Captivity Part 44

He looked at her craftily, his mind switching on to a less horrifying thought.

"Ha! I knew you had poison. Where is it?"

"I gave you all the poison in that tea, dear. What is there we can use to poison maggots? Surely they taught you that at the hospital?"

"Oh yes, yes--mix up salt and water and watch them wriggle! A quart of water and two tons of salt. Be quick! I'll poison the devils," he cried, and she watched in astonishment as he drank the salt water greedily. Of course he was sick, and very much better because much less poisoned.

His delusions became less terrifying; the maggots changed to a bee buzzing inside his ear, deafening him. She killed the bee by blowing cigarette smoke inside his ear and telling him it was dead. When he grew much quieter and more reasonable he asked her the time in so ordinary a voice that she thought he must be quite well. The next minute he begged her earnestly not to come near him again because her infidelities had made him loathe the sight of her.

Right back of her mind was the shaking conviction that she could not stand alone; she was longing, demanding almost, all that night, that G.o.d should come down from on high with chariots and thunderbolts to save her; she wanted Dr. Angus to tell her what to do, to persuade her that Louis was a sick man and not a bad man; next minute she wanted her father to come and thrash him to death for his wickedness. But all the time, illogically, she pitied him while she pitied herself. By accident he killed the self pity by trans.m.u.ting it to a softer, more beautiful thing.

"Did I tell you the c.h.i.n.ks had got that little Jimmy who was on the _Oriana_?" he asked casually at tea-time next day.

"Who? What do you mean?" she said, starting.

"I saw him and Peters sleeping out in the Domain that wet night. I was going to sleep there too, because I was afraid to come home to you. They told me they were starving. The kiddie had got his pyjamas in a bundle.

All their other baggage had gone somewhere--probably seized for rent somewhere. Serves the old fool right, spending all his tin on that little widow!"

"But where's Jimmy?" she cried, starting up to fetch him.

"I don't know. I gave him a s.h.i.+lling to get a feed, and the old chap came and had a few drinks with me. I forget what happened then. I expect the Salvation Army 'll get the kid--if they can get him from the c.h.i.n.ks."

That night she was tortured by Jimmy. Then she was tortured by all the children in all the worlds, especially those children who had no mother, and more especially those children whose fathers were chained as Mr.

Peters was. She could not leave Louis while she went to search for Jimmy, whom she would have kidnapped without a second thought if she could. Next day Louis, though sane, was very ill with gastritis, and though several of Mrs. King's lodgers went from Domain to hotel, from hotel to the police, and from the police to the Salvation Army, they could not trace Jimmy. She never saw him again; he lived in her mind, a constant torment, the epitome of victimization, gallantly loyal and valiant even in homelessness and starvation.

CHAPTER XVIII

While Louis was so weak and ill Marcella came to several conclusions.

The first was that they must leave Sydney at once; the second was that Louis must be made to work if he would not be persuaded to work willingly. In work, it seemed to her now, lay his salvation much more than in imprisonment, even though she should have him imprisoned in a nursing home, under treatment. And in getting away from Sydney lay her own salvation. It was high summer; the heat to her, after the cool exhilaration of the Highlands, was terrific; very often the thermometer she borrowed from Dutch Frank's bedroom registered a hundred and twenty degrees in their room, and the close intimacy of life in one room was becoming appalling to her. While he was in bed she was happy in a purely negative way; very soon happiness came to mean to her the state of quiescence when he was not drunk. They had cleared up many things, and though she was glad to have got to the bedrock of truth about him at last she was sick with disillusionment, and a self-disgust at having been so credulous, so easily deceived. In the state of chronic depression reactive to his orgy he let out all the truth about himself in a pa.s.sion of self-indulgent penitence. His tales of secret service were, he told her, not technically lies. They were the delusions of his deranged mind. He had read a spy book in England just before meeting her, when he was recovering from a similar orgy; it had made a dint on his brain similar to the impression left by the French girl earlier. In the same way he explained his morbid tales of Chinese tortures--once, in a fit of melancholy, he had attempted suicide, and after his recovery had gone to the seaside with his mother to recuperate; in the boarding-house had been a collection of books on atrocities. It seemed that everything he read or saw when in a state of physical relaxation affected him psychologically. Marcella did not realize this, however, until long afterwards.

The tales he had told her about his parentage he was inclined to treat with amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Don't you know, darling, that that's the first thing a man says when he's crazed with any sort of delirium? Either his mother's honour or some other woman's goes by the board. I just had a variant on that theme--that's all."

She was silent for a while, crushed.

"And then the things you said to me, Louis. About me and--that awful Mr.

King and old Hop Lee who brings the fruit. They are simply unforgivable.

Louis, I'll do all I can to help you, my dear, but I'm finished with you. You sneered at me because you knew I liked to kiss you. Nothing on earth can ever make me do it again."

