Secret Bread Part 35

"I can't tell you," said Judith dully. "You wouldn't understand and you'd be shocked."

Boase smiled as he sat down in the pew just in front of her. She leant back against her seat and looked pitifully at his kind deeply-lined old face.

"Besides, I'm not sorry!" she went on; "at least, not the sorry that means to give it up, only the sorry that wishes I had never started...."

"Tell me about him, my child!" said Boase. And Judy did. It was the first time she had ever spoken of him--what he was to her and what her life had been--to anyone. She made no wail beyond once saying, "I did not know it was possible that a person could make one suffer so...."

Gradually Boase drew what little story there was to tell from her, but more than she told him he gathered for himself, from his watching of her and his knowledge of Killigrew. He was an old man now and a wise one. The priest in him yearned over her to wean her from her sin, but the patient wisdom in him told him that not that way had she yet come.

He talked quietly to her, soothing her by his calmness, his lack of reproaches or adjurations, and presently she was sitting forward in the pew in the gathering dusk talking more normally.

"There are some sheep who are not only not of this fold," he said at last, "but who seem as though they never could be on this side of the grave. Joe has the odd quality of never having felt spiritual want, and probably he never will."

"It is that uncertainty of edge about him that has always been the difficulty," she said. "That--oh, it's so difficult to explain. I mean, he has never seemed to realise the limits of individuality. Woman is woman to him--not one woman. He's often said that the affinity made-for-each-other theory must be pure nonsense; that you meet during your little life hundreds of people who all have more or less of an affinity for you--some more, some less--and that it's practically your duty to fuse that alikeness wherever you meet it. Of course he agrees that among the lot there's bound to be one with whom the overlap is bigger than it is with any of the others, but then he looks on that as no reason for thinking that person is the one person for you. There are probably several more people knocking round with whom your overlap would be still wider, only you never happen to meet them. And to bind yourself irrevocably to one would be to prevent your fusing with them if you did meet them. It works out at this--that the greatest giving and the greatest taking is the ideal state of affairs. Give to everyone you meet and take all you can from them. But, you see, my trouble is I have nothing left to give anyone but him. I've always given him everything--I want no one and nothing else. And he's wanted so many and so much. I see the logic and admirable sense of his att.i.tude so clearly that even while a primitive root jealousy is eating me up I am so infected by his theory that I don't blame him. I feel myself nebulous as regards him, as blurred at edge as he is."

"Oh, my dear child!" said Boase, "this--this in a way bigness of his view just makes him more of an individualist than anyone. He limits himself nowhere, but simply because it's all gain to his individuality.

That it is gain to others too is neither here nor there."

"It can be loss to the others; there is such a thing as all taking and no giving."

"Ah, now you're looking on it from the point of view of payment! Take for a moment the truer view that sorrow is as much gain as pleasure. The only gain on earth is experience, and both emotions go to feed that."

"And then," continued Judith, pursuing her own line of thought, "something in me seems to say that that wide view, that merging of individuality, has the right idea at the root of it. It's an old strain of Puritanism in me, I suppose, that tells me anything is good which implies a loosening of individualism."

"I don't agree with you," said Boase energetically. "The root of all things good and great is personality. The success of any movement depends on the individuality of the leader, just as the whole of creation depends, whether it knows it or not, on the personality of Christ. 'Be individual' is a counsel of perfection--that is the only drawback to it. If the great ma.s.s of people were only nearer perfection the rein could be given to individualism; as it is it's a dangerous horse to drive--it so often runs away with its driver. Conceive now of the immense advantage it would be if, instead of a criminal being tried by the clumsy machinery of the law, the judge were to investigate the case quietly and thoroughly himself, get to know the man, his belongings and environment, and then deal with him as he saw fit. The thing's not workable; the judge might have an attack of indigestion that would jaundice his view, or be in a rosy glow of sentimentality after port.

