Secret Bread Part 38

Judy had written to Georgie, had written to say she was coming down some time soon, but primarily the letter had been to give news of Killigrew.

Ishmael and Georgie knew--exactly how they could not have told--in what relationship Judith and Killigrew had stood to each other; Ishmael felt he had known ever since that evening when he met Judy in Paradise Lane, and to Georgie the certainty had come with greater knowledge of life and realisation of herself. They had hardly mentioned the affair to each other, and then only in a round-about manner, but each guessed at the other's knowledge. Georgie was aware that for some years now Judith had seen very little of Killigrew, but how or why the severance had come about neither she nor Ishmael could guess. Judith had never mentioned Killigrew to them except as a mutual friend; she always had the strength of her own sins. Never till this letter had she spoken or written otherwise, but now she told that Killigrew was very ill in Paris and that she had gone to him. Very ill was practically all she said, beyond a mere mention that the illness was typhoid; but Ishmael knew at once what she meant, though she either would not or could not write it.

Through all Georgie's comments and hopes that soon better news would come he never doubted, though he said little, that Killigrew was dying, if not already dead, when Judith wrote. He knew her well enough, and guessed at her still more acutely, to know that she was quite capable of so much of reticence. And why did she speak so confidently of coming down to Cloom some time quite soon? She would not leave Paris while Joe was still unwell.... Ishmael knew, with the sureness he had once or twice before known things in his life, and the knowledge affected him strangely. He felt no violent grief, but a great blank. He had not seen Killigrew for years; but with the knowledge that he was to see him no more went something of himself--something that had belonged to Killigrew alone and that had responded to something in him which henceforth would be sealed and dead. He kept himself busy all day, but now he walked fast along the road, only accompanied by his thoughts.

The first hint of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall, and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old mine-shaft. Ishmael felt a moment's gladness for its escape; then he went on, and, soon leaving the road, he struck out over the moor.

On he went till he came to a disused china-clay pit, showing pale flanks in the curve of the moor. A ruined shaft stood at the head, the last of the sunset glowing through its empty window-sockets; an owl called tremulously, the sheep answered their lambs from the dim moor. A round pearl-pale moon swung in the east, level with the westering sun; as he sank she rose, till the twilight suddenly wrapped the air in a soft blue that was half a shadow, half a lighting. The last of the warm glow had gone; only the acres of feathery bents still held a pinkish warmth in their bleached ma.s.ses.

Ishmael sat upon the dry gra.s.s, where the tiny yellow stars of the creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay almost too idle for thought.

He wondered both why he did not feel more, and why he was feeling so much. If Killigrew had died when they were both young, Ishmael would have felt a more pa.s.sionate grief--an emptiness, a resentment that never again would he see and talk with him; but part of himself would not have died too. As he lay, there suddenly came into his mind the first two occasions on which he had heard of deaths that affected him at all intimately--the deaths of Polkinghorne and of Hilaria. Of both he had heard from Killigrew, he remembered. Polkinghorne--that news could not have been said actually to have grieved either of them, but it had been the first time in Ishmael's life that even the thought of death as a possible happening had occurred to him. Hilaria--a sense of outrage had been added to that; it was not her death that taught him anything beyond the mere commonplace that death can be a boon, but the news of her illness, that illness which unseen had been upon her even in the days when they had tramped the moors together and she had read to an enthralled ring of boys the breathless instalments of "The Woman in White." It had been the first time he had recognised that fear and horror lie in wait along the path of life, that not naturally can we ever leave it, that sooner or later illness or accident must inevitably make an end. Even with his pa.s.sionate distaste for the mere idea of death, this recognition would not have hit him so hard, if it had not been that the fact of Hilaria's youth, of her having been, as he phrased it, "Just like anyone else, just like I am ..." had shown him that not only for strangers, for people who are mere names in newspapers, do the hard things of life lie in wait. There was always this something waiting to spring--that might or might not show teeth and claws any time in life, that did not, in the form of an out-of-the-ordinary fate such as Hilaria's, often touch even on the fringe of knowledge, but that nevertheless was shown to be possible. That was the rub, that was what he had been aware of ever since. Life was not a simple going-forward, lit by splendid things, marked maybe by the usual happenings such as the death of parents, and even friends; but it could hold such grim things as this.... Once one had seen what tricks life could play there was no trusting it in quite the same way again. That such happenings should be possible would have seemed incredible till the realisation of Hilaria drove it home. Of no use to say that these things were the exception.

