Secret Bread Part 33

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 pa.s.sed 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 Va.s.sie 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 pa.s.sionate 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."

"He sounds as though he were going to suffer from what is called the artistic temperament," observed the Parson.

"Let's hope not," chimed in Killigrew, "because the so-called artistic temperament is never found among the people who do things, but only in the lookers-on. The actual creators don't suffer from it."

"It depends what one means by the artistic temperament," said Judy rather soberly. "If you mean the untidy emotional sort of people who excuse everything by saying they have the artistic temperament, I agree with you. That's what the Philistine thinks it is, of course."

"Oh, the real thing, the thing that creates, is nothing in the world but a fusion of s.e.x," said Killigrew swiftly. "It gives to the man intuition and to the woman creativeness--it adds a sixth sense, feminising the man and giving the woman what is generally a masculine attribute. But that's not what the Padre means. He's using the word in its accepted derogatory sense."

"I don't think he is quite, either," said Judy. "I think what you mean is more the deadly literary sense, isn't it, Padre?--the thing some people are cursed with, the voice that gets up and lies down with them, that keeps up a running commentary on whatever they do. The creative people can suffer from that."

"You mean the thing I always had as a youngster," said Killigrew. "If I went fis.h.i.+ng I used to hear something like this: 'The boy slipped to the bank with the swift sureness of a young animal, and sat with long brown legs in the water while his skilful fingers fixed the bait on the hook.'"

"That's the sort of thing," said Judith. "It's deadly dangerous."

"Don't you think I've grown out of it, then?" asked Killigrew quickly, but with a laugh. Judy did not reply, but turned to Ishmael.

"Don't you know at all what I mean?" she asked. "You must have had moments like that--every child has. Some people let it grow into a habit--that's what's fatal."

Ishmael thought it over. "Yes," he admitted. "I can remember whole tracks of thought like that in my childhood, but I think I recognised the danger and made myself alter."

"I'm sure you didn't suffer from it," declared Boase. "I knew you very thoroughly, Ishmael, and you were reserved and inarticulate; you never acted for effect." He felt startled, as though a sudden gap had yawned in the dear past; it did not seem to him possible, or only as the grotesque possibility of a nightmare, that the boy Ishmael should have held tendencies, trends of thought, which he had not realised....

Later came a message from Nicky that he would like Miss Parminter to come up and say good-night to him. They all laughed at the masculine tactics adopted thus early, but Judith went upstairs.

Later, when the others were thinking of going, Ishmael went up for her.

She was kneeling by the bed, a dark figure in the dim room. Nicky was asleep, one arm still flung round her shoulder: she held hers lightly across him; her head was bowed upon the sheet. Ishmael hesitated a moment, struck by something of abandon in her pose. Then he touched her lightly on the shoulder. She started and looked up.

"Oh, it's you!" she said, peering at him through the darkness. "How you startled me!"

"The others are going," said Ishmael. "It's been good of you to stay up here. How long's the little chap been asleep?"

"Oh, ages! He's so sweet, I couldn't go downstairs to the lamp and all of them somehow. So small and soft.... You are lucky, Ishmael."

"Am I?" said he, rather taken aback. "I hadn't thought of myself in that light. But I know what you mean ... about Nicky."

They left the room together, but Judy cloaked herself in the pa.s.sage and would not go again into the brightly-lit room. The Parson and Killigrew saw the two girls home, but Georgie and Boase reached the cottage first, and Georgie fell asleep while she was sitting up in bed waiting, scandalised, in spite of her modernity, for the return of Judith.

Nicky, sleeping peacefully in his little bed, had much to answer for that day. He had shown the startled Ishmael the gap that lies between two generations, whatever the tie of blood and affection; he had shown him too, by his anger at being torn out of it, that he could still have a mood of clamour for some thrill almost forgotten, some ecstasy he had thought dead ... and he had sent Judy, trembling, eager, as not for many months past, to the arms of the lover who could be so careless of her, but whom, when she chose, she could still stir to a degree no other woman had ever quite attained.

CHAPTER IX

JUDITH'S WHITE NIGHT

When Judith came in during the young dark hours of that morning, she could not sleep, and for a time she busied herself trying to remove the creases and dew-stains from her gown. Then she sat long by the window before she went to bed and laid the head that a few hours ago had known a sweet-smelling bracken pillow against the linen that could not cool her burning cheek.

She was suffering as she invariably did every time she gave the lover's gift to Killigrew; and always she paid for the joy of yielding with hours of reaction. She was wont to live over again in the drear s.p.a.ces of time the history of her life since she had known him, and it was the history of her love for him and of very little else. Now as she lay, spent but wakeful, sick at heart and soul, she saw again the self that had stayed in this house when first she grew to know him. How little she had imagined then, in her pride and poise.... That was what stung her on looking back--how little she had guessed. If before her then had been flashed the vision of herself as his secret lover, how impossible she would have thought it. Surely, having come to it, having lived in it now for so long, she ought to be able to see how and exactly when the step had been taken which had brought her to it, which had so altered herself and her views as to make it possible? Yet, looking back, she could see no such one point between the self to whom it would have been impossible and the self to whom it was an acknowledged thing of long standing. If life consisted of sudden steps, how easily could they be avoided, she thought, as she went again through the bitter waters to which she had never succeeded in growing indifferent. It was these gradual slopes....

