There followed for Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect required from a newly-made widower. Later, after the funeral was over and life at the Manor had somewhat settled down again, with the incongruous addition of a nurse, he began to feel that unkind touch of the ludicrous which accompanies the position of a young man left with a baby on his hands. He was ashamed of this feeling and tried to suppress it, but it was there nevertheless. It ceased to twinge when Vassie came down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit—partly because, he guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby's welfare in such a masculine house that she had come.
Vassie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically she was intensely proud of him. She had become an enthusiastic Radical, and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred. Ishmael suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it. He was just not quite a gentleman—a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but that he would go far even the Parson believed. Ishmael was grateful to the pair for coming, and never asked Vassie why she, who held such socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.
Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Vassie was that she first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child. One evening of winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the room she had arranged according to her modern ideas—the modernity of '69—as a nursery. A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery death. Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of this ritual. Vassie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.
James Nicholas Ruan—so called after his uncle and the Parson—was a little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be attractive even to a male observer.
Ishmael watched him as Vassie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think it all a huge joke. Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone—part of some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see. As he was soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air about him of a being really supremely independent of everyone; although his body seemed so helpless one got the impression that his soul was thoroughly aloof, untouched. When he laughed at the efforts of the grown-ups to please him it was a sublime condescension, that was all. When something failed to please him he was recalled to the things of this world and set up a loud wail, which filled Ishmael with anxiety, though Vassie and the nurse remained unaccountably calm. The baby evidently was of their opinion, because he left off wailing with the suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial.
Ishmael, though he had first held aloof and then been terrified when Vassie insisted on his taking the fragile little body in his arms, had yet felt a thrill go through him when he did so. It was not possible for a man to have the feeling for the land that he had and not both crave for a child and feel a deep-rooted emotion at its possession. Yet it was more than that, he told himself, when he felt the warm little body utterly dependent on him. He had taken him up before often enough, but never in the intimacy of this evening, which held the quality of a shrine.
He showed nothing of what he felt, but that evening, after Vassie and her ever-talking husband had settled themselves in the parlour, he went up again to the nursery and told the nurse she could go downstairs for a little while. Then he crossed over to the cot and, drawing back the curtain, looked down at the little morsel lying asleep in it. This was his son, this small rosy thing, his son that would one day walk his land beside him and would eventually take it over as his own. This was flesh of his flesh as no wife could ever be, and soul of his soul as well.
As he looked the baby began to whimper and opened its eyes, of the milky blue of a kitten's. Ishmael went on his knees beside the cot, and eager, absurdly eager, to be able to cope with the situation successfully himself, spoke as soothingly as he knew how. The baby's whimper became a cry. His little hand beat the air. Ishmael struck his forefinger into the tiny palm, and the little fingers curled round it with that amazing tenacity of babies, who can clutch and suck before they can do anything else—getting, always getting, from life, like all young things. The baby hung firmly on to the finger and his cries died down; his mouth twitched and puckered to an absurd smile. Ishmael felt an exquisite glow suffuse his tired heart that had been so dry for months. He dared not make a sound for fear he broke the spell of contentment that held the baby and himself; he stayed with his finger enwrapped by those tiny clinging fingers till long after the baby had fallen asleep again. Then he crept from the room, and meeting the nurse his face assumed a blank and casual expression. But his heart guarded the glow that had been lit, which grew within him.
He began to work at Cloom as never before, because this time he was not working for himself. As the baby grew and became more and more of a delight and a companion—and a baby can be an excellent companion—he felt within him a steady gleam that did not flicker with the mood of the hour as so many gleams will. He told himself, as he settled into a manner of life and thought of which the child was the inalienable centre, that this was indeed the greatest thing in life. Before this, desire paled and self died down; in the white light of this love all others faded in smoke, except the love of heaven, of which it was a part. By heaven he meant not only the future state of the soul, but the earth on which he trod, and the only thing likely to become pernicious during the years that followed was his obsession with the one idea and his certainty that he had found the great secret.
Yet in spite of the passion which held him, and which he told himself was the master passion, there at times, and more as the years went on, would arise in him the old feeling—the feeling that something must surely happen, that round the corner awaited events of which the mere expectation made each day's awakening a glowing thing. Life was young and insistent in his veins, and with the lifting dawns, the recurrent springs, it began to sing anew—for him as apart from his child. Not yet had he found any one thing to make the complete round, to give him enough whereby to live without further questioning.
While little Nicky was still too young to need troubling over in the matter of schooling, Ishmael yet found himself for the first time considering the subject, not so much as it would affect his child, but as it bore upon the children of the countryside—children such as his own brothers had been, as he might have been himself…. The Education Act had not long been passed, for it was the spring of '72 when Ishmael began to take an active part in its administration in the West. He was still a young man, but the happenings and circumstances of his life had made for thoughtfulness, and association with his firebrand brother-in-law was turning that thought into more definite channels than formerly. Ishmael was becoming less a philosophic dreamer, and he began to feel within himself the stirring of desire to do things. Not that he had ever been idle, but his own little corner of the world and the definite work he had had to do in it had hitherto filled the practical part of life for him. Now that Cloom was so far set upon the upward way as to allow him more liberty, bigger though not dearer ideas began to germinate within him.
The years his youth had seen were stirring enough; the excitements and scandals of the Crimean War, the chief topic during the time just before he went to St. Renny, had been followed, in his first year there, by the tragedy of the Mutiny and the wild stories that had filled the land at the time. Then, even in Cornwall, the question of the liberation of slaves had been a burning one, and that, combined with the sad tales of distress caused in the North and Midlands, had made the American war a live matter. Ever since he had heard Russell and Gladstone fighting for the doomed Reform Bill of '66—heard, above all, Bright's magic flow of words—the political world had held a reality for him it never had before. Ever since he too had been swept with the crowds to Hyde Park on that memorable day when the people of England had shown their will so plainly he had felt within him a rising sense of the necessity of reforms. Not till he met his brother-in-law, Dan, had it really become clear to him that there lay his own path…. Up till then, after the fashion of the young who have not been directly incited either by upbringing or an exceptional temperament to deeds bigger than themselves, he had been very engrossed with the personal life of himself and those he knew. Whenever he had projected beyond that—as he did in a degree incomprehensible to his family—it had been into the intangible regions of the spirit.
Now, with the first fine rapture of youth already faded, but its enthusiasm left burning for scope, with his emotional capacities exhausted for a long time to come and his mind sickened of the intimate matters of life, now he was ripening every day for the more material but impersonal energies involved in helping other people's minds and bodies. As usual, any measure took far longer to sink in in Cornwall than up-country, and the Education Bill might for long have remained an empty sound as far as Penwith was concerned if it had not been for Boase, Ishmael, and several others of the local gentry. The Nonconformists were still bitter against it, and there were riots and much heartburning among the poor. They resented having their children sent to school to learn more than their parents instead of helping them by earning almost as soon as their little legs could stagger. Indignation meetings were held in the local chapels, and the Parson was once stoned from behind a hedge. He, though by nature a Conservative, was too truly a wise as well as a compassionate man not to see the crying need for reforms, and though of necessity he deplored the creeping in of undenominationalism, yet he knew his parish was too poor to support adequate Church schools, and he was glad enough to see children in a way to receive some education. He smiled at the idea of the Bible being "explained" without a leaning to any particular creed, but he relied on his own Sunday school to supply that want. Also perhaps even he was not averse to supporting what had so violently the disapprobation of the Nonconformists…. There was no particular force in the objections of these latter in that district, as the Church school, the only one for miles, would not be large or convenient enough to come under the State aid of the Bill, so almost from the first it was a matter of building one of the new Board schools, where the undenominational system abhorred by Boase would be all that would hold sway.
