Secret Bread Part 45

Ishmael bent over to him, trembling, waiting, wondering.

"All these years I've tried to forget ..." said Archelaus, "and the Lard hasn't forgotten.... _Phoebe, Phoebe, keep the dog from off me!..._"

His voice cracked on arising scream. Then he fell into an exhausted silence, but his eyes still sought Ishmael's. Profoundly stirred, knowing that, at what was literally for him the last hour, Archelaus was agreeing to forego the full cup of his revenge, wondering why and yet too shaken to wonder intelligently, Ishmael called to him in sudden pa.s.sion:

"Archelaus ... brother! Try and think one thought of love, only one, don't think of your fear. There's nothing there to hurt you. There's only me and Nicky...." But Archelaus never spoke again. He lay and gazed as though he were struggling for speech; in his eyes struggled the tortured questioning of the inarticulate.

What it was that had struck home to his brother at the last Ishmael was never to know, but he recognised that in that minute's s.p.a.ce was all of remorse and understanding and forbearance, of a blind effort towards something not wholly self, that Archelaus had ever known. The dying man flung a failing hand out to Nicky, and his eyes were on him when what light still lingered in them faded and went out.

Nicky wanted to take Ishmael away, but the old man insisted on being left alone with his dead brother for a while, and when Nicky, determined not to go far or be more than a few minutes away, had left the room, Ishmael went to the fire and dropped the letters in it one by one. He watched them burn away, and then crossing over to the bed again he sat down slowly in the chair beside it.

Nicky had to send for the doctor, give the news to Marjorie, parry Jim's questionings; and when at last he went upstairs again it was to find Ishmael, in a deep sleep, slipped forward in his chair as though he had never left it, his head against the edge of the bed, so that the outflung dead hand of Archelaus almost touched his white hair.

CHAPTER V

REAPING

August came in hot and clear, all over the countryside the crops ripened well, and now, in the last quarter of the moon, they were ripe to cut.

Ishmael went down to the four-acre with Nicky to see the men at work, and Jim, who for days had been on the tiptoe of excitement over the advent of "the machine," as the binder was always called, ran in front of them.

The men had cleared a path some five feet wide all round the field with their scythes, and now the clattering thing, crimson painted, blatant, was going on with the work, and the great square of oats and barley stood up compact and close; while round and round it, diminis.h.i.+ng it every time, went the machine, drawn by three glossy horses harnessed unicorn fas.h.i.+on.

Up the slope of the field they went, heads nodding, swelling sides glistening in the sun, while Jimmy, proudly perched upon the leader, his legs sticking out straight on either side, chirruped an encouragement lost in the clatter. Up they came, till the three brown heads, the forelocks blown about their rolling eyes, were clear cut against the blue of the sea; then the man perched on his high iron seat tugged at the reins, and the three horses and the clamorous machine came swirling round the bend of the field and past the waiting knot of people. The huge wheel, made of flail-like pieces set horizontally on spidery arms, went thras.h.i.+ng round, scooping the standing corn on to the knife, which cut it and thrust it into the mysterious recesses of the machine in the twinkling of the blade. The next instant the bound bundle, neatly knotted round with string, was vomited forth on the far side....

So the machine--capable, crimson, noisy--went on its magic way with a glitter of whirling metal and a rhythmic clatter, the white blades of the wheel flas.h.i.+ng up against the sky. And a quiet little old man in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves and trousers all of a soft faded blue bent about in the stubble at its wake, leaning the bundles up, three together, against each other, the delicate heads interlacing, and the fresh green of the "lug"--the clover and other green things cut with the crop that make it so rich a food for the cattle--showing through the stems here and there.

"How d'you find it, John-w.i.l.l.y?" asked Ishmael of the little old man, who rolled an ear of barley in his h.o.r.n.y fingers and answered:

"Rich, Maister Ishmael, rich!..."

So it had come to the time of the harvest at Cloom, and the crops were sound and sweet, and, if the weather held, the thres.h.i.+ng would soon follow. Life and harvest went on as they had for years, and Ishmael saw that all things were done as they should be, and now the House had adjourned and Nicky had come down to help him. For this, after all, was life, Ishmael told himself--this seeing to the earth and her fulness, this dealing with men and their wages and their work. This was definite; about it there could be no illusion, no shattering of beliefs.

Nicky, who for all his years was still occasionally swept by the impulse to play, now when he saw Jimmy riding so triumphantly upon the leader stopped the machine as it came past, and, bidding the driver dismount, took his place upon the high iron seat and started off. Jimmy shrieked with delight, and urged on his horse so fast that Nicky had to shout to him to keep quiet. Jimmy kept on turning his head to see the completed bundles being emitted from the back of the binder, and at every one he gave a whoop of joy as though it were a result of his and his father's cleverness. Nicky cracked his whip neatly round the boy's head without ever touching him, as he had learnt to do in Canada, and every time the little group of men and women standing beside Ishmael, his tenants, applauded, admiringly. "They make a handsome pair, so they do!" said old John-w.i.l.l.y Jacka. "I reckon you'm rare proud of your son and grandson, Maister Ishmael!"

