CHAPTER I

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SECRET BREAD

BY

F. TENNYSON JESSE

Author Of "The Milky Way,"

"Beggars On Horseback," Etc.

"_Bread eaten in secret_..."

New York

George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1917,

By George H. Doran Company

Printed In The United States Of America

TO

EUSTACE TENNYSON D'EYNCOURT JESSE

MY FATHER AND FRIEND

CONTENTS

BOOK I--SOWING

Prologue

CHAPTER

I High Adventures in a Farmyard

II The Mill

III The Kitchen

IV Pagan Pastoral

V Head of the House

VI Reactions

VII The Chapel

VIII Seed-Time

IX Fresh Pasture

X Hilaria

XI The Place on the Moor

XII Some Ambitions and an Announcement

XIII The Wrestling

XIV The Wind upon the Grass-Field

BOOK II--GROWTH

CHAPTER

I A Family Album

II What Men Live By

III First Furrow

IV The Shadow at the Window

V Lull Before Storm

VI The Bush-Beating

VII The Heart of the Cyclone

VIII New Horizons

IX Hidden Springs

X Blind Steps

XI Glamour

XII Sheaves

XIII The Stile

XIV A Letter

XV Blown Husks

XVI The Grey World

XVII The Cliff and the Valley

XVIII The Immortal Moment

BOOK III--RIPENING

CHAPTER

I Under-Currents

II The Passage

III Phoebe Pays Toll

IV The Discovering of Nicky

V Centripetal Movement

VI The Nation and Nicky

VII Paradise Cottage Again

VIII What Nicky Did

IX Judith's White Night

X Lone Trails

XI Ways of Love

XII Georgie

BOOK IV--THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER

I Questions of Vision

II Autumn

III Bodies of Fire

IV The New Judith

V The Parson's Philosophy

VI "Something Must Come to All of Us..."

VII Earth

BOOK V--HARVEST

CHAPTER

I The Four-Acre

II Archelaus, Nicky, Jim

III The Letters

IV Hester

V Reaping

VI Threshing

VII Garnered Grain

Epilogue

BOOK I

SOWING

SECRET BREAD

PROLOGUE

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed,

awaiting his marriage and his death--a silence so hushed that it was not

broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the

casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the

hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were

dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick

man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined

hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All

life, both without and within, was dying life--waning day at the

casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man's

soul waiting to take wing.

Ruan lay with closed eyes, so still he might have been unconscious, but

in reality he was gathering together all of force and energy he

possessed; every sense was concentrated on the bare act of keeping

alive--keenly and clearly alive--until the wished-for thing was

accomplished. Then, the effort over, the stored-up vitality spent, he

hoped to go out swiftly, no dallying on the dim borderland. As he lay

his closed lids seemed like dull red films against the firelight, and

across them floated a series of memory-pictures, which he noted

curiously, even with a dry amusement.

He saw himself, as a big-boned surly lad, new to his heritage; then as a

middle-aged man, living in a morose isolation save for Annie and the

children. Little half-forgotten incidents drifted past him, and always,

with the strange detachment of the dying, he saw himself from the

outside, as it were, even as he saw Annie and the children. Finally, his

travelling mind brought him to the present still hour of dusk, so soon

to deepen into night. Thinking of that which was to come, his mouth

twitched to a smile; he flattered himself he had kept his neighbours

well scandalised during his life; now, from his death-bed, he would send

widening circles of amazement over the whole county, and set tongues

clacking and heads wagging at the last freak of that old reprobate, Ruan

of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful

creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making.

The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank smaller and

smaller as the close-set little points of fire died out, and the

feathery ash-flakes fell in a soft pile on the hearthstone.

Opening his eyes, Ruan turned his head a little on the pillow, so that

he could watch the changing square of sky. A ragged curtain of cloud,

blurred and wet-looking at the edge, hung almost to the hill-top, but

between ran a streak of molten pallor, and against it the hedge of

wilted thorns that crowned the hill stood out black and contorted. One

great ploughed field stretched from the garden to the hill-crest; in the

middle of its curve a tall grey granite monolith reared up, dark where

its top came against the sky, but at its base hardly distinguishable

from the bare earth around, which was charmed by the hour to a warm

purple hue; when Ruan's eyes left the gleam in the sky they could find

out the subdued green of the nearer hedge-row. For the last time, he

told himself; then, as the gleam faded from the sky and was gone, he

swallowed hard upon the knowledge that never again, for him, would the

daylight live behind the clouds. He rubbed his finger up and down the

sheet, that he might still feel a tangible sensation at will; then,

lifting his bare forearm, he looked closely and curiously at it, noting

the way the brown hairs lay across the back, and the finer texture of

skin down the inside of elbow and wrist. He, his living self, was in

that arm--he could still make the fingers contract and straighten, could

still pinch the flesh gently till it whitened--could still call it part

of himself. He was not thirsty, but he laboriously lifted the glass of

water at his side and drank, because the fancy took him to feel one of

the accustomed old sensations, the commonplaces of his every-day life,

now that his body would so soon be beyond his power. As the slow fingers

pushed the glass on to the little table again, the click of a gate

sounded sharply, followed by the noise of footsteps on a paved path. The

smile flickered back to Ruan's lips, and he settled himself to enjoy his

last little comedy.

Up bare stairs came the footsteps, then the room door opened with a

protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the

threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness

behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that

the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood.

He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp

of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over to the bed.

"So you've not cheated me, James!" she said. "I made sure to find 'ee

dead when I brought Passon--I thought you'd ha' done it to spite me."

"Dear woman," answered the Squire gently, "it's for my own pleasure I'm

wedding you, and not to make an honest woman of you. I've a fancy to

have the old place carried on by a child who's got a right to my name,

that's all."

"An' our first-born, Arch'laus, can go begging all's days, s'pose? An'

t'other lads and Vassie can go starve wi' en?"

Ruan's face changed, grew darker, and he spoke harshly.

"They were the children of our passion--true love-children. They remind

me of the days when I was a fool, and I'll leave them only my folly. But

the child that's coming--he'll be blessed by the law and the

Church--quite a gentleman of quality, Annie; far above the likes of you.

He'll live to breed hatred and malice in the pack of ye, and every hand

of his own flesh and blood'll be against him.... Parson, do your duty,

and tie the holy knot--small harm in it now nothing can hold me long."

The Parson came forward without a word. He was a clever man, whose

knowledge of souls was deep, if not wide, and he refrained from asking

whether repentance urged this tardy compliance with the law of his

religion; such a question could only have provoked a sneer from the old

cynic in the bed.

Annie groped along the mantelshelf until her fingers met a tallow rush,

which she lit by holding it to the fire, and in the wan flare of yellow

her weary figure showed that she was very near to her confinement. She

turned to the bed and set the candle on the table, meeting the Squire's

quizzical glance with eyes lit only by the tiny reflections of the

candle flame--expressionless eyes, the blue of them faded and the life

dulled. Then she went out of the room, and the stairs creaked beneath

her descending feet; the clamour of her voice came to the two men above

as she called through open doors:

"Katie! Kat-_ie!_ Passon's here, and you'm to fetch Philip and come up

to wance."

More feet sounded on the stairs, clattering hobnails among them, and

Annie returned, accompanied by Katie Cotton, the dairymaid, and her

sweetheart, Philip Jacka. Philip was a lithe, restless youth, with curly

hair that caught the light and bright, glinting eyes. He was far

better-looking than his girl, and far more at his ease; sturdy,

high-bosomed Katie was guilty of an occasional sniff of feminine

sympathy; Philip looked on with the aloof superiority of the male.

The service began, and Annie listened to the words she had longed to

hear for twelve years past, the words that would make her mistress of

Cloom Manor. Morality meant as little to her as to any of the

half-savage folk of the remote West in the middle of the nineteenth

century, when the post of squire's mistress was merely considered less

fortunate than that of squire's wife; but socially Annie was

gaining--for she would become an eligible widow-woman.

With fumbling hands Ruan slipped his signet-ring on the ugly, work-worn

finger of the woman who was at last his wife.

* * * * *

That night Annie gave birth to the latest heir of the house of Ruan, and

in the grey of the dawning, when, with the aid of parson and lawyer, the

Squire had arranged all his temporal affairs in a manner to ensure as

much ill-will as possible in the family he was leaving behind him, he

was gathered to his fathers.

In the big kitchen, where the mice skittered nervously over the last

night's supper-table, and the tall clock chuckled before it struck each

hour, huddled a group of frightened children. The eldest was angry as

well, for, while the younger boys and the little girl were but dimly

aware that all their world was tumbling about their ears, he, with the

precocious knowledge of the ten-year old country lad, knew more nearly

how the crying babe was ousting him from his previous height. Resentful,

sleepy, fearful, and exiled from the rooms of birth and death they

crouched together and watched the paling sky, their own quarrels

forgotten in their common discomfort; and overhead the cries of the

new-born child pierced the air of the new day.

CHAPTER I

HIGH ADVENTURES IN A FARMYARD

A bullet-headed little boy of eight sat astride upon a farmyard gate,

whistling and beating time with a hazel-switch. He had fastened his belt

round the gate-post and was using it as a bridle, his bare knees gripped

the wooden bar under him, and his little brass-tipped heels flashed in

the sun like spurs. It was Saturday morning, which meant no lessons with

Parson Boase at the vicarage, and a fine day in late August, which meant

escape from the roof of Cloom and the tongue and hand of its mistress.

Ishmael Ruan, his head stuffed with the myths and histories with which

the Parson was preparing him for St. Renny Grammar School, felt in the

mood for high adventures, and his surroundings were romantic enough to

stir the blood.

Cloom Manor, a deep-roofed, heavy-mullioned pile of grey granite dating

from the Restoration, presented a long, low front to the moorland, a

front beautified by a pillared porch with the Ruan arms sculptured above

it, and at the back it was built round a square court, from which an

arch, hollowed through the house itself, led into the farmyard. The

windows were low-browed and deep-set, thickly leaded into small squares,

with an occasional pane of bottle glass, which winked like an eye

rounded by amaze. Within, the wide fireplaces and ceilings were enriched

by delicate mouldings, whose once clean-cut outlines were blurred to a

pleasing, uncertain quality by successive coats of whitewash. The room

where Ishmael had been born boasted a domed ceiling, and a band of

moulding half-way up the walls culminated over the bed's head in a

representation of the Crucifixion--the drooping Christ surrounded by a

medley of soldiers and horses, curiously intent dogs and swooning women,

above whose heads the fluttered angels seemed entangled in the host of

pennons flaunting round the cross. Cloom was a house of neglected

glories, of fine things fallen on base uses, like the family itself.

When James Ruan came into his inheritance it was still a gentleman's

estate; when he died it was a mere farm. A distorted habit of mind and

the incredible difficulties of communication in the remote West during

the first half of the nineteenth century had gradually caused James Ruan

to sink his gentlehood in a wilful boorishness that left him a fierce

pride of race and almost feudal powers, but the tastes and habits of his

own labourers. As for the life of his mind, it was concentrated entirely

on money-making; and all that he made he invested, till he became the

most important landowner for miles, and in a district where no farms

were very large his manor lands and cottage property and his nine

hundred pounds or so of income made him a figure not to be ignored.

Nevertheless, for all his prosperity, he was a hard master, paying his

labourers, who were mostly married men with families, the wage of seven

shillings a week, and employing their womenfolk at hoeing or binding for

sixpence a day, while for fewer pence still the little children stumbled

on uncertain legs after the birds which threatened the new-tilled crops.

By such means--common to all his neighbours at a time when cultivation

was slow and such luxuries as meat, white bread, bedding, and coal were

unknown to the poor, and by a shrewdness peculiar to himself--did James

Ruan manage to make his property contribute to his private income, a

condition of affairs by no means inevitable in farming, although at that

time the hated Corn Law, only repealed soon after Ishmael's birth, had

for thirty years been in force for the benefit of landowners. If the

Squire had known the worth of the old family portraits hanging in what

had been the banqueting hall, where apples were now stored, he would

doubtless have sold them, but he had cut himself off from civilised

beings who might have praised them, and he thought the beruffed,

steel-plated men and high-browed, pearl-decked ladies rather a

dry-looking lot, though he never suffered Annie to say a disparaging

word on the subject.

Annie deeply resented this silent superiority of the Squire's, this

shutting off from her of certain fine points in his garbled scheme of

honour, and she chose to regard Ishmael as the embodiment of this habit.

Had she been left with unrestricted powers as to estate and money she

might have classed herself with her youngest-born and grown to grudge

her other children their existence, but as things were Ishmael was as

much in her way as he was in that of Archelaus. She realised she had

been tricked at the last to satisfy a whim of the Squire's--she would

have been far better off under the old will, which left Cloom to her

eldest son after her. A dishonoured name was all she had gained by the

transaction--a hollow reward, since to her equals it made little

difference, and to her superiors none at all, and when she remembered at

how much pains the special licence had been obtained from the commissary

of the Bishop of Exeter, how she had sent for the Parson the moment the

Squire had finally declared his mind made up, and then for Lawyer

Tonkin, only to be excluded from the conference that followed, Annie

felt her resentment surge up. If it had not been for the fact that the

Parson and Tonkin had been appointed guardians to the boy, Ishmael

would, in all probability, never have lived beyond babyhood. A little

neglect would soon have ended the matter, and even if any local magnate

had bestirred himself to make a fuss, no Cornish jury would have

convicted. All this Boase knew, and he managed to make Annie aware of

the fact that he meant his ward to thrive or he would make trouble, and

she was one of those women who tremble before a spiritual pastor and

master. Therefore she comforted herself by the reflection that at least

Cloom would always be her home, and a home of which she meant to be

mistress as long as possible. Under his father's will Ishmael came into

the property at eighteen, an additional grievance to Annie, but she told

herself that at least a boy of that age would not be able to turn her

out--he would still be too afraid both of her and of public opinion. The

hardness and the moral elasticity that go to make up a certain phase of

the Cornish character, made up Annie's, and grew to sway her utterly,

save for gusts of ungovernable emotions and an equally ungovernable

temper. The little Ishmael learned to fear, to evade, and to lie, till

he bade fair to become an infant Machiavelli, and at night his sins--the

tremendous sins of childhood--would weigh upon him so that he broke into

a sweat of terror.

On this August morning he had forgotten his crimes and was burning with

the high adventures of a farmyard. In the blue of the sky fat gold-white

clouds bellied like the sails of enchanted galleons, and the wind

ruffled the cock's bronzed feathers about his scaly legs, blew pearly

partings on the black-furred cat that sunned herself by the wall, and

whirled two gleaming straws, Orthon-wise, about the cobbles. The

triumphant cackling of a hen proclaimed an egg to be as much a miracle

as the other daily one of dawn, and the shrill-voiced crickets kept up a

monotonous and hurried orchestra. A big red cow came across the field

and stood in a line with the gate, her head, with its calm eyes and

gently moving wet nostrils, turned towards Ishmael. She was against the

sun, and at the edges of her the fine outer hairs, gleaming transparent,

made her seem outlined in flame--she was a glorified, a transfigured

cow, a cow for the gods. In a newly-turned field beyond a man and a boy

were planting young broccoli; they worked with the swiftness and

smoothness of a machine, the man making a succession of holes with his

spud as he walked along, the boy dropping in the plants on the instant.

From where Ishmael sat the boy and his basket were hidden behind the

man, and it looked as though wherever that shining spud touched the

earth a green thing sprang up as by magic. Truly, Cloom was a farm in

the grand manner this morning, a farm fit for the slopes of Olympus.

Ishmael flogged his gate and bounced up and down till the latch rattled

in its socket and the wide collar of his little print shirt blew up

under his chin like two cherub wings supporting his glowing face.

A clatter of hoofs made him look around, and a young man rode down the

lane opposite and into the farmyard. He was a splendid young man, and he

sat the big, bare-backed horse as though he were one with it, his

powerful thighs spreading a little as they gripped its glossy sides. His

fair hair curled closely over his head and clung to his forehead in damp

rings, the sweat standing out all over his face made it shine like

metal, and the soaked shirt clung to the big muscles of his body. His

face changed a little as he caught sight of the child on the gate--such

a faint expression, something between sulkiness and resentment, that it

was obviously the result of instinctive habit and not of any particular

emotion of the moment. As he flung himself off the horse a woman emerged

from the courtyard and called out to Ishmael.

"Come and tak' th' arse to meadow for your brother, instead of wasten'

the marnen'. Couldn' 'ee be gleanen' in th' arish? You may be gentry,

but you'll go starve if you do naught but twiddle your thumbs for the

day."

"Lave en be, lave en be, mother," said Archelaus Beggoe impatiently.

"Women's clacken' never mended matters nawthen. It'll be a good day,

sure 'nough, when he goes to school to St. Renny, if it gives we a

little peace about the place. Do 'ee hold tha tongue, and give I a glass

o' cider, for I'm fair sweaten' leaken'."

Mother and son passed through the archway into the courtyard, and

Ishmael, who had been silently buckling on his belt, took hold of the

rope head-stall and led the horse towards the pasture. As he went his

childish mind indulged in a sort of gambling with fate.

"I wonder if my right foot or my left will step into the lane first. If

it's my right I'll have it to mean that I shall be saved...." Here he

paused for a moment, aghast; it was such a tremendous risk to take, such

a staking of his soul. He went forward, measuring the distance with his

eye, and trying to calculate which foot would take that fateful step

from the cobbles on to the lane. He was there, and for one awful moment

it seemed as though it would be his left, but an extra long stride just

met the case.

"It didn't come quite natural that way," he thought, anxiously, "but

p'raps it means I'll be saved by something I do myself. I wish I could

be quite sure. Shall I have it that if I see a crow in the field I shall

be saved?"

The reflection that for a dozen times on entering the pasture he saw no

crow for once that he did made him change to, "Suppose I say if I don't

see a crow I shall be saved?" But that too had its drawback, as if,

after laying a wager in which the odds were so tremendously in his

favour, he did see a crow, there would then be no smoothing away the

fact, as often before, with "Perhaps that doesn't count"--it would be

too obviously a sign from Heaven. He finally changed the wager to, "If I

see birds in the field I'll see Phoebe to-day:" to such considerations

does a man turn after contemplation of his soul. On seeing a couple of

magpies, the white and black of their plumage showing silver and

iridescent green in the sun as they swooped over the field, he took

steps to justify the omen by setting off across the moors in quest of

Phoebe.

CHAPTER II

THE MILL

As Ishmael went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as

an offering to Phoebe--purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink

heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all

squeezed together in his hot little hand. The air seemed alive with

butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the "blue

skippers" that look like periwinkles blown to life. A bee shot past him

so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and

the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell,

quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The

heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but

was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael

kept doggedly on.

He was a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a

point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under

straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and

pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his

outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie's

changeling. Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away,

and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved, if at all, in the

malleable years between fifteen and twenty was as yet far ahead.

Nevertheless, Parson Boase was not wrong in scenting the idealist in

Ishmael, and he wondered how far the determined but excitable child,

with the nervous strain of his race and all the little bluntnesses of a

boy ungently reared, might prove the prey of circumstance; or whether,

after all, he might not so build up resisting power as to make a fair

thing of his life. A no more distant future than the next hour held

Ishmael's mind at the moment, and attracted by a strong smell of

peppermint from the marsh, the child turned that way, to add the pale

purple blossoms to his fast-wilting bunch.

A man in a black cassock, looped up for convenience in walking by a

shabby cincture, was wandering among the brambles and gorse bushes,

peering short-sightedly here and there, and as Ishmael appeared the

man's hand closed suddenly over some object on a leaf. Ishmael had

hardly recognised the Parson before he himself was seen.

"Come and look at what I've got here," shouted Boase, straightening his

long back and holding his curved-out hands aloft. Ishmael ran towards

him, the tussocks, dry from long drought, swaying and sagging beneath

him. As he drew near he caught a whirring sound, so strong as to seem

metallic, and saw a big green and yellow dragon-fly fighting in the

Parson's hands. Boase took hold of it carefully but firmly by the wings,

and the creature stared angrily at Ishmael with its huge glassy green

eyes, opening its oddly-fleshy mouth and wagging its fawn-coloured lips

like an evil infant cockatrice.

Suddenly the Parson launched it in the air again, raising two fingers in

whimsical blessing, then he looked down at Ishmael with a queer

expression in his eyes. That was Ishmael's fate, of which he was as yet

unconscious--no one looked at him absolutely naturally. His mother saw

him with aversion, Archelaus with resentment, and the younger brothers

and the little sister took their cue from their elders. The neighbouring

gentry treated him with an embarrassed kindness when they met him with

Parson Boase, and solved the problem by leaving him alone on other

occasions; the farmers looked at him as though he embodied a huge joke,

and their wives mothered him surreptitiously, giving him saffron-cake,

which he loved, and quick, hard kisses, which he detested. Even Boase

looked at him not only as a child whom he loved, but as the incarnation

of a hope, a theory--in short, as an Experiment. Nevertheless, it was

the Parson to whom Ishmael came with his pleasures, and for all the

intuition which told him the child went to no one in his griefs Boase

had not quite enough of the feminine in him to realise the importance of

the omission.

"Where are you off to, my son?" asked Boase, sticking his hand in the

pocket of his shabby old cassock. He knew better than to pat a boy's

head or thump him between the shoulder-blades with the hearty manner

peculiar to men who have forgotten their own boyhood.

"Oh, I'm just gwain to see if the mill-wheel's workin' down along," said

Ishmael--not for worlds would he have admitted Phoebe Lenine as the

object of his visit. The Parson's eyes twinkled as they rested on the

bouquet.

"Going, not 'gwain,'" he corrected gently.

"Going," repeated Ishmael, with his deceptive docility in little things.

"I'll come to the mill with you," said the Parson briskly, and Ishmael

set off by his side without a word, but presently lagged behind a moment

to drop his carefully-prepared offering between two gorse-bushes. Boase

smiled, then sighed, wondering where such an abnormal dread of ridicule

as Ishmael's would lead; it was a result of the Parson's calling that he

should feel anxiety as to the ultimate trend of things.

The two trudged on in silence; their friendship was so tried, and the

understanding between them so complete, that they sometimes spent an

hour or more together with hardly a remark. Finally Ishmael broke

silence.

"You coming to Cry the Neck this evening, Da Boase?" he asked.

"I'm going to look in before supper," replied the Parson; and

unconsciously his lips took on a sterner line. He was building much on

that evening's "Crying the Neck," which for the first time Ishmael was

to attend, and at the succeeding supper Boase meant him to take his

place at the head of the table, as future master of Cloom. "Crying the

Neck" was a moribund custom in the eighteen-fifties, and it was the

Parson, with an eye to its possibilities, who had encouraged what proved

to be its last revival.

"Mr. Lenine's coming," remarked Ishmael presently.

"Ah! Is he coming alone?" asked Boase carelessly.

"Happen he will, or maybe they'll all come, but Mrs. Lenine always says

she must stay in of an evening when others are trapesing," replied

Ishmael, with equal carelessness. For they were Cornishmen, these two,

and the Parson would no more have asked outright "Is Phoebe coming?"

than Ishmael would have given a direct answer.

