admit the two little girls, Vassilissa and Ruth. Vassilissa, always
called Lissa, to avoid confusion when her aunt came to stay, was a slim,
vivid-looking child, not pretty, but with a face that changed with every
emotion and a pair of lovely grey eyes. Ruth was simpler, sweeter, more
stolid; a bundle of fat and a mane of brown hair chiefly represented her
personality at present. Lissa was twelve, and looked more, but Ruth
seemed younger than her eleven years by reason of her shyness in company
and her slow speech. Ishmael privately thought Lissa a very remarkable
child, but something in him, some touch of the woman, made him in his
heart of hearts love better the quiet little Ruth, who was apt to be
dismissed as "stodgy." He frowned now as they both came tumbling
in--Lissa with the sure bounds with which she seemed to take the world,
Ruth with her usual heaviness. This room, the little one over the porch
that had been Nicky's bedroom in his boyhood, was now supposed to be
Ishmael's business room, and as such inviolate.
"Nicky! Nicky!" cried Lissa. "How late you are! And you know you
promised for twelve o'clock, and we've been waiting for ages and ages!"
"Promised what?" asked Nicky.
"Oh, Nicky ...!" on a wail of disgust; "you don't mean to say you've
forgotten! Why, only yesterday you promised that to-day if it was fine
you'd take us out in your tandem. You know you did!"
"Oh, Lord! Well, I can't, anyway. I've got an engagement."
"Nicky!" Ruth joined in the wail, but it was Lissa who passed rapidly to
passion, her face crimson and her eyes full of tears of rage.
"Then you're a pig, that's what you are--a perfect pig, and I hate you!
You never do what you say you will now, and I think it's very caddish of
you. It's all that beastly Oxford; you've never been the same since you
went there. Mother says so too. She says it's made you a conceited young
puppy; I heard her!"
"Lissa!" Ishmael's voice was very angry. "Never repeat what anyone has
said about anyone else--never, never. Do you hear me?"
"I don't care, she did say it, so there!"
Nicky was crimson. He went to the door. "Then it's easy to see where
you get your good manners from!" he retorted, and was gone before
Ishmael could say anything to him. Lissa was still trembling with rage,
and Ruth, who was rather a cry-baby, lifted up her voice and wept,
partly because of the disappointment and partly because she could not
bear people not to be what she called "all comfy together."
Georgie Ruan heard the noise and came in briskly. Ishmael made her a
despairing gesture to remove the two children.
Georgie stood taking in the scene. She had altered in fourteen years
more than either Ishmael, who was seldom away from her, or than she
herself, had realised; for she had never been a beauty anxiously to
watch the glass, and motherhood had absorbed her to the overshadowing of
self. She had coarsened more than actually changed--her sturdy little
figure had lost its litheness in solidity, her round face had thickened
and the skin roughened. Her movements were as vigorous and her mouth as
wonderful, though it was more lost in her face, but her small blue eyes
were still bright. She still managed to keep her air of a great baby,
and it went rather sweetly with her obvious matronliness. She swept like
a whirlwind on the two little girls, scolding and coaxing in a breath.
Lissa at once started to pour out her grievance about the faithless
Nicky.
"He said he had an engagement," put in Ishmael, seeing Georgie's face
harden.
"Oh, of course," she retorted, "and we can guess what it is...." She
broke off as Ishmael made a warning sign towards the children. "Anyway,
I think it's too bad of him to promise the children to take them out and
then not to do it," she insisted. "That's the third time he's done that
lately, and I know how they were looking forward to it. They came home
from school half an hour earlier on purpose."
Lissa and Ruth went to a small private school, whose scholars only
consisted of the half-dozen children of the local gentry, and which was
held at the village. It was called "school," and Lissa and Ruth felt
very proud of going to it, but in reality it was no more than going out
to a governess one shared with other girls instead of having a governess
to oneself at home. Ruth ran to her father and clung to his knee
heavily; he stroked her shock of brown hair and said: "Cheer up, little
Piggy-widden"--which was his pet name for her, partly because she was
the youngest and smallest of the family, partly because she was so fat,
and in Cornwall the "piggy-widden" is the name for the smallest of the
litter.
Lissa still stormed, but Georgie, with one of the sudden little gusts of
temper to which she had always been liable, swept on to her and bade her
be quiet at once and have a little self-control. She seized a child in
each hand and whirled them out of the room with instructions to go to
Nanny and have their faces washed. Then she came back to Ishmael and
perched herself on the arm of his chair. She looked very young at the
moment, for her attitude was of the Georgie of old days, and her round
face was screwed up in an expression of mock-penitence as she rumpled
his hair. She would have looked younger if the fashions had been kinder,
but the beginning of the 'nineties was not a gracious period for women's
dress. The sweep of the crinoline, the piquancy of the fluted draperies
and deliciously absurd bustle, had alike been lost; in their stead
reigned serge and cloth gowns that buttoned rigidly and had high stiff
little collars. Braid meandered over Georgie's chest on either side of
the buttons, and her pretty round neck was hidden and her cheeks made to
seem coarse by the stiff collar, while her plump arms looked as though
stuck on like those of a doll in their sleeves of black cloth which
contrasted with the bodice and skirt of fawn-coloured serge. Her
straight fringe that had had the merit of suiting her face was now
frizzed, while the rest of her hair was twisted into what was known as a
"tea-pot handle" at the back of her head.
Ishmael let her pull his head against the scratchy curves of braid, but
he was preoccupied and kept up a tattoo on the writing-table with a
paper-knife. There had been so many of these scenes since Nicky had been
growing up; Georgie had changed towards the boy ever since her own
children had been born. She was never unfair to him, but she seemed as
though always on the watch. He must not come near the babies with his
dirty boots on, must stay where he had been before he came near them at
all, for fear he had wandered where she considered there might be
infection. His dogs had come under the same ban, and one way and another
she had gone the right way to sicken Nicky of his little sisters if he
had not been both sweet-natured and rather impervious. Ishmael had
sometimes resented all this on Nicky's behalf, and then Georgie had
accused him of loving his son the most. Of course, she knew the others
were "only girls," and therefore she supposed of no interest to a
farmer.... Scenes such as this would end in penitence on her part and a
weary forgiveness on Ishmael's. He loved Georgie and all his children
deeply--perhaps his children meant something more to him--but he never
could quite do away with the feeling that there was something rather
absurd about the father of a family....
"What were you going to say about Nicky when I stopped you?" he asked.
"Where is it he goes? Is it anywhere in particular?"
"I thought you knew," said Georgie slowly, "though I might have known
you didn't; you never see anything, which may be very beautiful, but,
believe me, can be very trying to a poor female! If you really want to
know, he goes over to Penzance in his tandem every early-closing day to
take out Miss Polly Behenna--from Behenna the draper's in Market Jew
Street."
"Good Lord! ... there's nothing in it, is there?"
"I shouldn't think so; but you know how silly it is in a place like
this ... and she's a very pretty girl, and oh, so dreadfully genteel!"
"That'll save him, then! Dairymaids are far more dangerous. But, as you
say, it doesn't do.... I think there's something in the Canadian plan,"
he added to himself. He took up the lists of accounts he had been busy
on when first interrupted by Nicky and began to examine them. He had to
hold them far away from his eyes and even then to pucker up his lids
before he could quite make them out. Georgie watched him.
"You know, Ishmael, you want specs," she said suddenly. "I'm sure of it!
I've been watching you for ages and you never seem able to take in
anything unless it's a mile off. And all your headaches, too...."
Ishmael thought angrily: "Is there anything women won't say outright?
Can't she see I've been sick with terror about my eyes for months, and
that's why I haven't done anything about it?" Aloud he only said
gruffly: "I'm all right!"
"But you aren't!" persisted Georgie. "What's the good of saying you are
when you aren't?"
"Well, if you like I'll go and see an oculist next time I go to
Plymouth," promised Ishmael. "Will that do you?"
"I like that. It's not for me. I only said," began Georgie indignantly;
but he pulled her head to him and held it there a moment before kissing
her.
"Run away, there's a dear!" he said. "Eyes or no eyes, I've got to get
this done, and you know you can't add two and two, so it's no good
saying you'll stay and help."
"I can make two and two make five, which is the whole art of life,"
retorted Georgie, laughing. "But as there's the dinner to order, and as
you could no more do that than I could see to the accounts, I'll go."
She bent over him, and wickedly parted his hair away from a thin patch
that was coming on the crown of his head before kissing him full upon
it.
When she was gone Ishmael let the accounts lie untouched before him,
and, getting up, he crossed to the window and stood looking out. He
heard the sound of wheels and hoofs coming along the lane at the side of
the garden wall, and the next moment saw the head of Nicky's leader,
apparently protesting violently, come beyond the angle of the wall.
Nicky was evidently trying to turn it in the direction of the main road,
but the leader had other views, and gave expression to them by sitting
down suddenly on his haunches, with his white-stockinged forelegs struck
straight out, his fiddle-head, with the white blaze between his wicked
eyes, looking round over his shoulder at the invisible Nicky, whose
remarks came floating up to Ishmael on the breeze. Finally the leader
was made to see the error of his ways, and the light dog-cart swung
round the corner, and with a flourish of the whip and a clatter and a
heart-catching swerve round the angle of the hedge Nicky's tandem bore
him swiftly down the road towards where the telegraph wires told of the
way which led to Miss Polly Behenna.
