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Well – happy!

Happiness, he told himself, towelling vigorously, is a state of the emotions. So that here he was feeling physically, mentally and emotionally fine!

Why?

No, hang it all, when you are fortunate enough to achieve, even for a little while, such a condition of beatitude, you don't stop to ask why! A waste! A crime!

He sang:

“I want to BE happy, but I can't BE happy

Till I make YOU hap
—”

The word died abruptly on his lips. He stared absently at the wall for a minute while he put on his dressing-gown. Why are popular songs popular? Because they're true? Truisms? Obvious things, fundamental things that come into every one's life? Love –
“One alone to be my own
…” Hopes and imaginings
– “Somewhere the bluebird is singing and winging his way to you
.” Sentimental yearnings – “
Oh, God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree!
” Plain truths of human psychology. The ABC of the human
animal in love – “
I can't BE happy till I make YOU happy too!
”

So he said to himself, going back along the hall to their bedroom, “Well, well, fancy your discovering that!” and paused inside the door looking speculatively at Susan's belongings strewn about the room, as though he imagined that, in the light of his new understanding, they might take on a new significance.

And in a way, he thought as he dressed, they did. That morning, for instance, the first morning of their honeymoon, he had looked at them with a feeling quite different from his present feelings.

He'd wakened, he remembered, to a rather pleasant sensation of holiday. He could hear through his open window voices and laughter, early-morning surfers returning to the hotel, and he had begun calculating idly how many years it was since he'd spent whole days sprawling face downwards on the sand, feeling the sun beating into his body. He had wondered, too, if Susan liked surfing, if she liked sunbaking, if she liked a swim before breakfast; and whether, perhaps, they had created a record in that they had married each other without ever having had, in the true sense of the word, a conversation.

He'd got out of bed, into a dressing-gown and slippers, and leaned his head out of the window into the brilliant sunshine. There were still half a dozen bathers left on the beach; two girls, one in green and one in scarlet made, he thought, a rather charming patch of colour on the long creamy beach with the turquoise, white-ridged sea behind them. But all the time behind his conscious thoughts and observations, there had persisted a chain of rather intriguing guesswork about Susan, a new small hope that she might be quite a good
companion; and that there was no reason he could see why good companionship should not take, quite successfully, the place of love—

Rather anxious, perhaps, to begin testing his theory he'd knocked at the door of her room, but there'd been no answer, so he'd opened it and put his head in. Her bed was empty but he could hear her splashing in the bathroom, so he went over to her window which commanded a view of the road and the hotel garden, and stood there with his elbows on the sill watching a car load of picnickers setting out for the day.

Her voice came, presently, from behind him.

“Hallo!”

He had turned, slightly dazzled by the glare of the sun. She was hanging up her towel, looking, he thought, in her stockinged feet, and white slip, with her hair damp and ruffled, like a child of fourteen. He said “Good-morning,” and felt that it had sounded like an uncle to his niece, so he added hastily, “How's the head?” and decided irritably that that had, if anything, deepened the avuncular effect. She had answered politely, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting on her shoes.

“Quite well again, thanks.”

So then he had prowled across the room and had found her odds and ends rather intriguing. He had been amused, for instance, by her hairbrush, a stout wooden affair with intimidating steel-bristles sprouting from a rubber base. A queer thing! There was something, indeed, that appealed to him about all her belongings – they weren't the expensive, monogrammed fal-lals which she could, undoubtedly, have afforded, but oddments which gave the impression of having come with her from her childhood. A long, Japanese-looking,
wooden box with handkerchiefs in it; a good but small and old-fashioned hand mirror, ivory-backed; a plain black comb. Her suitcase was open on a chair; he could see stockings neatly rolled, and stacks of things that looked soft and silken; a blue linen dress was lying across the foot of her bed.

She had asked:

“Are you going to have your bath now?”

He said, “Am I in the way?” And she looked up swiftly, almost guiltily, and protested,” Of course not. I didn't mean that. But – aren't you hungry?”

