THE mild winter slid almost imperceptibly into spring. June, momentarily brightened by the American naval success at Midway Island, and the Anglo-Soviet treaty, grew darker again with the unfolding tale of retreat in North Africa. In July the headlines offered encouragement with one hand only to snatch it away with the other. Things were better in Libya, but in Russia the name Stalingrad leapt into the news to remain there for long months, flaring like a sombre beacon. Commentators and newspapermen juggled with those talismanic words “a second front,” and the people, hungrily hopeful, irritably impatient, starving for even a crumb of comfort, devoured their conjectures, and added their own stubbornly insistent clamours.
Danger accumulated in the north, but the material for resistance accumulated too. Along the hundreds of miles of road from Alice Springs to Darwin, which three hundred men had toiled to build in eighty-eight days, went the incessant stream of motor convoys carrying war supplies, and troops, and food. By August the enemy was building up a formidable strength in New Guinea, and fighting bitterly for supremacy in the Solomons. Yet the relentless logic of global war dragged even the most parochial minds away from exclusive contemplation of their own territories; the opposing forces of history in the making pulled those minds and stretched them till they sang and thrummed like wires. India thrust itself forward into their consciousness, and issues which had roused no response in them once, were now a painful plucking on their thought, a challenge to sharply-awakened moralities. If you are fighting domination, suppression, overlordship, said the singing in those minds, you are fighting it everywhere; if you believe in freedom, self-determination, democracy, you believe in it for every one. Global war? Well, then, global peace, global co-operation, global justice . . .
The people learned now—or remembered—that the diagram of man’s emotions is not a straight line with grief at one end and joy at the other, but a circle where the extreme of ecstacy blurs into pain. They learned that not only in their bodies and in their mysticisms, but also in their thoughts, the sharpest effort towards achievement must be shot with agony. They began to understand—not willingly, but because they must—that if no conflict in themselves hold more torture than mental conflict, no resolving of conflict brings more unassailable serenity. They began to grope towards that serenity, taking the knocks they had shirked before, sloughing off protective layers of prejudice, and wincing with the pain of exposure. They were worried, they were anxious, they were asking; they were on the way to salvation.
This was a background, a semi-conscious reaction to events. With the front of their minds they went on living from day to day, studying their newly-acquired ration-books, writing letters to the papers, taking sides on trivial domestic issues, growing vegetables, practising for air-raids, grumbling, quarrelling, laughing, filling the war loans, going to the movies. By the beginning of September their grim and irritable defence-mood had undergone a subtle change. Stalingrad was performing the impossible; Rommell was baulking in the desert; they had had their own taste of victory at Milne Bay. They had been running a Marathon, concentrating on keeping their place; now they were ready to sprint. The Japanese were pushing up the Kokoda trail, the Prime Minister was talking sternly of austerity, and still more austerity, but—whether because there was the feel of spring and the scent of brown boronia in the air, or whether from some obscure, psychological current of conviction—that mood added exhilaration to its grimness, and gained impetus.
The people expressed it in the streets, showering confetti on marching troops returned from the Middle East, surging forward from footpaths, hanging like clusters of fruit from trees, packing windows and awnings, sending out vitality in waves with their tumultuous cheering. Gilbert, jammed in the crowd with Marty and Prue, felt some of his own despondency lift, and regretted (but only for a moment) his inability to become completely identified with mass emotion. There was power here. Manpower. It occurred to him that that was a dangerous word, linking itself by association with horsepower, and becoming, thus, a word with merely physical implications. He felt it now as a spiritual power, and his own individual fragment of it as something straining almost beyond endurance to pull it in the direction he wanted it to go. Out of this experience as out of every other experience, the same old question emerged to confront him. If you could split this manpower into its component parts, how much of it would pull on his side, and how much on the other? What was going to be the result of the final tug-of-peace? The victorious arms of this nation or that nation were merely factors in the struggle to decide the fate of an epoch. What would be born out of the ultimate encounter? What idea would win in the last, inevitable showdown?
