NASTY things. And that Sir Michael Flanagan married a convict's wife when she had had her husband flogged till he died. And that Jennis Bowen's father died through drinking too much. And that old Mr Curry was nearly hanged although his grandson went to Oxford. And that Sir Alexander Todhunter's grandfather eats with his fingers. And yet you all pretend that we're nice and that everything is and always was nice and that nothing but nice things have ever happened. It's not true. It's a lie.” Mrs Peppiott quavered before the storm, but she compressed her lips to hide punishment, and when Harriet had finished returned, indefatigably smiling, to the fray. “There, there, my precious. You excite yourself. Just let me get my smelling salts. . .”
Harriet sulked. Then she felt remorseful and tried to answer Mrs Peppiott's undaunted niceness with a pumped-up niceness of her own. But in her heart she hated Mrs Peppiott and her lying niceness. Obscurely she felt that it was a lie against a part of herself, her most passionate, most precious, most living self. It was a lie which had eaten into the hearts of Mrs Peppiott and her kind and sucked the blood out, so that they were animated now only by its lying formulas. She had seen the process at work in James. There had been a fine fire of recklessness and honesty in James and then it was gone. The dead, lying formulas she heard so often on the lips of Mrs Peppiott and her friends, which struck her forcibly because although Miss Montaulk used many of them they had seemed unreal in the isolated life of the valley, crept more and more frequently into James's letters. “One must avoid scandal,” “One must not make a show of oneself,” “One must remember one's duty to one's family—parents—society,” and much more of the same sort, so unlike the James who was going to marry Jennis despite his father and make his own way in life, that Harriet began to fear for herself, for the blind, reckless, passionate desire to live, through which alone, she felt, she would have the strength to escape from her father's stubborn will. What, she asked herself, had happened to James? And studying the people who came to the house, contrasting old Mr Purvis and Sir Alexander Todhunter, Peppiott and what Cabell had told her about his father, she decided that it was a fear and a consuming shame of the past which made them hide behind this lie about niceness, the same fear she had seen in James and felt in herself. A horrible, lurking fear of the past was in them, not only of the brand of convictism but of the spirit of convictism and the wild recklessness of the old hands from which many savage deeds had come. They were afraid of that crude, reckless spirit their fathers had handed on to them and they tried to kill it in themselves and others. And when they couldn't kill it they pretended that it was not there, as when they pretended that she was a little mad, and that Cabell was really a nice man, and that nothing had really happened in the past which was not nice, and that all convicts had been sent out for stealing a loaf of bread. And having killed it or pretended that there had never been a savage reckless spirit in the country, and that everything had always been as nice as it was in England, and they themselves as nice as they would have been if their fathers had stayed in England instead of coming to fight for a hold on a new land, they got paunchy and withered, like Peppiott, and a smug mask covered their faces. But what was behind the mask when you had killed this crude, reckless part of yourself that must be there, because your father and mother could not have come here and conquered the country without being or becoming crude and ruthless and strong? Why, nothing except the lie that they had been nice people and so you were the inheritors of niceness—that and a consuming fear and shame. When she lost her temper she had seen a beseeching look in Mrs Peppiott's eyes, as though she was crying out, “No, don't say it. Please don't say it.” She had noticed the same look many times in their eyes when an old landtaker was in the room and insisted upon telling his dark, crude stories of the past. Comparing the landtakers with their children, Harriet could not help thinking that the wild, cruel, ruthless, reckless spirit of the old men was much finer than anything with which their sons had replaced it. Anyway, they had lived, and Harriet felt that if you made Mrs Peppiott's niceness your ideal you didn't live, couldn't live. You must turn against yourself. She was frightened of her father and she hated him, but he was really finer than James whatever he had done, because rather than kotow to HIS father he had gone out into the bush and carved a place for himself, whereas James was too weak or afraid. He would take his father's nasty money while coming to terms with the nice people who hated and despised Cabell. In her youthful ardour Harriet could not understand why the world should not be absolutely frank and honest and unashamed.
