Secret Bread Part 25

It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for litter for cattle. The time of year had fallen upon rust--brown-rust were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the ma.s.ses of seeded hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts of down, that blew against Blanche's dress as she pa.s.sed, and clung there.

Swish-swish ... came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue. She felt that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder.

There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray labourers, and with less s.p.a.ce about her she felt she would find her task easier. Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread to come. Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff that he had been wont to like to wander in.

They stretched, some dozen or so of them, down the slope, divided up thus for better protection against the wind. The close-set hedges of elder were bare as skeletons, but so thickly entwined as, even so, to form dense screens, only broken at the corners to allow of pa.s.sing from one little garden to the next and the next, both below and to one side.

In his childhood they had belonged to an old man who cultivated them a.s.siduously and sent in the produce to the weekly market at Penzance, and then, in their patchwork brightness as narcissi and wall flowers, violets, or beans and young potatoes, flourished there, they had deserved their name of jewel-gardens, and to himself he had always called them "the hanging gardens of Babylon"--a phrase that had filled him with a sense of joy. Now they had been long neglected, and the bare earth crumbled underfoot; even gra.s.s or weeds seemed afraid to grow there. Dead, quiet, and still, they were become sinister little squares of earth, shrouded by those contorted elders, dry and brown as they.

Blanche paused by a tall hedge and stood with her back against it, her arms outflung on either side and her head up bravely. Ishmael had a moment of looking round blindly as though he were in some trap from which he could not escape, as though the walls of dead elder had grown together and were penning him in. Then he faced her and spoke.

"Blanche!" he said; "won't you tell me what is the matter?"

Blanche said nothing; tears of pity suddenly choked her, and the knowledge of the blow she was about to deal. Ishmael at last brought himself to voice his dread.

"You aren't disappointed in it all--or in me?" he asked in a low voice.

"You're not getting--bored, are you, Blanche? After all, the actress sees the seamiest side of town; you won't mind leaving it? I know I'm offering you a very different life from what you're used to, but"--with a shade of the decisiveness that had always attracted her to him--"it will be much better for you. No late hours, no more of the sandwiches-at-odd-times game. We shall be very happy, just us two, even if we don't know people. People!" he cried scornfully, a wave of pa.s.sion breaking over him as he caught her to him. "What do we want with other people?"

Pressing her almost roughly against him, he bent her head back into the curve of his arm and kissed her fiercely. She lay pa.s.sive, deliberately taking all he gave and thrilling to it. Self-pity surged over her; she had been so happy--not only happy, but so much better! It was very hard, she felt, as she trembled with pleasure under his kisses. She shrank from giving pain, but she shrank still more from lowering herself in his eyes, and the situation needed all her skill. Disengaging herself from his arms, she faced him with what she felt to be a brave little smile.

"Ishmael! My poor boy; Ishmael!" she said.

He was suddenly very grave, but waited silently.

Still, he said nothing, and she took his hand in hers and spoke very gently.

"Ishmael, dear one! listen to me. You must see that it's impossible, that it would never do."

He did see it, her very certainty showed him plainly enough; but still he fought against it, bringing forward every plea, and ending with what was to him the great argument: "But if we love each other?"

"Of course love is very important, Ishmael," said Blanche, choosing her words carefully; "but don't you see how important other things are too?

It's the externals that matter most in this life, Ishmael; see how they matter to you, who have worked so hard to alter them."

"You can be clever about it," said Ishmael, a new look that was almost suspicion glinting in his eyes; "I can't talk round a thing, but I know things. I know I love you and would spend my life trying to make you happy. You say you aren't happy in your own life."

"But how could I be happy without my friends and my own kind of people, Ishmael?" asked Blanche reproachfully. She did not add that, being incapable of loyalty, she had no real friends, but suddenly she saw it as true, and staggered under the flood of self-pity that followed.