Lenine's mill, known as Vellan-Clowse, which means "The Mill by the

Wood," nestled in a valley below the Cloon moor where the leet ran along

built-up banks to the dam and then down a succession of wooden troughs

to the crest of the wheel. Facing the mill was the great cluster of elms

that headed the valley, and behind only a tiny little yard divided it

from the steepness of the hillside. The trees were the biggest for miles

in that wind-swept district, and the bed of the valley showed green and

lush with its marshy pastures, where the ugly red and white cows were

tearing at the grass. The wheel was standing dumb, as harvest was not

yet garnered, and Boase and Ishmael passed the mill door and went on to

the house. There the door stood open, as did the further one at the end

of the cool, straight passage that looked dark by contrast with the yard

beyond, where, under the blazing sun, a little girl was feeding some

fowls. The whole scene, set in the black oblong of the doorway, was

compact of blue and flame colour--the blue of the frock and the shadows

and the pale flame of the gravel where the shadows lay and the deeper

flame fowls clustered. The man and the boy looked through for a moment

in silence, then Phoebe turned and saw them.

Phoebe Lenine, being a woman of some eight years old, shook the

remains of the corn off her small blue lap with no signs of haste or

discomposure, and, turning her back, called to a hidden corner of the

yard.

"Faëther! Faëther! Passon's come to see you!"

"How d'you know I haven't called to see you, Miss Phoebe?" asked

Boase, stepping into the passage. She ran and seized him by the knees,

flinging back her head so that her dark curls hung away from her

softly-rounded face. Her pouting mouth, always slightly open to show a

hint of two little front teeth, laughed up at him, her dove's eyes

narrowed with her mirth. Of Ishmael she took no more notice than if he

had not been there, and he leant against the doorpost, scraping the

earth with the toe of his hard little boot, his thumbs stuck in his

belt.

"I be gwain to help cry the Neck over to Cloom!" announced Phoebe--to

the Parson and at Ishmael--"and I be gwain to stay to th' supper, and

maybe I'll dance wi' a chap. There's Maister Jacka's John-Willy would be

proud to dance wi' I!"

"So you're fond of dancing, Phoebe?" asked the Parson.

"Sure 'nough! Dancen' and singen'--that's life, that is. Ef you can't

dance and sing I don't see no good in liven'! I don't hold wi' chaps who

think of nawthen but wanten' to be saved. Time 'nough for that when

gettin' on for thirty!"

Ishmael winced at the hit, and the Parson laughed as he tied two of

Phoebe's ringlets into a bow under her chin.

"There are ways and ways of remembering the Creator in the days of your

youth, Phoebe," he said, "and one of them's by dancing and singing--if

it's with the right kind of chap. I don't think much of Jacka's

John-Willy; if you really want to be a great lady to-night you must get

Ishmael to dance with you. He's going to be master of the feast, and

perhaps if you ask him very nicely he'll dance with you just once."

This view of Ishmael as a person of importance was a new one to

Phoebe, and she looked at him as though appraising him afresh.

"I don't ask no chaps to dance wi' I," she announced loftily. "Faëther's

just comen' to see you, Da Boase."

She wriggled her sleek little otter-like head under his arm and slipped

past him as she spoke. Then:

"Like to see the pigs?" she asked Ishmael carelessly. "Da ringed 'en the

marnen'."

"Don't mind if I do," answered Ishmael, still scraping the gravel.

"Naden't come ef 'ee don't want to more'n thet!" retorted Phoebe, "and

I could have shown 'ee where the old pig was killed. There's been a dark

place on the stones ever since. I saw it killed, I did, Ishmael Ruan. I

saw Da stick in the knife and the blood come all out, I ded!"

"So 'a ded, my 'andsome, so 'a ded!" applauded the miller, whose big

form, powdery white, had appeared in the passage.

The Parson felt decidedly sick. He was country-born himself, and, being

no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country

people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but

this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe.

Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the

boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had

a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, and the thought of how often

the boy would have to encounter them struck at his heart.

"I won't see it," said Ishmael, pressing himself back against the house

wall; "I won't see where no pig was killed." Then, afraid lest Phoebe

should taunt him with his fear: "But I'll come and see the pigs, though

I don't s'pose they're as fine as ours. They were ringed yesterday was a

week, and even the piggy-widden's bigger than most pigs."

"Ours is bigger, ours is bigger!" cried Phoebe indignantly, "and you'm

nawthen but a gëat coward, Ishmael Ruan. I don't want _my_ pigs to set

eyes on 'ee!"

She sauntered away across the yard, but turned her head as she reached

the far end, and glanced back at Ishmael. He hesitated, pride fighting

with longing; then he also began to saunter--aimlessly at first; then,

giving up the struggle, he frankly followed her. Lenine chuckled softly.

"Talk o' the way o' a man wi' a maid--'tes nawthen to the way o' a maid

wi' a man, is it, Passon? She'll be one for the chaps, she will!"

Boase assented, laughing, then his eyes saddened, as he watched the two

little figures, side by side now, disappear round the corner of the

pig-styes. It suddenly struck him as rather horrible that anything so

innocent as Ishmael still was should develop into a man, even a healthy,

clean-living man; such a pity that the instinct that was the cause of

charming play with Phoebe should ever become desire. It was a feeling

that a mother might have had, and Boase smiled at it even as he gave a

sigh to the pity of inexorable things.

"So you're bringing Phoebe over to Cry the Neck, Sam?" he asked

casually. Sam Lenine nodded.

"Gwain be there, Passon?"

"Maybe. Fact is, Sam, I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit

that boy at the head of the table--"

Lenine nodded again, but waited in silence.

"You're an influential man," continued Boase, "and the way you speak of

him and treat things generally would rather give the lead to the people

round here."

For the third time the miller nodded, then started a little as he caught

sight of Ishmael and Phoebe reappearing from the pig-stye, and his

eyes lightened suddenly. He dropped his thickly-veined lids to hide

them.

"Happen I can do a little, Passon," he said; "I'll think on et."

"Do," said Boase heartily. Then he too started slightly and looked at

the miller a little suspiciously, and, though he said nothing, his face

darkened. Already the cords of intrigue were beginning to close round

Ishmael Ruan, and the Parson longed to break them with one clean stroke,

even while he realised the futility of the wish. He called rather

sharply to the children.

"Ishmael! You must come back with me now; there are things I want you to

do at the vicarage. Come."

Ishmael recognised the tone of authority. He was an obedient child

simply because he was so proud he would not fight a losing battle.

Sooner than be conquered he obeyed as though he were doing the thing

commanded merely because he himself wished to, and for the same reason

if he could forestall a command by his own action he did. He came to the

Parson's side.

"Must be going, Phoebe," he remarked carelessly; "I've a heap of

things to do for to-night, you see. Morning, Mr. Lenine!"

And he set off again, with his thumbs in his belt.

CHAPTER III

THE KITCHEN

Annie Ruan and three of the children were assembled in the great kitchen

preparing for the supper party that was to be held after the Neck had

been cried. The world without was still steeped in the golden light of

full afternoon, but the small windows only looked on to the courtyard

and let little of the gleam into the low-ceiled room; dimness veiled the

corners, and through it each plate on the old dresser held a faintly

glimmering crescent of light. On a sheet of iron laid upon the open

hearth the last loaves of barley-bread were baking under a crock, and

Vassilissa Beggoe was preserving the leaven for next week's breadmaking

by the simple process of placing it in a saucer of water, where it would

mildew in peace.

Vassilissa was the youngest of the four Beggoes,--only three years older

than Ishmael. She was the most like Archelaus in face, and showed

promise of a sleek, white and gold beauty to come; at present, being far

too tall for her age, she seemed unable to manage her long legs and

arms, but her movements had the graceful ungainliness of a young animal.

She was muffled in a dirty print pinafore, and above its faded blue her

neck looked a delicate privet-white, and would have looked whiter still

had it been cleaner. In the dusk her little pale head, the shape of it

clearly defined by the way in which she wore her hair sticking stiffly

out from her nape in two tiny plaits, took on a quality suggestive of a

frescoed angel--a delicately-modelled, faintly-shadowed quality that she

might miss in a stronger light. Putting the saucer of leaven on the

untidy dresser, she spoke over her shoulder to her mother.

"I be gwain to give myself a rub over and put on my Sunday gown. I be

gwain now."

Annie paused in the act of washing a plate, and let the film of dirty

water run off it into the pan again. Then she drew a deep breath, as

though the greasy-smelling steam that wavered up towards her nostrils

were the sweetest of incense. Vassilissa, who was accustomed to this

silent gathering of the forces before her mother broke into specially

impassioned speech, began calmly to untie her pinafore.

"That's right!" cried Annie, with sudden vigour; "go off and make

yourself fine, and lave me to wash all the cloam that's been standen' up

in grease these three days. Vanities o' the flesh are all you think

on, 'stead of helpen' your mother as has done everything for 'ee since

you was naught but a young babe, and that scrawlen' come night there was

no gettin' any sleep. You might not be a maid toall for the help I get

of 'ee."

"I'll help wi' the cloam," said a big, heavily-made boy who was seated

at one end of the table, eating a pasty. He crammed the last pale,

stodgy morsel into his mouth and pushed back his chair, saying:

"I'll do the cloam for 'ee, mother. Lave the maiden be."

John-James was a good-natured, thick-headed boy, the third in the

family, and the one of her children who seemed to have inherited Annie's

peasant blood undiluted. He supplied the restful element in a house

where the eldest-born was hot-tempered and revengeful and the second son

more like a girl-child for sharpness and a woman grown for scheming. Tom

had already made up his mind to be Mr. Tonkin's office boy, and from

that he meant to become articled clerk, and from that--who could tell?

Tom remained quiet on the subject of his ultimate intentions, but he was

fighting his mother's apathy and natural habit of opposition to attain

the first step in his career. Mr. Tonkin, who, as Ishmael's guardian,

visited fairly frequently at the Manor, was expected to the supper that

night, and Tom meant matters to come to a head. He had noticed what an

influence the Methodist lawyer had over his mother and meant to use it

for his own ends. Annie had a secret fear of Tom; Archelaus she adored,

and Vassilissa came only second; but John-James she held of small

account. She turned on him now even while she gave the dish into his

hands.

"There you go, John-James Beggoe, talken' as though I grudged my own

cheild maken' herself 'ansome. Vassie, my worm, you may have that bit o'

blue ribbon I bought last Corpus Fair--'tes in the chest."

Vassie was off before her mother had time to change her mind, and

John-James began slowly to rinse the china through the darkened water,

on whose surface the grease lay in a shimmering arabesque. Annie went

round the kitchen rasping the chairs over the stone floor and making

futile dabs at their seats with her apron. She had that curious

uncertainty of aim usually seen in dogs, who never seem to be sure of

touching the object at which they paw.

The head and shoulders of Archelaus, furze-laden, passed the window,

apparently floating through the luminous warmth of afternoon that filled

the courtyard as through the depths of the sea. The illusion was

shattered when he kicked the door open and, striding in, flung his

burden on to the dying fire. The sudden glow that leapt up revealed Tom

ensconced in the settle, cleaning his boots with a pat of butter stolen

from the dairy. He continued his occupation quite unmoved by the

fulminations of his mother, bending his ruddy head over the boots. Tom

was the "red-headed Dane" who crops up generation after generation in

some Cornish families.

"Hold your tongue, mother," he said at last, holding one boot at arm's

length and cocking his head sideways the better to admire the effect of

the buttering; "I'm going to look decent to-night if no one else is. And

so I don't mind a-tellen' 'ee--" with a sudden slip into the dialect

that he studiously trained himself to avoid. Any lapse of the kind meant

that Tom was not in a mood to be trifled with, and Annie turned suddenly

to Archelaus.

"Where's the cheild?" she asked.

"I set'n to gather bullock's glows for th' fire--we shall want more'n

furze for to-night," replied Archelaus. "Give I a light to take

overstairs; 'tes time I was cleanen' of myself. I'm gwain to run with

the Neck to-night."

Annie went obediently to a cupboard and took out a little cup of oil in

which a wick lay, the tongue of it drooping over the cup's rim. She lit

it with a twig from the fire and stood looking at Archelaus for a moment

with the cup in her hand. The footlight effect softened her

prominently-boned face and struck some of the over-strong colour from

her cheeks--she showed a faint hint of the prettiness that had attracted

the old Squire.

"An' who is it you'm thinken' will be at the door for 'ee to kiss when

you get in wi' the Neck?" she asked grimly.

Archelaus shuffled from one big foot to the other.

"Jenifer Keast, maybe?" pursued his mother.

"Happen Jenifer, happen another. A maid's a maid," mumbled the

disconcerted Archelaus.

Tom put his boots on the settle and stood up.

"It makes me sick to hear you, Archelaus," he declared slowly, but with

extraordinary venom for a boy of fifteen; "Jenifer Keast! Have you no

sense of who you are that you should think of Jenifer Keast?"

"She'm a fitty maid," muttered Archelaus.

"A fitty maid! Listen to the great bufflehead! She's fitty enough but

with nothing to her but the clothes on her back. You've no call to be

leading a maid toall yet. S'pose you was ever master of Cloom, what

would you be wanting with Jenifer Keast?"

"Master o' Cloom! That's plum foolishness. We all d'knaw I'd be master

o' Cloom if right were right, but there's the law siden' wi' the cheild;

devil run off wi' en!"

"If the devil don't somebody else might," said Tom, "and then Cloom'd be

mother's and ours. Eh, I wish I was the eldest; I'm the only one with a

headpiece on me."

"Th' cheild's healthy enough," grumbled Archelaus.

"My children are all healthy; I never buried but the one between Tom and

John-James and the one as never drew breath," interrupted Annie, "and if

the cheild is set up by the law he's your own flesh and blood. He would

have been as fine a cheild as any of 'ee if he'd kept his place."

"I'm not saying nothing against the brat," cried Tom in exasperated

tones; "anyone'd think I wanted'n to die by the way you go on at me. I

don't--it don't matter to me, for I'm going to be a lawyer like Mr.

Tonkin to Penzance, but Archelaus'll be a fool if he don't look higher

than Jenifer Keast."

"I'm not looken' to lead no maid," cried the badgered Archelaus,

snatching the light. "Do 'ee grudge a chap a kiss or two? What's the harm

in kissen'? You knew all about it when you was young, mother; you're a

nice one to talk to a chap, you are!"

With which unfilial gibe he disappeared.

Annie was one of those women who like a buffet, verbal or physical, from

a man, whether he be husband, brother, or son. She looked after

Archelaus with pride.

"He be rare and like his da when he's got the uglies," she said; "he'll

look fine at the head o' the table to-night, will Arch'laus."

"Parson Boase'll put Ishmael at the head of the table," announced Tom

carelessly, with a sly glance at his mother. Annie whipped round at him

in blank surprise, while even John-James paused in his washing-up and

stood gaping over a dish.

"Gwain to put my own cheild auver my head and the head of my first-born,

is 'ee?" cried Annie. "Eh, that passon! Sim'me he's lacken' his senses!

Sim'me that when the law lets a man like that come shoven' and meddlen'

in a woman's house that the law's lacken' its senses too!"

"Don't fret about the law," advised Tom; "I've heard tell the law can be

turned any way a clever chap has a mind. I'll see what I can do with it

when I'm to Mr. Tonkin, and then perhaps we'll all snap our fingers at

Parson Boase."

"Tom do talk a wunnerful passel o' nonsense," remarked John-James

placidly as his brother picked up his boots and went out. But Tom was of

the truly great who can always contain themselves when there is nothing

to be gained by an explosion, and he disappeared without answering.

Annie and John-James proceeded to put the finishing touches to the

kitchen--John-James doing all the real good that was done, and Annie

setting things backwards and forwards in her strange aimless way.

Upstairs Vassie was tying her hair--brushed out now into a short,

crimped fluff that made her look more like an angel than ever--with the

blue ribbon; while Archelaus and Tom greased their locks with the

remains of Tom's stolen butter. Soon Annie and John-James also went

upstairs to prepare themselves for the feast, and the kitchen grew

slowly dark.

Ishmael staggered across the last field with his bucket of fuel, his

lean little arms aching under its weight, but his mind singing the

triumphant refrain:

"The evening's coming, and I'm going to cry the Neck! I'm going to cry

the Neck!"

CHAPTER IV

PAGAN PASTORAL

The last of the corn had been reaped in Cloom fields and all was ready

for the ceremony of "Crying the Neck." The labourers, their womenfolk

and children, had gathered together, and Annie, with a select party of

friends, took her place in the forefront of the crowd. A very old

labourer who bore the splendid name of Melchisedec Baragwaneth, went

from sheaf to sheaf, picking out a handful of the most heavily-bearded

ears, which, though they are apt to grind the worst, still make the

bravest show. He was stiff with his great age and the cruel rheumatism

that is the doom of the field-worker; and against the brass and leather

of his boots the stubble whispered loudly. Overhead the rooks and gulls

gave short, harsh cries as they circled around hoping for stray grains;

but the thousand little lives which had thriven in the corn--the field

mice and frogs and toads--had been stilled by the sickles; some few had

escaped to the shelter of the hedges, but most were sacrifices to the

harvest.

Melchisedec Baragwaneth intertwined with his wheat ears some splendid

stalks of ragwort and chamomile, like a cluster of yellow and white

stars, and twisted tendrils of bindweed, with frail, trumpet-shaped

blossoms already drooping, around the completed bunch. His thick old

fingers fumbled over the niceties of the task, but he pushed the women's

officious hands aside, and by the aid of his toothless but bone-hard

gums pulled the knot to successfully, and the bunch became the "Neck."

Then he set off, followed by the rest of the folk, to the highest field

under grass, cresting the slope behind Cloom, the field that had been

ploughed earth when the old Squire's dying eyes looked on it from his

bedroom window.

The last of the day still held the world, and from the western rim the

sunset beat up on to one vast level stretch of cloud that nearly covered

the sky, drenching it with rose-coloured light which refracted to the

earth, steeping everything in one warm glow. The stubble stood up like

thin straight flames from a soil that showed wine-coloured, and the

green of leaf and pasture was turned by the warmth of the light to that

tender but brilliantly vivid emerald to which it wakes in the gleam of a

lantern at night. All colour was intensified, though all was suffused

with the triumphant rose, which steeped sky and air and earth till they

seemed infused with some impalpable wine; and the procession moved

through an atmosphere full of refractions and bright edges afloat in the

tender glow.

Melchisedec Baragwaneth took his stand in the middle of the field beside

the tall monolith, and his followers made a huge circle about him.

Jacka's John-Willy staggered round with a firkin of cider, and each man

set his hands about its body and took a long drink. Then Melchisedec

Baragwaneth bent slowly down, holding the Neck towards the ground, and

all the labourers bowed low over their billhooks. Still more slowly the

old man straightened himself, raising his arms till he held the bunch of

corn high above his head, like some sylvan priest elevating the Host.

The billhooks, which a moment before had lain like shining crescents on

the grass, went flashing up into blackness against the glow of the sky,

and from each man came a great shout:

_"A nack! A nack! A nack! We hav'en! We hav'en! We hav'en!"_

Three times the rite was performed, and the rose-light, that so soon

dies, had faded away, though no one could have told the actual moment of

its passing. A vibrant dusk, that to eyes still glamour-ridden seemed

full of millions of little, pricking points of light, permeated the

world, and in their harmonious-coloured clothes the people mingled with

the soft grey-green of the pasture, only their faces and hands gleamed

out a few tones paler.

With the fall of the billhooks fell solemnity, and men, women and

children ran wildly hither and thither, shouting, singing, and breaking

out into rough dances.

A new and blissful excitement tingled through Ishmael. When the

labourers had shouted he had dropped Phoebe's hand and shouted with

them, flinging up his arms. The glamorous light, the sense of something

primitive and vital that the ceremony expressed, and the stir at the

pulses caused by the sight of many people moved to do the same thing at

the same moment, went to his head. He ran about singing and leaping like

the rest, but keeping a little away from them, and quite suddenly there

came to him for the first time that consciousness of pleasure which

marks man's enjoyment off from the animal's. Hitherto, in his moments of

happiness, he had not paused to consider the matter, but merely been

happy as a puppy is when it plays in the sun. Now, suddenly, he stopped

still, and stood looking at the distant blackthorn hedge that made a

dark network against the last gleam in the west.

"I am happy? I am _being happy_!" he said to himself, and he turned this

consciousness over in his mind as he would have turned a sweet in his

mouth. Ever afterwards the memory of that moment's realisation was

connected for him with a twisted line of hedge and a background of pale

greenish sky. He stared at the distorted hedgerow that stood out so

clearly, and to him this moment was so vividly the present that he did

not see how it could ever leave off.... "This is now ..." he thought;

"how can it stop being now?" And the shouting and the still air and the

definite look of that hedge all seemed, with himself as he was and felt

at that moment, to be at the outermost edge of time, suspended there for

ever by that extreme vividness....

And then Phoebe ran up to him and dragged him off to where Sam Lenine

stood examining some of the ears he had picked on his way past the

sheaves. The miller took the toll of one twelfth of the farmer's grist,

so Sam studied the ears with care. Owing to the drought the corn was

very short in the straw, but that was not Sam's part of the business,

and he nodded his head approvingly over the quality of the ear.

Suddenly Archelaus sprang forward, snatched the Neck from Melchisedec

Baragwaneth, and made for the house, everyone crowding after him to see

the fun. At the front door stood the dairymaid, Jenifer Keast, holding a

pail of water in her strong arms, ready to souse him unless he succeeded

in entering by another way before she could reach him with the water,

when he could claim a kiss. Archelaus made a dash for the parlour

window, but the bucket swept round at him threateningly and he drew back

a moment, as though to consider a plan of campaign. He was determined to

have his kiss, for through the soft dusk that veiled any coarseness of

skin or form, and only showed the darkness of eyes and mouth on the warm

pallor of her face, she looked so eminently kissable. Before she could

guess his intention he ran round the angle of the house wall, down to

the dairy window, and, plunging through it, came up the passage at her

back. Seizing her by the waist, he swung her round and took his kiss

fairly from her mouth, and, though she struggled so that the water

drenched him, he felt her lips laughing as they formed a kiss.

CHAPTER V

HEAD OF THE HOUSE

For years Ishmael was unable to remember that evening without a tingling

sense of shame. The unwonted excitement, combined with the prominence

which the Parson successfully achieved for him, went to his head and

caused him to "show off." The thought of how he had chattered and

boasted, talking very loudly and clumping with his feet when he walked,

so as to sound and feel like a grown-up man, would turn him hot for

years, when, in the watches of the night, it flashed back on him. Long

after everyone else had forgotten, even if they had ever noticed it, his

lack of self-control on that evening was a memory of shame to him. He

clattered across to his place at the head of the table, and was

mortified that a couple of big old calf-bound books had to be placed on

his chair to make him sit high enough. Phoebe and the Parson were at

either side, and the foot of the table was taken by Annie, Archelaus,

defiant and monosyllabic, on her left, and Lawyer Tonkin, glossy with

black broadcloth, on her right. The lawyer had a haunting air as of

cousinship to things ecclesiastical, and, indeed, he was lay-preacher at

a Penzance chapel. Tom, who had taken care to set himself on his other

hand, kept a careful eye for his plate and glass, being particularly

liberal with the cider. The lawyer spoke little; when he did his voice

was rich and unctuous--the sort of voice that Ishmael always described

to himself as "porky." He was as attentive to Mrs. Ruan's wants as Tom

to his, and she, never a great talker save in her outbursts, still kept

up a spasmodic flow of low-toned remarks to him, whom of all men she

held in highest veneration.