Ishmael watched as long as the cart was in sight, taking pride and
comfort in the fact that his eyes could see the minutest detail as far
as the turn on to the high-road; then he came back into the room, and
with a smile and a sigh took up the accounts. Some absurd little thing
within him made him determine that he would not take to spectacles till
Nicky had gone to Canada and could not remark on them.
CHAPTER II
AUTUMN
A few evenings later Ishmael went out alone on to the moors, filled with
very different ideas from any that had held him of late. Not the petty
friction of domesticity, nor the pervading thought of that queer feeling
in his eyes, nor care for Nicky's future, or anything of the present,
stirred within him. A letter received by Georgie that day, and the
thought and realisation of which Ishmael had carried about with him
through all his varied work, now swamped his mind in memories so vivid
that the present was only in his mind as a faint bitter flavour hardly
to be noticed.
Judy had written to Georgie, had written to say she was coming down some
time soon, but primarily the letter had been to give news of Killigrew.
Ishmael and Georgie knew--exactly how they could not have told--in what
relationship Judith and Killigrew had stood to each other; Ishmael felt
he had known ever since that evening when he met Judy in Paradise Lane,
and to Georgie the certainty had come with greater knowledge of life and
realisation of herself. They had hardly mentioned the affair to each
other, and then only in a round-about manner, but each guessed at the
other's knowledge. Georgie was aware that for some years now Judith had
seen very little of Killigrew, but how or why the severance had come
about neither she nor Ishmael could guess. Judith had never mentioned
Killigrew to them except as a mutual friend; she always had the strength
of her own sins. Never till this letter had she spoken or written
otherwise, but now she told that Killigrew was very ill in Paris and
that she had gone to him. Very ill was practically all she said, beyond
a mere mention that the illness was typhoid; but Ishmael knew at once
what she meant, though she either would not or could not write it.
Through all Georgie's comments and hopes that soon better news would
come he never doubted, though he said little, that Killigrew was dying,
if not already dead, when Judith wrote. He knew her well enough, and
guessed at her still more acutely, to know that she was quite capable of
so much of reticence. And why did she speak so confidently of coming
down to Cloom some time quite soon? She would not leave Paris while Joe
was still unwell.... Ishmael knew, with the sureness he had once or
twice before known things in his life, and the knowledge affected him
strangely. He felt no violent grief, but a great blank. He had not seen
Killigrew for years; but with the knowledge that he was to see him no
more went something of himself--something that had belonged to Killigrew
alone and that had responded to something in him which henceforth would
be sealed and dead. He kept himself busy all day, but now he walked fast
along the road, only accompanied by his thoughts.
The first hint of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had
begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the
evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the
granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm
ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a
greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and
the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall,
and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old
mine-shaft. Ishmael felt a moment's gladness for its escape; then he
went on, and, soon leaving the road, he struck out over the moor.
On he went till he came to a disused china-clay pit, showing pale
flanks in the curve of the moor. A ruined shaft stood at the head, the
last of the sunset glowing through its empty window-sockets; an owl
called tremulously, the sheep answered their lambs from the dim moor. A
round pearl-pale moon swung in the east, level with the westering sun;
as he sank she rose, till the twilight suddenly wrapped the air in a
soft blue that was half a shadow, half a lighting. The last of the warm
glow had gone; only the acres of feathery bents still held a pinkish
warmth in their bleached masses.
Ishmael sat upon the dry grass, where the tiny yellow stars of the
creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay
almost too idle for thought.
He wondered both why he did not feel more, and why he was feeling so
much. If Killigrew had died when they were both young, Ishmael would
have felt a more passionate grief--an emptiness, a resentment that never
again would he see and talk with him; but part of himself would not have
died too. As he lay, there suddenly came into his mind the first two
occasions on which he had heard of deaths that affected him at all
intimately--the deaths of Polkinghorne and of Hilaria. Of both he had
heard from Killigrew, he remembered. Polkinghorne--that news could not
have been said actually to have grieved either of them, but it had been
the first time in Ishmael's life that even the thought of death as a
possible happening had occurred to him. Hilaria--a sense of outrage had
been added to that; it was not her death that taught him anything beyond
the mere commonplace that death can be a boon, but the news of her
illness, that illness which unseen had been upon her even in the days
when they had tramped the moors together and she had read to an
enthralled ring of boys the breathless instalments of "The Woman in
White." It had been the first time he had recognised that fear and
horror lie in wait along the path of life, that not naturally can we
ever leave it, that sooner or later illness or accident must inevitably
make an end. Even with his passionate distaste for the mere idea of
death, this recognition would not have hit him so hard, if it had not
been that the fact of Hilaria's youth, of her having been, as he phrased
it, "Just like anyone else, just like I am ..." had shown him that not
only for strangers, for people who are mere names in newspapers, do the
hard things of life lie in wait. There was always this something waiting
to spring--that might or might not show teeth and claws any time in
life, that did not, in the form of an out-of-the-ordinary fate such as
Hilaria's, often touch even on the fringe of knowledge, but that
nevertheless was shown to be possible. That was the rub, that was what
he had been aware of ever since. Life was not a simple going-forward,
lit by splendid things, marked maybe by the usual happenings such as the
death of parents, and even friends; but it could hold such grim things
as this.... Once one had seen what tricks life could play there was no
trusting it in quite the same way again. That such happenings should be
possible would have seemed incredible till the realisation of Hilaria
drove it home. Of no use to say that these things were the exception.
They could still happen.
And now Killigrew--before his natural time, though not so violently as
had been the case with the other two old playmates. Killigrew had lived
his life very thoroughly, though he had always loved not well but too
wisely. Sitting there on the lonely moor amid the ruined china-clay
works, with only the sounds of bird and beast breaking the still air,
Ishmael seemed to himself as though suspended in a state that was
neither space nor time, when independent of either he could roam the
past as the present, and even the future as well. It was as though time
were cut out of one long endless piece as he had often imagined it as a
little boy, when he had been puzzled that it was not as easy to see
forwards as backwards, and been pricked by the feeling that it was
merely a forgotten faculty which at any moment hard straining, if only
it lit on the right way, could regain. For the first time for many years
he had a glimpse of the pattern of life instead of only the intricacies,
seemingly without form, of each phase. Killigrew and, in a much less
degree--but, as he now saw, hardly less keenly--Hilaria, had both so
affected the web of his life, not in action, but in thought, that
without them he would either have learnt different lessons or the same
lessons quite differently. Even Judith, Carminow, and all the rest of
the people who had impinged in greater or less degree, went to make the
pattern, though not always, as with Killigrew, Hilaria, and
Polkinghorne, could he see any one definite thing that they had been the
means of making clear to his groping vision. For we cannot know people
with even the lightest degree of intimacy without both taking from them
and giving to them. Externally it may be only two or three people in
life who have had the influencing of it, but each casual encounter has
helped to prepare us for those people.
What Ishmael felt in regard to Killigrew at the present moment--and
rightly felt, for, as he found out later, on the day the letter arrived
at Cloom Killigrew had died--left a blank in his life, but more it
brought home to him that, the meridian once passed, blanks were things
that would increase. Children grew up, but they grew away; grandchildren
would be a stay, but one must be content to be a background for them.
This falling away, step by step, through life was, he saw, part of its
ordered procession. And he saw too, with a deadly sureness there was no
evading, that this thing he knew of Killigrew stood for another
knowledge to him as well, a knowledge he had been fighting and to which
he still refused to accede. The knowledge that physical decay had to
be, that for him it had begun. He was still a young man as men count
youth nowadays, but he knew the difference between that and the tingle
of the rising sap of real youth. It was not Killigrew's death he mourned
so much as the death of that self who had been Killigrew's friend.
Long now he had been accustomed to the greater sense of proportion in
things mental and emotional which amounts to a greyer level of feeling;
he had lived on those not unsweet flats for years. But only lately had
the physical messages been flashing along to him down his nerves and
muscles, and he resented them far more bitterly than anything mental or
spiritual. His eyes--it might be they merely needed spectacles for close
work; but he resented that almost as fiercely as the fear about them
which sometimes assailed him when the pain was bad and his lids pricked
and were sore--the waning capacity to stand long strain and fatigue, the
waning power of physical reaction altogether.... Lately his cold bath
had meant a half-hour's shivering for him instead of the instantaneous
glow which showed perfect bodily response. He was a strong, healthy man
who had led a healthy life, but all the same he was not the man he had
been, and this night he acknowledged it. To this he had come, to this
everyone must come; as a commonplace he supposed he had always known
that, if he had been asked about it--even as a boy he would have agreed
to that, but with the inward thought: "Not to me ... it can't...." To
Nicky too it would come, though Nicky would have laughed the idea to
scorn as so far off as not to be worth troubling about. Yet how quickly
it came ... how terribly quickly! Life seemed to Ishmael to be a shining
ribbon that was always being pulled through the fingers, inexorably
fast, cling as they might.
