Shackles

Chapter 1

Naomi breathed convulsively as she moved around the bed and tucked its coverings into place. The flush on her cheeks was not due entirely to exertion; her lips were set in grim, hard lines that indicated the strain of emotional repression. Her eyes were smoldering pits of fury.

She snatched the dimity counterpane from the floor where it had fallen, and flung it across the bed. There was something theatrical in the gesture; something primitive. It produced an instant’s relief by offering a channel through which her emotion might express itself. Save for the utter silliness of the action, she would have given free play to a pent-up impulse and struck the bed.

The remembrance of a picture she had once seen flashed across her mind. It was a horrible thing, but it haunted her. She was gripped by its stark brutality… Against a background of steaming jungle, two figures stood; at least one stood—a black-bearded rubber trader. The other, an aged Indian, cowered at his feet, impotent to escape the lash descending on his naked back, the slave’s yellow fangs were imbedded in the trader’s leg. The picture had fascinated Naomi by its very repulsiveness—the savagery on both distorted faces, the unmasked hat. But the white man’s expression held an element of brute satisfaction, and as she recalled it, Naomi wished that the dimity counterpane were a black-snake lash…

The bed, however, would not cower and flinch. It did not even protest as she pounded the pillows upon it. Calm, it lay before her; serene; insensible alike to pain and passion, mocking her hot rage.

It was her husband’s bed.

Naomi moved to the window, knowing before she reached it, what she would see. Far away, in front of the old stone church and new stone rectory snuggling close—looking, with its frilly curtains and flower boxes, like a beribboned maid hanging onto the arm of a staid old man—there, before the church, Arnold would be standing, delivering two and a half—always something less than three—chocolate maple buds into the eager mouth of the Rev. Haddington Allyn’s dog.

“Now,” she could almost hear him say, “no more, Scotchie, old fellow. That’s the last. Moderation in all things, you know… May I recall your Shakespeare?… ‘Things sweet to taste, prove in digestion sour.’ It is not unlikely that I will see you on my return.”

Then man and beast would shake hands, impressively, and Arnold would swing jauntily around the corner, keeping perfect step to the measure of his inward applause.

But Naomi stood still, looking out into the golden morning, only half aware that the pictures she saw were of the mind rather than the eye… There was something maddening in Arnold’s walk… if one watched it, moved with it, day after day and year after year. It wasn’t merely vigorous, buoyant. She could have borne that. There are few women to whom masculine inertia makes a permanent appeal. But Arnold betrayed something deeper, more fundamental than vigour. There was a suggestion of complacency, self-righteousness in the way he held his head, that had become exasperating. Even had he been a total stranger, Naomi would have suspected him of being an irreclaimable egoist, a man so happily protected by an armour of well-being and right-doing that nothing really touched him; nothing got beneath the skin. Having lived with him for eleven years, there was no room for doubt or speculation. She knew. She had beaten herself against that armour, unable to find a sheltering softness for her aching and bruised spirit. Year after year she had seen it harden by his passionate conviction that suffering is the salutary treatment of a Higher Wisdom, and that the degree of permanent peace is proportionate to the measure of temporary pain. Of late, she had seen some humour in the fact that the Higher Wisdom had rather defeated its own ends by endowing Arnold with so credulous a disposition.

She recalled the months when financial disaster threatened them like a deadly miasma, spreading over the whole field of their endeavour. Did Arnold sink or sicken? Did he protest against the harshness of fate? Did he come to her for comfort or offer commendation of her courage?

By no means. He rarely mentioned his affairs at all, save to suggest some further possible retrenchment, but this admirable restraint lost some of its effectiveness in Naomi’s eyes because it was accompanied by a manifest satisfaction in bearing his burden.

“We must look upon this as a test of our endurance,” he once said. “Never a morning do I wake without conscious thankfulness for the strength that is sustaining me.”

But he understressed the trifling circumstance, Naomi realised, looking backward, that hers was the strength for which he felt grateful. Hers were the eternal sacrifices, the self-denials. So far as the discomforts of every-day existence were concerned, life was, for Arnold, virtually unchanged.

She dispensed with a servant. She laboured over the daily menu so that the retrenchment might not be noticeable. Styles came and went unheeded while she mended his clothes, her own, rags of bed and table linen, and even the carpets.