They could still happen.

And now Killigrew--before his natural time, though not so violently as had been the case with the other two old playmates. Killigrew had lived his life very thoroughly, though he had always loved not well but too wisely. Sitting there on the lonely moor amid the ruined china-clay works, with only the sounds of bird and beast breaking the still air, Ishmael seemed to himself as though suspended in a state that was neither s.p.a.ce nor time, when independent of either he could roam the past as the present, and even the future as well. It was as though time were cut out of one long endless piece as he had often imagined it as a little boy, when he had been puzzled that it was not as easy to see forwards as backwards, and been p.r.i.c.ked by the feeling that it was merely a forgotten faculty which at any moment hard straining, if only it lit on the right way, could regain. For the first time for many years he had a glimpse of the pattern of life instead of only the intricacies, seemingly without form, of each phase. Killigrew and, in a much less degree--but, as he now saw, hardly less keenly--Hilaria, had both so affected the web of his life, not in action, but in thought, that without them he would either have learnt different lessons or the same lessons quite differently. Even Judith, Carminow, and all the rest of the people who had impinged in greater or less degree, went to make the pattern, though not always, as with Killigrew, Hilaria, and Polkinghorne, could he see any one definite thing that they had been the means of making clear to his groping vision. For we cannot know people with even the lightest degree of intimacy without both taking from them and giving to them. Externally it may be only two or three people in life who have had the influencing of it, but each casual encounter has helped to prepare us for those people.

What Ishmael felt in regard to Killigrew at the present moment--and rightly felt, for, as he found out later, on the day the letter arrived at Cloom Killigrew had died--left a blank in his life, but more it brought home to him that, the meridian once pa.s.sed, blanks were things that would increase. Children grew up, but they grew away; grandchildren would be a stay, but one must be content to be a background for them.

This falling away, step by step, through life was, he saw, part of its ordered procession. And he saw too, with a deadly sureness there was no evading, that this thing he knew of Killigrew stood for another knowledge to him as well, a knowledge he had been fighting and to which he still refused to accede. The knowledge that physical decay had to be, that for him it had begun. He was still a young man as men count youth nowadays, but he knew the difference between that and the tingle of the rising sap of real youth. It was not Killigrew's death he mourned so much as the death of that self who had been Killigrew's friend.

Long now he had been accustomed to the greater sense of proportion in things mental and emotional which amounts to a greyer level of feeling; he had lived on those not unsweet flats for years. But only lately had the physical messages been flashing along to him down his nerves and muscles, and he resented them far more bitterly than anything mental or spiritual. His eyes--it might be they merely needed spectacles for close work; but he resented that almost as fiercely as the fear about them which sometimes a.s.sailed him when the pain was bad and his lids p.r.i.c.ked and were sore--the waning capacity to stand long strain and fatigue, the waning power of physical reaction altogether.... Lately his cold bath had meant a half-hour's shivering for him instead of the instantaneous glow which showed perfect bodily response. He was a strong, healthy man who had led a healthy life, but all the same he was not the man he had been, and this night he acknowledged it. To this he had come, to this everyone must come; as a commonplace he supposed he had always known that, if he had been asked about it--even as a boy he would have agreed to that, but with the inward thought: "Not to me ... it can't...." To Nicky too it would come, though Nicky would have laughed the idea to scorn as so far off as not to be worth troubling about. Yet how quickly it came ... how terribly quickly! Life seemed to Ishmael to be a shining ribbon that was always being pulled through the fingers, inexorably fast, cling as they might.

