Secret Bread Part 26

That his instinct had always been to fight the intrusion of the personal, that still it was so to the extent of a deadly clearness of vision which prevented him thinking the affair of greater importance than it was, did not prevent one shade of his pain; rather it was the more acute for raging in spite of himself. He was powerless to do anything but set his teeth and a.s.sure himself that it would eventually pa.s.s. He looked at his suffering as a man may look at a broken leg: he sees it stretched helpless before him; the pain from it ravages his whole sense, but it is local, so that he can lay his hand upon it and look from it to uninjured portions of his being which are yet unconscious of immunity, so much is his whole sense occupied with the one suffering portion.

Meanwhile Ishmael set himself to believe, or rather to realise--for he never lost his feeling for values sufficiently ever to believe otherwise--that all this would one day fall from off him; he even thought that then he would be as he had been before, not yet knowing that pain never leaves a man as it found him--that freshness of emotion lost in any direction, it can never be recaptured. Meanwhile, now and again, for all his philosophy, he was occasionally guilty of adding to the sum of his own pain by deliberately indulging in it. There were evenings when he fell on weakness and allowed himself to go over the fields at dark to Paradise, where he would stand at the point in the hedge whence he had been wont to watch her light. One evening there was a light in her window, and his heart had thudded in his chest so that he could have heard it had he been occupied in anything but clutching the hedge with both hands and staring, half-expecting a miracle to happen and her form to be shadowed on the blind at any moment. Sometimes, too, as he lay in his bed after a hard day's work and sleep would have come to him had he let it, he would start imagining, as he had been wont to do when a little boy. Only now it was not mere cloudy, impossible dreams of renown, of rescuing the whole family from a burning house, that filled his mind, but reconstructions of the time with Blanche.... If he had said this or that, something different from what he had said; if only, if only.... And if she were to come back, how he would forget all he had said about it being impossible to go on as they were in uncertainty--how willingly would he catch at any excuse for trying it all over again. He would plan that too, till sometimes his vivid imaginings would for a few moments almost deceive himself, and he would realise, with a pang whose sharpness turned him sick and banished sleep, that it was all only the pretence of a child.

Nevertheless, he did not succ.u.mb to the temptation to write to her, probably because in his inmost heart he knew too well that if she wanted him she would write--on some other excuse. He had been in a curious way clear-sighted about her from the first; he had always acknowledged that strain of insincerity, but he had fallen into the error of believing that underneath all those s.h.i.+fting sands there was at last bedrock and that it was his hand which was to discover it. He now knew that it was nothing but sands, and a quicksand at that, yet the knowledge made the death of his love no easier. Love cannot be killed--it always dies a natural death; and natural deaths are slow processes. Of all the things Blanche had said to him one at least was very true, and that was on a day when he had been telling her the many reasons why he loved her. Her mouth, her eyes, her soul, her voice, it had been the usual lover's medley. She had listened, and then perhaps, with the knowledge in her heart that disillusionment was bound to be his, said:

"There's only one safe reason for loving anyone, Ishmael, and that is--'because I am I and you are you!'... Love a person for beauty or brains or virtues, and they may all fail--there's only the one reason that may be trusted not to change." And that was, of course, precisely why he had loved her, and why the love died harder than the reasoned loves of older years which respond to reasoning.

Affairs at home were not likely to provide a pleasurable change for Ishmael's thoughts. Va.s.sie, it was true, meant more to him, as he to her, than ever before. The pain that Va.s.sie had suffered when Killigrew had left after his first visit, though not comparable to Ishmael's, being disappointment and hurt vanity, yet had dowered her with a degree of comprehension she might otherwise have missed. She felt she loved this young brother more dearly than she had ever thought to; something of the maternal awoke in her; she helped him in many little ways he did not notice, getting between him and their mother's tongue, exerting herself to make the affairs within the house run more smoothly. She was proud of her youngest brother, of his unlikeness to the rest, even of the aloofness and fits of dreaming which she no more than the others understood, but which she was sufficiently in advance of them to revere instead of scorning. She was more like him than she knew, though in her ambition had taken harder and more personal form.

