Secret Bread Part 14

As Ishmael drove him from Penzance through the warm, clear May afternoon Killigrew waxed enthusiastic with appreciation of what he saw.

"Anyone living here should be perfectly happy," he declared. "I don't wonder you've never wanted to leave. It has more to it, so to speak, than our old country round St. Renny."

For a moment Ishmael made no reply; it was the first time it had occurred to him it would be possible to leave Cloom, and though he knew that up to now he had not wanted to, yet he was not quite pleased that Killigrew should take it so for granted. He sent his mind back over the years since he had seen his friend, comparing what had happened to himself with all that happened to Killigrew as far as he could imagine it--which was not very far. Killigrew was the more changed; his beard and the lines of humour--and other things--round his eyes, made him seem older than his twenty-two years, but it was more the growth in him mentally that had been so marked as to suggest that he had changed. This was not so, as the alterations had all marched in inevitable directions--it could not have been otherwise in one who lived so by his instincts as Killigrew, and held them so sacred. He had not changed, but he had developed so far that to Ishmael he seemed disconcertingly altered.

"It's all right for me," said Ishmael at last, "but I expect you'll find it dull after Paris. It must all be so different over there."

"Oh, Paris is Paris, of course, and unlike anything else on earth. It is not a place as much as a state, which is one of its resemblances to heaven. You see I haven't forgotten all my theology."

"I sometimes think," announced Ishmael, firmly believing what he was saying, "that it's time I went about a bit. To London and Paris ... the place can get on quite well without me for a bit."

"My son, be advised by me," said Killigrew gaily; "for good little boys like you this is a better place than gay, wicked cities. Of course, I'm not good--or bad either; it's a distinction that doesn't mean anything to me--but I have to be in Paris for my painting. Can you imagine it, I've been with Diaz and Rousseau? And there's a young fellow who's coming on now that I've seen a lot of called Lepage--Bastien Lepage, who's going to be a wonder. I can tell you, sometimes when I think of the dear old Guv'nor's business, and how he had set his heart on my going into it, I can hardly believe it's true that I've been there, free to do my own work, with those men...."

Killigrew's voice sounded younger in its enthusiasm, more as it had in the old days when he used to speak of Turner.

"I'll bet you're going to be as great as any," cried Ishmael, the old sense of potencies that Killigrew's bounding vitality had always stirred in him awaking again. "How we all used to talk at St. Renny about what we'd do ... d'you remember?"

"Rather. And it's most of it coming true. I was to be a painter and old Carminow a surgeon. I've just heard he's at the Charing Cross hospital."

"And Polkinghorne major? D'you know anything about him? Did he get into his Highland regiment?"

"I heard about him at St. Renny from the old bird. I stopped there last night, you know, to break this devil of a journey. I tell you, Ishmael, it's less of a business getting over to Paris than down here."

"What did Old Tring say about everyone? How was he?"

"Just the same, only thinner on top and fatter below. He told me about Polkinghorne. He went to Italy the year you left, you know. Well, Old Tring told me while he was still there the war broke out, and he enlisted under Garibaldi and was killed in a skirmish just when peace was settled."

There was a second of silence--not because Ishmael had any feeling for Polkinghorne beyond a pleasant liking, but because it was the first time the thought of death as an actuality instead of a dreamlike hypothesis had ever struck home to him. Then he said: "Poor old Polkinghorne ... but he was hardly older than us. It doesn't seem possible anyone like us can be dead...."

He pushed the thought away from him and soon was listening to Killigrew's tales of Paris, some of which were so obviously meant to startle him that he kept to himself the fact that they succeeded.

Awkwardness died between them, and when he turned in up the new drive--still only half-made, but the whole scheme of it clear--Ishmael could glow at the other's admiration of his home.

If he could show off Cloom without a qualm, however, it was not the same when it came to displaying his family, and never had he been so thankful for Va.s.sie's beauty as when he saw Killigrew's notice of it. And how that beauty glowed for Killigrew! Even a brother's eyes could not but admire. Phoebe sat unnoticed, her charm swamped in that effulgence.

Annie's querulous remarks faded through sheer pride into silence. The Parson, a welcome addition, arrived for supper; greasy Tonkin, inevitable though not so greatly a source of pleasure, drove over from Penzance and sat absorbing Va.s.sie, so to speak, at every pore.

Supper was going off well, thought Ishmael, as he watched Killigrew eat and laugh, and listened to his talk that could not have been more animated--so reflected Ishmael in his relief--if Va.s.sie had been a d.u.c.h.ess. Under the brightness the tension, so common to that room that it had become part of it, evaporated, and yet what, after all, was it that achieved this miracle? Nothing in the world but ordinary social intercourse between young and gay people who met as equals, intercourse such as poor Ishmael had never known under his own roof before.... And they all made a fuss of him: John-James actually said something approving, if difficult to follow, about his farming; Va.s.sie beamed on him not only for his friend's sake; the Parson drew him out--he felt himself a host, and responded to the sensation.

Killigrew was just drawing upon the tablecloth, unreproved of Annie, a sketch of a fashionable Parisian lady for Va.s.sie's instruction when the door opened to admit of Tom, a very rare visitor at Cloom nowadays. He was in sleek black broadcloth and looked almost as ecclesiastical as Tonkin, and much more so than Boase. Tom wore a handsome white cravat beneath his narrow, clean-shaved chin, which was decorated on either side with whiskers whose fiery hue made Killigrew's seem but tawny. Tom wore also a curious smile on his thin lips, but Ishmael was forced to admit, as he watched him shake hands quietly with Killigrew, that this dreaded and disliked brother had given the most unexceptional greeting of any of his family.

Tom sat down, but refused food. He had only come out to see his mother, and because it was Ishmael's birthday, or so he said.

"Is anything the matter, Tom?" asked Annie artlessly.

"No, what should there be?" demanded Tom in a slightly contemptuous fashion. "Can't I want to see you without that? Don't give me away before the visitor, especially as Ishmael's such an attentive son."

Annie began to sniff, and Va.s.sie bade him, in an angry undertone, be quiet. Tom obeyed, but it was an odd quietness as of something waiting its time. Conversation drooped as though a blight had fallen upon it, and once or twice Tom might have been observed to glance towards the window.

"I'll have a drink if I won't eat," he declared at last. "I must drink the young un's health on an occasion like this, after all. Here, mother, fill up."

Killigrew leapt to intercept Annie and fetch her the big cider jug from the dinner-waggon, and giggling like a girl she took it from him and filled the gla.s.ses. Some faint return of gaiety, the sense of it being Ishmael's evening, returned, and he sat as they raised gla.s.ses to him, in a sudden brightening. As she was tilting hers to her lips, Annie gave a sudden cry, so sharp everyone stopped, gla.s.s in hand. A shadow had fallen across the window, barring the flow of the westering light, and towards it Annie was staring. The others followed her gaze.

Bearded, brown, roughly clad in a big coat hunched about his ears, Archelaus stood looking in. He continued to stand, motionless, after he had been seen. Annie cried out again and, almost dropping her tumbler on to the table, rushed from the room, knocking against the door-frame in her blundering way as she went. The others stood bewildered a moment, not taking it in, not recognising the bearded figure that stayed motionless, itself giving no sign of recognition. It was Ishmael, who had not seen his brother since he himself was very little, who yet knew him the first, warned by some instinct. He got up and went out, followed by the others, who all talked at once though he stayed silent.

In the yard Annie was clinging around Archelaus, and the big man suffered it with a better grace than in the old days, though with a careless good-nature. Tom, smiling, stood a little behind the two of them. Not to Archelaus's primitive if cunning mind belonged that scheme for returning the evening of Ishmael's party; it was Tom who for two days had held him in reluctant seclusion at Penzance so as to spring the surprise at the least convenient moment. It was characteristic of Tom to scheme, even when there was nothing to gain by it but a little malicious gratification, as in this case.

Not for nothing, however, had Ishmael been trained as he had, and his voice, so unmistakably that of a gentleman as to strike them with a sense of something alien, came quietly if a little tremulously for the first few words.