Ishmael lifted his eyes and stared out over the darkening moor, and his attention was caught by a flicker upon the western horizon. The last line of light from the sun's setting still lingered there, so that at first it was not easy to disengage from it that flicker of brighter light which seemed vague as a candle flame in daytime. A few minutes made certainty, however, and Ishmael stared at the gathering flicker and wondered whether it were a serious fire or mere swaling. It gathered in a rose of flame that gradually lit the horizon and burnt so steadily that he knew no swaling could account for it, and, standing up, he took his bearings and decided that it must be either Farmer Angwin's buildings or ricks ablaze. Angwin was a shiftless fellow, gentle and meek, who was wont to bewail his ill-luck; here was another slice of it for him, poor man! Ishmael was too far from home to return quickly for a trap, and it would take time to put the horse in. Suddenly he decided he would make the run on foot across country, as he often had as a boy on seeing that ominous but thrilling glow gathering in the sky. He got to his feet, nimbly enough if not with suppleness; as he did so he felt a twinge in his thigh such as it had been subject to ever since a bad attack of rheumatism the winter before. He stood a moment watching the rising glow, then stretched himself. Unconsciously he was asking of limbs and muscles as to their fitness; as he drew in deep breaths of the soft air and let the tautened sinews relax again there was no alien note in the symphony of his being--all felt as sound and strong as ever; now he was standing the twinge did not bother him--he told himself that in every inch of him he was still the man he was. Yet he knew he no longer felt the tw.a.n.g of some divine-strung cord within that had been wont to thrill and inform the whole.

Quite suddenly, as he stood, there came to him the idea to try and see whether by physical abandon he could recapture the old frenzy, whether to the bidding of violent exercise and healthy exhaustion, to the joy of feeling covered with sweat and earth, a mere glowing animal who feels and does not think, something of what he had lost would come back to him if only for an hour.

CHAPTER III

BODIES OF FIRE

The dusk was deepening rapidly, that glow brightened every minute; Ishmael began to run. He ran on and on--it seemed to him effortlessly--and with a tingling glow rising in him that made him feel alive as he had not for long. On and on, straight as keeping that glow ahead could make his course, over the hedges, damp and clinging with dew, scattering its drops, breaking the clinging gra.s.s stems and the tangled weeds. At each wall he felt the old upleaping of power as he took it, hurling himself over cleanly in the darkness, delightfully regardless of what might be on the other side. Down marshy fields that sucked at his feet, through the pools that splashed up into his heated face, over the clumps of long gra.s.s that grew between the tiny rivulets and swayed beneath his step and would have given way with him had he not always leapt on in time with the sure-footedness of long custom. On up long dry slopes, where he ran slowly but easily, conscious of his own ease, though he could hear his deep-drawn breaths. Through patches of moorland where the bracken clung about him or the furze p.r.i.c.ked his legs, as he was subconsciously aware without really noticing it. Once he came vaulting over a granite wall, to find himself almost on top of a blood-bull, with a ring in his nose and a curly fringe on his forehead that showed clearly in the rising moonlight. Ishmael could see, too, his wet glistening nose and dark eyes. The bull stayed still staring in astonishment, and Ishmael hit his flank gaily in pa.s.sing and ran on, down a marshy bottom, over another wall and up the next slope. The glow was brighter now because he was so much nearer, but in reality it had subsided somewhat--its first fierce spurt had burnt itself out. Ishmael began to go less easily--his breath rasped a little; but his sensations were all pleasant--the pounding blood in his whole body ran sweetly, he tingled with a glow that was enjoyable beyond anything he could have imagined. He knew he must be in a deplorable condition; he could feel the sweat running down his forehead into his eyes and his shirt clinging to his body under his light coat. Up to the knees he was soaking wet, and splashed with mud higher still; his clothes were torn by the brambles, and so were his hands and face. He felt happy--happy, in spite of the news that had come to him. At that moment his run seemed to him to hold an epic quality--the physical aspect of things; the health and strength he felt coursing through him, the delightful exhaustion that he knew would follow so healthily and naturally, seemed the most important things in the world. Let all else go but this....

He slowed up to a walk as he came to Angwin's farm, pa.s.sed through the dark yard, and through the gates into a field next the rickyard. It was full of folk crowded in from all the countryside. The engine from Penzance had come and was puffing and panting by the pond, sucking up water with stertorous breaths; at every gasp it rocked with its own intensity upon its wheels as it stood, sending out a pulsing shower of sparks over the muddy water.