Ishmael lifted his eyes and stared out over the darkening moor, and his
attention was caught by a flicker upon the western horizon. The last
line of light from the sun's setting still lingered there, so that at
first it was not easy to disengage from it that flicker of brighter
light which seemed vague as a candle flame in daytime. A few minutes
made certainty, however, and Ishmael stared at the gathering flicker and
wondered whether it were a serious fire or mere swaling. It gathered in
a rose of flame that gradually lit the horizon and burnt so steadily
that he knew no swaling could account for it, and, standing up, he took
his bearings and decided that it must be either Farmer Angwin's
buildings or ricks ablaze. Angwin was a shiftless fellow, gentle and
meek, who was wont to bewail his ill-luck; here was another slice of it
for him, poor man! Ishmael was too far from home to return quickly for a
trap, and it would take time to put the horse in. Suddenly he decided he
would make the run on foot across country, as he often had as a boy on
seeing that ominous but thrilling glow gathering in the sky. He got to
his feet, nimbly enough if not with suppleness; as he did so he felt a
twinge in his thigh such as it had been subject to ever since a bad
attack of rheumatism the winter before. He stood a moment watching the
rising glow, then stretched himself. Unconsciously he was asking of
limbs and muscles as to their fitness; as he drew in deep breaths of the
soft air and let the tautened sinews relax again there was no alien note
in the symphony of his being--all felt as sound and strong as ever; now
he was standing the twinge did not bother him--he told himself that in
every inch of him he was still the man he was. Yet he knew he no longer
felt the twang of some divine-strung cord within that had been wont to
thrill and inform the whole.
Quite suddenly, as he stood, there came to him the idea to try and see
whether by physical abandon he could recapture the old frenzy, whether
to the bidding of violent exercise and healthy exhaustion, to the joy
of feeling covered with sweat and earth, a mere glowing animal who feels
and does not think, something of what he had lost would come back to him
if only for an hour.
CHAPTER III
BODIES OF FIRE
The dusk was deepening rapidly, that glow brightened every minute;
Ishmael began to run. He ran on and on--it seemed to him
effortlessly--and with a tingling glow rising in him that made him feel
alive as he had not for long. On and on, straight as keeping that glow
ahead could make his course, over the hedges, damp and clinging with
dew, scattering its drops, breaking the clinging grass stems and the
tangled weeds. At each wall he felt the old upleaping of power as he
took it, hurling himself over cleanly in the darkness, delightfully
regardless of what might be on the other side. Down marshy fields that
sucked at his feet, through the pools that splashed up into his heated
face, over the clumps of long grass that grew between the tiny rivulets
and swayed beneath his step and would have given way with him had he not
always leapt on in time with the sure-footedness of long custom. On up
long dry slopes, where he ran slowly but easily, conscious of his own
ease, though he could hear his deep-drawn breaths. Through patches of
moorland where the bracken clung about him or the furze pricked his
legs, as he was subconsciously aware without really noticing it. Once he
came vaulting over a granite wall, to find himself almost on top of a
blood-bull, with a ring in his nose and a curly fringe on his forehead
that showed clearly in the rising moonlight. Ishmael could see, too, his
wet glistening nose and dark eyes. The bull stayed still staring in
astonishment, and Ishmael hit his flank gaily in passing and ran on,
down a marshy bottom, over another wall and up the next slope. The glow
was brighter now because he was so much nearer, but in reality it had
subsided somewhat--its first fierce spurt had burnt itself out. Ishmael
began to go less easily--his breath rasped a little; but his sensations
were all pleasant--the pounding blood in his whole body ran sweetly, he
tingled with a glow that was enjoyable beyond anything he could have
imagined. He knew he must be in a deplorable condition; he could feel
the sweat running down his forehead into his eyes and his shirt clinging
to his body under his light coat. Up to the knees he was soaking wet,
and splashed with mud higher still; his clothes were torn by the
brambles, and so were his hands and face. He felt happy--happy, in spite
of the news that had come to him. At that moment his run seemed to him
to hold an epic quality--the physical aspect of things; the health and
strength he felt coursing through him, the delightful exhaustion that he
knew would follow so healthily and naturally, seemed the most important
things in the world. Let all else go but this....
He slowed up to a walk as he came to Angwin's farm, passed through the
dark yard, and through the gates into a field next the rickyard. It was
full of folk crowded in from all the countryside. The engine from
Penzance had come and was puffing and panting by the pond, sucking up
water with stertorous breaths; at every gasp it rocked with its own
intensity upon its wheels as it stood, sending out a pulsing shower of
sparks over the muddy water.
Seven ricks had blazed that night, and still smouldered sullenly. The
great grey hose played upon them; the water hissing upon the hot straw
and hay, sending up clouds of steam, tinged to a fiery pallor against
the moonlit night. The walls, not only of the rickyard, but of the
surrounding fields were warm to the touch, for the dry furze growing
along them had caught fire from the blowing sparks, so that at one time
the fields had been outlined with fire. Now the furze had smouldered
and died, but the smooth granite slabs were still hot to the hand, an
unnatural warmth that seemed malign in those dewy fields.
Now the ricks burnt less and less fiercely; Ishmael gave a hand with the
other helpers, but there was really nothing to be done. Luckily, as it
was still warm weather, the livestock had all been out in the fields, so
there had been no panic even when one end of the cowshed caught fire.
That had been put out and the walls of the barns and out-buildings
drenched again and again, and everyone was trying to comfort Johnny
Angwin with pointing out how much worse it might have been.
Leaning over the low warm wall between the ricks and the next field,
Ishmael recognised a couple of the artists who of late years had settled
in those parts, and he caught their comments along with those of their
neighbours.
"What a glorious sight!" said one of them, with a deep-drawn breath;
"I've never seen anything to touch it...." A couple of farmers' wives
standing by peered curiously at the speaker and his companion. "Simme
them folk must be lacken' their senses," said one to the other, "carlen'
a sight like this bewtiful! Lacken' their senses, sure 'nough!"
Ishmael smiled to himself, and in his mind agreed with both. "I wonder
how it happened?" piped up another artist, anxious to remove a false
impression of callousness. Ishmael explained that spontaneous combustion
was probably the cause of the fire, and a farmer standing near
volunteered his opinion that Angwin had packed his hay damp. Everyone
stood a while longer, staring; the glow had gone from the smouldering
ricks, and the excitement of the event began to die in the minds of the
onlookers. The artist straightened himself and prepared to go. "They're
out now," he said, half-regretfully, half-cheerfully. The farmer near
him spoke again. "Them ricks won't be out for days and nights," he
said; "they'll go on burning in their hearts. They'm naught but a body
o' fire, that's what they are ... a body o' fire...."
Ishmael stayed to see Angwin and do what he could to help; then he began
his walk home. He was not running now, but aware of a physical
discomfort that was not mere exhaustion. He had a sharp pain in his side
such as children call a stitch, but no amount of stooping to tie
imaginary shoelaces would drive it away. He was glad to accept the offer
of a lift home when he was overtaken by a farmer's cart, and as he was
jogged along the pain grew fiercer. By the time he reached Cloom the
splendid fire that had warmed him on his run had died to nothingness,
and at his ashen look Georgie cried out. He allowed her to help him to
bed and give him hot drinks, to scold him in her woman's way.
"Such a foolish thing to do at your age ... you might have known!" she
kept on repeating. He said little, but in his own mind ran the refrain:
"She doesn't understand. She's still too young...." He wondered whether
women ever really did know when talking was a mere foolishness, however
sensible the thing said. And again, over and over to himself, as an
accompaniment even to his pain, ran: "How well worth it ...!" For he had
recaptured for a magic couple of hours something he had thought left
behind him, had burned with it ardently and secretly. He too had been a
body of fire.
The phrase stayed, pricking at him, through the drifting veils of sleep
that alternately deepened and thinned about him all night long.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW JUDITH
For a long time Ishmael paid the price of that night raid upon his
physical resources, and when he was beginning to take up work again, as
usual, Nicky was off to Canada--off with the latest thing in outfits,
letters of introduction, high hopes, and such excitement at thought of
the new world at his feet that only at the last moment did the sorrow
that because of the uncertainty of life all leave takings hold, strike
him. Then--for he was a very affectionate boy--he felt tears of which he
was deeply ashamed burning in his eyes; he ignored them, made his
farewells briefer, and was gone.
A few days later Judith came down to pay her promised visit. Both
Ishmael and Georgie drove over to meet her train, and both failed for
the first startled moment to recognise her. Ishmael had an incongruous
flash, during which that occasion years earlier when he had seen her and
Georgie walking down that same platform towards him was the more vivid
actuality.
Judith's epicene thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much
as the colouring of her face and the fact that she was wearing pince-nez
that made her an absolutely different being. This was the third time in
her life that Judy was coming down to the West. Once it had been as a
very young girl, full of dreams and questionings; once it had been as a
woman who had already learned something of proportion; now it was as
this elderly and alien person whom her friends could not connect with
the Judith they had known. Not till they saw the beam of her eyes, as
profound but somehow less sad than the eyes of the girl had been, did
they feel it was the same Judy. The exaggerated colour on her face, the
white powder and overdone rouge, embarrassed them both. Judy saw it and
laughed, and when they were in the waggonnette and driving along the
road she said: "You're thinking how horribly I'm made up! I can't help
it. I began it and I found I couldn't leave off, and that's the truth.
And of course my eye for effect has got out. But I don't think I'm
generally as bad as this. It comes of having done myself up in the
train."
"But, Judy--why?" asked Georgie. She was very shocked, for in those days
only actresses and women no better than they should be made up their
faces.