His spiritual powers she rated far higher than those of the Parson, who

never fulminated from the pulpit till she felt the fear of hell melting

her bones within her. This the lawyer did, and managed at the same time

to make her feel herself a good woman, one of the saved, and the

piquancy of the double sensation was the hidden drug of Annie's life.

She dallied with thoughts of eternal suffering as a Flagellant with

imagings of torture, and when her mind was reeling at the very edge of

the pit she would pull herself back with a loud outcry on the Almighty,

followed by a collapse as sensuous in its utter laxity.

Annie would have been shocked if anyone had tried to force on her the

idea, that, in the unacknowledged warfare which enwrapped Ishmael,

Tonkin was on her side as against the child; but even she was dimly

aware that he and Boase, joint guardians as they were, stood in opposite

camps. But it was towards her, the respectable widow-woman, the owner,

but for Ishmael, of the biggest estate in all Penwith, that Tonkin's

current of consideration flowed, whereas hers, after her religion, was

perpetually set about Archelaus. He, the beautiful young man with the

round red neck and the white arms and the strong six feet of height,

whom she had made and given to the world, to him she would have given

the world and all the heavens had it been in her power. And, as things

were, she could not even give him Cloom Manor and its fruitful acres. Of

this impotency Archelaus was even more aware than usual as he sat beside

her and glowered down the table at his little brother.

Ishmael was still showing off, though less noisily, for he was feeling

very tired and sleepy; the unaccustomed cider and the heavy meal of

roast mutton, in a house where there was rarely any meat except

occasional rashers, were proving too potent for him. The room was

intensely hot, the prevailing notion of comfort being to shut every

window at night, and a large fire, before which the side of mutton had

been gravely twirling for hours, was only now beginning to subside. The

candles guttered and grew soft in the warmth, beads of moisture stood

out on the faces of the company, and the smell of incompletely-washed

bodies reminded the Parson of hot afternoons with his Sunday school.

Phoebe found Ishmael dull since his volubility had begun to desert

him, and turning a disdainful shoulder, she tried to draw Jacka's

John-Willy into conversation--a difficult matter, since, though he had

been placed there instead of in the barn for Phoebe's benefit, he felt

the watchful eye of his mother, who was waiting at table, too frequently

upon him for his comfort.

Katie Jacka, her colour more set than it had been when she witnessed

that marriage eight years ago, was as emotional as ever, her facile

feelings only restrained at all by her husband's rigid taciturnity, even

as her high bosom was kept up by the stiffest of "temberan busks"--a

piece of wood which, like all self-respecting Cornishwomen, she wore

thrust inside the front of her stays. Philip Jacka, who was now headman

at the farm, presided at the labourer's supper in the big barn, whither

everyone would presently repair, including Ishmael, if he were not too

sleepy. The Parson divided his attention between him and Mr. Lenine, who

was expanding to greater and greater geniality, always with that

something veiled behind his eyes. He encouraged Ishmael, trying to draw

him out when the Parson, seeing the child was, in nursery parlance, "a

bit above himself," would have kept him quiet.

"Well, young maister"--at the phrase in the miller's booming voice ears

seemed visibly to prick down the length of the table--"well, and how do

'ee like helpen' to Cry the Neck?"

"Fine, that I do," came Ishmael's shrill tones; "an' I'm gwain to have

en cried every year, and I'll give ever so much bigger suppers, with

beef and pasties and beer as well as cider, and saffern cakes and--";

here his tongue failed at the list in his excitement.

Annie had gone a dull crimson, and she drew the whistling breath that

with her was the precursor of storm. Help for her outraged feelings and

a snub for the young master came from a quarter which surprised them

both.

"It is not you who give the supper, Ishmael," spoke the Parson quietly;

"it is your mother. And unless you show you know how to behave she will

never let you sit up again."

Annie expelled the breath unaccompanied by any flow of words. Archelaus

sniggered, and Ishmael sat in that terrible embarrassment that only

children know, when the whole world turns black and shame is so intense

that it seems impossible to keep on with life at all. His face was one

burning flush, his eyes stung with tears he was too proud to let fall.

All his wonderful day had fallen about his ears, and it seemed to him

that such a mortification, added to his own shamed sense of having

disappointed Da Boase, would burden him so that he could never be happy

again. And only a couple of hours earlier he had realised for the first

time how splendid somehow life and everything in it was, himself

included ... and now all was over. He sat staring at the congealed

remains of a pasty on his plate. He did not see how it was possible to

go on living.

Suddenly a soft, very small hand slid into his lap under cover of the

table's corner, and Phoebe's fingers curled round his as she

whispered: "Don't 'ee mind, Ishmael. Don't cry. Tell 'ee what, I'll

dance weth 'ee, so I will."

"I'm not cryen'." Ishmael's accent was always most marked when he was

struggling with emotion. "I'm not cryen' toall. But I don't mind if I do

dance a bit weth 'ee if you want me to."

A grinding of chair legs over the flags proclaimed the end of the feast,

and the Parson, who, rather to Ishmael's resentment, was smiling as

though nothing had been the matter, caught hold of him with one hand and

of Phoebe with the other and led the way to the barn.

Out-of-doors the air struck exquisitely cool and fresh to heated faces;

the courtyard was lapped in shadow, but once through and in the farmyard

the moon was visible, still near the horizon and swimming up inflated,

globulous, like a vast aureate bubble. Save for that one glow everything

looked as chill as underseas; the whitewashed walls of the out-buildings

glimmered faintly, the heaped corn had paled to a greyish silver, the

shadows were blue as quiet pools. The whole world seemed to have been

washed clean by the moonlight.

The sense of calm only lasted as far as the door of the barn--not as far

to the ear, for the sounds of merry-making came gustily out before the

opening of the door showed an oblong of glowing orange that sent a shaft

into the night, to fade into the darkness that it deepened. It was not

quite as hot in the barn as it had been in the kitchen, for the building

was much loftier and boasted no fire. Lanterns swung from the beams,

throwing upwards bars of shadow that criss-crossed with the rafters and

trembled slightly as the flames flickered, so that the whole roof seemed

spun over by some gigantic spider's web, while the shadow-patterns

thrown by the lanterns on to the floor below looked like great spiders

dropped from the meshes. In this impalpable tangle sat the men and

women--tenants of cottages, labourers, farm servants and their children,

all who had been helping with the harvest. Jenifer Keast was there,

flushed now instead of with that mysterious pallor of the dusk, and to

her Archelaus made his way with a sort of bashful openness, followed by

glances and sly smiles. People felt disposed to condone whatever was in

the way of nature, for the meal of hoggans--pasties with chunks of bacon

in them, superior to the fuggans of everyday life, which only harboured

raisins--of pilchards steeped in vinegar and spices, all washed down by

strong cider, had combined to give that feeling of physical well-being

which causes the soul also to relax.

Archelaus, suddenly irked by proximity to the girl or fired by the

thought of an excuse to clasp her more fully, sprang up and called for

helpers to clear the floor. The long trestle tables were pushed to one

side and everything that lay upon the dusty boards swept away, even to

the form of old Melchisedec Baragwaneth, the high-priest of an earlier

hour, who was found with his head under a bench and his stiff old legs

sprawled helplessly.

The Parson did not mean Ishmael to stay for more than a dance or two, if

that, so he determined to get the thing on which he had set his mind

done at once. Picking the boy up, he stood him on the table, just where

a lantern, hitched to the wall, threw its beam of light, for the Parson

was nothing if not a stage manager by instinct. An awkward silence fell

upon the assembly; men scraped their feet uneasily through its hush.

For a moment the Parson let his eyes wander over the clustered faces,

full of strong colour in the warm light, with bright, vacant looks and

half-open mouths. He knew everyone there, had christened and married

many of them, he knew their individual count of kindness and coarseness

and self-seeking; knew how hard-working they were, how thriftless, how

generous and strangely tolerant, yet how harsh at times in condemnation.

It was to their charity of outlook he wished to appeal now, or rather

wished Ishmael to make an unconscious appeal.

"There's no need for me to make any speech to you, my friends," he

began. "You all know me, and I know you. We've trusted each other and

worked together for a good many years now, and please God we shall for

many more. You are all to me as my children. But there's one amongst

us--" (and here his hand on Ishmael's shoulder seemed to bring the

shrinking little boy into greater prominence) "who is even more of a

trust to me than any of you. He is a trust to you too--to me because I

am his guardian, pledged to see that he grows up into a man who will

make a good and just Squire to his tenants, to you because you are those

tenants. I think I can promise you that as your Squire grows up it will

mean better and better times for all of you, that things won't be so

hard. There was a time when the Squires of Cloom were noted for their

generosity and just dealing, when, so they say, every man on the estate

had his side of pork--ay, and half a sheep too--in his kitchen, and a

good coat to his back the year round, and wages to put in his stocking.

Those times will come again when the glories of Cloom are restored, when

it is once more a good gentleman's estate...."

The Parson had spoken quietly but very deliberately. He knew how public

feeling had sided with Annie and the dispossessed Archelaus. The people

had grown so used to associating on a familiar level with the powers at

the Manor that they had ceased to think of the advantages of a different

mode of intercourse. The idea that they would themselves benefit by the

restoration of Cloom and its owner to the old position of gentry had

never occurred to them. It was true that it would mean the elevation of

this intruding child, who was merely the son of their Annie, whom they

all knew, but at the same time it meant certain obligations towards

them. It meant more money, help in times of stress, security. That was

a thing worth considering. The old Squire had hoarded his income and let

his fortune swell; if the all-powerful Parson were going to bring this

child up in the way he suggested it meant that money would be spent, and

on them....

The Parson gave his idea time enough to arrive, though not long enough

to be turned over. He pushed Ishmael gently forward again.

"Say what I told you," he bade him, "and no more."

At that moment something came to Ishmael which had failed him in that

evening's ordeal--a poise, a confidence of touch which was his by

inheritance, though so long unsummoned. He straightened himself and

thrust his hands into the pockets of his little breeches.

"Thank you very much for having come to-night," he said, in a voice free

from any twang of dialect--the voice he fell into naturally after a day

alone with the Parson: "I'm very glad you could come. I hope I'll often

see you and that we'll all be very happy together...." He paused, could

think of nothing more to say, so retreated back in sudden shyness

against the Parson's arm.

There was another moment of hush. Archelaus was sitting, his face suffused,

staring in front of him; a murmuring of "the pretty lil' dear" ... ran

amongst the women. It was Lenine who brought the moment to its fit rounding.

"Three cheers for Missus and the lil' Squire," he called, and on that

able blend of sentiments all voices met with a roar. As the last sound

died away Phoebe could be heard clamouring:

"I can do things too; Da Boase nadn't think Ishmael can do it all. I can

dance and sing, I can!"

"So thee can, my worm," boomed the miller, and, swinging her up, he

stood her also on the table. "Shaw us what 'ee can do, my beauty," he

encouraged her.

Phoebe, not at all shy, spread her crumpled skirts and did a little

dance that consisted of jigging up and down in the same place, to the

accompaniment of a sing-song of one verse:

"I likes coffee an' I likes tea,

I likes th' chaps an' th' chaps likes me,

So, mawther, you go an' hold your tongue--

You had a fellow when you was young!"

Thus piped Phoebe, and the audience applauded with clapping and

laughter. Her cheeks were ablaze with the excitement of success; she

seized on Ishmael for the promised dance. But the Parson bade him say

good-night and come away. He remained deaf to all appeals from Phoebe

for just one dance, only one, and, making his own farewells, bore

Ishmael back with him to the Vicarage for the night. He was going to run

no risk of an anti-climax.

CHAPTER VI

REACTIONS

There are days in life which, to the backward look of later years stand

out with undying vividness, and this not necessarily because of any

import attached to them; often, in the irrational workings of memory,

very vital affairs refuse to come when bid, while quite little things or

aspects of them are imprinted on the mind for ever. That ceremony of

"Crying the Neck" at Cloom had, it is true, been for Ishmael Ruan a

notable happening, but it was for a certain pictorial brilliance that he

retained it so clearly in after years, and not for any strategic

importance, which at the time would not have impressed him. Yet, long

afterwards, in the light of that memory, he saw how his life had turned

a corner on that occasion, and how after it a different phase began.

Life to him at that time was, of course, entirely centred round himself,

the only organism of which he was thoroughly aware. People went to fill

his world, but only as they affected him. Archelaus was a terrific being

whom he held in awe for his feats of strength, but about whom he was

beginning to be conscious of a certain inferiority. Tom he dreaded for

his powers of sarcasm, and here he felt no sense of superiority as he

did over Archelaus; Tom could make him feel even smaller than the Parson

could, and with no kindly intention behind to soften the knock.

But if everyone else were out of temper, there was always one person he

could be sure of finding the same, and that was John-James--good, kind,

reliable John-James, whom he adored. Did he want a boat made? John-James

would do it with those big hands which looked so clumsy and were so

sure and careful. Had he broken the rope reins with which he and Jacka's

John-Willy played at horses? John-James would mend them. All of kindness

and consideration to be found for him in that house he extracted from

John-James. One thing only he could not get even from him, and that was

a return of his deep devotion. This was not because of any bitter

feeling in the elder boy's heart. Ishmael had done him no harm, and he

bore him no grudge; neither, since he was not an admirer of his elder

brother Archelaus, did he take up his cause. It simply was that

John-James was not made for the emotions. He knew nothing about them and

they made him uncomfortable. For a long while Ishmael failed to discover

this. He flung himself upon John-James, and felt him satisfactorily

solid and worried no more on the matter. But when, in the natural course

of development, his mind began to feel pain as well as discomfort at the

chill which met him from his family, he turned to his sure support for

help in this also, he found a blank. John-James would take him fishing,

save his pastry for him, stand between him and harshness, but he would

not, because he could not, give him love to live on. If he had one

outward-flowing sensation it was towards his sister Vassilissa. Ishmael

was just the "lil' un" and a trouble because the cause of trouble, but

Vassie was something so infinitely quicker, cleverer, more elusive than

himself that she stood to John-James for what of beauty was interwoven

with the very everyday stuff of his life. She, like Ishmael, was at the

intensely personal period, though with her it took objective form in

dress and pleasures rather than in the subjective wonderings of her

youngest brother. As to John-James, he hardly entered into the fabric of

her existence. Life to her was the cat-like attempt to get as much

comfort as possible regardless of others. The only emotion Ishmael

obtained out of Cloom came from Katie Jacka, and that was rather

unhealthy, because furtive and sentimental, and he only detested it. As

to his mother, that hectic, uneven creature, she was to him a

loud-voiced person of tempers and tendernesses equally gusty, not a

being as much "I" to herself as he was to himself. It was only on the

day following the supper party that he began to be affected by her as a

violent personality.

It was a grey day, threatening with rain which might mean ruin to the

cut corn waiting to be stacked in the great arishmows that always seemed

to Ishmael like the tents of some magic host. All the way up from the

Vicarage, which lay a couple of sloping miles away, his thoughts and

hopes were busy, triumphing over the greyness and the faint damping mist

that blew in from the sea like smoke. For, somehow, after last night, he

expected everything to be "different." How, he hardly knew; but for the

first time in his life he had been allowed to be himself--more, himself

had been discovered to be Somebody. True, there had been that

mortification at supper which gave him what felt like an actual physical

hollow in his chest when he thought of it, but after that the Parson had

set him up and everyone had cheered him, and Archelaus had not dared do

anything to spoil it. He had been called "the little master"--well, if

last night, why not to-day? Katie would probably be cleaning up when he

arrived, but she would see him and call out. "Here's the little master

come back!" ... and his mother would ask him whether he would like a

piece of cake. So he went on planning, after the dramatic manner of all

imaginative children. He would be very nice to them all, but he too

would be different, now that he knew who he was. For the Parson, finding

him intensely puzzled, had partially explained to him that morning.

Questions of legitimacy, and any reflection on his mother, Boase had

omitted for the time being, merely telling him that when he was grown

up Cloom would be his because his father had willed it so. He tried to

impress on Ishmael that usually the eldest son inherited everything, and

so it was natural that Archelaus should feel hurt about it. At first

Ishmael, with the quick generosity of his age, had wanted to give Cloom

up to his brother there and then, but the Parson talked gravely to him,

impressing on him for the first time what was to be the keynote of his

teaching, that never, never must he forget that Cloom was the great

trust of his life. What he made of Cloom was everything; he could not

shift this thing God had put upon him. Thus the Parson, to whom what he

was to make of Ishmael had become the absorbing passion of his own life.

Boase made Ishmael promise not to let anyone know he had been told about

it; that, too, was part of the trust--that Ishmael should prepare

himself in secret, by diligent study, for this thing that was to be his.

The child promised, proud of the confidence, his imagination thrilled by

the romance that had come to him, and so, although he meant to be quite

nice to everyone, there was a tinge of kindly pity in the manner he

pictured himself displaying when he arrived home. And, overriding even

these plans for the immediate future, was a tingling sense of glory he

had never known before, the glory of this trust that was to fill his

life....

No hailing of him as little master or as anything else took place when

he reached home; Katie was busy at the washhouse, and he met no one

amidst all the dreary litter of last night's festivities till he came on

his mother in the back kitchen. The piled dresser showed a muddle of

unwashed dishes, and the floor was gritty with mud. Annie looked, and

was, dirty with exertion; and even the steam that wreathed upwards from

the washbowl added a sense of uncleanness to the air. Ishmael was too

young to be depressed by dirt, which he rather liked, but the greyness

of it all settled on him like a blight.

He had been right about one thing--there was a distinct change in

Annie's manner. It was not, however, any difference such as he had

imagined; it went deeper than mere speech. As he entered his mother came

over to him, and, tilting up his chin, searched his eyes with hers till

he felt uncomfortable. He jerked his head away, retreating against the

door which had swung to behind him.

"Eh," said Annie, and he knew it was not to him she spoke; "it is to be.

The Lard will accept him as He accepted the infant Samuel."

Ishmael began to be afraid; his mother's eyes had the glitter in them

that usually went with one of her storming fits, but now she was quiet,

though tense. "What is it, mother?" he asked nervously, staring at her

in his turn.

"You'm a brand to be plucked from the burning," she told him, "an' by

the grace of God mine's to be the hand that'll pluck 'ee. You'll be

saved along of your poor old mawther, won't 'ee, dearie?"

Then, as Ishmael showed no disposition to do anything but try and get

away, she caught up a slab of heavy-cake which lay on the dresser. "Thee

mustn't be afeared of thy mawther, my worm," she murmured, her voice

more coaxing than he had ever heard it; "we're gwain before the Lard

hand in hand.... There, take this bit o' food into the yard, but don't

'ee go far. Do 'ee hear what I say, Ishmael?"

He hastened with a submissive "Yes" and then fled, cake in hand. Out in

the yard his little mind struggled in vain with the problem of this

change, for there was no added respect in his mother's treatment of him,

such as his stepping openly into the position of owner of Cloom might

have made. Neither, his child's true instinct told him, was it affection

suddenly awakened in her. He cast about vainly for what it might mean.

Presently he went into the washhouse, where Katie and another woman were

busy; they took scant notice of him, but went on discussing the fact

that Archelaus had not been home to bed all night, had not long come in,

and gone upstairs, where he still was, snoring for all to hear. Ishmael

was not altogether ignorant, and allusions were bandied back and forth

across his head which he was at once too young and too old to hear

unscathed.

Left alone, Annie went upstairs, listened a moment outside the door of

her eldest-born, then went on to the tiny room over the porch that was

Ishmael's. And there, on her knees by the bed, she prayed silently, her

eyes rolling till a slather of white showed beneath each faded iris, her

reddened fingers wringing each other so that patches of pallor sprang

out on them.

Annie was in the midst of a religious crisis that had overwhelmed her

like a typhoon. She was one of those women who must have an outlet for

passion. It had taken merely physical form with her in the days of the

old Squire, but since her elevation to the position of a widow-woman she

had undergone "conversion." What she had hitherto accepted, much as her

farm beasts accepted it--as a clamorous necessity--she now held to be a

thing accursed. Her position was an inconsistent one, as she was quick

to uphold her ill-used righteousness with her neighbours; but that did

not worry Annie, whose mind, blurred and wavering, never faced anything

squarely.

Lawyer Tonkin had gazed into her eyes when he said good-night, and she

had felt his moist and pudgy hand squeeze hers; but she knew it was the

eyes and hand of the widow-woman, the owner, but for Ishmael, of Cloom

Manor, with which the lawyer had dallied. Her sense of her position was

flattered and a glimpse of a yet more consequential one flashed before

her, but no thrill went with it. It was in the grip of what she would

have thought a very different emotion that she had gone up to her room.

For Tonkin had told her of a noted revivalist who was coming through

West Penwith, and already she felt the first delicious tremblings of

that orgy of fear which should be hers.

Hers and another's, for she was set on the redemption of her beloved

first-born, her beautiful Archelaus. Him she would lead to the heavenly

courts and win forgiveness for the sin of his creation; he, the brand

she had lit, should by her be plucked from the burning. Crossing over to

her window, she had leaned her hot brow against the pane, closing her

eyes in an ecstasy of prayer. It was very dim still in the house, but

without the first faint pallor of the dawn was growing, and against it

every solid object showed distinct and black. And, opening her eyes,

Annie saw, silhouetted darkly with the precision of sculpture against

the paling sky, the figures of Archelaus and a girl. He was half-lifting

her over the stile whose stone steps crested the edge of the hill, and

for a second the two figures stayed poised on the topmost step. The girl

seemed protesting, even struggling, though with slaps that were more

horseplay than earnest, and the next moment the boy's big arms had

caught her and dragged her out of sight down on the far side of the

stile.

The whole quick vignette was over in a flash, but Annie fell back from

the window with all the egoism in her dulled nature torn awake. A more

normal mother, of a more refined type, might have thought what she had

seen meant nothing but a rude flirtation; Annie's blood told her

differently. If she had merely heard of the matter her lack of

visualising power would have saved her from sensation; it was the sight

of those two striving figures which had made her feel. She moaned that

her baby son had grown up and away from her, and she agonised over his

soul, which she had planned to wrest for the Lord during the coming

revival--small heed would she get Archelaus to pay to his soul now this

new thing was opening before him. Her mind was conscious of a great

emptiness where her scheme for the salvation of Archelaus had been

waxing.

Annie had about as much true moral sense as a cat. Her quarrel with

Archelaus was not that, in a wayside copse, with some girl, Jennifer or

another, he was learning as fact what he had long known in theory; the

chastity of a man, even of her beloved son, meant very little to her.

Terrible things, far worse than the casual mating of a man and a maid,

happen in the country, and it needed something keenly sharpened to make

Annie's dulled sensitiveness feel a shock. She raged that her son was

taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had

denied her lovely boy. And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind

her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there

lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger against life. Some last

remnant of femininity cried out because for her it was all over--gone

the shudderings and the fierce delights.... Suddenly she felt intensely

old, and she collapsed from her kneeling attitude on to her heels and

sat there slackly. Youth is so confident that it can never grow old, and

then one day unthinking middle age awakens and finds that it has become

so.

