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Captivity by M. Leonora Eyles

M >> M. Leonora Eyles >> Captivity



CAPTIVITY

by

M. LEONORA EYLES

Author of _Margaret Protests_

1922







TO E. J. R-S.

You have often said that you could never write a book. You have written
this one just as surely as Beatrice wrote the Vita Nuova for Dante.
Until I talked with you I did not know that our lives are the pathway
for God's feet; I had not realized that Trinity of body, brain and
spirit; and it had never come to me before how, for each other's sake,
we must set a censor, very strong and austere, upon our secret thoughts.
I have learnt these things from you; the gold of your thoughts has
passed through the crucible of my experience to make a book. Perhaps a
little of the gold has been left clinging to the crucible--and for that
I have to thank you, my dear.

Margaret Leonora Eyles.

Bexhill-on-Sea, _1st February, 1920._




"Man comes into life to seek and find his sufficient beauty, to
serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it; to face anything
and dare anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the
dying eyes still turn to it. And fear and dulness and indolence and
appetite--which, indeed, are no more than fear's three crippled brothers
who make ambushes and creep by night--are against him, to delay him, to
hold him off, to hamper and beguile and kill him in that quest."

H. G. Wells ("The History of Mr. Polly").




Captivity




CHAPTER I


As long as Marcella could remember, the old farm-house had lain in
shadows, without and within.

Behind it rose the great height of Ben Grief, with his gaunt face gashed
here by glowering groups of conifers, there by burns that ran down to
the River Nagar like tears down a wrinkled old face. Marcella had read
in poetry books about burns that sang and laughing waters that clattered
to the sea for all the world like happy children running home from
school. But the waters on Ben Grief neither laughed nor sang. Sometimes
they ran violently, as though Ben Grief were in a rage of passionate
weeping; sometimes they went sullenly as though he sulked.

It was upon Ben Grief that Marcella looked when she went to bed at night
and when she wakened in the morning in her little stark room at the back
of the house. There was another window in the room from which she could
have seen the sea, but Aunt Janet had had a great mahogany wardrobe
placed right across it, and only the sound of the sea, creeping
sometimes, lashing most often, came to her as she lay in bed, reminding
her that the sea was there all the time.

In front of the house rose Lashnagar, the home of desolation, a
billowing waste of sand rising to about a thousand feet at the crest.
Curlews called and sea-gulls screamed over Lashnagar; heather grew upon
it, purple and olive-green; fennel and cooch and henbane sprang side by
side with dwarfed stink-nettles, stunted by the salt sand in which they
were rooted. But the soil was not deep enough for trees or bushes to
take root.

In Marcella's lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and
dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back. Legend had it that
hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling
round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella's folks. That was in the
year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and
lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot
summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the
soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board. A
wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding. All the wooing had been done
by the woman--as was the way of the Lashcairn women ever afterwards--in
the dry heat of that unnatural summer when the sap dried in the trees
and the marrow in men's bones, while the heated blood surged through
their veins more quickly than ever before. On the Feast of All Souls,
the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all
the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror. That
night, after they slept, while Andrew Lashcairn lay awake in the
witch-woman's arms, a great wind came in from the sea, sweeping before
it the salt sand of the dunes, covering the village and the castle and
the old feet of Ben Grief where sheep and cattle fed. The witch-woman,
with her lord and a few servants, fought and battled a way through the
storm of sand and stones to settle where the last of the wind-blown
desert piled on the knees of Ben Grief. The next year Andrew rode away
to the fight at Flodden Field. Unknown to him, the witch-woman who loved
him rode close to his heels.

There his pennant, with its sun in splendour and its flaunting "By
myself I stand," went down. When the hush of death fell on the noise of
battle the witch-woman crawled by night among the dead to find her lord
lying with one arm thrown carelessly over his dead horse's neck. It was
there, companioned only by the dead, that the witch-woman's twins--a boy
and a girl--were born. And it pleased their mother's grim humour to
creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and
trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for
her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to
brooding Lashnagar. It was the boy who was Marcella's ancestor.

Lashnagar was her nursery. On Lashnagar she had seen queer things. One
night, when everyone was asleep and the path of the full moon lay
shining across the sea, she went up on to Lashnagar with the shadows of
the flowering henbane clean-cut and inky about her feet. Half-way up a
great jagged hole lay gashed. Peering into it--she had never seen it
before--she could distinguish the crumbling turret of a church, the roof
of a house and the stiff tops of trees buried partly in a soft sea of
sand in the middle of which was a depression. The heathery ground on
which she kneeled began to crack very gently, and, with beating heart,
she started back, realizing that the hillside was hollow, formed here of
rotted trees thinly overgrown with turf and sand. Next morning she heard
that a shepherd was missing, and then she guessed with horror the
meaning of the chasm and the soft depression.

Next day she went back to gaze fascinated at the hole, only to find that
already the dry sand had almost filled it, quite covering the cracked
place where she had kneeled, the turret and the roof. She told no one
but Hunchback Wullie, an old man who tended the green-wood fires in the
huts on the beach, where fish were cured. Excepting her mother, he was
Marcella's only friend--he it was who had soaked her mind in the legends
of Lashnagar and the hills around; he it was who had taught her the
beautiful things learnt by those who grow near to the earth and humble
living things.

She ran down the hillside to him that day, her eyes--the blue-grey eyes
of her people--wide with horror, her long, straight, fair hair, that she
wore in two Marguerite plaits, loosened and swinging in the wind.
Hunchback Wullie was in the first hut, threading the herrings through
their gills on the long strings that went from side to side high up
under the roof. His ruddy brown beard glistered with the shining scales
of the fish, for he had a habit of standing by the hut door looking out
to sea and stroking his beard, when another man would have smoked and
rested.

"Things never come tae an ending, lassie," he said, his little red-brown
eyes looking out over the grey water. "Either for good or for ill
they're always gaun on. They may be quiet like Lashnagar for years, an'
then something crops out--like yon crumbling last night that killed
young Colin. But it's not always evil that crops out, mind ye."

Marcella did not go on Lashnagar again for months. The next time Wullie
was with her, and half-way up the incline they found apple blossom
growing about one foot from the ground on a little sapling with a
crabbed, thick trunk.

"Why, look at that little apple tree, Wullie--how brave of it! I'm going
to root it up and take it to my garden. It can never live here in the
sand and the wind."

Wullie sat down and watched her, smiling a little and stroking his beard
as she dug with her hands in the friable soil. For a long time she dug,
but the sapling went deeper and deeper, and at last she sat down hot and
tired.

"D'ye ken what ye're daein', lassie?" he said, looking at the pink and
white bloom reflectively. "Ye're diggin' doon intae death! Yon flooer's
the reaping of a seedtime many a hundred years gone by. If ye was tae
dig doon an' doon all the day ye'd find yon apple tree buried deep i'
th' sand. The last time it fruited was afore Flodden, when Lashcairns
were kings--"

"What, Wullie, a poor old tree buried all those years, pushing up to
light like this? How could it?" said Marcella, staring at it fascinated.

"I've tauld ye afore, Marcella. There's no ending tae things! Sometimes
the evil comes cropping oot, like when men get caught an' buried on
Lashnagar. Sometimes it's something bonny, like yon flooer. Yon apple
was meant to live an' bear fruit; the bonny apple's juist the
makeweight. It's the seed that matters all the time--the life that
slides along the tree's life. Yon tree was buried before its seedtime,
and all these years it struggled, up an' up, till it broke through into
the light of the sun. Like God strugglin' at the end through a man's
flesh--"

Marcella stared at him: Wullie often talked like this, and she only
understood very vaguely what he meant. But she could grasp the idea of
something trying to struggle through desperately, and looked pityingly
at the little frail plume of blossom.

"And after all these years, to struggle through on this bleak hill! Poor
little tree!" she said.

"That happens often to folk's lives. They come struggling through tae
something very rough and hard. But it's the struggling that matters. Yon
tree may only have one fruit that will seed. And so life goes on--"

He stroked his beard and stared over the sea to where the brown-sailed
herring boats of his brother and his nephew were coming in through the
morning sunlight.

"It's a bit sad, isn't it?" Marcella said dreamily. "It seems hard on
the tree somehow, Wullie. Just as if the poor tree was only a path for
the new tree to walk along--"

"Well, that's all life is--a path for other life to walk along."

"I wish you'd explain better, Wullie," she said, staring from him to the
plant.

"Explaining's never any use, lassie. Folks have to live things to find
them out." He stood up slowly. "There's the boats comin' in, an' I must
get on back to the huts. Ye'll learn, Marcella--ye'll come tae it some
day that ye're only a path yerself for things to walk along--"

"Wullie--_what_ things?" she demanded.

"Other folks, maybe. Maybe God," he said, and went off to the huts.

Overcome by the pathos of the little hopeful tree, Marcella carried
baskets of soil from the farm and pots of water to lay them round about
it. She planted stakes round it to keep off the force of the wind. But
that year the flowering bore no fruit. And Wullie smiled at her attempts
to help the tree.

"The roots are doon too deep, lassie," he said. "Sae deep ye canna reach
them. There's little ye can dae for tree or man, Marcella, but juist not
hinder them. All we can do, the best of us, is to put a bit of soil an'
watter half-way up a tree trunk an' hope we're feeding the roots--"

"Then what can anyone do?" she said, looking at the pitiful little
tree, stripped now of its leaves in the autumn chill.

"I tauld ye--juist not hinder. An' lie as quiet as ye can because ye're
a path--"

It was in this way that Marcella got her education. Most of the time
Wullie talked above her head save when he told her of the habits of
animals and plants, of the winds and the seasons. Her mother, before she
was too ill, had taught her to read and that was all. Even her mother,
drawn in upon herself with pain, talked above her head most of the time,
too. The girl turned herself loose in the big room at the farm where
books were stored and there she spent days on end when the weather was
too wild to be braved. It was a queer collection of books. All Scott's
novels were there; she found in them an enchanted land. She lived them,
she fed on them. She never read herself into the woman's part in them.
Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left
much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was
young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on
full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic
legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long
"s's" in the printing. There was Fox's Book of Martyrs: there were many
tales of the Covenanters, things hard, austere and chill.

One summer a young student came to the farm for the harvest. He was a
peasant lad, a penniless bursary student at Edinburgh University. In the
Long Vacation, he worked at his native farming, reading voraciously all
the time and feeding sparingly, saving his wages against the coming
bleak winter in his fireless attic in an Edinburgh wynd. He talked to
Marcella, dogmatically, prodigiously, unanswerably. On her legends and
fairy-tales and poetry he poured contempt. He read the "Riddle of the
Universe" and the "Kritic of Pure Reason," orating them to Marcella as
they worked together in the harvest field. She did not even understand
their terminology. He had a quite unreasoning belief in the stolidly
utilitarian of German philosophers and laid siege to Marcella's
mysticism, but after he went back one day she discovered a box of her
mother's poetry books and so Tennyson, Shelley and Keats shone into her
life and, reading an ancient copy of "David and Bethsaibe," she gathered
that the Bible Aunt Janet read sourly had quite human possibilities.
This box of books was her first glimpse of a world that was not a long
tale of stern fights; it was her first glimpse of something softly
sensuous instead of austere and natural and passionate.

Marcella never knew quite how her folks came to live at the farm; it had
happened when she was three years old and she took for granted her world
of crumbling, decayed splendours. Hunchback Wullie had told her that
the old grey house on Ben Grief used to be her home, and that the lands
all about had belonged to her father. But they were his no longer and
she was forbidden to pass the old grey house, or even to speak of it.

Andrew Lashcairn, Aunt Janet, two women servants and a man who never
seemed to have any wages for their work lived with Marcella at the farm.
The man and Aunt Janet planted things in the garden, but on the poor
land, among the winds they never grew very well. Oats grew, thin and
tough, in the fields, and were ground to make the daily porridge;
sometimes one of the skinny fowls that picked and pecked its hungry way
through life round about the cattle pen and the back door was killed for
a meal; sometimes Marcella ran miles away up Ben Grief when one of the
lean pigs screamed its life out in a stream of blood in the yard. She
used to feel sorry for the beasts about the farm; the cows seemed to
have such huge, gaunt bodies and looked at her with such mournful eyes
when she went through the croft in which they were eating the scanty
grass. The two old horses who did the ploughing and the harvesting
had ribs that she could count, that felt sharp when she stroked their
patient sides. The cows lowed a great deal--very plaintively and deep;
the pigs squealed hungrily every time a pail clattered in the kitchen or
steps passed their sty door.