Seven ricks had blazed that night, and still smouldered sullenly. The great grey hose played upon them; the water hissing upon the hot straw and hay, sending up clouds of steam, tinged to a fiery pallor against the moonlit night. The walls, not only of the rickyard, but of the surrounding fields were warm to the touch, for the dry furze growing along them had caught fire from the blowing sparks, so that at one time the fields had been outlined with fire. Now the furze had smouldered and died, but the smooth granite slabs were still hot to the hand, an unnatural warmth that seemed malign in those dewy fields.

Now the ricks burnt less and less fiercely; Ishmael gave a hand with the other helpers, but there was really nothing to be done. Luckily, as it was still warm weather, the livestock had all been out in the fields, so there had been no panic even when one end of the cowshed caught fire.

That had been put out and the walls of the barns and out-buildings drenched again and again, and everyone was trying to comfort Johnny Angwin with pointing out how much worse it might have been.

Leaning over the low warm wall between the ricks and the next field, Ishmael recognised a couple of the artists who of late years had settled in those parts, and he caught their comments along with those of their neighbours.

"What a glorious sight!" said one of them, with a deep-drawn breath; "I've never seen anything to touch it...." A couple of farmers' wives standing by peered curiously at the speaker and his companion. "Simme them folk must be lacken' their senses," said one to the other, "carlen'

a sight like this bewtiful! Lacken' their senses, sure 'nough!"

Ishmael smiled to himself, and in his mind agreed with both. "I wonder how it happened?" piped up another artist, anxious to remove a false impression of callousness. Ishmael explained that spontaneous combustion was probably the cause of the fire, and a farmer standing near volunteered his opinion that Angwin had packed his hay damp. Everyone stood a while longer, staring; the glow had gone from the smouldering ricks, and the excitement of the event began to die in the minds of the onlookers. The artist straightened himself and prepared to go. "They're out now," he said, half-regretfully, half-cheerfully. The farmer near him spoke again. "Them ricks won't be out for days and nights," he said; "they'll go on burning in their hearts. They'm naught but a body o' fire, that's what they are ... a body o' fire...."

Ishmael stayed to see Angwin and do what he could to help; then he began his walk home. He was not running now, but aware of a physical discomfort that was not mere exhaustion. He had a sharp pain in his side such as children call a st.i.tch, but no amount of stooping to tie imaginary shoelaces would drive it away. He was glad to accept the offer of a lift home when he was overtaken by a farmer's cart, and as he was jogged along the pain grew fiercer. By the time he reached Cloom the splendid fire that had warmed him on his run had died to nothingness, and at his ashen look Georgie cried out. He allowed her to help him to bed and give him hot drinks, to scold him in her woman's way.

"Such a foolish thing to do at your age ... you might have known!" she kept on repeating. He said little, but in his own mind ran the refrain: "She doesn't understand. She's still too young...." He wondered whether women ever really did know when talking was a mere foolishness, however sensible the thing said. And again, over and over to himself, as an accompaniment even to his pain, ran: "How well worth it ...!" For he had recaptured for a magic couple of hours something he had thought left behind him, had burned with it ardently and secretly. He too had been a body of fire.

The phrase stayed, p.r.i.c.king at him, through the drifting veils of sleep that alternately deepened and thinned about him all night long.

CHAPTER IV

THE NEW JUDITH

For a long time Ishmael paid the price of that night raid upon his physical resources, and when he was beginning to take up work again, as usual, Nicky was off to Canada--off with the latest thing in outfits, letters of introduction, high hopes, and such excitement at thought of the new world at his feet that only at the last moment did the sorrow that because of the uncertainty of life all leave takings hold, strike him. Then--for he was a very affectionate boy--he felt tears of which he was deeply ashamed burning in his eyes; he ignored them, made his farewells briefer, and was gone.

A few days later Judith came down to pay her promised visit. Both Ishmael and Georgie drove over to meet her train, and both failed for the first startled moment to recognise her. Ishmael had an incongruous flash, during which that occasion years earlier when he had seen her and Georgie walking down that same platform towards him was the more vivid actuality.