So after the dinner at Peppiott's she decided that she had had enough of nice people. She avoided the men who came to see her father, and was disgusted with herself for ever having felt that she could like such fat, dull dolts. To the ladies she was so rude that they soon stopped calling, except the more determined ones who had an axe to grind, like Mrs Peppiott. Her wide mouth went a little grey at the corners and took on a permanent pout. She slept badly, and dreamt badly, and day and night felt a dull ache in her breast. It was the pain of her pent-up energy, love, and desire, which were like a vine hungrily groping in a void for something to take hold on. Her body, thinner than ever, began to look like a vine, and in her hands, white and thin and restless, was the twisted agony of vine tendrils, and in her eyes a lurking succubus look which frightened the men on whom it rested.
It frightened Doug Peppiott the first time he was left alone with her—one day when he drove his father to the house and stayed in the drawing-room with Harriet while Peppiott and Cabell went to confer.
He sat opposite her on the sofa, looking down at his crossed legs, which bulged muscularly in their tight trousers, with an expression of sulky discontent on his face. His big eyelids hid his eyes, drawing between them a curtain through which she tried to peer. He could feel her eyes probing him, and under his disgust of her thin body and wide mouth and pale gaunt face, and his anger at having his life upset by his parents' determination that he should marry her, he felt little stabs of fear. He sensed the hungry succubus in her and his manhood, which was not very manly but rather spoiled and softened by maternal pampering, was scared. Little shivers ran up and down his flesh as though he could feel the tendrils of her spirit groping over him for a place to fasten on. Summoning all the resources of his supercilious, masculine silence he tried to cover himself from her witchlike, probing eyes.
“You went to school with Jimmy, didn't you?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“He often talks about you.”
Again a long silence, while he stared at his knees and burned with resentment. He thought how her father's money had interfered with his dreams of a good time in England, corrupting even his indulgent mother, and he turned his resentment against her. He would not be polite and talk, damn her. His indifference, his downcast eyes and silence fascinated Harriet. She mistook them for strength and deep masculine mystery.
“Do you work with your father?” she asked.
“No.”
“You live in Brisbane?”
“Of course.”
“Oh!” She was rebuffed. Her quick temper came up. “Why don't you talk? Have you got a toothache?” she attacked, in her usual blunt way.
Such direct methods shook him. He glanced at her. “No.” And added morosely, “I don't want to talk, that's all.”
“What did you come for?”
“My father brought me?”
“By the hand?”
He glared at her, colouring.
“I hope you won't come again, anyway.”
He rose, very offended.
“Oh,” Harriet said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. Please don't go.” He remained standing stiffly, a little foolish.
Impulsively she took his hand and pulled him back on to the sofa. “Please forgive me, Mr Peppiott. I didn't know I could be so rude. Of course you must come again. Please promise.”
“No need to apologize,” he grumbled, freeing his hand from her hot fingers.
“But you must forg
ive me. REALLY forgive me.”
“There's nothing to forgive.”
“But you must say it. Do.”
“Very well. If you insist. I forgive you.”
“Thank you,” Harriet said humbly, “but I'll never forgive myself. Now let us talk about something else. Where are you going to work? Jimmy's going to the mine, you know. At least, Father wants him to. I suppose you'll learn law with your father.”
He hesitated, then with startling violence, looking at her accusingly, said, “I'm going to England.”
“How lovely.”
“Yes, I am, and nobody's going to stop me.”
She studied his face, with the clipped, red, military moustaches, which didn't seem quite to belong. The face, the soft chin, and soft, spoilt mouth didn't quite come up to their fierceness. But Harriet, mistaking a sulky swelling of the lips for resolution, thought it was the strongest face she had ever seen. “I think I understand. Your father doesn't want you to go.” “Yes,” he said. “But how did you know?”
“Oh, I think all old people must be alike. They want to rule. It's the same with my father and James.”