Losing Ishmael, she was indeed bereft, not only of him, but of her new self, and with the worst of all pangs--loneliness--striking through her, she laid her arms against the hedge and, hiding her face, burst into a storm of tears. Ishmael stood by her silently; like most men, he was inarticulate at the great moments, and Blanche sobbed on. She who for so many years had made herself believe what she wished, had gagged and blindfolded her own soul till truth showed its face to her in vain, was now stripped of all bandages and having facts pa.s.sed relentlessly before her. She had made Ishmael love her, as she had so many men, by seeming something she was not; she had fallen in love with Ishmael herself, and must keep up the pretence of being the woman he thought her, for for her real self such a man as Ishmael could have no comprehension. She told herself that if they could only have married she would in time have grown to be the woman he thought her, and she railed bitterly at Fate.

For her there only remained the old path, and the knowledge filled her with a leaden weariness. But for Ishmael--what remained for him? Never again would he be able to delight in the world of hopes he had set up with such care. What could she give him to help him face reality? The plighted word, steadfastness, friends.h.i.+p, none of these gifts were Blanche's to bestow, but she could at least send him away his own man again--at the sacrifice of her vanity. A struggle shook her mind, all the well-trained sophistries warring against a new clarity of vision.

There were two courses open to her--she might hoodwink Ishmael, bewilder him with words, show herself as grieving, exquisite, far above him, yet in spirit unchangeably his; or she might show him the truth, let him see her as the world-ridden, egotistical creature of flimsy emotions and tangible ambitions that she was. If she chose the first way, Ishmael would have an unshattered ideal to take away and set up in his lonely heart; but it placed forgetfulness out of the question for a man of his temperament. If she decided on the second course, he would have a time of bitter disillusionment, but could some day love again, perhaps all the sooner for the shock; Blanche knew that nothing sends a man so surely into a woman's arms as a rebuff from another woman. In her heart she saw the finer course, yet the little voices clamoured, told her she would be destroying the ideality of a delicate nature, spoiling something that could never be the same again: on the one side whatever there was of self-abnegation in her love, on the other the habit of a lifetime.

She raised her head, and her glance was arrested idly by a deserted spider's web woven from branch to branch of the elder hedge and wavering gently in the breeze. Some seed husks had been blown into the meshes and clung there lightly, cream-hued against the pearly threads. Blanche found herself picturing the disgust of the departed spider over this innovation on flies. "It is like my life," she thought, "blown husks for bread," and the tears welling in her eyes made the seeds seem to swell and the web run together in a silvery blur. The moment of idle thought had taken the keen edge from her ideas, and, like many another, she tried to compromise.

"I'm afraid you must reconstruct your ideas of me, Ishmael," she said, with an air of candour that struck him as worthy of her even through his pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not.

I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life--friends.h.i.+p, beauty, one's own kin--mean so much to me."

He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited silently.

"Ishmael!" she said desperately; "it's no good, I'm not the sort of woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me, and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks.... Oh, Ishmael, Ishmael, I loved you so!"

Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out to Ishmael--she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap. He was yet to learn that no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.

"There's nothing to blame yourself about," he said. "You've given me the most beautiful things to remember, and it's not your fault you can't give more. When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel I couldn't let you give more even if you would...." Always unfluent of speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression. Ishmael had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world well lost for love--the hackneyed expression came so readily to him.

"She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books don't prepare one for the half-shades. n.o.body can love without a flaw--we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite good or quite bad: nothing is black or white, but just varying tones of grey. They make life d.a.m.ned difficult, the half-shades!"

Giving his shoulders a little shake, he turned to Blanche. "I must go,"

he said gently. "Good-bye, Blanche!"

She held out both her hands, and he took them in his, repeating, "Good-bye, Blanche!"

Then she made her only mistake; she swayed towards him, her face held up to his in a last invitation. Roughly he put her hands away.

"Not that, Blanche ... not that!" said a voice he hardly recognised as his own, and, wheeling, he went heavily through the little dead gardens.