Judith's epicene thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much as the colouring of her face and the fact that she was wearing pince-nez that made her an absolutely different being. This was the third time in her life that Judy was coming down to the West. Once it had been as a very young girl, full of dreams and questionings; once it had been as a woman who had already learned something of proportion; now it was as this elderly and alien person whom her friends could not connect with the Judith they had known. Not till they saw the beam of her eyes, as profound but somehow less sad than the eyes of the girl had been, did they feel it was the same Judy. The exaggerated colour on her face, the white powder and overdone rouge, embarra.s.sed them both. Judy saw it and laughed, and when they were in the waggonnette and driving along the road she said: "You're thinking how horribly I'm made up! I can't help it. I began it and I found I couldn't leave off, and that's the truth.

And of course my eye for effect has got out. But I don't think I'm generally as bad as this. It comes of having done myself up in the train."

"But, Judy--why?" asked Georgie. She was very shocked, for in those days only actresses and women no better than they should be made up their faces.

"Because I began it so as to keep looking young as long as I could, and now I no longer care about keeping young-looking I can't drop it. That's the worst of lots of habits which one starts for some one reason. The reason for it dies and the habit doesn't. I know I overdo it, but it's no good my telling myself so. And it doesn't matter much, after all."

"No," agreed Georgie, brightening; "after all, one loves ones friends just as much if they have mottled skins or a red nose in a cold wind or a shiny forehead, so why shouldn't one love them just as much when they have too much pink and white on? It looks much nicer than too little."

They both laughed and felt more like the Georgie and Judy of old days--more so than they were to again. As the days went on Georgie, whom marriage had taken completely away from the old artistic set, found herself feeling that after all she was a married woman and Judy was still only Miss Parminter.... Judy, scenting this, told her flippantly that a miss was as good as a mother, and Georgie laughed, but warned her to remember the children were in the room.... Judy was inclined to be hurt by the needless reminder, and, as she considered it foolish to be hurt and still more foolish to show it, she went out.

She found Ishmael reading in the rock garden that had been made by the stream, which ran along the dip below the house where once had been rough moorland. Now there were slopes of smooth, vividly green gra.s.s and grey boulders, among which they ran up like green pools; great cl.u.s.ters of brilliant rock flowers grew in bright patches over their smooth flanks. Judy sat down beside Ishmael, who closed his book.

"So you wear those?" she asked, pointing to his gla.s.ses, which he had taken off and was slipping into their case.

"Yes, I went to the oculist at Plymouth when I went up to see Nicky off.

He said I had splendid sight, but wanted them for close work. I didn't know you had to wear them."

"I've known for years and years that I ought. I ought to have as a girl.

I went once to an oculist, who told me if I wore them till I was forty I could then throw them away. I thought it was so like a man. I preferred to do without till forty and wear them the rest of my life."

"But haven't you injured your eyes?"

"Probably."

"It isn't all as simple as oculists think," said Ishmael, with that intuition which is generally called feminine and which had been all his life his only spark of genius. Judy looked and smiled her old smile, which charmed as much as ever even on her too-red lips.

"No," she agreed. "I remember once, after going to that oculist, I tried to wear gla.s.ses one night when I was going out with Joe. That decided me."

"What happened?"

"I was staying in lodgings at the time, in London. It was the first year I knew how I felt for him. You know about that--that I did? Yes? I was sure you did. Well, he came to take me out to dinner. The lodgings were rather horrible, though even they couldn't spoil things for me. And I was dressing in my room when he came. The sitting-room joined on to it by folding doors. I called out to him I was still dressing, but as a matter of fact I was trying to screw myself up to put the beastly things on. I remember when I went in to him I kept the shady brim of my hat rather down over my face. The sitting-room was in darkness except for what light came in from the hall gas. He said, 'Are you ready? Been beautifying?' I said, 'No, exactly the reverse. I've got my gla.s.ses on.

You know I told you I had to wear them sometimes.'" Judy broke off, then went on, looking away from Ishmael.