“Anyway,” he repeated, as if delivering her an ultimatum, “I'm going.” “That's right,” she said eagerly. “You go. You must go. Don't do what James is doing—keep putting it off until it may be too late.”
The study door opened. They looked at each other.
“Have you got the money to go?” she whispered.
“Money? No—but. . .”
“You'll have to go as a sailor then? How exciting!”
“A sailor? Me? Don't be silly.”
“Why not? You want to go to England, don't you? You haven't got the money.”
Her words summed up all the futility of his little rebellion. He had no money.
Peppiott and Cabell were coming down the hall.
Harriet pressed his hand. “But come again, won't you, and tell me all?” He felt gooseflesh pains spread over his hand. “Yes,” he said sourly, “I'll come again.”
Chapter Seven: Succubus
Peppiott and Cabell were very thick now and Peppiott dropped in three and four times every day. As Mrs Peppiott had spied out the land he always brought Doug in the afternoon when Miss Montaulk was upstairs taking her nap.
But Cabell was not blind. He had watched Harriet so closely for so long that he was aware at once of a great change in her. She had become curiously still, concentrated, like a cat at the first faint nibble of a mouse in the moulding. The look of discontent had gone from her face which seemed to alter its very form, so that one became aware of features one had not noticed before—the deep cavities of her eyes, the ripe sensuousness of her mouth. Her body was less angular, more supple, but clenched, sprung. All her restless energy had disappeared. She lounged in the drawing-room, unmoving for hours, like a cat waiting with awful, confident patience. So, though she no longer spent the day rushing from piano to bookcase, to garden, and back to the piano, irritable with unconsumed energy, she seemed more fiercely energized than before. Her eyes were brittle and pointed with light, as if all her strength were concentrated there in a hypnotic willing. Of what? Cabell wondered. At first the change pleased him. She submitted when he caressed her, listened when he spoke. Then he realized that this was because she thought of something else all the time, and that when she looked at him she did not see him, saw nothing. He had noticed Doug Peppiott's visits, which he had to put up with because he could not get along without Peppiott's help, but it never occurred to him that she might have fallen in love—with all the naïve ardour of her inexperience and a hungry desire to spend affection for which she had never had any object. At least, he refused to admit the possibility.
He needed much less to make him jealous: the mere idea that she was friendly with a stranger, another man, was enough for that. She hadn't got two words to say to her father, yet she seemed to chatter away for hours to that young whelp. What about? He tried to question her but her eyes filled with a secretive look he did not like at all and she answered evasively. So one afternoon, instead of leaving the study with Peppiott, he made an excuse to slip out alone and tiptoed down the passage. The house was silent, except for Miss Montaulk's snoring and the chitter of birds in the garden. But beyond this noise and this silence a deeper, vibrant silence flowed from the drawing-room, the nervous silence of an animal sprung in patient watching and waiting. The room might have been empty for all the sound that came from it, but he knew it was not empty, as a man, entering a dark room, sometimes knows that a cat is waiting and watching there, even before he sees its eyes, glowing with still, brittle fire in the blackness, blind to everything except their own invisible desire, eyes no longer but organs of a pitiless, mesmeric will which stagnates the air and holds walls and furniture in a trance of cruel, watchful waiting.
He paused in the doorway with one hand on the door-jamb, fixed by a strange scene. They were sitting on the sofa, Peppiott at one extreme end, Harriet at the other. Peppiott sat erect and stiff with his arms folded, gazing away from her through the open doors to the garden. He looked as though he had just been offended in a quarrel and was refusing to be coaxed out of his rage. A heavy frown creased his forehead and drew his thin, red brows together. Harriet was looking at him. She lay back in the cushions, her body paralysed, as though every atom of strength had gone from it, sucked into her eyes. Her face was pale and her hands, palm upwards in her lap, were white and boneless like the hands of a person in a faint. But in her eyes was the condensed fire of her being. Under their brows, black as jet against her bloodless face, they seemed to give forth palpable heat. Though Cabell was almost in the line of her vision she did not stir, absorbed in her concentrated gazing. There was nothing tender in her gaze. It was domineering and unmerciful. It astounded Cabell, revealing in his petulant child a woman of unsuspected power.