Ishmael's first definite outward movement came about on an evening when Boase came up to the Manor to see him and the Flynns, who were staying with him at the time. Nicky was then three years old, and a daily growing delight to Ishmael, but the Parson was not without a guileful plot to wean him somewhat from that allegiance. He had begun to consider—probably because Daniel Flynn, deeply as he disagreed from him in many respects, had stirred him to the wider issues—that Ishmael must be made to take a hand in other affairs than the ordering of his estate and the upbringing of his son. He had watched with alarm the increasing inwardness of the man he loved, to him always the boy he remembered—an inwardness not towards egoism, for that Ishmael's distrust of individualism, would always prevent, but towards a vague Quietism that enwrapped him more and more. His son, deeply as he engrossed him, rather increased this trend than otherwise, and Boase, casting about for other influences, had irresistibly thought of Flynn.
Daniel Flynn was a living mass of contradictions. An Irishman and a disciple of the O'Connell tradition, he was yet—though the word had not then been coined—an Imperialist, for his Canadian sympathies were strong, and he knew that not yet could the Colonies be entirely cut loose from the Mother Country. A Liberal, he had been an ardent supporter of the Dominion scheme evolved under the Tory Government of Derby. He revered the memory of Durham, that large-ideaed, generous-hearted, spectacular nobleman whose crime had been to hold by the spirit rather than by the letter, and whom Dan declared to be the father not only of Canada, but of the modern Colonial system. Though he held the Crimean War to be an error of policy and the Chinese War of '57 to be an abomination, he never joined with those of Palmerston's detractors who accused him of being too French in his sympathies. He inveighed against all wars in the abstract, yet raged at the loyalty of O'Connell, which, by stopping short at the use of rebellious force, had alienated his adherents; and he himself had borne arms for Garibaldi. He had been among the most passionate critics of the manner in which the trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence pronounced against them, but his Imperialist and O'Connellised self had deprecated the action of the Fenians in the first place. He was a Catholic by blood and an agnostic by temperament; the former made him abhor blasphemy, and the latter definite boundaries. He was a follower of Russell, that aristocrat of reform, and yet voted against his Reform Bill, as many Liberals did, because it was half-hearted. He was an Irish-Canadian and sat for a manufacturing town in the Midlands.
Daniel Flynn was a man whose brain was too finely balanced not to see fairly, but whose sympathies were so passionately partisan they were for ever swaying action to one side or other of the true point of equity. On this evening the Parson found him in fine fettle for a talk, and if necessary for a fight. He was sitting in the parlour with Vassie, but his whole soul was with a letter he had had from Ireland telling of a disastrous case where the new Irish Land Act, of which even Dan had hoped great things, had failed more signally than usual.
"Listen to this," he burst forth almost as soon as Boase was seated, "and tell me if that fool Government doesn't want hanging as high as those poor Fenians! Here's a man in my own country, where the little cabin is that saw me born, before ever me father took me to the new country; and his landlord has told him he'll not give him a penny piece for the shed and the new wall and the garden patch he's made out of the bare earth with his own hands. And him going to America, and the money the scoundrel ought to pay him for them would take his family across in comfort, and his wife with child at the blessed moment!"
Boase held his head in comic bewilderment, and Dan laughed a little and calmed down.
"And why can't he make the landlord pay, you'd ask? Because the spalpeen had it in writing from him when the Bill was passed that if he put on a new roof to keep the wet off a dying child he should never enforce the terms of the Act against him…. Didn't I vote against the Act because of the very clause allowing that? I knew the landlords and the devil's tricks they'd be up to…. Saving your presence, Ishmael, old fellow, landlords are the scum of the earth!"
"At least you can't accuse me of being an absentee landlord," saidIshmael, smiling.
"No, indeed," chimed in Vassie almost indignantly. "If you knew all he's done here, Dan, it's like a miracle. I don't believe wages or the standard of living could be lower in Ireland than they were here when Ishmael took the place in hand."
"I believe you," said Flynn. "It's myself thinks Ishmael has it in him to be a grand reformer; that's why I can't bear to see him wasting himself over morals and manure when he could be working away at the bettering of the world."
Ishmael laughed, but the Parson took up the suggestion seriously.
"The world's a large order," he said, "but this particular corner of it, perhaps…. There's several matters down here would be the better for the gentry taking more interest in them. These new school boards, for instance—"
"Ah, the children…!" cried Flynn, the light of the enthusiast springing into his fine eyes. "They're what matter, when all's said and done. If we get the children we get the world. Every generation has in it the millennium, the seeds of Utopia."
"The phantom cities of Fata Morgana …" said the Parson with a sigh. "But we're all the better for sighting them, even so. What d'you think of the suggestion, Ishmael?"
"What? I didn't know there'd been one made."
"That you should be on this new board," said the Parson boldly. "Lord Luxullyan has had to retire through illness; he himself suggested you should take his place."
Ishmael was stricken silent for a moment. The idea seemed to him a little absurd, but Boase and Flynn, both of whom he respected, seemed alight with enthusiasm. He thought it over as well as he could in a short space. Perhaps there might be something in it after all. He remembered his own youth, how, if it had not been for the especial interest taken in him by the Parson, he, like his brothers, might have had to be content with the bare elements of reading and writing imbibed at the local dame school whenever Annie chose they should go. Tom had been the only one to educate himself further by his own efforts; he himself, he believed, would never have done as much as Tom. All around him he saw the children of his tenants growing up in ignorance, too ill-educated even to respond to his schemes for advancing them, for their better health and conditions of labour. He knew there was opposition to this new scheme, that the Parson had come in for a share of obloquy, and that the parents themselves, in some cases were their children's enemies. And lastly, in that swift flashing before him of these thoughts, came the image of Nicky—of Nicky whose intelligence was daily showing as a brighter thing, whose jolly little presence meant so much of the future to him, on whom he was building his own life-work as he had up till now conceived of it. How if it were his Nicky who was destined never to learn, never to be pulled out of the slough of deadly content, never to know any of the things that make life rich and the horizon not only the material one proscribed by locality? The countryside was full of little Nickies—not so finely dowered by nature, doubtless thicker of skull and soul, but still little Nickies…. Better co-workers with Nicky these could be made. For the first time he saw not only Cloom and his own tenants, but the whole countryside that he knew so well, growing finer, freer.
And it was all about a school board! An ordinary enough thing now, when custom has staled it and the many faults in the system have become visible; but, printing once invented, school boards could no more be held back than the eventual express railway engine once Hero of Alexandria had made his little experiments with a steam kettle. About the benefit of either there may be two opinions, but none about their inevitability.