Then stirred in Annie the outraged feeling of a parent, which says that

it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion.

It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible

in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning

to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the

fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like

that about other people, but differently about themselves.

Broad daylight had seen Archelaus return, but by then Annie had fallen

into a heavy sleep and did not hear his entry, though there was nothing

furtive about it; rather was it the unashamed clatter of the master. She

awoke to deadness of all feeling except the thought of the revival that

was to sweep like a flail over the land, and in her tired but avid mind

that winnowing began to assume the proportions of the chief thing for

which to live. She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of

inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the

youngest--he whom she could flaunt in the face of God and men. Some

receptacle for passion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman,

it had to be a personal one. Archelaus had gone beyond her clutch, Tom

she knew would evade her, John-James she, like Ishmael, found

unresponsive. As for girls, she placed them below any male creature. She

loved Vassie far more than she did Ishmael, if she could be said to love

him at all, but nevertheless he was a son. Her punishment for sin might

be that those other more dearly loved ones were not to be among the

saved, but this child she could shake in the face of the Almighty....

It was by this new passion that Ishmael, with his foolish little plans

of a new importance, found himself caught up and held relentlessly.

CHAPTER VII

THE CHAPEL

The revivalist preacher had come, and was indeed sweeping the land like

a flail. Everyone was caught up in that threshing, and staid old

church-goers of years rushed into the chapels and added their groans and

outcries to the rest. Parson Boase stood aside, powerless while the

excitement lasted. Those were days when Methodism was at its most harsh;

the pure, if fierce, white flame of Whitefield and Thomson and Wesley

had become obscured by the redder glare and smoke of that place whose

existence seemed the chief part of these latter-day Methodists' creed.

Hell was the theme of sermon and hymn--a hell of concrete terrors enough

to scare children in their beds at night. Thanks to the Parson, Ishmael

had hitherto been kept out of this maelstrom of gloomy fears, but now

that Annie, with the vicarious piety of so many women, had set her mind

on his "conversion," he too was to run the gamut of religious emotion,

in which it has been said there are contained all the others.

Ishmael, in so far as at that age he could be said to wish to attend any

place of prayer at all, was quite pleased to be going to chapel, partly

because he had never been allowed to, and partly because the singing,

from without, always sounded so much noisier and more frequent than

church music. Annie impressed on him that he was to say nothing to the

Parson about her intentions, and, though it made Ishmael uncomfortable

and even miserable to think of deceiving his friend, he was too afraid

of his mother to go against her, especially since this new sustained

violence was upon her.

It was a weekday evening when the preacher came to the gaunt little

chapel which affronted the skies at the highest curve of the moorland

road. Annie had put on her Sunday clothes, though she had ripped the

feather out of her bonnet as a concession to the spirit of repentance,

and she dressed Ishmael with care in the fine little nankeen suit with

braided tunic that the Parson's housekeeper had made for him. She oiled

his unruly black hair till it looked as though painted on to his bullet

head, except for the obstinate forelock that would fall over his eyes;

then she took him firmly by the hand and they set out together. Vassie,

to whom any gathering was better than none, was already gone with a girl

friend; John-James, who was the Martha of the family, had too much to

attend to at the farm; while Archelaus was frankly a scoffer, though an

uneasy one. Neither was Annie anxious for the presence of her other

children at chapel. The belief that as a judgment on her these

dearly-loved ones were not to be among the saved had been growing; it

was to be Ishmael whom the Lord demanded of her; it was by the tail of

his little tunic that she, clinging, should also be swept into the

region of the secure. Archelaus had failed her; that must be meant to

show that it was not the children of her heart who were chosen by the

Almighty. It was with a set mind and look that she urged Ishmael along

the rough track that curved inland over the moor, its rain-filled ruts

shining in the glamorous evening light.

They were not the only people on that errand; the pale road was

scattered with moving specks of blackness--solitary old men and women

that stumbled on faster than they had done for years in their anxiety

lest no place should be left for them; family groups already discussing

all they had heard of the preacher; knots of youths, half-ribald and

half-curious, encouraging each other as over their reluctant spirits

there blew the first breath of that dread which was to send them,

shaking, to the penitents' bench. Little children, sagging sideways from

the hand of a grown-up relation, dragged their feet along that road,

taken to the means of salvation willy-nilly.

Ishmael's heart began to stir within him; the sight of so many people

all intent on the same way affected him curiously with a tingling of

excitement. But at the first glimpse of the hideous chapel--one of those

buildings found throughout the Duchy which rebuke God for ever having

created beauty--seemed to Ishmael like some awful monster sucking in its

prey. The chapel had one chimney cocked like an ear, and two large front

windows that were the surprised eyes in a face where the door made a

mouth, into which the black stream of people was pouring. If he had ever

heard of Moloch he would have been struck by the resemblance, and

unfairly so, for when revivals were not in the air that ugly little

chapel was served very faithfully by a spiritually-minded minister, who

hurled himself all the year round against the obduracy of the people.

Ishmael had a quick movement of withdrawal as his mother led him in

through the prosaic yellow-grained doors, but it availed him nothing.

Another moment and he was being propelled into a pew.

They were in good time, and Ishmael stared about him curiously. The

place was very bare and ugly--the walls washed a cold pale green, the

pews painted a dull chocolate that had flaked off in patches, the pulpit

a great threatening erection that stood up in the midst of the pews and

dominated them, like a bullying master confronting a pack of little

boys.

The chapel was lit by lamps hung in iron brackets, and, the oil used

being extracted from pilchards, a strong fishy odour pervaded the air.

The pews soon filled to overflowing; people even sat up the steps of

the pulpit and stood against the walls; every place was taken save in

the front pew that was being kept for penitents. Annie had told Ishmael

of its import, and he stared at it in morbid fascination.

There was a stir and a sound throughout the chapel when the preacher

made his appearance. Quite an ordinary-looking man, thought Ishmael with

a sense of flatness, unable to note the height of the brow and its

narrowness at the temples, the nervous twitching of the lids over the

protuberant eyeballs and the abrupt outward bulge of the head above the

collar at the back. Abimelech Johns was a tin-miner who had spent his

days in profane swearing and coursing after hares with greyhounds until

the Lord had thrown him into a trance like that which overtook Saul of

Tarsus, and not unlike an epileptic fit Abimelech himself had had in

childhood. Since the trance he was a changed man; his passion for souls

was now as great as his passion for pleasure had been before, and he had

a name for working himself and his congregations up to a higher pitch

than any one who had been on that circuit for years past. It was known

to be a terrible thing to see Abimelech wrestling with the Lord.

The meeting began quietly enough with a long extemporary prayer from the

preacher that was more a confident button-holing of the Almighty, and

Ishmael began to feel bored and at the same time relieved. Then the

first thrill of instinctive protest ran through him as the voices of old

and young arose in a hymn:

"There is a dreadful hell

And everlasting pains,

Where sinners do with devils dwell,

In darkness, fire and chains."

Thus bellowed the strong voices of the men and the reedier tones of the

women, while the clear little pipes of the children went up

complacently. Ishmael was not alarmed yet, but his attention was

attracted. Then Abimelech went up into the pulpit and stood there a few

moments with closed eyes, communing with unseen powers before entering

on the good fight. When he opened them it could be seen that in one he

had a slight cast; this was wont to grow more marked with emotion, and

gave at all times the disconcerting impression that he was looking every

way at once. It seemed to Ishmael that that light glittering gaze was

fixed on him, and he was aware of acute discomfort. Annie whispered him

sharply not to fidget, and the next moment the preacher gave out his

text: "For many are called, but few are chosen." With a long breath of

anticipation the congregation settled itself to listen.

Of what was done and said that evening Ishmael fortunately only carried

away a blurred impression, owing to the frenzy that it all threw him

into. Every text in the Old Testament and the New that bore on hell-fire

and the unrelenting wrath of God the preacher poured down. He impressed

on his hearers that eternity went on for ever and ever, that each

night's sleep in this world might be the last moment of unconsciousness

the soul would know for everlasting. He painted man as being guilty from

his start, only to be saved by the grace of this offended tyrant Who had

made him vile because it seemed good to Him so to do. The preacher

called on all present to flee from the wrath to come, from the

inevitable condemnation hanging over them if they persisted in their

sins; he talked of lusts and dishonesties and lies and envyings, and

accused everyone of all of them. Ishmael, his heart turning cold within

him, remembered how he had lied to the Parson about that evening's

meeting, how he lied to his mother many times a day for the sake of

ease; remembered how he and Jacka's John-Willy had pored over a snail

which they had unearthed in the act of laying her eggs. There they were,

still adhering to her--a cluster of little opaque white spheres, like

soapy bubbles. He and John-Willy had used the occasion to try and add to

their store of knowledge, and the memory of that unedifying discussion

made Ishmael burn now. That time, too, when he stole his mother's Bible

from her room that he might puzzle over portions of it which he had

better have left unread. True, it had been John-Willy--whose household

did not include a Bible and who could not read--who had started him on

the course and urged him on, for as boys go, especially country-bred

boys, Ishmael was singularly clean of thought by nature, and also far

more ignorant than he knew, but none the less conscience accused him and

him only. He knew the sin of it, because he was aware of what the Parson

thought of such goings-on, and John-Willy had no such guide to right and

wrong. All these crimes thronged on him now, and still the awful voice

went on. The chapel grew hotter and hotter, and the flames shuddered at

the wicks till to Ishmael's starting eyes the shadowy walls seemed

a-quiver, and the people's faces swelled and diminished again. The

groans that began to sound from all around him bewildered him so that

sight and hearing became one confused sense and the place seemed dark

with the groaning. Then cries began to pierce the medley of sound and

vision. "Lord, save us, we perish!" shrieked a woman just behind

Ishmael, while Annie rocked herself back and forth, the tears streaming

down her face as she gave vent to little howls like an animal in

distress.

* * * * *

The preacher was clutching the rim of the pulpit with both hands, his

face had turned to a curious greenish colour, his eyes were rolled

upwards till only the whites could be seen: he was no longer articulate;

convulsive shudders tore at him, froth dabbled his chin. Suddenly he

fell down inside the pulpit and was lost to view, all except those

fearful hands, that clutched and beat at the rim. Then that too ceased,

and they hung over motionless, like the hands of someone drowned....

The whole chapel was clamorous now with cries and groanings, but a

comparative stillness fell as the preacher's hands gripped the edge of

the pulpit again and he dragged himself erect. The sweat ran down his

white face and splashed like tears on to the Bible before him.

"Who is going to stand forth and be saved?" he yelled: "Who amongst you

is still a prisoner to Satan? Let him come forth and confess the Lard. I

see 'ee over there"--pointing a shaking forefinger--"you'm hesitating.

You can't make up your mind to give up that sin you love. Give it up, or

this night thy soul shall be required of thee, and all the devils in

hell shall play at ball with it in the midst of the flames."

Several men, each convinced that finger had threatened him, rose to

their feet and struggled towards the penitents' pew, the tears streaming

down their drawn faces, their breath rasping as though they had been

running. A young girl sprang up and ripped the ribbon off the straw

bonnet she was wearing; the sharp tearing sound added an alien note to

the babel. Then she too, trembling violently, attained the pew and fell

on her knees, the despoiled bonnet askew on her bowed head. One after

another all those not already converted made their way through the

encouraging throng to the fateful pew.

Annie shook Ishmael by the arm.

"Get up," she urged excitedly; "go to the pew, Ishmael. Confess the

Lard, de 'ee hear? You'm got to confess the Lard."

But Ishmael, sick with fear, was crouching down, trying to shield both

eyes and ears at the same time with his enfolding arms. He shrieked as

Annie touched him.

"Go to wance," she commanded. "You heard what the minister said? You'll

die and go to hell unless you repent. Get up and be saved ...;" and she

drew him to his feet, his struggles unavailing against her.

But at sight of that sinister pew, choked with its weeping throng of

ugly people, Ishmael went distraught with fear. He felt if he were put

in that place of dread he would die at once. He fought Annie's grasp for

a moment, screaming wildly, then collapsed in a little heap against her.

Annie thought he was dead, and that her offering, like Cain's, had

proved unacceptable on high. She drew back in horror, her hands dabbing

aimlessly from her own face to the sides of the pew. It was another

woman, a comfortable creature who had remained very unaffected

throughout the service, who gathered Ishmael up and forced her way out

with him in her arms.

As she laid him on the grass outside a burst of praise came through the

open door of the chapel; the scene of fear was over, and the penitents,

confident of their salvation, were rejoicing together. All was peace and

happiness, but Ishmael lay, his head upon the steep lap of the stranger,

quite unaware that the Lord was appeased at last.

CHAPTER VIII

SEED-TIME

The Parson was a cassocked whirlwind in his wrath. He said little, not

being a man who wasted words when a thing was done, but he acted

decisively, pinning Annie by her terror to agree to a permanent

alteration in affairs. As soon as Ishmael could be moved--for the fit he

had had left him weak and nervous--the Parson took him to the Vicarage,

and there for the next three or four years, till he went to St. Renny,

Ishmael made his home.

They were, he realised much later, the happiest years of his life.

Looking back on them, he grudged his unconsciousness of the fact at the

time. There is nothing in the world quite like the atmosphere of an

old-fashioned English parsonage--the quietness, the well-bred but simple

air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance

never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately. Something of

the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming

saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most

characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country

parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin. And it was

the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne--how above all he

would have loved the works of Traherne if they had then been

discovered!--that Boase represented. A Church domestic, so to speak,

with priestly powers, but wielded as the common laws of a household. The

widening ripples of the Oxford Movement had touched even the West with

its spreading circle, but though it had his respect it left him

curiously unstirred. Its doctrines were his already, perhaps with a

wider interpretation here and there; and for ritual, except in so far

that he liked everything done decently, he had no feeling. His sense of

religion was profound but simple, as simple as daily bread. He held that

it should be allowed to become part of a child as unforcedly as air or

food, and he had an especial horror of what are known as heart-to-heart

talks. Above all he abominated revivals, he knew too much of the greater

apathy that welled in their hysterical wake. Wesley, he held, had had a

mission, which is a very different thing.

Therefore the Parson's first care with Ishmael was to sweep him as bare

of all thought as might be. He even stopped him when the child, still

conscience-ridden, would have poured out exaggerations of misdoings,

though he registered the knowledge he guessed at for future guidance. It

was against Ishmael's nature to be expansive, and if he had been so on

that occasion he would probably never have felt so easy with the Parson

again. As it was, he began, in his secretive way, to copy Boase at all

points that seemed good to him, doing things of his own initiative which

he would have rebelled from being told. When the Parson got him a pony

at fair-time, Ishmael soon gathered that a gentleman rode without

kicking his horse in the belly or jagging at its mouth, as was the

custom in that part of the world. He learnt, too, by the simple

reappearance of a tin bath, flanked by an earthen pitcher of water, in

his room morning after morning, that a gentleman washed all over every

day. At first this bored him considerably, but after one day when the

Parson took him down to the cove to bathe, and he had occasion to be

ashamed of his grubby little legs and feet beside the other's shining

whiteness, that too altered. Yet the Parson had said nothing, hardly

given more than a look. In the same way, when he gathered that the

Parson trusted him to tell the truth, and that no grievous consequences

attended it, he gradually ceased to lie, though this took time, since

lying with him, as with many children, had become an instinct. Gradually

the whole atmosphere of the Vicarage, with its shiny mahogany furniture,

its faded rep curtains, its old prints and few unassuming miniatures of

the quiet country gentlefolk who were Boase's ancestors, its queer

mingled smell of old books and lavender, all became part of Ishmael's

consciousness.

He had a great deal of freedom, once the morning's lessons were over,

for the Parson was a busy man and his parish many miles wide. At first

Boase had been rather worried about these spaces in Ishmael's time, for

there were no gentlefolk's children for him to play with nearer than

seven or eight miles, and it was a necessary part of the great plan to

keep from undue familiarity with the village boys. There was always

Phoebe, but Ishmael was growing of an age to despise girls. Besides,

nice soft little thing that Phoebe was, she talked with a dialect as

thick as treacle. Eventually, however, it turned out that girls were to

be Ishmael's chief companions, and the Parson concluded it would do him

no harm to be under what is commonly supposed to be a softening

influence before plunging into the stern masculinities of St. Renny. It

was John-James who brought about the feminine factor in Ishmael's days,

some six months after the Vicarage period had begun.

It was early spring, the first rathe-primroses were showing their

milk-fair faces on the cliff, and the light-green leaves were beginning

to uncrumple on the wind-wilted elders, when John-James appeared on a

mission of his own at the Vicarage. There was a good deal of coming and

going between the Manor and the Vicarage, for the Parson laid himself

open to no charge of alienating affections, but this visit was quick

with a portentousness beyond the normal. To begin with, John-James asked

for Mr. Boase instead of for Ishmael, and when he was shown into the

study he stood revolving his cap in his hands and some weighty thought

in his brain till the Parson bade him sit down and say what it was had

brought him. But John-James still stood and, his eyes fixed anxiously on

the Parson, at last blurted out:

"Mr. Boase, you'm tachen Ishmael things like gentry do belong to knaw,

aren't 'ee?"

"Why, yes," said Boase.

"I want to knaw if 'ee'll tache our Vassie too. Archelaus, he'em too

old, and thinks on naught but gwain with females, and Tom's doen fine

with Mr. Tonkin, and for me--I'm not that class. Farmen's my traade. But

the maid, she'm so quick and clever, 'tes only fitty she should have her

chance same as the lil'un. She's gwain to be 'ansome, white as a lily

she is, and it'll be better for she if she do have things to think of

like the gentry. For if Ishmael's gentry, there's no rason Vassie

shoulden be. They'm the same blood after all. An' it's dangerous blood,

Mr. Boase."

The Parson sat for a moment in silence while John-James shifted his feet

anxiously. Mingled with the swift appreciation of the humour of himself

as tutor to the arrogant Vassie was a pang of reproachful conscience.

"What does your mother say?" he temporised; "and Vassie?"

"Mother's willen, only she did say you was so took up with the lil'un

you wouldn't take no account of Vassie, seeing she'm only a bastard like

the rest of us. But Vassie said if you thought it was the right thing to

do by her you'd do it."

Boase had as little vanity as any man, but it was pleasurably pricked by

this. Also he still reproached himself.

"John-James," he began almost diffidently, "you mustn't talk like that

about bastards--as though it made any difference to me. You know it

isn't because of that I look after Ishmael and treat him differently;

it's because he was left to me as a charge. I want to make a fine thing

of him and for him to make a fine thing of Cloom.... But that includes

his overcoming this barrier between him and his family; it won't be

complete till he and Archelaus can meet in friendship as brothers

should, without a grudge or a fear. All this bad blood needs sweetening."

"I daresay," said John-James, "but meanwhile Ishmael'll be growen up

further and further from his folk."

"But you wouldn't have me not educate him, would you?" urged Boase,

speaking as to a fellow-man; "you say yourself it's too late with

Archelaus. It always was; he hated me from Ishmael's birth."

"That's right enough," agreed John-James; "it's only Vassie you can

help. And helpen her will help your plan too, won't it? For it'll make

one of his own kind in his family. And she's gwain to be 'ansome, she

is."

"You're quite right, John-James, and I'm obliged to you for the

suggestion. I don't think I can supply an education much good to a young

lady, but we'll see what can be done."

"Mother says," mumbled John-James, "that happen later Vassie could go to

what they do call a boarding school to Plymouth church town, seen' as

the money won't be Ishmael's yet awhile.... Only she must learn to

cipher and make nadlework flowers afore go, or the other maids'll mock

at she."

"I can teach the ciphering but not the needlework flowers, I fear," said

the Parson, laughing; "my housekeeper will have to be called in over

that. Well, you tell Vassie to be here by nine in the morning and she

shall begin her education. Whether she sticks to it is her own affair."

"She'll stick to it," prophesied John-James. "She'm terrible proud, is

Vassie."

That was how it came about that Vassilissa Beggoe, half pouting

defiance, half eager, began to pull herself out of the slough into which

her race had slipped. There were difficulties perpetually

arising--Ishmael had to be snubbed for sneering at her abysmal

ignorance; and a course more adapted to her needs and temperament than

the classic one the Parson was unfolding before the boy had to be

arrived at; and her own recurring fits of suspicion and obstinacy had to

be overcome. The intimacy between brother and sister did not deepen

perceptibly, for the three years between them made too wide a gulf at

that period in life, and to counter Ishmael's scorn of her as a girl and

far more ignorant than himself, was her scorn of him as younger, less

daring, much less swift of apprehension, though keener of application.

Each began to have a certain respect for the other, nevertheless--she in

his superiority over the other boys she knew, he in her splendour that

made the other boys' sisters seem dim. These two were laying the

foundations for possible intimacy later on, though there was too much

against it now.

The Parson felt it as a matter for self-reproach that he never became

really fond of Vassie; her hardness, and a certain set determination

about her that was rather fine as well, blinded him to her good points.

She was certainly unlovable at that period, but she and the Parson had

natures which would mutually fail to respond at the best of times. Being

what he was, this made him all the more careful to do all he could for

her, but he never rejoiced in her really quick intellect as he did in

the slow sensitive one of Ishmael, or even in the kittenish

superficiality of Phoebe's.

For the miller had no rest when he heard what was going on at the

Vicarage of a morning until his Phoebe was reaping equal benefits, or

benefits that would have been equal had Phoebe the temperament to

avail herself of them. If the Parson had not possessed a natural genius

for teaching, even his patience would never have survived those

schoolroom struggles with three children of differing ages and

capacities. But he was interested in Vassie's determination to improve

herself, and of little Phoebe he was fond in the way one cannot help

being fond of some soft confiding little animal that rubs up against

one.

The miller built much on those few years of childish friendship during

which he told himself his Phoebe too was learning to be as good as

anyone else, but the Parson had no fears on that score. Ishmael was

going, as he saw things, to be a man of wider ideas than ever little

facile Phoebe, with her superficial quickness in acquiring anything

"lady-like," would be able to fill.

Meanwhile, the Parson told Ishmael, in language that made everything

seem clean and wonderful, as much as he thought wise of the mysteries

which had perplexed him and Jacka's John-Willy over the snail. The

ideals Ishmael gradually absorbed during these years made the thought of

the furtive conversations with John-Willy seem hateful, and with their

swift acquisitiveness of values both little girls appreciated that he

would be superior to them if they indulged in any of the vulgarities

most children are apt to fall into at one period, harmless enough in

fact, but not cleansing to the mind. Therefore each of the three

affected the other two in some way, and the pattern of Ishmael's life,

though so essentially isolated as everyone's must be in greater or less

measure, was intermingled at many of its edges with those of the two

girls'. But always it was the Parson who held his heart as far as any

human entity could be said to do so. For it was still the world of

things and ideas which filled the round of his horizon most for Ishmael,

and in that world the thought of his great trust held ever-strengthening

place.