But if the judge could be depended on for sympathy and intuitiveness, half the crime in the world would be stamped out. It's the same everywhere. If priests could be allowed to discriminate between divorced persons they thought it fit and desirable to remarry and those they did not, much sin might be avoided. But it wouldn't work, simply because the individual can't yet be trusted, and so it is quite right that the law should be as it is. But that doesn't prevent rank individualism from being the counsel of perfection--in which, curiously enough, Joe would agree with me more than Ishmael, who fights against the individual in life to an extraordinary extent. I wish something would happen to make him succ.u.mb to it again. I don't want him to grow inhuman...."

"I wish it were possible to grow inhuman," said Judy.

"If you knew," said Boase slowly, "that besides doing--as I must tell you--a right action by leaving off all connection with Joe Killigrew, you could also cease at once to feel anything for him, would you then leave him?"

"Ah! not yet ..." said Judith. "I must have a little longer. Wait till I'm older--till I can't make him want me...."

As she went home, comforted more than she could have thought possible by the mere telling of what had accompanied her so long, she knew that she had not been wholly disingenuous. That Killigrew would cease to want her for at least a good while to come she did not believe, and it was not that dread which had sent her shaking for the first time to the help from which she had hitherto held proudly aloof. As a matter of fact she kept up the illusion of youth better with Killigrew than with the rest of the world, and she knew it. For one thing, he was never away from her long enough at a time to get a thoroughly new vision of her on his return, a vision apart from that which he was expecting to see. For another, she took more care with him. Other people might see her unpowdered, bleak--never he. And for this, too, she had paid the penalty. Sometimes when he held her, gazing down into the face she had prepared with so much skill to meet that look--counting half upon the material aids upon her skin and half upon the state she should have evoked in him before she courted that gaze--then she would think to herself: "And if I were not 'tidied,' if I were 'endy,' looking greasy, as I have all day, he would not be feeling like this...." Then with that thought would flash into her aching heart: "On so frail a thread hangs love...."

But it was not anything in Killigrew which had eaten into her consciousness this past week--it was something in herself. Something which had risen to its crest that night among the bracken had failed ever since, was falling on deadness, and that something was her own power to feel the love which had made her life for so long. There were always periods of deadness--she knew that--but this held a quality none of them had had. What if even she were subject to the inevitable law, if for her too after the apex came the downward slope? That was the fear that gnawed at her, that was what she dreaded when the Parson had held out exactly that as a hope.

While she had been suffering and loving she had longed for the release of cessation; now she dreaded it, for it undermined to her the whole of the past. She was one of those women to whom faithfulness in herself was a necessity of self-respect, and failure of love, without any deflection of it, was to her a failure of faithfulness. She had nothing tangible to go upon; it was only that she felt this deadness now upon her was not the mere reaction of feeling, but an actual snapping of something in the fabric of life. She told herself it was not possible, that not so could she give the lie to all she had suffered.

As she went up the lane to Paradise she met Ishmael coming down it; evidently he had been taking Georgie home. She stopped to speak to him, and, feeling he was reluctant to pa.s.s on by himself yet awhile, she leant over a gate and let him talk to her. For a minute or so he said nothing that was not an ordinary commonplace of encounter, but after a short silence had fallen between them he began abruptly on another note.

"Judy," he said, "do you believe in what is called 'falling in love'?"

"Do I believe in it?" echoed Judith. "It depends on how you mean that.

If you ask do I believe that there is such a phenomenon, I do, for the simple reason that one sees it happening all around one and people doing the maddest things under its influence. If you mean do I think it's a good thing, or a pleasant thing, or a thing that lasts ...?"

"Yes, that's what I meant, I think."

"Falling in love is giving someone the power to hurt you.... I suppose it depends on you, or rather on them, if it's worth it or not. But how can one say anything of any value about a thing unless one has first clearly defined what that thing is? And love is like religion, like the vision of truth itself--it means something different to every man."