Marty was restless. She liked to observe crowds in the same way that she liked to observe the sea—from a distance. She hated the emotionalism of humanity in the mass, and profoundly dis-trusted the symbolisms that fed it. She loathed a national flag because it fluttered between her and her own inner conception of the land it represented; she shut her ears obstinately against martial music because it attempted to shape the emotions she felt quite capable of shaping for herself; she detested the hypnotic tramp-tramp of marching feet because it debased the natural contact of man with his mother earth to the rhythmic insensitiveness of a machine; she condemned all uniforms because they masked the final value of the human being—his uniqueness. She looked at the flowing river of cocked hats, which was all she could see of the procession, and said irritably to Prue:
“I’m going to extricate myself—if I can.”
“Wait a bit—we’ll come with you.” Prue yelled above the din: “Do you want to watch any more, Dad?”
He shook his head. They pushed laboriously through the crowd, and emerged at last, dishevelled. Marty adjusted her hat, and said:
“I’ll leave you here. I have some shopping to do.”
She set off along Pitt Street, walking briskly, and thinking about the book which was beginning to take shape in her mind. She was actually more interested in the way it was taking shape than in the prospect of writing it, for her brain, with a bland, momentous inconsistency, was reversing its usual procedure. Always before she had seen a character, and spun a story out of it. Now she had seen a story, but its centra! character remained misty She wasted no time on speculating which was the “better” method but she was acutely intrigued to discover the machinery of her mind behaving so little like machinery that it elected, suddenly, serenely, and purposefully, to work backwards. She decided without either approbation or regret that it might be a result of several years during which her attention had been fixed on problems rather than on personalities, and she was, for the moment, simply waiting—an attentive spectator—to discover how, and at what stage, her story would become inhabited. At present it was merely a scene and a few impressions. There was a little cottage, a basket of darning, a stove, pots and pans, pipes, toys, school-books, a pram. The woman who presided over it was, so far, not a person, but an abstraction. Her functions as well as her possessions were clear enough; her busy little days, her routine of chores, her flitting, disconnected little preoccupations. Her domestic annoyances were vivid—the butcher late, the gas-stove out of order, the leaking roof, the washing fallen in the muddy yard; and so were her small relaxations—the movies, the tea-party, the wireless serial. Her anxieties were the baby’s lack of appetite, the son’s disobedience, the daughter’s sullenness, the husband’s fits of moroseness, the mounting household bills. And yet, though the spotlight never moved from this little scene, and the courageous, ant-like activity of this little creature, the story itself was not there. Behind her, governing her every action, hampering her every effort, frustrating her every achievement, was the social organisation of her community. She was exhibited in all her pitiable helplessness, her mind, hemmed in by the four walls of her domestic environment, undergoing a slow atrophy, seeing bills only as her bills, illness only as the illness of her family, the moods of her husband, her children, herself, only as mysterious personal manifestations. Down to its most trivial detail this woman’s little life appeared as dominated by remote political forces in which, irritably and impatiently, she proclaimed herself not a bit interested.
But who was she? No doubt, Marty reflected resignedly, plunging down a flight of steps, and pushing her way towards a crowded grocery counter, she would materialise in time. Until she did there was, obviously, nothing to be done about it. Am I Nick, she asked herself, that I should deal in Type Number So-and-so, housewife, lower middle-class? But for all her determined confidence she could not avoid a stab of anxiety for her own brain—that curious, un-mechanical machine—clogged by her own domestic inertia, endlessly halted by the demands of her own stove and vacuum-cleaner. I’m getting too old, she thought, with sudden despondency, to cope with this splitting of my energies.
And then, waiting list in hand, she became aware of eyes upon her which looked hastily away as she turned. Something in the sallow face, the blue-green eyes under sandy lashes, the faded red hair of that middle-aged woman was familiar. She looked away, searching her memory; but it was not until she saw the shabby, meagre figure leave the counter, struggling with a suitcase, a string bag, and two small children, that recognition came. Abandoning her place in the queue, she dived in pursuit.
