"I am getting on, you know," said Nicky Ruan. "At twenty-two—nearly twenty-three—a fellow isn't as young as he was. And I don't want to stick here till I'm too old to enjoy seeing the world."
"What should you consider too old, Nicky?" asked Ishmael.
Nicky hesitated; he made a rapid calculation in his head, and arriving at the fact that his father must be quite forty-six or seven, and being always averse to hurting anyone's feelings unless it was very worth while, he temporised.
"Oh, well! it depends on the fellow, doesn't it? I expect, for instance, you weren't nearly as old as me when you were my age, because you didn't go to the 'Varsity, and of course that makes a difference…."
Ishmael sat smoking and looking at the boy in silence. He felt he knew what the old Bible phrase meant when it spoke of yearning over a child. He felt the helpless desire to protect, to stand between this golden boy and all that must come to him, and he knew that not only can no one live for anyone else, but that youth would refuse the gift were it possible to make it.
Nicky, about whom he knew so little, about whom he realised he had always known so little…. What did he really know about Nicky's life, his doings up at Oxford, his thoughts? Roughly he was aware of his tastes, his habits at home, his affections; but of the other Nicky, the individual that stood towards life, not the boy who stood in his relation of son towards him, he knew nothing. Women, now … what lay behind that smooth lean young face—what of knowledge about women? Ishmael had no means of telling. Whether Nicky were still as pure as his two little sisters, whether he had the technical purity that may for some time go with a certain amount of curiosity and corruption of the mind, whether he had already had his "adventures," or whether he were still too undeveloped, too immersed in sports and himself to have bothered about women, Ishmael could not really tell, any more than could any other parent.
The only thing in which Ishmael differed from the average parent was in acknowledging his ignorance to himself. But then Nicky had always had that curious intangible quality, that mental slipping-away from all grip, which had made it especially difficult ever really to know what his thoughts were and what he really knew. Not that there was any reserve about Nicky—he was not at all averse to talking freely about himself; but it seemed as though either there were in him a hollow where most people keep the root of self, or else that a very deep-seated personality held court there. Whichever it was, the effect was the same, the effect as of a sealed place.
Father and son sat looking at each other, and there was something inimical in the eyes of both. Nicky sat thinking: "Of course father's a brick in all sorts of ways, and there isn't anybody quite like him, but he doesn't understand. He never was young like me…." Thus Nicky, and saw no inconsistency with his statement of a minute earlier that his father had been so much younger than he at the same age. And Ishmael thought: "He has the only thing that matters in the world….And I was like that once…." And almost, for a moment, hated him that he should have the youth which slipped so fast. The moment died, and with it his bitterness, merged in the pity of youth which welled up in him as he sat fronting Nicky's superb confidence, his health, his swelling appetite for life.
"But why Canada?" asked Ishmael at last, temporising in his turn.
"Because I'm sure it's the country of the future; you should hear UncleDan about it!… And of course he knows so many people there, so Ishould have introductions and all that. You know you believe in UncleDan!"
"Yes, I believe, as you call it, in your Uncle Dan's sincerity, if only because he's done so many inconsistent and apparently contradictory things in his life. But that doesn't make me see any real reason why you should go to Canada."
Nicky's bright face took on a sulky expression, he swung a foot, and his jaw stood out as it did when he was angry, thickening his whole aspect.
"Because, if you want to know, I'm not going to be content to spend my whole life in an obscure farm in Cornwall, as you've done!" he burst out. "There's the whole world to see and I want to see it. There's—oh, a thousand and one things to do and feel one could never get down here, things I want to do and feel. You can't understand."
That was true, and Ishmael knew it. What human being, he reflected, marooned as each of us is on the island of individuality, can understand another even when there is no barrier of a generation between, that barrier which only the element of sexual interest can overleap? There had been moments when he had wished that his destiny had not tied him quite so much, but on the whole he had loved that to which he was tied too dearly to resent it. He could see that Nicky thought his life had been very wasted; he allowed himself a little smile as he thought of what Cloom would have been like as a heritage for Nicky if he had not taken the view of his destiny that he had. What would Nicky's own position in life have been? Probably no better than that of his grandfather, old James Ruan. Ishmael laughed outright, much to Nicky's indignation, but when he spoke again his voice was gentler.
"I'll think it over," he promised, "and I'll write to your uncle and ask him what he thinks. I don't want to clip your wings, Nicky, Heaven forbid! I mayn't always have enjoyed having my own flights so circumscribed, you know."
Into Nicky's generous young heart rushed a flood of sympathy on the instant. "It must have been rotten for you," he said eagerly. "I know the old Parson's always saying how splendid you've been about this place and all that; you mustn't think I don't realise."
Ishmael, aware that he had not really wished his flights to be wider, that his nature had been satisfied, as far as satisfaction lay in his power, by Cloom, by the soil which was the fabric of life to him, felt he was obtaining sympathy and approbation on false pretences—indeed, he had deliberately angled for them. They were too sweet to refuse, however come by. Nicky, the young and splendid, whom he loved so dearly in spite of—or could it be because of?—his elusiveness, did not so often warm his heart that he could spurn this. He crossed over to where Nicky sat on the edge of the table and allowed himself one of his rare caresses, slipping his arm about the boy's shoulders. "We'll see, Nicky!" he said.
At that moment there came a crash against the door, and it burst open to 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 toPlymouth," 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.
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.
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.
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," saidIshmael.
"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 extraordinaryménagesin 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 istheman; he sins because it isawoman."
"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.
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 asfin-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.