"Because I began it so as to keep looking young as long as I could, and
now I no longer care about keeping young-looking I can't drop it. That's
the worst of lots of habits which one starts for some one reason. The
reason for it dies and the habit doesn't. I know I overdo it, but it's
no good my telling myself so. And it doesn't matter much, after all."
"No," agreed Georgie, brightening; "after all, one loves ones friends
just as much if they have mottled skins or a red nose in a cold wind or
a shiny forehead, so why shouldn't one love them just as much when they
have too much pink and white on? It looks much nicer than too little."
They both laughed and felt more like the Georgie and Judy of old
days--more so than they were to again. As the days went on Georgie, whom
marriage had taken completely away from the old artistic set, found
herself feeling that after all she was a married woman and Judy was
still only Miss Parminter.... Judy, scenting this, told her flippantly
that a miss was as good as a mother, and Georgie laughed, but warned her
to remember the children were in the room.... Judy was inclined to be
hurt by the needless reminder, and, as she considered it foolish to be
hurt and still more foolish to show it, she went out.
She found Ishmael reading in the rock garden that had been made by the
stream, which ran along the dip below the house where once had been
rough moorland. Now there were slopes of smooth, vividly green grass and
grey boulders, among which they ran up like green pools; great clusters
of brilliant rock flowers grew in bright patches over their smooth
flanks. Judy sat down beside Ishmael, who closed his book.
"So you wear those?" she asked, pointing to his glasses, which he had
taken off and was slipping into their case.
"Yes, I went to the oculist at Plymouth when I went up to see Nicky off.
He said I had splendid sight, but wanted them for close work. I didn't
know you had to wear them."
"I've known for years and years that I ought. I ought to have as a girl.
I went once to an oculist, who told me if I wore them till I was forty I
could then throw them away. I thought it was so like a man. I preferred
to do without till forty and wear them the rest of my life."
"But haven't you injured your eyes?"
"Probably."
"It isn't all as simple as oculists think," said Ishmael, with that
intuition which is generally called feminine and which had been all his
life his only spark of genius. Judy looked and smiled her old smile,
which charmed as much as ever even on her too-red lips.
"No," she agreed. "I remember once, after going to that oculist, I tried
to wear glasses one night when I was going out with Joe. That decided
me."
"What happened?"
"I was staying in lodgings at the time, in London. It was the first year
I knew how I felt for him. You know about that--that I did? Yes? I was
sure you did. Well, he came to take me out to dinner. The lodgings were
rather horrible, though even they couldn't spoil things for me. And I
was dressing in my room when he came. The sitting-room joined on to it
by folding doors. I called out to him I was still dressing, but as a
matter of fact I was trying to screw myself up to put the beastly things
on. I remember when I went in to him I kept the shady brim of my hat
rather down over my face. The sitting-room was in darkness except for
what light came in from the hall gas. He said, 'Are you ready? Been
beautifying?' I said, 'No, exactly the reverse. I've got my glasses on.
You know I told you I had to wear them sometimes.'" Judy broke off, then
went on, looking away from Ishmael.
"He said, 'Oh, Lord, take 'em off! Here, let me have a look!' He swung
me round, with his hands on my shoulders, into the light from the hall
gas, and I met his look. 'They might be worse, I suppose, but for
goodness' sake take them off!' he said; 'you don't have to wear them,
you know!' I said nothing, but broke away and went down the steps. He
came after me and continued to look in the street. 'I say, you look just
like your mother in them!' he went on. That was the cruellest thing he
could have said, because he knew my mother ... he only did it because he
did not think I really had to wear them, and he thought it would make me
leave off. I told him what the oculist had said, and he said he would
call on me again after I was forty. I pretended to laugh, but I was
feeling like death. Later on I slipped them off, and he had the tact not
to say anything when he saw what I had done. I never wore them again
with him, and went over the world unable to see the things he was raving
about, and having perpetually to pretend that I did and guess at the
right thing to say. Now--it doesn't matter. I prefer wearing them to
having blinding headaches."
"It was pretty rotten of him to let it make a difference," said
Ishmael.
"No, I understand what he felt so well. I knew it myself. There is
always something ridiculous about making love to a woman in glasses. It
destroys atmosphere. If you're married, and either you're so one with
the man that he really does love you through everything or else is so
dull that he doesn't feel their ugliness, it wouldn't make a difference.
But I was not married--he had not the married temperament. And you must
admit that it is impossible to imagine a mistress in glasses...."
"Don't!" said Ishmael sharply.
"Don't what? Did you think I was speaking bitterly? I wasn't. There
isn't a scrap of bitterness in me, I'm thankful to say. I couldn't have
lived if there had been. I saw that almost at the beginning, as I did
about jealousy. If you have much to be bitter and jealous about, you
can't be; it would kill you. It's only the people who can indulge in a
little of it who dare to. I have not been unhappy for the most part, and
I wouldn't undo it, which is the great thing. You knew I had given up
having times away with him years ago?"
"Yes, I wondered why."
"The thing had somehow lost something ... what is lost in marriage just
the same--rapture, glow, fragrance.... And in marriage, with luck,
something else comes to take its place ... domesticity, which is very
sweet to a woman. Looking after him instead of being looked after--a
deep quiet something. You and Georgie are getting it. But in a relation
outside marriage you can't get that. You can in those extraordinary
_ménages_ in France where the little mistress is so domesticated and
lives with her lover for years, but that would have been as bad to him
as marriage. So I thought it was best to let it all come to an end. It
wasn't easy, for though I had got so that it was torture to be with
him, because all the time I was feeling our dead selves between us, yet
directly I was away I knew that, even though he was the man he was and I
the me I had become, we were still nearer to what had been than anything
else could be. But I did it. It was only when he was dying I went to
Paris to him."
"And that...?"
"Oh, it was quite a success. I don't mean to be brutal, but it was. He
was glad to have me, and showed it.... A deathbed is so terribly
egoistic; it can't be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever
before. I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was
rising to the occasion without knowing it himself. Not that he was
emotional; he was never that. But he showed me something deeper than he
ever had before. With all his passion he was always so English, always
so much the critic, in spite of his powers of enjoyment. He had always
made love in caresses, never in words. Till this last time, as he was
dying."
Judy was speaking in a quiet voice that sounded as though all her tears
had been shed, yet they were pouring down her face, making havoc of the
paint and powder, of which she was quite aware and for which she cared
not at all. Ishmael thought she had never shown her triumphant
naturalness, her stark candour, more finely. As on that evening when he
had met her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each
other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human
being, because they were in some respects so alike. Something quiet and
incurably reserved in him--he could never have talked as bravely as she
did--yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her
secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those
relations off when she thought it best. And now she seemed to have won
through to some calm, he wondered what it was and how she had come to
it....
"What you said about marriage," he said at last, "struck me rather. It's
true. One loses something, but one finds something."
"Marriage, even the most idealistic of marriages, must blunt the edges
to a certain extent," said Judy. "You may call it growing into a saner,
more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the
edges--the fact is the same. Marriage is a terribly clumsy institution,
but it's the most possible way this old world has evolved. It always
comes back to it after brave but fated sallies into other paths."
"Such as yours?" asked Ishmael. It was impossible to pretend to fence
with honesty such as hers.
"No, not such as mine, because I cannot say I did it for any exalted
reason, such as wishing to reform the world. I had no splendid ideas on
mutual freedom or anything like that. I did it simply because I loved
Joe and it was the only way I could have him without making him tired of
me and unhappy. It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of
wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have
been so unbearable in the world. A woman's sin is always blamed so
heavily. That's a commonplace, isn't it? Yet a woman's sin should be the
more forgivable. She sins because it is _the_ man; he sins because it is
_a_ woman."
"Sin!" said Ishmael. "Don't you get to that point in life when the word
'sin' becomes extraordinarily meaningless, like the word 'time' in that
chapter of Ecclesiastes where it occurs so often that when one comes to
the end of the chapter 't-i-m-e' means nothing to one. Sin seems to come
so often in life it grows meaningless too."
"Sin, technically speaking, does, to all but the theologian; but playing
the game, doing the decent thing, not only to others, but to oneself,
and keeping one's spiritual taste unspoiled, these things remain, and
they really mean the same."
"I suppose they do. I like talking to you, Judy. It's not like talking
to a woman, although one's conscious all the time that you are very much
of a woman. But you seem to meet one on common ground."
"There's not so much difference between men and women as people are apt
to think. People are always saying 'men are more this and women are more
that' when really it's the case of the individual, irrespective of sex.
A favourite cry is that men are more selfish. I really rather doubt it.
Perhaps, if one must generalise, men are more selfish and women are more
egotistical, and of the two the former is the easier vice to overcome.
But all this talk of men and women, women and men, seems to me like
something I was in the middle of years ago, and that now means nothing."
"What does mean anything to you now?"
"I'm not quite sure I can tell you yet," said Judy slowly; "and I don't
think it would be any good to you--there'd be too much against it. What
does mean anything to you, personally?"
"I don't know.... I only know that for real youth again, for perfect
ease of body, I would give everything short of my immortal soul."
"Ah! then you still feel the soul's the most important?"
"Part of me does--the part of me that responds to the truth, which is
going on all the time, with us if we like, without us if not, but which
is surely there. It's because I know it's there, even though my longings
are out of key with it, that I still say that about the soul."