One great cause for relief he had, which came upon him soon after the

settlement of the scholastic arrangement at the Vicarage, and that was

the departure of Archelaus, who enlisted and went to the Crimea. Later

he was wounded and discharged, but even then he did not come home, but

went to the goldfields of New South Wales. The great fever of that rush

was on, and, any form of mining being in a Cornishman's blood, there

were many that went from West Penwith alone. The malignant presence of

Archelaus withdrawn, though he did not understand the malignancy,

Ishmael felt lighter, freer. Tom he hardly ever saw, and the girls were

under dire penalties from the Parson never to hint to Ishmael the true

reason of the domestic complications of Cloom. That Boase reserved for

himself, as a difficult telling, which Ishmael might take hardly, and

for which he was to be well fortified in the years of childhood.

Long after, on looking back, Ishmael saw better the whole atmosphere of

those years from eight to twelve than he did when in the midst of them.

Golden summers, when he spent whole days out on the cliff or moor with

the Parson, their specimen cases at their backs; ruddy autumns when the

peewits cried in the dappled sky and the blackberries were thick on the

marsh; grey winters when the rain and mist blotted the world out, and he

and the Parson sat by a glowing fire of wreckage, the Parson reading

aloud from Jorrocks or Pickwick, or the entrancing tales of Captain

Marryat, and later, for more solid matter, Grote's "History of Greece,"

its democratic inferences counterbalanced by "Sartor Resartus," whose

thunderous sentences enthralled Ishmael, if their purport was yet beyond

him; wonderful pale springs when the sunshine and the blood in his veins

were both like golden wine. So the time went, and it mostly belonged to

himself and his dreams, with even the Parson more unconsciously felt

than actively realised, and with the two girls still more upon the

fringe, though it was true there were splendid games, such as Cavaliers

and Roundheads, which could not be played by himself. For this and

kindred affairs Vassie and Phoebe were of great use, though Phoebe

cried if she had to be a Roundhead too often out of her turn. Still, she

was a good little thing, but when the fateful date arrived which was to

see the journey to St. Renny, Ishmael had no pang at leaving her or

anyone else. He was not a shy boy, and felt only intense interest at the

thought of what lay before him. For the journey in a railway train was

alone enough to set the blood thrilling--it was a thing that no one whom

Ishmael knew, excepting Parson Boase, had ever undertaken. It was only a

matter of five years since the West Cornwall Railway from Truro Road to

Penzance had been opened. The same year the great Duke had died, but the

opening of the railway, with the mayor and all the magistrates and the

volunteer band in attendance, had made far the greater stir in West

Penwith. Iron Dukes were intangible creatures compared with iron

engines, although the Parson had preached about the former and seemed to

think, as some parishioners said, that it might have been the Almighty

Himself who had passed away. Wellington had gone, but the railway had

come--therein lay the difference; and Ishmael swelled with pride as he

talked casually to Phoebe of the experience before him.

The miller lent his trap for the drive into Penzance, for, incredible as

it may seem, there was still hardly a cart in the countryside, all the

carrying of turf, furze, and produce being done on donkeys' back, and

thus it came about that Phoebe came too to see him off. She held her

round softly-tinted face, with the mouse-coloured ringlets falling away

from it, up to his in the railway station as he prepared to climb to his

place in the pumpkin-shaped compartment. He ensured a tear-wet pillow

for her that night by merely shaking her hand at the full length of a

rigid arm.

CHAPTER IX

FRESH PASTURE

For most children the first day at school is a memorable landmark; for

Ishmael it was the more so because all his life hitherto he had lived in

one atmosphere, without the little voyagings and visitings in which more

happily-placed children are able to indulge. The change to St. Renny,

although in the same county, was a great one, for whereas Cloom lay on

the wind-swept promontory where only occasional folds in the land could

give some hint of what gentler-nurtured pastures might be like, the

whole little grey town of St. Renny seemed embowered in foliage that did

not indeed encroach upon its actual ways, but that gave the rolling

slopes of its guarding hills a richness of dark green that Ishmael had

never imagined trees could hold. The life itself bore a very similar

analogy to that he had led hitherto, not because the school was at all

luxurious or riotous, but because his life, even at the Vicarage, had

been of an unusual austerity. This new world held at once greater

restrictions and more liberty of spirit, for at school every boy works

out his own salvation or the reverse. Not being shy, Ishmael had no

inner terrors to overcome--only a feeling for self-defence which was the

outcome of his anomalous position. The Parson hoped and thought there

would be no disagreeables about that at St. Renny; the headmaster, of

course, knew of it, but of the boys, those adepts at torture, none

happened to be from the furthest West. For St. Renny still bore the

reputation it had attained under a famous headmaster, when the best

known of West Country novelists had been a scholar there, and parents

from right up the country, even from London itself, if they had the

blood of Devon or Cornwall in their veins, sent their sons to grey St.

Renny. It was with a London boy, son of a one-time Plymouth merchant who

had become an alderman and a shining light of Bloomsbury, that Ishmael's

fortunes were to be most closely linked.

In spite of his pose of self-sufficiency--so ingrained as to deceive

himself--Ishmael's heart beat fast as he followed the Parson through the

arched doorway of grey granite that was to open so often for him in the

years to follow. He was filled with an inarticulate wonder at the

knowledge that it was to be so, and it occurred to him for the first

time--for children, like animals, accept what comes to them very

naturally--that it was odd one could be so completely disposed of by

grown-up people, even for one's undoubted good....

Of the interview with the headmaster, so square of jowl and brow and yet

so kindly, Ishmael remembered little in after years; for it became

blurred by all he grew to know of "Old Tring" during the long though

intermittent association of school. Old Tring rang a bell, after a gruff

sentence of welcome, and, apparently as glad as Ishmael for an excuse to

part, told him he should be shown round by one Killigrew. Old Tring

added that he, Ishmael Ruan, would be sure to like Killigrew. Ishmael

doubted this; somehow, waiting there in that still room, whose

tranquillity seemed so much of its essence as to be more than a mere

absence of noise, waiting and gazing at the strip of sunlit High Street

that seemed lambent by contrast with the dimness within, Ishmael

conceived a dislike to Killigrew. The name sounded brisk, brutal even;

Ishmael was unaware that it was the fact that he had been told he would

like Killigrew which awaked his antagonism. Unconsciously he resented

that this old man should take advantage of knowing more of books to

think that therefore he knew what he, Ishmael, would and would not like.

They all three waited; the Parson ran a finger along the lines of

calf-bound books, then paused, Old Tring at his elbow. Ishmael was

forgotten, isolated in himself, and, without warning, in the irrational

way of such phases, he was overwhelmed by one of those strange periods

in which, though actually but a second or so, time seems to hold its

breath and the consciousness, muffled by some overwhelming dimness, is

arrested and stands alone, on a pin-point of eternity, without past or

future. It seemed to him that nothing would ever move again in the dim

room, where for this fraction of a second everything was motionless

except the dust motes that danced in the beam slanting through the low

window, wreathing this way and that like steam within the strip of

brightness, but ceasing to be visible at the edge as sharply as though

they ceased to exist--as though an impalpable line ruled in the air

would not allow the twisting coils to pass beyond, even when the pattern

demanded it. Ishmael stared at this aerial path of living light, his

mind hypnotised by it, and the remainder of the room by its contrasting

density seemed to fall away from him; out of a great distance came the

Parson's voice saying, "So you've got a first edition of the

Antiquities...." Followed the soft rubbing sound of one smooth book

being drawn out from between its companions, then the crisper noise of

large pages being turned.

The moment, which had seemed so intensely the present to Ishmael that

during it he had thought it could never cease to be, reeled and sank

into the past, leaving him with the feeling that time was once more in

motion, like a vast clock whose pendulum has stopped for one beat, only

to resume its swing again. At once it became possible that everything

should go on, the idea of the incursion of the boy Killigrew ceased to

be wildly chimerical, and with this acceptance of it Killigrew himself

was in the room.

The vibrant path was no longer bright to the shutting-off of all else,

material and mental; the Parson looked up from his first edition; Old

Tring's hand, advancing, came into the strip of light, and seemed to

spring to life, swelled to huge dimensions, became of a glowing

whiteness. Killigrew, red-headed, freckled, standing with an air of

surly self-protection, suddenly raised his light lashes to give the

sweetest smile Ishmael had ever seen. Always, even in moments of

irritation, it was to remain with him as illuminative of Killigrew--that

peculiar radiant smile which carried him so softly, if not triumphantly,

through life. It would have been a disgusting smile if it had been

calculated, even self-conscious; as it was, it made of Killigrew a

creature subtly apart, though for no deeper reason.

Old Tring said: "Killigrew, this is Ruan, who has come from Bolerium,

or, as you would vulgarly term it, Land's End. Take him and show him the

school, but bring him back to have tea with his guardian." The two boys

went out and as he was shutting the door Ishmael, who had the woodland

hearing of a little animal, caught some low-toned words of the Parson's:

"... makings of a fine spirit. I assure you, Tring ..." That was

himself, Ishmael Ruan, whom they were speaking of. "A fine spirit ...";

the phrase pricked his imagination--he swelled to it. He glanced at

Killigrew, who was whistling in rosy unconsciousness of proximity to any

spirit at all, and suddenly felt enormously relieved that the other boy

had not heard, aware, by the new angle to which he was already

responding, that Killigrew would have been disgusted rather than

impressed. Once in the courtyard, the freemasonry of young things

released from the pressure of grown-ups drew their eyes together.

Unconsciously Ishmael thrust his hands into the trouser pockets of his

new serge suit, in imitation of Killigrew, whose swagger was really a

thing inimitable. Something stirred in Ishmael which had hitherto been

unknown to him; it was not love, which in greater or lesser degree he

already knew--for he was an affectionate boy in his inarticulate way--it

was not merely an impulse for friendship; that would have been no alien

thing. It was the beginning of that relationship which only masculine

creatures ever really know, a relationship which is intimate without

ever making inroads on privacy; full of pleasure in companionship

without any feeling of a blank when apart; where love cannot be said to

exist, and yet of which, if the irrevocableness of death remove one of

the two, there remains to the other a void that is felt recurrently for

the rest of his life whenever anything arises which that other person

alone could have felt and appreciated in quite the same way. It was no

David and Jonathan friendship which grew between Ishmael and Killigrew

such as may sometimes be found among boys, but it was an intimacy that,

in its aloof way, was to add something to the pattern of their lives

that neither would have found without it.

In after years, if Ishmael had examined into the thing, which he never

did, he would have seen that it was because, widely different as their

two natures were, each had a side that corresponded. For everyone has a

part of him, nearly always the larger, which is in relation with the

general run of the world, and also a part which is out of key with it.

Neither is more real than the other, though one is always bigger and

more insistent than the other, and in the relative proportions lies

every possibility. It was those parts of them which were out of key with

the ordinary acceptances that were attuned in Ishmael and Killigrew,

though neither was as yet aware they had such aspects, far less in what

measure. On that first afternoon and for several days afterwards they

were merely unthinkingly aware of a blind tolerance for each other that

rose more nearly to a warm respect over the matter of Killigrew's

badger.

This attractive though violent animal lurked in a hutch artfully

concealed between the roof and the rafters at the far end of the

dormitory where Killigrew slept. A trap door gave admission to the dim

three-cornered place where heads had to be bowed for fear of the beams

and voices and footsteps tuned down as low as possible lest someone in

authority should overhear. For the badger was contraband, or so its

owner, for greater glory, chose to assume, though as a matter of fact it

was more than likely had permission been asked to keep the beast it

would have been accorded, for St. Renny had its reputation as the great

naturalists' school to keep up. Half the glamour surrounding the savage

pet would have vanished, however, and the secret was jealously guarded,

the badger himself, by his unconquerable stench, being the only person

likely to give it away. Luckily the hutch was not directly over the

dormitory, but right at the angle of the roof, where a low window, kept

always open by Killigrew, allowed the worst of the smell to be wafted

away. The increasing size of the badger and its consequent fierceness

were likely to make its ultimate retention impossible; even now, a mere

ball of striped fluff, it bit savagely whenever it was handled.

Badgers, which are often erroneously supposed to be nearly extinct in

England, swarm over Cornwall, so that Killigrew's specimen did not enjoy

any special distinction as a rarity, save in its capacity as a "pet."

They are, however, very difficult to catch, being strong and cunning and

armed with terrific teeth and claws, and Killigrew was passionately

attached to his unyielding prisoner, not so much for its own sake as for

what it represented for him--outlawry, romance, the touch of the wild

which glorified life. Not on the first day was Ishmael accounted

worthy, or even safe, as a repository for this secret, but when

Killigrew did show it him, Ishmael rose in importance through his

intimate knowledge of badgers and their ways.

"Wouldn't _He_ let you keep it if _He_ knew?" asked Ishmael, when,

finger and thumb round its neck and another finger firmly gripping under

a forepaw, he had held and admired the spitting animal.

"Rather not. We're not allowed to _keep_ anything, though they make us

sweat across the moor what they call 'observing the animal creation in

its own haunts.' They like one to grind over beastesses and butterflies

and suchlike."

"I know a lot about them," boasted Ishmael.

"Then you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, that's all I can say,

or the fellows will think you're a prig. It was all right when it was

started because the fellows were keen on it themselves, but then the

masters took it up, and of course we had to drop it. We're off bugs in

this shop."

Ishmael digested in silence the profundity of the point of view thus

presented to him, and, according to his habit, quickly made it part of

his practice. For his first weeks at school he kept very silent,

absorbing its traditions and the unwritten laws made by the boys

themselves, on the nice observance of which hung respect and popularity.

The Grammar School of St. Renny was an old-fashioned affair even for

those days, but it had a certain name in a quiet way. It was run on

classical lines, Greek and Latin being considered the only two subjects

worth a gentleman's attention. Botany and entomology were the unofficial

subjects that had won the school its name, but Ishmael soon found that

to show any keenness for these two pursuits was to class yourself a

prig. The robuster natures preferred rod and line, or line only, in the

waters of Bolowen Pool to any dalliance with stink-pots and specimen

cases. Like far greater schools, it was really run by the traditions

evolved by the boys. There were certain things that were the thing and

certain other things that were not the thing, and these varied

occasionally. One term you simply had to wear a dark blue-and-white tie

for going into the town and bear's grease your hair; another term a

certain slovenliness in dress was the thing. You dismissed all womenkind

as trivial and useless, but you were in love with the doctor's daughter,

a stately, full-blown damsel who floated, so to speak, up the church

upon the swaying bubble of her crinoline every Sunday morning, and sat,

sunk to the waist in the swelling waves of silk, worshipped by a row of

eyes from the school pew.

During the Sunday promenade around the churchyard--an unchanging

ritual--you manoeuvred to be the one of the couple passing her as she

came up the short path that bisected the circular one where you were

marching. The two boys who were leading had the advantage of being able

to set the pace more or less, but often they miscalculated the time of

her appearance, and then some other couple, by a judicious lagging for a

moment or a sudden quickening, achieved the meeting that after all was

no more than a furtive interchange of glances, supercilious or

almost-smiling on her part, according to her mood and the boy that

encountered it. None of the boys ever met the damsel in any other way,

except sometimes at a select party; but this adoration was a cult,

though a purely academic one, so to speak. The true goddess of the

school was far otherwise, as Ishmael was to find.

Another feature of life at St. Renny was the weekly market-day. It was

forbidden to go into the town, it being placed out of bounds for the

occasion, and therefore to slip out and drink cider at the corner shop

and come back with your pockets stuffed with buns and solid country

sweets of gaudy hues was a deed that placed you high in the respect of

your fellows. Ishmael achieved this once as a matter of form, and then,

having no real interest in it, turned his attention to other matters. On

ordinary days the boys had a very real freedom, only limited by the hour

at which they must return, and Ishmael and Killigrew nearly always took

their rods and spent the half-holidays at Bolowen Pool, rarely catching

anything, for the trout were abnormally shy; but Ishmael at least had

the true fisherman's temperament, and was content to sit all day at one

end of a rod and line even without a fish at the other. As for

Killigrew, he was soon following where Ishmael led, and would have gone

bug-hunting with him had he so decreed, though he felt relieved that

Ishmael had cast such things aside.

Ishmael was casting aside much these days. He was at that expanding age

which accepts what it is taught as good, but thinks it fine to throw it

over. Later comes the age of thinking for oneself and concluding that

whatever one has been taught is bad. Curiously enough the outward result

of the two states is the same. Only later comes the period of judicious

sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly

formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's

root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the

school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his

inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his

bent for dominance made some action, one way or the other, necessary.

The Parson sank more and more into the background, but there came over

the rim of his world a new figure that, oddly enough, filled much the

same place.

On that first night at school, when the Parson had gone back home and

Ishmael lay in a narrow little bed, one of ten such, in the darkened

dormitory, he shed no tears for the Parson, or for his old companions,

nor yet for the strangeness of the new world where he might, in the

reaction from the first excitement, have been feeling lonely. He was too

solidly set on getting all that was possible out of his fresh life. But

in his most curious searchings into the likely future as he lay that

night for an hour or so upon a wakeful pillow, he did not picture

anything as delightful as, in after years, he was to realise Hilaria

Eliot had been for those boys who at the time so casually and

unthinkingly enjoyed her wayward companionship.

CHAPTER X

HILARIA

"Point the toe, if you please young gentlemen; slide well forward and

bow to your partner from the waist.... Ruan, you have the air of a poker

trying to be graceful. Watch Killigrew and do as he does. Now, all

together please ..."; and the row of self-conscious boys bowed, gloved

hands upon severely jacketed chests, while as many little girls, aware

of doing the thing correctly and of not looking fools in the doing of

it, spread white tarletan skirts in starchy semi-circles by way of

reply.

It was the weekly dancing class, when Mr. Pierre Sebastian Eliot, who on

other days taught French at the Grammar School, undertook to instruct

the boys in what he referred to as "the divine art of Terpsichore," a

habit which had earned for himself the simple nickname of "Terps." The

class was held in a spacious room used for balls, both subscription and

private, at the "George" Inn, and to it came not only those Grammar

School boys whose parents paid for this polite "extra," but also the

maidens from the gentle families of St. Renny and the neighbourhood.

Ishmael was dancing opposite Hilaria Eliot, and his enjoyment of it lay

in knowing that Killigrew, who had basely tried to trip him up shortly

before, was suffering pangs of envy. After some four years of knowing

her, Killigrew was suddenly in love with Miss Eliot and didn't mind who

knew it. In fact, to be accurate, Killigrew's emotion was chiefly based

on a desire to be different from the rest of his world, and what was

the good of being different unless people knew it?

Thus Killigrew--to Ishmael, who was growing vaguely aware of a

difference from his fellows that he could not remedy, the argument would

have had no force. Killigrew was neither of those St. Rennyites who

despised girls, nor of those who held the cult of the doctor's daughter,

that dizzy exemplar of fashion, nor of those others--a small band these

latter, made up of the best boys in the school, little and big--who

admired and liked Hilaria as a "good sort." Killigrew was determined to

be different, and so, like Burns, "battered" himself into love. If

Ishmael had been disposed to feel a tender sentiment for her himself, he

could not have cherished it with any comfort, being already cast by

Killigrew for the confidant of passion. Thus it came about that, though

in after years those stolen meetings between Hilaria and a ring of boys

would flash into his memory as being romance in essence, at the time

they held no more thrill for him than might be imparted by some new

novel--contraband in the perpetual war against grown-ups--that she would

bring to read aloud to them in some hollow of the moor. Always it was

from the angle of the third person--that most comfortable of

view-points--that he saw her. Only later by the light that lingered

round her ways did he know how she had stood for beauty.

Now, as he watched her sway and dip before him, it only struck him that

she differed from the little misses on her either hand, but quite how,

except that he would have said she was jollier, more like a boy, he

couldn't have told. That indeed, translated from boy-like into

unmaidenly, was the town's chief complaint against her, or primarily

against her father. Mr. Eliot's position was not an easy one, and he did

nothing to make it easier. For he was half French, his mother having

been brought over as a little girl at the time of the Terror. There

were people still alive in the 'fifties and 'sixties who remembered the

Napoleonic wars and the shadow cast by that giant figure upon the world;

indeed, so slowly did thought move down in the far West that it might

almost have been said that St. Renny was just beginning to realise the

wars, and rather resented the fact that English and French had since

fought side by side in the Crimea. Also the vagaries of Napoleon III.

kept England in a perpetual state of distrust, in spite of the

championship of Lord Palmerston, then in his second Ministry. Mothers

still frighted their babes with the name of Boney, and the French were

still the hereditary enemies of all good Cornishmen, so many of whom had

gone to man the fleet that won at Trafalgar. The obscure feeling of

distrust that always stirs in the lower classes of remote districts at

anything alien did not, of course, extend to the educated people, but

Mr. Eliot, being poor and very eccentric, refused such championship from

his equals as might have been his.

He lived with his daughter and an old housekeeper in a little cottage on

the outskirts of the town, and earned his living by teaching at the

Grammar School and giving private lessons in French, dancing, fencing,

and physical culture generally. It was this latter that caused him to be

looked on with so much suspicion as an eccentric. He actually made his

daughter, attired in a skirt that only reached to her knees, perform

inelegant feats on parallel bars and ladders, while he was wont to boast

that she could out-fence any boy at the school. She was an expert

swimmer too, and there were rumours, that at summer bathing excursions

she wore a somewhat similar garment to that of the gymnasium, instead of

one of those long serge gowns reaching to the ankles that ladies were

wont to disport themselves in amidst the surf--gowns in which it was

impossible to do anything but bob up and down at the end of a rope.

It was curious that a man who was half a Frenchman should have been the

one to have such advanced ideas on female education, but then Mr. Eliot

was the son of a refugee, which says much. For those French aristocrats,

who never turned hand to a task in their lives till the Revolution,

lived to learn very differently after their flight. The farm and the

shop taught what the court had failed to impart, and the blood that

despite folly directs so truly in moments of extremity did not fail

them. The children who, had the course of events never been ruffled,

would have grown up in a vicious and futile court, were forced to

practise economies and learn at first hand the dignity of labour. With

those families who returned to the increasing viciousness which

culminated under Napoleon III. the lesson may not always have been

lasting, but for those who, like the forbears of Mr. Eliot, allied

themselves with their English hosts, and remained where they were, the

hard life of struggle, if the alliance had not been rich, continued the

new philosophy. Added to all this normal cause, Hilaria's father was

certainly an original, or rather one of those people considered so

because they are ahead of their time and condemned to misunderstanding

in consequence.

None of it mattered to Mr. Eliot, who drifted about the world in a daze

that, had it been a happy one, would have made him an enviable man. As

it was, his invincible habit of over-sensitive gloom robbed him of the

detachment which is the most truly enviable of all the gifts of the

gods. He was a little man, beautifully made, with the high nose, the

tossed-back hair, the piercing look of the man at once prejudiced and

nervous. He lived wrapt in himself, and saw in his daughter more his own

hope in old age than a creature wonderful in her youth and vitality for

her own ends. When the crude heartlessness of the boys racked him or

the well-meaning advances of the gentry offended his alert vanity, it

was to Hilaria that he would turn in thoughts and words to attain that

measure of approbation without which his own self-love would have

languished of inanition. It was Hilaria who healed his hurts, though

with increasing difficulty. For there is little gulf, and that easily

bridged, between the very young child and the old man, but between the

adolescent and the old it is wide and deep. And she was eager where he

was retiring, confident where he was suspicious. With what of pity,

lovely but half-patronising too, did she solace him!... Between them lay

the gulf not only of a generation but of a different habit of thought,

of alien tastes, which not all his passionate clutching or her impatient

tenderness could bridge for more than a few moments of clinging together

against the world. None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so

they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without

knowing why.

Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so

now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost

necessities of life. Her low brow--truly Greek in its straightness and

the crisp ripple of her hair around it--was not in favour at that time.

The hair, which was of a dull ashen brown, was strained back tightly and

confined by a round comb. Her eyebrows, too straight for the period and

too thick, nearly met above the short, tip-tilted nose, freckled as a

plover's egg, and that at a time when no well brought-up damsel ventured

forth in the sun's rays without veil or parasol. Her face was deficient

in modelling, being one of those subtly concave faces not without a

fascination of their own, with an egg-like curve of prominent

delicately-square chin. Her mouth, too large, opened very beautifully

when she laughed over square thickly-white teeth. Her eyes were small

and of no particular colour, though bright with a birdlike shining

between the thick short lashes of a neutral brown. She had a something

boyish in poise and action that really made her charm, but that also set

her hopelessly out of her time. It was impossible to imagine Hilaria

happy in a crinoline, and she fought them fiercely, yet crinolines were

in full flower, and the one disported by the doctor's daughter of a

Sunday was the admiration and envy of the feminine members of the town.

"I should feel I was in a cage," quoth Hilaria at the suggestion that

she should trammel her long legs in such a contraption--unconsciously

hitting on the essential reason for the allure of crinolines. She had to

wear one now for dancing-class, as it made movement and spacing so

different; but other times she went her wilful way, short nose in air,

encouraged by the complacence of her father, who had no more knowledge

of what the country people called her "goings-on" than if he had lived

in an alien clime.

Hilaria was a hoyden. She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil,

sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing

trees. She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the

most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad

way. That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet

some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the

wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer Eve was proof of all these things,

and yet what a scandal it made in St. Renny when the fact leaked out!...

Hilaria was at present going through a phase of "trying to be good," as

the bishop was coming to hold a confirmation, and only those accounted

worthy were to be confirmed. Her goodness was of that healthy elastic

kind natural to children, which never prevents them doing what they

wish, because they instinctively keep it in a compartment to itself.

There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys

who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of

honour to be "done" together. Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as

she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and

the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness

of her age in it. She was nearly sixteen, several months younger than

Ishmael, who was now just over that age, and who, owing to the

reputation for seriousness his secretiveness had earned for him, was one

of the candidates undergoing preparation with Old Tring. He had

apparently outgrown his fits of unbalanced talkativeness, and had

become, with the difficult years, one of those boys who speak with

almost comical rarity, and then with unemotional gruffness. This power

of reticence never fails to win respect, if of a half-irritated,

half-resentful order, and Ishmael held a certain position in the school.

Also as the ward of a parson he was supposed to "be good" and know about

such things as confirmations. As a matter of fact, he considered his own

Tractarian principles, rigidly inculcated by Boase, as superior to the

mild evangelical platitudes of Old Tring, and plumed himself

accordingly. He was just at that dangerous age, reached somewhat later

in the healthy normalities of school than it would have been had he

stayed eating his own thoughts at Cloom, when religion either falls away

entirely from a boy or flares up into a sudden vitality. Ishmael's blood

ran with too much of inherited aptitude for prayer for the former

pitfall to ensnare him, but the latter yawned beside him now and he

thrilled to its attractions. Sliding his stout, shiny shoe back and

forth with the stiff attempt at elegance so deprecated by Mr. Eliot, he

asked himself whether the Lord could really countenance such frivolity.

It was difficult to think of the things of the soul while so employed,

while on the moor, or by Bolowen Pool the thoughts came as naturally as

birds. Spring was in his blood and he called it faith, as later he would

call it love.

Spring was in the low-browed room at the "George," pouring in at the

long windows and spilling in pools of hazy yellow upon the polished

boards. Spring was in the old garden outside, touching the warm tangle

of gillyflowers to fire, transmuting the pallor of the narcissus to

light itself, making the very shadows more luminous than a winter's

shining. The freakish sun, lit this and left that, after its habit, for

nowhere is more mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in

the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's

thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so

delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a

line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again,

while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its

length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one

flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped

through into the fourth dimension. A pair of white butterflies,

pearly-grey or golden as they fluttered in and out of those invisible

chambers of the air that held sun or shade, chased each other in futile

circles; the flower-heads nodded in and out of the brightness; and in

the room the white girls dipped into the Danaëan showers and back

through the dimness, coloured like the butterflies by the swift

transitions, swaying like the blossoms. If not only the spacing of the

light but also the waves of movements could have flashed out visibly

like the spider's threads the garden and the room would have shown full

of the lovely curves.

And Ishmael felt the warm dazzle of the light and thought of the moor

and how in another half-hour or so the shadows would be long beside the

pool and the trout beginning to rise at their supper, and of how he

would like to be a holy hermit and live alone there with a dog and a gun

and a rod and God; while Killigrew was divided between trying to signal

a question to Hilaria and wishing he could paint the dim room with its

splashes of sun and wondering what colours he could get that would be

pure enough; and Hilaria was wishing Ishmael would give her a chance to

whisper to him the news she was burning to impart and not merely stare

at her and everything else with that blank gaze that always seemed to go

through her to the wall beyond. And most of the boys itched to get out

for an hour or so before supper, while the little girls thoroughly

enjoyed themselves and Mr. Eliot wished the whole lot of them, or

himself, elsewhere. At last the wheezy piano sounded its last note, the

faded lady who once a week thumped it for an hour and the sum of

two-and-sixpence gathered her shawl about her and tied the ribbons of

her bonnet beneath her pointed chin: the little girls were also

enshawled by prim figures who now materialised from the shadowy seats

where they had waited for this moment; and the boys, with a hurried

touching of caps to Mr. Eliot, went clattering out through the flagged

and panelled passage into the High Street. Hilaria, by the door, caught

Ishmael's sleeve as he rose from changing his shoes--he was always the

last when a fussy quickness was in question--and, ignoring the hovering

Killigrew, said in her low husky voice:

"Tell them I can be on the moor in half an hour, will you? I must go and

take off this beastly thing first ..." She kicked a protesting leg

against the framework of her crinoline, that shot out in front of her

alarmingly.

"Tell who?" asked Ishmael, densely.

"All of them, of course. Killigrew and Moss minor and the Polkinghornes

and Carminow--not Doughty; I didn't like him last time--I don't know

why ..." She broke off and bent forward, her tones took on a thrill;

"I've got it," she announced.

"The new number of 'The Woman in White'? Oh, Hilaria!..."

"It wasn't easy, I can tell you, and we shall have to hurry with it, but

it's in my shoe-bag now."

"Must you go home and change? It'll give us so little time. It's dark at

eight, and we have to be in to supper then, anyway."

Hilaria hesitated, still slightly leaning forward like a great

full-petalled blossom heavy with approaching night.

"I suppose I could manage.... Papa goes on to give a French lesson

before he comes home.... It would be awful if it tore though.... All

right, I'll risk it, but you'll all have to simply lug me over the

stiles. Fancy if I stuck in one all night!" Her laugh, husky as her

voice, gurgled out, and Mr. Eliot looked up from the packet of books he

was sorting at the end of the room.

"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at

him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the

movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back

for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.

"Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?" And with

this adroit carrying of the war into enemy's country she deflected Mr.

Eliot's interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task.

A few minutes later, having stopped to spend her week's

pocket-money--only threepence--on a paper twist full of jumbles, she

might have been seen going in the direction of home, walking, for her,

sedately, and looking very lady-like with the important bulk of the

crinoline swelling out the mantle that made all women, from behind, seem

at least fifty. A few people who saw her said to themselves that

Eliot's maid seemed to be growing up at last, but they did not see her

when, arrived at the stile she would have passed severely by had she

been going home, she flung her shoebag over it and, boldly tilting up

the cumbrous hoops, scrambled over it herself, with a flashing display

of frilled cambric trousers and white legs terminating in kid boots.

CHAPTER XI

THE PLACE ON THE MOOR

The nearest way to the hollow on the moor that Hilaria had made her own

was a tiny track so overgrown with brambles and gorse as hardly to be

worthy the name, and on this particular evening, out of care for her

strange garb, she took a path which curved with some semblance of

smoothness in a wider arc. Thus Ishmael and Killigrew, who had got away

in advance of the others of the "Ring," came to the hollow before her

and, climbing up behind it, flung themselves on a boulder where they

could watch all approaches. It was a wonderful place, that which

Hilaria's feminine instinct for the right atmosphere had led her to

choose. The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was

not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle

of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the

curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as

of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks.

They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by

freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young

leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-clustered buds just breaking

into a dense snow of blossom. Periwinkles trailed down upon the turf,

and the closely set stonecrop made a reddish bloom on the lower

boulders, amidst bronze-hued moss, pale fragile scales of lichen, and

glossy leaved fibrous-rooted ivy, that all went to pattern their sullen

grey with delicate arabesques. The strongest note of colour was in the

wild hyacinths, that, where the earth had been disturbed at some time

and so given them a chance, made drifts of a deep blue that seemed

almost purple where they came against the paler azure of the sky.

The boys climbed to the flat top of the highest boulder, where the

gorse-bushes, some still darkly green, some breaking into yellow flame,

thrust their strong clumps from the rocky soil to stretch in a level

sea, inset with tracts of heath and bracken, for miles around. The whole

arc of the sky, the whole circle of the world's rim, lay bare to the

eye, infinitely varied by clouds and cloud-shadows, by pasture and

arable, dark patches of woods and pallor of pools, by the lambent

burnish of the west and the soft purpling of the east, even by differing

weathers--here great shafts of sunlight, there the blurred column of a

distant shower, or the faint smear, like a bruise upon the horizon, of a

low-hanging mist.

Killigrew lay on his stomach and gazed his fill, his thin nostrils

dilating rather like a rabbit's, as they always did if he were moved by

anything--a trick which, with his light eyelashes, had won for him the

name of "Bunny." Ishmael threw himself on his back and lay staring up at

the sky as it was slowly drawn past overhead, till with hard gazing the

whole world seemed spinning round him and the plummet of his sight was

drowned in the shifting heights that seemed to his reeling senses

bottomless depths. When Killigrew spoke he plucked his eyes from their

fixed stare with what was a physical effort and turned them giddily on

to the other boy's usually pale face, now copper-pink in the warm light.

"Why d'you suppose she don't like Doughty?" asked Killigrew.

"I dunno ...; he is rather a swine, anyway."

"Yes, but how does she know that?"

This was a poser, and Ishmael failed at an answer beyond a feeble "Oh,

well, because he is."

"If he's been a cad to her--" muttered Killigrew, vengefully.

"I don't know how he can have been; she's only seen him with us. But I

don't know what you'd do about it if he had; you can't lick him; he's

twice your size and weight."

"Would you never fight unless you were sure of winning?" demanded

Killigrew scornfully. Ishmael thought a minute.

"I think it is that I never fight until I'm sure of winning," he said at

last; "if I found I wasn't strong enough I wouldn't go in and be beaten;

I'd train hard till I was and then fight."

"But that might take ages and you'd forget what you wanted to fight the

chap about."

"I don't think I'd forget, if I'd wanted to fight him. I might, though,

I suppose...."

"You're all wrong, you know," opined Killigrew; "'tisn't the winning

that really matters ... sounds silly, but I don't know how to explain

it."

"Sounds like something the Parson would say--my Parson," said Ishmael on

one of his flashes of intuition; and then they both laughed, for

Killigrew was one of those rare creatures, a born pagan--or rather

heathen, which is not quite the same thing. The pagan has beliefs of his

own; the true heathen denies the need for any, through sheer lack of

interest.

"D'you think girls are so very different from us ...?" went on Killigrew

after a moment's silence. "The sort of things they really want to do and

think about?"

"Girls are quite different," said Ishmael firmly; "they talk awful rot;

I've heard my sister and Phoebe--that's a girl at home."

"Yes, so does my sister--at least, she talks sort of clever stuff

that's as bad. But how about Hilaria?" asked her admirer.

"Well, she's more sensible than most, because she wants to do things as

though she weren't a girl, but I don't see how she's going to keep it

up. She'll fall in love and then it'll all be over."

"You don't think much of girls, do you?"

"Oh, well ... they're all right, I suppose. I want to do things, and

girls want to feel things. Oh, yes, Bunny, they're awfully different."

"From you, perhaps ... I dunno ... I say, d'you really want the old

bishop to lay his paws on your head?"

"Yes," replied Ishmael, briefly.

"Well, so does Hilaria. She read me some stuff out of a book--ripping

fine stuff it was--by a chap called Mallory. All about knights that were

searching for a cup they thought had the blood of God in it or something

of the sort. But she seemed to believe it."

"I believe it, too. Not that they lived like that book, but that there

is the Blood ... Oh, what's the good of trying to explain to you? It's

like you when you're painting and you try and make me see a lot of

colours I can't."

"Hullo ... there she comes," cried Killigrew, with a sudden quickening

of voice and aspect; "I say, it must be ghastly trying to walk in one of

those things. Girls must be different or they wouldn't put up with them.

I'll go and help her. Come on, we'll have to sit down below now."

The two boys scrambled down the boulders and assisted Hilaria--the hem

of whose white tarlatan skirts showed already the worse for her

walk--over the hummocky patch of rocks and gorse that fringed the

hollow. Laughing rather ruefully, she flung herself down, scattering her

bonnet, shawl, and bag over the turf in the impetuous movement. The

lowest rim of the crinoline promptly stood straight up from the ground

like a hoop, displaying her long legs and the multitudinous petticoats

lying limply upon them, and she was forced to adopt a change of

position. Finally she settled herself with her feet tucked in under her

and the obnoxious garment swelling out all round, as though she had just

flopped down and made what the children call a "cheese."

"I say, where's the magazine?" asked Ishmael.

"In my bag; but you're not to 'look on.' Here are some jumbles, but we

must keep the others' share for them. Did you get them all, Ishmael?"

For some reason best known to herself, she called him by his Christian

name and Killigrew by his nickname of "Bunny," though she addressed the

other boys in mannish fashion of surnames only.

"I told Polkinghorne minor and told him to let the others know."

"Did you remember to tell him we didn't want Doughty?"

"I think so ... at least I didn't say to ask him to come," confessed

Ishmael, who had the worst head in the world for a message.

"Here they are," announced Killigrew; "I think there're only four of

them ..." He screwed up his eyes to gaze, for he was short-sighted.

Ishmael gave a glance.

"There's five ..." he said apologetically; "I'm afraid he's there. I can

see Polkinghorne and Carminow and Polkinghorne minor and Moss minor

and--yes, it's Doughty. I hope you don't mind fearfully, Hilaria?"

She threw a queer little look at him. "It's not for me," she said

slowly; "it's only that I don't think he likes you, Ishmael. He tried to

tell me something funny about you the other day. He comes to papa for

extra coaching in French, you know, and I had to give him tea...."

"About me--?" Ishmael stared blankly, then, more from some premonition

than anything else, grew slowly and burningly red. The colour ebbed

away, leaving him pale. "What was it?" he asked.

"Nothing. At least, I honestly don't know what. Papa shut him up. He

said to him he was no gentleman to say such things before a _jeune

fille_--" She broke off, feeling she had hardly improved matters. A

deadly suspicion that had once before knocked on Ishmael's heart and

been refused more than a second's glance for sheer incredibility pounded

at him again, making the blood sing in his ears. Nothing heard at school

or from the Parson--who had long perturbed himself as to the right

moment for explanations--had started those first warning notes, but

words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then

meaningless to him--words that had since echoed back on to fuller

knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker

and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that

Ishmael spent a large part of his holidays with friends of the Parson's

in Devon and Somerset, the conspiracy of secrecy, wise or unwise, could

not have lasted so long. He stared at Hilaria and his fingers dug into

the turf at either side of him.

At that moment Killigrew relieved the tension by jumping up and calling

a wild, long-drawn "Hullo-o" to the approaching boys. They came running

up the slope and flung themselves down in a circle, while Polkinghorne

major, a big, jolly, simple-minded boy, one of the best liked in the

school, laid audacious hands on the bag, which Hilaria snatched from him

with a shriek.

Doughty had ensconced himself by her, crowding between her and Ishmael

to do so, a manoeuvre which the latter, rather to Doughty's surprise,

did not seem to resent. This was the more odd as the boys had several

times already, both in school and out of it, come into conflict over

trifling matters, not so much from any desire to quarrel as because

they were by nature extremely antipathetic. Ishmael disliked Doughty and

took little trouble to hide the fact. He hated his pasty sleekness,

which made him think of a fat pale grub, and he hated the way the elder

boy hung round Killigrew; not from jealousy--Ishmael still cherished

aloofness too dearly for that--but from some instinct which told him

Doughty was evil. Killigrew lay opposite Doughty now, looking oddly

girlish with his slim form and colourless face, that would have been

insipid but for his too red mouth. There was a white incisiveness about

Killigrew, however, a flame-like quality quaintly expressed in his hair,

that promised the possibility of many things, and showed up sharply in

comparison with the gross but hard bulk of Doughty. There had been no

real reason till this evening, when Hilaria had told of his

evil-speaking, for Ishmael to dislike Doughty, but now he knew that he

had done so all along.

Doughty hated Ishmael because he did not understand him, and he was of

the breed which hates the incomprehensible. Though he had only joined

the preceding term, Doughty was nearly seventeen, and owing to a spinal

weakness of his youth he had till now been educated at home. He came

from Devonshire, which would not have mattered had he been popular, but

which, as he was not, was frequently thrown at him as a disadvantage.

Now, as he lay beside Ishmael, he stared at him with a something slyly

exultant in his look, but the younger boy failed to meet his eyes and

merely gazed serenely into vacancy. Hilaria settled herself, opened the

bag, and disentangled from the ribbons of her dancing shoes the precious

number of _All the Year Round_ that contained the instalment of "The

Woman in White" they had all been so eagerly awaiting.

The boys left off fidgeting and became mouse-still, while only the low

voice of the girl reading of the helpless lovers, of the terrible

smiling Count Fosco and his grim wife, broke the silence. The boys lay,

thrilled by the splendid melodrama, their little differences forgotten

with the rest of their personal affairs, and so they all stayed, Hilaria

as enthralled as they, while unperceived the light began to fade and

evening to creep over the moor.

CHAPTER XII

SOME AMBITIONS AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT

Hilaria read on till, though she held the page close to her eyes, she

seemed to fumble over the words. She was by then at the end of the

instalment, and when she put the magazine down she pressed her fingers

to her lids and complained that her eyes hurt her. "They often do," she

said; "it's a good thing I'm not going to be an artist like Bunny or the

hero of this story, isn't it?" She dropped her chin into her cupped

palms and sat staring ahead, her eyes shining for all their smarting

lids. "Isn't it, funny," she went on, "that we're all going to be

something, some kind of a person, and don't really know a bit what kind?

Yet I feel very much me already...."

"I'm going to be a soldier," said Polkinghorne, serenely missing any

metaphysical proposition. He looked forward, on the strength of a

Scottish mother, to joining a Highland regiment, and was known to shave

his knees twice a week to make them of a manly hairiness against the

donning of a kilt.

"I shall have to go into the City like my guv'nor, I suppose," admitted

little Moss, "but I don't see why one shouldn't be the kind of chap one

wants all the same. Your father's in the city, too, isn't he,

Killigrew?"

"Yes, but that's no reason why I should be, and I'm jolly well not going

to. I'm going to be an artist like Turner...." And Killigrew's voice

unconsciously took on a singing inflection of rapture.

"There's no doubt about old Carminow, anyway," observed Polkinghorne, to

be greeted with laughter. For Carminow, though the gentlest of

creatures, took an extraordinary delight in all the agonies of human

nature. Mine accidents had hardly occurred before Carminow, by some

subtle agency, seemed aware of them, and had rushed to the scene, out of

bounds or not. It was with genuine simplicity that he once bewailed the

fact that it had been "an awfully dull half--no one had been killed for

miles around." It was he, too, on the occasion of a terrible tragedy in

the High Street, when Teague the baker had been killed by the lashing

hoofs of his new horse, who had rushed out to superintend the removal of

the body. The widow, clamorous with her sudden grief, had seized his

arm, exclaiming "Oh, Master Carminow, whatever shall I do; whatever

shall I do?" and, in all good faith he, his soul still unsatisfied by

the view of the corpse, had replied kindly: "Do? Why, Mrs. Teague, if I

were you I should have him opened...."

The story had lived against Carminow, and when in doubt about any course

of action he was always advised to "have it opened." He did not join now

in the laugh, but said seriously, failing, as always, to pronounce the

letter "r":

"Of course I shall be a doctor. Last holidays I went a lot to Guy's

where I have a chum, and I saw a lot of dissecting. Do you know that

when they dissect 'em they stick a sort of squirt in their chests and

dwaw off all the blood? I've got a theowy that I mean to put into

pwactice some day. It seemed to me such a shame that all that good blood

should go to waste like that, and it occurred to me what a splendid

thing it would be if, instead of doing nothing with murdewers but kill

'em, they dwew off their blood while it was still warm and pumped it

into famous men, gweat generals and people like that, who were getting

old and feeble. Most murdewers are thundewing stout fellows, you know."

"How horrid you are, Carminow!" cried Hilaria. "I shouldn't think a

great man would at all like having a murderer's blood in his veins. I'm

sure my darling Lord Palmerston wouldn't."

"Oh, I don't say it's possible at pwesent," replied Carminow placidly,

"but when surgeons know their business it will be. One must look at

these things from a purely utilitawian standpoint."

Ishmael said nothing. He was lying on his back again, folded arms

beneath his head, staring at the glory of the west that had passed from

liquid fire to the feather-softness of the sun's aftermath. The presence

of the others hardly impinged on his consciousness; vaguely he heard

their voices coming from a long way off. One of his moods of exaltation,

that only the very young know, was upon him--a state which amounts to

intoxication and to recapture any glow of which older people have to be

artificially stimulated. That is really the great dividing-line--when

the sparkle, the lightness, the sharpened sense which stimulates brain

and tongue and feeling, ceases to respond without a flick of help from

the right touch of alcohol. That intoxication of sheer living was upon

Ishmael now, as it had been on that long-ago evening when the Neck had

been cried, as it had a few times since, with music, or a windy sun, or

a bathe in rough sea, or some sudden phrase in a book. A something

glamorous in the light, the low accents of Hilaria's voice and the

stirring quality of what she read, the reaction, had he but known it,

from the shock of suspicion occasioned by what she had told him, the

cumulative effect of the exalted thoughts of the past weeks, all these

things, added to his own rising powers and urgent youth, welled within

him and mounted to his brain. He felt tingling with power as he lay

there, apparently lax; it seemed to him he could hear the blood leaping

in his veins and the beating of his pulses all over his body, could

hear the faintest sound of calling lamb or far-off owl, could catch,

with ears refined to a demigod's, the ineffably quiet rubbing of the

millions of grass-blades, as though he could almost hear the evening

falling.... From afar came the babble of the others as to what they

might think they were going to be; for himself he could be anything,

scale any heights, beat triumphantly through all things. He felt the

swelling earth bearing him up, as though he were one with its strength

and fertility, one with its irresistible march. He felt the sword-chill

breath of the spring wind on his brow; he saw the first faint pricking

of the earliest stars, and the rolling up of the sky as the great cumuli

massed overhead; and he felt as though he too could sweep into them and

be of them. Life was before him for him to do what he liked with. He

laughed aloud and rolled over a little, flinging his arms wide. A

stinging blow came on his cheek, and he heard Doughty's angry voice

crying, "Take that!" and a sharp sound from Hilaria.