At the time of the Forster Act the school board was a new and thrilling thing, one more sign of the approaching day when reform should have made a perfect world. Very famous and great people did not scorn to sit upon it, and the whole movement was considered in the light of a benevolent revolution. Ishmael, seeing with the eyes of his age and time, tingled to the thought. It was the first occasion on which the cup of ambition had been held before him, and to him it was momentous. He said little, but did not try and dissuade the Parson when he declared he would take the matter to the authorities, and he listened to Flynn for the rest of that evening with less the sensation of the outsider, the mere onlooker, than ever before.
Reform, reform, was Daniel's theme, especially the reform of the whole voting system. He was a keen advocate of increased franchise and the ballot, and here the Parson differed from him. The Parson, in his heart of hearts, would have taken the vote away from most of the people he knew; he would certainly not have enlarged its scope, and as to the system of the secret ballot-box, he was too used to knowing what all his parishioners did with their votes and to guiding their hands…. There were steps he could not take with Flynn; but Ishmael, listening, began to waver in his allegiance towards the Parson. His own nature would have supported the idea of secret voting even if his progressive spirit, the eager spirit of youth that can put all right, had not urged him to be on the side of things new. Already he had once or twice found himself failing to support the Parson's advocacy of Derby, and in debate upheld Gladstone against Disraeli. This evening it dawned upon him that Boase was not infallible, that times had moved past him…. The dear old Parson, of course he would always feel just the same about him; but after all he had stayed down here too long and was getting old … he could not be expected to know as much as younger men.
It was only towards the end of the evening that Ishmael's complacency received a slight prick that made it waver. Dan had told of an Irishman who, after winning a case against his landlord, had hidden behind a hedge and shot him on the way home from the court.
"It was his heart was broken by all the trouble of it," said Flynn, "and when the victory was his he didn't want it. If he'd lost his case he wouldn't have done it. But it's a difficult thing to get into the head of a jury, especially when it's a packed jury of black Protestants from the North."
"We don't make nearly enough account, in our laws or our private lives, of which of the two great divisions any deed falls into," said the Parson.
"What divisions?" asked Flynn curiously.
"The divisions of what one may call the primary and secondary—I mean, if a deed be born of itself, a pure creation, or whether it is the result of a reaction. I have had more girls 'go wrong' after a religious revival than at any other time. Pure reaction! I firmly believe reaction is at the bottom of half the marriages and all the divorces of the world."
"It's at the back of quite half the crime," assented Flynn, "and murder should certainly be classified under that distinction."
"It's at the bottom of nearly all the decisive steps in a man's own life," said Ishmael thoughtfully. He was thinking that his self-created impulses seemed to have ceased with the death of his love for Blanche. She and Cloom had both been passions born of their own inevitable necessity. But his marriage came under the heading of "reaction" if ever anything did. He wondered whether this new fire he felt beginning to warm him did not partake of some quality of reaction also—reaction from the dreams and undisciplined longings of adolescence which had served him so badly. At the thought the glow died down, and greyness spread over the vague budding schemes that had begun to swell life out.
"But one mustn't confuse the law of reactions with that of cause and effect," the Parson went on, "which it is easy to do if you let yourself think sloppily."
Dan pounced on the point eagerly. "No, indeed, or it's all reforms would be only on the secondary plane, instead of which any reform worthy the name is a pure impulse of creation. I don't believe any deed, public or private, of the finest calibre can come under the head of the secondary type."
"Perhaps not," said Boase, "but it's all the more important a distinction. Both the foolish and the criminal deed are less blameworthy if they are the result of some violent reaction, even if the fine deed is the less unalloyed."
Thinking it over that night with his accustomed honesty, Ishmael came to the conclusion that it was the law of cause and effect, and not the law of reactions, which prompted his new stirrings, and he was as nearly right as any man may be about his own motive power.
The school board was only a beginning, and, though Ishmael never yielded to Dan's persuasiveness to the extent of standing for Parliament, he took an increasing share in local administration. Reform was in the air; it was the great time of reforms, when men burned over what would now seem commonplaces, so used are we become to the improvements these men made.
When Gladstone dissolved Parliament in '74 and made his appeal to the country to reinstate the Liberals, Ishmael boldly made up his mind as to his own convictions and supported the Liberal candidate. But England was sick of the Liberals, in spite of the reforms of the late Government. The dread of Home Rule, the defeat of the Ministry over the unpopular Irish Universities Bill, and the ill-feeling aroused by the payment of the fine to the United States for the depredations of theAlabama—which was to have marked the beginning of a new era when all troubles would be settled by arbitration—these things had all, though none had loomed as large in the popular imagination as the great Tichborne case, contributed to the weariness felt where Mr. Gladstone was concerned. Ishmael, unswayed by the childish temper of the nation, based his convictions chiefly upon the condition of the lower classes, which he had too good cause to know was entirely unsatisfactory. Not all the old English squiredom of Mr. Disraeli—surely the most incongruous figure of a squire that ever gave prizes to a cap-touching tenantry—could persuade Ishmael that the labourer might live and rear a family in decency on ten shillings a week. The labourer had just sprung into prominence in the eyes of the world, but Ishmael had known him intimately for years. The Ballot Act having been passed in '72, this election held a charm, a secret excitement, new in political history; but in West Penwith the people were so anxious to impress Ishmael with the fact that they had voted the way he wished, or if it were the Parson whose favour they coveted, to tell that gentleman that the Conservative candidate had had the benefit of their votes, that much of the objective of voting by ballot was lost. Except, as Ishmael observed, that they were all quite likely to be lying anyway….
As all the world knows, Gladstone's party failed to get in, largely owing to the influence of the publicans and brewers, who had been alarmed at his attempts to regulate the liquor traffic, and Mr. Disraeli came into power; the pendulum had swung once more. Daniel Flynn had paid a flying visit to the West and made a few impassioned speeches in favour of the Liberal candidate, and Ishmael had driven him about the country. If Blanche Grey could have looked ahead she might have seen fit to stand by her bargain after all. That Vassie and her Irish firebrand should sit at dinner with Lord Luxullyan, that Ishmael should be called upon to receive with the other county potentates a Royal princeling on a tour in the West—who could have foretold these things? Certainly not Ishmael himself; and though the Parson had had limitless ambitions for him, he had never thought of them in actual terms.
Neither was Boase altogether happy about the path in life of his spiritual son, although that path seemed to lead, in its unobtrusive manner, upward. It was an age when materialism was to the fore, when the old faiths had not yet seen their way to harmonise with the undeniable facts of science, when morality itself was of a rather priggish and material order. And Ishmael would in not so many years now be reaching the most material time of life—middle age. At present he was very much under the sway of two entirely different people—Daniel Flynn and little Nicky.
When Nicky reached the age of eight years he was entrancing, very much of a personage, and to Ishmael a delightful enigma. Nicky was so vivid, so full of passing enthusiasm, so confident of himself, with none of the diffidence that had burdened Ishmael's own youth. He was not a pretty boy, but a splendidly healthy-looking one, with fair hair, not curly, but rough, that defied all the blandishments of Macassar oil, and long limbs, rather supple than sturdy, for ever growing out of his clothes. He had the pretty coaxing ways of a young animal—Phoebe's ways, with a bolder dash in them; and his brown eyes looked at one so frankly that it was a long time before Ishmael could bring himself to understand that this son of his was apparently without any feeling for the truth. It was not so much that he lied as that he seemed incapable of discriminating between the truth and a lie; whatever seemed the most pleasant thing to say at the moment Nicky said, and hoped for the best. It was a problem, but Boase was less worried by it than the young father.