She could not even say, "It was that moment I first knew I loved him."

She lay, her brow pressed against the pillow, and saw again the Killigrew and the Judy of those early days at Cloom when she had been staying with Blanche, taken down there almost unwillingly, certainly against the wishes of her people, who had not shared her enthusiasm for Miss Grey. She had liked Killigrew at once; his odd, whimsical, slanting way of looking at life had appealed to the clever young girl whose intellect had developed in front of her emotional capacities. It was her brain that had charmed him, more than her uncertain beauty; in those early days her personality had been so strong and her beauty still so hidden beneath its eccentricities, which later had added to it. All the time Ishmael had been so deeply in love with Blanche she and Killigrew had been getting more intimate, and yet there was "nothing in it" then.

When had it begun? Surely on that long train journey up to town there had been a new note, a feeling of something there had not been before ...

partly because Blanche had left them at Exeter to make a cross-country connection, and she and he had had those first few hours of an enclosed intimacy they had not had before--in the train. What a queer, stuffy background ... hardly unromantic, though, when you thought of all trains stood for and had seen! She had examined rather anxiously into her own feelings that night at home, she remembered, because she knew Killigrew's views on marriage as the most unsatisfactory and immoral of states, and she did not wish to suffer. She was not given to self-pity, and it never struck her that there was some pathos in that careful wish to avoid suffering formed by one so young, who had already borne an unhappy girlhood with a mother who drugged and a stepfather who dared not show his affection for her for fear of his wife's jealousy. The kind, weak little man had died and left her a few hundreds a year; she was always grateful to him for that, and forgave him for not standing between her and her mother as he might have done. Those hundreds had saved her from any question of taking money from Killigrew. Her poems would not have kept her--that she knew. Also she had never done as well as in that first slim book when she had known nothing of life at all. Real experience had bitten too deep for transmission to paper.

When he came back from Paris, a year after the time at Cloom, he had written to her and she had met him. Then it had all come out--all about her wretched home and her mother--and they had met again and again.

Killigrew could not bear the thought of suffering, and he had tried to make up to her by taking her out as much as he could--not alone, for that was impossible in those days, but always with such others as merely formed a pleasant negative background. Between them from the first of those days in London was a consciousness of being man and woman there had not been for her at Cloom, though he now told her she had always disturbed him, that there was for him a something profoundly troubling in her slim s.e.xless body, her burning mind, her quaint little sureness of poise which never let her lose her sense of proportion. That had so appealed to him ... never from her had he heard the talk of women, that love was the greatest thing in the world, or that any one person could matter more than all the many other things put together. She had thought with him that life was far otherwise--made up of many things, a pattern.... And yet it was she who, though in theory keeping all those ideas, had lived and suffered only for the one thing, had her horizon narrowed to his figure. All the time she told herself it was a distorted view, but that did not prevent her suffering; it only enabled her to be aware that it mattered very little whether she suffered or not.

They had gone on meeting, and soon it was a recognised thing that he should kiss her who had never even let herself so much as be kissed at a dance. But this was different, she told herself--he kissed her so kindly. His kisses altered, but still she bore them, dimly aware of portent in them, but trying, with a woman's guile, to laugh them off by seeming to keep a child's uncomprehension of what they meant. Then she had had a bad time to undergo during her mother's lingering illness and death, before she could take her freedom. Her mother left her nothing, but she had the kind little man's small income. She had been worn out by the time everything was over; and owing to her mother's complaint, which had made it impossible to have visitors at the house, and to her jealousy, which had prevented Judy making many friends for herself outside, she knew no one with whom she was intimate enough to ask for advice and help. Killigrew had taken charge of her and been goodness itself.

He kept clear always of the actual words and forms of love-making. He was very fastidious and hated anything that went to vulgarise his relations.h.i.+ps, and would not spoil his genuine affection and intimacy and pa.s.sion for her or any other woman for whom he felt them by using s.h.i.+bboleths that did not express what he really meant.

He took her away up to a quiet mountain country in Wales, and all the weeks he looked after her there never showed any more pa.s.sion than the kisses and close embraces she was now used to, and those not often. He was not only not ever an inconsiderate lover, but he was too much of an epicure to take too much or too often even when he could. He left her once or twice in those weeks to go to town, and she knew be saw other women there, and the knowledge meant very little to her. Already she was loving him more deeply than she knew and understanding him more deeply still, and she knew jealousy would be the end of everything. If she had begun to be jealous, it would have been so deadly, she would have had so much to be jealous of, that she never dared let herself indulge in it.

She had her reward when he once told her she was the only woman who had never once asked him where he had been or whom he had been with. She was so happy in the pain this self-repression gave her she hardly thought how much happier she could have been had there been no need for it. If that had been the case he would have been entirely different from what he was, and then perhaps she would not have loved him at all.

The time in Wales was not spoilt by anything that made her unable to face her own mind; never did his arms or lips encroach; she came back still feeling she belonged to herself--still clinging to that physical possession of self because she was now aware that her peace of soul was gone into his keeping where it would have no rest again.

After that her true pain began. Sometimes on looking back she wondered how she could have lived through it so often--for of course it was not always at the same pitch. No pain or love or appreciation ever can be.

There were whole months when she managed to do very well without him, when he was abroad and she too, perhaps, went on the Continent to some other far-off place and found things in which to interest herself. She belonged to the semi-artistic circle in which alone it was possible in those days to have any liberty of action, and she had the artist's keen appreciation of the externals of life; and when the personal failed her there were always things. But when the pain was at its worst things failed her.

Bad times when a letter from him, written because he happened to be in the mood to write and wanted an answer which, though she knew his mood would have pa.s.sed by the time he received it, yet she would not be able to prevent herself writing.... Times after he had been to see her, either on a flying visit, or to be near her for several days, taking her about and spoiling her delightfully.... After they were over came a bitterness that would make her moan out loud to herself, "It isn't worth it ... it isn't worth it...." And she would welcome the next few days when they came as thirstily as she had the last.

Only the fact that she had a naturally strong will, made stronger by youthful years of self-repression, and that he never wished from a woman what she did not want to give, kept her so long not his lover in body as she was in heart and mind. Looking back, she marvelled at the length of time she had withstood her own heart. Not her senses; they had not entered into the affair for her at that time. She actually loved him too well, and was too unawakened physically, to feel the promptings of the pulses. She felt in him, for him, by him, so intensely it sometimes seemed to her she must be fused with him. She could have burned away into his being and ceased to have a separate existence if the pa.s.sionate fusing of the mind could have accomplished it.

For three years she loved and suffered. She saw him always several times a year, was with him during those times, and he never lied to her about what he felt. He never told her she was the "only woman in the world for him" and that he could not live without her. He never mentioned other women to her, except such of his friends as she had met and of those she never knew, except in so far as her own intuition told her, which were only friends, which mingled the give and take of pa.s.sion with the cooler draught. On the other hand, he never hid his pa.s.sion when he felt it for her, and he always showed his affection and care of her when in the pleasant s.p.a.ces between pa.s.sion. He could not but know she was aware that he would be glad if one day she gave him more; meanwhile he did not make her hate herself and him with actions that would have excited without satisfying. He was the perfect companion, or would have been if she had not loved him.

For three years she never told him that she did; she met his kisses only with frank affection, and though she felt no urge of pa.s.sion in herself to teach her lips, yet she began to feel that which would have made her more the eager one, and less the kissed, as she always sternly kept herself. For these three years she did not imagine he lived a chaste existence; there was no reason, with his pagan and quite genuine convictions, why he should. Fidelity in so far as it meant keeping to one person was to him foolishness. In so far as it meant loyalty of affection and absolute honesty he was faithful to everyone.

At the end of the three years she had become aware that things were different ... at first she could not say how. Then she slowly saw that unless she gave more, made herself more to him, she would become less.

He made no demands on her; he would have resented the idea of possessing a woman as much as that of any woman possessing him--freedom to him was the salt of every dish. Judy told him sometimes that he made the marriage service of too great importance, just as much as did the advocates of it, though in a different way. They thought there ought to be no love outside it; he thought there could be none within-it. To her mind, which always went for the essentials and left the trappings alone, the actual legal compact would not have mattered either way. That was what her instinct, which in her was as nicely balanced as reason, told her. But there was a side of her, as was inevitable, which was the child of her period and upbringing, and that side had never been talked over by Killigrew's philosophy, with the result that when she gave him everything she suffered in her conscience as well as in her heart. She had suffered ever since. Truth was with her a pa.s.sion, and yet she had to pretend to the world. She suffered acutely when with girls of her own age, because she felt unfit to be with them. Often, with Georgie, who had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house. She suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really was. And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge, surely she was clean enough....

She had never breathed the word "marriage" to Killigrew, who had no reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement. It had been a "success"; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he could take her as he wished. Killigrew would as soon have married as have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a _union libre_ held no illusions for him. Yet to do him justice it was even more that he would have hated to have their relations.h.i.+p spoiled by anything so hard-and-fast. They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together, and if she knew he was "fitting her in," she was too wonderfully poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to dwell on it--beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would follow upon every time--she would have died, in heart and mind, if not in body, of the pain.

Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does.

These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw sleep would not come.