THE GREY WORLD
During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with
Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing
him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell
into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his
suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness
again, as insistent as before. He fought his lassitude of spirit as
stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result,
the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would
doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined
Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a
stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not
doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the
true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his
mistress have passed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed
on at Cloom. At Cloom--where there was no evading the thought of her
amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from
what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow
seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to
take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept
the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still
there.
There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must
repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as
though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure
pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held
by the cry of the wisest of men--that "hope deferred maketh the heart
sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click
of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did
not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he
saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven
years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases
of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched
too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he
drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in
which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next
onslaught.
That his instinct had always been to fight the intrusion of the
personal, that still it was so to the extent of a deadly clearness of
vision which prevented him thinking the affair of greater importance
than it was, did not prevent one shade of his pain; rather it was the
more acute for raging in spite of himself. He was powerless to do
anything but set his teeth and assure himself that it would eventually
pass. He looked at his suffering as a man may look at a broken leg: he
sees it stretched helpless before him; the pain from it ravages his
whole sense, but it is local, so that he can lay his hand upon it and
look from it to uninjured portions of his being which are yet
unconscious of immunity, so much is his whole sense occupied with the
one suffering portion.
Meanwhile Ishmael set himself to believe, or rather to realise--for he
never lost his feeling for values sufficiently ever to believe
otherwise--that all this would one day fall from off him; he even
thought that then he would be as he had been before, not yet knowing
that pain never leaves a man as it found him--that freshness of emotion
lost in any direction, it can never be recaptured. Meanwhile, now and
again, for all his philosophy, he was occasionally guilty of adding to
the sum of his own pain by deliberately indulging in it. There were
evenings when he fell on weakness and allowed himself to go over the
fields at dark to Paradise, where he would stand at the point in the
hedge whence he had been wont to watch her light. One evening there was
a light in her window, and his heart had thudded in his chest so that he
could have heard it had he been occupied in anything but clutching the
hedge with both hands and staring, half-expecting a miracle to happen
and her form to be shadowed on the blind at any moment. Sometimes, too,
as he lay in his bed after a hard day's work and sleep would have come
to him had he let it, he would start imagining, as he had been wont to
do when a little boy. Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams
of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that
filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche.... If he
had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if
only, if only.... And if she were to come back, how he would forget all
he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in
uncertainty--how willingly would he catch at any excuse for trying it
all over again. He would plan that too, till sometimes his vivid
imaginings would for a few moments almost deceive himself, and he would
realise, with a pang whose sharpness turned him sick and banished sleep,
that it was all only the pretence of a child.
Nevertheless, he did not succumb to the temptation to write to her,
probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted
him she would write--on some other excuse. He had been in a curious way
clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that
strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing
that underneath all those shifting sands there was at last bedrock and
that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was
nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the
death of his love no easier. Love cannot be killed--it always dies a
natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes. Of all the things
Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, and that was on a
day when he had been telling her the many reasons why he loved her. Her
mouth, her eyes, her soul, her voice, it had been the usual lover's
medley. She had listened, and then perhaps, with the knowledge in her
heart that disillusionment was bound to be his, said:
"There's only one safe reason for loving anyone, Ishmael, and that
is--'because I am I and you are you!'... Love a person for beauty or
brains or virtues, and they may all fail--there's only the one reason
that may be trusted not to change." And that was, of course, precisely
why he had loved her, and why the love died harder than the reasoned
loves of older years which respond to reasoning.
Affairs at home were not likely to provide a pleasurable change for
Ishmael's thoughts. Vassie, it was true, meant more to him, as he to
her, than ever before. The pain that Vassie had suffered when Killigrew
had left after his first visit, though not comparable to Ishmael's,
being disappointment and hurt vanity, yet had dowered her with a degree
of comprehension she might otherwise have missed. She felt she loved
this young brother more dearly than she had ever thought to; something
of the maternal awoke in her; she helped him in many little ways he did
not notice, getting between him and their mother's tongue, exerting
herself to make the affairs within the house run more smoothly. She was
proud of her youngest brother, of his unlikeness to the rest, even of
the aloofness and fits of dreaming which she no more than the others
understood, but which she was sufficiently in advance of them to revere
instead of scorning. She was more like him than she knew, though in her
ambition had taken harder and more personal form.
With the spring Annie became unbearable. Archelaus had suddenly gone off
again, after his fashion, this time to the goldfields of California, and
Annie, who felt his departure bitterly, chose to blame Ishmael for it.
Christmas had been for her the occasion to revive all her religious
frenzies, and the house rang with her cracked-voiced hymns till Ishmael
felt he could have smothered her with her own feather-bed. Her lust for
religion, however, was taking a new direction--it was towards the Parson
and his church instead of the conventicle of Mr. Tonkin. Quite what had
brought about this change was hard to say--probably chiefly the
infatuation of Tonkin for Vassie, a circumstance Annie took as an insult
to herself.