"Children often seem to have a natural affinity for the false instead of the true," he said, "and they grow out of it when they begin to see more plainly. The great thing is not to frighten him so that he doesn't dare admit it when he's lied."
Ishmael accepted the Parson's advice thankfully; besides having a distaste for the idea of corporal punishment, he could hardly have borne to hurt the eager, bright creature who always hung about him so confidingly when in the mood, but who had no compunction in not going near him for days, except to say good-morning and good-night, when in one of his elusive fits.
Vassie, who had no children of her own, adored her little nephew, and was very proud of him, so one way and another it was not remarkable that Nicky was in a fair way to be spoilt. Already he was too much aware of his own charm, of the fact that to these kind but rather stupid people, whom it was so easy to deceive, he was wonderful. He seemed to be a clean-natured boy, but what he did and did not know it would have been hard to say, as, added to a certain secretiveness which in different ways both Phoebe and Ishmael possessed, there was in him a strain of elusiveness; you could not coerce him to a definiteness he did not wish any more than you could catch a butterfly by stabbing at it in air with a needle.
Ishmael would sometimes observe him quietly when the boy was unaware of scrutiny, and always the mere sight of the round close-cropped head, the delicious idle busyness of childhood, the air at once of import and carelessness it holds, disarmed and captured him. It seemed to him to be his own younger self he was watching, and the pathos of unconscious youth, slipping, slipping, imperceptibly but swiftly, struck at his heart. How little while ago it seemed since he had been like Nicky, intent on profound plans, busy in a small but vivid sphere which focussed in self, which swayed and expanded and grew incredibly bright or dark beyond hope at such slight happenings! Looking back on his own childhood, drawing on it for greater comprehension of his Nicky, he never could connect it up with his present self, it always seemed to him a different Ishmael that he saw, who had nothing to do with the one he knew nowadays. He saw his own figure, small and alive, as he might have looked at some quite other person into whose nature he had been gifted with the power to see clearly, not as himself younger, less developed. In the same way he regarded his early manhood, when he looked back upon the ardent boy who had loved Blanche and staked all of intensity that apparently he was capable of on that one personality. Phoebe too….
With memory of her he felt more alien still, unless he were looking at Nicky; then he would have a queer sensation that he was seeing some embodiment of what she had stood for to the passionate Ishmael who had married her. Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like if she had not died…. She would have lost her charm perhaps, become coarser—or would that peculiar dewy softness of hers have survived the encroachments of the years? Further apart they would inevitably have grown; less and less of sympathy between them would have been inevitable. So much his honesty had to admit. Passion, which he flattered himself he had so mastered, almost as though it had been shocked out of him on that terrible night of waiting for its fruit to come and rend the mother's life away from her—would passion have lived? He knew that as anything individual between her and him it could not have, so that he would always have been meaning to deny its claims, and would always have been falling into what would have become a mere custom of the flesh impossible to break, only yielding, after years of it, to boredom.
From that he had been saved, and he gave thanks without pretence, for with the freedom of his body was enwrapped the freedom of his soul. Yet he was still a young man when Nicky was nearing "double figures"—only in the early thirties. To him the years that had passed since Nicky's birth were so different in quality from all that had gone before that it was small wonder they seemed to him another life and he himself another person. Nicky had been the dominating human factor; the public life of the times, as it affected his own corner in particular, the chief interest which had kept him hard at work, too busy for the dreams of his unsatisfied youth. He had altered, hardened, sharpened, become more of a man of the world, thought himself contented, and in action and practical affairs drowned mental speculation and emotion.
This was the Ishmael of the late 'seventies, a being altered indeed, but not more so than the England of that period was from the England of the 'fifties and 'sixties. That she had grown, improved, set her house in better order, it would have been futile to deny—the improvements were of the visible kind, patent to all men. That Mr. Disraeli's new policy of Imperialism was to be a great and splendid thing there were few men among the Liberals wise enough to foresee, and Ishmael was not yet amongst them. That he himself had grown, developed, become a useful member of society, no one who knew him would have denied, but whether his growth had been altogether towards the light was another question. The old Parson was a wise and a patient man who had gone too far along life's road to take any stage in it as necessarily final, and he watched and bided the time perhaps more prayerfully, certainly more silently, than of yore. Ishmael never failed in consideration, in affection, but there had grown a barrier that was not entirely made of a difference in politics. He knew it even if Ishmael, the child of his heart, seemed not to care enough one way or the other to be aware of it.
One day, a sunlit blowy day of spring, when the cloud-shadows drew swiftly over the dappled hills and the young corn was showing its first fine flames of green, Ishmael received a letter. Long after it had come he sat with it in his hand, reading and re-reading it. A tinge of excitement, a heady something he had long not felt, because it was purely personal, went through and through him as he read. The letter was from Killigrew, from whom he had heard nothing for several years, and it held news to awake all the old memories in a flood. The letter began by asking for news of Ishmael, and went on with a brief dismissal of the writer's own life during the past years. It had been the "usual thing"—no small measure of success, friendships, women, play and work. What mattered was that Killigrew had suddenly taken it into his head he must come down again to Cloom. He was coming and at once. He gave a few characteristic reasons.
"I have lost something and till yesterday I couldn't for the life of me tell what," wrote Killigrew. "It's been a good time, and I've enjoyed most of it, but suddenly it occurred to me that really I wasn't enjoying it as much as I thought I was, as much as I used to. I lay on the lawn of this confounded suburban villa whence I'm writing to you now—I'm putting in a few days at my mother's—and I was doing nothing particular but think over a lot of old times. And there came into my mind without any warning—flashed into it rather—a saying of my old master's in Paris. He was a wise old bird, the wisest I ever knew—somehow reminds me of your old Padre, though you couldn't meet two men more different. And what I remembered was this. 'The test of any picture, or indeed of any of the arts, is whether or not it evokes ecstasy.' I don't know whether it's the test of the arts, but I know it's the test of life. And that is what I've lost. Ecstasy! One still feels it now and again, of course, but how more and more rarely! Well, I lay on the lawn, with this light flooding in on me, and suddenly I opened my eyes and what do you think I saw? There was a flock of starlings in the sky, and I opened my eyes full on 'em, so that I got 'em against the west, which was full of sunset. They were flying in a dense mass between me and the glow. I could see their beating wings in serried ranks of black V-shapes. And, quite suddenly, at some bird-command communicated—heaven knows how—the whole flock of them heeled over, presenting nothing but the narrow edge of their wings, hair-fine, all but invisible. In that one flashing moment the whole solid crowd of birds seemed to vanish, as though swallowed up by a shutter of sky. I'd never seen it before, and I might have gone through life without the luck to see it. I can tell you, it made me tingle. I could have shouted aloud, but the sound of my own voice would have spoilt it so. I got ecstasy all right that time, and I realised with a pang of gratefulness that it's the impersonal things that produce ecstasy. In personal contact you may get delirium, but that's not the same thing. This, says I, is the sort of thing I'm after. And so of course I thought of you and that wonderful place of yours and that nice solid impersonality that always wrapped you round and made you so restful. So I'm coming down. I won't stay with you; find me digs somewhere—I'm better on my own."
