Secret Bread Part 36

He turned towards her then, dropped his pipe, and looked full at her.

"You mean that? You have definitely done it?"

"Undone it," she said cheerfully; "it would never have answered. I've known that for ages. He's so much cleverer than I am, but so much less wise! He's just a nice boy who would be the ordinary simple kind if it weren't for his music. And even there we can't agree, you see."

"I'm not clever--not the kind that can do clever things," said Ishmael.

"It's not the doing clever things that matters, I've come to the conclusion, though Val would think that was heresy. Being things matters more, somehow. He knows all about music, and they say he's going to be the great English composer, and I only know that even a barrel-organ in the street has always made me feel what I used to call when I was small all 'live-y and love-y.'"

"There is nothing one can get drunk on like music and poetry," said Ishmael slowly. "Pictures one needs to understand before they can intoxicate, and prose can fill and satisfy you, but it's only the other two one can go mad on, and this--"

He pulled her to him, a hand beneath her chin, his other arm round her st.u.r.dy, soft little body, and she met his eyes bravely for a moment.

Then hers closed, but he still paused before he kissed her.

"Georgie, are you sure?" he asked. "Have you thought over all the drawbacks?"

"Such as--?"

"My brothers ... even my son, who will have to come before any we may have.... I don't want any more bad blood over this heritage, Georgie!

And I--I'm a good many years older than you--"

"And terribly sot in your ways, as Mrs. Penticost says ..." murmured Georgie. "Ishmael, aren't you going to ...?"

Then he did, and Georgie nestled close to him with a sigh of satisfaction. After a little while her indefatigable tongue began again.

"Ishmael, isn't it funny to think it might never have happened? Just suppose I had been actually married to Val instead of only sort of engaged.... I might have been, you know."

"If you didn't care about him," began Ishmael, then stopped, feeling he was a poor advocate of a simple and unmistakable method of loving.

"Well, it's very difficult for a girl," explained Georgie. "Even when I was getting fond of him I knew it wasn't what I'd imagined falling in love to be like, but I thought it might be all I could manage. You see, in real life, the second-best has such a disconcerting habit of coming along first. You know all the time that it is only the second-best, but you think to yourself, 'Suppose the first-best never comes along for me, and I have said No to this, then there'll be nothing but a third-best to fall back on.' That's why so many women marry just not the right man."

"And I--am I the first-best ...?" asked Ishmael in a low voice.

Georgie nodded.

"Ah!" she said; "you need never be jealous of poor Val. If anyone has anything to be jealous over, it's me--not that I'm going to be. After all, one can't be a man's first love and his last, and it's more important to be his last! What's the matter ...? You look funny, somehow...."

"Nothing," said Ishmael; "I was only thinking what a dear you are.

You're so sporting about everything. And I--sometimes in the middle of being happy everything seems suddenly empty and stupid to me, and I dread your finding that out. Arid s.p.a.ces.... I don't know how to explain it. They'll come even in my love for you."

Georgie nodded again, like a wise baby mandarin, as she sat there with her feet tucked up under her. She stared ahead, and slowly a change came over her face, a change like the suffusion of dawn. She caught his head to her and drew it to her breast.

"I've had nothing to make me tired yet, not like you. I almost want you to feel tired and sad and lost if it'll make you come to me, like this...." She stroked his hair gently, holding his head very lightly. He pressed it hard against her; he could feel her heart beating at his ear; he rubbed his cheek against her breast. "You make me feel like a child again," he said. "No one has ever done, that...."

"Do you know," said Georgie, still stroking rhythmically, "that every woman wants her husband to be four things--her lover, her comrade, her child, and her master? Did you know that?"

"No; I think I thought it was only the lover they cared about. I'm very ignorant, Georgie! Have I to be all that? D'you think I can?"

"Which of them do you doubt?" asked Georgie slyly.

"Sometimes the lover, sometimes the comrade, sometimes the child, and always the master, though I'll play at even that if you want me to. But the other three--I shall always be all of them underneath, even in the dry s.p.a.ces."

Georgie slowly kissed his ruffled head, and then started to try and tie the longer hairs on the crown into tight knots. He twisted his head away and sat up, laughing. "If that's how you're going to treat me when I'm being your child," he threatened, "I'll--"

"You'll what?" asked Georgie.