"A man on in years like him, oldern' I be myself, and a minister before
the Lard, ought to have other things to think on than wantoning with his
thoughts after a maid young enough to be his daughter! Where's his
religion, I should like to knaw?" This was Annie's own explanation, and
even she realised that against Boase no charge of thinking about women
could be brought--that quality of priesthood even her ignorance
unconsciously admitted. She approached Boase on the subject of his creed
and met with scant encouragement, which made her the more earnest. If
the Parson had been anxious to receive her into the path he trod, she
would have lagged; as it was, his brusqueness awaked a sensation of
pleasure in her--there was no male to snub and bully her now that
Archelaus had gone away. She set up to herself the image of Boase that
some more educated women make of their doctor--a bully who had to be
placated, who would scold her if she transgressed his ideas. She took to
going to church every Sunday evening and sat in the Manor pew, every
jet bead trembling on her bonnet as she kept her mind strained to
attention--always a difficult task with her for any length of time.
One wet afternoon Vassie found she was not in the house, though when she
had slipped out no one could say. Ishmael, alarmed--for nothing could
have been more unlike Annie's habits--was about to set out in search of
her, when the kitchen door was thrust open and slammed again and Annie
stood before them, soaking with wet, her arms clasping a bundle of
little books and a light of sly triumph in her eyes. Boase, shutting a
dripping umbrella, was behind her. She had been across to the Vicarage
in all the wet and cold to make the Parson talk to her about her soul,
and to get rid of her he had finally given her a host of little cheap
devotional books that had from time to time been sent to him from the
publishers, and which he himself, disliking most modern books of
devotion, had not troubled to read. He knew they were suited to the
mentality of the average child of ten, and that therefore Annie with an
effort might understand them and would certainly think them full of the
Spirit.
He stood behind Annie, grave and quiet, signalling to Ishmael and Vassie
with his eyes. Vassie sprang forward.
"Why, Mamma, you're soaked!" she cried. "Come! it's up to the bed you
must go at once, and I'll bring you a hot drink when you're undressed.
You can look at your books better in bed, you know."
"That's a true word," said Annie; "so I can. I can have 'en all around
me on the bed, can't I, Vassie? I'll take en up, though; don't you touch
en, I fear you'm nought but an unconverted vessel, and I won't have 'ee
touchen my books."
Assuring her she should have it all her own way, Vassie got her out of
the room and upstairs, while Katie heated water for a stone bottle to
be put at her feet. Ishmael and Boase went into the parlour and sat down
with grave faces.
"I don't understand it at all, Padre," said Ishmael. "This isn't a bit
like her. Of course, she's always been funny, but she's never done a
thing like this."
"It may be nothing but her annual attack of salvation," said the Parson
drily. "I shouldn't worry about it if I were you; only keep an eye on
her. She's not as young as she was, and it won't do her any good to be
running about getting wet through."
"She'll never listen to anything I say."
"Well, Vassie seems able to manage her all right. She's a most capable
girl, that!"
"She is indeed," said Ishmael, pleased at praise of his sister, whom he
knew Boase as a rule was apt to criticise silently rather than admire.
"I don't think my life here would be possible without Vassie. There are
times when I feel I want to take mother's head and knock it against the
wall. It sounds awful, but it's true. I want to knock it and hear the
crunch it would make. There! But you can't think what it's like
sometimes. One's soul is thrown at one, so to speak, morning, noon, and
night. I don't believe it's a good thing, anyway, to be always taking
one's soul out to feel its pulse. Except that mother's uneducated and
ignorant about it, she reminds me very much of a woman at that vicarage
in Somerset I used to go to sometimes in the holidays. She was the aunt
of the family and was what she called a deaconess. It's a sort of half
and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly...."
"A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?" suggested the Parson. "I think I once
met the lady and I know what you mean. She had rows of little books,
hadn't she?"
"Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed
saying what she called her Hours. I'm sorry to be profane, but she did
annoy me so though I was only a youngster. And now mother seems to be
getting very like it. I wouldn't mind a bit if it made her happy, but it
doesn't, not a bit of it."
"Nothing would make your mother happy--she wouldn't think it right; but
she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to
have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept
on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born
Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more
arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under
acquired Catholicism. I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen
too much of these women."
"Women make such a fuss about nothing!" complained Ishmael.
"What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it
is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to
trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-God
theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal
things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we
must leave off seeing to them--that would result in our all lying down,
shutting our eyes, and starving ourselves gently into futurity. I mean
that we should do the things, and do them well; because they are of such
an insignificance they may just as well be done right as not. Get
yourself into the habit of washing dishes so well that instinctively you
are thorough over the job, and you won't have to think about it while
you do it. But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the
average religious beats the worldly person hollow."
"They dissipate their secret bread into crumbs, in fact," said Ishmael
with a laugh.
The Parson nodded. "Exactly--and stale crumbs at that. I wonder--it's
easy to judge after all, and, as I once tried to tell you, it means
something different to every man. Tolerance--the deeper tolerance which
is charity ... if life doesn't teach one that, it's all been so much
waste. Who am I and who is anyone to despise the means by which another
man lives? Some of us find our relief in action, in the actual sweat of
our bodies; some find it in set hours and rows of little devotional
books--the technique of the thing, so to speak. And some of us find it
out of doors and some within narrow walls--some find it in goodness and
some only by sin and shame.... One shouldn't let other people's
salvation rub one up the wrong way."