"Well, what's he want to laugh at me for? I'll teach him--" came

Doughty's voice again. Ishmael had scrambled up; his blood was still

singing in his veins; he felt no dismay at the sight of the looming

Doughty.

"Don't be an ass, Doughty," said Polkinghorne sharply; "and if you can't

help being a cad, wait till Miss Eliot isn't present."

"Oh, never mind about me; I want to see you _kill_ him, Ishmael!" cried

Hilaria viciously.

"Well, why did you want to laugh when Doughty said that?" asked

Polkinghorne judicially.

"Said what?" asked Ishmael.

"Why, that he was just going to be a gentleman."

"Did he say that? I didn't hear him. But I should have laughed if I had...."

Killigrew stared at his friend in amazement. Was this the Ishmael who a

half-hour or so ago had put forward the theory that one should never

fight till one was sure of winning? He did not know that the wine in

Ishmael's brain at that minute was the headiest in the world, the most

sure in imparting sense of power--the sudden up-welling of the joy of

life. It was Doughty's turn to laugh now; he seemed suddenly to have

recovered poise.

"I forgot--you'd be such a good judge of a gentleman--with your family

history," he said.

The singing went from Ishmael's being, but something hot came up through

him like a tide. "What d'you mean by that?" he asked, and still in his

passionate dislike of the other did not see what was opening at his

feet.

"Only that a fellow with a pack of bastard brothers must have had just

the father and mother to teach him...."

There was a moment's silence; the boys all felt intensely uncomfortable,

not so much even at Hilaria's presence as at this sudden nakedness of

thought and emotion. Doughty, set on justifying himself at least as far

as accuracy went, held on. "I heard it at once when I went to my uncle's

at Penzance last holidays. Everyone knows it down there. Of course Ruan

knew it all along; he's been kidding all you fellows. He's no right in a

school for gentlemen at all. His father married his mother when he was

dying and all the brats but him were already born. That's why Ruan's

being brought up a gentleman--because he's the only one who's not a

bastard."

"Shut your foul mouth," ordered Polkinghorne angrily. "Hilaria, let

me--"

"It's not true," cried Hilaria. "Tell them it's not true, Ishmael."

Killigrew had the quicker instinct. "What does it matter if it's true or

not?" he asked. "We all know Ruan, and we think he's an awfully nice

chap, and nothing else is any affair of ours. We don't care what

Doughty's father and mother are, because we don't like him; we don't

care what Ruan's are because we do like him. Personally, I don't see why

Ruan should mind either. The thing doesn't alter him at all."

But that was exactly what Ishmael felt it did, though how he could not

yet have told. Although he never doubted what he heard, it seemed to him

like a dream that he had dreamt long ago and forgotten. It was a curious

sense of unreality that impressed him most, that feeling of "This cannot

really have happened to me ..." that everyone knows in the first moment

of disaster. It was this sensation, not any temporising or actual

disbelief, that kept him still motionless, staring. Polkinghorne began

to feel the proprieties outraged by this immobility.

"I say," he began, "you can't take no notice ...; he's said things about

your people, you know--about your mother ..."

For in common with many male creatures, men and boys, Polkinghorne,

though not feeling more than others any particular sentiment beyond

affection for his mother, yet held the point of honour, perhaps dating

from ancient days of matriarchy, that an insult to one's mother was the

deepest to oneself. Ishmael, too honest to be influenced by this

consideration, yet felt constrained by the weight of public opinion.

Also he was still upon the uplift of his mood; his blood tingled the

more for the mental shock that had numbed his reasoning faculties. As in

his turn he hit Doughty's cheek he felt a little glow at his own

carelessness of consequences. Polkinghorne was beginning to feel

worried, because seen together it was plain that the big Doughty

overtopped Ishmael by nearly a head. Suddenly he had an inspiration and

threw himself between them as Doughty swung out at the younger boy,

thereby incidentally getting the blow himself.

"I'll lick you for that later, Doughty," he ejaculated. "Meanwhile,

kindly shut up while I say something. Ruan can't fight you--"

"Can't he? Then what did he hit me for?"

"I can fight him all right, thanks," said Ishmael.

"But he can wrestle you," went on Polkinghorne imperturbably, "because

he's a clever wrestler and he'll stand a fair chance. You can take it or

leave it, but if you leave it I'll give you a thrashing for the honour

of the school."

A murmur of assent came from the others, who saw an impossibly difficult

situation thus in a way to be solved as far as the two principals in the

quarrel were concerned, while to themselves it gave time to adjust their

attitude, which they did not all take as simply as had Killigrew. In a

fight Doughty's superior size would have given him all the advantage; in

the West Country method of wrestling this would not necessarily hold

true. And Ishmael was in far better condition.

Polkinghorne turned to Hilaria.

"Someone will see you home, of course," he said politely. "I shall have

to stay as stickler, and Carminow as well, but I'll send Moss and the

young 'un with you. And mind you keep your jaws shut about it when you

get back to the school, you two."

Polkinghorne minor and Moss both looked considerably taken aback, but

not more so than Hilaria. "Oh, I must stay, Polkinghorne," she pleaded,

feeling for the first time a terrible sensation of not being wanted, of

an unimportance essential to her sex and beyond her power to alter

whatever her tastes or her justifiable reliance on her own nerves. But

Polkinghorne, backed by Killigrew and Ishmael himself, was adamant,

though Carminow saw no reason why she should not stay if it interested

her. They stood waiting till her crinoline, like a huge piece of blown

thistledown, had swayed around a curve of the path which hid it and the

two little boys from sight, and then they prepared for business.

CHAPTER XIII

THE WRESTLING

It was growing swiftly dusk, though the amphitheatre of turf where the

boys stood, cupped the last of the light from the west, backed as it was

by the semi-circle of tall rocks.

Polkinghorne made a quick survey of the place, then placed his men so

that the light fell sideways, not directly upon either face.

"Shoes off, Doughty!" he ordered. "None of your nasty Devonshire ways

here!" For the Devon rules admit kicking, and that with shoes, while

Cornish, though allowing leg-play, insist it should be in stocking-feet,

and consist of tripping and locking only. The whole West Country style

of wrestling differs enormously from the North Country, in which Ishmael

would have stood a poor chance against an opponent so much his superior

in size. In the West they play for a hitch, instead of trying for a fall

by sheer strength and weight, and if the smaller wrestler has a stock of

good holds, and can only get under his opponent quickly enough, he may

bring off the "flying mare," the great throw clear over the shoulder.

Leg-play is the great feature, even in Cornwall, where prominence is

given to the hug, and Ishmael had very strong legs, though his shoulders

were not so heavy as Doughty's.

He took his stand opposite Doughty. He had never wrestled with him

before, but he had had much practice with boys of all builds. He eyed

him closely and knew his best chance lay in trying to rush him so as to

get under him and with a good inside lock of the leg trip him up. In

shoulder play he would otherwise stand small chance with one so much

taller. Doughty's best plan would be to stand off him, a thing not

possible in North Country wrestling. In the West a special jacket of

strong linen is worn for the taking of hitches, and Polkinghorne made

the two boys pull out their shirts as the nearest approach to it. All

was arranged to the satisfaction of the three who were acting as

"sticklers," and in what seemed to Ishmael the flashing of a moment he

and Doughty were crouching, cat-like, opposite each other, legs bent,

arms out, hands tense. They stood so for what seemed minutes, though it

was only a fraction of the time that had gone in the preparations.

Ishmael felt no fear of Doughty; exhilaration was still strong enough

within him to eliminate that dread, though the fear of losing that

always pricks at the fighter was not quite deadened. He circled, still

in that cat-like attitude, Doughty circling also, both waiting to

spring. Ishmael was intensely aware of superficial physical

sensations--the tense feeling in his skin, and under the soles of his

feet the hardness of the ground. He spread his feet a little and moved

his toes against the grass. All his muscles were on the alert, and

suddenly, from acute consciousness of every fibre of his body, he passed

to a splendid lightness, a complete ignoring of anything but poise and

spring. In that moment, so swiftly on the edge of the first circling

movement that Doughty, the slower of communication from brain to limbs,

thought it the same, he had rushed for his hitch.

He got him by the sleeve, and Doughty, surprised at the quick hold,

shyed away, but could not twist out of it. He grappled Ishmael more

closely to try and get full shoulder-play, but the only result was that

each obtained a hitch on the arm and breast of the other's shirt. The

"flying mare" was now out of the question for Ishmael this round, but

with a dexterous twist of his leg he got an inside lock on his

opponent's, and the next moment Doughty was sprawling. He was up the

second after, and, since his shoulders had not touched the ground, the

fall counted for nothing, and this time he rushed in at Ishmael. He was

very angry.

He stooped more, so as to keep his legs out of Ishmael's reach, and the

two strained to try and over-balance each other's body, using the

ordinary arm and breast hold. Ishmael, after a few moments of this

immobile straining, let go Doughty's arm to seize him by the back of the

collar, and Doughty, profiting in a flash by the steeper angle of

inclination, caught him square under the arms and raised him bodily in

the air.

Ishmael hung on grimly, making no effort to disengage himself, which

would only have given Doughty the further purchase needed to throw him.

Instead he began to work round in the other's arms. As soon as he had

sufficient twist on his hips he entwined his feet round Doughty's knees,

and with an effort that caused the blood to suffuse his face and

neck--for Doughty was fighting the movement with relentless pressure--he

got himself, by the hold his legs gave him, round so that his shoulders

instead of his chest were against the chest of his upholder. He flung

his arms backwards round Doughty's fore-arms, thus keeping himself

pressed upon the other, his stomach arched outwards, his legs curled

back each side round the other's knees, his arms, also backwards,

pressing the other's torso in a curve that followed and supported his

own with the disadvantage of having his full weight upon it.

They stayed apparently motionless, breathing heavily, save for that

laboured sound seeming like wrestlers of bronze. Slowly Doughty began to

feel his balance slipping from him under the full weight of Ishmael upon

his chest and stomach; his spine felt as though if it curved a fraction

more it would crack. He could not move his feet for the strong coil of

Ishmael's legs around his, and he knew that in a moment more he must

fall backwards with the weight still upon him. The only joints in which

he still had play were his ankles; stiffening them he began to incline

forwards. Slowly the interlocked bodies, like a swaying tower, came up

and up, till the watchers caught their breath wondering what would

happen to the one who was undermost in the fall if both stayed so

unyielding.

But Ishmael, whose brain was working with that clarity only attained

when it is responding to trained instinct, almost mechanically relaxed

his grip on the other's spine when he felt the angle coming forward,

then, using all his nerve, he waited--waited till the forward angle, in

which he was the underneath, had become acute, till the momentum of the

fall had begun. Then he relaxed his grip on one of Doughty's legs, at

the same time forcing the other outwards with all the strength of his

foot and leg. Doughty had to unstiffen a knee to prevent himself coming

taut and prone on the ground, and a hard shove with Ishmael's elbow,

thrown backwards against his shoulder, combined with the leg-play to

send him spinning sideways. The momentum was too great for him to

regulate the fall, and he came fairly on both shoulders, while Ishmael,

who had been thrown forwards on one knee, picked himself up and stood

reeling slightly but unhurt.

The sticklers ran forward to help Doughty to his feet, but he lay

motionless, eyes closed. In his mind, as he lay there, worked the

thought that he did not wish either to go on with the fight or to let

Ishmael triumph as at an easy victory. He would frighten him, frighten

them all, by making out he was very badly hurt. His spine, that would

do.... Opening his eyes he murmured, "My back ... my back ..." and made

as though trying to move. A terrible pang shot through his spine as he

did so. His next cry was a scream of real pain and fear. The tears

gathered in his eyes with his rage and terror. He cried, "You've done

for me; you've broken my back! Oh, my back; curse you, my back!..."

The others were terrified. For the second time that evening Ishmael was

seized by the awful feeling of irrevocableness, of an impossible thing

having happened and of it being still more impossible to undo it.

It had become dark with an effect of suddenness to those who had been

intent on other things than the progress of the night; and it seemed to

Ishmael that the whole world was narrowed to a circle of dim moor, in the

midst of it that white thing crying about its back--always its back....

Carminow, the least perturbed, insisted on raising the sufferer to his

feet, and it was found, after much protest on his part, that he could

walk slowly with support on either side. It only remained to get him

back to the school somehow and in at the side door to his bed and the

ministrations of the matron if not the doctor.

The little procession began to move off, Polkinghorne and Carminow, the

two biggest, carrying Doughty on their crossed hands, and progressing

with a slow sideways motion, trying not to stumble over the uneven

ground. Killigrew ran on ahead to warn the matron and urge her to

silence, in case the injury might turn out to be but slight after all.

A miserable loneliness fell upon Ishmael. He had won, and none of the

sweets of victory were his. He lagged behind. There was a rustle at his

side, and Hilaria's hands were round his arm.

"What on earth--" he began--angry, confused, aware that tears were

burning in his eyes.

"Don't be cross.... I had to stay. I was up on the boulders. Oh,

Ishmael, have you killed him?"

The question jangled his frightened nerves, and he answered sharply,

telling her he neither knew nor cared, even while he was shaking with

the fear lest what she suggested might be true. "I'll say something to

those youngsters for having let you stay," he added, catching sight of

Polkinghorne minor and Moss, where they hesitated in the shadows.

"As though they could have prevented me!" she said, with swift scorn. He

looked at her more closely, struck by a something strange about her, and

saw that her skirts no longer swelled triumphantly on either side, but

fell limply, and so long that she had to hold them up when she took a

step forward by his side.

"I couldn't climb on the boulders in it," she said, answering his look.

"I made the boys turn their backs and I took it off."

"Well, I imagine you can't go home without it," said Ishmael wearily. He

supposed he would have to see her home, for it was already past the time

for the younger boys to be in. He felt he hated girls and the bother

that they were.

"Cut off in, you two," he ordered; "and mind, if you blab about Hilaria

having been here I'll baste you."

They promised eagerly, and Hilaria thanked him in a subdued voice. She

went through the darkness to where she had left her crinoline. They

found it lying, wet with dew, a prostrate system of ugly rings, held

together by webbing. It looked incredibly naked, a hollow mockery of the

portentous dome it had stood for in the eyes of the world.

He slung it over one shoulder without a word, inwardly resenting

bitterly the touch of the ludicrous it gave to the evening's happenings,

and almost silently he went with the stumbling girl towards the town,

only leaving her at the corner of her lane. She thanked him with a new

shyness, and taking the cumbrous emblem of her inferiority over her left

arm, held out her strong hard little right hand to him.

"Don't think it horrid of me to have stayed," she pleaded. "It was that

I so wanted you to win ... I was afraid ..."

"It was very--very unladylike," began Ishmael, then paused. Till that

moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had

become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his

womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him

adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it

brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause no more.

"Don't worry, Ishmael," she said. "Father has often told me of people

hurting their backs wrestling and doing things like that, and he says

it's very seldom anything. If it is they can't walk at all, and he

walked quite well. Besides, I know he's pretending it's worse than it is

to upset you; he's that sort...."

Ishmael felt a little pang of gratitude, he gripped her hand, muttered a

"good-night," and was off through the darkness. But he did not go back

to the school for an hour yet. He was in for such trouble an hour more

or less after time made no difference, and he was past thinking in terms

of the clock. He had grown up violently and painfully in a short space,

and ordinary methods of measuring time mean very little to one who has

crowded years of growth into one evening. He walked about the moor till

physical exhaustion drove him in, where Old Tring, with a glance at him,

gave him hot brandy and water and sent him to bed with hardly a word.

Not till next day did Ishmael notice he was lame in one knee.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WIND UPON THE GRASS-FIELD

A week after the fight Ishmael went over the moor to the sea. Everything

was very still, even his footsteps were soundless on the thick turf. It

was one of those days filled with a warm mist, so fine it cannot be

observed near at hand, but always seeming to encircle the walker, as

though he carried some charm to make a hollow space around him where the

breath of the mist may not live. Yet, out in it for long, the clothes

become sodden, while every grass-blade and leaf can be seen to hold its

burden of a glittering drop, though the earth itself remains dry and

powdery and on the hard, pale roads the dust lies all day, as though the

actual soil were not of the texture to respond to a mist so fine.

Not a breath blew the vaporous clouds in the wreaths that usually change

shapes while one watches, and the long drifts in the valley at Ishmael's

feet hung motionless in the air, the dark side of the opposite slope

showed here and there, crossed by the pale zig-zag of the path. He went

on to the cliff's edge; far below at its foot the sea, lost further out,

was visible, motionless and soundless, save for the faint rustle where

it impinged upon the cliff in a narrow line of white. No outward pull or

inward swell of the sea's breast was visible; it was as though that fine

edge of murmurous whiteness were always made of the same particles of

water, hissing perpetually along the cliff's foot.

Ishmael lay down on the damp young bracken and listened to the stillness

that was only pierced by the rare wail of a syren far out to sea and

the steady moan of the horn from the lighthouse. He felt as dead as the

world seemed, as grey, as lost to all rousing; and, ignorant of

reactions, wondered why, and whether henceforth he would always be like

that.

He was suffering from too much fuss. In the days which had elapsed since

the wrestling bout on the moor Doughty's injury had seemed likely to

prove a bad sprain, but there had been a terrible twenty-four hours when

the doctor, a portentous person with more pessimism than knowledge, had

wagged his head forebodingly over the moaning patient. Doughty had felt

it was not in nature for anyone to be severe on a boy with an injured

back, and so he babbled freely, under cover of a pretended delirium,

feeling it was better to let his version get first to Old Tring. For he

guessed how that personage, always one to examine the springs of action

before judgment, would look at his share in the matter. Dr. Harvey had

asked for a famous Plymouth surgeon to be sent for, and this afternoon

he had arrived. On his verdict as to Doughty's condition depended

Ishmael's own fate, and he knew it. For, whatever the provocation, the

fact remained that Ishmael had injured a schoolfellow in a wrestling

match admittedly serious in its intent, and the discipline of the school

had to be considered, all the more rigidly that many rumours, mostly

untrue, had circulated in the school. Old Tring had suspended judgment,

merely sending for Boase, who had arrived one evening at St. Renny

covered with smuts and giving freely his opinions about the railway, on

which, for motives of Christian poverty, he had been rash enough to

travel in one of the unroofed third class compartments.

And, for the first time in his knowledge, Ishmael was aware that the

Parson had not quite understood. It was not that he did not understand

what Ishmael felt as much as that he expected him to feel so much more

than he did. Ishmael loathed a fuss. Yet the Parson had been a rock of

support; Old Tring had been generosity itself; Polkinghorne and

Carminow, even the little boys, had held their tongues and let him see

that for their part they intended to think no more of what Doughty had

said. Killigrew had treated the whole affair as something between a joke

and a matter so unimportant it made really no difference to anyone. And

of all the attitudes it was Killigrew's, in the revulsion from fuss,

that Ishmael was beginning to adopt as his own. The only burning thing

he felt about his position was anger--an anger against his father in the

first place and against Archelaus, oddly enough, in the second. He knew

that his eldest brother would do all in his power to make life as

difficult as possible when he went back to take up the reins at Cloom.

With that burning grudge went another sensation--the realisation that if

all things had been otherwise, been normal, Cloom would, after all,

never have been his, and he was struck by a certain unfairness that it

should be his now.

But of any shame at his position he felt none, and it was this that

apparently he was expected to feel by all save Killigrew. They were all

so eager to make him understand that there was nothing for him to feel

ashamed about, that no one thought any the less of him or wanted him to

think any less of himself. Ishmael began to discover what he never,

being very un-self-analytical, fully realised, that he was one of those

elect souls born without that gift of the Evil One--shame. Some attain

that freedom by hard striving, but some are born free, and of them was

Ishmael.

Now, as he lay upon the cliff, all the embarrassment he felt was at this

set of emotions that was expected to rack him and did not. He was not

yet old enough to have the courage of his lack of convictions, and he

feared he had failed in something a finer creature would have responded

to. He rolled over on to his elbows and stared at the pale faces of a

clump of wet primroses that stared back at him with an equal innocence

of emotion. Beyond them the wild violets gleamed like faint blue flames,

and the tightly-curled fronds of young bracken showed silvery grey

amongst the litter of last year's stalks that lay in patches of a dead

burnt-orange upon the grey-green turf. Ishmael spread his fingers wide

and plunged them in the primroses, in the grass, in the loose soil, for

the pleasure of their soft, clean textures. He rubbed his face in them

like a young animal, and drew in deep breaths of the best smell in the

world--the smell of damp, green growing things. He turned on to his back

again. The mist had begun to waver, a breath was stirring fitfully but

finely. It came cool upon him, and as it blew the world seemed very

gently to come to life again. He could see what he had come to look at

and overshot in the mist--the little harbour of Povah lying to his left.

He rolled over and stared curiously at its stone jetties and clustered

shipping. There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade

lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied

tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was

still a rare sight in those parts--a steamer. She was a side-wheeler,

with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast,

fore-and-aft on her mizzen. A little crowd stood on the end of the quay

to stare at her, and it was on her that Ishmael too fixed his eyes; then

he scrambled up and made his way diagonally down the cliff to the

harbour.

It had occurred to him to run away to sea. He was of the land and knew

nothing about ships, but he had often read of boys who ran away to

sea--they shipped as cabin-boys and often were killed by the rough life

or never heard of again. A sick wave of self-pity flooded Ishmael as he

thought of it. He whose salvation was that he so seldom saw himself from

the outside--unlike Killigrew, the feeder on emotion, now was aware of

the poetic fitness of the story--the proud boy who sooner than live with

dishonour had left home and friends to face the wide world and roam, a

veritable Ishmael. Adventure began to call to him; the salt on his lips

as he licked them seemed its very tang. He was big and strong, and had

no fear of hard living; neither was he fearful physically. On one thing

he was determined--not to stay to be expelled and then be taken

ignominiously back to Cloom and the jeers of his family.

