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“Are you there? Rope coming down!”

It fell beside them. They stood apart, staring down at it stupidly. Then Susan, wordless, went away and vanished into darkness behind the headlights of the
car, and Bret, breathless and bewildered, stooped slowly for the rope.

When they got home, Margery had coffee and sandwiches made for them. Susan shook her head and went off silently to their room. Bret, half stupid with weariness but very hungry, ate a few sandwiches and drank a cup of coffee. When they spoke it was in low voices so as not to disturb the sleepers, who were not asleep; it all seemed to Bret, through a haze of fatigue that dimmed his perceptions as a fog dims the vision, more like a scene from a rather bad play than a slice from normal life.

When at last he went out to his stretcher on the veranda it was nearly two o'clock. They'd had trouble coming home – lost the track twice and got bogged in the soft mud on the creek bank. He stood up for a moment winding his watch mechanically, fairly swaying on his feet with weariness and looking at the faint blur of Susan's head through her mosquito nets. His last conscious thought when he was at last in bed was that there was something concerning her which he must remember to think about in the morning.

S
UNLIGHT
across his closed eyes woke
Bret next morning to a magpie chorus so intoxicatingly lovely that without opening them he lay while it lasted, listening. The sun on his face was warm, his body relaxed and rested. Plunged from unconsciousness straight into this ecstasy of sound, he did contrive to keep, for a few blissful minutes, that delicious blankness of the mind which, upon waking, is usually so ruthlessly destroyed. He felt too, an awareness of some new well-being, a realisation of beatitude, waiting patiently just beyond the closed door of his consciousness until he should be pleased to admit and enjoy it.

The sun on his face made a red dazzle behind his lids; he lifted a hand and laid it palm outward across his eyes. But the movement, and its accompanying pain, woke his idle brain to coherent thought, and sharply disturbing memory.

Yes, disturbing certainly, but a new and less painful disturbance— His thoughts had sped, by way of the stiff aching of his cut wrist, straight back to Susan with his blood on her cheek, Susan the next moment in his arms—

And the sensations which went with that memory were, he discovered, unaccompanied by the instant alarums and excursions, the warring and jarring, all the mental turmoil, stress and confusion to which he
had become, in this last year, unwillingly accustomed. So accustomed, he marvelled that the very relief which their absence roused in him was a shock which in itself amounted almost to suffering. The kind of shock, the agonising relaxation which one might feel beneath the gallows at an eleventh-hour reprieve!

Warily, like one who having once pulled the tiger's whiskers with impunity makes ready for a second attempt, he let his thoughts slide back to that strange overwhelming moment. He found nothing there but a medley of pleasantly poignant sensations, small things like the roughness of her woollen jumper on his arms, the sudden flutter of her lashes against his cheek. Things, he thought, that he'd felt often enough – too often – before, but always with the background of his own inhibitions to spoil them. Things that he'd felt, not with last night's grateful simplicity, but with some inner whisper not to be subdued, which had made of them temptations and beguilements, woven about them and about him in his moments of nauseated capitulation, a veil of illusive and resentful shame—

That, he thought soberly, opening his eyes and blinking them in the dazzling sunlight, was a silly word to use, to think of, in any relation to Susan. And he stirred, turned over on his side, peered across the veranda through his mosquito nets at the other white shrouded bed in the shade of the wall.

She must be still asleep. He looked at his watch, and sat up suddenly. Half-past nine! Good Lord, they were to have been on the way by eight! He got out of bed and went over to wake her, but nothing was visible except a heap of curls which in the shadow looked, he thought, the colour of dead pine needles. Disarming curls;
disarmingly small, the huddled lump under the bedclothes; he turned away and went inside to have his shower.

He thought, shivering under the cold well water, that quaint as it appeared, he'd only seen her asleep half a dozen times in his life! And all those times had been on their quite fantastic honeymoon! And at the thought of that honeymoon he caught himself smiling a little, because it had really been rather funny in its way – a fun they had both, thank heaven, been able to appreciate!

