OUT FROM UNDER.

Otago Witness, Issue 3885, 28 August 1928, Page 80

OUT FROM UNDER.

By

Helena J. Henderson.

(Copyright.—For th Otago Witness. } Mina w&rked in a pickle factory, sorting onions. It is not an elevating occupation, but the quickest worker gains a kind of prestige over her slower and clumsier sisters. She catches the forewoman’s eye, perhaps, and is moved up a grade. She may even in time become a forewoman herself. In any walk of life the same rule applies. The worker with a store of vitality comes to the fore.

Alina was not the quickest worker. She worked in a pickle factory because Fate had pitchforked her into the job. She did not like sorting onions, and made no effort to excel in her work. But since it was her work she did it quite effectually, and methodically, and mechanically. The nearest she ever got to taking an interest in it was when the round, sleek onions rolled out from under her hands, and the thought popped into her mind that they were seeking a way of escape. Escape! There was no escape. Onions were like people. The little ones were drafted away from the protecting big ones, and turned out to forage for themselves, like young calves weaned from their mothers.

Alina was small and black-haired, with a petite round face white as a snowdrop. Her pallor was remarkable. It never varied. Her cheeks never showed a trace of tan, even in the height of summer, and only on the rarest occasions did a faint pink flush submerge the white. Her hands and feet were tiny, but she took no pride in them. She wore a black serge dress and black stockings, and her black hair was rolled round in ii heavy knot on her neck. That was what first caught Jim Harmon’s eye, the round black knot of hair in a line of shingled heads; that, and the queer pallor of her amidst a niedlev of natural pihk-and-whiteness, of rouged and powdered flamboyance, and of ineffectual sallowness. That, and the uncanny quietness of her. She was like a bluegum stripped of its leaves by the wind, and standing dreamy and" immovable, a foil to its sighing, swishing, chattering neighbours. ° The round black knot of hair caught Jim Harmons eye. Jim was a carrier who carted onions to their doom. A fortnight later he stopped beside her jto inform her that one of her long, black, crinkly hairpins was working loose. He received a hurried “Thank you.” There may have been other incidents between that and their commencing to walk out together. Courtship is a trickv business, and requires handling with care, especially when the quarry is shy and elusive and unresponsive.* It was six months before Alina could talk freely and easily with Jim; six more*before he felt he had come near enough to her to ask her to be his wife, and six more before they were married. He took her to a little house in a mean street. Alina thought it was heaven. She had lived in a sordid shanty in the worst street in town with the disreputable old couple who had brought her into the world. Home to her had meant greasv walls, broken beer bottles, empty salmon tins, meals of bread and tea and sausages, soiled bed-clothes, and a smokv copper that she boiled up on Sundays to wash her few things in, and to have a batm Home with Jim in a little house in a mean street was both heaven and escape from hell.

Jim was always happy. He was big and boisterous and healthy, and Alina was his very antithesis. She was still like the stripped bluegum, dreamy and immoi able, but there was about her a quietness that drew you to her. She was -not cold. She was not unresponsive. She was an unfinished melodv, a little Slav song with a tender lilt, and no words to fit it.

In sei en years she had three bovs. Then she began to get very weary. She ■would cry weakly when Jim slipped an arm round her and kissed her. Jim’s kisses were like himself, hearty, and his arms were like steel bands, so hard and close they gripped. He had a habit when he spoke to her of standing with his hand on her shoulder, and to her sick fancy this heavy hand would-'.grow and gi ow till it was like a huge leaden sinker crushing her down. He had a habit, too, of gripping her arm as he passed. He meant it for a mark of affection. She was his and he loved her, and in an exuberance of health and high spirits he must give her tangible proof of it. Afterwards Alina would watch the slow blood creep back to the dents his fingers had left on her white nesli. Sometimes she would cry. Sometimes she felt, deadly sick. Sometimes, again, a futile rage would seize, her. If Tjl fi | ht this ter rible lissi-: tude that had always held her in its grip. If she were well like Jim and the boys she could laugh and play, with them,' and always hold her own. No gripping

hand would have power to hurt her then.

Sometimes at night she had troubled dreams. She would come to a wide lake lying whitely-silver under a thin moon; or to a river slipping like oil, between its heavy banks; or to a heaving sea that rolled to her feet, and she would know that, somehow, she must get across. (So many of her dreams were of obstacles that she must cross—great chasms, or unscalable walls, ’-or wide, terrible waters.) And then would come hands to hold her back—hands that pawed at white shoulders and left sickening imprints thereon; baby hands that mauled all over her—at hair and eyes and lips; heavy hands, punishing hands, possessive hands. Thev would drag her back from the waters, the cold, black, siren waters, and there she would be upon her bed, panting sharplv, trembling, and bathed in an icy sweat. Once si j lay sleepless looking out to the night. One little star swam in a lifeless sky. She wondered vaeuelv where the others were. He looked so " lute and meek and lonely peering in at her, and she white and meek and lonely peering back at him. Wanderers both, drawn to what port if to anv port, they knew not. Not that Alina’cared. She was too tired to care. But if the little star cared . . she felt an overwhelming pity for the little star. He seemed so small and white and lonelv.

