The restless, tropical night seemed full of wings to Leoline’s ears as she lay on her back with hands clasped under her fragrant hair, and her wide eyes looking up into the bridal fall of the mosquito net. In spite of being alone she had gained no hint of sleep, nor had she expected it. The heat was intense, even though the bungalow was some way above the town up on the hillside, and the heaviness of the rains still seemed to hang in the air. The complaining, vicious note of a mosquito haunted the safe curtains, through which he could not find an entrance; and, as if in contempt of him, Leoline had flung off the covering sheet, and where the soft frills fell back her white body tempted the angry insect with sweets out of reach. It would have been a pity to mark that perfect skin; but the mosquito thought of his own desire above all artistic considerations—just as that much higher creation called Man might do if, for instance, he wished to feel the pressure of his own hand on hers.
Mrs. Lewin was hardly thinking as the long hours wore to morning, and the flutter of moths’ wings gave way to that of humming-birds, who had built their nests below the stoep,—she was simply suffering. It seemed to her that her mind was one blind pain and a bewildering humiliation. For it was not the thing in itself that horrified her—a man’s hand laid over hers for some sixty seconds seemed a trivial thing enough—but what it meant. She who had unconsciously put herself on a pedestal, found that she had fallen, not by the unimportant act but by the revelation it had brought of her own emotions. She had not been cool under Gregory’s touch; if she had she would have brushed the incident aside as a thing of no consequence, tiresome but to be disregarded; her blood had answered his, and beat in her veins, and made her whole body thrill and sicken as no touch had ever done before. A knowledge that she could no longer deny to herself dismayed her, showing her this first touch as the prelude to more that she dared not contemplate. It was the thin end of the wedge, the passing of a boundary line to a path that might lead her—anywhere. She knew it, and in the warm, soft darkness she did not lie to herself as she might have done in the decent day. A married woman is somewhat defenceless against herself, for she is forced to acknowledge her own emotions, and has legitimised their classification. While she is unmarried—whether by law or slighter bonds—she can theorise, but she can always excuse herself by saying that she does not know the meaning of her sex. Nor in a certain degree does she. It is, however, her husband’s useful province to deprive her of such a defence, and to make her horribly conscious of the meaning of starting pulses and too generous blood.
Ally had once told Chum, with a chuckle, that she took to married life as a duck takes to water. And, in truth, she did not quarrel with nature any more than any other healthy, clear-minded wife whose womanhood is ripe. But there was a nicety about her that was content to look on passion as a thing incidental to married life, but not to be dwelt upon, and her bodily relations with Alaric had never seemed to her of so much importance as those of her mind. There was again a hint of superiority in this, for she saw other women holding out grosser inducements to charm than she professed, and made a somewhat fastidious use of her physical advantages by contrast.
For once, and quite suddenly, it seemed to her that this attitude had after all been false. If she wore her frocks with a daintier grace than other women, did it not suggest that what lay beneath was daintier too? She thought with disgust of Mrs. Clayton’s bodices being actually unlaced; but her own bodices had been quite as tempting to the audacity of men’s thoughts, and she had meant them to be so. It was only that she promised and did not perform, while other women enjoyed the fulfilment of their own allurements. No man could say a word of her as they might of Beatrix Denver; but how many had envied Ally to the extent of fancying themselves in his place for one wicked blissful moment? And she had regarded that as legitimate, and a rightful compliment to them both.
Oh, but what did it matter, compared to this new fire in her veins—this mad possibility of painful happiness that was surely not sane, for she could find no reason to excuse it. Every yearning instinct of her, brain, body, and soul, seemed drawn out, beyond her power to will to restrain it, to a man who was not her husband, and who had not even such attractions as might excuse a physical passion. She thought of Ally’s handsome face, and easy, comfortable personality, contrasted with Evelyn Gregory’s harsh features and difficult nature. There would be nothing comfortable in a life with Gregory, unless indeed a woman were so at one with him as for their two personalities to harmonise without a discordant note. He would be overbearing and exacting, but strong both for himself and her; there came the renewed leap of heart, as all the woman in her craved for a master. She was tired of her disillusion, and of being the one to guide and act both at once. Gregory had appealed to her through the feeling of reliance with which he had filled her. There had been the snare and the excuse, if an excuse were possible for a feeling which seemed to her outside the pale of argument.
“What does it matter,” she thought wearily, “since I am proved a fraud on all accounts. I am not what I thought I was—all my theories with regard to myself seem to have been mere vapours to vanish with the first ray of sun. But I can fight still—I can—I can.”
She set her little white teeth, and gripped the pain as though it were a tangible thing. And then, because she was just a good girl and no heroine, she threw aside the mosquito net and knelt down beside the bed to pray to a God whom she believed had sent an ugly tragedy into her life, not to take it away, but to help her to hide it after the fashion of women. She was ready to trust Him where she no longer trusted herself, and having certain sturdy principles born and bred in her, she had not even the advantage of excusing self-indulgence upon the plea of possessing the “artistic temperament,” which is a very convenient back door for immorality to the modern woman. It generally means lack of exercise and hysteria; but Leoline Lewin’s digestion being a good one, she had no claim to such an immunity from inconvenient virtue.
Towards morning she fell asleep, but not into the same sound oblivion as on the night when Ally lay in a drunken slumber next door. She could control her waking thoughts, but her dreams were cruel, and were haunted by such forbidden joy as made her glad when the broad sun struck through the venetian shutters and brought the sick, hot day.
The mail came in that morning, and all Port Victoria went down to the harbour to meet it. The town was cut off from all save chance communication with the outer world for a whole month, and so the arrival of news was a greater event than in a larger colony. The wharf was a rendezvous, therefore, on mail days, and the U.C.L. officers of the incoming boat could have laid themselves up with cého in the first half-hour, if they had accepted all the hospitality offered them, and drunk the liqueur fast enough. Leoline rode down to town early, and sat patiently on Liscarton’s back among the coal-dust and the smell of fessikh, or salted fish, which is as the smell of unutterable decay, and believed by many to be nothing but dried nigger, and high game at that. The little colony gathered gradually about her, and for the first time the sameness of the faces struck her with a kind of horror. She had met them over and over again, and they had not so oppressed her; now she realised that there were only some forty white people in the immediate neighbourhood to know, and that she must go on meeting them for all the remainder of the time that Ally was stationed there, until the social life seemed like a circle. There were one or two newer faces out at China Town, or Port Albert, perhaps,—a Planter or so scattered beyond the Pass or up on the Tableland; but even these belonged to the same community. She looked at the blue bay, the forest of masts, the one big ship at the quay, the line of ravenalas along the shore with their lifted fans like spread fingers, the warm wooded hills that shut it all in,—and Halton’s words returned to her with meaning for the first time.—
“We are in a rat-trap!”