They went up into the house, and that night Georgie, whether because
some feminine jealousy that he talked so much with Judy was stinging at
her, or whether because even without that spur she would have felt some
old stirring of warmth, was sweeter to him than for long past. As he
held her against him he was aware that it was not so much passion he
felt as that deeper, sweeter something Judy had spoken of, and for the
first time he felt free to savour it instead of half-resenting it as a
loss of glamour.
This was a satisfying companionship he had of Georgie, a sweet thing
without which life would have been emptier, even if it settled no
problems and left untouched the lonely spaces which no human foot can
range in their entirety, though in youth some one step may make them
tremble throughout their shining floors.... It was good, though it was
not the whole of life, and as he took it he gave thanks for the varied
relationships in the world which added so to its richness, even if they
could only impinge upon its outer edges.
CHAPTER V
THE PARSON'S PHILOSOPHY
That summer the Parson began to show signs of breaking up. Judith had
been struck by the change in him when she came down, a change less plain
to those who were seeing him often, but startlingly distinct to her who
had not seen him for so long. She took up her friendship, that had begun
on that evening when he had found her in the church, in the place where
it had left off, and this was somewhat to the credit of both, since it
transpired that during the past year Judy had been received into the
Roman Catholic Church. Judith was quiet about her religion as she had
been about her love. She had not accepted it in any spirit of there
being nothing else left for her now in life, as the vulgar-natured would
have supposed had they known her history; neither was it because, most
frequent accusation of the ignorant, it appealed to the sensuous side of
her. For ritual she cared as little as the Parson, and by preference she
always went to low Mass instead of to a high Mass. She had found
something that for her had been hitherto hidden, and Boase saw it and
was glad. It was noteworthy that it was to him and not to Ishmael she
spoke of it. Georgie, with all her dearness, was almost too prosperous
to understand. Judy radiated an inner joy that Ishmael had not attained
and that Georgie had never felt the need of. That joy had not been won
until her feet had trod stranger ways than her friends at Cloom ever
imagined. Often she was seized by a pang of conscience that they should
admire her as a creature above everything honest and courageous ... for
there was more to know of her now than her relation with Killigrew. She
knew how the single-heartedness of that had absolved her in their eyes;
but for what it had plunged her in they would have had less
comprehension. For it was not in a nature so essentially womanly as
Judith's to be content with sex-starvation once passion had been aroused
in her, and the irony of it all was that she, who had not for several
years awoken to stirred senses with the man she loved, was unable to
stifle their urgency after she had left him.
From slight dalliance with first one man and then another, she had
progressed to the greater intimacies, ashamed but unfighting. Till at
last the pricking thing had begun to grow fainter and her will stronger
and she was able to break away. She hid the truth and kept up the old
tradition of having loved only once, partly because it was true she had
not felt actual love again, but partly for vanity's sake....
It was not that she was vain of the romantic figure she seemed to her
friends; it was a more deadly thing than that. She was vain of the
quality of her past love. Too much had been made of it, and she would
have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the
temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great
passion. And to this had she come, although her love had been so
real....
Ishmael never again during that visit felt quite the easy intimacy with
Judy that he had touched that day by the stream, though as the next few
years went on and her visits became a regular thing to look forward to
there was built up between them a fabric of friendship that grew to be
something unique to both. Those things which had happened to Judy had
taught her every tolerance and sympathy.
They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed. Nicky, after
writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of
coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal
thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone. The thought
of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of
Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom. When he had
first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it
had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal
Cloom which his father's conduct had shattered. Now he realised that if
he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the
same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any
conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task. Now, since
Nicky's departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme
would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky
wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over
the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old. He knew by
Nicky's letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him. For
days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost
illuminated it once again.
The 'nineties, young and go-ahead as they felt to themselves, did not
seem to Ishmael nearly as wonderful as the 'seventies, which had seen so
much deeper changes. This world--in which people now moved so
complacently talking of Ibsen and Wilde, of weird Yellow Books of which
he heard from Judith, and many other things all designated as
_fin-de-siècle_--he had seen it in the making. The very children growing
up in his house, the plump little Ruth and the clever, impatient Lissa,
they thought they knew so much more than he did because they had been
born so much later; and so in a way they did, in as much as the younger
generation always sees more truly because it has not had time to collect
so many prejudices, but can come straight and fresh to setting right
the problems of the world. But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise
as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new
century would look upon them with a gentle pity.
On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had
gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news. The
Parson could not often get over to Cloom Manor now, but it was the
highest tribute to him that not only Ishmael and Judy and Georgie, when
she could spare the time, but the children too, considered a visit to
the Parson in the light of a pleasure. Boase knew it and was glad--even
his sturdy aloofness and self-reliance would have felt a pang at being
called on for decency's sake.
Ishmael found Boase lying on the long chair in his study, that for him
always held something, some smell or atmosphere of the mind, that
carried him back to his childhood. He felt in the midst of the old days
again at once, when he was not looking at Boase, who was grown very old,
his once rather square face and blunt features having taken on a
transparency of texture that was in itself ageing, while his hair,
sparse about the big brow, was a creamy white like froth. Boase called
to Ishmael, recognising his step, to take off his wet things in the
hall, for it was raining hard, with that whole-hearted rain of the West
which when it begins seems as though it could never stop again. That was
a wet summer, when the stalks of the growing harvest were flattened to
the earth and the corn sprouted green in the ear and the hay rotted on
the ground before ever it could be carried. Ishmael had to be careful
about getting wet since that night when he had run to the burning of
Angwin's ricks, and he did not scorn the Parson's offer of a pair of
shabby old slippers that lurked under the hall chair for just such
occasions as this.
It seemed to Ishmael that if he had not been feeling such a different
being himself he might have been a little boy again and time never have
moved on from the days when he lived here with the Parson and did his
lessons in this room. Outside the shrubs bent before the rainy wind, as
they had done so many times before his childish eyes; the scrap of lawn
visible between them showed as sopping and as green; the fuchsia had
grown bigger; but its purple and scarlet blossoms, so straightly
pendant, each held a drop of clear water at the tip, as they had ever
done in weather such as this. Within the room might be a little fuller,
a little smaller, whether owing to the Parson's untidiness, with which
the new housekeeper could not cope as well as had old Mrs. Tippet, long
dead, or whether to the shrinking that takes place in rooms after
childhood is passed, Ishmael could not have told. Three walls were still
lined with dusty golden-brown books that he had been wont to describe as
smelling of bad milk pudding, and the shabby green tablecloth was
littered with sermon paper and more books just as it had been for his
lessons. He almost expected to see Vassie's golden head, no more alien
from him than his own boyish dark one, bending over it as he looked.
Boase held out a thin hand to him, laying down the book he had been
reading, after slipping a marker in the place. Ishmael saw it was a new
book from the library. "Robert Elsmere" was the name upon its cover.
"What good thing has happened?" asked Boase, watching Ishmael's face.
"Padre, you are too clever; if you had lived a few centuries earlier you
would certainly have been burned alive! Nicky is coming home."
"That is splendid news! He has been away quite long enough to be good."
"For him?"
"No, for you. You are getting stodgy, Ishmael."
Ishmael laughed, but felt rather annoyed all the same.
"What is one to do? I am growing old."
"Nonsense! Have the decency to remember that compared with me you are a
young man. Wait till you are close on eighty and then see how you feel
about it."
Ishmael had a quick feeling that after all he was young compared with
this frail, burning whiteness, yet it seemed to him that he could never
be as old as that, that then indeed life could not be worth living.
Aloud he said mechanically:
"You? You are always young."
"Age does not matter when you are really old; it is only the getting old
that matters," said Boase; "it is like death. No one minds being dead;
it's the dying that appals. But seriously, my dear boy, what really
matters is to have the quality of youth. Don't lose that."
"I'm not sure I ever had it," said Ishmael slowly, sitting down by the
long chair.
"Perhaps not. You were acutely young, which is not quite the same thing.
Our friend Killigrew had the quality of youth. One can say of him that
he died young. I think your Nicky has that quality too. That's why he'll
be so good for you."
"What about the girls? Aren't they enough to save my soul alive?"
"Oh, well, girls are never quite the same thing. A father loves his
daughters if anything more than his sons, but it's as a father and not
as a fellow human. You know, I've seen a good deal of Judith this
summer; she's always good at coming and talking to an old man, and what
interests me about her is that she keeps so fluid. I mean that she never
sticks where she was. I don't want you to either. You came in the days
of Ruskin and Pater and of great men politically, but I don't want you
to stick there. There's no merit in being right at one time in one's
life if one sticks to that rightness after it has lost its significance.
You know, a stopped clock is right twice every twenty-four hours, but
it's a rightness without value. Keep fluid, Ishmael. It is the only
youth."
"Is that why you're reading 'Robert Elsmere'?" asked Ishmael, with a
smile.
"Exactly. I'm not going to change what feeds my soul daily for what is
offered me between these covers, but that's not the point. One can
always discriminate, but one should always give oneself things to
discriminate between."
There was a short silence, which the Parson broke. "I too have had a
letter," he said, and there was something in his voice which made
Ishmael aware of a portent beyond the ordinary. "From Archelaus ..."
added Boase.
