Secret Bread Part 46

He helped, too, to carry out "crowse"--the midmorning lunch--to the men, and he wandered about with the crowds of stray children and patted the unresponsive dogs, and was admired by the women and bored by them, and himself partook of big saffron buns, that Marjorie said would spoil his dinner, but that didn't. Nothing, he felt, could have spoilt anything that day.

With evening and the last whirring of the thresher Ishmael, watching him at play, felt, as he always had, that it is impossible to watch children without an ache for the inevitable pity of it that they should have to grow up. It was not, he felt, because they are particularly happy--for never again can there be griefs blacker than those which darken all a child's horizon, but simply because they stand for something beautiful which can never come again. Now, looking at Jim and the other children, he felt the old pity, but tinged with something new. For the first time he saw that it was only by realising that children were symbols, the mere pa.s.sing exponents of a lovely thing which was itself ever present, that it became possible to look at them without that aching. There would always be, he supposed, some people who could look at children and feel, not so much pity that these young things must age as self-pity that they themselves had lost childhood; but others looked as he always had, with a more impersonal pang, sorry that so beautiful a thing should fade. And it was for the comfort of such as he to realise that it did not matter in the least, because, though children grew up and away, childhood remained--a bright banner carried from hand to hand, always in a new grasp before the old one could tarnish it. More, he saw that it was this very evanescence which had for him given childhood its sadness that also gave it its beauty; if there were anywhere on earth a race of perpetual children it would not be beautiful. For he saw that it was the inevitable slipping-away of all life which gave poignancy to loveliness.

He spoke something of his thought to Lissa, and she nodded in comprehension.

"That's why no picture or sculpture can be as beautiful as the human model," she said, "not because of any necessary inferiority, but simply in the terrible permanence of man's work as compared with G.o.d's."

They stood a while longer side by side, and then Jimmy, who with the last whirring note of the thresher suddenly felt very tired, came and leant up against his grandfather. Ishmael stooped over the boy, and with a great heave, despite Marjorie's protests--she had come out to take her son to bed--he hoisted him up to his old bowed shoulder.

"Say good-night to the thresher," he told him. "You are going to bed, and it is going to bed too."

"Is it very tired?" asked Jimmy.

"Yes, nicely tired, like you when you have been running about all day."

"Not nasty tired like I am after lessons?"

"No, not nasty tired."

"Are you tired, Grandad?"

"Yes," said Ishmael.

"Nice tired or nasty tired?"

"Nice tired," said Ishmael; "old men and little boys both go nice tired."

"Like the thresher?" persisted Jimmy, and, receiving an answer that satisfied him, allowed his grandfather to carry him in to bed, though he could have gone in so much more quickly himself, for grandpapa could not run with him on his shoulder as his father could. But Jimmy was in no hurry, because every minute gained was a minute out of bed and in this wonderful world where threshers hummed and golden clouds wove themselves ceaselessly in the air.

Ishmael too felt very tired, as he had said; but, as he had also said, it was a pleasant tiredness. His day had been too full for thought other than of what was happening before his eyes. An exquisite sense of fitness, of something that was falling into place as everything in the history of the harvest had done, a sense as of gathered sheaves and stored grain, was with him, though sub-consciously. His brain felt filled with visual impressions, his old eyes held a riot of blue and gold, and a humming was still in his ears. As he closed his lids that night golden motes danced within them.

He sank off into sleep, and then drifted, half-awake again, to that state when the mind is not fully aware of where it is or of what has happened. It seemed to him, for one blurred moment, that he was a little boy again, falling to sleep on that evening when the Neck was cried ...; and then, out of the far past, came back to him the remembrance that it was at the Vicarage he had slept that night. Something told him he was not there now.... Vaguely, in the darkness, he put up his hand to feel if the plaster Christ were above his head. His groping old fingers found it, and he stayed, half-reared up against his pillows for an instant, while he touched the drooping head with its th.o.r.n.y crown, and on that familiar touch he let his hand fall, and with it fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

GARNERED GRAIN

The next morning he was found lying as though worn out suddenly, never to move or speak again. Only his brain was still alert as he lay there and watched them all from under his heavy lids. Three days he lay, and they could not even tell how much he understood, for he was past the effort that communicating with them would have meant; but all the while he was feeling his brain was clearer than it had ever been in his life, that at last he knew many things he could have told them if he could have spoken, only they were things that cannot be taught by one man to another, for every man must find them for himself.