“Sally!” she cried, grabbing at an arm in a cheap tweed coat. “Aren’t you Sally Dodd?”
The smaller of the two children burst into loud screams. Sally said hurriedly:
“Yes—I thought I knew you, but I wasn’t sure. Be quiet, Joyce! Les, you give ’er back ’er tank this minute!” She looked at Marty again, and asked with awkward formality: “And ’ow ’ave you been keeping?”
“I’m very well,” Marty said hastily. “Can’t we—wouldn’t you and the children have a cup of tea with me, and we can talk? Look, there’s a cafeteria just through the archway . . . ?”
She thought as they found a table and set down their laden trays that the years had not changed Sally’s habit of fatalistic acceptance. Nor, she admitted wryly, her own habit of bossiness. They had reverted instantly to the old relationship; Marty proposed and disposed—Sally followed acquiescently. Not only the exhaustion of city shopping, not only the effort of buying groceries, stowing them in bags, finding money and accepting change, and trying at the same time to shepherd and control two restless children, gave Sally that battered and dishevelled appearance. Life, Marty thought, has been shoving her around ever since she was born; it’s still shoving her. There was that curious suggestion of waiting detachment in her eyes—the expression of poor women who look neither back nor forward, but husband their resources for what each passing moment may bring. A passing moment had brought Marty—so there Sally sat, accepting it, waiting passively for developments. Even observation of her children, even the movements she made to seat them properly, to place plates before them, to steady the brimming glass of milk-shake which Joyce was lifting rapturously to her lips, were automatic; her eyes remained absent. If it had been a bomb through the roof, Marty thought, instead of me, she would have accepted that just the same. Gone through the necessary motions, faced it as part of a life which had always been incomprehensible, and against which there had never been any defence but a patiently and stubbornly continued existence. She asked, pouring tea:
“Where are you living now, Sally?”
“Leichhardt.”
Sally had never wasted words, and she did not waste them now. One hand went out to steady the glass again, and the other, machine-like, intercepted a plump, predatory hand hovering above the plate of cakes. “You can’t ’ave that one, love; you know the cream makes you bilious.”
Les disputed the statement with vigour; Joyce pounced on her opportunity.
“C’n I ’ave it, then? It don’t make me bilious.”
Sally said sharply:
“You can’t neither of you ’ave it. Here’s two with jam in them. There. Now eat ‘em up nicely, or you won’t get no more.”
She sat back and sighed wearily. Marty asked:
“Have you any others besides these?”
Sally’s eyes lost none of their detachment. She said briefly: “Four more. These are the youngest.” She looked at Marty and asked, in a tone which made the question a mere civility. “You got any?”
“I had one boy,” Marty answered. “He died.”
She found herself looking anxiously for some sign of softening or sympathy in Sally’s eyes, and found none. It was not for herself that she desired to see it, but as a reassurance that the effort of living had not left her old friend quite emotionally numbed. Sally, putting her cup down, said matter-of-factly: “I lost two when they was little.” She made a small sound like a laugh, but without mirth. “Six is enough to provide for.”
Marty said: “Yes, indeed.” And added: “Are the others old enough to have jobs yet?”
“The eldest—’e’s nineteen—went to Malaya. We ’aven’t ’eard from ’im in months. Janet’s eighteen. She ‘as a good job in a factory. Billy’s fourteen next month, so ’e’ll be leavin-school soon, but Ken’s only eleven.” She drank some more tea, and added in an absent-minded way: “Kids are an ’andful, all right.”
“And your husband?”
“ ’E’s up North—workin’ on some aerodrome.”
“Janet . . . ?” Marty asked. “Did you—name her after Janet Laughlin?”
Now there really was a flicker of something in Sally’s pale eyes.
“I seen about ’er death in the paper not long before my baby was born. So I called ’er Janet for a sort of remembrance. Mr. Laughlin was real good to us.”
