BLOWN HUSKS
Not for nothing had Ishmael given way to the incursion of the personal,
always before so jealously kept out of his life. His desire for
impersonality now only kept by him in a fierce wish to blot out his own
as much as possible, to sink it in that of the beloved, to drown in
hers. He was obsessed by Blanche, she filled the world for him from rim
to rim; and though with his mind he still admitted the absurdity of it,
could even look at his own state dispassionately, he yet had to admit
the fact. It was some time since he had been near Boase, because,
although the Parson never so much as hinted it, Ishmael knew he was not
in sympathy with him over this. Annie he felt he could hate for her
antagonism, which, as long as it had been against himself alone, he had
not minded; even Vassie would not yield altogether and come in on his
side. Blanche had to fight the lot of them, he told himself--resentful,
fearful lest they should frighten her away. But at the bottom of it all
was the fear, the distrust of her which he refused to recognise.
On this morning as he went down over the fields to Mrs. Penticost's he
was more uneasy than ever before--he knew it was not his imagination
that she had been different these last few days; he began to be beset by
vague fears to which he had not dared give form even in his own mind,
much less in any speech with her. Yet since the dance he had faced the
conclusion that they could not go on as they were, that Blanche must
either agree to a wedding or a final parting....
He reached the cottage and had to wait awhile till Blanche, pale and
grave, came to him in the little parlour.
"Come out," he said to her. "There's a lot of things I want to say, and
I can't here. The room's too small."
Blanche hesitated, seemed to be weighing something in her mind, and then
agreed docilely; she put on a hat, and then went beside him towards the
cliff. As they went Ishmael tried to take her hand, trying to capture
with it some of the spirit of joy which had fled, but she was carrying a
little bag, which she snatched away; there came from it a crackle as of
a letter.... They went down on to the cliff together and stood awhile in
a speechless constraint among the withered bracken.
It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam
refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any
direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes
from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for
litter for cattle. The time of year had fallen upon rust--brown-rust
were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that
lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of
dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks
with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the masses of seeded
hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts
of down, that blew against Blanche's dress as she passed, and clung
there.
Swish-swish ... came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound
that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared
sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue. She felt
that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in
their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through
the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a
series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder.
There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray
labourers, and with less space about her she felt she would find her
task easier. Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread
to come. Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff
that he had been wont to like to wander in.
They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up
thus for better protection against the wind. The close-set hedges of
elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to
form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of passing from
one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side.
In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them
assiduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance,
and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers,
violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had
deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always
called them "the hanging gardens of Babylon"--a phrase that had filled
him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare
earth crumbled underfoot; even grass or weeds seemed afraid to grow
there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares
of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.
Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her
arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely. Ishmael had a
moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from
which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown
together and were penning him in. Then he faced her and spoke.
"Blanche!" he said; "won't you tell me what is the matter?"
Blanche said nothing; tears of pity suddenly choked her, and the
knowledge of the blow she was about to deal. Ishmael at last brought
himself to voice his dread.
"You aren't disappointed in it all--or in me?" he asked in a low voice.
"You're not getting--bored, are you, Blanche? After all, the actress
sees the seamiest side of town; you won't mind leaving it? I know I'm
offering you a very different life from what you're used to, but"--with
a shade of the decisiveness that had always attracted her to him--"it
will be much better for you. No late hours, no more of the
sandwiches-at-odd-times game. We shall be very happy, just us two, even
if we don't know people. People!" he cried scornfully, a wave of passion
breaking over him as he caught her to him. "What do we want with other
people?"
Pressing her almost roughly against him, he bent her head back into the
curve of his arm and kissed her fiercely. She lay passive, deliberately
taking all he gave and thrilling to it. Self-pity surged over her; she
had been so happy--not only happy, but so much better! It was very hard,
she felt, as she trembled with pleasure under his kisses. She shrank
from giving pain, but she shrank still more from lowering herself in his
eyes, and the situation needed all her skill. Disengaging herself from
his arms, she faced him with what she felt to be a brave little smile.
"Ishmael! My poor boy; Ishmael!" she said.
He was suddenly very grave, but waited silently.
Still, he said nothing, and she took his hand in hers and spoke very
gently.