At first it seemed to him he was floating very peacefully on a clear sea, untroubled in mind or body, though seeing he was drifting, because he was also aware that whither he was drifting was the inevitable direction of a kindly current. Then after a little or long while, he could not have told which, he seemed himself to become stationary, while past him flowed the pattern of his life as he remembered it--scenes grey and many-coloured, blurred at the edges, but sharp with an aching clarity at the core. They had all gone, these happenings, but it was not that which gave the poignancy; it was that the Ishmael who had taken part in them was gone too, and each had borne something of himself away with it.

Those first childish years after he had known Cloom was to be his, that he had to regenerate it; then those years at St. Renny ... Killigrew floated past him, joyous and pagan. There was Hilaria, joyous also ... he had forgotten her for years now. At St. Renny life was always just ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters.... In those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres. Yet even then there had been something else, some recognition of the fact that even this was not an end to itself alone.... Then youth--the first years at Cloom and that wonderful incursion into the London that was as past as he was, that London that had been half-wonder, half-nightmare, and that had held his love for Blanche. There had been a brief spell when he had told himself that this was the chief thing, that in that pa.s.sionate fusing of two spirits, that absorption in some one other loved being, lay the end in life, but the mirage had dissolved then even as the image of it wavered and faded now. While he was lost and groping in the wastes it had left him in, there swam up the memory of Hilaria again, but no horror went with it. And though this second impinging of her life on his bore the far-off memory of fear, yet it now seemed as vital and natural as the first. She had shown him something long ago which he was fully understanding now.

He pa.s.sed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it did not of necessity. He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now. He saw again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that physical pa.s.sion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from it, his effort to break away.

He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had strengthened--the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had whispered to him.... What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after?

He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that curtain. He went on pa.s.sing again through his life, and he saw the harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase, when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes and working out of them had filled the hours--still with Nicky as the chief personal interest.

In his childhood he had lived by what would happen in a far golden future, in his youth by what might happen any dawning day; but in his years of manhood, and from then till he began to feel the first oncoming of age, he had lived by what he did. Then he came again to Georgie, and saw how insensibly he had been won to softer ways, though never to the glamour-ridden ways of first youth. They had been sweet, those years, and the sweeter for the outside things--the friends.h.i.+p with Killigrew that had vivified his life, the pleasant intermittent times with Judith, the renascence of intimacy with Boase and the growth of his children, growing away from him every year, but none the less to be loved for that. What had he lived by during those years? Not, consciously, by anything, except a mere going on and a determination to make the best of things, to get the most out of everything. When the Parson died he had a glimpse of a world he had lost sight of since his youth, but not then could he give up this one sufficiently to do more than glimpse it.

And when Nicky was in South Africa he had suffered that second violent onslaught of the personal which racked him this way and that.

Va.s.sie--the horror that her death had held now seemed to him as empty of all save peace as Hilaria's. But all the while he had been living by what he found in that pa.s.sionate moment when he stood, a man of sixty, at the top of the hill above the seaward valley and had seen the rainbow arching over Cloom and the distant sea. Beauty, the actual joy of the world, that had been feeding his soul all the time, giving him those moments of ecstasy without which Killigrew had always said the soul could not be saved alive. From that moment the slope of the ten years down to the present seemed so swift that he found his vision of them less clear than of preceding periods. What of these last years, each of which was bringing him with, it seemed, such increasing momentum, towards the end?

And in a flash he saw what he had, all unknowingly, lived by since the decline of his powers had fallen upon swiftness, and he saw it as what alone makes life bearable. He had lived by the knowledge of death, by the blessed certainty that life could not go on for ever, that there must be an end to all the wanderings and pain, to all the dulnesses and unsatisfactory driftings, to all the joys that would otherwise fall upon sluggishness or cloy themselves. This it was that gave its fine edge to pleasure, its sweet sharpness to happiness, and their possible solace to pain and grief. He had lived, as all men do, knowingly or not, by death.

This was the secret bread that all men shared.

Again came that period of unconsciousness which corresponded to night, and the third day dawned. Again his brain felt of a crystal clearness; he was undistressed by the fact he could not speak to those around him or even return the pressure of their hands, for he was feeling all the old intoxicating joy of discovery at breaking into new lands. He even felt a mischievous elation that all this secret pageant, this retrospective wonder that was life, should be his to watch and enjoy, while all around thought him past emotion already.

If, then, men lived by death, what was death? Not a mere cessation--then a going-on.... He made no definite images of it in his mind, did not even wonder whether he should see those others he had known and loved who had pa.s.sed into these tracts before him. That seemed to him now, as it always had when he had thought of it, rather unimportant. What mattered, he had always known, was the adjustment of the soul to something beyond it, to which it and the whole of life stood in inextricably close and vital relations.h.i.+p. Those other relations.h.i.+ps, those other meetings, might be included in that as an added pleasure, but the other thing, if there at all, would necessarily be of such supreme importance as in its bright light to drown all minor effulgence.

And that it was there, always, in this world and the next, he knew, for he had always felt his soul breathe it as surely as his lungs had inhaled the free airs of the earth. That the first meeting with it might not be all happiness, that as, in the Parson's creed, inevitable pains would have to be worked through before the soul could be sufficiently purged to meet it clearly upon its ultimate levels, mattered very little. At least, the pains would be different pains, not the same old wearying ones of earth--the disappointments and the mortifications, the burning anxieties and the bitter losses, the overwhelming physical disasters, that everyone had to go through sooner or later.

It lay before him, not as a darkness, but a brightness, that he knew. He felt an exquisite easing, even of the very muscles of his stricken body, as he thought of it--a brightness which every soul went to swell, which gained a glowing, luminous pulse of light from each one that slipped into its s.h.i.+ning s.p.a.ces....

And with that came light on all that puzzled and tormented him since he had known the facts about Nicky, and the mere physical paternity of him seemed a small thing beside such light as this. That pa.s.sion of joy he had felt when he had heard of Nicky's coming had not been wasted: it had gone to make something in himself he would never otherwise have known; it had gone on in him as a living force, and had helped him to make Nicky what he was as much as one human being can make another. Archelaus had "won" in that Cloom would belong, though no man knew it, to his son and his grandson after him, but it no longer seemed to Ishmael to matter whether Archelaus "won" or not. There was at last no striving, no unacknowledged but hidden combat, no feeling of lingering unfairness.

Ishmael knew how, with all his elusiveness, Nicky had been very malleable, immensely open to impressions, to what was held before him, and he knew how different Nicky would have been if Archelaus had had the moulding of him. Just as even at this hour he was reverting to all he had learnt--more from watching and imbibing it than any other way--from Boase, so Nicky had absorbed from him what made him what he was. And yet, so till the end did the deep inherited instinct of the man who lives by land hold him, Ishmael took pleasure in the thought that, after all, Nicky was of Ruan blood.... So much of earth held by him as everything else began to slip away.

Then towards evening thought fell away too, leaving him only with what he had called to Jimmy a "nice tiredness." So do children feel after a day's play, so do old, old men feel after a life's work....

He was dimly but certainly aware that Nicky was beside his pillow, his hand upon him, that other figures were beyond, of Nicky's bent head, but in his drowsy mind it was confused with the head of the plaster Christ that had leaned forward from the wall behind and was drooping low over him. The hair fell softly over his eyes like the falling of a shadow, and under it he could see the Divine eyes, that had beamed at him now and again throughout his life, but never as brightly as in boyhood, smiling into his. He smiled back, and then, with a queer little apology in his mind, he turned his eyes away to take a last look at the soft dusk through the window.