Fleetingly, her stillness, her deep-set eyes, and in those eyes an enigmatic expression of resolve, almost of cunning, reminded him of Emma.
“Here, what's wrong with you, girl?” he demanded.
Peppiott leapt as though a gun had gone off in his ear, but seeing Cabell a look of relief wiped the frown from his face and he smiled. “Oh, sir, you startled me.”
But Cabell was watching Harriet, who turned without a flicker of change in her expression. “Are you sick?” He went over and shook her.
“Of course not,” she said quietly. “Why?”
“Look as if you'd just seen a ghost.”
She shrugged impatiently. “I was only thinking.”
Cabell turned and looked at Doug. “Waiting for your father?” he snapped.
“Yes, sir. Yes.”
“He'll be busy for an hour. We'll drive him home. You needn't stay.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Thank you,” Doug said with puzzling alacrity, then positively darted from the room without a glance at Harriet. There was something absurdly mouselike in the way he scampered out.
Cabell went on to the veranda and watched him drive away. He looked potent, handsome, driving the two grey stallions, moving in the aura of their high-stepping pride.
He came back into the room. “There's something funny going on here. What is it?”
“Funny?” The glow had gone from her eyes, but they were still intent, with a secret thought concealed in their depths and the ruckle between her heavy eyebrows. Again, he saw the likeness to her mother, who also had guarded a ruinous secret behind her eyes.
“Miss Montaulk ought to be here when people come,” he grumbled. “It's not proper.”
She did not reply. She seemed to purr over her secret thought, halfasleep. She had never been more widely awake, more tensely alert in every groping tendril of her vinelike spirit. Indeed, she seemed only now to have awakened from a long coma in which she had dreamt of her father and his schemes. She had believed that she was somehow doomed to be his prisoner for ever, that nothing in the world was strong enough to defeat his obstinate will, but as she compared him with Doug
Peppiott she saw that he was not like an eagle at all really, that he was just a weak, cantankerous old man. For Peppiott was young and she was young—young and resolute and strong. Oh, she could do anything if only—if only Doug would love her and help her. And he WOULD love her! Yes, she would MAKE him love her.
So she watched him anxiously for a sign, but he gave none. Her anxious, shameless watching seared him. What kind of a girl was this? A decent, modest girl, a nice girl, wouldn't look at a man in that hungry way. What you heard about her must be true—that she knew a bit too much. So he kept as far off as he could, and in his remoteness she thought there was some hard, mysterious masculine strength when there was nothing but plain funk—funk of what people would say if he married a girl like that, and, deeper down, a worse funk of he knew not what, a funk of being swallowed up. It was fantastic. He didn't try to analyse it. But there it was. He wished, if his mother was determined to marry him, she would pick on somebody else—Lady Todhunter's sister, for example, a real lady, or Jennis Bowen. But this one—ugh! His neck bulging in its tight collar, his mouth cut in a full, fleshy, sensual bow, his eyes half-covered superciliously in their heavy lids, his brown, athletic hands—these fascinated her as the attributes of a mysterious, male power. Exigently, shamelessly, she pried into the mystery.
“What are you thinking of now?”
“I wasn't thinking of anything.”
“But you must be thinking of something.” And hastily, as he frowned, she added, “Oh, I'm sorry. I'm always bothering you.”
He was most uncomfortable when she humbled herself like that suddenly, a subtle snare to put him in the wrong and force him to reassure her. The cunning devil! He refused to answer. So they sat in silence again with the length of the sofa between them, and he determined, if he was to marry her, to give her nothing, not even a kind word. And all the time he could feel her eyes, active, witchlike, and the feeling was intolerable. He had to look around to see what she was doing, as though he expected to catch her making passes over him. But she was only watching him, waiting for a sign, and when she caught his glance she thought it was a sign of relenting and began again.
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