Blanche, sick with disappointment, noted dully that he never turned his head as he pa.s.sed out of the last. A sob rose to her throat, and as she heard the choking sound she made, the swift thought came: "That sounded real! I must be broken-hearted to sob like that...."; and she sobbed again. Then a flash of self-revelation ran over her, and she stood aghast.

"Nothing is real about me, nothing!" she cried despairingly, "not even my sorrow at being so unreal." Drying her eyes, she stared out at the pale gleam of the Atlantic glinting through the elders and began to think. She saw love, such love as she was capable of, had been ruled out of life for her; it became all the more necessary that she should capture other things that made life pleasant. If she let this new phase of sincerity become a habit, she was lost indeed; better to slip into the old self-deceiving Blanche once again. Deliberately she shut off thoughts of Ishmael, and barred them out until such time as she could think of him, without effort, from a point of view that in no way lowered her self-esteem. She had been artificial in her strivings after sincerity; now, for the last time, she was real in her acceptance of unreality. Lightly dabbing her eyelids with a pocket powder-puff, she went back to the cottage.

There she read through the letter again, then consulted a time-table; she could change at Exeter and catch a train that would enable her to reach home that evening. She could make up a story to her stepmother to account for her sudden appearance. Blanche began composing in her mind what she would say to her. She would pretend not to have had the letter; even her gentle, garrulous little stepmother's good opinion was dear to her. She would seal it up again and forward it on herself; it would reach her at home a day after her own arrival. Yes, thought Blanche, everything would dovetail excellently. She went into the kitchen where Mrs. Penticost was ironing and the pleasant smell of warm linen hung upon the air.

"I've decided I must go home, Mrs. Penticost," she said. "That letter was to say my father is very ill, and I was only waiting till I'd seen Mr. Ruan.... I've told him I must go to-morrow. I'm so sorry, but--"

"Ah!" interrupted Mrs. Penticost; "'tes as well--'twould be dull for 'ee alone wi'out Mr. Ruan able to come so much about the place, and I wouldn' have had en here with Miss Judy gone and you alone. You was rare taken up wi' he!"

Blanche's vanity was too insatiable to spare Ishmael; she sighed pathetically.

"Oh, Mrs. Penticost! you make me feel horribly guilty, for I'm afraid it's all over," she said with simple earnestness, "but I couldn't prevent it; and poor Mr. Ruan--"

"Don't 'ee go for to tell I about it!" broke in Mrs. Penticost; "'tes downright ondecent in 'ee!"

Blanche flushed. "Horrid, insufferable woman!" she thought angrily as she went upstairs. "How thankful I shall be to see the last of her!"

Opening her box, she began to throw her belongings in viciously. From without came the crunch of Billy Penticost's boots as he crossed the little yard and the clink of a pail set down; then the rhythmic sound of pumping, so like the stertorous breathing of some vast creature, rose on the morning air. A sudden loathing of country sights and sounds gripped Blanche, and, tearing off her faded frock, she began to dress herself in the one smart travelling gown she had brought with her.

"I don't care what Mrs. Penticost thinks!" she told her reflection in the blurred looking-gla.s.s as she pulled a gold-coloured ribbon round her waist; "I don't care what any of them think--they're just country b.u.mpkins, with no ideas in their heads beyond crops and cows!"

Without warning, a throb of memory a.s.sailed her: was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung them down.

"I'll buy some roses in Exeter," she thought; "they'll look more suitable than hedge-flowers." It was her definite rejection of the country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again--her last tribute to the memory of Ishmael.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GREY WORLD

During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness again, as insistent as before. He fought his la.s.situde of spirit as stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result, the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his mistress have pa.s.sed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed on at Cloom. At Cloom--where there was no evading the thought of her amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still there.

There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held by the cry of the wisest of men--that "hope deferred maketh the heart sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next onslaught.