Secret Bread Part 42

"What are you doing to-day, Ishmael?"

"I am thinking of helping with the four-acre. Nicky will soon be down for the Easter recess, and then I shall be so carefully looked after I shall not get the chance to overtire myself."

"Nicky has turned out a dear boy, and good son," said Judy kindly.

"Nicky always was a dear boy--even at his most elusive. Jim is more human than Nicky was at his age, but he hasn't Nicky's charm, that something of a piskie's changeling that made Nicky so attractive. Yes, he's a 'good son,' to use your horrible expression, Judy. And Marjorie is a very good wife for him, though I must say I enjoy it when I can have the two boys, the big and the little one, to myself."

"I sometimes wonder how much you ever really liked women," said Judy.

"I have always liked them, as you call it, very much indeed. But I don't think I've ever thought of them as women first and foremost, but as human beings more or less like unto myself."

"That's where you've made your mistake. Not because they aren't--for they are--but because that destroys the mystery, and no one is keener on keeping up the idea that women are mysterious creatures, unlike men, than women themselves."

"I daresay you're right. But to look at, merely externally, I've always been able to get the mystery. They can look so that a man is afraid to touch such exquisite, ethereal creatures, all the time that they're wanting to be touched most. Georgie always used to say I never understood women."

"When she meant that you showed your understanding too clearly. Dear Georgie!"

"Yes, dear Georgie! It does seem rough luck that she should have gone the first when she was so much younger than I, doesn't it?"

"Rough luck on you, or on her, are you meaning at the moment?"

"At the moment I was meaning on her. She was so in love with life. But I suppose really on me. I might, humanly speaking, have been fairly sure that I should have had her as a companion all the last years."

"Do you find it very lonely since Ruth married her tame clergyman and Lissa went away to become a full-blown painter?"

"Doesn't it always have to be lonely? Isn't it always really? The only thing is that when we are young we have distractions which prevent us seeing it. We can cheat ourselves with physical contact that makes us think it possible to fuse with any one other human being. But it isn't.

When we are our age--well, we know it's always isolated, but that it doesn't matter."

"What does matter? Those to come?"

"Yes, those to come--always them first; yet not that alone, or there would be no more value in them than in ourselves if it were always to be a vicious circle like that. Each individual soul is equally important, the old as much as the young, in the eternal scheme. It is only in the economy of this world that youth is more important than age."

"I think I can fairly lay claim to being a broadminded ''vert'" said Judith, "but of course, you know, I can't help feeling I've got something in the way of what makes things worth while that you haven't?"

"Yes, I know you do. I see you're bound to have. But of course, owing to what the Parson inculcated into me, I think I've got it too, but I quite see I can't expect you to think so."

"It's seeing the light that matters most, I think," said Judy. "We believe the same though I _know_ I've got it, and you only _think_ you have! But it's the thinking that is all important. The mystery to me is how anyone can be satisfied with the phenomena of this world alone as an answer to the riddle."

"It's not so much of a mystery to me. The world is so very beautiful that it can stand instead of human love, so why not, to some people, instead of Divine love also? The beauty of it is what I have chiefly lived by. It could for very long thrill me to the exclusion of everything else."

"And now?" asked Judith.

"Now? Now I am old that has been young, and still I cannot answer you that. I believe these airmen tell you of air pockets they come to, holes in the atmosphere, where their machines drop, drop.... I think I am in an air pocket, a hole between the guiding winds of the spirit ... one is too occupied in not dropping when in those holes to think of anything else. Action is the best thing, which is why I am now going to leave you to sow the four-acre."

He got up, slowly and painfully, though he stood as erect as ever once he was upon his feet. He stood a moment looking at Judith.

"Judy, d'you ever have those times when you feel something is going to happen?" he asked, "when you expect something to come round the corner, so to speak, at every moment. One so often had it in one's youth--one woke with it every morning: I don't mean that, but the expectation of some one thing that is in the air so near one that any moment it may break into actuality?"

"I never have it now, my dear, but I know what you mean. Why? Have you got it?"

"Yes."

"Is it about anything particular you are feeling it?"

"No, no; my uncanny vision doesn't go as far as that, I'm afraid."

"Dare I murmur indigestion?" she asked, with a gentle chuckle, hunching herself into her shawls.

"You may murmur, but I scorn you as a materialist and one who isn't even genuine. I go to my sowing, but you'll see if this old man is not justified of his dreams." He left her, and she watched him across the lawn with the detached affection of the old in her eyes; then she took up, not her knitting or her writing-pad, but the little book of devotions that lay in a fold of her shawl, and started to read, her lips moving slightly but soundlessly.

In the four-acre field there was a strong wind blowing that for days had been drying the turned earth to powder. The soil, so rich of hue when freshly turned, now showed a pale drab, dry and crumbling beneath the feet, while every step stirred up the fine particles and made them blow about like smoke.

Ishmael superintended the pouring of a sack of dredge-corn into the gaping maw of the drill, and the man took the rope reins, and, throwing over the lever, set the horses off, following as faithfully as might be the curve of the hedge. The sun gleamed on the glossy haunches of the horses, on the upper curve of the spidery wheels, whose faded vermilion seemed to revolve under a quivering splash of living gold that magically stayed poised, as it were, to let the wheels slip perpetually from under. The wind blew the horses' forelocks away between their ears; while about their plumy fetlocks, wreathing around the wheels and the sharp nozzles of the drill and from the heavy feet of the man who followed, rose the blown clouds of powdery soil, as though the earth were smoking at some vast sacrifice.

All the way up and down the field, back and forth, with a clanking as the lever was thrown in and out of gear for the turn at either end, this cloud went with them, blowing fine and free, encompa.s.sing them high as the horses' bellies. Ishmael watched, checked the man at the turn, and finding the corn was flowing too freely, altered the indicator, and then himself took the reins and in his turn went up and down the lines of smoking earth. And gradually, as he went, his sense of sight, and through it his brain, became gently mesmerised as the shallow furrows made by the nozzles of the drill drew themselves perpetually just before him. He could see the bright seeds dribbling into the top of the serpentine tubes, but no eye could catch their swift transit into the earth, which closed and tossed over itself in the wake of the nozzles as foam turns and throws itself about in the wake of a screw. Ishmael, his eyes on that living earth that surged so rhythmically yet with such freedom of pattern that no clod fell like another, while the dust blew back from it like spray, was soothed in exactly the same way that a man is soothed when he watches the weaving of the foam-patterns as they slip perpetually from beneath a s.h.i.+p.

Every year upon his farm there now came something of the joy of the gambler to Ishmael, who never sowed without feeling that it might be for the last time. Curiously enough, it never occurred to him as possible that he could die before what he had sown was grown and reaped. Every thres.h.i.+ng over, he wondered if he should live to see another; every sowing he told himself it might be the last time he saw the earth closing over the trail of the seeds, that before another spring came round the earth might be closed over him instead, and this gave an extra keenness of appreciation to all he did and watched. Now, as he sowed, peace seemed to come to him as well as pleasure, a feeling that though sowing was always for a blind future, yet that future was as securely in the womb of the thought of G.o.d as the seeds in the womb of the earth. He walked on, up and down, till the last furrow had been sown and the seeds lay all hidden and the ruffled earth only awaited the quieting of the roller. Then he leant upon the drill and stared out over the acres that were to him as the flesh of his flesh; he bent down and crumpled a clod between his fingers for sheer joy of the feel of it.

When he straightened himself it was to see the figure of an old man he did not know coming through the gate that led from the lane into the farmyard. There was only one field intervening, and Ishmael's eyes were still very good at a distance; he could see the old man was no one from those parts. There was something outlandish, too, about the soft slouch hat and the cut of the clothes, of a slaty grey that showed up clearly amidst the earthy and green colours all around. The old man stood fumbling with the gate in his hand, then, when it swung back, he stayed staring round him as though he were looking for something he did not find. He made two or three little steps forward, then paused. Ishmael, having bidden the man see to the horses, went into the next field that gave into the yard.