"Marcella," he said solemnly, "the other night I had d.t.--just a mild attack. Ask any doctor and he'll tell you about it. Those things I said to you _I_ didn't say, really. They were just lunacy. There was an Indian student at the hospital who used to a.s.sure us solemnly that delirious or drugged or drunk people were possessed by the spirits of dead folks; drunkards by drunkards' spirits who wanted drink so badly they got into living bodies to satisfy their craving that even death couldn't kill. I used to laugh at him as a mad psychic. But I'm hanged if it doesn't look as if there's something in it. You know _I_ couldn't talk to you like that, little girl, don't you? You forget that this is illness, dearie."

"I'm afraid I do, Louis. Anyway, whether it's you or--or--an obsessing spirit, or anything else, I can't help it. I can't have you talk like that any more."

"No--I quite see that," he said thoughtfully. "I can explain it, you know."

"I'm tired of explaining," she said wearily, sitting on the table with her legs swinging. Her hair was plaited back and tied with a big bow, as she usually wore it in the house; his heart contracted with pity as he saw what a girl she looked.

"I don't think people ever realize how deeply this question of physical fidelity has sunk into us--as a race, I mean. If you knew it, Marcella, it's absolutely the first thing of which people accuse those they love when they get deranged in any way. A dear old man I knew--he was quite eighty--a professor of psychology--when he was dying had the most terrible grief because he seriously thought he'd got unlimited numbers of girls into trouble. I suppose"--he went on slowly, wrestling with his thoughts as he put them into words--"I suppose it's because we resent infidelity so bitterly or else--why is it it touches us on the raw so much? Why is it you were so sick with me for saying that insane thing about King and Hop Lee?"

"I don't know, Louis," she said hopelessly. "It simply made me feel sick."

"But--it _did_ touch you on the raw, you know, or you wouldn't have felt sick. It wouldn't make you feel sick if I accused you of murder or burglary--I believe it's simply because we might, all of us, very conceivably break the seventh commandment; in fact, I don't believe anybody goes through life, however sheltered and inhibited they may be, without wanting to break it at least once! And that's why we're so mad when anyone says we have."

She thought this out for a while.

"Well, I think that's perfectly disgusting, and that's all I can say about it," she said finally.

Later he explained in a very clear, concise way, the reason for his outburst. Partly it was periodic; partly it was the result of outside circ.u.mstances. He had lied to her to "keep his end up," he said; he had clung to his father's money because he could not bear that she should be penniless; then a letter from his mother, brought at his request by King, had upset him. It told how Violet had returned his engagement ring; she had forgotten to do it until her husband, noticing it in her jewel-case, had asked its history and insisted on its return. His mother had said she would keep it safe for him until he came back; his father had said it must be sold to pay some of the debts Louis had left. There had apparently been a family quarrel: the mother, wanting sympathy, had written to Louis about it. And he had felt angry with Violet, angry with Violet's husband, angry with his father. "That explains why, when I went off my head, I said I wasn't the Pater's son, and why I crystallized my annoyance with Violet into hatred of you."

There was a long silence. Marcella was learning things rapidly.

"Then, when everything outside goes well, we shall be happy, but if the tiniest thing upsets or annoys you I shall have to suffer?" she said calmly.

"Oh, my pet--" he began brokenly, and burst into tears.

She felt that his crying was pitiful, but very futile. Later, very shakily, he wrote a letter to his father at her dictation, and she posted it, thus cutting them off from England. He got better slowly, able, as his brain cleared, to treat himself as a doctor might have done. As soon as he seemed able to talk about the future she raised the subject.

"Louis," she said one evening, "I've learnt a lot of things lately. I've learnt that I must never believe a word you say, for one thing. And I'm going to act on that. But what's worrying me most is that we have practically no money left."

"Oh, my G.o.d!" he cried tragically.

"You see," she went on calmly, "I believed in your work, so I was not particularly careful with the money. That's one thing. Another is that we're both going to work or you'll be worse and I'll murder you soon.

Number three is that we're going to get out of this city where you won't be in constant temptation. Perhaps when you've got some nerve back again we'll live among people again. You can't stay in bed for the rest of your life. You'd be bored to drink in no time--"

"I couldn't be bored where you are, girlie," he whispered tenderly. "How could I be?"

"I don't know, but you are. And so am I," she said grimly. He stared at her and was silent.

"What are we going to do till we get away, then?" he asked. "We've still got the Pater's money--"

"Yes, that will come for weeks yet. I've thought all about that. If I were heroic I suppose I'd not touch it. But I don't see how we can avoid it."

"But it isn't enough to get out of Sydney with," he said petulantly.

"Yes it is. I'm going to find work for us," she informed him.

"What sort of work?"

"Anything--farm work is all I know. But probably I could cook. Mrs. King has told me a good many things to make."

"But, Marcella--" began Louis, almost tearfully.

She turned to him quickly.