"From Archelaus?" echoed Ishmael. The name came upon him like the name
of one dead, it seemed to him that when they spoke of Killigrew they
touched more upon the living than when they mentioned Archelaus. "Why
does he write?" he added; and his voice sounded harsh and dry even to
his own ears, so that he felt a little shame at himself.
"He has met Nicky in Canada."
"I thought Archelaus had gone West in the States, if he were still alive
at all. I was beginning to think something must have happened to him. No
one has heard for so long. He took a funny idea into his head at one
time to write to Georgie, whom he had never seen--queer letters, telling
very little, full of sly remarks one couldn't get the rights of."
Ishmael paused, waiting for the Parson to produce the letter and show it
him, but Boase made no move. "It's funny Nicky never mentioned it," went
on Ishmael with an odd little note that was almost jealousy in his
voice....
"He says he did not tell Nicky who he was," said the Parson reluctantly.
"I think there is more good in that queer, distorted creature than you
think for, Ishmael. Seeing the boy seems to have roused him to old
feelings of home.... He writes oddly, but in a strain that is not
wholly base."
"I can't make out why he wants to write to you at all, Padre; he always
hated you, blamed you so ... for the marriage and all that."
"There is not much accounting for the vagaries of a man like that. Your
father thought to be ironic when he had you called Ishmael; he saw every
man's hand against you--you the youngest and the one against so many.
And you have made a strong, secure life for yourself and your children,
and it is Archelaus who wanders...."
"Archelaus would always have wandered. He has it in his soul. Do you
remember the day Killigrew was classifying men by whether they wandered
or stayed at home? He was right about Archelaus then. Da Boase--you
don't think I could have behaved any differently to him, do you? He
wouldn't be friends. That time in the wood ... you know ... I always
knew in my heart that he had hit out at me, though I was so afraid of
really knowing it that I never spoke of it even to you. And then when he
came home after my marriage to poor little Phoebe--he made the first
advances, it's true, but I never felt happy about them, although he
seemed so altered. I've reproached myself sometimes that I was glad when
he went away after she died. I always hoped he wouldn't come back any
more. What else could I do, Da Boase?"
"I too hope he will never come home any more," said the Parson slowly,
"and yet ... if he does, try and remember, Ishmael ... not that he is
your brother--that would not make things easier--but that he is not
quite an ordinary man, that in him the old brutalities dormant in most
of us have always been strong and that he has had nothing to counteract
them. He is not quite as we are. If we cannot understand we should not
judge."
Again a little silence fell. Then Ishmael said suddenly:
"What does feed your soul, Da Boase? I shouldn't have asked you that,"
he added swiftly. "Besides, I know. But though I know, and though I
believe in it too, yet I can't yet find all I want in it."
Boase lay silent, looking out of the rainy window at the wash of green
and pearly grey without. His hand caressed Ishmael's as though he had
been a little boy again.
"That feeds my soul from which my soul came ..." he said slowly, "and
daily the vision draws nearer to me and its reflection here strengthens
even to my earthly eyes. This world is dear and sweet, but only because
I know that it is not all, or even the most important part. Each day is
the sweeter to me because each day I can say 'Come quickly, O Lord
Jesus.' I do not need to say to you all that knowledge means."
The rain had blown away when Ishmael went home again, yet it seemed to
him he went with a more anxious heart than that with which he had set
out. Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already,
whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him
that no one could ever take his place. Killigrew he was missing as much
now as when he died, because though he had not seen him so very often,
yet Killigrew and he had each stood for something to the other that no
one else could quite supply, and so his going had left a sense of loss
that time did nothing to fill. But with Boase it was more than that.
There was something in Ishmael which Boase had fathered and which knew
and recognised its spiritual paternity. His mind had taken much colour
from Killigrew, but from Boase it had taken form. He felt that that
afternoon in the stuffy study he had touched something he had almost
forgotten, that had slipped rather out of his life for the past years,
since Nicky had been growing up: a significance, a sense of some plan of
which he had caught glimpses in his youth and had since forgotten.
As he went through the wet world it seemed to him as though he were
once again the same Ishmael who had so often gone this way long years
ago, when the soul behind life had still intrigued him more than the
manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the
study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the
remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty
books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a
forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life
but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere material
agencies of the sense of smell and sight: or whether the Parson had
touched him in some atrophied cord that had rung more freely in days
gone by, the effect was the same.
As he went it was as though time had ceased to exist, as though he
caught some vision of the whole pattern as one rhythmic weaving, and not
isolated bits disconnected with each other. The sensation mounted to his
brain and told him that time itself was a mere fashion of thought, that
he was walking in some period he could not place. He remembered the day
when the Neck had been cried, and it had seemed to him that the moment
was so acute it could never leave off being the present and slip into
the past; he remembered the first day at St. Renny when he was staring
at the sunbeam and feeling that that at least would go on spell-bound
for ever; he remembered that moment when, on his return to Cloom, he had
gone over the fields with John-James and, looking once more on the same
field, had recalled that first moment, and smiled to see how it had
slipped away and was gone. He had smiled without thinking that first
moment akin to the second one in which he was, whereas now he saw how
the one had led to the other and both to this ... and how they were all
so much one that none seemed further off than another. The word
"present" lost significance in such a oneness as this. It came to him
that this sense of completeness, of inevitable pattern, was what the
Parson felt, what enabled him to wait so tranquilly.
Ishmael mounted the long slope and stood looking down upon Cloom, and it
seemed to him the fabric of a dream. So strong upon him was the sense of
loss of the time-sense that the place-sense also reeled and slipped to a
different angle in his mind. He saw how in a far-off field at the crest
of the further slope serried rows of washing were laid out, looking so
oddly like gravestones that the surface of his mind took it for a
cemetery until, pricked to a more normal consciousness, he realised that
there could be no such thing there, but only a field belonging to a farm
of his own. Even then it seemed to him that he was wandering in an
unfamiliar country, with a something unreal about it that gave it a
dreamlike quality. The sky was by now a deep slate colour; below it the
yellow of the road and the green of the fields showed a bleached pallor,
and on the telegraph poles that rose and dipped to the crest the china
insulators looked like motionless white birds against the darkness. He
went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was
not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone
by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some
other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is
straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them. He knew
it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace--rather it sent
a chill of helplessness to his heart. He still wanted something in this
world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived.
CHAPTER VI
"SOMETHING MUST COME TO ALL OF US"
With autumn Boase died. Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so
without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the
man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss.
He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few
of the country people too coarse of grain to understand a man's life
could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own
likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made
for him intolerant critics among his own class. Yet, all in all, he was
as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding, as
anyone Ishmael had ever heard of--far more so than anyone he had ever
met. And of later years the Parson had grown in tolerance, which always
to him had been a Christian duty--though it was far from being a weak or
maudlin tolerance; and he had also lost much of that individualism which
had been the only thing to cloud his judgment. More than most old men he
had been free from glorification of the past, though not as free as he
himself imagined. Something of Ishmael had gone with Killigrew's going,
but that something had hardly included much of his heart; now there was
buried with the Parson, or, more truly, strove to follow him whither he
had gone, a love which was as single-natured a thing as can be felt. The
return of Nicky was the only thing which at all filled the emptiness in
Ishmael's days.
Nicky had altered, and for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not
the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel
Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would
after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had
lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still
had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better
grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a
man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind
him. He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in
Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amusement against
himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been
of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in
Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to
try his hand.
When Ishmael had first started machinery at Cloom, beginning with a
binder and going on to a steam thresher that he hired out for the
harvest all around the district, the hedges had been black with folk
crowding to see the wonders, just as they had when the first traction
engine made its appearance in West Penwith. Yet Cornishmen, who are
conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes,
although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use
up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured
forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could
have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.
John-James was an old man now--he had aged quickly with his outdoor
life; but always he refused to let Ishmael pension him off, and though
as overseer he had a wage passing any paid in the county, and though he
lived comfortably enough in his little cottage chosen by himself, with a
tidy body who came in from the village every day to attend to his wants,
he still showed all the premature ageing of the countryman. He had
never married, and with age had taken many queer ways, one of them being
a rooted dislike to having any woman except his sister Vassie in his
house. Georgie was never allowed to cross its threshold, and he always
called her "Mrs. Ruan." The two little girls he adored, and they knew he
was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they
accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man
because he was eccentric and mustn't be worried to live as father did.
Ishmael was very fond of this brother--as fond as John-James' rigid
taciturnity would let him be. John-James' chief peculiarity was
displayed always during the week's holiday he took every year; on each
day of this week he would make a pilgrimage to some cemetery. A new
graveyard was an unfailing magnet for him; he would spend hours there
and return next year to note what new headstones had taken root. "Why on
earth do you want to go and spend all your holiday in cemeteries,
John-James?" Georgie had once asked him; "you'll have to be there for
ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?"
John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly
fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily "I go to the
graveyards," he said at length, "because them be the only places where
folks mind their own business...."
Tom had quite dropped out of the family circle made by Ishmael, Vassie,
and John-James. He found the annoyance of not being received in the same
circles as Ishmael and Vassie too irksome to him--who, he not unfairly
considered, had done so much the best and with the greatest handicaps.
The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and
John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social
values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did
very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of
mayor never was to be for him. He married the daughter of a rich
draper--in "the wholesale"--and as soon as he could afford it he dropped
all doubtful practices and became strictly honest in his profession.
