Part 62 (1/2)

”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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+ft. 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 h.e.l.lish 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 G.o.d. You can see they are, they look so beaming! I felt like that. Only G.o.d didn't seem to come into it. I was just at peace with myself.”

She nodded, and he went on slowly: