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Captivity by M. Leonora Eyles

M >> M. Leonora Eyles >> Captivity




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 hellish 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 God. You can see they are,
they look so beaming! I felt like that. Only God didn't seem to come
into it. I was just at peace with myself."

She nodded, and he went on slowly:

"I'm not clear about the rest. Having smashed me, you see, he began to
put me together again. I felt I could worship him--that sounds rather
like hot air, old girl, but it's quite true" he added, reddening a
little. "He'd got rid of that bally cancer for me."

"But how did you know--?"

"How do you know the sun has risen, dear? How did that poor devil that
was tearing himself in the tombs know that he need fear no more when
Christ spoke to him? How did the blind man know he could see? I just
don't know, but it happened. And Marcella, do you know what I did?
Lord--it was awful. I cried like anything, and asked him to give you
back to me. It came to me like a flash that I'd no right to you, that
you and he were much righter for each other. But I just couldn't spare
you. More selfishness! And it seemed I'd such a lot to make up to you.
He said: 'Are you sure you can take care of her now, Louis?' I laughed.
It seemed such cool, calm impudence the way our positions were reversed.
He laughed too, and said: 'Queer how we still look upon women as goods
and chattels, isn't it?'"

"You didn't seem to take me into account much," she said.

"Kraill answered for you in the surest possible way. And then we started
to come back to you. He said an astonishing thing on the way back--asked
me if I'd read a book on 'Dreams,' by a German chap named Freud. I said
I left dreams and 'Old Moore's Almanac' to housemaids and old ladies. He
laughed, and we talked about dreams. He told me some of his--rather racy
ones. I told him lots of mine--those horrors I used to have, and all
that. And he kept nodding his head, and saying: 'Yes, I thought so.'
I've often wondered what he was getting at, or if he wasn't getting at
anything at all, but just simply changing a difficult subject--like when
he asked you to make that tea."

"So that's that," he said at last, and talked of England. Presently she
surprised him by saying that she very much wanted to go to Sydney.

"Want to test me among pubs, old lady? Well--I am armed so strong in
honesty that dangers are to me indifferent! I can't help swanking bits
from 'Julius Caesar,' you know--my only Shakespeare play! But it'll be
great to go to Sydney. Only--what are we going for? Shopping?"

She evaded his question, and in a flash he thought he saw the reason for
the journey and became very tender and considerate of her. They made
plans immediately; he was like a child being taken out for the day. He
kept telling her how delightful it was not to be kept on a lead; and she
could have told him how delightful it was not to be at the controlling
end of a lead.

They left Andrew with Mrs. Twist; Marcella was very quiet during the
drive in to Cook's Wall, though for some moments she was almost
hysterically gay. Just beyond the station was a gang of navvies and a
camp; the railway was pushing on to Klondyke; great Irishmen and navvies
from all parts of Australia, drawn by the phenomenal pay, sweated and
toiled under the blazing sun making the railway cutting. The sound of
rumbling explosions came to them as the rocks were blasted: she watched
the men running back with picks over their shoulders; she loved to see
their enormous bull-like strength as they quarried the great boulders.

They stayed at Mrs. King's, and went to a theatre the first night. Louis
grew more hungry for England every moment as he came into touch with
civilization. Marcella sat in a dream; the music that would once have
delighted her to ecstasy was muted; the people were things moving
without life or meaning; she answered Louis every time he spoke to her,
but her mind was drawn in upon itself by a gnawing anxiety.

The next day, leaving Louis to his own resources, she and Mrs. King went
out.

He was a little inclined to chaff them about their air of mystery, but,
taking Marcella's tiredness and whiteness into account, he was expecting
them to say they had been buying baby clothes, though it was rather
unlike Marcella to keep anything secret.

Her tragic face and Mrs. King's eyes, red with weeping, froze the gay
words on his lips when they came in just before lunch, where he was
playing a slow game of nap with some of the boys in the kitchen.

They went upstairs to their old room. When the door was closed she said
to him: "Louis, I've been to a doctor. He says I'm not well."

"I knew it. I told you, didn't I? You want a change, my dear," he said
anxiously.

"I'm afraid it's rather more serious than that, Louis," she said
gravely. "He seems to think it--it may be--cancer. Oh, I wish they'd
call it something else! I hate that word. It's such a hungry word."

She was feeling stunned, and very frightened.

"But Marcella, it's ridiculous! For one thing, you're too young--"

"That's what the doctor thought. But he says it's been known--in
textbooks, you know. A girl of eighteen that he knew had it. I'm to see
two other doctors to-morrow."

He began to pace about the room. Then he laughed a little shrilly.

"Oh, it's a silly mistake. Doctors are not infallible, you know! He's
brutal to have suggested it even. Oh damn these colonials! No English
doctor would have told you."

"I insisted," she said quietly, and he guessed that the doctor was not
to be blamed.

"But," he went on, "it couldn't have happened except through an injury.
You've had no injury that I can think of--"

"No, of course I haven't," she said rapidly. "But these things seem to
happen without cause, don't they? Anyway, we won't believe it until
we've got to. I've been ill for months, and noticed things. I've been an
awful fool. But I didn't think it was dangerous, and--I don't think I'd
have cared much if I had known."

The next day confirmed the first doctor's opinion. Marcella was a little
incredulous. It did not seem to her that she was ill enough to be in
danger. It was only when the doctors advised immediate operation that
the horror and terror of it came flooding in upon her.

"Louis, we'll tell them what we think about it to-morrow, please," she
said.

They went back to Mrs. King's almost in silence. Both of them seemed as
creatures walking in a dream. With one accord they looked at each other
when they got back in the room. Mrs. King, anxious-eyed, was talking to
someone in the kitchen. To avoid having to talk to her they went up on
the roof. The city rumbled beneath their feet, very, very much alive.
Everything seemed to be blatantly alive, flaunting its bounding life at
them. They sat down on the coping.

Without warning she clung to him and began to cry.

"Louis--please don't let me be chopped up," she sobbed. He held her as
though he would snatch her out of life and pain and danger. But he did
not know what to say.

"Louis, I hate my body to push itself into notice like this," she cried
after awhile. "I always did--as a child, and when Andrew was coming, I
hated you to see me--like that--Oh and Louis, I can't die--yet--"

"My darling, you're cracking me up!" he cried. "But don't think of
dying. Surgeons don't let people die nowadays! You can't die. You're too
much alive. You'd fight any illness--"

They sat trying to think some alleviation into their misery. Presently
she snatched herself away from him.

"It's such a beastly, slinking sort of way to die! In a bed--sick and
ill! Why can't they have wars--so that I could die quick on a
battlefield? You wouldn't have time to be getting cold beforehand, then.
Louis, it's like father, lying in bed till his poor heart was drowned.
Louis--Oh--"

She stopped, breathless. Her eyes narrowed; she was thinking deep down.

"I wonder if it's--necessary?"

He shook himself impatiently.

"How can pain and illness ever be necessary?"

"They may be--perhaps not to the sufferer, you know," she said, and
would not explain what she meant. She was seeing pictures of herself
praying for weakness--and of burning Feet--

"I wish Andrew had come with us. Is there time to send for him?" she
said presently.

"Every day is important now," he said, choked.

"Yes. I've not to be sentimental," she said, and tried not to grieve him
as she remembered very vividly her own sick misery when her father and
mother were ill and there was nothing she could do.

But even as she tried to be brave little fears would crop up, little
jets of horror burst out and wring words from her lips.

"Louis, it's the beastliness of it, you know," she cried. "Imagine
something taking possession of your body against your will. I hate that.
Like a madman seizing hold of you--like that gorse being burnt out and
growing up and breaking through other things that tried to grow--"

Louis was dumb. After awhile, when she had thought and thought again,
she said:

"I'm a wretched coward to say these things to you. It makes it harder
for you. But I can't help it. Kraill was right when he said I'd got to
cracking-point. If I were heroic I'd lie down and be a beautiful
invalid, waiting for a happy release. It would be easier for you if I
could. Louis, I just can't. It wouldn't be honest. If I die, it won't be
a beautiful spectacle, my dear. I'll fight every inch of the way!
There's such a lot of me to kill. I'm so alive, and I love to be alive.
It--it won't be dignified--"

"Oh God, I wish I were a Christian, or a theosophist, or something, and
believed people went on!" he groaned.

"I don't want to go on anywhere else," she said. "I want to go on here
with you and Andrew. And I want to see Dr. Angus and Aunt Janet and all
the others at Lashnagar--and--No, I don't want to see him," she added,
and thought again for a while in silence. "I don't need to--"

He looked at her quickly, and said nothing.

"Louis, do you think I've been wrong? I remember I said something to
Kraill about not wanting to die, though it seemed worlds away then. And
he said: 'It seems to me that you take too much on yourself. Are you
the ultimate kindliness of the world?' Perhaps it will be better for
Andrew if I'm not there--Oh, but that's morbid!"

"It is," he said decidedly. "And you're not going to die--"

She broke in quickly: "Just think if this had happened last year! I'd
have been frantic for fear of leaving you and Andrew. Why, I would never
have dared to go to the hospital, for fear of what might happen to you
while I was there. And now I'm not a bit afraid of that."