Of all the family, Vassie, who had started out with a more defined
character than the others, was the least changed. She was eminently
successful--had been ever since she met Flynn and determined to marry
him. She had made him a good wife, for he was one of those men who need
feminine encouragement, and with all his brilliance would never have got
so far without her to encourage him. He was not to be one of the great
men of his day, but he had done well, having attained an
Under-Secretaryship under Gladstone's last Administration, which he
continued under Lord Rosebery. With the advent of the Conservative party
in '95 he retired, though still only sixty, and busied himself with a
small estate he had bought in Ireland, where he intended to work out his
schemes for model Utopian tenancies. Vassie was irked by the change. She
had carried into middle life her superabundant energy--her love of being
in the eye of the world. She had no children to occupy her--her only
real quarrel with life--and it did not suit her to sit in Ireland while
her once flaming Dan played with model villages and made notes for his
reminiscences. He had, as flaming dreamers often do, fallen onto the
dreams without the fire, and, having attained a certain amount of his
ideals, was better pleased to sit and look backwards over those which
had not materialised than to face a losing struggle in their cause.
Vassie tried all her wiles to induce him to come to London after the
first year in retirement, and at last she was able to assure him that
she was not feeling well. The symptoms were but slight to begin with--a
tinge of rheumatism in one leg, which annoyed without incapacitating
her. The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last
decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly
acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion.
Vassie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she
carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next
week she was at Cloom.
Ishmael was shocked at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown
its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of
the Government, was now a faded grey--that harsh green-grey that fair
hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows
under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his
shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.
"Don't look like that!" she told him. "The doctor says it's not
hopeless, or wouldn't be if I'd let them operate."
"It? What is it?" asked Ishmael.
"Tuberculosis in the knee. They want me to have my leg off, and I won't.
You don't want me to, do you, Ishmael? I'd rather die whole if I've got
to."
He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his
heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes. Vassie
linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of
the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan's voice
as he talked to Georgie. Ishmael could not trust himself to speak.
Vassie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between
them during their lives. She stood for something to him no one else ever
had, even as she did for John-James. She had never been popular with
women--Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coarse; but
to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to
them as far as her sex went, she meant a good deal as a friend. Judith
and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really
intimate, and that was more a curious kinship between them, a mutual
respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other's very
different character, than anything warmer. But to Ishmael and John-James
she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early
days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her
hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity. When
she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need
caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more
for him than for anyone else in the world. She felt more his equal than
she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite
of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that were beyond her
practical reach. She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never. She
slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.
"Don't worry! After all something must come to all of us," she said.
The phrase knocked at Ishmael's heart. "Something must come to all of
us...." Everyone had to die of something, from some outrage on nature.
There had to be some convulsion out of the ordinary course to bring it
about; cases where the human machine simply ran down, as with the
Parson, were rare. This horror was lying in wait for all--the manner of
their leaving. It was astonishing, looked at in cold blood, that people
lived and were gay and happy with this hanging over them from their
birth onwards. He realised that it was this fact--that only by some
disruption of the ordinary course could death come--which had always
made death seem so unnatural to him. He had for a flash the feeling that
every woman, however maternal, has when she knows she is to have a
baby--a feeling of being caught in something that will not let one go.
"Something must come to all of us...."
Her "something" had come to Vassie. She had to submit to the operation,
but, though she rallied from it, no real good could be done, and the end
became merely a question of time. She did not kick against the pricks,
as Ishmael had done all his life; she accepted it all with a certain
stoicism that was not without its grandeur, and, though she became very
irritable, she had moments of greater softening than ever before. She
was dying when the clouds of the coming war with the South African
Republics first began to lower over the country. The Flynns were in
London, for Vassie was now too ill ever to think of crossing over to
Ireland again, but she suddenly took it into her head to wish to be
taken down to Cloom. This was when she heard the news that Nicky, who
had been a volunteer for some time, had enlisted in the Duke of
Cornwall's Light Infantry. She had always been very attached to him,
spending upon him what of thwarted motherhood she alone knew, and he for
his part had responded to her rather more than he did to most people.
Ishmael was wired to, and in November of '99, a month after the
declaration of war, Dan brought her down with a couple of hospital
nurses and she was installed in the biggest and sunniest room at Cloom.
With Nicky's absorption into the Army and Vassie's incursion hard upon
the edge of her final parting Ishmael was more strangely affected than
by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life. The
approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave
him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel. He
had thought the loss of power to feel for himself an inevitable part of
age, as it had been of the thickening and greater materialism of middle
life; but now he knew that never had he been ravaged as now, because
never before had he encountered fear for someone he loved.
Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells
one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain,
anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and
remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no
sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase. But
this was something different--this aching sense of helplessness, of a
passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof
nor Nicky on the far veldt. He had not been of those who are insensitive
to the pain of the world--rather had it held too much of his sympathies;
but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he
would give everything--the war, the whole rest of the world--to have
Nicky back in safety. That was only at first, or when the fear was
strongest; at other times his sense of proportion and knowledge of how
Nicky himself would feel towards such a sentiment, brought him to a
truer poise.
The war dragged on. The nation began to see that it was not to be the
"walk-over" so confidently expected; disasters occurred, long sieges
wore the folk at home even as those in the beleaguered towns, growls
against the Government were raised, people talked of "muddling through,"
and every barrel-organ in the land ground out "Soldiers of the Queen"
and "The Absent-minded Beggar." Then the world went mad and mafficked,
felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for
years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical. And "Nicky ...
Nicky ... Nicky ..." beat out every swing of the pendulum of Time at
Cloom.
Between the beats of intensest feeling Ishmael would fall into the arid
spaces which all deep emotion holds as a strongly-running sea holds
hollows--spaces where it did not seem to matter so much after all, when
in a dry far-off way he could tell himself that nothing really made any
difference in life. From these hollows he came up again as a man comes
floating into consciousness after chloroform--recalled by a sense of
pain. He had one of these spaces just after Vassie had been buried, and
all the time he was consoling Dan's frantic and noisy sorrow he was
feeling a hypocrite, because, so he told himself, he really did not
care. He did care, and deeply, but he was making the mistake of thinking
that any grief can go the whole way, that all else in life can possibly
be blotted out. True instinct told him it could not, that all of life
could never fall in ashes round the head even when it was bowed in
irrevocable loss; but a remnant of the conventional made him feel as
though it ought to, and this made him distrust what grief he felt. His
thought for Nicky, even when he was in his dry spaces, he always knew
was eating at him. When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky's
return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known
all that fatherhood meant. Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for
all his life, would surely come back with Nicky.
CHAPTER VII
EARTH
"When Nicky comes home" grew to be the watchword in the household at
Cloom. The two girls, clever Lissa and thoughtful Ruth, were now grown
up, and far from the childish griefs of postponed drives; they had built
up a very pretty legend round the figure of Nicky these three years of
the war. Ruth had copied out his letters from South Africa and made a
manuscript book of them, that Lissa, who was "going in" for
craftsmanship, bound in khaki with the badge of the D.C.L.I. on the
cover, and they gave it to their father with great pomp. All of life
centred round "when Nicky comes home." He had done very well, having
gained a commission and won a D.S.O., and there was talk of a public
reception in Penzance for him and the rest of the local heroes.
One day Nicky came home, but with a wife, and the homecoming was
consequently quite unlike everything that had been planned. The girls
declared loudly that he had spoilt everything and that they had wanted
him to themselves, though privately Ruth thought Marjorie very
fascinating.
Marjorie was a Colonial by birth--a good-looking, vigorous modern young
woman, with a rather twangy voice. She admired Cloom so much as an
antique that her enthusiasm seemed somehow to belittle it. Yet there was
something splendid about her--in her confidence and poise, her candour,
her superb health, and the simplicity of her thoughts. Ishmael could not
but think her the perfect wife for Cloom and the future of Cloom. She
would bring fresh, clear blood to the old stock, which showed signs of
falling on unhealth. For the first time in his thirty-odd years Nicky
was in contact with someone he admired more than himself, and the result
was excellent. His early discontent had settled into ambition--the
limited honest ambition of the country gentleman such as Ishmael would
most have wished to see in him. Canada and the war between them had
carried him far from the politics of his father--as far as Ishmael had
found himself from Boase long ago; and when a bye-election occurred in
the division he stood for it in the Unionist interests, and won, his
honours still thick upon him, even in that Radical locality. He was now
growing more and more to be master of Cloom, taking an interest in it
even during his inevitable absences in town, Ishmael falling into the
background; for his sixty years, though vigorous within him if he took
care of himself, made him suffer for any violent exertion.
He had slipped into the background--to all but Georgie. She kept pace
with him, although so much younger, because in him she saw her own
youth. Her children had grown up and away from her as children must, and
she clung to her husband as she had not been wont to do when the
practical affairs of a family had absorbed more of her attention.
Ishmael endeavoured to live up to the Parson's advice and keep fluid,
and his naturally mobile nature helped him in this. Where and when he
did fall short, as the inevitable prejudices of age in favour of the
ways it knows arose in him, he at least could see it and smile at
himself. But, following on the intense period of personal feeling he had
lived through while Nicky was at the war, had come the inevitable
reaction, and from that reaction, as far as the capacity for any
outstanding emotion went, he was too old to recover.