Marty felt her old hatred of her father stir. She said slowly:
“Yes, I expect he would have been. You had a hard time in those days, Sally. I’ve often thought of it since.”
“We got along,” Sally said unemotionally. She looked at Marty again after a moment’s pause, adding, as a bald statement: “And now it’s the war.”
“Yes,” Marty plunged. “What do you think of the war, Sally?”
“I s’pose we got to get it over with.”
“And then . . . ?”
“Well,” Sally said heavily, “let’s ‘ope we ’ave more sense than we did last time.”
“Do you think we will?”
Sally was silent for a moment, stirring her tea. There was the faintest note of defiance in her voice when she said at last:
“My eldest boy and girl’s both Reds. They reckon they understand what this New Order ought to be like. I don’t know. I never ’ad no time to study these things. But I reckon it couldn’t be no worse than what we’ve ’ad.”
“It might. What does your husband think?”
“ ’E used to get wild with Ted and Janet. But ’e’s comin’ round to thinkin-they might be right now. Janet’s a bright sort of girl.” She drank her tea and twisted the cup automatically to study the tealeaves. “Sometimes seems,” she said remotely, “as if namin’ ’er Janet made ’er a bit like the other Janet. Sort of serious, wasn’t she? Old for ’er age. My Janet’s like that too. Says she isn’t goin’ to bring up no family like I’ve ’ad to.”
“I wanna sambwidge,” said Joyce.
Sally gave her one; she waved it away.
“Wanna bermata one.”
Les swallowed hastily.
“I wanna bermata one too.”
Sally cut the tomato one in two, and gave them each half. She asked Marty:
“ ’Ow’s Gil . . . your brother?”
Marty winced. She had, more consciously, the same idea which had manifested itself to Gilbert as a vague emotion when he was fifteen. There was a child-world, and if you were a child you belonged in it. But the adult world was split into sections, and from her section Sally found herself instinctively baulking at the Christian name she had used so naturally long ago.
“He’s well,” she replied wearily. “He married Phyllis, you know. They have three children.”
“Writes books, don’t ’e?” Sally remarked.
“Yes.”
“Seen write-ups about them in the papers. I don’t get no time to read. You write things too, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Always did. I remember you and Janet—always writin’ things. Where’s your other brother—the little one?”
“Nick? He’s in the army—somewhere up North.” She added: “He’s a Red, too.”
Sally looked at her with an innocent, transparent curiosity. As clearly as if she had said it, her expression asked: “What’s he want to be a Red for?” Marty recognised, unhappily, the origin of yet another cleavage in the adult world—the mistrust of the “worker,” who knew by experience, for the “intellectual,” who knew by observation, by mental effort, by imagination. If your life were a struggle for the bare necessities, she admitted, could you help doubting the good faith of people like herself, and Nick, and Gilbert . . . ?
Sally was wiping the children’s mouths and fingers with her handkerchief. They sat still now, happily replete, staring at Marty with round, observant eyes. Looking about her, she noticed the placards hung over the various counters in the huge basement, and felt her mind check in momentary astonished blankness, followed by a sharp, childish delight. “CUTLERY” said one placard. “WOOL” said another. “NECKWEAR” said a third. And a fourth said “VISIONS.” Alas, only for a second. From where she sat a thick pillar hid the “PRO” which made melancholy sense of it. She felt an insane desire to point it out to Sally—to ask her what vision she would care to buy. A vision of the New Order? Of her eldest son, wherever he might be? Of some cottage, garden, farm, to which her longing turned in rare, unguarded moments? Of an electric stove, a lounge suite, the brotherhood of man? But Sally was preparing for departure, adjusting Joyce’s hat, brushing crumbs from Lestrousers, pulling on her own worn cotton gloves. Marty followed the little party to the doorway with a curious sense of failure and frustration.
“It’s been real nice seein’ you again,” Sally said with formal politeness. “Good-bye.”