With the spring Annie became unbearable. Archelaus had suddenly gone off again, after his fas.h.i.+on, this time to the goldfields of California, and Annie, who felt his departure bitterly, chose to blame Ishmael for it.

Christmas had been for her the occasion to revive all her religious frenzies, and the house rang with her cracked-voiced hymns till Ishmael felt he could have smothered her with her own feather-bed. Her l.u.s.t for religion, however, was taking a new direction--it was towards the Parson and his church instead of the conventicle of Mr. Tonkin. Quite what had brought about this change was hard to say--probably chiefly the infatuation of Tonkin for Va.s.sie, a circ.u.mstance Annie took as an insult to herself.

"A man on in years like him, oldern' I be myself, and a minister before the Lard, ought to have other things to think on than wantoning with his thoughts after a maid young enough to be his daughter! Where's his religion, I should like to knaw?" This was Annie's own explanation, and even she realised that against Boase no charge of thinking about women could be brought--that quality of priesthood even her ignorance unconsciously admitted. She approached Boase on the subject of his creed and met with scant encouragement, which made her the more earnest. If the Parson had been anxious to receive her into the path he trod, she would have lagged; as it was, his brusqueness awaked a sensation of pleasure in her--there was no male to snub and bully her now that Archelaus had gone away. She set up to herself the image of Boase that some more educated women make of their doctor--a bully who had to be placated, who would scold her if she transgressed his ideas. She took to going to church every Sunday evening and sat in the Manor pew, every jet bead trembling on her bonnet as she kept her mind strained to attention--always a difficult task with her for any length of time.

One wet afternoon Va.s.sie found she was not in the house, though when she had slipped out no one could say. Ishmael, alarmed--for nothing could have been more unlike Annie's habits--was about to set out in search of her, when the kitchen door was thrust open and slammed again and Annie stood before them, soaking with wet, her arms clasping a bundle of little books and a light of sly triumph in her eyes. Boase, shutting a dripping umbrella, was behind her. She had been across to the Vicarage in all the wet and cold to make the Parson talk to her about her soul, and to get rid of her he had finally given her a host of little cheap devotional books that had from time to time been sent to him from the publishers, and which he himself, disliking most modern books of devotion, had not troubled to read. He knew they were suited to the mentality of the average child of ten, and that therefore Annie with an effort might understand them and would certainly think them full of the Spirit.

He stood behind Annie, grave and quiet, signalling to Ishmael and Va.s.sie with his eyes. Va.s.sie sprang forward.

"Why, Mamma, you're soaked!" she cried. "Come! it's up to the bed you must go at once, and I'll bring you a hot drink when you're undressed.

You can look at your books better in bed, you know."

"That's a true word," said Annie; "so I can. I can have 'en all around me on the bed, can't I, Va.s.sie? I'll take en up, though; don't you touch en, I fear you'm nought but an unconverted vessel, and I won't have 'ee touchen my books."

a.s.suring her she should have it all her own way, Va.s.sie got her out of the room and upstairs, while Katie heated water for a stone bottle to be put at her feet. Ishmael and Boase went into the parlour and sat down with grave faces.

"I don't understand it at all, Padre," said Ishmael. "This isn't a bit like her. Of course, she's always been funny, but she's never done a thing like this."

"It may be nothing but her annual attack of salvation," said the Parson drily. "I shouldn't worry about it if I were you; only keep an eye on her. She's not as young as she was, and it won't do her any good to be running about getting wet through."

"She'll never listen to anything I say."

"Well, Va.s.sie seems able to manage her all right. She's a most capable girl, that!"

"She is indeed," said Ishmael, pleased at praise of his sister, whom he knew Boase as a rule was apt to criticise silently rather than admire.

"I don't think my life here would be possible without Va.s.sie. There are times when I feel I want to take mother's head and knock it against the wall. It sounds awful, but it's true. I want to knock it and hear the crunch it would make. There! But you can't think what it's like sometimes. One's soul is thrown at one, so to speak, morning, noon, and night. I don't believe it's a good thing, anyway, to be always taking one's soul out to feel its pulse. Except that mother's uneducated and ignorant about it, she reminds me very much of a woman at that vicarage in Somerset I used to go to sometimes in the holidays. She was the aunt of the family and was what she called a deaconess. It's a sort of half and half thing, not like a Sister of Mercy exactly...."