He had learned the lesson of life too well, saw the whole pattern with
too great clarity. This alone would have relegated him to the
background, for it is the frame of mind which, when it is temperamental
from the outset, makes the looker-on at life; while when it is attained
it creates the person to whom other people come for sympathy and help in
matters that seem to them enormously important, even while they appeal
to the wider view for better proportion.
He was in the background; but he was not yet content to be there. He was
content to be thought a person who could have feelings that started and
ended in others--even as a young man he had worked for that; but he had
not filled in his background with anything that satisfied the portion of
himself, which, even if a man live for others ever so completely, still
clamours for satisfaction. Every part of him that was in relation to
others had adjusted, but that one spot which always answers to the self
alone was merely going on from day to day as best it could. He was
content to have no burning emotions, no strong longings, to be
considered less important than themselves by all the younger people
amongst whom he lived, but within him the voice that says "I am I ... I
still want something for myself alone, some solution of the riddle,
something to make up for loss of youth and beauty and strength," still
stirred and muttered. Not prosperity, not children, not a wife who took
step by step with him, could give this, or even help him to find out
what it was. Not his memory of what the Parson had lived and died by
could fill him wholly; he had not yet come to that perfect satisfaction,
life was too insistent in him. Not in the next world, or in any personal
contact, however intimate, in this, could the stuff of life be found. He
had imagined while Nicky was away that after all he too had attained the
personal fusion that most people seemed to cling to as the chief support
in life, but now he knew that that way was not for him any more than
for any other at the loneliest pass.
A few days after Nicky's triumphant election, when thought was once more
possible at Cloom, Ishmael felt more depressed than he had for long; he
had been living not so much in the valleys as upon the straight plains
of late. To-day his eyes were hurting him and he could not read; there
was no work crying to be done, and the heavy warm air was misted with
damp that seemed to melt into the bones. He went out, shaking off
Georgie's protests, and struck up the valley leading from the sea. The
old mood was on him that had recurred again and again through life--the
mood when nothing would satisfy but to go out alone and walk and walk
and breathe in peace from earth and air. He went on, not walking fast,
for the depression that was on him was not like a definite grief that
urges the body to fierce exertion, and as he went it was as though he
had neglected the charm too long and it was going to fail him. A blight
seemed to hang upon everything, and a dread that had no form but that
pressed on him grew as he went.
He came at last to the marshy bottom of the valley, where the wet and
tussocky grass was set in a tangle of blackberry bushes and bracken
higher than a man. A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in
the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the
moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking black slugs, three or
four inches long, that lay motionless all over the marsh. A faint,
subtle smell hung on the air, the fragrance of the dodder, that covered
the gorse bushes with a fine vermilion net, studded with pale pink
flowers like fat flesh-coloured flies caught in a vast red spider's web.
The whole place seemed redolent of evil--the motionless glossy slugs,
the deadly parasite with its curiously obscene flowers, the littered
undergrowth rotting in the water, all these filled Ishmael with a
suffocating sense of doom. He stayed at gaze, yet longing to get away
from this steamy place, where the gorse had gone grey beneath the false
embraces of the dodder.
At last he turned and climbed slowly up the valley side; when he reached
the top he had to pause and lean upon a gate to get his breath. His
heart was pounding in his ears. He did not look up; for a few minutes
the world was dark and filled with a great roaring. Then he felt his
breath coming more easily and the giddiness passed; he opened his eyes
and straightened himself.
He opened them on to the wide stretch of sky that arched over the sea,
and there he saw, stretched from headland to headland, one gleaming foot
springing from an irradiated field, the other dying into a swirl of
misty foam, a perfect arch of rainbow. It was so triumphant, so
brilliant, so unexpected, that at first he stood staring, his mouth
open, his whistling breath coming unheeded.
A rainbow alone in Nature always looks an alien thing--it is never part
of a landscape, but the added touch which means wonder. Like snow, it is
always a phenomenon. It has never lost the quality of miracle.
Far below the glowing span lay Cloom, wet grey roofs gleaming, and a
dazzle of sun upon its whitewash; around the fields lay like a jewelled
canopy, lighter than the sky, which still wore a deep purple-grey,
against which the arch burned like fire.
As Ishmael looked the tears swam in his eyes, making the whole radiant
vision reel and run together in a blaze of passionate light and colour.
As he stood there, feeling a keener joy than he could ever remember the
personal having given him, all his philosophy, all his changing beliefs
in what was most worth while, resolved themselves into the passionate
cry: "Let beauty not die for me.... May dawn and sunset, twilight and
storm, hold their thrill to the last; may the young moon still cradle
magic and the old moon image peace; may the wind never fail to blow
freedom into my nostrils, and the sunlight strike to my heart till I
die. And if colour, light, shadow, and sound of birds' calling all fall
away from my failing senses, at least let the touch of earth be sweet to
my fingers and the air to my eyelids."
BOOK V
HARVEST
CHAPTER I
THE FOUR-ACRE
A little boy was riding into Cloom farmyard astride a big carthorse,
whistling and beating time with a toy switch upon its irresponsive
flanks. He was so small that his bare brown legs stuck straight out on
either side of him, but he sat upright and clutched the dark tangled
mane firmly. The horse planted his big gleaming hoofs with care, his
broad haunches heaved slightly as he went, and the child swayed securely
to the action. Beside the horse's arched neck walked an old man, less
sure of step than the animal; the child drummed with his sandalled feet
against the round sides of his steed and managed to kick the old man as
he did so.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Granpa!" he said in a clear treble, laughing a little,
not because he thought it was funny to have hit his grandfather, but
because it was such a fine day and it was so jolly on the big horse, and
he knew his grandfather would understand that he could not help laughing
at everything. The old man put up his hand and laid it gently on the
slim brown leg, keeping it there till the horse stopped in the middle of
the yard, when he held up both his arms and the boy slipped down into
them.
"Jim!" called at woman's voice from the house. "Jim! Hurry up; it's past
lesson-time."
"Bother!" said Jim regretfully; "it's always lesson-time just as I'm
really occupied. I wish I was a grown-up and could do what I liked."
The old man did not contradict him with a well-worn platitude, because
he knew that in the way the child meant grown-ups did have a great deal
of freedom.
"You wouldn't like to be as old as I am, would you, Jim?" he asked. Jim
regarded him thoughtfully; evidently this was the first time he had even
imagined such a thing ever being possible. He cast about in his mind to
think of some answer that would not hurt his grandfather's feelings.
"Well, perhaps not quite as old as you, Granpa!" he said; "as old as
Daddy; not with white hair like you--just a grown-up man."
"Jim ...!" came the voice again more insistently, and his mother
appeared at the back door and stood framed in its arch of carved
granite. Marjorie Ruan was still a fine young woman; her thirty-odd
years sat lightly upon her. Her tanned skin and the full column of her
long, bare throat gave her a look of exuberant health. She was dressed
in a smart suit of white linen and her brown head was bare.
"Have you been having a ride?" she asked. "But you mustn't stop when I
call you, you know! You shouldn't keep him when he ought to come,
Granpa!" The grandfather remained unperturbed. He liked and admired
Marjorie, but there were times when he considered her manners left
something to be desired. Jim ran into the house, and Marjorie,
shepherding him in with a sweeping motion of her strong, big arm,
disappeared also, curved a little over him. Ishmael was left alone in
the yard, stroking the velvet-soft muzzle of the waiting horse.
Ishmael made a fine figure as he stood there, a little stooped, but
handsome in his thin old way, with his strongly-modelled nose and his
dark hazel eyes deep-set beneath the shaggy white brows. He was
clean-shaven, and the fine curve of his jaw, always rather pointed than
heavy, gave a touch of the priestly which looked oddly alien with his
loose Norfolk jacket and corduroy breeches and the brown leather gaiters
that protected his thin old legs. His close-cropped grey head was
uncovered, and he still carried it well; he looked his years, but bore
them bravely, nevertheless.
"You are going to finish sowing the four-acre to-day?" he asked the man
who came out from a shed leading another horse. "I shall come along
myself later on. Mind you regulate the feed of the drill carefully; it's
not been working quite well lately." He stood watching a moment while
the man harnessed the horses to the big drill, which, standing quiescent
now, was soon to rattle and clank over the ploughed and harrowed earth
of the four-acre field. Then he turned, and, going through the house,
went out on to the lawn, where on a long chair in the sun, carefully
swathed in shawls, an old lady was lying.
"Have you everything you want, Judy?" he asked, sitting slowly down on
the garden-chair beside her. She looked up at him through the large
round spectacles, that gave her an air as of a fairy godmother in a
play, and nodded. "Everything, thanks! Marjorie has been very good. My
knitting--which I always take about with me, because I think it's only
decent for an old lady to knit, not because I can do it well, for I
can't; to-day's _Western Morning News_ and yesterday's _Times_; and my
writing-pad, if I should take it into my head to write letters, which I
shan't, because, as you know, I think letters are thoroughly vicious.
One of the few signs of grace about the present generation is the
so-called decay of the art of letter-writing."
"Jim would agree with you. He has just had to go in to his lessons; and
he thinks that letters are a lot of rot, anyway!"
"What are you doing to-day, Ishmael?"
"I am thinking of helping with the four-acre. Nicky will soon be down
for the Easter recess, and then I shall be so carefully looked after I
shall not get the chance to overtire myself."
"Nicky has turned out a dear boy, and good son," said Judy kindly.