"Oh Louis, please do it again." That time she closed her eyes and was only conscious of thinking that, if the ship went down, it would not matter just so long as nothing interrupted the kiss.
"Dear little girl," he whispered, and ceased to feel frightened of her. As he saw the tremendous effect his kisses had on her, masculine superiority put pokers into his backbone and made him feel a very fine fellow indeed. He had no time to think what his kisses had done to Marcella. All that he grasped was that she was not like Violet who had drawn away from him to lead him on further; who had flirted with him and teased him seductively, and made him pay dearly for kisses by pleadings and humiliations: who had never given anything, and had never come one inch of the way to meet him.
"I say, Marcella," he said, as he let her go. "Don't you know anything at all about the art of lying? Can't you lie?"
She frowned at him. He went on quickly.
"I've never met a girl yet who admitted that she liked a man to kiss her. They lie and lie—they put up barriers every minute."
"There can't be barriers between us, Louis. I'd rather die than have barriers," she said quietly, though she did not realize why, or what she implied.
CHAPTER XI
Looking back in after years on the six weeks of the voyage Marcella saw them as days and nights coloured by madness and storms through which Jimmy went like a little wistful ghost, hanging on to her hand, the only thing in grey tones amidst splashes of wild colour. Many a time in the sun-drowned days and windless nights Marcella was reminded of those old tales she had heard on Lashnagar from Wullie's lips, of the hot summer when the witch-woman came and men went mad just before the destruction came on the village. It was as though the Oriana went on ploughing through the waters, with the Dog-Star hitched to her masthead inflaming men's blood. Marcella was in a state of puzzlement. She was puzzled at herself, puzzled at Louis, puzzled at the people round her. Men went about barefoot in pyjamas, women in muslin nightdresses all day after Suez; in the Indian Ocean, one blazing day, they ran into the tail of a monsoon; the lower decks were swamped and the steerage passengers were sent on to the upper decks, where Marcella and Louis sat surrounded by half a dozen forlorn children whose parents had succumbed to the pitching of the ship and the heat. Great walls of green, unfoaming water rose sullenly and menacingly higher than the ship, which tossed like a weightless cork; seas came aboard with an effect of silence; down in the saloon glasses, crockery and cutlery crashed to the deck with a momentary fracture of the deadly quiet which seemed all the more silent afterwards: occasionally a child screamed in fright and was hushed by an almost voiceless mother, while stewards went about with trays of iced drinks, slipping to the deck in a dead faint now and again with a momentary smash that was swallowed to silence immediately. Underneath the sulky, heaving water lurked death, silent and sharp, from which the shoals of flying fishes escaped for the moment by soundless, silvery, aimless poising in the blue air, only to fall back exhausted again into the green water and the waiting white jaws. Some of the fishes flopped on board, and were put out of life by the blows of the sailors who dried and stuffed them and sold them afterwards to the passengers. To Marcella everything seemed cruel and mad and preying. The passengers were cruel—to each other and to the stewards; one day, going into the saloon by chance, she found Knollys leaning over a table looking white and sick, as he tried to polish spoons and forks.
"Are you ill?" she asked him.