“I’ll have to get a stronger bulb for that light,” Elsa thought, “and a new typewriter ribbon.” From the page before her, covered with Gilbert’s thick, sloped writing, she peered at her typescript, bending forward. “It’s ‘inevitably,’ and I’ve got ‘in-variably.’ Damn!” She dropped her hands on the table, looked across the room at him, and said:
“Gilbert?”
“Yes?”
“Will they publish this?”
He laid his book face downward on his knee, and took his pipe out of his mouth.
“I don’t know.”
She asked dryly:
“What are your chances?”
“As good as the lottery.”
“And you think it’s worth the bother?”
His brows contracted slightly.
“It isn’t a bother.” He looked at her sharply. “To me, I mean. Leave it, Elsa—I should have remembered that you’re typing all day. I can do it myself to-morrow.”
She said impatiently:
“I didn’t mean that. Goodness, it’s only a letter—five minutes-work. I was just wondering if it accomplished anything.”
She thought with exasperation: “If only he’d answer quickly! Those long pauses while what you’ve said sinks in, and what he’s going to say comes out! And when it comes out it’s always so damned fair, and careful, and considered, and reasonable! Well, here it comes!”
“I suppose it’s a drop in an ocean of protest.”
“If it’s published.”
“If it’s published,” he agreed, and then added slowly, “and even if it isn’t published.”
“What’s the good of a protest that nobody sees?”
He struck a match and re-lit his pipe; she saw the reflections of its tiny flame dance in his glasses.
“It’s made,” he said.
“You mean it’s good for yourself?”
“It’d be bad for myself if I didn’t make it.”
She lit a cigarette and went on typing. A sudden thought struck her, and she burst out laughing.
“Wasn’t your mother a missionary, Gilbert?”
“Yes. Why?”
She sat back in her chair and studied him with faintly malicious amusement.
“There’s something in heredity, isn’t there?”
“You see signs of the missionary spirit in me?”
“And how! Your brother and sister, too. You’re all missionaries.”
He asked rather wearily:
“What’s the alternative?”
She suggested lightly:
“Leave things alone . . . ?”
He looked at her. She fidgeted, puffed at her cigarette, and acknowledged irritably:
“Oh, yes, yes, I know all about laissez faire! You’re right, of course—you’re always right, darn you! So what? So we must all turn into missionaries, one way or another. We take in each other’s salvation instead of each other’s washing.”
“Don’t blame me,” he said shortly. “I didn’t originate the idea. Are we our brothers-keepers, or aren’c we? Are we members one of another, or aren’t we? It’s a choice people have had to make ever since they had brains to think with.”
She shrugged.
“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”
“An unspeakable life,” he retorted with some heat, “if you do weaken.” He was looking at her, but the light shone on his spectacles so that she couldn’t see his eyes. She knew only from his voice that she had antagonised him. “And we aren’t all mis-sionaries,” he said, “not by a long shot. Lots of us are apathetic—just plain dumb, and some of us are . . . fence-sitters . . .”
Her dark eyes snapped, and her mouth tightened.
“Meaning me, Gilbert?”
The words were out, a challenge, before she could stop them. They stared at each other for a startled, silent moment. This was the first time that hidden hostility, of which they had both been conscious from the beginning, had thrust itself into the open. He took his glasses off, laid them on his book, and put the book on the mantelpiece as he rose. He came over to the table and stood opposite her with his pipe in his hand, and that familiar frown of concentration on his forehead.
“I don’t know what you are,” he said, looking hard at her. “Surely I should, by now? I know my wife’s mind, I know my brother’s, and Marty’s, and Prue’s. I know the minds of all my friends, and most of my acquaintances—but I don’t know yours.”
She was looking down at her left hand, resting on the edge of the table; it was shaking so that the thin coil of smoke from her cigarette broke into tiny whirls and circles. She had wanted reality, hadn’t she? She had attached herself to this man so that she could go with him into the reality he so obviously knew, and discover herself there. But it was no good; even to him she was a ghost. She said incoherently:
“I suppose you can’t have reality—in sections . . .”
