Secret Bread Part 39

"He said, 'Oh, Lord, take 'em off! Here, let me have a look!' He swung me round, with his hands on my shoulders, into the light from the hall gas, and I met his look. 'They might be worse, I suppose, but for goodness' sake take them off!' he said; 'you don't have to wear them, you know!' I said nothing, but broke away and went down the steps. He came after me and continued to look in the street. 'I say, you look just like your mother in them!' he went on. That was the cruellest thing he could have said, because he knew my mother ... he only did it because he did not think I really had to wear them, and he thought it would make me leave off. I told him what the oculist had said, and he said he would call on me again after I was forty. I pretended to laugh, but I was feeling like death. Later on I slipped them off, and he had the tact not to say anything when he saw what I had done. I never wore them again with him, and went over the world unable to see the things he was raving about, and having perpetually to pretend that I did and guess at the right thing to say. Now--it doesn't matter. I prefer wearing them to having blinding headaches."

"It was pretty rotten of him to let it make a difference," said Ishmael.

"No, I understand what he felt so well. I knew it myself. There is always something ridiculous about making love to a woman in gla.s.ses. It destroys atmosphere. If you're married, and either you're so one with the man that he really does love you through everything or else is so dull that he doesn't feel their ugliness, it wouldn't make a difference.

But I was not married--he had not the married temperament. And you must admit that it is impossible to imagine a mistress in gla.s.ses...."

"Don't!" said Ishmael sharply.

"Don't what? Did you think I was speaking bitterly? I wasn't. There isn't a sc.r.a.p of bitterness in me, I'm thankful to say. I couldn't have lived if there had been. I saw that almost at the beginning, as I did about jealousy. If you have much to be bitter and jealous about, you can't be; it would kill you. It's only the people who can indulge in a little of it who dare to. I have not been unhappy for the most part, and I wouldn't undo it, which is the great thing. You knew I had given up having times away with him years ago?"

"Yes, I wondered why."

"The thing had somehow lost something ... what is lost in marriage just the same--rapture, glow, fragrance.... And in marriage, with luck, something else comes to take its place ... domesticity, which is very sweet to a woman. Looking after him instead of being looked after--a deep quiet something. You and Georgie are getting it. But in a relation outside marriage you can't get that. You can in those extraordinary _menages_ in France where the little mistress is so domesticated and lives with her lover for years, but that would have been as bad to him as marriage. So I thought it was best to let it all come to an end. It wasn't easy, for though I had got so that it was torture to be with him, because all the time I was feeling our dead selves between us, yet directly I was away I knew that, even though he was the man he was and I the me I had become, we were still nearer to what had been than anything else could be. But I did it. It was only when he was dying I went to Paris to him."

"And that...?"

"Oh, it was quite a success. I don't mean to be brutal, but it was. He was glad to have me, and showed it.... A deathbed is so terribly egoistic; it can't be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever before. I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was rising to the occasion without knowing it himself. Not that he was emotional; he was never that. But he showed me something deeper than he ever had before. With all his pa.s.sion he was always so English, always so much the critic, in spite of his powers of enjoyment. He had always made love in caresses, never in words. Till this last time, as he was dying."

Judy was speaking in a quiet voice that sounded as though all her tears had been shed, yet they were pouring down her face, making havoc of the paint and powder, of which she was quite aware and for which she cared not at all. Ishmael thought she had never shown her triumphant naturalness, her stark candour, more finely. As on that evening when he had met her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human being, because they were in some respects so alike. Something quiet and incurably reserved in him--he could never have talked as bravely as she did--yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those relations off when she thought it best. And now she seemed to have won through to some calm, he wondered what it was and how she had come to it....

"What you said about marriage," he said at last, "struck me rather. It's true. One loses something, but one finds something."

"Marriage, even the most idealistic of marriages, must blunt the edges to a certain extent," said Judy. "You may call it growing into a saner, more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the edges--the fact is the same. Marriage is a terribly clumsy inst.i.tution, but it's the most possible way this old world has evolved. It always comes back to it after brave but fated sallies into other paths."

"Such as yours?" asked Ishmael. It was impossible to pretend to fence with honesty such as hers.

"No, not such as mine, because I cannot say I did it for any exalted reason, such as wis.h.i.+ng to reform the world. I had no splendid ideas on mutual freedom or anything like that. I did it simply because I loved Joe and it was the only way I could have him without making him tired of me and unhappy. It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have been so unbearable in the world. A woman's sin is always blamed so heavily. That's a commonplace, isn't it? Yet a woman's sin should be the more forgivable. She sins because it is _the_ man; he sins because it is _a_ woman."

"Sin!" said Ishmael. "Don't you get to that point in life when the word 'sin' becomes extraordinarily meaningless, like the word 'time' in that chapter of Ecclesiastes where it occurs so often that when one comes to the end of the chapter 't-i-m-e' means nothing to one. Sin seems to come so often in life it grows meaningless too."

"Sin, technically speaking, does, to all but the theologian; but playing the game, doing the decent thing, not only to others, but to oneself, and keeping one's spiritual taste unspoiled, these things remain, and they really mean the same."

"I suppose they do. I like talking to you, Judy. It's not like talking to a woman, although one's conscious all the time that you are very much of a woman. But you seem to meet one on common ground."

"There's not so much difference between men and women as people are apt to think. People are always saying 'men are more this and women are more that' when really it's the case of the individual, irrespective of s.e.x.

A favourite cry is that men are more selfish. I really rather doubt it.

Perhaps, if one must generalise, men are more selfish and women are more egotistical, and of the two the former is the easier vice to overcome.

But all this talk of men and women, women and men, seems to me like something I was in the middle of years ago, and that now means nothing."

"What does mean anything to you now?"

"I'm not quite sure I can tell you yet," said Judy slowly; "and I don't think it would be any good to you--there'd be too much against it. What does mean anything to you, personally?"

"I don't know.... I only know that for real youth again, for perfect ease of body, I would give everything short of my immortal soul."

"Ah! then you still feel the soul's the most important?"

"Part of me does--the part of me that responds to the truth, which is going on all the time, with us if we like, without us if not, but which is surely there. It's because I know it's there, even though my longings are out of key with it, that I still say that about the soul."

They went up into the house, and that night Georgie, whether because some feminine jealousy that he talked so much with Judy was stinging at her, or whether because even without that spur she would have felt some old stirring of warmth, was sweeter to him than for long past. As he held her against him he was aware that it was not so much pa.s.sion he felt as that deeper, sweeter something Judy had spoken of, and for the first time he felt free to savour it instead of half-resenting it as a loss of glamour.

This was a satisfying companions.h.i.+p he had of Georgie, a sweet thing without which life would have been emptier, even if it settled no problems and left untouched the lonely s.p.a.ces which no human foot can range in their entirety, though in youth some one step may make them tremble throughout their s.h.i.+ning floors.... It was good, though it was not the whole of life, and as he took it he gave thanks for the varied relations.h.i.+ps in the world which added so to its richness, even if they could only impinge upon its outer edges.

CHAPTER V

THE PARSON'S PHILOSOPHY

That summer the Parson began to show signs of breaking up. Judith had been struck by the change in him when she came down, a change less plain to those who were seeing him often, but startlingly distinct to her who had not seen him for so long. She took up her friends.h.i.+p, that had begun on that evening when he had found her in the church, in the place where it had left off, and this was somewhat to the credit of both, since it transpired that during the past year Judy had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Judith was quiet about her religion as she had been about her love. She had not accepted it in any spirit of there being nothing else left for her now in life, as the vulgar-natured would have supposed had they known her history; neither was it because, most frequent accusation of the ignorant, it appealed to the sensuous side of her. For ritual she cared as little as the Parson, and by preference she always went to low Ma.s.s instead of to a high Ma.s.s. She had found something that for her had been hitherto hidden, and Boase saw it and was glad. It was noteworthy that it was to him and not to Ishmael she spoke of it. Georgie, with all her dearness, was almost too prosperous to understand. Judy radiated an inner joy that Ishmael had not attained and that Georgie had never felt the need of. That joy had not been won until her feet had trod stranger ways than her friends at Cloom ever imagined. Often she was seized by a pang of conscience that they should admire her as a creature above everything honest and courageous ... for there was more to know of her now than her relation with Killigrew. She knew how the single-heartedness of that had absolved her in their eyes; but for what it had plunged her in they would have had less comprehension. For it was not in a nature so essentially womanly as Judith's to be content with s.e.x-starvation once pa.s.sion had been aroused in her, and the irony of it all was that she, who had not for several years awoken to stirred senses with the man she loved, was unable to stifle their urgency after she had left him.

From slight dalliance with first one man and then another, she had progressed to the greater intimacies, ashamed but unfighting. Till at last the p.r.i.c.king thing had begun to grow fainter and her will stronger and she was able to break away. She hid the truth and kept up the old tradition of having loved only once, partly because it was true she had not felt actual love again, but partly for vanity's sake....

It was not that she was vain of the romantic figure she seemed to her friends; it was a more deadly thing than that. She was vain of the quality of her past love. Too much had been made of it, and she would have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great pa.s.sion. And to this had she come, although her love had been so real....

Ishmael never again during that visit felt quite the easy intimacy with Judy that he had touched that day by the stream, though as the next few years went on and her visits became a regular thing to look forward to there was built up between them a fabric of friends.h.i.+p that grew to be something unique to both. Those things which had happened to Judy had taught her every tolerance and sympathy.

They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed. Nicky, after writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone. The thought of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom. When he had first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal Cloom which his father's conduct had shattered. Now he realised that if he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task. Now, since Nicky's departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old. He knew by Nicky's letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him. For days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost illuminated it once again.

The 'nineties, young and go-ahead as they felt to themselves, did not seem to Ishmael nearly as wonderful as the 'seventies, which had seen so much deeper changes. This world--in which people now moved so complacently talking of Ibsen and Wilde, of weird Yellow Books of which he heard from Judith, and many other things all designated as _fin-de-siecle_--he had seen it in the making. The very children growing up in his house, the plump little Ruth and the clever, impatient Lissa, they thought they knew so much more than he did because they had been born so much later; and so in a way they did, in as much as the younger generation always sees more truly because it has not had time to collect so many prejudices, but can come straight and fresh to setting right the problems of the world. But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new century would look upon them with a gentle pity.

On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news. The Parson could not often get over to Cloom Manor now, but it was the highest tribute to him that not only Ishmael and Judy and Georgie, when she could spare the time, but the children too, considered a visit to the Parson in the light of a pleasure. Boase knew it and was glad--even his st.u.r.dy aloofness and self-reliance would have felt a pang at being called on for decency's sake.

Ishmael found Boase lying on the long chair in his study, that for him always held something, some smell or atmosphere of the mind, that carried him back to his childhood. He felt in the midst of the old days again at once, when he was not looking at Boase, who was grown very old, his once rather square face and blunt features having taken on a transparency of texture that was in itself ageing, while his hair, spa.r.s.e about the big brow, was a creamy white like froth. Boase called to Ishmael, recognising his step, to take off his wet things in the hall, for it was raining hard, with that whole-hearted rain of the West which when it begins seems as though it could never stop again. That was a wet summer, when the stalks of the growing harvest were flattened to the earth and the corn sprouted green in the ear and the hay rotted on the ground before ever it could be carried. Ishmael had to be careful about getting wet since that night when he had run to the burning of Angwin's ricks, and he did not scorn the Parson's offer of a pair of shabby old slippers that lurked under the hall chair for just such occasions as this.

It seemed to Ishmael that if he had not been feeling such a different being himself he might have been a little boy again and time never have moved on from the days when he lived here with the Parson and did his lessons in this room. Outside the shrubs bent before the rainy wind, as they had done so many times before his childish eyes; the sc.r.a.p of lawn visible between them showed as sopping and as green; the fuchsia had grown bigger; but its purple and scarlet blossoms, so straightly pendant, each held a drop of clear water at the tip, as they had ever done in weather such as this. Within the room might be a little fuller, a little smaller, whether owing to the Parson's untidiness, with which the new housekeeper could not cope as well as had old Mrs. Tippet, long dead, or whether to the shrinking that takes place in rooms after childhood is pa.s.sed, Ishmael could not have told. Three walls were still lined with dusty golden-brown books that he had been wont to describe as smelling of bad milk pudding, and the shabby green tablecloth was littered with sermon paper and more books just as it had been for his lessons. He almost expected to see Va.s.sie's golden head, no more alien from him than his own boyish dark one, bending over it as he looked.

Boase held out a thin hand to him, laying down the book he had been reading, after slipping a marker in the place. Ishmael saw it was a new book from the library. "Robert Elsmere" was the name upon its cover.

"What good thing has happened?" asked Boase, watching Ishmael's face.

"Padre, you are too clever; if you had lived a few centuries earlier you would certainly have been burned alive! Nicky is coming home."

"That is splendid news! He has been away quite long enough to be good."

"For him?"

"No, for you. You are getting stodgy, Ishmael."

Ishmael laughed, but felt rather annoyed all the same.

"What is one to do? I am growing old."

"Nonsense! Have the decency to remember that compared with me you are a young man. Wait till you are close on eighty and then see how you feel about it."

Ishmael had a quick feeling that after all he was young compared with this frail, burning whiteness, yet it seemed to him that he could never be as old as that, that then indeed life could not be worth living.