"Ishmael, dear one! listen to me. You must see that it's impossible,
that it would never do."
He did see it, her very certainty showed him plainly enough; but still
he fought against it, bringing forward every plea, and ending with what
was to him the great argument: "But if we love each other?"
"Of course love is very important, Ishmael," said Blanche, choosing her
words carefully; "but don't you see how important other things are too?
It's the externals that matter most in this life, Ishmael; see how they
matter to you, who have worked so hard to alter them."
"You can be clever about it," said Ishmael, a new look that was almost
suspicion glinting in his eyes; "I can't talk round a thing, but I know
things. I know I love you and would spend my life trying to make you
happy. You say you aren't happy in your own life."
"But how could I be happy without my friends and my own kind of people,
Ishmael?" asked Blanche reproachfully. She did not add that, being
incapable of loyalty, she had no real friends, but suddenly she saw it
as true, and staggered under the flood of self-pity that followed.
Losing Ishmael, she was indeed bereft, not only of him, but of her new
self, and with the worst of all pangs--loneliness--striking through her,
she laid her arms against the hedge and, hiding her face, burst into a
storm of tears. Ishmael stood by her silently; like most men, he was
inarticulate at the great moments, and Blanche sobbed on. She who for so
many years had made herself believe what she wished, had gagged and
blindfolded her own soul till truth showed its face to her in vain, was
now stripped of all bandages and having facts passed relentlessly before
her. She had made Ishmael love her, as she had so many men, by seeming
something she was not; she had fallen in love with Ishmael herself, and
must keep up the pretence of being the woman he thought her, for for her
real self such a man as Ishmael could have no comprehension. She told
herself that if they could only have married she would in time have
grown to be the woman he thought her, and she railed bitterly at Fate.
For her there only remained the old path, and the knowledge filled her
with a leaden weariness. But for Ishmael--what remained for him? Never
again would he be able to delight in the world of hopes he had set up
with such care. What could she give him to help him face reality? The
plighted word, steadfastness, friendship, none of these gifts were
Blanche's to bestow, but she could at least send him away his own man
again--at the sacrifice of her vanity. A struggle shook her mind, all
the well-trained sophistries warring against a new clarity of vision.
There were two courses open to her--she might hoodwink Ishmael, bewilder
him with words, show herself as grieving, exquisite, far above him, yet
in spirit unchangeably his; or she might show him the truth, let him see
her as the world-ridden, egotistical creature of flimsy emotions and
tangible ambitions that she was. If she chose the first way, Ishmael
would have an unshattered ideal to take away and set up in his lonely
heart; but it placed forgetfulness out of the question for a man of his
temperament. If she decided on the second course, he would have a time
of bitter disillusionment, but could some day love again, perhaps all
the sooner for the shock; Blanche knew that nothing sends a man so
surely into a woman's arms as a rebuff from another woman. In her heart
she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she
would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling
something that could never be the same again: on the one side whatever
there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit of a
lifetime.
She raised her head, and her glance was arrested idly by a deserted
spider's web woven from branch to branch of the elder hedge and wavering
gently in the breeze. Some seed husks had been blown into the meshes and
clung there lightly, cream-hued against the pearly threads. Blanche
found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this
innovation on flies. "It is like my life," she thought, "blown husks for
bread," and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell
and the web run together in a silvery blur. The moment of idle thought
had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she
tried to compromise.
"I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said,
with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his
pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not.
I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life--friendship,
beauty, one's own kin--mean so much to me."
He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited
silently.
"Ishmael!" she said desperately; "it's no good, I'm not the sort of
woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think
me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me,
and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks.... Oh, Ishmael,
Ishmael, I loved you so!"
Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out
to Ishmael--she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a
thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more
intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary
house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a
time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something
to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain
makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was
broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had
happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to
breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap. He was yet to learn that
no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.
"There's nothing to blame yourself about," he said. "You've given me the
most beautiful things to remember, and it's not your fault you can't
give more. When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel
I couldn't let you give more even if you would...." Always unfluent of
speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so
swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression. Ishmael
had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of
books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him
fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world
well lost for love--the hackneyed expression came so readily to him.