"Then don't be afraid at all. Look here, let's talk as if you're not my
Marcella at all, dear. Let's talk as if you were someone we're both keen
about. Can't you see that you're in very little danger, really? You're
so young, and so tremendously hard--"

She tried to make him think she was reassured, but a little later the
fear cropped out again.

"If I die," she said quietly, "what are you going to do? No, don't look
miserable about it. I'm miserable enough for two of us, goodness knows.
But people have been known not to wake up after an operation, haven't
they?"

"Just as they've been known to be run over by a taxi," he said.

"Yes. Well then, let's try to be quite unemotional about this stranger
called Marcella that we're both keen about. If she did happen to finish
up--out of sheer cussedness and desire to make a sensation, next week,
you'd be the victim of a ghost, Louis! I'd simply have to be back to see
what you're up to! You know what a managing sort of person Marcella is,
don't you?"

He made a desperate effort to be unemotional, and presently he said,
very decidedly:

"I know now what I'm going to do, old girl! I absolutely refuse to allow
illness to go on! There! That's a challenge to the Almighty, if He likes
to take it--"

She laughed gently, with tears in her eyes.

"I feel helpless. And I'm fed up with feeling helpless. That
socialization of knowledge has got to begin, or I'll--Oh. I don't know!
Look at the idiocy of it! Here we are in the twentieth century, and
people are dying like flies all over the show. Why, there's no room for
houses because there's so much room needed for grave-yards! And--even
if they don't die, they're ill, most of them. And I'm not going to have
it!"

"Louis! What are you going to do?" she said, staring at him, taken out
of her fear by his enthusiasm. "I've never seen you like this before."

"No. I never have been. But this business of illness has just come and
touched me on the raw, you see! You ought not to be ill. It's waste and
lunacy to think of it. And I--ten years of my life wasted by a neurosis!
And your father, and Lord knows how many millions more! I'll tell you
this much, Marcella! Before five years have gone by I'll be in the
battlefield against illness, and I'll be damned if illness won't have to
look out! I loathe it, just as you do! I resent it! I'm going to stop
it. Listen, old girl, as soon as you're out of that hospital, you're off
to England, and I'm going to the Pater, and I'm going on my knees to beg
him to give me another go at the hospital. I've got to get my tools
ready, you know--"

"Do you think your father will?"

"He'll be sceptical. I should if I were he. I've been such a bounder to
him in the past. But if he's too sceptical to help--well, I'll go to
Buckingham Palace and ask King George to lend me the money! I should
think he'd be jolly glad to think there was a chance of wiping out
illness for ever."

Tears brimmed over: it was when she saw the eternal child in Louis that
she loved him most, and was most afraid for him; not afraid now that he
would waste himself again, but afraid that he would never touch the
mountain-tops at which he was aiming.

"Yes, we'll go home," she said dreamily. "And I'll take you on
Lashnagar--and we'll see them all again. I'll ask Uncle to give us the
money to take us home. This wretched illness will take all we have."

"Don't you worry about your Uncle's money," he said grimly. "I'll see to
that! Marcella, there's nothing I can't do now. If only I hadn't
monkeyed about at the hospital, probably I'd have had the knowledge to
save you all this now."

"Why, how silly!" she laughed. "If you hadn't monkeyed about at the
hospital we should never have met!"

The next day she went into hospital: as the anesthetic broke over her in
delicious warm waves she was frantically afraid that she was going to
die; it seemed to her that these calm, business-like surgeons and nurses
only treated her as one of millions, not realizing that she was Marcella
Lashcairn, immensely important to Louis and Andrew. She began to feel
that it would be much better if she did not have an anesthetic at all,
and superintended the whole business herself intelligently. It seemed
wrong that she should have no hand in a thing of such profound
importance. Then her will relaxed a little and she was horribly afraid
that she would feel sharp knives through the anesthetic. A blinding
flash of realization abased her utterly. Just on the borders of
unconsciousness she saw Kraill looking at her with his beautiful eyes
clouded with disappointment.

"He knows I'm afraid of being cut up--and he knows I'm afraid of dying
I--Naturally he knows--he lives in my imagination!--and he wanted my
courage--But I'm not really frightened, you know. Can't you see I'm
not?"

It became immediately necessary to explain this to Kraill. She tried to
push the mask away. A very steady, pleasant voice was saying "breathe
deeply," and she realized that she had once more been taken up by things
much stronger and wiser than herself: quite conceivably they might make
a mess of her, hurt her and even kill her. But they were doing wisely;
and anyway, she herself could do nothing more--buoyant warm waves took
her up and carried her right away from caring.