"I thought women were always supposed to love in much the same way,"

said Ishmael vaguely--"better than we do. They always say so."

"Oh, it depends on the individual, as always. Chiefly it depends on whether you're the sort of person that loves 'in spite of' or 'because of.' If you're the 'because of' kind, all sorts of things, external drawbacks and disappointments in character, put you off. If you're the 'in spite of,' they don't. I think the only difference between men and women is that as a rule men love because of and women in spite of."

"I'm afraid I should be the 'because of.'"

"Yes, I think perhaps you would. If a woman loves 'in spite of,' all the little external things that at the beginning might have shocked her only make her care more."

"Like eating with one's knife, you mean?"

"Yes, even that. Or the person having a cold in his head or a spot on the end of his nose! She notices whatever it happens to be and has a little shock of surprise at finding it makes no difference. And that makes her feel how strong her love must be; and pouf! it gets stronger than ever."

"And the underneath things, like finding out little insincerities, little meannesses even?"

"The same plan works there--if you're the 'in spite of' lover."

"Tell me," said Ishmael suddenly, "do you--does any woman--have moments when the very word 'love' is an insufferable intrusion, when it all seems petty and of no account, a tiresome thing in whose presence it suddenly doesn't seem possible to breathe?"

"When one is sick of the whole question, and the way life is supposed to be built round it? Yes; but when a woman feels like that it generally is in reaction from too much of it. She doesn't feel it purely academically, so to speak, as a man can." Judy's voice was suddenly very weary. Her eyes met Ishmael's, and in that look a comprehension was born between them that was never quite to fail, that was, in its best moments, to mean true intimacy. Judy blinked at him with her sad monkey-eyes, smiled a little, and held out her hand in farewell. He took it--suddenly e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed a "Good-night" accompanied by a "Thank you" which he felt, though he could not quite have told why. He went off down the lane without seeing her back to the cottage, and she stayed awhile, grateful in her turn that meeting him had taken the keen edge off her own problems. She went in to supper and bed feeling very tired, a tiredness that was in her mind and soul, but that had the pleasantness of a healthy physical exhaustion. Georgie showed a disposition to come into her room and ask her her opinion of "falling in love" over mutual hair-brushes, but Judith evaded the tentative suggestion. By then she was feeling that the word was a meaningless string of four letters, and the thing she supposed it stood for as fantastic and far-off as the recurring fragment of a dream, which seems so vivid in the dreaming and is a broken kaleidoscope of ill-fitting colours on awaking. She went to bed and slept soundly, better than she had done for months.

She was to wake to the old weight, half-joy, half-pain, but more and more she was to feel the new dread that she was growing out even of that, left in a dryness that belittled the past; but the periods of numbness once begun had to go on in spite of her, and with their bitterness was mingled at least the negative healing of indifference.

CHAPTER XII

GEORGIE

Georgie had been up to the village to post a very important letter--so important that her hand stayed hesitant over the slit in the box for a moment or two while she made up her mind all over again. Then, with a gasp, she pushed the letter through and heard it fall with a faint thud to the bottom of the box. The last chance was still not gone, for the friendly old postmaster would have given it back to her if she had asked for it, but the mere noise it made in falling--one of the most distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world--caused her to feel a lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction. She turned and went away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by their doors, and then she struck off the hard, bleak road, where the wind sang mournfully in the insulators at every telegraph post, and made for the open moor.

It was one of those mood-ridden days of spring when the whole countryside changes in the pa.s.sing of a cloud from pearly grey to a pale brightness unmarred by any dark note. Even the cloud-shadows were no deeper than wine-stains as they trailed over the slopes; against the cold, clear blue of the sky the branches of the thorns seemed of pencilled silver--their leaves were a rich green amid the colder verdure of the elders and the soft hue of the breaking ash leaves. Ploughed lands were a delicate purple, and the pastures still held the pure emerald of the rainy winter, though paled by the quality of the light to a tone no deeper than that of the delicate young bracken fronds which were uncurling upon the moor. Everywhere was lightness--in all colour, in the wandering airs, in the texture of leaf and blade--in Georgie's soul as she went over the soft turf and hummed little tunes to herself.