"She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and
pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books
don't prepare one for the half-shades. Nobody can love without a
flaw--we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite
good or quite bad: nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of
grey. They make life damned difficult, the half-shades!"
Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche. "I must go,"
he said gently. "Good-bye, Blanche!"
She held out both her hands, and he took them in his, repeating,
"Good-bye, Blanche!"
Then she made her only mistake; she swayed towards him, her face held up
to his in a last invitation. Roughly he put her hands away.
"Not that, Blanche ... not that!" said a voice he hardly recognised as
his own, and, wheeling, he went heavily through the little dead gardens.
Blanche, sick with disappointment, noted dully that he never turned his
head as he passed out of the last. A sob rose to her throat, and as she
heard the choking sound she made, the swift thought came: "That sounded
real! I must be broken-hearted to sob like that...."; and she sobbed
again. Then a flash of self-revelation ran over her, and she stood
aghast.
"Nothing is real about me, nothing!" she cried despairingly, "not even
my sorrow at being so unreal." Drying her eyes, she stared out at the
pale gleam of the Atlantic glinting through the elders and began to
think. She saw love, such love as she was capable of, had been ruled out
of life for her; it became all the more necessary that she should
capture other things that made life pleasant. If she let this new phase
of sincerity become a habit, she was lost indeed; better to slip into
the old self-deceiving Blanche once again. Deliberately she shut off
thoughts of Ishmael, and barred them out until such time as she could
think of him, without effort, from a point of view that in no way
lowered her self-esteem. She had been artificial in her strivings after
sincerity; now, for the last time, she was real in her acceptance of
unreality. Lightly dabbing her eyelids with a pocket powder-puff, she
went back to the cottage.
There she read through the letter again, then consulted a time-table;
she could change at Exeter and catch a train that would enable her to
reach home that evening. She could make up a story to her stepmother to
account for her sudden appearance. Blanche began composing in her mind
what she would say to her. She would pretend not to have had the letter;
even her gentle, garrulous little stepmother's good opinion was dear to
her. She would seal it up again and forward it on herself; it would
reach her at home a day after her own arrival. Yes, thought Blanche,
everything would dovetail excellently. She went into the kitchen where
Mrs. Penticost was ironing and the pleasant smell of warm linen hung
upon the air.
"I've decided I must go home, Mrs. Penticost," she said. "That letter
was to say my father is very ill, and I was only waiting till I'd seen
Mr. Ruan.... I've told him I must go to-morrow. I'm so sorry, but--"
"Ah!" interrupted Mrs. Penticost; "'tes as well--'twould be dull for 'ee
alone wi'out Mr. Ruan able to come so much about the place, and I
wouldn' have had en here with Miss Judy gone and you alone. You was
rare taken up wi' he!"
Blanche's vanity was too insatiable to spare Ishmael; she sighed
pathetically.
"Oh, Mrs. Penticost! you make me feel horribly guilty, for I'm afraid
it's all over," she said with simple earnestness, "but I couldn't
prevent it; and poor Mr. Ruan--"
"Don't 'ee go for to tell I about it!" broke in Mrs. Penticost; "'tes
downright ondecent in 'ee!"
Blanche flushed. "Horrid, insufferable woman!" she thought angrily as
she went upstairs. "How thankful I shall be to see the last of her!"
Opening her box, she began to throw her belongings in viciously. From
without came the crunch of Billy Penticost's boots as he crossed the
little yard and the clink of a pail set down; then the rhythmic sound of
pumping, so like the stertorous breathing of some vast creature, rose on
the morning air. A sudden loathing of country sights and sounds gripped
Blanche, and, tearing off her faded frock, she began to dress herself in
the one smart travelling gown she had brought with her.
"I don't care what Mrs. Penticost thinks!" she told her reflection in
the blurred looking-glass as she pulled a gold-coloured ribbon round her
waist; "I don't care what any of them think--they're just country
bumpkins, with no ideas in their heads beyond crops and cows!"
Without warning, a throb of memory assailed her: was it only a month ago
she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet
Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few
blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their
vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to
perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung them down.
"I'll buy some roses in Exeter," she thought; "they'll look more
suitable than hedge-flowers." It was her definite rejection of the
country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up
the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again--her last tribute to
the memory of Ishmael.