CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOW AT THE WINDOW
For nearly three years that content of Ishmael's held—held till the Parson, who had worked for it, grew ill-pleased. It seemed unnatural that so young a man should never want to roam further afield than the annual cattle fair; should be sufficiently stayed with that perpetual struggle against weald and weather. It was just that tussle which, by keeping the body hard and the mind stimulated, made the content possible. Ishmael had up till now asked for nothing better, and so far, so good. But, as the Parson told himself, the time would come when he would demand more, and then, for lack of knowing other possibilities, he might slake himself with whatever was near at hand and slowly sink into the things of the soil till he was smothered with their reek. Up till now he had spiritualised the land by his wrestling with it, but now that some measure of success, enough to make the struggle less a thing that must not be relaxed for a day, had come, now was the time when the reverse process might begin unseen.
Cloom had undergone a wonderful regeneration, though at present it went only skin-deep, and if left to herself she would soon relapse into savagery. Ground that had been furze-ridden within the memory of man now yielded roots and grain, though not yet richly; the stubborn furze had been burnt and hacked and torn up, the thorns and thistles, the docks and sorrel, had been patiently attacked until they too yielded, the fine clinging roots of the innocent-looking pink-faced centaury and the more blatant charlock had been eliminated from the tenacious soil; while the pale golden cows of alien breed waxed fat and gave rich milk only a few tones paler than their own smooth flanks.
All this was in the main Ishmael's work; and his blunders had been few—he had a genius for the land. It had been hard work though it meant joy, and left not much time or ease of limb for recreation. It had been in that respect the Parson met difficulties. There was hunting in season, and Ishmael was a keen rider to hounds, in spite of his aversion to slaughter of any kind, which upon the farm was the source of not unkindly mirth amongst the men. They could not yield of their fullest respect and nothing of comprehension to a master who was never present when his own pigs were killed, beyond one occasion when he attended to assure himself that all was done in the most merciful way and had ended by being violently sick into the bowl of pig's blood. In hunting Ishmael found, like many another, that his own excitement helped him to bear with the thought of the fox's pain, though he was always glad, in guilty secret, when there was no kill. It was not this idiosyncrasy that troubled Boase; it was the social questions that hunting evoked. Boase, who also followed to hounds, felt his heart glow to see how well the boy was received; for Ishmael's surly shyness had passed into a new phase, expressed by a rather charming deference mingled with independence which appealed to the brusque, goodhearted members of the "county," who went to make up the very mixed hunt in that sparsely-peopled district.
Still, all was not well. Vassie had grown in discontent, Annie in melancholy. The girl herself might—probably would, with her beauty and adaptability—have won a place with Ishmael had it not been for the mother. Annie's touchy pride, mingled with what Vassie frankly called her "impossibleness," made the situation hopeless, for the former quality would not let her efface herself, and the latter prevented her daughter being called upon. Therefore, although Ishmael went out now and again and had struck up a fairly intimate acquaintance with one or two nice families within a radius of ten miles, yet he had no sort of home life which could satisfy him for long.
The only thing Boase saw to be thankful for was that Ishmael's thoughts had not been driven on to Phoebe, and that was probably only because it had never occurred to Ishmael as a possible contingency. He had been so healthily occupied and was so used to Phoebe. Also, Vassie, in her discontent, spent the time visiting her rather second-class friends in Plymouth as much as possible, and, even when she did not insist on sweeping Phoebe with her, intercourse with the mill stopped almost entirely. Annie never pretended to any liking for the helpless Phoebe, who could not even answer her back when she insulted her, as she frequently did all timid people. Never since that accidental touch of quaintness on the first evening had Ishmael discovered any kindred habit of mind in Phoebe, and she, in her sweetly-obtuse way, sometimes wondered that Ishmael did not want to be more with her.
It was not a common failing with the chaps around that district. Phoebe's peculiar allure of utter softness was not one that could remain unfelt even among the slow and primitive young men she met day by day, or who gazed at her dewy mouth and eyes in the church which, for the sake of the vision, they attended instead of chapel. Vassie, who was really a beauty, they only feared. At any moment, if he were not drawn outside himself and the affairs of Cloom, that sudden curious twist of vision which means glamour might occur for Ishmael as he looked at Phoebe. If there were no rich enough materials at hand to make a fuller life for the boy, then, thought the Parson, with logic, it must be brought to him. The difficulty was Ishmael himself.
He had a curious quality derived of some inherited instinct of fear—a quality that made him distrust change. It had been that which had held him back on the day at St. Renny when he had dallied with the notion of running away to sea; it had been that which had made him loth to leave school at the end in spite of his excitement over returning to a Cloom legally his; and it was that now which enabled him to be hypnotised by his own furrows drawing out in front of him. He clung to what happiness he knew in a way rare in one so young, and he was quite aware how much of it he found even in uncongenial company. What might lie beyond it he distrusted.
Not for nothing had Annie lived through the stress she had before his birth, and from her circumstances, though not her nature, he drew that queer mingling of content and dread. But from the old Squire, little as he resembled him in all else, came that impersonality in what are usually personal relationships, against which even the Parson beat in vain. Through all his passionate sinning James Ruan had held himself aloof from the sharer in his sins. What for him had been the thing by which he lived no one ever knew; his sardonic laughter barred all ingress to his mind.
With Ishmael, as the Parson was beginning to see, places had so far stood for more than people. St. Renny, the manner and atmosphere of it, had meant more than Killigrew, the Vicarage than the Parson, Cloom than his brothers and sister and the friends he made there. It was towards this very detachment that the Parson's upbringing of Ishmael had tended, and yet he now felt the need of more. For some appetite for more life was bound to stir and break into being one day, and Boase was passionately desirous that it should make for happiness and good. Thus Boase thought of it all, but, after the fashion of the race of which Ishmael also was one, he showed no sign of his meditations.
With the approach of the boy's twenty-first birthday the Parson saw light. Though Ishmael had come of age, as far as the property went, three years earlier, still the occasion was not without import, and could fittingly mark some change. A word to Annie produced no result, a hint to Vassie and the thing was in full swing. Ishmael always thought it was his own idea that Killigrew, back in London from his Paris studies, should be asked down to Cloom. It was not everyone that could have been called in to help at celebrating a twenty-first birthday under such circumstances as Ishmael's; it could hardly be made an occasion for feasting tenantry and neighbouring gentry, but it might be used for what Boase, through Killigrew, hoped—the disruption of an atmosphere. That done, a new one could be created.
Killigrew arrived. He startled the natives considerably by his loose jacket and flowing tie, but his red hair was cut fairly short, though his chin was decked by a soft young pointed beard that gave him a Mephistophelian aspect ludicrously set at naught by his white eyelashes, which, round his more short-sighted eye, were set off by a single glass.
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 Vassie'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 Vassie, 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 Vassie had been a duchess. 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; Vassie 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 Vassie'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 Vassie 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 glasses. Some faint return of gaiety, the sense of it being Ishmael's evening, returned, and he sat as they raised glasses to him, in a sudden brightening. As she was tilting hers to her lips, Annie gave a sudden cry, so sharp everyone stopped, glass 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 apron ceaselessly; she had relapsed into kitchen ways in a flash and, swathed in sacking, waited on her big son herself. Vassie 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-god as he sat there, thrusting the food into his mouth, golden beard dripping with golden cider, careless limbs outflung. Vassie only saw the inelegance, for he was her brother, but to Phoebe his very scorn of dainty ways made him more god-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 glass, that Vassie, 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 brimming 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.