"Hullo, Archelaus!" he said, shaking hands before the other's slower wits had decided whether to proffer the salute or no. "Come along in!

You're just in time for my supper-party...." No speech could have robbed the conspirators of their little triumph more completely--it offered a welcome as from one who had the best of rights to invite a guest in, and at the same time accepted the place as the home of both. Archelaus stood glowering, thought of nothing to say in reply, and found himself following his young brother into the house.

After that the evening ceased to be Ishmael's and became a background for Archelaus. He had dug for gold in Australia, and if he had not had the luck of many others who had struck richer claims, he yet brought home money to fling round upon his fancies. For years he had wandered over the far places of the earth, so that his skin was tanned darker than his bleached hair, and his limited vocabulary had enriched itself with strange and coloured words. He was indeed a man. Even Ishmael felt that, as he sat in the dim kitchen where they had all gone to see Archelaus eat a vast meal and listen to his talk. Annie was entranced; the rare colour burnt on her cheekbones, her fingers rolled and unrolled her ap.r.o.n ceaselessly; she had relapsed into kitchen ways in a flash and, swathed in sacking, waited on her big son herself. Va.s.sie tilted a superior nose and in the intervals tried to impress Archelaus by the remarkable progress of his family during his absence; but Phoebe, who had planned for Ishmael, fluttered all spontaneously for Archelaus. It seemed to her that he was like a demi-G.o.d as he sat there, thrusting the food into his mouth, golden beard dripping with golden cider, careless limbs outflung. Va.s.sie only saw the inelegance, for he was her brother, but to Phoebe his very scorn of dainty ways made him more G.o.d-like because more man-like.

When darkness crept over the kitchen so that the hero could no longer be seen properly, Annie went into the parlour and returned carrying the elegant lamp, with its globe of frosted gla.s.s, that Va.s.sie, when it was lit, proceeded to cover with a sort of little cape of quilled pink paper edged with flowers made of the same material. The room being thus too dimmed for Annie's fancy, she tilted the shade to one side so that a white fan of light threw itself upon Archelaus, making his tangled beard and crisp hair gleam and showing the warm colour br.i.m.m.i.n.g in his face up to the line of white across his untanned brow. So Ishmael saw him as he rose and went out to cool his own heated cheeks upon the cliff, and so he saw him as he lay in bed that night, flaring out in a swimming round of light against the darkness.

CHAPTER V

LULL BEFORE STORM

There was a place upon the cliff which Ishmael had made peculiarly his, where he went whenever he wished to be alone, which was not seldom. No other place since that hollow where the favoured boys had been wont to meet Hilaria had meant so much to him, and this one had the supreme advantage that it belonged to him only. The rest of his family did not indulge in cliff-climbing. Generally he was accompanied there by Wanda, his big farm-dog, a jolly, rollicking, idiotically adoring creature who spent her days wriggling and curvetting at his feet, her silly pink tongue dabbing at him, her moist eyes beaming through her tangled fringe. She was not very clever, being one of those amiable fool dogs whose quality of heart is their chief recommendation, but she had a certain wisdom of her own nevertheless.

Nowhere on all the coast was it possible to see a wider stretch of sky than from this plateau half-way down the sloping turf-clad cliff. On either side was ranked headland after headland, growing dimmer with the soft bruised hue of distance, while the plateau itself was set in an inward-curving stretch of cliff from which the whole line of the horizon made a vast convexity. Sometimes Ishmael would lie upon his back and, blotting the green protruding edge of the plateau from his mind, watch only the sky and sea, where, such was their expanse, it was often possible to glimpse three different weathers in one sweeping glance.

Away to the left, where, far out to sea, the Longships stuck a white finger out of the foam, a sudden squall might come up, obliterating lighthouse, headlands, all the sea to the cliff's foot, with its purple smother. Directly in front of him, below a piled ma.s.s of c.u.muli that hung darkly from zenith to horizon, a line of livid whiteness would show the sea's rim, while nearer him, half-way across the watery floor, great shafts of light, flanked by others of varying brightness, poured down from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of the delicate exhaust of both.