Later, when Nicky had closed the sightless eyes, the young moon swam up upon her back. She who had just gone through her full round scarred maturity and died of old age was now virgin once again, with that renascent virginity some of the greatest courtesans have known, a remoteness of spirit, a chill freshness that is in itself eternal youth.

EPILOGUE

Jimmy Ruan went through the farmyard and climbed upon the gate that led into the field. He saw the big straw stacks that had been built up only four days ago at the time of the thres.h.i.+ng; he saw the black and sodden patch upon the turf where the steamy water had dripped ceaselessly, the ruts where the heavy thresher and the traction engine had driven deep into the soil. He saw, too, the last little scales of chaff, still palely golden, that had lain hidden till this frolicsome wind had come to whirl them up in one last mad dance before it lost them for ever. For it was a morning of clear and windy brightness, one of those first days of autumn which are also a last flicker of the summer.

The wind was everywhere--high in the flocculent clouds, low between the closest gra.s.s-blades; scattering the seeded flowers in the hedgerows, rippling under the tarpaulin covers of the stacks so that they seemed to be drawing deep breaths, twisting the golden straws upon the cobbled yard until they seemed to be playing together--playing mad games of wrestling, each slim golden combatant writhing from beneath his fellow at the last moment of contact. The wind lifted also the collar of Jim's tunic, making it flap about his rosy cheeks, and it sent streaming out the black silk tie that his mother had knotted there herself.

Jim put up his hand to make sure the black tie was still safe. He was sorry that his grandfather was what people called dead, but with his sorrow went a tiny thrill. Nothing so important had ever happened to Jimmy before. He wondered if he would be put into black altogether so that the other children he met would know he was in mourning.

He swayed back and forth upon the gate. First he pretended he was a soldier riding on horseback like his father had been in South Africa-on-the-map. Next he was a sailor in a storm at sea, and the wind was shaking his good s.h.i.+p under him, and the waves were mounting, high, high, as they often had over the s.h.i.+p of old Uncle Archelaus, whom he had met long ago.

Thought of the sea and sight of the tiny ripples on the surface of the horse-trough suggested a new game to him. He had been told to run away out of doors and not bother, so it was very quietly that he crept into the empty breakfast-room, which was also his playroom, and began to search in his toy chest for something he could pretend was a s.h.i.+p. With a cry of joy he pounced upon a walnut sh.e.l.l that lay tucked away in a corner. He sat upon his heels, the sh.e.l.l in his little brown hand. He was remembering that it was one his grandfather had cracked for him and made into a boat by the addition of matches for seats and mast. He loved it until his uncle Archelaus had made him a real boat of wood, and then he had thrown it aside and forgotten it. In this corner it must have lain ever since while he played with and broke the other s.h.i.+p of wood.

He took it out now into the sunny, windy yard and on into the lane, on the other side of which there was a tiny thread of water that trickled down the slope to the stream which raced along the bottom of the rock garden. Jim was not allowed to go down to the real stream by himself, so he stayed in the lane and carefully launched his recovered treasure upon the tiny rivulet. He watched anxiously--yes, it floated. He bent forward and poked with a twig to dislodge it from a tiny tangle of weed; then his foot slipped and he splashed his clean socks. Bother! He had promised not to be a nuisance. He soon was wetter still, and began to feel happier.

When the little boat was fairly caught in the current it went bobbing away out of his reach, and he saw it disappear in the pipe under the road. He pictured it emerging, being hurtled down to the real stream and then hurried upon that right out to sea.... He felt no pang at losing it in his excitement at its adventurous career. Soon he was busy upon other matters; he was by turns a pirate, an engineer who built a dam, and an airman who jumped off a boulder and had one intoxicating moment in mid-air.... Then for a while he played at being grandfather and lying still with his eyes shut.

But that was dull, and he was glad when he heard his mother's voice calling him in to dinner. He shook off the earth with which he had tried to besprinkle himself and scrambled up. It was dull being dead. He would never be dead, but he would be anything and everything else--when he was a man.