"It all goes to make the pattern, as Killigrew would say," suggested
Ishmael thoughtfully.
"When I was very young," went on Ishmael after a pause, "I think I lived
by the Spirit--much more so than I can now, Da Boase. I seem to have
gone dead, somehow," Boase nodded, but said nothing. "And then it was
Cloom that meant life to me when I came back here and started in on it.
Then it was love!"
He spoke the word baldly, looking away from the Parson. "Then it was
love!" he repeated; "and now it's just emptiness, a sort of going on
blindly from day to day. It's as though one were pressing through dark
water instead of air, and one could only struggle on and let it go over
one's head and hope that some time one will come out the other side."
"Don't forget," said Boase gently, "that no one can see a pattern when
he is in the middle of it. It all seems confused and without scheme
while we are living in the midst of it; it's only on looking back that
we see it fall into shape."
"And does it, always?"
"I firmly believe so. It rests with us to make it as beautiful a pattern
as possible, but a pattern it is bound to make. And a terribly
inevitable one, each curve leading to the next, as though we were
spiders, spinning our web out of ourselves as we go...."
"I suppose so," said Ishmael listlessly. Boase looked at him keenly. He
could hardly believe that Cloom meant nothing to Ishmael; he was certain
that there balm must eventually be found. He glanced out of the window,
and saw that the rain had left off and a still pallor held the air.
"Come out for a turn with me," he suggested. "I haven't seen you go
beyond the fields for ages. Your mother'll be all right now."
Ishmael hesitated, then picked up a stick, and went out with the Parson.
Boase had wondered much how deeply Ishmael had been hurt by the
defection of Blanche, and it had been difficult for him to ascertain, as
the young man's reserve was not of the quality which all the time
tacitly asks for questioning. On the surface he had shown no trace,
except by a sudden ageing that was probably temporary; there had been,
as far as Boase knew, no outbreaks of rage or pain. Now he began to
suspect that it was taking a worse way--an utter benumbing of the
faculty of enjoyment. Never since Ishmael's earliest boyhood had beauty
failed to rouse him to emotion, and the Parson wondered whether it could
fail now. At least it was worth trying, and it was not without guile
that he had proposed this walk; he knew of something he meant to spring
upon Ishmael as a test. He led, as though casually, to a wild gorge that
lay on the way to the Vicarage, but nearer the sea than the
commonly-used path, which here looped inland to avoid it. A stream,
half-hidden by heavy growths of bracken and hemlock and furze, raced
down this gorge to the pebbly beach, where it divided up into a dozen
tiny streams that bubbled and trickled to the sea's edge. All down the
gorge great hummocks of earth had been thrown up at some giant upheaval
of the land's making, and over their turfy, furze-ridden slopes granite
boulders were tumbled one against the other. In the treacherous fissures
between brambles and bracken had grown thickly; over everything else
except the bare rocks the furze had spread in a dense sea that followed
the curves of the slopes and stretched on up over each side of the
gorge. Everything was grey--pearly grey of the sky, grey-green of the
turf, brown-grey of last year's undergrowth, cold grey of the
boulders--everything except the gorse; and it was this that had caused
the Parson to catch his breath and stand amazed when first he came upon
it as at too much of beauty for eyes to believe--that caught at him
again now though he was expecting it. He and Ishmael rounded the end of
the valley, mounted a slope, and stood with all the length and sweep of
the gorge rolling around them.
By some freak of soil or aspect every tuft of the low-lying cushion
gorse that covered the slopes and hummocks as far as the eye could see
was in full bloom, not a dry bush to be seen--bloom so thickly set that
hardly a green prickle was visible; bloom of one pure vivid yellow,
undimmed in the distance, unmarked to closest view, a yellow that was
pure essence of that colour untinged by any breath of aught else. The
air reeked with the rich scent; the greyness of sky and land became one
neutral tone for the onslaught of those pools of flaring molten gold
that burnt to heaven with their undestructive flame. And every ardent
sheet of it had a grape-like bloom, made by the velvety quality of the
thousands of close-set petals; they gave the sensation of exquisite
touch merely by looking at them, while their passionate colour and scent
made the senses drunken on pure loveliness.
That was how it had taken Boase--how in normal days it would have taken
Ishmael, even more keenly. Now he stood staring at it, hardly seeing,
untouched to anything but a bleak knowledge that it was beautiful. Not
a breath of ecstasy went through him; for him it was nothing, and he
never even noticed that Boase was watching him. He moved forward as
though to continue the walk, and the Parson fell into stride beside him.
Something in Ishmael was dead, and in dying it had for the time being
stunned what Boase could only hope was a more vital and permanent part.
Ishmael said good-bye at the Vicarage and went home again, his mind
floating through greyness even as his body was passing through the grey
of the weather and surroundings. At home he found John-James waiting to
consult him about the breaking up of a grass-field, and harnessing the
horse to the iron-toothed tormentor, he took it out himself and spent
the rest of the day driving it over the tumbling clods.