Secret Bread Part 30

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 compa.s.sionate 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 ma.s.s 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 n.o.bleman 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 pa.s.sionate critics of the manner in which the trial of the Manchester Fenians had been conducted and at the sentence p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sionately 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 Va.s.sie, 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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.u.m of the earth!"

"At least you can't accuse me of being an absentee landlord," said Ishmael, smiling.

"No, indeed," chimed in Va.s.sie 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 paris.h.i.+oners 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 p.r.i.c.k 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," a.s.sented Flynn, "and murder should certainly be cla.s.sified 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 pa.s.sions 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.

CHAPTER VI

THE NATION AND NICKY

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 the _Alabama_--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 cla.s.ses, 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 pa.s.sed 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 impa.s.sioned 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 Va.s.sie 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 un.o.btrusive 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 pa.s.sing 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 Maca.s.sar oil, and long limbs, rather supple than st.u.r.dy, 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.

Va.s.sie, 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sionate 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 coa.r.s.er--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. Pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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.