The stranger looked round, saw him, hesitated again, then went forward, more surely this time, as though he had either remembered something or suddenly made up his mind. He pa.s.sed through the archway into the court.

Ishmael stood, his hand on the gate, staring after him, his heart thumping painfully, why, he could not or would not admit to himself.

Then he, too, went on and into the court. He crossed it, went through the pa.s.sage door that stood open, and on into the kitchen which lay on the left. There was no one there. He pa.s.sed into the sitting-room on the right of the pa.s.sage, and there he saw the old man standing by the fireplace and looking round him with an odd, bewildered air. He looked up as Ishmael came in, and their eyes met. Afterwards Ishmael realised that he had always known it was Archelaus from the moment he had seen him stand and look round him at the gate.

Archelaus looked a very old man. He was old even in actual years, and almost ageless if some indefinable look on his seamed face registered more truly the period sustained by the ravaged spirit. He stood staring at Ishmael, then spoke in a husky, uncertain voice that went suddenly from gruffness to a high querulousness.

"Who be you?" he asked. "I be Archelaus Beggoe, and I'm come home to where I was born and reared.... I'm come home, I tell 'ee."

The two old men stood looking at each other.

"Don't you remember me?" asked Ishmael gently. "I'm Ishmael, your brother; you know...." He went forward and took the other's unresisting hand. "Welcome home, Archelaus!"

The elder brother said nothing, but slowly a look of comprehension began to dawn in his bleared old eyes, a look that was inexpressibly sly and yet harmless, so infantine was his whole aspect of helplessness. He shook Ishmael's hand very slowly, then dropped it.

"I'm come home," he repeated obstinately.

CHAPTER II

ARCHELAUS, NICKY, JIM

The next day it became plain to Ishmael that Archelaus spoke the truth when he announced that he had come home. His legs were old and stiff, but after pottering all the morning after his brother, who suddenly felt years younger through sheer force of contrast, he followed him obstinately out to the four-acre field, where Ishmael had hoped to get away from him. And Ishmael watched the rolling, as he had only the day before watched the sowing, but with a sinking of the heart instead of the lightening that had been his only twenty-four hours earlier. The mere presence of Archelaus, though they were now both old men, past rivalry, held for him an antagonism he could hide but could not keep himself from feeling.

As the ridgy clods flattened out to a level of purplish fawn beneath the one pa.s.sing of the c.u.mbrous roller, that yet looked so small behind the huge mare, Ishmael felt his spirits being as flattened as the four-acre itself. Yet even as yesterday the two horses had done, so to-day the mare spread her powerful haunches and raised clouds of earth with each firm impact of her gleaming hoofs; but the joy was gone from the sight.

Even Hester, the farm-dog, lineal descendant of poor Wanda, seemed to feel the inaction in the air, and, leaving off her slavish following of the roller, flung herself down on a stretch of field where it had already pa.s.sed, legs outspread, looking so flattened as she lay there, a mere pattern of black and white, that the roller might have pa.s.sed over her also. Archelaus stood leaning upon a favourite stick of Nicky's that he had taken from the hall, and commented shrewdly enough upon the affairs of the farm. He seemed suddenly to be showing a great interest in them, and during the days that followed this did not diminish. For all his years his wits seemed bright; only whenever the suggestion arose that he might be happier if he took up his quarters elsewhere his eyes seemed actually to film over like a bird's with the blankness that descended on them. Indeed, there seemed no real reason for getting rid of him. He was old and strange, but he behaved himself and played with the children, both Ruth's couple and little Jim; he was a huge success.

He ousted the grandfather--so much more vivid were his tales, so much more amusing the things he could do with a penknife and a bit of wood.