Ishmael read so far, where the letter ended abruptly; there was, however, a postscript:—"P.S.—Do you remember Judith Parminter? She wants a holiday and is coming down with a friend. If Mrs. Penticost is still in the land of the living you might fix up for them there."
Ishmael followed out all Killigrew's instructions, but that night he took the letter over to Boase. It was as though the atmosphere of the old days re-established by its arrival, the habit of the old days, claimed him sub-consciously. The Parson read it, but did not comment beyond the obvious remark that it would all be very pleasant. After Ishmael had gone he sat and thought for a long while. What struck him as noteworthy was that Killigrew should have been satiated with the personal, which he had cultivated so assiduously, at the moment when, or so it seemed to him, Ishmael, after a life spent for so long in the impersonal, might be expected to react in exactly the opposite direction. Ishmael, as he walked home, was only aware that the letter had stirred him beyond the mere pleasurable expectation of once again seeing his friend. That one word "ecstasy" had stung him to something that had long been dormant—the desire to feel life again as something wonderful, that did not only content but could intoxicate as well. He was unaware of this revulsion, and was only vaguely surprised that a queer discontent should mingle with his pleasure.
When the train came slowly into the station and clanked to rest with a long, tired sigh of steam, Ishmael's first search was for Killigrew's red beard and pale face. While his gaze roved up and down the line of carriages a couple of women, one of whom seemed to know him, swam into his range of vision and distracted his attention.
It was nearly ten years since he had seen Judith Parminter, and he stared for a moment in bewilderment. Fashion had undergone in those years one of its rare basic changes. Instead of the swelling curves which had been wont to encompass women, so that they seemed to float upon proud waves, skirts had become a species of swaddling clothes caught back below the knees, whence a series of frills clung tightly about the feet. Rows of flutings, tuckings and what-not, confounded simplicity of line, but all the drapery was pulled in a backwards direction and puffed to a sudden bulkiness behind, so that women looked as though they were walking in the face of a perpetual wind. On their heads they were wont to perch delicious little hats, poked forward, in contradistinction to the trend of the draperies, slanting nosewards and tilted up in the rear by plaited chignons.
Of the two women advancing towards Ishmael, the tall dark one, by far the elder, wore under a black silk jacket a gown of soft red, the terra-cotta then beginning to be in vogue amidst the artistic elect, but it was smartly cut, whereas the peacock blue garment of her companion showed a depressing sloppiness, which was not helped out by the drooping rows of many-coloured beads which were slung round her throat or the peacock feathers that trailed from her shovel hat of gauged silk. This girl, Ishmael saw vaguely, had a pale chubby face like a child, but the long, dark countenance of the other, lit by a smile of recognition, was suddenly familiar to him. Only—Judy had become a woman, a thin, rather sad-looking woman, with a melancholy that was not the old effect of tragedy for which her monkey-look and the bistre shadows beneath her eyes had been responsible without any deeper cause. The monkey-look was there still, but Judy was almost beautiful in spite, or perhaps more truly because, of it. Ishmael felt her lean, strong hand, ungloved, come into his.
"I knew it was you!" exclaimed Judy in the husky voice he remembered."You've changed, but only along the lines one would have expected. Mr.Killigrew can't come—not for a day or two. He told me to tell you he'dtry to get down by the end of the week. May I introduce you to MissGeorgie Barlow?"
Another hand was thrust into his, with a suddengauchemovement that was not without a girlish charm. Ishmael found himself looking at the pale chubby face, and the only thing he noticed in it was the mouth. Georgie Barlow stayed in his mind as "the girl with the mouth," as she frequently did to those who met her even once. She had a wonderful mouth, and was wont to declare it to be her only feature. It was not very red, but very tenderly curved, the lips short, flat in modelling and almost as wide at the ends as the centre, which just saved them from being a cupid's bow. The corners were deeply indented, tucked in like those of a child. Not only the lips but the planes of the chin and cheeks immediately around them were good, very tender in colour and curves, with the faint blur of fine golden down to soften them still more.
Such was Georgie Barlow—a short, rounded little creature, with a bare neck that was not long but delicate, and surrounded by three "creases of Venus" like that of a baby. Her rather small but frank blue eyes held a boyish look that was intensified by the fact that her hair was cut short after the new fashion in a certain set and brushed almost to her fair eyebrows in a straight fringe in front, while on the nape of her neck it curved in little drake's tails of soft brown. The blue beads riding up her neck ruffled the tails like tiny feathers.
Both she in her "artistic" way and Judy in her quiet smartness were very different from the women Ishmael had been seeing of late years—the dowdy county ladies or Vassie in her splendid flamboyance. He felt oddly shy with them; the ageing of Judy, so marked and somehow so unexpected—she had seemed such a child only ten years ago—made him feel she was as much of a stranger as her little companion, and there was also about her some new quality he could not but feel, a something aloof, a little hard, for all her gentleness of manner. He had never envisaged her as growing into this self-possessed woman, whose most noticeable quality, had it not been for her aloofness, would have been a certain worldliness. He felt his dreams of the old time rudely upset. Killigrew's erratic defection, the altered feeling of Judy, which made him uncertain even whether to call her by her Christian name as of old or not, the presence of this oddly-attired girl with the mouth, were all so different from what he had been expecting. He told himself that when Killigrew did arrive he also would probably be a different creature from of old, not knowing that exactly what made Killigrew such a wearing person to keep up with was that he never changed, only became more himself.
Judith was not very illuminating on the subject when he questioned her, merely answering him with an affirmative when he asked her whether she had seen a good deal of Killigrew since the old days, and he was forced to keep company with his curiosity till Killigrew should appear out of the blue a few days hence.
Meanwhile, he drove the two ladies to Mrs. Penticost's, Judy saying that as they had luggage she thought it would be simpler to go straight there instead of stopping for supper at the Manor. The next day, however, both were to meet Boase there for tea.
Meanwhile Ishmael had to relinquish them to the care of Mrs. Penticost and go back to the Manor, feeling discontented and unable to settle to anything, while at the same time he was not at all sure he was glad that Killigrew had ever taken it into his head to come down and send his harem, as Ishmael annoyedly termed it to himself, before him. Not so Mrs. Penticost. She still called Judith her lamb, and after folding her to her portly breast was not likely to feel any tremors when she held her off to gaze at her.
"You'm gone through somethen' since I saw 'ee, my dear," she announced candidly. "There's lines under your pretty eyes that dedn' belong to be there. I shouldn' wonder if it wasn't the men as had putt en there. Menfolk are like children—they'm a pack of worry, but the women can't get along happy wethout en."
"Well, at least I haven't any children, Mother Penticost," said Judy, laughing.
"Aren't married, are you, my dear? Mr. Ruan ded say 'Miss Parminter' toI when he came about the rooms."
"No, I'm not married."