“What?”
She looked up at him in a sort of terror. He pulled up a chair and sat down, resting his folded arms on the table. She went on with nervous rapidity:
“I wanted—companionship, Gilbert. That’s all. I wanted another human being to be with me—can’t you understand that?”
“Of course. Well?”
“Just that. Not anything else.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I won’t be dragged into things.”
“You mean you want a relationship that’s purely personal?”
“I suppose so . . .”
“There isn’t any such thing, Elsa.”
She said confusedly:
“Perhaps there isn’t. That’s what I meant when I said you can’t have reality in sections.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Afraid . . . ?”
“Yes!” he said with sudden rough emphasis. “Afraid!” And while she groped for an answer he remembered her denial of fear during their first night together, and his own acknowledgment of it. He knew the answer and spoke it for her.
“You’re not afraid of outside things—only of yourself—somehow. Aren’t you?”
She muttered sulkily:
“I suppose so. I don’t know. Yes, I think I am . . .”
“Why?”
Suddenly she found words.
“Why? You said you didn’t know me. How could you? I don’t know myself. There isn’t any me—isn’t that something to be afraid of?”
He looked at her in bewilderment.
“It would be if it were true. What do you mean? What do you want—care about?”
She asked with painful eagerness:
“What should I want or care about? What do you want or care about? You’re real enough!”
“If I am,” he said, “you should know what I care about by now.”
“People,” she said slowly, as if remembering and repeating a lesson. “People—and writing. Isn’t that it?”
“Yes, that’s it. Don’t you care about those too?”
Something was hypnotising her into an alarming honesty. She shook her head.
“No.”
“Not at all?”
“Not a bit. Not really.”
“Not even writing?” He was almost pleading with her.
“No. Not your way, Gilbert. Only as—something for myself. I don’t want to be a writer—I just want to write things . . .”
For the first time he smiled.
“It’s a subtle distinction, but I see what you mean. And people?”
She avoided his eyes; her own, losing their dazed honesty, were becoming wary and secretive again.
“I . . . like people . . . all right.”
He had nothing to say to that, and his silence angered her into words that resisted him. “People, I said! Not ‘the people’! Not your blasted proletariat, and your everlasting toiling masses! I want a personal life, Gilbert. I’ve never had one—I don’t seem to be a real person at all . . .”
“How can you be,” he asked impatiently, “if you persist in shutting the world out? You make a ghost of yourself.”
That word on his lips, actually spoken aloud, which had been so often in her own thoughts, gave her an almost superstitious chill. She said angrily, but so low that he could not hear:
“My mother made a ghost of me.”
“What did you say?”
“It was my mother!” she said loudly and fiercely. “She never let me forget her first marriage, and her first home. She never let me forget Janet. She adored Scott Laughlin, and all my life I heard about him, and about Janet, about that house you took me to see, about her life there, even about you and your family. My own life wasn’t ever real to me—it always played second fiddle to the life mother told me about. I heard so much about Janet, Janet, Janet, that when I was little I played at being Janet. So that my mother would love me as much as she loved Janet. Can’t you see, Gilbert, I’ve got to escape from that—I’ve got to have a life that’s mine, and people who are mine . . .”
She was crying. He began to understand it all now, and he looked at her with the horrified pity he would have felt for a human being incurably maimed or deformed. He pushed his chair back hurriedly and went round the table to her. She flung her arms round his waist and held him desperately, and while his hands stroked her hair his mind was hunting for words of comfort. You have me. But had she? You are a writer. But was she? Failing comfort, there was warning. Don’t try to escape, Elsa; there’s no escape. . . . That was only telling her what she was so bitterly discovering—only turning the knife in her wound. He said nothing. What was there to say?