One dreadful day they squealed all the time while Marcella's little
English mother lay on her couch in the window that looked over
Lashnagar, and cried. She had lain on this couch for nearly two years
now, whiter and thinner every day. Marcella adored her and used to kiss
her white, transparent hands, and call her by the names of queens and
goddesses in the legends she had read, trying to stretch her own ten
years of experience to match her mother's thirty-five so that she could
be her friend. And this day when Rose Lashcairn cried because the beasts
were crying with hunger and there was no food for them, Marcella thought
of Jeannie Deans and Coeur de Lion and Sir Galahad. Buckling on her
armour in the shape of an old coat made of the family plaid, and a Tam
o' Shanter, she went out to do battle for the helpless creatures who
were hungry, and stop her mother's tears.

It was a three-mile walk to the little town. There was a corn factor's
shop there at which her father dealt. She walked in proudly. It was
market day and the place was full of people.

"Andrew Lashcairn says ye'll please to be sending up a sack of meal and
a sack of corn the day," she said calmly to the factor who looked at her
between narrowing eyes. The factor was a man imported to the district:
he had not the feudal habit of respect for decayed lordship.

"Indeed he does? And why disna Andrew Lashcairn come tae dae his own
begging?"

Marcella stared at him and her eyes flashed with indignation though her
knees were trembling.

"He is not begging, Mr. Braid. But the beasts are crying for food and
he's needin' the corn the night."

The people in the shop stopped talking about prices and listened
greedily. They knew what Marcella did not.

"Then ye'll tell him tae go on needin'. When he's paid for the last
sack, an' the one afore that, he'll be gettin' more."

"But of course he'll pay," she cried. "My father is busy, and he can't
mind things always. If you ask him, he'll pay."

The man laughed.

"He will, fine he will! No, Mistress Marcella, ye can tell yer father
not tae go sendin' children beggin' for credit whiles he hugs his bar'l.
The corn's here safe enough when he chooses to pay for't."

Marcella went homewards, her mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew
nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had
none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling.
She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been
the same; she expected nothing else of him, or of fathers generally. She
knew that he lived most of his time in the little room looking out on
Lashnagar and she had certainly seen the "bar'l"--a thirty-six gallon
barrel being taken into that room. She did not know that it held whisky;
if she had known, it would have conveyed nothing to her. She knew that
the green baize door leading to the passage from which her father's room
opened must never be approached; she knew that her father had frequent
fits of Berserk rage when the little English mother cowered and fainted
and things were smashed to splinters. In one such rage, when Marcella
was seven years old, he had seen her staring and frowning at him, and
the rage he always felt against her because she, the last of his race,
was a girl and not a boy, had crystallized. That time he had flung her
across the room, breaking her thin little arm. She remembered ever
afterwards how he had picked her up, suddenly quietened, and set and
bandaged the arm without the suspicion of tenderness or apology or
shame, but with cool skill. All the time she heard his teeth grinding,
and watched his red-rimmed grey eyes blazing. She gathered that he
considered his women-folk belonged to him, and that he could break their
arms at will.

Other things she remembered, too--cries in the night from her mother's
room when she had been a tiny mite and thought they were the cries of
banshees or ghosts; she remembered a terrible time nearly three years
ago when she must not sit on her mother's knee and lay her head on her
breast because of cruel pain there; she remembered the frightening scene
there had been when surgeons had come and stayed in her mother's room
for hours; how they had gone past her where she cowered in the passage,
smelling a queer, sweet, choking smell that came out when they opened
the door. In the book room she had heard raised voices when the
Edinburgh surgeon had said, "In my opinion it was caused by a blow--it
cannot have come in that particular position except by injury--a blow,
Mr. Lashcairn."

There had been a Berserk rage then, and violence before which the
doctors had been driven away.