Ishmael nodded. His eyes were fixed on the two of them as they appeared up the slope--Jim coming in view first, so young and glowing against the sunlit blue of the sky, so small upon the big powerful horse; then Nicky, lean and handsome, his grave face lit to mirth, looking, with his slouch felt hat and bare neck and chest exposed by the loose open s.h.i.+rt he wore, like some brown G.o.d of the harvest--not a young deity of spring, but the fulfilled presentment of life at the height of attainment, at harvest.

Yet he had been as young as Jim, would be as old as himself--so thought Ishmael, with that impotency the watching of the flight of time evokes in the heart. To Ishmael it seemed such a mere flash as he looked back to the evening when the Neck had been cried in that field, and he had thought the moment so vivid it must last for ever. That moment seemed hardly further ago than when he had first broken his own earth in this field with his new iron plough. Neither seemed really long ago at all--time had gone too swiftly for that--yet both seemed very far away, not set there by period, but by being in another life. What seemed furthest away of anything was the morning last spring when he had sown these acres with the dredge-corn now being reaped, and when the figure of an old man in slaty-grey clothes had paused by the gate and stared across the farmyard.... Archelaus now lay in six feet of earth, while he himself still walked free upon these broad acres; and yet--what was it Archelaus had said? "It'll be I, and not you, who's living on at Cloom; 'tes my flesh and blood'll be there, so 'tes mine, after all...."

How much did that affect it? thought Ishmael now, as he watched for them to come round once more, and gave a nod and a wave of the hand as they breasted the slope. It was not, it occurred to him, not for the first time, but more deeply than ever before, as though Archelaus had been some stranger. He had built to make Cloom a good place for his descendants, for his flesh and blood, but the same blood ran in Nicky whether he or Archelaus had fathered him. Not one jot of it was different. And this, which to Archelaus, had he been in Ishmael's position, would have been the sharpest pang--which he had meant to be the sharpest--was to Ishmael the saving element. For it prevented Cloom being made in his eyes a thing of no account, the mere vehicle of strangers. Cloom was more to him than his dislike of Archelaus--that was what it amounted to. Nicky was more to him as himself than his idea of him as his son. Jim was everything to him as the future of Cloom, not as his grandson any more than that of Archelaus. But sons.h.i.+p struck more nearly than any matter of a generation twice removed, and not so simply as all that could the thing be harmonised with his groping soul. For he was still tormented by doubts as to whether all he had lived on and by must not be valueless since they were conceived on what did not exist, still feeling lost, without anything definite to hold to, without any solution of the riddle. He refused to believe that the whole riddle of life might be without an answer, that there could be no pattern, only a blind mingling of threads; that was a supposition everything in him, inborn and learned, failed to tolerate.

This summer had been a ghastly effort for him, who, for all his reserve, had never been any use at deception; he had felt as though he took about with him all day a sensation as of a hollow weight--something that bore him down and yet had no solidity, that was rather the nightmare heaviness of a dream. Also he was obsessed by the triumphant face of Archelaus that leered at him, that stared at Nicky and Jim with a deadly possessiveness in his eyes while they went their unconscious ways, that said, as plainly as words could have, "I have won ... I have won!..."

Life was not simple even at seventy, when such a mixture of motives and sensations could hold sway--the old fear of Archelaus crystallised into a definite writhing under this triumph of his, the aching sense of personal loss in his son, and, sharpest pang of any, the fear that all of life lay hollow behind and before.... Ever since Nicky's birth it had seemed to him that every revelation had come to him through his fatherhood of Nicky--ecstasies he had otherwise not touched.... Never, much as he loved his girls, could they have given him hours such as Nicky had; neither when Georgie had told him of the advent of each, nor at the time of birth, had there been for him the deep significance of the night when Phoebe had whispered to him.... There the fact that he could only feel a thing at its height for the first time had stepped in, preventing ever again a renewal of such ecstasy.

And what was ecstasy worth if based on a lie? Back to the old question he came, turning it over and over, aware of it in the back of his mind even when he was thrusting it sternly away from the forefront of his attention.