When she wakened again all fear had gone; she was conscious of a burning
corkscrew boring into her body somewhere, but she was too lazy to
localize it. A long, long time after that she saw sunshine and smelt
something very beautiful.

She focussed her eyes on something that swayed drunkenly: after awhile
it stood still, and she saw that it was a little blue vase filled with
boronia. The breeze from the open window was tapping the blind softly to
and fro, and wafting the scent of the boronia over her face. Then she
saw Louis's face, very white, above her.

"All right, old girl?" he whispered.

She tried to find her hand to raise it to him, but it seemed so far
from her that she would have to go to the end of the world to fetch it.
And that was too far. So she smiled at him.

"You're all right, you see," he said nervously. "Gloomy forebodings are
so silly, aren't they?"

"I--thought I should feel it," she said.

"I told you you wouldn't, didn't I? The nurse said you took an awful
time to go under--"

"Yes. I wanted to explain something. And I wanted to help the
surgeons--I thought I'd--do it--much better than they could."

"Just like you, old lady," he said, with his eyes wet.

"Silly to fight, Louis--strong things--wise things--like those
surgeons--even if they are making awful pains for you to bear--"

"I wouldn't talk, darling," he whispered anxiously, his face against
hers.

"I'm not talking, Louis--I'm thinking," she said anxiously. "Something I
was thinking--all mixed up with old Wullie, and a pathway. It seems to
me God is like those surgeons--only--strong and wise, you know--only He
never gives you chloroform, does He?"

She lost sight of Louis's face then for a very long time.




CHAPTER XXXI


Three months later they were aboard a P. and O. steamer, calling their
good-byes to Mrs. King and half a dozen of the boys, and Mr. and Mrs.
Twist who had come all the way from Loose End to see them off.

Marcella had stayed in hospital for two months; for another month she
had been struggling with inability to begin life again in a nursing home
overlooking the thunders of the Pacific. Louis had gone back to the
Homestead. He would not explain what he was going to do. He merely
fetched Andrew, and put him in charge of Mrs. King, who brought him
every day to see her. And then he vanished. But she had no fears for
him. They had vanished; her sudden yielding to the chloroform in the
hospital had been symbolical of a deeper yielding; she felt that these
strong, wise forces of her life, if pain became unendurable, would
either cure it or find an anesthetic for it.

And one day, towards the end of the three months, Louis had come to the
nursing home to see her. His hands, as he seized her passionately, felt
hard and stuck to her thin silk blouse.

"Louis!" she cried, taking one of the hands in hers, which had grown
very soft and white, "I've seen them pretty bad before with the gorse.
But whatever have you been doing? Where have you been? They're like a
navvy's hands!"

"Were you worried about me, old girl?" he asked.

"No, but dreadfully curious," she began. He took a roll of dirty notes
out of his pocket and threw it in her lap.

"Look! Alone I did it! Monish, old girl! Filthy lucre! Just enough to
take us home. I meant to do it off my own bat, without asking your
uncle!"

"But how on earth could you, in the time?" she asked.

"Navvying! That bally railway cutting at Cook's Wall! Lord, Marcella, if
I don't get the Pater to pay for me to go to the hospital, I'll do a
year first on the music-halls as the modern Hercules. I should make
millions! My hands were blistered till they got like iron; my back felt
broken; I used to lie awake at nights and weep till I got toughened. I
had a few fights, too."

"Why? Didn't they like you?"

"No, they're not so silly as you. They resented my English
particularly, and they resented my funking whisky when they were all
boozing. They thought I was being superior. Lord, if they'd known! One
night, when they were calling me Jesus' Little Lamb and Wonky Willie, I
saw red and tackled an Irishman. Of course, he knocked me out of time. I
knew he would. And just to show them that I wasn't wonky, and wasn't a
Cocoa Fiend--that was another name they had for me--I downed a tumbler
full of whisky neat."

She drew a deep breath.

"Oh, don't worry! It made me damned sick! Lord, wasn't I bad! There's
something in my brain so fed up with the stuff that my body won't give
it house-room."

"Good thing too," said Marcella.

"I'm not so sure," he said reflectively. "In a way, it's weak. Whisky
still beats me, you see. There ought not to be anything on earth one's
afraid of."

"I think that's a bit morbid. I'm very much afraid of snails, and I
certainly don't think I'm called upon to go and caress snails."

"Ah, this is different. This isn't physical. It's psychological. Just
as, once, I hungered for whisky, now I loathe and dread it. The ideal
thing would be to be indifferent to it. That may come in time."

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