Ishmael did precisely what every other lover in the world would have done in answer to that question at that moment. Later, when the sun had moved high and they scrambled up to go home, Georgie was the laughing child again; only for a second, as they stood on the ridge above and looked down to the silvery patch where the bright gra.s.s was flattened where they had lain, she wore the look that had transfigured her before.

In the early autumn Ishmael married, and a new phase began for him at Cloom. For the first years his precision of them held very true, except that, though they held more of deep and actual satisfaction than he had imagined, the moments of rapture were less glamorous.

Ishmael was one of those unlucky and rare people to whom everything has lost poignancy when it is occurring not for the first time. He knew how far dearer to him was Georgie than Blanche had ever been--how far more lovable she was. But his love had not the keenness, the exquisite sharpness, of the earlier love, because that first time had taken from him what in spite of himself he could not give again. If Georgie had left him he would not have suffered the agonies he had lived down after Blanche had gone.

In the same way he loved Georgie incomparably more than Phoebe, and between them pa.s.sion was a deeper though not a sweeter thing; yet never again was he to feel the abandon that had delighted and finally satiated him with Phoebe. His relation towards any other human being could never now stretch from rim to rim of the world for him as had so nearly been the case when he loved Blanche. No one thing could seem to him to overtop all others as he had tried to make it in the first months with Phoebe.

As time went on there came about many measures of which he was as keen an advocate as he had been of school reform and the ballot, yet never did he recapture that first fine glow which had fired him at his entry into the world of men who worked at these things. He believed as time went on, more firmly, because more vitally, in G.o.d and the future of the soul than ever he had in his fervid schooldays, yet these beliefs aroused less enthusiasm of response within him.

He could still feel as strongly in body, soul or mind, but never did he have those flas.h.i.+ng periods when all three are fused together in that one white pa.s.sion of feeling which is the genius of youth. Always one of the three stood aloof, the jarring spectator in the trinity, and affected the quality of what the other two might feel. Life, as he went through its midway, seemed to him to disintegrate, not to move inevitably towards any one culmination of its varied pattern. When he had been young he lived by what might happen any golden to-morrow; now he lived by what did happen day by day.

BOOK IV

THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER I

QUESTIONS OF VISION

"I am getting on, you know," said Nicky Ruan. "At twenty-two--nearly twenty-three--a fellow isn't as young as he was. And I don't want to stick here till I'm too old to enjoy seeing the world."

"What should you consider too old, Nicky?" asked Ishmael.

Nicky hesitated; he made a rapid calculation in his head, and arriving at the fact that his father must be quite forty-six or seven, and being always averse to hurting anyone's feelings unless it was very worth while, he temporised.

"Oh, well! it depends on the fellow, doesn't it? I expect, for instance, you weren't nearly as old as me when you were my age, because you didn't go to the 'Varsity, and of course that makes a difference...."

Ishmael sat smoking and looking at the boy in silence. He felt he knew what the old Bible phrase meant when it spoke of yearning over a child.

He felt the helpless desire to protect, to stand between this golden boy and all that must come to him, and he knew that not only can no one live for anyone else, but that youth would refuse the gift were it possible to make it.

Nicky, about whom he knew so little, about whom he realised he had always known so little.... What did he really know about Nicky's life, his doings up at Oxford, his thoughts? Roughly he was aware of his tastes, his habits at home, his affections; but of the other Nicky, the individual that stood towards life, not the boy who stood in his relation of son towards him, he knew nothing. Women, now ... what lay behind that smooth lean young face--what of knowledge about women?

Ishmael had no means of telling. Whether Nicky were still as pure as his two little sisters, whether he had the technical purity that may for some time go with a certain amount of curiosity and corruption of the mind, whether he had already had his "adventures," or whether he were still too undeveloped, too immersed in sports and himself to have bothered about women, Ishmael could not really tell, any more than could any other parent.

The only thing in which Ishmael differed from the average parent was in acknowledging his ignorance to himself. But then Nicky had always had that curious intangible quality, that mental slipping-away from all grip, which had made it especially difficult ever really to know what his thoughts were and what he really knew. Not that there was any reserve about Nicky--he was not at all averse to talking freely about himself; but it seemed as though either there were in him a hollow where most people keep the root of self, or else that a very deep-seated personality held court there. Whichever it was, the effect was the same, the effect as of a sealed place.