He turned it over again now as the clattering binder went round and round, diminis.h.i.+ng the square of waving gold, littering the stubble with swathes; and at every pa.s.sing of it he waved to Jimmy, even when the child had forgotten his presence and was showing off for the benefit of some newcomer in the little group. The machine was nearing the tall monolith of granite that stood up amid the corn, and Nicky was driving carefully so as not to sc.r.a.pe the flails against its stone side. High as he sat on his iron perch, it towered above him, and he turned the horses carefully round it with a swirl that made Jimmy shriek for pleasure. Jimmy leant sideways from his steed to try and slap the grey granite in pa.s.sing, but could not reach it save with the end of his little whip.

The last film of standing crop fell away from before the monolith, and it reared up grim and gaunt, but sparkling with a thousand little points of light as the bright flecks in the stone caught the sun. Nicky, who had grown rather tired of his freak, undertaken to please Jimmy, brought it, to an end with the successful negotiation of the monolith, and, getting down, went to lift Jimmy also from his perch.

"Dinner-time," he told him, and let him sit upon his shoulder, big boy as he was, to ride to the gate.

"Come along, father," said Nicky, slipping one hand upon Ishmael's arm, and keeping the other folded over the slim brown ankles crossed against his chest; "I promised Lissa I wouldn't let you tire yourself."

They set off towards the house, the three of them, but it was Nicky who answered Jim's eager talk as they went, and Ishmael who in silence tried to answer his own thoughts. To one thing only he clung just then, with a blind, almost superst.i.tious, clinging, and that to his determination to taste every moment of this harvesting, to see that everything was done in the way he liked, to watch the rhythmic procession of it while yet he could say that it was all his own. Physically also he had not been the same man these months since the death of Archelaus. With his uncertainty of mind as to the whole meaning of life went a feeling of insecurity about everything. Often he had to keep a firm hold on himself not to cry aloud that the world was slipping, slipping....

When the corn was all built into the great arishmows that stood bowing towards each other like the giant dancers in some stately minuet, he was there to watch. All day he went from field to field and watched the strong young labourers building; those on the ground tossing to those on the stooks, while the air was full of a deep rustling. One man would crawl about on the growing mow, arranging each sheaf as it was tossed up to him, so that its feathery crown lay towards the centre, away from chance of rain. At last it was all finished--all the precious grain tucked away out of possible harm in the heart of the arishmows, save for the feathery bunch at the crest that fastened all off with a flourish.

It had been a lovely task, the building of the arishmows, for, like all work to do with the land, it was the perfection of rhythm, and this, added to the unending flow of tossing and packing, held always that lovely rustling of stalk and ear as an accompaniment of music to the action.

Not many days later and the stately arishmows were destroyed and the sheaves brought in on waggons and built into great stacks in the field which lay next to the farmyard, where the thres.h.i.+ng would take place.

There was a pile of the dredge-corn, another of deeply-golden oats, a third of the greyer-tinted wheat, which was a little smaller than the other two, though that also was as high as the roof of the barn.

In the cleared s.p.a.ce between the stacks the great steam thresher would be brought; but now the men who would help in that work were still all part of the weaving pattern of stacking; one man tossed from the high-piled waggon, another, on the highest point of the growing stack, caught it with his pitchfork and threw it on, with a sideways twist, to the man on the lower end who got further and further along as he packed the sheaves, so that the thrower had to increase the tangent of his twist at every throw. Each of the men caught and tossed and placed, always to the moment, with the unending flow of machinery. And again --so often before, but never so keenly as now--was Ishmael struck with the pattern of it all.... This could not surely be the only thing that moved so rhythmically towards harvest; this inevitable flow, this deeply necessary procession of events, of sowing and ripening, of cutting and building and thres.h.i.+ng, must surely hold its counterpart in the garnering of men's lives ...; or did they alone reap the whirlwind, and when the swirl of that was past, subside into formless dust?

CHAPTER VI

THREs.h.i.+NG

That day had come to which the whole of the farming year leads up--the day of the thres.h.i.+ng, when the grain is at last released from danger and made ready to be stored in barns, to be ground in mills. "Guldise," as it is still called in West Cornwall, is an epic occasion, when all the months, from the first breaking of the land to the piling of the reaped sheaves, culminate at the apex of achievement.

In the field, between the waiting stacks, was the thresher; the traction-engine which had dragged it there stood beyond, only harnessed to it now by the long driving-belt that would, when the time came, make of the thresher a living creature. Presently all the men began to arrive, not only the labourers who always worked on the Manor farm, but the men from the neighbouring farms, from those owned by Ishmael and from others, for every thres.h.i.+ng is a festival with a great dinner and refreshments in the field and good cheer, even for the crowds of children and stray dogs that always turn up out of nowhere. In the kitchen the maids were busy with the preparations for the dinner, and in the breakfast-room even Lissa, always late, was hurrying through her breakfast so as to go out and start work on the series of quick sketches she meant to do of the thresher at work and the groups around it.