He laughed.

“Why, are you?”

“Starving!”

“Now, I come to think of it, I am too.” He had watched her for a moment. “Is that a good kind of brush?”

She'd paused with it half-way to her head and studied it with a faint surprise.

“I don't know. I've always used one like this. What's the joke?”

“I was wondering how you get that soap-and-goodwill shine off your face.”

The sudden impishness of her smile made him remember vividly the Susan of his first acquaintance.

“If you'll bring me my powder bowl from over there I'll show you presently.” He picked it up. Its extraordinary beauty of shape and colouring impressed him. It was very heavy, very smooth, brilliantly blue. He had wondered as he brought it to her, what it was made of

“Where did you get this lovely thing?”

Her hand had stopped its rhythmical movement.
She had pushed her hair away from her face and met his eyes.

“Jim gave it to me.”

He had put it down carefully in front of her. He realised with sharp dismay and consternation that the mere mention of his brother's name had been enough to destroy in a second the sense of well-being, of pleasant companionship which had just now enwrapped them. Suddenly aware of his own silence, of the small preoccupied frown that was creasing his forehead, he had glanced at her. She was looking out the window, but she turned at once to meet his eyes again. He said with an effort:

“Well, I'd better have my bath. I won't be long. But don't wait for me if you're hungry.”

Dressed, he brushed his damp hair and stood for a moment staring soberly at the dressing-table. Yes, that was how he had felt, that was how he had reacted on that day which seemed so long ago, to those same trifles which now lay there before his eyes, the same – and yet, actually, so different!

The brush was still the same comical brush; the box still had handkerchiefs in it, and the powder-bowl which Jim had given her was gleaming with a lovely luminous blueness in a streak of morning sun. Somehow it didn't hurt him now. Somehow those things had acquired a rather precious and familiar air; from becoming the personal belongings of a stranger they had slipped somehow into the pattern of his life. …

He went out on the veranda, lifted
the mosquito net away and pulled one of the russet red curls gently.

“Wake up, Carrots.”

She sighed and grumbled and came up from under the bedclothes, yawning and rubbing her knuckles in her eyes.

A
S
she turned over, yawning, her warm cheek came down on his hand where it still lay on her pillow. She opened her eyes, squinted down at it, and then quickly up at his face. She said, “Oh – hallo,” in a voice still slurred and blunted with sleep, and he saw her feet thrust down under the bedclothes and her whole body stiffen like a cat's in one vast luxurious stretch.

There in the shade the air was keen; his movement was as instinctive as the spreading of chilled hands to a fire, as the bending of one's head to a scented flower. When his arm was half round her and his face against her cheek he remembered a puppy which had followed him once in the city. It had been an endearing small thing; his hands, on that cold day, had found a certain pleasure in patting it, in burrowing into the soft folds beneath its chin; he'd been amused, for a few idle moments while waiting for his tram, at its eager, absurd, passionate adoption of himself. And he'd wondered rather uneasily, catching his last glimpse of it as the tram rattled off, standing with its head lifted, and its tail drooping, its eyes full of the incredulous misery of the forsaken, whether his caresses, his careless acceptance of an illogical devotion, hadn't been rather a low-down brutal sort of kindness. …

He found his impulsive movement slain suddenly by this memory. For a second he remained there, thinking with a smile in the thought, that she was really even
warmer and pleasanter than a puppy, and then, with the smile vanishing, that she probably had, also, an even greater capacity for being hurt. But as, with a sigh, he began to pull his arm away, he felt her suddenly stroke his hair back from his forehead with a touch so gentle, so loving and compassionate that it seemed to clarify and bring to a single focus of misery all the vague doubts and nebulous fears which had been for so long overshadowing his mood. She said:

“Poor old Bret!”

He asked slowly, staring at her.

“Why ‘poor'?”

She smiled and gave his cheek a pat as he straightened up.