All these things Marcella remembered during her lonely three-mile walk
in the winter twilight, and for the first time they co-ordinated with
other things, broke through her mist of dream and legend and stood out
stark like the summit of Ben Grief.

That night she was more than usually tender to her mother. Kneeling
beside her bed, she put her strong young arms under the bedclothes and
held her very tight. Through her nightgown she felt very frail--Marcella
could touch the sharp bones, and thought of the poor starved cows.

"My queen, my beautiful," she whispered in her mother's ear. "I'm going
to be Siegfried and save you from the dragon--I'm going to take you
away, darling--pick you right up in my arms and run away with you--"

She stopped, choked by her intensity, while her mother stroked her
ruffled hair and smiled faintly.

"You can't take people up in your arms and snatch them out of life,
childie," she said. And then they kissed good night.

As she went to her little cold room Marcella heard the padding of feet
outside in the croft, and grunts and squeals. The hungry beasts, as a
last resort, had been turned loose to pick up some food in the
frost-stiffened grass; incredulous of the neglect they haunted the
farm-house, the pigs lively and protestant, the cows solemn and pathetic
and patient. Marcella had taken her piece of oatcake and cheese at
supper-time out to the door. But it was no use to the beasts. The little
black pig gobbled it in a mouthful and squealed for more. In her agony
of pity something dawned on her.

"I suppose," she said to herself, as she stood shivering, looking over
rimed Lashnagar, "that Jesus was as sorry for His disciples as I am for
these poor beasts. He knew they'd be so hungry when He had gone away
from them. So He gave them His body and blood--it was all He had to
give."

She got into bed, but the thought stayed with her. It was to come back
again many years afterwards, illuminating.

That night she heard steps about the house--her father's heavy
steps--but she felt tired, and fell asleep. It was midnight when her
father opened her door and came into the room.

"Marcella, are you asleep?" he said in his beautiful voice that always
made her wish he would let her love him.

"No," she said, starting to wakefulness.

"You've no mother now, Marcella," he said, and turned away. She heard
him stalk heavily up the passage.

When she ran along after him Aunt Janet was holding a hand-mirror over
her mother's mouth and looking at it carefully. She had red-rimmed eyes.
Marcella stood still, staring, and thought how white her mother's ear
was against the faded blue of her old flannel jacket over which her
long black hair lay in two long plaits. Then her father came in and sent
her down to the village for the old woman who attended to the births and
deaths of people. She went over the croft, among the hungry cows that
stared at her, one after one as she passed. Later, when the woman had
gone, and the two servant women were crying in the kitchen while they
drank scalding tea and spilt it down their aprons from trembling hands,
Andrew Lashcairn and Aunt Janet sat in the book-room with all Rose
Lashcairn's papers spread out before them. Marcella sat for a while
watching.

There were letters, smelling of the lavender and rue that lay among
them. They were tied in little bundles with lavender ribbons. There were
little thin books of poetry, a few pressed flowers, a few ribbons that
had decked Baby Marcella, a tiny shirt of hers, a little shoe, a
Confirmation book. All these they threw into the fire, and read some big
crackling papers with seals and stamps upon them. Then Marcella crept
away along the passages through which the wind whistled while the rats,
hungry as everything else about Lashnagar, scuttled behind the
wainscotings.

She opened her mother's door. A candle was burning on the table by the
bedside. A sheet covered the bed. Underneath it she could trace the
outline of her mother's body. As she came across the room, walking
softly, as she always did, to avoid the loose board that had so often
jerked her mother back to wakefulness and pain, it seemed to her that
all the loving kindness of the world had gone from her. From then until
her mother was buried she never left her.




CHAPTER II


After his wife's death Andrew Lashcairn was harder, colder. Fits of
glowering depression took the place of rage, and he never went behind
the green baize door, though the barrel stayed there. He seemed to have
conceived the idea of making Marcella strong; perhaps he was afraid that
she would be frail as her mother had been; perhaps he tried to persuade
himself that her mother's illness and death were constitutional frailty
rather than traumatic, and in pursuance of this self-deception he tried
to suggest that Marcella had inherited her delicacy and must be
hardened. Divorced from his den and his barrel by his own will-power he
had to find something to do. And he undertook Marcella as an interest in
life.

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