“Did he clean his own office?” she asked herself. “Did he help with the housework or cooking? Did he even make his own bed? No! He enjoyed the fruits of my labours as unconcernedly as though I felt exalted at the privilege that had been given to me to become an unaccustomed drudge.”

Could he suffer? Could he ache with agony so penetrating that it pierced the very core of his being? Or did not his reaction to suffering produce a self-gratification so keen that it nullified the pain and became a panacea for his spirit, thus losing all its salutary effect? If she could only know…

“Exactly how would he feel,” she wondered, “if I called him up and said, ‘Oh, I forgot to mention it this morning, Arnold, but you’d better get your dinner downtown. I am going away. Hugo and I have decided to fling over the traces, and we leave for New York this afternoon?’ Would he experience any depth of emotion?” So much depended upon that.

Naomi found it almost impossible, consciously, to hurt anyone. Abnormally sensitive herself, she suffered acute distress at causing to others even the smallest pain. An absurd instance recurred to her as she stood at the window wondering about Arnold….

She was no more than seven years old. Her mother had called her out to the verandah where several ladies sat drinking tea. She had been kissed by each, and her appearance had been commended by whisper and facial contortion. She had no idea that her elders considered this perfectly transparent manner of communication, untranslatable to her immature intelligence.

One lady, very moist and very stout, clamped her to the rocking chair in which she sat. Naomi was a slender child and stood polite and helpless in the embrace, and presently she felt the rocker cut hard across her foot.

She made no outcry. A dread of seeing the visitor’s discomfort and receiving the torrent of apology that must follow the discovery, kept her dumb. Only when her mother noticed the tears streaming down her twisted face, did she gain release. And then she rushed away from the company with a burst of well-feigned, if hysterical laughter.

Again, when she was about sixteen, she noticed that an unprepossessing youth whose racial allegiance to God’s favoured family was clearly decipherable on his lean, swart features, appeared in her path each day as she returned from school. She did not realise at once that he was trailing her with a piteous, dog-like insistence that roused her compassion even while it annoyed her. But one day, he flung a little screw of paper at her feet.

“I haven’t a soul in the world to speak to me,” it read. “I can’t imagine why I go on living at all. Will you smile at me—just smile—I ask no more?”

Naomi was not constituted to resist such an appeal. The next day, in answer to the burning look in the boy’s eyes, she bowed. His mute gratitude made her a little faint. It was so enveloping, inescapable. It caught her whether she wished or not, like the waves of a rising tide. She hated herself for being unable to ignore him, but she couldn’t do it.

One day in early spring, the youth left a box on her doorstep. It contained a sprig of arbutus. She thanked him. And because he stood before her, with an air that implored a little kindness, she turned and walked a few steps beside him, to the amazement and amusement of her associates.

After that, she found it impossible to avoid walking with him a little distance each day. She took no pleasure in his companionship. He was without conversation. He was shabby and reminiscent of onions and smoked fish, but she couldn’t hurt him.

Her parents heard of the strange attachment and arraigned her severely.

“It’s all very well to give a derelict a meal in the kitchen,” said her father, angrily, “or a cast-off suit of mine or your Uncle Toby’s, but admitting him to friendship, raising him to a level of equality with you—appearing with him in public—why, this exceeds any fantastic act you have committed yet! Will you tell me—I ask as a seeker after information—will you be good enough to tell me what you can see in this unwashed worm? You can’t be deluding yourself that you love him?”

Naomi shook with fury. “I hate him!” She screamed. “I hate…hate…hate him. But don’t you understand, I can’t bear to see him squirm?”

Would Arnold squirm if she went away with Hugo? So much depended upon her knowing that.

Naomi tried desperately hard to be fair. Times without number she reminded herself that Arnold was good for her. She believed this utterly. But that did not make living with him any easier, and it did not add any perceptible joy to the duties she felt called upon to perform. There was the bed, for example—it symbolised a hundred and one little services which, shorn of the love impulse, became irksome, detestable, menial. Naomi had reached the point where she rebelled against certain services savouring of duteousness to her husband. And of late, he had been unusually exacting.

She didn’t blame him. She derived no satisfaction from convicting him of wrong. Equipped with a logical mind, she knew that such was not the case, and also that she, herself, could boast of no spiritual superiority. No! Whatever fault there was, lay at her door… It was she who had changed, who had permitted discord to enter into their relations. She no longer loved her husband. Grudging acts of house-wifery were all she had to give, and her whole being quivered in a fever of revolt.