"And why's that?" demanded the direct Mrs. Penticost. "Not because they haven't asked 'ee, I'll lay. Couldn't 'ee fancy none of en, my dear sawl?"
"Not enough for that, apparently."
"I used to think you and that Killigrew weth his red head and his free tongue would make a match of it, but I suppose it was not to be…. Never mind, my dear. We never goes to church weth the first one as takes our fancy."
"Oh, I shall never marry!" declared Judith lightly. "By the way, I hearMr. Ruan has a beautiful boy, Mrs. Penticost."
"Aw, dear sawl, so he have. Best thing that flighty little faggot to the mill ever ded was to make that babe. Children's a deal of trouble, though, so they are. Some has boys and wants maids, and some has only maids and provokes the Lard to send en boys, as though there weren't enough men in the world. No pleasing some folks."
"They're a trouble that's well worth while, anyway. Children, I mean," said Judith.
"Ah! so some of us says as hasn't got en. We can all stand any joys that come along, but we'd all like to have the choosen' of our troubles," replied Mrs. Penticost non-committally.
"I certainly think children must be the nicest troubles one can choose," remarked Judith.
"There's many a poor maid that's thought otherwise," responded Mrs.Penticost.
"Oh, well, I didn't mean that way … that's a trouble for the children too when they grow up … worse than for the mother. That's why it's wicked to have them like that. I meant if one were married."
"It's not all honey then, my dear. Look at Jenny Trewen down to the church-town. She'm never had naught but boys, and she sticks every virtue on that maid she always wanted and that never came. 'Twould have been just the same if it had been the other way on, if you see what I do mane. 'Tes the babes as never are born that lie nearest to a mother's heart…."
"What a terrible theory!" broke in Georgie, swinging her legs as she sat perched upon the corner of the table. "And according to the same theory, are the men one never meets the nicest, and the picture one never paints the finest, and the kiss that never comes off the sweetest?"
Mrs. Penticost turned and surveyed her with a kindly tolerance for her impertinent youth.
"You'm spaken' truer than you do knaw," she told her. "And truer than you'll knaw for many a day to come if you'm one of the lucky ones. Now I suppose you'll be like you always were, Miss Judy, washing the life out of 'ee weth hot water? The bath's gone up overstairs."
Judy laughingly got to her feet and went up to her room. She was very tired; though she was tenacious of constitution, the first elasticity of youth was gone from her, and she was glad of the warm water, the soft bed, the light meal of eggs and cocoa that Mrs. Penticost brought her when she was between the sheets. Ishmael was not the only one who felt a deadening of the spirit that night, and even on awakening the following morning. Judith had carried that about with her in her consciousness for enough years now to recognise the old weight upon her thoughts on awakening. But Georgie, triumphant, healthy, full of excitement at the new world that lay beyond the low wall of Paradise Cottage, ran into Judith's room, the "best" bedroom, the one Blanche Grey had had when the childish Judy had been wont to come in as Georgie came in to the woman Judy now. The turn of the wheel struck upon Miss Parminter's mind as she lay and watched the slim, sturdy young thing perched upon the end of the bed, her boyish head bare and a ray of morning sun tingeing its soft brown to a brighter hue and showing up the clearness of her pale matt skin.
"I don't think I much like your hero of romance," grumbled Georgie. "He took precious little notice of either of us, and he looks so surly."
"He's not my hero," objected Judy, "he's Joe's; and I'm sure he isn't really surly. I think he was disappointed at not seeing Joe."
"Well, it was very ungallant of him when we turned up all right. I have a good mind to flirt outrageously with him to punish him. And when he's deeply in love with me I shall say 'No, thank you, sir! I've no use for surly squires, and I've a young man of my own at home.'"
"Georgie, you're to do nothing of the sort. You know I told you all about him to make you careful. He was abominably treated by that cat Blanche, and I won't have it happen again."
"Well, I don't suppose I shall have a chance. I don't suppose he'll look at me. I don't think country bumpkins are educated up to my peculiar style of beauty." And Georgie stroked her ridiculous little nose with an affectation of content.
"Thank heaven you aren't a beauty, or there'd be no holding you at all!"
"That's just where you mistake. If I were really pretty, instead of having apetit minois chiffonéI should be able to sit placidly and leave it all to my profile. As it is I have to exert myself to charm, and everyone knows charm is far more fatal to man than mere looks. I am rather fascinating, aren't I, in spite of my pudding face? What was Blanche like, Judy? Didn't you see her the other day in town?"
"Yes, I met her at a Private View," admitted Judy. "She had sort of gone to pieces, if you know what I mean. I don't suppose it was a sudden process really, but it came on me suddenly."
"What did she look like?"
"As large as life and twice as unnatural. She had lost her 'eye' for making up, as they say everyone does, and the rouge stood out on the white powder so that you could see it a mile off. She gushed at me, and I felt she wasn't meaning a single word she said. She had her husband with her and introduced him. She even patronised me for not having one. I didn't say I'd sooner not than have one like hers, because she wouldn't have believed me, and it would have been rude. But he was a little wisp of a man—a seedy little clerk. She knew she couldn't carry off the idea of having made a good match from a worldly point of view, so she murmured something to me about how beautiful true love was when it was the 'real thing,' and how she had never known what the meaning of life was till she met 'Teddie.' Do stop me; I'm being an awful cat! But that woman aroused all the cat in me; she's such an awful liar, and a liar is the worst of sinners, because he—or perhaps more generally she—is so absolutely disintegrating to the whole social fabric."
"I suppose she must have been very fascinating once upon a time."
"She was, though, oddly enough, men either hated her or were deeply in love with her, and as time went on the sort that were in love with her grew more and more fearful. But it was young girls she attracted most. I used to think her the most wonderful thing in the world, and I used to be enraged if I introduced her to anyone and they hated her at sight. If one's eye for making up gets out as one grows older, one's eye for life gets a more and more deadly clearness—unless you're like Blanche, when I suppose you grow more and more incapable of seeing the truth."
"You think an awful lot about truth, don't you, Judy?"
"Yes, I do, though I suppose if you knew all about me you'd think it very inconsistent. Of course I don't mean just 'telling the truth,' as children say, but the actual worship of truth in our relations with each other and ourselves. But it's not a counsel of worldly wisdom, so don't pay any attention to me."
"But I want to. I admire you ever so," said Georgie girlishly. "I know that I'm an awful little beast in all sorts of ways, but I would love to be like you if I could."
"Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Judy.
"Well, as much as would suit my style," laughed Georgie. "But tell me, Judy, what sort of thing d'you call being badly untruthful—the sort that matters? I'll tell you the sort of thing I do, and I can't help myself. I hate myself, but I can't stop. You know just before I got engaged to Val?"
"Yes?"
"Well, we were at that house on the river, and Val came down for the day, and mother knew we were going to get engaged, I suppose; anyway, she didn't make the usual fuss about being alone, and we went out in the punt and took lunch to a backwater. I didn't even really think he cared for me that kind of way; I was only wondering. I'd been washing my hair when he arrived, and it wasn't quite dry. This was before I cut it off, you know. And so—I thought I'd take it down and finish drying it…."
"Go on. I've done that myself," murmured Judith dryly.