"A Cousin of Mercy, shall we say?" suggested the Parson. "I think I once met the lady and I know what you mean. She had rows of little books, hadn't she?"

"Yes, and thought it was the sin against the Holy Ghost if she missed saying what she called her Hours. I'm sorry to be profane, but she did annoy me so though I was only a youngster. And now mother seems to be getting very like it. I wouldn't mind a bit if it made her happy, but it doesn't, not a bit of it."

"Nothing would make your mother happy--she wouldn't think it right; but she's only like a lot of women in that. The evils of Puritanism seem to have taken a deeper root in women than in men, and in some it has kept on cropping up generation after generation. Your mother is a born Puritan, which is why I wish her to stay a Wesleyan. There is no more arduous combination than the Puritan by instinct labouring under acquired Catholicism. I am a bad missionary, I suppose, but I have seen too much of these women."

"Women make such a fuss about nothing!" complained Ishmael.

"What has always seemed to me the mistake about the religious life as it is lived to-day," said Boase, "is the overweening importance given to trifles. The distortion of the sweeping-a-room-to-the-glory-of-G.o.d theory. If the mind is properly attuned to the spiritual sphere temporal things should lose significance, not gain them. I don't mean that we must leave off seeing to them--that would result in our all lying down, shutting our eyes, and starving ourselves gently into futurity. I mean that we should do the things, and do them well; because they are of such an insignificance they may just as well be done right as not. Get yourself into the habit of was.h.i.+ng dishes so well that instinctively you are thorough over the job, and you won't have to think about it while you do it. But the self-consciousness put into mundane affairs by the average religious beats the worldly person hollow."

"They dissipate their secret bread into crumbs, in fact," said Ishmael with a laugh.

The Parson nodded. "Exactly--and stale crumbs at that. I wonder--it's easy to judge after all, and, as I once tried to tell you, it means something different to every man. Tolerance--the deeper tolerance which is charity ... if life doesn't teach one that, it's all been so much waste. Who am I and who is anyone to despise the means by which another man lives? Some of us find our relief in action, in the actual sweat of our bodies; some find it in set hours and rows of little devotional books--the technique of the thing, so to speak. And some of us find it out of doors and some within narrow walls--some find it in goodness and some only by sin and shame.... One shouldn't let other people's salvation rub one up the wrong way."

"It all goes to make the pattern, as Killigrew would say," suggested Ishmael thoughtfully.

"When I was very young," went on Ishmael after a pause, "I think I lived by the Spirit--much more so than I can now, Da Boase. I seem to have gone dead, somehow," Boase nodded, but said nothing. "And then it was Cloom that meant life to me when I came back here and started in on it.

Then it was love!"

He spoke the word baldly, looking away from the Parson. "Then it was love!" he repeated; "and now it's just emptiness, a sort of going on blindly from day to day. It's as though one were pressing through dark water instead of air, and one could only struggle on and let it go over one's head and hope that some time one will come out the other side."

"Don't forget," said Boase gently, "that no one can see a pattern when he is in the middle of it. It all seems confused and without scheme while we are living in the midst of it; it's only on looking back that we see it fall into shape."

"And does it, always?"

"I firmly believe so. It rests with us to make it as beautiful a pattern as possible, but a pattern it is bound to make. And a terribly inevitable one, each curve leading to the next, as though we were spiders, spinning our web out of ourselves as we go...."

"I suppose so," said Ishmael listlessly. Boase looked at him keenly. He could hardly believe that Cloom meant nothing to Ishmael; he was certain that there balm must eventually be found. He glanced out of the window, and saw that the rain had left off and a still pallor held the air.

"Come out for a turn with me," he suggested. "I haven't seen you go beyond the fields for ages. Your mother'll be all right now."

Ishmael hesitated, then picked up a stick, and went out with the Parson.