But deep down in him his ineradicable honesty kept nagging at him,

telling that this new sea-lure was all make-believe, that not that way

for him did happiness lie. Yet he kept on, always with a tingle of

excitement mingling with an undercurrent of disbelief in the reality of

it all, and made his way to the quayside determined to talk to the

sailors and introduce the subject of a new hand.... Half an hour later

he came away, after a desultory though interesting enough conversation

in which his project had never got past his tongue. Through no cowardice

or dread, he had simply not been able to broach it. He stared back at

the ship when he paused on the crest of the hill, trying to puzzle out

what was struggling for recognition in him. Dimly it began to dawn on

him that there are only two ways for a man to live fully. The first is

by being rooted to a spot that is everything to him, by which he makes

his bread, by which and on which he lives, so that its well-being is as

that of himself; and the second is by calling no place home, wandering

the world over and remaining always free. The way which lies betwixt

these two--that of hiring this house or that, putting belongings about

it and being attached to it by purely artificial ties of expediency and

rent, a house that was born of the thought of some unknown, the fabric

of whose ground is nothing to him who hires it--this way, which is the

way of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, is false and

unsatisfying. It would be splendid to have two lives and give one to

each of the primary ways, to live once by the soil and once by the sea;

but that is a thing that can happen to no man. He may wander till he is

ageing and then "settle down," but that is a different affair. Ishmael

was born of the soil; Cloom, not only by inheritance, but by his

peculiar training, meant his life. With a sensation of something

clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it. Cloom had been

too strong for him.

It was the only time another path ever even suggested itself to him, and

then the suggestion had not been sincere, merely the promptings of that

literary sense which is in all imaginative youth. It prompted, too, not

so worthily, in an aspect of his new knowledge that did not escape

him--a certain romance about it, a feeling that it made him rather

interesting, something of a figure.... He would not have been human had

he quite escaped that at his age. And yet it was that feeling no one but

Killigrew, who frankly mooted it, had a suspicion of as possible, so

Ishmael realised with shame. Also his commonsense told him that the

sordid and quite unromantic incidents were likely to pile up more

thickly than any of charm or pleasure. His was an admirable position for

any one who loved self-pity; he would be able to see himself as a

romantic centre, to feed on misunderstanding and enjoy a self-conscious

isolation.

That was the real danger, one that the Parson, who was in some matters

of a beautiful simplicity, had never realised. He had only foreseen the

straightforward shames and difficulties, and by these Ishmael was at an

age to be untouched, while he was just ripe for the former snare.

He walked over the moor and rejoined the St. Renny track with the sense

of relief that we all get when one of two ways has been definitely

discarded. He had even ceased to worry over what decision Old Tring had

come to, though when he made out the Parson's figure coming towards him

his heart gave a leap and then beat more quickly than its wont. He

hastened his steps to meet him.

Boase waved his hat in a gesture of triumph, as though to signal that

all was well, and his first shouted words told Ishmael that this was not

to be the end of his career at St. Renny. With the knowledge went a

queer little pang of disappointment; he had so been accustoming his mind

to the glamour of expulsion in circumstances such as his. The Parson, in

whose philosophy it would have held nothing but disaster, was beaming

with joy. He sat down on a stretch of turf and Ishmael lay beside him,

waiting.

"In the first place, the injury isn't serious. Carron, the surgeon from

Plymouth, says it's nothing in the world but a muscle torn away, that is

painful but not dangerous. He says he does not know why the boy made

such a fuss; he can see nothing to account for delirium. I could have

given a guess, but refrained.... Anyway, I've been having a talk with

Dr. Tring--"

Ishmael kept an ungrateful silence; it seemed to him that week had been

all talks.

The Parson waited a second and then, with a tiny pang of disappointment,

went on:

"It is to be all right; everything is to be as it was before. I know you

feel that is impossible, but it will hurt less and less with time,

believe me. Character is what counts in the long run, Ishmael. And I

have seen--I can't tell you how proudly--that you have character, that

it has made its mark here. That shows in the way this affair has been

taken. So pull yourself together; tell yourself how little it all really

matters, and you'll find it is so."

A wave of affection for his friend went over Ishmael as he listened to

the words that really fitted his case so little and were so kindly

spoken. He felt in a flat muddle, unaware whether he wished he did feel

all he was expected to or glad he did not; but one good thing the

Parson's words accomplished. They purged him of the artificial

standpoint of the afternoon. It was impossible for one as naturally

direct as Ishmael to be in contact with so much of singleness of purpose

as the Parson's and not be ashamed of his own impulses towards

theatrical vision. He turned his head away to hide his emotion, which

the Parson took to spring from the news he had imparted and welcomed

with relief. He took the boy's hand and pressed it, a thing rare for

him, who was so sensitive of others' wishes he generally left physical

expression to them in the first place.

"Shall we be getting back?" he said, after a moment.

As they were walking over the moor a gleam of sun shone out, wavered,

then strengthened, and before a soft breeze the mist began to vanish,

only clinging here and there in the pockets of the moor like fine white

wool rubbed off the backs of phantom sheep. For a while they strode in

silence; then the Parson said:

"By the way, you know old Mr. Eliot's daughter, don't you? Tring told me

she went to the dancing classes."

"Yes.... Why?" Ishmael asked in sudden alarm.

If it had all come out--to have a girl mixed up in this story of

his--the ignominy of it! The next moment with his relief mingled a

contrition for his selfish impulse when Boase replied: "She's not well,

apparently. Her father made Carron have a look at her; he's no faith in

Harvey. Seems she's been doing too much for her strength--walking too

far. She appears to think nothing of ten to fifteen miles."

"There's nothing wrong, really wrong, is there?"

"Oh, no, only they think change of air will be good for her and more

rest. She's to go on a long visit to some relations in France. I don't

know what she'll think of the change, a girl like that. She's a splendid

creature."

"Have you met her?" asked Ishmael in surprise.

"Why, yes. Her father seemed to think she was a little hysterical and

asked me to see if she would talk to me...."

"More talking ..." thought Ishmael.

"I don't think her at all hysterical. It seemed to me more physical. In

fact, I suggested Mr. Carron. But I think there's nothing like a

thorough change. Her father'll miss her, I fear, though."

Ishmael had a sly chuckle as he thought of others who would do likewise,

and, catching a twinkle in the Parson's eye, it occurred to him for the

first time that day that perhaps all the subtlety of the race was not

confined to those of the age of himself and Killigrew. He grew a little

hot; then the Parson began to speak on another theme, and he thought no

more of Hilaria. He was to think of her less and less as the months

during which she never came back to St. Renny went by, and he did not

guess how he was to hear of her again.

"About your confirmation," the Parson was saying. "This affair will make

no difference. There is no real reason why it should be put off. Dr.

Tring quite agrees with me. You are in the same mind about it, eh?"

Ishmael, who was feeling more and more as though the past week had been

a grisly burden that was slipping off him like a bad dream, acquiesced

in a rush of eager thankfulness. The complications of life were

beginning to unfold in front of him, and both by training and heredity

he turned to the things that bore relation elsewhere but in this life

for a solution.

"I want to be decent ..." was all he said gruffly, but with a something

so youthful in manner and sentiment that Boase had a yearning over him

as in the days when he had been a little boy.

"Let me say one thing to you, Ishmael. I have said it before, but when

you were less able to understand. You will meet people--men--who will

tell you no man can keep altogether a rigid straightness in matters

that, as you know, I hold important. You will meet women who will

condone this view and tell you that they do not expect it, that men are

'different,' and that they would not even have it otherwise. Do not

believe them. It may be true of some men, though, if they were brought

up with other ideals, it would not be true of nearly as many as it is

now. But it will not, I think, be true of you, which is all you are

concerned with. Your very position should make you more scrupulous than

most men. You have had a shock, I know, but has it yet occurred to you

to think over the effect your father's conduct has had on those other

lives--your brothers' and your sister's?"

"No," confessed Ishmael.

"Try. You are not fond of Archelaus, I know, and there is no reason why

you should be. But try and see his point of view. He has the attachment

to Cloom that you have--not the same kind; he would never have felt it a

trust or something to be made better for its own sake, but he does feel

he has a right to it, and that is a hard thing to bear. Ishmael, all

this misery, the reason why your brothers have not been brought up as

you have, with the same advantages, which now they can never gain all

their lives long, the reason why Vassie, who is clever and pretty, will

have a difficulty in getting a husband worthy of her, is because your

father lived according to the law of the flesh instead of the spirit.

Never place any child of yours in that position."

"I never will, I promise. But, I say, you know, Da Boase"--the childhood

name slipped out unawares--"I don't think I care about that sort of

thing--girls and all that. Not like Killigrew."

The Parson hid a smile. "You will not ripen as early as Killigrew, in

all probability," he said, "but one does not have a temper such as

yours without other passions. There is another thing. Men of the

world--Killigrew, when he is a little older--will tell you that it is

possible and right to gratify those passions at less cost than the

embroilment your father made about him. Casual intercourse where no such

question arises.... Do not listen to that either. If it is possible for

you to be one of those who carry an undimmed banner, do. People often

talk as though purity were negative, whereas it is very actual. Keep it

as a beautiful thing that once lost is gone for ever at whatever gain of

experience or even understanding."

"I really don't want that sort of thing," persisted Ishmael a little

outraged he should not be thought to know best.

"However that may be," said the Parson, rather sharply, "different by

nature or grace, you should never let your difference make you feel

superior. A person who despises or fails to sympathise with all the

sorrow and the sin in the lives of others is the worst of sinners. There

are even times when chastity can be very chill and bare, though purity

is always lovely."

"But you were saying----" began Ishmael, then stopped. "I think I do

know what you mean," he said more humbly. The Parson made no reply, but,

stopping in his walk, looked over a low wall of loose granite and laid

his arms along it. "Come and look here a minute," he said.

The sun had died away, but the mist had not returned, and a still

greyness held the world in the low-lying part of the moor which they had

reached.

Fields lay on one side and stretched in a parti-coloured patterning over

the slope before them as they leant upon the wall. The breeze, too,

seemed not to stir there, as though the pearly greyness that seemed to

tinge the very air were a blight that lay on sound and motion as well as

sight. No breath stirred strong enough to lift the petals of the

gorse-blossoms by the wall, or rustle the wayside plants. The only

movement came from a field of long grass on the slope--one of the

pattern of fields, newly-ploughed, short-turfed, or misted with green

from the three-weeks-old corn springing a few inches high, a pattern

that lay like a coverlet drawn over the rounded flank of the hill. And

over that one field movement was busy--the rank grass was exactly the

length, density, texture, to respond to what imperceptible breath there

was, and that grass only. Over and over it passed the silvery waves made

by the bending of the blades, over and over, always rippling up the

slope till it looked as though a film of smoke were perpetually being

blown from below to vanish over the crest. Ripple after ripple, ripple

after ripple, shivered up the slope and was gone--the field shuddered

and breathed with it; there was something uncanny about this silent

unceasing movement in the dead landscape--this visible effect of an

invisible thing.

"We're most of us too full of effort," said the Parson abruptly; "we

think too much of trying to be good, of whether what we are going to do

is right or wrong. Whereas if we only got our minds into the right

attitude the rest would follow naturally and be worth all the striving.

If we could only be more flower-like--let ourselves grow and blossom.

Look at that field, the only thing moving; d'you see it? Well, it's

rippling like that all by itself because it's the only thing able to

answer to the little breath that's abroad. If you get yourself sound and

right and don't worry about yourself, then you respond to the breath of

the Spirit, like that grass. For the wind bloweth where it listeth...."

He fell into a silence, and Ishmael, stirred out of the crust of

depression which had held him so many days, felt all his heart and high

hopes, his eagerness for life and its possibilities, stirring within him

again. He drew a deep breath and stretched widely, sloughing off mental

sloth in the physical act as young things can. He felt more alive

because more conscious of himself and his surroundings than ever before,

eager and ready to take up the remainder of his time at St. Renny. He

stirred a little by the Parson's side.

Boase brought his thought to an ending with the rest of the quotation:

"So is everyone that is born of the Spirit...."

BOOK II

GROWTH

CHAPTER I

A FAMILY ALBUM

Vassilissa Beggoe stooped to take a final look at herself in the small

mirror, for she was so tall that, in her flowery bonnet that swooped

upwards from her piled chignon, she nearly touched the sloping roof of

her bedroom. She stooped and gave a glow--half smile, half a quickening

of light, over her whole face--at what she saw in the cloudy glass,

which could not materially dim her white and gold splendour. A slight

thickness of modelling here and there, notably in the short nose and

too-rounded chin, blurred the fineness of her beauty and might make for

hardness later on, but now, at twenty-one, Vassie's wonderful skin and

her splendid assurance were too dazzling for criticism to look at her

and live. She gave a pat, more approbation than correction, to a rose on

the bonnet, smoothed the lapels of her Alexandra jacket--so-called after

the newly-made Princess of Wales--and pulled up her gloves under its

pegtop sleeves. Then she turned with a swoop and a swish of her wide

blue taffeta skirts.

"There!" she exclaimed in the studiously clear notes she had not been

able to free from a slight metallic quality; "that's not so bad a sight

to go and meet a little brother, I believe?"

The younger, softer, slighter bit of femininity on the bed gave a gentle

little sound that meant admiration, and clasped a pair of dimpled, not

very clean, little hands together.

"You're beautiful, Vassie, just beautiful. And just like a lady...."

"I am a lady," said Vassie sharply. "How am I not a lady, I should like

to know? Haven't I been four years in a boarding-school, and don't I go

and stay with a clergyman's family in Plymouth? A lady.... When I was at

Plymouth last month for the Prince's wedding celebrations one of the

officers of a battleship asked who I was!"

"I know, you've told me. Vassie--"

"Well?"

"Nothing. Only I sometimes wonder why you've never got wed up there to

Plymouth. One of those officers, or perhaps a clergyman...?"

Vassie rather wondered herself, but all she said was: "I'm not going to

give up my freedom for the first man who lifts his little finger, I can

tell you. I haven't such a great opinion of the menfolk. Conceited

creatures, the most of them. I mean to pick and choose. And I mean

Ishmael to help me."

"Oh, Vassie, how?" came from the wide-eyed listener on the bed.

"Why, I shall make him bring his school friends down, of course. They're

all gentlemen. And then I shall make them fall in love with me."

"But won't they be a lot younger than you, Vassie? You're three years

older'n Ishmael."

"Some of 'em may be older than him, mayn't they? And one thing leads to

another. We might both get asked to stay with their folks. Besides--I

don't know that I should mind a man younger than me. I'd know more what

to do with him. I've always found boys easier. Men are so funny--as if

they were always keeping something to themselves. I don't like that."

She looked indeed as though she might demand and take all she could

get--a girl greedy of life and the good things in it, or the things that

to her seemed good. She swooped down beside the little creature on the

bed and flung an arm round her. The younger girl's personality seemed

to be drowned in the bright effulgence of the elder as her slight form

in the swelling folds of blue taffeta skirt that overflowed her.

"What about Mr. Tonkin?" ventured Phoebe; "he'd have you fast enough.

And he's almost as good as a clergyman, though of course not as good as

an officer...."

"Old Tonkin, indeed!" cried Vassie indignantly. "I wouldn't touch him if

he was the only man alive. Why, mother's actually jealous of the way he

tries to come patting and pawing me.... She can have him--if she can get

him. Horrid, pale, fat old man!" She shook the thought of him from off

her, and ran on: "And when I'm a la--I mean when I'm married, I'll see

what I can do for you, Phoebe. You're too soft ever to do any good for

yourself. As like as not you'd take any clumsy lout that offered, simply

because you wouldn't know how to say 'No.'"

Phoebe said nothing, but a bright colour ran up over her pale skin and

her soft mouth set in a little obstinate line. The whole expression of

her face altered when she set her lips so that they covered the two

front teeth that at once made her face irregular and gave it

individuality. She lost her exquisite softness and became a little

stupid, for it made the lower part of her face too brief--what Vassie

called "buttoned up." Phoebe was not actually pretty, but she was very

alluring to men, or would be, simply because everything about her was

feminine--not womanly, but feminine. Her mouse-brown hair, straight and

soft and fine, refused to fall into the heavy polished curtains that

were the mode, and which made of Vassie's two waves of rich brass,

bright and hard-edged as metal. Phoebe's eyes were brown, not of the

opaque variety, but with the actually velvet look of a bee's body. The

girls at school had told her her eyes looked good to stroke. Her nose

was an indeterminate snub, her chin delightfully round but retreating,

falling away from a mouth like a baby's--so fine in texture, so petal

soft, so utterly helpless-looking, with its glint of two small square

teeth. Only when she looked obstinate and closed her mouth the charm

went out of her face as though wiped off like a tangible thing. She

looked almost sullen now, but Vassie, heedless of her, jumped up and,

pirouetting round to show herself off once more and to give herself that

feeling of mental poise for which physical well-being is needful, made

for the door. A swish, a flutter, a bang, and she was gone.

Left alone, Phoebe sat a moment longer, then rolled over on the bed

with a kitten-like motion and, stretching her arms above her head, lay

taut for a second, then relaxed suddenly. Head tucked in the pillow, she

apparently was lost in thought, for her brown eyes, slightly narrowed,

stared vacantly at the frilling of the pillow-slip. Then she gave a soft

little sound that had it not been so pretty would have been a giggle,

wriggled round, and slipped off the bed. She ran to the mirror and began

to take down her tumbled hair. As she raised her arms her round breast

swelled like a bird's when it lifts its head; her bright eyes and pursed

mouth, full of hairpins, were bird-like too. She was perpetually, to the

seeing eye, suggesting comparison with the animal creation; she was

bird-like, mouse-like, kitten-like, anything and everything that was

soft and small and obviously easy to hurt and crush physically. That was

her allure, her most noticeable quality--that she presented

unconsciously, but unmistakably, the suggestion that it would be easy to

hurt her, easy and sweet.

She made trial of her hair in the fashion the new Princess had

started--drawn back _à la chinoise_, with a long rolled curl, known for

some reason as a "_repentir_," brought forward to lie over one shoulder.

Then she went to the washstand and took more care than usual over the

cleansing of her hands. That done, she deliberated whether or not to

put on her grey chip hat with the pink plume that on her arrival she had

flung on the bed, where it still lay. She tried herself with it and

without, then debated as to whether it looked better to give the

impression of being one of the family by appearing bonnetless, or

whether, on the other hand, it would not be more interesting to Ishmael

if he got the impression of a visitor ... of someone who was not always

about the house, who was to be seen outside. She finally decided on the

latter. Then she sat down to wait, though the time was bound to be more

than an hour, since Vassie and John-James had only now started in to

Penzance in the smart new market-cart to meet the eagerly awaited

arrival, Ishmael Ruan.

Downstairs Annie too had her deliberations, her changes of mind, her

sudden impulses of affection and of resentment, as her ill-regulated

brain had always had them. She had not changed much in the years that

had brought them past Ishmael's eighteenth birthday. All of worn tissues

and faded tints had been hers long before, and except for an increased

jerkiness she seemed the same. In attire she had altered, and her black

silk dress, with its scallops and trembling fringes, suited ill enough

with her badly-arranged hair and work-worn hands.

She sat in the little parlour, which she had been made to take into use

by Vassie, who had successfully made it hideous with antimacassars and

vases of artificial flowers. As Annie sat rigidly upright upon a

slippery horsehair-covered chair, her eyes wandered vaguely here and

there and fell on the album in which Vassie had collected all the

photographs taken of the family from time to time. Photographs printed

on paper were only just beginning to supersede the older daguerreotypes,

and a gleam of interest came into Annie's pale blue eyes, for the album

was still a new toy to her. She remembered that Vassie had only lately

finished sticking in the last photographs, and, picking it up, she began

turning the pages.

There was Archelaus ... she caught her breath. Her lovely Archelaus as

he had appeared before going off to that terrible Crimea, which Annie

always thought was so called because it was such a wicked place. The

print was not very clear, as it was only a copy made from the original

daguerreotype, but what it lacked in definition Annie's memory could

supply. Archelaus was standing with one elbow leaning upon a rustic

pillar; he wore his uniform and looked like a king. He had splendid

side-whiskers, though their yellow hue did not show in the photograph.

Her beautiful Archelaus ... now toiling and moiling in those terrible

deserts, those sandy places, of Australia, which was the underside of

the world, where black heathen went about mother-naked. By now he had

doubtless dug much gold--many, many sovereigns of it--out of the sand,

and perhaps some day very soon he would walk in with his pockets full of

it; and then who would cut a dash in the country-side, from Land's End

up to Truro and beyond it? Her Archelaus. Even in her dreams Annie did

not picture Archelaus pouring out his gold upon her or as being anything

but of a splendid masculine surliness.

She turned a page and came on John-James--reluctant, bashful, glowering

at the camera ... he was the most dutiful of her children, and she

passed on carelessly and came to Tom. Sleek and shiny in black

broadcloth, with the foxy sharpness of his features somehow suggesting

the red of his colouring even in the photograph.... He was sitting in a

low plush chair with Vassie standing, after the ungallant fashion of the

pictures of the period, behind him, one hand on his shoulder. She looked

a swelling twenty, though she had only been seventeen when it was taken.

Another turn of the page and Annie saw herself--an unkind vision, at her

most set, hard of hair and jaw, with deep eye-sockets. She admired it

for the black gown and the lace handkerchief she was holding; but she

was interested in it, too, as the true egoist always is in

self-portraiture, however unflattering.

She stared at it longer than at any of the others, then, at last turning

the page, came on a photograph of Ishmael, sent by him from St. Renny at

the Parson's instigation. She stared at the mouth that, with its more

generous curves, was yet so like her own, at the square brow that never

came from her side of the family, at the narrow chin that in its

delicacy seemed to her girlish. As she looked a sudden tremor ran over

her. She realised she had been gazing at it as at the picture of a

stranger, so altered did he look from when she had last seen him, over

two years ago.... For some reason that stuck-up Parson had made every

excuse for the boy to spend his holidays elsewhere for over two years.

She had not seen him since before his confirmation, which she looked on

vaguely as some sort of civil ceremony like a superior kind of getting

apprenticed ... perhaps as being definitely apprenticed to gentility.

She had had Vassie "done" at Plymouth for that reason. This strange boy,

this young man, was coming to-day to her house, which was his house ...

coming to upset everything. She stared again, trying to trace the

features she remembered after a fashion, but which love had never

imprinted on her memory with the only indelible draughtsmanship. She

turned backwards swiftly till she came to the beginning of the book,

where was another photograph taken from an old daguerreotype. It showed

Ishmael as a baby ... his mouth rather wet-looking, helplessly open, not

unlike Phoebe's now ... he seemed somehow a pathetic baby. Even Annie

was struck by it.

She laid the book on her slippery lap, whence it fell unheeded to the

floor, and stared in front of her.... Out of the dim past, almost as

dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch. The

touch of a baby's hands feeling about her breast.... Not of Ishmael's in

particular--how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so

blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not

purely animal ...? But it was his picture she had been looking at which

had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him

personally that her mind connected the swift memory that was more a

renascence of an actual sensation. She closed her eyes and clutched at

the breast that had fallen on flatness. Her children would all go from

her except this one who was coming back.... A warmth that was

half-animal, and nearly another half-sentimental, rose in her heart, but

at least for the moment it was genuine. There was even some vague

feeling that she would protect him if the others made it hard for

him....

Wheels sounded on the cobbles of the courtyard, and the clatter of

hoofs; it meant that John-James and Vassie were back, bringing her son.

She got to her feet and went through the house to the yard door, already

recovering a little of poise, which meant artificiality, but still with

something of that real glow about her. She knew a moment of dread lest

Ishmael should rebuff it. She held out her arms with an uncontrolled

gesture, and heard her own voice call his name on an ugly piping note

she could not have told was hers.