"Well, I was sitting a little in front of him on the bank and a little bit of my hair blew in his face. I manoeuvred so that it should. Beast that I am! And later, when I was doing it up again, he handed me the pins and said, 'Ripping stuff it is, Georgie!' It was the first day he called me Georgie, and you can't think how often he did it. Why do men always call hair 'stuff,' I wonder? Well—oh, where was I? Oh, I know. And then he added, 'It was blowing across my face just now.' And I said, 'Oh, was it? I hope it didn't tickle. Why on earth didn't you tell me?' And he said, 'I loved it' in a funny sort of fat voice. As though I hadn't known, and hadn't planned for just that…. I think that's the sort of thing that makes me hate myself, and yet I can't help it."
Judith lay silent. She was too used to playing every move in her power with full knowledge of the effect to blame this child for tampering with forces which she was blandly innocent of understanding.
"I don't think that 'mattered,' as you call it," she said at length. "After all, you're honest with yourself, that's the chief thing. I admit if you go on being dishonest with others in time it has a deadly tendency to react on yourself and blur your vision, as it did with Blanche, but then she was crooked anyway. I shouldn't worry about myself if I were you, Georgie!"
"Well, it deceived Val, I suppose," remarked Georgie.
"Not about anything vital. He loved you already, and you were to find you loved him. Besides … with men … it's not quite the same thing…."
Georgie stared at her in round-eyed silence for a moment, struck by a weary something that was no more old than young, that was eternal, in Judith's voice. Suddenly the elder girl seemed so much woman as she lay there—the everlasting feminine, the secret store of the knowledge of the ages…. Georgie, for all she was newly engaged, felt somehow like a little girl. Judith's long half-closed eyes met hers, but with no frank giving in their depths at the moment. She was withdrawn and Georgie felt it.
"Well, I must get up," said Judith suddenly. "Clear out and see if you can hurry Mrs. Penticost over breakfast."
Georgie went, and Judith slipped out of bed, and going to the window, examined her face in the clear morning light, lifting her hand-glass at many angles.
After her bath she took up the glass again and began with infinite care to rub in first rouge and then powder. Gradually she became a less haggard-looking creature and the years seemed to fall away. When she had done she examined herself anxiously. The dread that her eye would get "out," as Blanche's had, was upon her.
Relieved by the scrutiny, she stepped into a soft rose cashmere frock and buttoned up the long, close-fitting bodice, settled the little ruffle at the throat, and adjusted with deft fingers the perky folds of the bustle. "Making-up makes one look so much better that it makes one feel better," she reflected. She took a final look at herself in the dimpled glass that gave back her figure in a series of waves and angles, and suddenly she gave a little half-rueful laugh. She was comparing herself with the slangy fresh girl downstairs, that product of the new decade, so different from the generation born only ten years before her. Judith had spoken to this wholesome, adorablygaucheyoung creature of truth, while, to maintain the thing that stood to her for light and food and truth itself, she had, amongst other shifts, to resort even to this daily paltering with the verities upon her face.
Killigrew arrived a couple of days later, and Ishmael drove Georgie over to meet him. Judith had refused to go and Georgie liked the idea of a drive. Ishmael was still shy in Georgie's presence, simply because he had never met anyone in the least like her. He was only a matter of some thirteen or fourteen years her senior, but that made all the difference at that period. Ishmael had been born in the midst of the dark, benighted 'forties; Georgie at the beginning of the 'sixties. He had grown up before any of the reforms which made modern England; she had first become intelligently aware of the world at a time when nothing else was in the air, when even woman was beginning to feel her wings and be wishful to test them. She was alarmingly modern, the emancipated young thing who began to blossom forth in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties; she studied painting at an art school, and had announced her intention to her alarmed but admiring parents of "living her own life." There was a horrid rumour that she had once been dared to smoke and had done so. Her aggressively "arty" dress was only the temporary expression of her fluid and receptive mind feeling and trying for itself. Her frankness was disconcerting at first, yet somehow very delightful too…. It made him feel young also; it was as though she were perpetually telling him things that took him into a conspiracy with her.
Judy had made him feel old; all the time he was aware of things in her life of which he was ignorant, and though he had never been intimate enough with her to mind this, yet it did not tend towards intimacy now. There was always the knowledge of Blanche and Phoebe between him and any friendliness with Judith, knowledge of so much he had resolutely put behind him. But with this careless girl, so untouched and confident, it was as though it were possible to be the self he felt that he now was without any drag from that old Ishmael. He knew vaguely that she was engaged, and this seemed to make intercourse lighter and more jolly. Every relationship is new, because to no two people is anyone quite the same, but there was in the first tentative approaches of his acquaintance with Georgie Barlow a novelty that struck him pleasantly. He was shy of her only because he was still so ignorant, but he felt no barriers, rather an overlapping of something they both had in common, which is the surest herald sometimes of friendship, sometimes of other things.
Killigrew arrived with a copy of "Richard Feverel" under one arm and the first edition of Fitzgerald's "Omar Khayyam" under the other. He exuded life and enjoyment, and Ishmael wondered what indigestion, mental or physical could have had him in its grip when he felt that the power of ecstasy was slipping. Certainly he seemed to bubble with it now, though it remained to be seen whether what chiefly evoked it were the impersonal things of life or not. It was impossible to feel any shyness with him, and even Ishmael soon was talking and feeling curiously unscathed when Killigrew unabashedly referred to old times, painful and otherwise. "It is only Joe …" Ishmael reflected, which was the fatal leniency that had pursued Killigrew through life.
Georgie left the two men to spend the evening together and went back to Paradise Cottage, but before she fell asleep that night she heard a low murmur of voices outside. She jumped out of bed and ran to the window. It was a night of bright moonlight, and under the shadow of the tamarisk hedge she could see Killigrew's darker figure, with its unmistakably raking poise. Another shadow had just parted from it and was coming to the door—the figure of Judith. She had been out when Georgie entered—out for a walk, Mrs. Penticost had said. Georgie skipped back to bed full of excitement. She had guessed before that Judy cared about Killigrew, and now, judging by that parting, they were engaged and everything was to be all right. How thrilling!… She smiled and dimpled as she met Judy's eye next morning, inviting the announcement.
The days went on and Judy did not make it. Only as the lovely spring days, pale with windy sunlight or soft with fuming mists, slipped by, Judith blossomed as the rose. But it was a fierce blossoming, a fiery happiness, that Georgie could not understand. It was not thus that the nice jolly Val had made her feel. She wondered and she felt a little hurt that Judy should not confide in her, but as the days went on her own affairs began to engross her, and she shrugged her sturdy self-reliant shoulders and told herself that Judy must after all manage her own affairs.
It was a wonderful spring, the sweetest time of the year because the period of promise and not of fulfilment. This spring, in its wine-pale clarity, its swift shadows, its dewy brightness of flame-green leaf, seemed to Ishmael to hold the quality of youth as none had done for years. He and Nicky and Joe Killigrew and the two girls from Paradise Cottage spent whole days together, for Joe and Judith, though obviously very intimate, never seemed to wish for solitude. Together they fronted the winds and the quick showers and the bright rays, saw the rainbow lift over the dark sea, watched its passionate colour die and the sunbright foam fade to pearly dimness or break over water turned to vivid blue. They heard the first bird-notes begin to glorify the evenings and saw each day the hedges grow richer with pink campion, with pale drifts of primroses and the blue clusters of the dog-violets. The blackthorn began to show a breaking of pale blossom upon its branches and the hawthorn to vie with it.