Boase had wondered much how deeply Ishmael had been hurt by the defection of Blanche, and it had been difficult for him to ascertain, as the young man's reserve was not of the quality which all the time tacitly asks for questioning. On the surface he had shown no trace, except by a sudden ageing that was probably temporary; there had been, as far as Boase knew, no outbreaks of rage or pain. Now he began to suspect that it was taking a worse way--an utter benumbing of the faculty of enjoyment. Never since Ishmael's earliest boyhood had beauty failed to rouse him to emotion, and the Parson wondered whether it could fail now. At least it was worth trying, and it was not without guile that he had proposed this walk; he knew of something he meant to spring upon Ishmael as a test. He led, as though casually, to a wild gorge that lay on the way to the Vicarage, but nearer the sea than the commonly-used path, which here looped inland to avoid it. A stream, half-hidden by heavy growths of bracken and hemlock and furze, raced down this gorge to the pebbly beach, where it divided up into a dozen tiny streams that bubbled and trickled to the sea's edge. All down the gorge great hummocks of earth had been thrown up at some giant upheaval of the land's making, and over their turfy, furze-ridden slopes granite boulders were tumbled one against the other. In the treacherous fissures between brambles and bracken had grown thickly; over everything else except the bare rocks the furze had spread in a dense sea that followed the curves of the slopes and stretched on up over each side of the gorge. Everything was grey--pearly grey of the sky, grey-green of the turf, brown-grey of last year's undergrowth, cold grey of the boulders--everything except the gorse; and it was this that had caused the Parson to catch his breath and stand amazed when first he came upon it as at too much of beauty for eyes to believe--that caught at him again now though he was expecting it. He and Ishmael rounded the end of the valley, mounted a slope, and stood with all the length and sweep of the gorge rolling around them.

By some freak of soil or aspect every tuft of the low-lying cus.h.i.+on gorse that covered the slopes and hummocks as far as the eye could see was in full bloom, not a dry bush to be seen--bloom so thickly set that hardly a green p.r.i.c.kle was visible; bloom of one pure vivid yellow, undimmed in the distance, unmarked to closest view, a yellow that was pure essence of that colour untinged by any breath of aught else. The air reeked with the rich scent; the greyness of sky and land became one neutral tone for the onslaught of those pools of flaring molten gold that burnt to heaven with their undestructive flame. And every ardent sheet of it had a grape-like bloom, made by the velvety quality of the thousands of close-set petals; they gave the sensation of exquisite touch merely by looking at them, while their pa.s.sionate colour and scent made the senses drunken on pure loveliness.

That was how it had taken Boase--how in normal days it would have taken Ishmael, even more keenly. Now he stood staring at it, hardly seeing, untouched to anything but a bleak knowledge that it was beautiful. Not a breath of ecstasy went through him; for him it was nothing, and he never even noticed that Boase was watching him. He moved forward as though to continue the walk, and the Parson fell into stride beside him.

Something in Ishmael was dead, and in dying it had for the time being stunned what Boase could only hope was a more vital and permanent part.

Ishmael said good-bye at the Vicarage and went home again, his mind floating through greyness even as his body was pa.s.sing through the grey of the weather and surroundings. At home he found John-James waiting to consult him about the breaking up of a gra.s.s-field, and harnessing the horse to the iron-toothed tormentor, he took it out himself and spent the rest of the day driving it over the tumbling clods.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CLIFF AND THE VALLEY

A month later Annie's religiosity, which had been increasing in violence, unmistakably took the form of mania. She became very violent, and for her own sake as much as for her family's she was removed to a doctor's establishment for such cases in Devons.h.i.+re. The whole affair left the three at home very untouched--John-James because he was of a stolid habit, Va.s.sie because she was never in sympathy with her mother and had borne much from her of late, and Ishmael because it seemed to him to have really no more to do with him intimately than if she had been a stranger woman living in his house. Both he and Va.s.sie felt guiltily on the subject, not realising that reaction from strain was at the bottom of their seeming impa.s.sivity. To be able to take definite action instead of having merely to put up with the thing day by day was, when it came, a blessing to both of them, although it took what might conventionally have been a.s.sumed to be such a terrible shape. They were both very honest people, their strongest quality in common, and kept up no pretence even in outward appearance, unlike most people who keep it up even to themselves. They hardly spoke of the matter beyond making the necessary arrangements, and when Va.s.sie had a fit of weeping in her room it was for the mother she remembered from her childhood, the mother of stormy tendernesses that nevertheless were sweet to her at the time, and whom she thought of now instead of letting her mind dwell on the woman who had been growing more and more distorted these last few years.

