up that railway pa.s.s I should be through before lunch on Sat.u.r.day. And then, old girl, there'll be doings! I hear you can get hitched up in Sydney for about twenty-seven bob, without waiting for notices of any sort. Till then, all my love and all my thoughts are for you.
”Your own Louis.
”P.S. (Just like a woman) You'd better get something decent and not Scotch to wear if your uncle came down decently. And book us rooms at the Hotel Australia. They do you very well there.”
It was her first love letter. She felt, vaguely, that it lacked something though she did not quite know what. She hated the talk about money and about her uncle. She hated that he could borrow money so casually from a nurse who had been good to him. She wished that terrible hunger he had predicted had not happened to her. She knew, with absolute certainty, that Dr. Angus had gauged her fatal habit of conceited anxiety to help other people when he cabled to her not to marry a drunkard whom she had merely put to him as a hypothetical case. And she knew the doctor was inevitably right about the folly of marrying a man like Louis.
”But he's wrong about there being no cure. When he is with me every minute and I can look after him as if he is my little baby, he won't be able to do it. I'll be a gaoler to him--I'll be his providence, his mother, his nurse, his doctor. Oh everything--I'll be what G.o.d was to father.”
Down on Circular Quay she felt she could not go aboard the Oriana yet.
In spite of the unsteadiness of her feet it was very pleasant to be walking about in a new land, so, taking out Louis's letter again she went on rather blindly through the wharves, reading it. A j.a.panese boat was loading; smells of garlic and of spice and sandalwood were wafted to her from the holds and weaved into her thoughts of Louis; a little further along there was a crowd of stevedores cl.u.s.tered in the roadway round a violent smell of whisky. She turned away, sickened by her memories of that smell, with her father's ghost and Louis's at her side, but uncontrollable curiosity made her press on again. A great barrel--like the barrel at Lashnagar--had been broken by falling from the top storey out of the clutch of a derrick; there was a pool of blood, dreadful and bright in the roadway and men were lifting the crushed body of a man into an ambulance; quite close to the pool of blood was one of whisky that was running into the gutter. Two big, bronzed, blue-s.h.i.+rted men were kneeling beside it, dipping their hands in it and licking them greedily; trembling at the same time and looking sick with the fright of sudden death. From a warehouse near by came a heavy smell of decay--sheep skins were stored there in great, stiff bales. She went on, feeling as though horror happened wherever she went.
But along by the sea wall it was very peaceful; only the soft lapping of the landlocked tide against the stone, the slow gliding of ferry boats, the lazy plash of oars and the metallic clanking in the naval dockyard on Garden Island came to her. On a man-of-war out in the stream the sailors were having a was.h.i.+ng day; she could hear their cheery voices singing and laughing as they hung vests and s.h.i.+rts and socks among the rigging, threw soapy water at each other and skated about the decks on lumps of soap.
A little further along by the wall was a great garden; she went in in a dream; unfamiliar flowers covered unfamiliar bushes with pink and scarlet snow; a bed of cactus looked like a nightmare of pincus.h.i.+ons and tumours. She sat down beside them, under a low, gloomy leaved eucalyptus and dreamed. The champagne quality of the air, the sunlight dancing on the blue water, the great banks of dark green trees on the opposite sh.o.r.e, with prosperous, happy-looking little red houses nestling among them brought about an effect of well-being that soft weather and beautiful surroundings always gave her. She had, all her life, been able to escape from unhappiness by the mere physical effect of going into the suns.h.i.+ne and the wind--and then unhappiness and grief seemed impossible, incredible. Sitting there with half-closed eyes she dreamed of the future; the disgust of Melbourne had gone; the disillusionment of Louis's letter had gone, and yet she had very few delusions about what was going to happen to her.
She wished she had the courage to run away now, to her uncle, or anywhere away from Louis. And she knew quite well that nothing on earth would make her leave him. She was beginning to realize, vaguely, what marriage to him might mean; she had flas.h.i.+ng visions of him, drunk, dirty, foolish and--beastly. She shrunk from him fastidiously; even thinking of him made her heart thump in sheer horror; she felt that, to be shut up in a room with him when he was drunk would be an indignity, a disgust too horrible to contemplate. And he had hinted things that frightened her, about her ”having her work cut out” about her ”not realizing what she had taken on.” Next minute the soft sunlight and the fluttering leaves made her think of him when he was not drunk, and she frowned; she so hated his air of superiority, his calm pus.h.i.+ng aside of her opinions as not worth notice, his cool insistence on her inferiority as a woman.
”Still, he's awfully clever,” the dancing water told her. But she knew that he was not more clever than very many other people and that his cleverness had never been of any use except in getting money.
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