“Well, aren't you?”

He said vehemently:

“I don't know. I feel it sometimes. Perhaps – what made you say it, anyhow?”

She sat up, pushing her hair away from her face.

“Sometimes I used to feel that way about Jim.”

“What way?”

“As you felt just now. I was awfully fond of him. Sometimes I used to feel inclined to stroke his hair because it had a nice crinkly feel – and sometimes I used to want to hug him – just because he was young and healthy and strong and good to touch – but I couldn't because I was always afraid he'd think it meant more than it did mean. …”

Bret sat quite still looking along the veranda to the green of the paddocks and the cobalt shadows on the hills. He sat for so long saying nothing that at last Susan stood up on the bed in her pyjamas, jumped down on to the floor and went off to her bath. And still Bret sat there thinking.

He
thought that probably she was right to insist so on her relationship with Jim. That uncompromising determination of hers to stress at all times the strange parallel of his present attitude to her with her past attitude to his brother might be, according to her code of honesty and pride, her only possible course. What was it, after all, when you brought it down to its simplest and crudest terms? Simply that she saw Jim quite clearly as the barrier between them. Simply that she saw, in his evasions of the subject, in his tortured desire to forget or ignore it, an attempt to creep round the barrier and leave it standing – no longer between, but everlastingly before them. Wasn't she right to fear that?

He stood up and went over to the railings where he had stood last night, and wondered when he got there whether that physical movement might not have been a subconscious effort to find again the mood he had so deeply felt there, and so swiftly lost.

Jungaburra, he thought looking up at it, had lost its midnight air of menace; it seemed actually to have moved farther away, no longer lowering blackly almost over his head, but withdrawn by some magic of colour and light, its lavender and amethyst and lichen-green washed over by pale sunlight, and its peak showing faintly through a veil of mist. It wasn't likely, he thought ruefully, that here in daylight, chasing it with the blundering clumsiness of conscious effort, he would recapture the fugitive impulses of an emotion that had come like a moth out of the dark, and returned …

He seemed to see her vanishing past him into the dusk in her pale wide-spreading dress. He'd thought her like a moth then.

“If
I were your sister.”

Never, he told himself rather irritably, had he done such an infernal amount of thinking and feeling and worrying and wondering as he had done since he married Susan! There was hardly, hang it all, an hour when he could be comfortably and stolidly himself, doing a definite job with a clear and easy mind. He couldn't, he realised with amazement and trepidation, get up and walk across a veranda without beginning to analyse his motives like some blasted be-spectacled highbrow dabbling in psychological bunk!

And yet he was aware, uneasily, that contempt and profanity would not explain, far less banish or subdue the strange disturbances of his mind. They would not obliterate the knowledge that he had for nearly a year past, and especially last night, been cast adrift upon his emotions like a cork on a stormy sea. He'd felt fear and anger and loneliness and relief all with ten times the intensity he had ever known before. He'd been wildly excited, furiously angry, triumphantly glad. He'd sworn at Susan in one breath and laughed heartily at her in the next. No wonder his feet had, literally, stumbled with weariness last night, as he went to bed; no wonder he had slept so soundly!

No wonder—

But there he stopped, his thoughts baulking, trembling on the verge of a discovery. Thoughts seemed to be like that. If you kept them, drove them like horses on the roads – well, the roads were all you ever saw. But if you let them range they brought you to new places. They had brought him once already that morning along the trivial by-path of a song to an elementary fact which he had never realised before.
And here they were again showing him the end of a sentence he had unwittingly begun.

No wonder he'd wakened feeling so good!

Well, this also was kindergarten stuff, he supposed. After all, everybody knew that to keep any living thing in good working order you had to allow it the full exercise of its natural functions. Funny that he'd never realised before that your emotions needed exercise just like your muscles, that the healthy human being had the waste products of his feelings to get rid of as well as the waste products of his digestive organs! And he thought with a kind of alarmed amusement: