Secret Bread Part 40

Aloud he said mechanically:

"You? You are always young."

"Age does not matter when you are really old; it is only the getting old that matters," said Boase; "it is like death. No one minds being dead; it's the dying that appals. But seriously, my dear boy, what really matters is to have the quality of youth. Don't lose that."

"I'm not sure I ever had it," said Ishmael slowly, sitting down by the long chair.

"Perhaps not. You were acutely young, which is not quite the same thing.

Our friend Killigrew had the quality of youth. One can say of him that he died young. I think your Nicky has that quality too. That's why he'll be so good for you."

"What about the girls? Aren't they enough to save my soul alive?"

"Oh, well, girls are never quite the same thing. A father loves his daughters if anything more than his sons, but it's as a father and not as a fellow human. You know, I've seen a good deal of Judith this summer; she's always good at coming and talking to an old man, and what interests me about her is that she keeps so fluid. I mean that she never sticks where she was. I don't want you to either. You came in the days of Ruskin and Pater and of great men politically, but I don't want you to stick there. There's no merit in being right at one time in one's life if one sticks to that rightness after it has lost its significance.

You know, a stopped clock is right twice every twenty-four hours, but it's a rightness without value. Keep fluid, Ishmael. It is the only youth."

"Is that why you're reading 'Robert Elsmere'?" asked Ishmael, with a smile.

"Exactly. I'm not going to change what feeds my soul daily for what is offered me between these covers, but that's not the point. One can always discriminate, but one should always give oneself things to discriminate between."

There was a short silence, which the Parson broke. "I too have had a letter," he said, and there was something in his voice which made Ishmael aware of a portent beyond the ordinary. "From Archelaus ..."

added Boase.

"From Archelaus?" echoed Ishmael. The name came upon him like the name of one dead, it seemed to him that when they spoke of Killigrew they touched more upon the living than when they mentioned Archelaus. "Why does he write?" he added; and his voice sounded harsh and dry even to his own ears, so that he felt a little shame at himself.

"He has met Nicky in Canada."

"I thought Archelaus had gone West in the States, if he were still alive at all. I was beginning to think something must have happened to him. No one has heard for so long. He took a funny idea into his head at one time to write to Georgie, whom he had never seen--queer letters, telling very little, full of sly remarks one couldn't get the rights of."

Ishmael paused, waiting for the Parson to produce the letter and show it him, but Boase made no move. "It's funny Nicky never mentioned it," went on Ishmael with an odd little note that was almost jealousy in his voice....

"He says he did not tell Nicky who he was," said the Parson reluctantly.

"I think there is more good in that queer, distorted creature than you think for, Ishmael. Seeing the boy seems to have roused him to old feelings of home.... He writes oddly, but in a strain that is not wholly base."

"I can't make out why he wants to write to you at all, Padre; he always hated you, blamed you so ... for the marriage and all that."

"There is not much accounting for the vagaries of a man like that. Your father thought to be ironic when he had you called Ishmael; he saw every man's hand against you--you the youngest and the one against so many.

And you have made a strong, secure life for yourself and your children, and it is Archelaus who wanders...."

"Archelaus would always have wandered. He has it in his soul. Do you remember the day Killigrew was cla.s.sifying men by whether they wandered or stayed at home? He was right about Archelaus then. Da Boase--you don't think I could have behaved any differently to him, do you? He wouldn't be friends. That time in the wood ... you know ... I always knew in my heart that he had hit out at me, though I was so afraid of really knowing it that I never spoke of it even to you. And then when he came home after my marriage to poor little Phoebe--he made the first advances, it's true, but I never felt happy about them, although he seemed so altered. I've reproached myself sometimes that I was glad when he went away after she died. I always hoped he wouldn't come back any more. What else could I do, Da Boase?"

"I too hope he will never come home any more," said the Parson slowly, "and yet ... if he does, try and remember, Ishmael ... not that he is your brother--that would not make things easier--but that he is not quite an ordinary man, that in him the old brutalities dormant in most of us have always been strong and that he has had nothing to counteract them. He is not quite as we are. If we cannot understand we should not judge."

Again a little silence fell. Then Ishmael said suddenly:

"What does feed your soul, Da Boase? I shouldn't have asked you that,"

he added swiftly. "Besides, I know. But though I know, and though I believe in it too, yet I can't yet find all I want in it."

Boase lay silent, looking out of the rainy window at the wash of green and pearly grey without. His hand caressed Ishmael's as though he had been a little boy again.

"That feeds my soul from which my soul came ..." he said slowly, "and daily the vision draws nearer to me and its reflection here strengthens even to my earthly eyes. This world is dear and sweet, but only because I know that it is not all, or even the most important part. Each day is the sweeter to me because each day I can say 'Come quickly, O Lord Jesus.' I do not need to say to you all that knowledge means."

The rain had blown away when Ishmael went home again, yet it seemed to him he went with a more anxious heart than that with which he had set out. Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already, whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him that no one could ever take his place. Killigrew he was missing as much now as when he died, because though he had not seen him so very often, yet Killigrew and he had each stood for something to the other that no one else could quite supply, and so his going had left a sense of loss that time did nothing to fill. But with Boase it was more than that.

There was something in Ishmael which Boase had fathered and which knew and recognised its spiritual paternity. His mind had taken much colour from Killigrew, but from Boase it had taken form. He felt that that afternoon in the stuffy study he had touched something he had almost forgotten, that had slipped rather out of his life for the past years, since Nicky had been growing up: a significance, a sense of some plan of which he had caught glimpses in his youth and had since forgotten.

As he went through the wet world it seemed to him as though he were once again the same Ishmael who had so often gone this way long years ago, when the soul behind life had still intrigued him more than the manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere material agencies of the sense of smell and sight: or whether the Parson had touched him in some atrophied cord that had rung more freely in days gone by, the effect was the same.

As he went it was as though time had ceased to exist, as though he caught some vision of the whole pattern as one rhythmic weaving, and not isolated bits disconnected with each other. The sensation mounted to his brain and told him that time itself was a mere fas.h.i.+on of thought, that he was walking in some period he could not place. He remembered the day when the Neck had been cried, and it had seemed to him that the moment was so acute it could never leave off being the present and slip into the past; he remembered the first day at St. Renny when he was staring at the sunbeam and feeling that that at least would go on spell-bound for ever; he remembered that moment when, on his return to Cloom, he had gone over the fields with John-James and, looking once more on the same field, had recalled that first moment, and smiled to see how it had slipped away and was gone. He had smiled without thinking that first moment akin to the second one in which he was, whereas now he saw how the one had led to the other and both to this ... and how they were all so much one that none seemed further off than another. The word "present" lost significance in such a oneness as this. It came to him that this sense of completeness, of inevitable pattern, was what the Parson felt, what enabled him to wait so tranquilly.

Ishmael mounted the long slope and stood looking down upon Cloom, and it seemed to him the fabric of a dream. So strong upon him was the sense of loss of the time-sense that the place-sense also reeled and slipped to a different angle in his mind. He saw how in a far-off field at the crest of the further slope serried rows of was.h.i.+ng were laid out, looking so oddly like gravestones that the surface of his mind took it for a cemetery until, p.r.i.c.ked to a more normal consciousness, he realised that there could be no such thing there, but only a field belonging to a farm of his own. Even then it seemed to him that he was wandering in an unfamiliar country, with a something unreal about it that gave it a dreamlike quality. The sky was by now a deep slate colour; below it the yellow of the road and the green of the fields showed a bleached pallor, and on the telegraph poles that rose and dipped to the crest the china insulators looked like motionless white birds against the darkness. He went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them. He knew it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace--rather it sent a chill of helplessness to his heart. He still wanted something in this world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived.

CHAPTER VI

"SOMETHING MUST COME TO ALL OF US"

With autumn Boase died. Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss.

He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few of the country people too coa.r.s.e of grain to understand a man's life could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made for him intolerant critics among his own cla.s.s. Yet, all in all, he was as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding, as anyone Ishmael had ever heard of--far more so than anyone he had ever met. And of later years the Parson had grown in tolerance, which always to him had been a Christian duty--though it was far from being a weak or maudlin tolerance; and he had also lost much of that individualism which had been the only thing to cloud his judgment. More than most old men he had been free from glorification of the past, though not as free as he himself imagined. Something of Ishmael had gone with Killigrew's going, but that something had hardly included much of his heart; now there was buried with the Parson, or, more truly, strove to follow him whither he had gone, a love which was as single-natured a thing as can be felt. The return of Nicky was the only thing which at all filled the emptiness in Ishmael's days.

Nicky had altered, and for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind him. He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amus.e.m.e.nt against himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to try his hand.

When Ishmael had first started machinery at Cloom, beginning with a binder and going on to a steam thresher that he hired out for the harvest all around the district, the hedges had been black with folk crowding to see the wonders, just as they had when the first traction engine made its appearance in West Penwith. Yet Cornishmen, who are conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes, although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.

John-James was an old man now--he had aged quickly with his outdoor life; but always he refused to let Ishmael pension him off, and though as overseer he had a wage pa.s.sing any paid in the county, and though he lived comfortably enough in his little cottage chosen by himself, with a tidy body who came in from the village every day to attend to his wants, he still showed all the premature ageing of the countryman. He had never married, and with age had taken many queer ways, one of them being a rooted dislike to having any woman except his sister Va.s.sie in his house. Georgie was never allowed to cross its threshold, and he always called her "Mrs. Ruan." The two little girls he adored, and they knew he was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man because he was eccentric and mustn't be worried to live as father did.

Ishmael was very fond of this brother--as fond as John-James' rigid taciturnity would let him be. John-James' chief peculiarity was displayed always during the week's holiday he took every year; on each day of this week he would make a pilgrimage to some cemetery. A new graveyard was an unfailing magnet for him; he would spend hours there and return next year to note what new headstones had taken root. "Why on earth do you want to go and spend all your holiday in cemeteries, John-James?" Georgie had once asked him; "you'll have to be there for ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?"

John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily "I go to the graveyards," he said at length, "because them be the only places where folks mind their own business...."

Tom had quite dropped out of the family circle made by Ishmael, Va.s.sie, and John-James. He found the annoyance of not being received in the same circles as Ishmael and Va.s.sie too irksome to him--who, he not unfairly considered, had done so much the best and with the greatest handicaps.

The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of mayor never was to be for him. He married the daughter of a rich draper--in "the wholesale"--and as soon as he could afford it he dropped all doubtful practices and became strictly honest in his profession.

Of all the family, Va.s.sie, who had started out with a more defined character than the others, was the least changed. She was eminently successful--had been ever since she met Flynn and determined to marry him. She had made him a good wife, for he was one of those men who need feminine encouragement, and with all his brilliance would never have got so far without her to encourage him. He was not to be one of the great men of his day, but he had done well, having attained an Under-Secretarys.h.i.+p under Gladstone's last Administration, which he continued under Lord Rosebery. With the advent of the Conservative party in '95 he retired, though still only sixty, and busied himself with a small estate he had bought in Ireland, where he intended to work out his schemes for model Utopian tenancies. Va.s.sie was irked by the change. She had carried into middle life her superabundant energy--her love of being in the eye of the world. She had no children to occupy her--her only real quarrel with life--and it did not suit her to sit in Ireland while her once flaming Dan played with model villages and made notes for his reminiscences. He had, as flaming dreamers often do, fallen onto the dreams without the fire, and, having attained a certain amount of his ideals, was better pleased to sit and look backwards over those which had not materialised than to face a losing struggle in their cause.

Va.s.sie tried all her wiles to induce him to come to London after the first year in retirement, and at last she was able to a.s.sure him that she was not feeling well. The symptoms were but slight to begin with--a tinge of rheumatism in one leg, which annoyed without incapacitating her. The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion.

Va.s.sie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next week she was at Cloom.

Ishmael was shocked at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown its old bra.s.sy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey--that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.

"Don't look like that!" she told him. "The doctor says it's not hopeless, or wouldn't be if I'd let them operate."

"It? What is it?" asked Ishmael.

"Tuberculosis in the knee. They want me to have my leg off, and I won't.

You don't want me to, do you, Ishmael? I'd rather die whole if I've got to."

He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes. Va.s.sie linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan's voice as he talked to Georgie. Ishmael could not trust himself to speak.

Va.s.sie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between them during their lives. She stood for something to him no one else ever had, even as she did for John-James. She had never been popular with women--Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coa.r.s.e; but to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to them as far as her s.e.x went, she meant a good deal as a friend. Judith and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really intimate, and that was more a curious kins.h.i.+p between them, a mutual respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other's very different character, than anything warmer. But to Ishmael and John-James she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quant.i.ty. When she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more for him than for anyone else in the world. She felt more his equal than she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that were beyond her practical reach. She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never. She slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.

"Don't worry! After all something must come to all of us," she said.