Nevertheless the fabric of their daily lives was torn up, and Ishmael began to see that things could not go on as they were. Va.s.sie badly needed not only a rest, but a complete change and new interests; she had been living a life of strain lately, and her vigorous personality, unaccustomed to being swamped in that of others and only forced to it by her strong will, began to a.s.sert its needs. For the first time her bloom showed as impaired--something of her radiance had fled. Ishmael saw it, and knew that her affection for him would prevent her telling him as long as flesh could bear it. A Va.s.sie grown fretful was the last thing he wanted, and her marred bloom hurt him; he always, in some odd way, looked on Va.s.sie as a superior being even when he saw her little faults in style--so much more devastating than faults of character--most clearly. It somehow got itself settled that Va.s.sie was to take a charming though impoverished maiden lady, whom the Parson had known for years in Penzance, as chaperon, and was to go and spend the summer at some big seaside place such as she delighted in. Va.s.sie seemed to glow afresh at the mere notion, at the feel of the crisp bank notes which Ishmael gave her, and which represented all the old ambitions that swelled before her once more like bubbles blown by some magic pipe. She departed in a whirl of new frocks and sweeping mantles and feathery hats, and a quietness it had never known settled upon Cloom.

For the first few days, even a week or so, Ishmael enjoyed it. The scenes with Annie had been violent enough to fray the nerves more than he knew, but they had done him the service of putting other thoughts out of his head for the time being. Now these thoughts came back, but, as the days wore on, with a difference.

In his relations with Blanche the physical side had been hardly counted by him; he had felt pa.s.sion for the first time, but so refined by his boy's devotion that he had not given it place. He had been so aware of what she must have had to confront from other men, and had besides thought her so much younger than she was, that the idea of desire in connection with her, though in the nature of things not entirely eliminated, had yet been kept by him in the background even to himself.

He had loved Blanche as unselfishly as only a woman or a boy can love, and now he began to suffer from it in a manner he had not at the time.

In London he had never felt any temptation to go with Killigrew when that young man frankly announced his intention of making a night of it with some girl he had picked up at the Cafe Riche or Cremorne; distaste had been his dominant instinct, yet many of the suggestive things he had apparently pa.s.sed through unscathed came crowding back on him now. When he was not actually driving himself to physical labour his mind would fill with pictures that he was able to conjure up without knowing how; sometimes Blanche would partner him in those imaginings, sometimes some stranger woman of his invention. He felt ashamed of these ideas, but that did not prevent them coming, and sometimes he would deliberately give way and allow himself hours to elaborate them, from which he would rouse himself worn out and fevered. From these mental orgies he would feel so intense a reaction of disgust that he knew how keenly he would feel the same if he gave way actually, in some hidden house by Penzance harbour, where men that he knew sometimes went. Physical satisfaction and the fact that Nature had been allowed her way would not have saved him from the aftermath, and he did not delude himself that it would. He looked sometimes at John-James, sitting so placidly opposite him at meals, and wondered about him, whether his physical nature did not perhaps follow his mental and remain untroubled. Yet this thing seemed in every man.... He wondered, but never asked, and, by dint of hard work and a resolute cleansing of his mind, kept the thing at bay.

The summer was a singularly perfect one, and the contrast between its emptiness and that time only a year ago when he came down from London and was expecting Blanche to follow, p.r.i.c.ked him at every turn. He felt convinced he no longer cared for Blanche; he was regaining interest in the world without, but she had left this legacy of reaction behind her.

He told himself that this too must be borne with, but all the time his youth and natural disposition to get all that was possible out of life were preparing him for fresh enterprise. He could no longer be happy over nothing but the sheer joy of life, yet simple pleasures began to appeal to him once more, as Boase noted thankfully. The daily expectation, that absurd delicious hope, that "something" would happen, had not yet deserted him, and once again he began to live on it.