He discovered that his hair was full of grains of sand and grit that had fallen into it last night on Jungaburra, so he put his head, too, under the shower and soaped it vigorously, thinking with one corner of his mind that the frothy and feathery touch of soapsuds down one's back was strangely pleasant, and with another of his wedding day.

He'd sat on the railing of the hotel balcony, watching the sea and the faint pathway across it of the rising moon. Everything, he supposed, had contributed to the strange alertness which, even now, he could remember as having been his predominant sensation. If he'd been a dog, he reflected, he'd have had his nose in the air, sniffing, his ears pricked! Keyed up, mentally, physically and emotionally to an unfamiliar atmosphere. Salty air from the sea instead of the indefinable country scents to which his nostrils were accustomed; a deep incessant thunder of surf instead of silence; and there behind him in a room whose light made a bar of yellow across the balcony, that disturbing, red-headed stranger who had so suddenly become his wife—

He'd admitted to himself that it was she, actually,
who had saved the whole preposterous day from being the nightmare it might have been. Standing alone that morning at a street corner waiting for her, he had had an interval of sheer ignominous panic. What he was doing had still seemed the only possible thing to do; not the action itself, but its details suddenly alarmed him, and it was in a state as far removed as was possible from his usual self-possession that he had seen her at last walking towards him with her father and mother. Well, she'd been cool enough, anyhow! Cool, calm, friendly, business-like! The ceremony in the registrar's office might have been the signing of a lease! He'd taken, thankfully, his cue from her; Millicent had been, with a dignity which not even this bizarre and painful situation could shake, indomitably herself, but Drew had been sweating at every pore! His trouble had been, of course, that the Book of the Rules by which, unconsciously, he formed his behaviour, was in this case disconcertingly useless. He couldn't greet with a jovial word and a slap on the back this son-in-law so obviously malgre-lui; he couldn't beam paternally; couldn't wish them happiness—

He couldn't even, Bret realised, his faint grin fading, expect it for them. And on that thought he'd turned his head towards the lighted window, his forehead creasing, his mouth tightening with a perplexed anxiety, a mental bracing of himself to a difficult job. He'd told himself for the fiftieth time that whatever you thought of her you couldn't deny her pluck. It hadn't at that time struck him as being ominous that he should find it necessary so often to dam back the tides of his resentment, his dislike, with this one frail barrier of approval.

Not that there weren't other things to be said for
her. That day, their wedding-day, had shown him quite a lot of them. There was something, he had reflected, beginning to stroll up and down the balcony, essentially sporting in her whole attitude to life, to himself— A game with, according to your skill, prizes or penalties. He, himself, he had supposed ruefully, was her penalty, and he couldn't but admit that she'd accepted him gamely enough. Of that strange confession – or assertion – of hers the other day among the spinach and the cabbages, he had tried to think as little as possible. It couldn't be true, of course; she was very young, very distraught at the time – hysterical probably. Didn't girls get queer spasms of affection for people—? “Crushes” or “pashes” or something—

And there hadn't been, since that moment, any suggestion in her manner that she regarded him as other than an accident in her life, as she was in his, to be accepted as philosophically as possible!

He'd said abruptly as they drove:

“I've engaged connecting rooms and a bathroom. I shan't bother you.”

The corner of his eye had caught a fiery glinting streak as her head came sharply round to him. In the momentary glimpse he'd had of her face before he fixed his attention on the road again, he'd seen her cheeks flaming, her eyes bright with a kind of angry pride. She'd replied instantly:

“There was no need for that.”