Killigrew was not long in discovering this place, which he declared presented an unrivalled stage for the setting of vast dream-dramas he watched trailing their cloudy way across it, and Ishmael was not loth to share his plateau with him. The incursion of Va.s.sie was another matter, but by this time--nearly a month after that momentous birthday--Ishmael felt helplessly drifting. He was enjoying himself, while Killigrew showed no signs of wishing to return to Paris and Va.s.sie was blooming as never before. She sat to him for sketches that never were finished, and that to her eyes, though she did not say so, looked just the same even when Killigrew declared a stroke more would wreck their perfection.

Ishmael was neglecting his personal supervision of the farm these days--he had developed a new theory that it was time he tested how far things could go well without him. He had heard a hint or two dropped to the effect that the friend from foreign parts was only amusing himself with proud Va.s.sie, but he paid no heed. What could be more absurd, he reflected, than the idea that she could want a boy a couple of years her junior and a mere student to fall in love with her? Thus Ishmael, while Killigrew laughed at him and with Va.s.sie all day long, and she glowed and answered him and seemed as light-hearted, as either of them.

On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the gra.s.s of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Va.s.sie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground "rooms" of a dead people. Now, as the day drew to a burnished close, they all sat upon the soft turf, and Killigrew and Ishmael watched with half-closed eyes the play of the sea-birds below them. The wheatears flirted their black and white persons over the rocks, the gulls dipped and wheeled, planed past them on level wings, uttering their harsh cries, or for a flashing moment rested so close that the blot of blood-red above their curved yellow beaks showed vividly; out to sea a gannet hung a sheer two hundred feet in air, then dropped, beak downwards.... He hit the sea like a stone with his plumage-padded breast, a column of water shot up from his meteoric fall, and he reappeared almost before it subsided with his prey already down his shaken throat. Killigrew clapped his hands in approbation and Va.s.sie feigned interest.

"What a life!" exclaimed Killigrew; "if we do have to live again in the form of animals, I hope I shall be a bird, a sea-bird for choice. Just imagine being a gull or a gannet.... I wish one could paint the pattern they make in the air as they fly--a vast invisible web of curves, all of them pure beauty."

"Don't wish to be a bird in this part of the world, then," advised the Parson drily.

"Why not? Don't they have a good time?"

"If you had watched as long as I have ... seen all the mutilated birds with trailing legs and broken wings that pick up a miserable living as long as the warm weather lasts.... There's not a boy in the countryside, save a few in whom I've managed to instil the fear of the Lord, that doesn't think he's a perfect right to throw stones at them, and, worse, to catch them on devilish little hooks and as likely as not throw them aside to die when caught. Grown men do it--it's quite a trade. I know one who, if he catches on his hooks a bird he does not want, wrenches its beak open and, tearing the hook out, flings the bird away to die.

This just mutilates the bird sufficiently to prevent it getting caught and giving him all the trouble over again. And the Almighty does not strike this man with his lightning from heaven.... I sometimes marvel at the patience of G.o.d, and in my short-sighted ignorance even deplore it...."

"Don't tell me," said Killigrew swiftly. "I don't want to know. I'd rather think they were all safe and happy. It isn't as though one could do anything."

"One can do very little. Lack of imagination, which is doubtless the sin against the Holy Ghost, is at the root of it, and to that the tongues of men and of angels plead in vain. But something can be done with the children, if one gets them young enough, or so one hopes. Sometimes I reproach myself because when one of the people who practise these abominations is in pain and grief, I look on and feel very little pity when I remember all. 'It is not here the pain of the world is swelled,'

I say to myself; 'it is out on the rocks, in the fields, where the little maimed things are creeping and wondering why, and the rabbits are crying all night in the traps....' It could all be so easily avoided; that's what makes it worse. Deliberately to augment the sum of suffering in the world, where there must be so much--it's inconceivable."

"Like adding to the sum of ugliness. These people do that too," said Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by day; "and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one only lets it alone...."