Lissa was a young-looking woman for her thirty-five years, no more pretty than she had ever been, but graceful, and with a strong charm in her lazy voice and long grey eyes and in the mouth that was so like Georgie's, only less regular. Her chin and jaw had the clear sharpness of Ishmael's; she was far more like him both in character and aspect than the sweet round Ruth, and Ishmael had grown to feel more and more that no matter how long a time elapsed between the occasions when he and Lissa saw each other, yet they could always pick up where they had left off, that there was never need for more than half-sentences between them. She, who was supposed to be the selfish one of the family because she lived in London most of the year and seldom wrote--she was still the only member of the household who had known something was wrong with Ishmael. She had found him uncommunicative on the subject, but she watched him with her clear understanding eyes that always made him think her so restful.

"Come on, do Auntie Lissa!" urged Jim. "It's begun; I can hear it."

"So can I," said Lissa drily; for the great moaning hum of the thresher filled the air, went on and on as it would all day except at food-times, sounding like some vast wasp held captive and booming unceasingly--some great dragon of a wasp, as Jimmy put it.

They went out together, but Lissa insisted on going to find grandpa first and helping him on with his light coat; then they all three went out across the farmyard and through the open gate into the field.

The thresher stood humming and palpitant, its great bulk painted a dull pinkish colour like a locust, but faded and stained with rust. Upon its trembling roof the piles of oats, thrown by the men on the stack alongside, showed a pure golden; above the sky was dazzlingly blue, and in it the white c.u.muli rode brilliantly. The men working on the top of the thresher showed bronzed against the luminous blue, their s.h.i.+rts as brightly white as the clouds, the shadows under their slouched hats lying soft and blue across their clear eyes.

Poised on the stacks the men were busy feeding the sheaves to the men on the thresher, who in their turn tilted them into the great concave drum in its hidden heart. From one end poured out steady streams of golden grain, into the hanging sacks that boys took away as they filled, bringing in their place empty sacks that hung limply for a minute and then began to fill, swelling and puffing out to sudden solidity. The sieves beneath the thresher shook back and forth, back and forth, tirelessly, while chaff poured away from the open jaws at the side in a fine dusty column of pale gold, from which the topmost husks blew up into the air, so that it was always filled with a whirling cloud that danced and gleamed in the sunlight like a swarm of golden bees.

At the far end of the thresher, away from the traction-engine, the fumbling lips of the shakers, mouthing in and out beneath their little penthouse, pushed out the beaten straw into the maw of an automatic trusser, which Ishmael had only bought that year and which he was watching eagerly. For one moment the formless tumble of straw, pushed out by those waggling wooden lips above, was lost in the trusser, then it shot forth below in bound bundles that had been made and tied by the hidden hands of the machinery within, to the never-ceasing wonder of the gaping children, who stared at the solemnly revolving spools of string in the little pigeon-holes on either side and from them back to where the string was perpetually disappearing, sucked into the interstices of the trusser, as though, if only they stared hard enough, they must eventually see how the miracle was accomplished. And from the ground yet more men picked up the bundles on their pitchforks and tossed them to men who were building the straw-ricks at the same time as the corn-stacks were diminis.h.i.+ng. Little boys bore away the chaff gathered into sacks or swept it into a golden pile, feather-soft, from which smoke-like whirls wreathed in the little breezes.

In line with the thresher stood the engine, looped to it by trembling curves of driving-belt, that wavered like a great black ribbon from the driving-wheel of the traction-engine to that of the thresher, and that showed a line of quivering light along its edge. A trail of dark smoke blew ceaselessly from the traction-engine, staining the blue of the sky, against which it faded and died away. The engine rocked a little unceasingly upon its wheels as it stood, even as the thresher did, and its governor whirled round and round like a demented spirit, so fast that its short arms with the blobs on their ends made a little dark circle in the air. A pool of steamy water lying in the gra.s.s beneath the waste-pipe gave off white wreaths that wavered upwards and fell again, while from a huge black b.u.t.t upon wheels the greedy boiler sucked up more and more through a coiling tube that glittered like a serpent.

It was dark, ugly, smelly, the traction-engine, but it was what endowed the murmurous thresher with life. In spite of its dirt and oil and dripping secretions, it kept going that wonderful life which was filling the world, the rising and falling hum, the streams of pouring grain, the swelling sacks, the great glossy bundles of straw, the blown column of chaff, the cloud of dancing golden magic bees that made of the air an element trans.m.u.ted, glorified.

With all the thres.h.i.+ngs he had seen, it seemed to Ishmael that he had still never seen any quite so wonderful, so radiant, so rich to eye and ear and nostril, as this; and to little Jimmy, who had never been there for guldise before, it was a golden miracle. He stood, silent for once, transfixed, fronting the wondrous monster who did so many different things at once with such perfect ease, never making a mistake or getting out of time....