He'd shrugged, and after a mile or so she'd said rather wearily, “Thank you,” and gone on to pleasant and trivial remarks about the road, the car, the scenery—

So now, he'd thought, pausing in his stroll and
leaning his elbows on the balcony rail, it was up to him. He glanced over his shoulder at the lighted room where she was unpacking. He had cleared out and left her to it simply because he could think of nothing to say to her. Emotions, he admitted grudgingly, were funny things. The last few days, wrenched out of perspective by the shock of his brother's death, seemed now to be like a separate, distorted life between one orderly existence and another at whose beginning he stood perplexed. Emotions which had seemed in that fevered interlude to loom overwhelmingly with the unchallenged permanence of Mont Blanc, now seemed, to his uneasily roving mind, less inevitable, less fundamentally changeless. It wasn't any good denying to himself, for instance, that in there, after dinner, he'd felt—

Well, what it amounted to was that a mock-marriage, even in such circumstances as these, wasn't going to be easy all the time. That didn't mean, he told himself angrily, that it was impossible. When the child was born, he realised (without feeling in the very least called upon to analyse his conviction) things would be different. That was the way he happened to be made. Until then—

Suddenly, as if accepting a challenge, he had walked along to the lighted door and knocked. A very composed voice told him instantly to come in.

Here again, a year later, with his head under the shower, Bret found himself smiling. He found, too, in his memory a picture so bright, so detailed and clearly defined, that he wondered fleetingly that some unconscious self should have stored and guarded it so jealously.

She was in bed, reading. He had wondered, amused
and rather touched, if she had been trying to make herself unalluring. She had scrubbed her face, and her nose had a shiny high-light down the middle of it. Her hair, damp round the forehead, combed back relentlessly, looked darker, less like a war-cry than usual. She was wearing a very plain white dressing-jacket that covered her from throat to wrists.

He remembered now the sound of his own sudden laughter. He had felt genuinely what he had been acting all day – friendly and light-hearted and matter-of-fact. And amused. Amused by an only-just-realised mental picture he must have built up somehow of a lovely unscrupulous Susan, subtly sophisticated, delicately rouged and powdered, dangerously versed in all the arts of seduction; a very different Susan from the one who was looking up at him over the top of her book with a smile whose valiance did not quite hide its hesitation, its hint of appeal—

He sat down on the edge of her bed.

“What's the book?”

She showed him.

“It's rather good. Do you like his books?”

“Yes, as a rule.”

He had looked at her curiously. It had struck him for the first time that there might be qualities of companionship in this rather unpromising marriage. He said:

“I wonder if our literary tastes are alike.” But she only answered non-commitally, “I wonder.”

“There are,” he stated, looking at her, “quite a lot of things we have to find out about each other.”

“Yes.”

He saw that her hands were shaking, and he went on quickly:

“I've found out
one about you already.”

She said, “Have you? What is it?” looking slightly nervous and avoiding his eyes.

“You have a shiny nose.”

She laughed, her head back, her teeth gleaming in her red, half-opened mouth; he added:

“And that schoolgirl complexion.”

She stopped laughing and a faint wave of colour ran up in her cheeks. He said on an impulse:

“I hope – I haven't persuaded you into something that's going to make you miserable.”

She said quickly, brightly:

“Oh, no! I'm sure it – it will be all right—”

She had taken the book from him and begun to turn its pages. He saw, compassionately, that she was perilously close to tears and stood up with a yawn which, artificially begun, ended in a spasm of intense and genuine weariness. He said.

“Good-night. Can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you. Good-night.”

So he'd given her back a little pat, her nose a little tweak, and gone outside for a pipe before turning in. …

Margery knocked on the door.

“Bret?”

“Hallo?”

“Grilled steak or bacon and eggs?”

“Both.”

“Hog. How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

Fine! He began to be aware, as if
his body had been awaiting verbal confirmation before asserting itself, that he really did feel very fine indeed! He was in a most tremendous glow, a glow only partly accounted for, he felt, by the sting of cold water. That climb last night. A good feeling! Rightly or wrongly, one got a kick out of flirting, now and then, with danger! He felt now a kind of delayed mental exhilaration – what he should have felt last night if his body had not been so rebelliously exhausted! And not only that either. He felt …