She ran up a gra.s.sy peak crested with grey boulders and flung herself against them, half-leaning, half-standing, over a rough cool curve of grey granite, arms outstretched, eyes closed.

She was conscious of the fabric of her body as never before. She felt her heart beating as a thing heavier and more powerful than the rest of her frame; she was aware of the breath pa.s.sing through the delicate skin of her nostrils, of a faint, sweet aching in her thighs, of the tenderness of her breast crushed against the rock, of the acuteness of life beating in her outspread finger-tips against the rough granite and in her toes pressed against the turf. She dropped to the ground and, rolling over, stretched to utmost tension, then relaxed to limpness, eyelids closed and the hair blowing upon them the only moving thing about her. Then she scrambled to her feet again and set off towards Cloom.

As she neared it she saw on the far slope a plough at work, looking like a tiny toy, the horses a rich bright brown in the sunlight. Her strong young eyes could see the darker blown mesh of their manes and the long hair about their fetlocks; she could see, too, that the man in a faded blue s.h.i.+rt and earth-coloured trousers driving them was John-James, for even at that distance his st.u.r.dy build and the copper red of his broad neck were unmistakable. She saw that the man standing talking by the gate was Ishmael, and she stayed still, wondering if he would see and recognise her. The tiny figure turned, stood staring, and then waved its hat above its head; Georgie fluttered her handkerchief and turned off down towards the stream at the bottom of the moor while Ishmael was still watching.

It was warmer down by the stream than on the crest above, and the air was as though filled with a bright sparkle with the refractions of the sun from ripple and eddy. The stream was a mere thread of water, but broken by stone and drooping bough to the semblance of urgency, and with its mazy lights went a clear murmur of sound. Georgie took off her little cloth jacket and threw herself down on the gra.s.sy slope that, amidst a tangle of hemlock, edged the purling water. Between her and the sunlight drooped an alder; she saw against the sun the showers of yellow catkins all gleaming transparent, like sunlit raindrops caught at the moment when they lengthen.... She lay under the glory of this Danaean shower and half-closed her eyes to stare up at the wonder of it.

Presently she heard the sound of twigs and leaves being crushed under advancing feet, but she did not look up, only started to hum a little tune, though she could not hear it for the rising beat of her own heart in her ears.

When Ishmael merely dropped down beside her and, asking if he might smoke, proceeded to light his pipe, she calmed a trifle--a sick dread that she dismissed as impossible flashed through her; she peeped at him from her tilted hat brim, and saw his hands were trembling slightly as he struck the match. In a moment she had caught back her own poise; she watched sidelong, noting with an odd precision exactly how he looked, how his brown skin glistened a little in the sun, so close to her that she could see the infinitesimal criss-cross of lines upon the backs of his hands and the stronger seams upon his reddened neck. She saw the glisten of a few grey hairs in the dark thick patch above his ear; she could see the texture of his lip as it pouted beneath the sideways hang of his pipe. She wondered why anyone ever really loved someone else; looked at like that, and thought of clearly, reasonably, they did not look very wonderful, but only obvious flesh and blood, enclosing something that, try as one might, must always remain alien, cut off. Yet she knew that, reason as she might, this particular piece of flesh and blood, animated by this particular soul, had power over hers that her leaping pulses at the very sound of his footfalls, that her eager planning mind at night in her bed, would not let her deny. Suddenly she looked away from him, and, twisting her hands in the dew-wet gra.s.s, spoke. "I've written to Val," she said.

Ishmael did not answer, and she went on:

"You don't seem very interested, but I'm so full of it I must tell someone. After all one doesn't break off an engagement every day...."