Yes, Marty was right, he supposed, when she said that he was “soft.” Ruthlessness was not in his nature. He fell back on his compassion for Elsa and the bond of their physical intimacy. For the next month or so he made a deliberate effort to provide her with the “purely personal” relationship which he knew to be an illusion. He stopped discussing the news with her, he gave up the interchange of books and pamphlets, he took her to movies instead of meetings; and all the time he knew that she was too intelligent not to feel the growing artificiality of their companionship. He admitted to himself that his “missionary spirit” found obstinate cause for hope in this. She would learn from experience, perhaps, what he had told her—that no human relationship can exist in a vacuum. She would find that every road which promised escape, no matter how alluringly it might seem at first to lead away from all she wanted to avoid, sooner or later took a sly turn, and led her back to confront her world. She would feel the impossible, tedious emptiness of conversations which may go just so far, and then must stop, cut short, left in the air, because danger lay ahead. She would acknowledge at last the grim simplicity of the issue: not “Will you go?” but “Will you choose your path or be pushed?”
Her attitude to himself during this time was one of casual affection, flaring out sometimes into a defiant hostility. He knew that she was going out more and more with Jimmy Baxter, and wondered sometimes if she were trying to make him jealous. He felt sorry for her when this thought crossed his mind, for absence from her now was a relief—an opportunity to return to himself and his own thoughts. He found them less oppressive than they had been before; they were still hard, but at least they had substance, and thinking them released him from his self-imposed task of becoming a ghost to console her ghostliness. They lifted and lightened to the news of the Japanese retreat over the Owen Stanley Range, of greater air strength in Egypt. They checked in painful suspension, awaiting the outcome of the naval battle in the Solomons. Some part of them was always alert, an unsleeping eye, a listening ear, conscious of Stalingrad.
He was able to take the bufferings of thought more calmly now, and was aware of indebtedness to Elsa. He had not fully realised the strain of a life grown almost celibate until he escaped from it with her; and his worried knowledge that he had given her less than she had given him was not altogether quieted by the knowledge that she had no use for what he could offer. She was right about him, he admitted. No missionary had ever more ardently desired to wrestle with the devil for a soul’s salvation, but during this month he began to appreciate the stress of such spiritual wrestlings. It was a month of torrential rains and wild weather. Prue succumbed to influenza, and retired for a week to the mountains, and Gilbert, thus released from the necessity for sleeping at his own flat, spent most of the nights with Elsa. She met his patience with flippancy, his sometimes clumsy sympathy with ridicule, his conversation with indifference, and his passion with passion. He went to and fro between the office and her flat, and the boisterous weather was only an extension of his own struggle with her. The harbour woke from its placidity in a fury of white-capped waves, breakers dashed high over cliffs and quiet beaches, the Manly ferry Stopped running, small craft were damaged at their moorings, and with the further easing of water restrictions came warnings against floods. Fresh from Elsa’s unrestful presence, he plunged out into the rain- and wind-swept streets with a feeling that he had left the worst of the storm indoors.
The night before Prue was to return he tried what he felt must be the last line of attack.
“Have you begun on your book yet?”
“I thought you said I wasn’t ready for it.”
“I may have been wrong. Why don’t you try?”
“You wouldn’t like my way of doing it.”
“Does that matter?”
She shrugged.
“Not a bit, I suppose. Why do you want me to do it, anyhow?”
He spent longer than usual thinking out the best reply to that, and she forestalled him with her bitter comprehension.
“I know, of course. You want me to come up against the ‘realities’ of the story, and find myself unable to cope with them. You want me to make a mirror for myself to look into. Supposing I don’t choose to treat it that way?”
“Supposing you don’t? How would you treat it?”
“I might make fun of it.”
Suddenly he laughed outright. She had said that, he knew, with a vicious perversity intended to hurt him, but after the first second of shock he had seen how safe Scott Laughlin would be from any such portrayal. He said:
“You could do that, of course, but it would be nothing but a little invented tale. You can ignore truth if you want to—but if you do you have nothing left but falseness. Obviously.”
The look she gave him was almost one of hatred.