Once upon the cliff, Ishmael, walking with Georgie, came on a patch of the most exquisite of spring flowers, the vernal squill. Georgie clapped her hands for joy at sight of the delicate blue blossoms, but Ishmael, lying beside them, buried his face in their rain-washed petals and drew a deep breath of that scent which is like the memory of may-blossom.
As he breathed in the fragrance it seemed to him for one flashing second as though the years fell away, that he was again young in mind as he still felt in body; and for a flash, as on that long-ago evening in Cloom fields when they had cried the Neck and in the parlour that first day at St. Renny, time stood still and everything around the one point where consciousness was poised ceased to be. Youth, spring, and ecstasy itself were in that breath. Ecstasy, the unphilosophic stone which alone transmutes to the semblance of gold … which alone does not ask what will come next, what has led so far, or where lies actual worth; ecstasy which is sufficient in itself…. Even thus had he felt when he had known that Nicky was to come to him, only then the flood-tide of emotion had been set outwards, while this seemed to beat back and intensify the sense of self.
It was Nicky who broke through this moment now, clamouring in his turn to be allowed access to the patch of blue that so excited the grown-ups, and who then proceeded to rub his brown fists in it and tear the delicate little flowers up before anyone could stop him. Indeed, after the first moment Ishmael did not try. He sat watching until Nicky, with all the uncontrolled excitement of highly-strung children who so often lose their heads and do things for which they suffer agonies in the watches of the night for long afterwards, was shouting and tearing at the flowers and throwing them over Georgie and drawing attention to himself by every extravagance his child's brain could light upon.
"Look at me, Georgie; look at me!" he cried, pulling a bunch of the flowers through his buttonhole and jumping up on a boulder that thrust itself through the turfy cliffside; "I'm the King of the Castle, I'm the King of the Castle!…" Georgie threw a few bits of grass at him and then turned to go on with an argument she had been having with Ishmael when the sight of the vernal squills had distracted them. Nicky would not leave them alone; determined not to be ignored, he went on pelting her and kept up his monotonous chant: "I'm the King of the Castle, I'm the King of the Castle…."
"Don't do that," said Ishmael sharply. "Do you hear me, Nicky? Leave off!" But Nicky went on, and, finding no notice was being taken of him, he flung a frond of bracken, then, losing his temper, a clod of earth and turf he dug up from the ground. It hit Georgie on the cheek and scattered against her; a tiny fragment of stone in it cut her skin slightly, so that a thin thread of blood sprang out. Nicky felt suddenly very frightened. He kept up his song, but his note had altered, and as Ishmael got to his feet his voice died away.
"Don't be angry with him," said Georgie quickly. "He didn't do it on purpose."
She felt the embarrassment one is apt to feel at a display of authority over some third person. She looked at Ishmael as though it were she he was angry with, and felt a ridiculous kinship with Nicky. The little boy stood away from them both, defiant, scowling from below his fair brows, his small chest heaving, his nervous eyes sidelong. He was frightened, therefore all the more likely to make matters worse by rudeness. Ishmael was, unreasonably, more annoyed than he had ever been with Nicky, who had often been far more disobedient and in more of a temper. Ishmael picked him up and held him firmly for all his wriggling. Nicky yelled and screamed; his small face was scarlet with fear and passion; he drummed with his heels against his father's legs and hit out with his pathetically useless fists. Ishmael swung him under his arm.
"Please—" began Georgie.
"I am going to take him home," said Ishmael. "You had better not come. You'll find the others at the foot of the cliff, you know." He went on up over the brow of the cliff, carrying the screaming, struggling Nicky with the terrible ease of a grown-up coping with a child. Georgie remained sitting where she was for a few moments till the exhausted screams of Nicky died in the distance.
Ishmael's annoyance had not abated when they reached Cloom, though by now his arm had tired somewhat, and Nicky, sobbing angrily, walked beside him, firmly led by the hand. Ishmael took him up to the little room over the porch which was Nicky's own and there administered a whipping for the first time. Nicky was too exhausted to scream by then, but his anger grew deeper. He was aware that his father had often passed over worse actions, and that it was not so much his, Nicky's, disobedience in the matter of throwing things at Georgie which was the trouble as some mood of his father's which he had come up against. He resented the knowledge and burned with his resentment. When Ishmael, suddenly sorry, stayed his by no means heavy hand and stood the child between his knees, Nicky would not face his look, but stood with tightly shut eyes and set mouth. Ishmael thought it was shame at his punishment which sealed Nicky's eyes; he knew what agonies it would have occasioned him at that age, and he felt sorrier still. But Nicky never felt shame; he could extract a compensating excitement from every untoward event, and at the present moment he was making a luxury of his rage.
Ishmael tried to get some expression of contrition from the child, but vainly, and at length he left him, safely shut in. He was very puzzled as he went and smoked in the garden below. He would not go out on to the cliff again lest Nicky should be up to any dangerous pranks in his room or have another screaming fit. For the first time it was brought home to him how terribly children differ from the children that their parents were…. Nothing he remembered, be it never so vivid, about himself, helped him to follow Nicky. He would never have drawn attention to himself as Nicky constantly did; he would not have dared—his self-conscious diffidence would not have let him. He had had fits of losing his head, but more quietly, often in his imagination alone. He did not see that the self-consciousness of childhood was at the bottom of both his youthful reserve and Nicky's ebullitions. That his own pride had been his dominating factor, forbidding him to enter into contests where he was bound to be worsted, and that for Nicky pride did not exist in comparison with the luxury of spreading himself and his feelings over the widest possible area with the greatest possible noise, made the difference between them so marked that Ishmael could see nothing else. Nicky had inherited from older sources, he reflected, a flamboyance such as Vassie and Archelaus and, in his underhand way, even Tom possessed, but that had missed himself.
Killigrew and the others were coming over to supper, and the Parson also was expected. Ishmael judged that Nicky had had enough excitement for one day, and so, though not as any further punishment, sent him to bed with a supper-tray instead of letting him come down. He recounted the afternoon's happenings at supper and confessed himself hopelessly puzzled.
"I don't understand the workings of his mind," he admitted; "when I took him up his supper he seemed quite different from the half-an-hour earlier when I'd been up. He'd—it's difficult to describe it—but it was as though he'd adjusted the whole incident in his own mind to what he wanted it to be. He greeted me with a sort of forgiving and yet chastened dignity that made me nearly howl with laughter. He sat up there in his bed as though he were upon a throne and expecting me to beg for pardon, or, rather, as though he knew I wouldn't, but he had the happy consciousness that I ought to. It was confoundingly annoying. I asked him whether he wanted to see Miss Barlow to say good-night—you know the passionate devotion he's had for her of late—and all he said was, 'No, thank you; he didn't think he could trust himself to speak to her just yet!' I said, 'Don't be a little idiot,' and he only smiled in a long-suffering manner, and I came away feeling squashed by my own small son."