Jim lay beside her sound asleep, his arm thrown round her. It might have been a bar of pig-iron so heavily did it press upon her. Steadily it gained in weight till it was a dozen bars that bore Her down and down. A panic seized her. Supposing Jim died in the night with his arm around her, and she woke to find it stiff and cold and immovable, and she couldn’t get out from under! And she had to lie there through the dark and creeping hours. She clutched at the arm with both hands and lifted it from her. Jim roused momentarily. “ Hurting you, Alin ?” he murmured drowsily, and turned heavily round to the wall. But he had been stirred from pleasant dreams, and they did not return. Instead there came an ogreish dream, a haunting dream that he never could escape. He was a boy again, sent out by niggardly parents to earn his living at 12. It was . his first job. It lasted six months, and the memory of it clung round him still, like a damp miasmatic vapour. He dreamed of icy mornings in a turnip field, with his feet like frozen marble stumps beneath him, and his hands bulbous with chilblains; of days when hunger gripped him; of nights when he shivered under scanty blankets, and rubbed one cold leg against the other in an effort to get warm. He felt himself trembling in the grip of an inescapable horror, and then roused for a blessed moment to find himself in his own house, in his own bed, with his little pale wife beside him. They were his, all his own, the things he Aiad battled for and wrested from life. He turned gratefully beneath the blankets, and his arm went groping out for something warm and tangible. Alina in her sleep felt the heavy weight go down on her, and eased her listless body to it, as a bullock to its yoke. A long, hot, breath-taking summer gave place to a regal autumn. Alina lay for hours on the kitchen sofa and watched a line of bronze chrysanthemums nid-nodding against tire* paling fence. Beyond the fence one slim-built poplar loosed gilded showers of leaves that rustled despairingly as they dropped to a lingering death among the grass. The blue-and-gold days crept by dispassionately. Alina was not unhappy. She had never been snatched up to giddy pinnacles of ecstasy or whirled to cavernous depths of despair, and now this slow trickling away of her life seemed hardly to touch her. She felt as though she stood cutside herself and watched; sat in the stalls and looked on at herself in the last act, which was so wretchedly played that it moved her to no enthusiasm and no despair. Jim was taking it badly. He went about his work in a grim silence, his mouth shut tightly like’ a trap. He would come in and sit beside her and, taking her , hand between his leathery palms, stroke it backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, with a fierce, uncanny persistency. She would ' close her eyes, and to her sick fancy, a tiger crouched beside her, licking, licking, with his long, red, rasping tongue. Soon he would draw blood, • and then . . . Then- she would open her eyes piteously, to meet those of Freddie, her eldest boy, looking at her understandingly from the foot of the sofa. Freddie had thin features and eyes like a girl. He would grow up chivalrous and tender-hearted, she thought, and some woman would, ride roughshod over his heart and splinter it to pieces. 1 Anri his sons would think him a damnable fool, and their would' cringe ro 'their feet in approved cave-man fashion. So, each evolving from its own antithesis,

the slow generations would creep by, while she who had never had good red blood in her veins, nor any clean-cut stiength to battle with life, would lie in some green, quiet haven, with her troubled dreams at rest. A fierce winter bustled in. IVinter is the season for lusty souls, who can look him in the face, not for bloodless invalids chained to horse-hair sofas in dim kitchens where the vista comprises three rows of draggled cabbage stalks, one row of drenched brown chrysanthemum sticks, and a stripped poplar filigreed against a mournful sky. If she were well, of course . . . That thought was Alina’s most constant and pitiful companion. Tf she could laugh and joke and sweep the baby up in her arms and hold him, kicking and crowing, above her, as Jim did, and chase the boys round the diminutive back yard, and dance—Jim loved dancing, Jim loved life and the things you got from life. He had dragged himself up from a starved boyhood, worked, slaved, acquired a home, ayd a wife and children. And now\his/ house of cards was tumbling round about him. 8o Alina lay and pondered, closing her ej es at intervals when little threadbare wisps of sunlight crept in and flicked tauntingly around her. Then they, too. faded out, merged and swallowed up in the heavy, lustreless, wintry afternoon, Alina moved uneasily. The close air of the kitchen was like a weight upon her. It was like an arm, a heavy, heavy arm. It was like a hundred heavy arms—like all the iron arms in the world heaped down upon her. A frightful panic seized her. Soon she would be crushed to death by their relentless weight. She tried to call, but found she had no voice to call with. And then came a little slipping of the load, a tiny, trembling displacement. The incredible relief of it! And then, breathlessly, it lifted and soundlessly it fell away, all the accumulated burden of it, and she was free, unhampered, out from under.