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 mass of cumuli 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 Vassie 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 Vassie 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 Vassie, 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 Vassie 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 grass of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Vassie'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 Vassie 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 God, 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…."
"There's a queer vein of cruelty in the Celt—at least in the Cornish Celt—that is worse than the Latin," went on Boase. "When they are angered they wreak vengeance on anything. And sometimes when there are a lot of them together under circumstances which you would think would have roused their pity, the devil of wanton cruelty enters into them. I shall never forget when a school of whales came ashore in the Bay … they lay there stranded, poor creatures! And from the oldest man to the little boys out of school a blood-lust came on everyone. They tore and hacked at the poor creatures with penknives and any weapon they could get, they carved their names on them and stopped up their blow-holes with stones, till the place was a perfect shambles and the blood soaked into the sand as into an arena in ancient Rome…. Nobody could stop them. It was a sight to make one weep for shame that one was a man."
Ishmael lay in silence. He knew—no one with eyes to see could live there and not know—but, like Killigrew, he had always tried not to think too much about it. He was so unable to take things superficially that he feared thought, and hence often did less than men who did not care as much. He gave a slight movement now that was not so much impatience as a thrusting away of a thing that sickened him and which he felt he could not stem. It seemed to him that the glory of the day had departed. He, too, remembered that shambles of which the Parson spoke; it had been the first time the pain in the world he so loved had come home to him. He remembered now how, as he and the Parson had come back, in melancholy silence, from that scene of blood, his own declarations about its being such a good world, made to the Parson on his first night home and repeated so often since to his own high-beating heart, had mocked at him. What did it avail being happy when there was such pain in the world? Himself or another, or, worse still, these innocents that could not philosophise about it—that any should suffer made all happiness futile. The same deadly consciousness came upon him now on the sunny cliff, and he resented that the topic should have been started, himself keeping a sullen silence. But the Parson turned and spoke directly to him.
"By the way," he said, "I hate to have to tell you, but I hear, and I'm afraid it's true, that Archelaus is starting bush-beating on the estate again. I met John-Willy Jacka coming back from the direction of the wood late one night with a suspicious-looking sack and a bludgeon, and next day I asked John-James if he knew anything. He didn't give anyone away, but I gathered—"
"If it's true—" Ishmael paused for sheer rage, then went on: "I'll tackle John-Willy, and if it's true he can go. But of course it's Archelaus really, just because he knows how I feel about it. It isn't even as though it were the season for it, if you can talk of a season for such a thing, but no one can be very hard up for food as late as this. Oh, if I can't be free of him even now he's working at Botallack—"
"I had such a quarrel with Mamma about that this morning," struck in Vassie, who disliked the conversation and thought she had been out of it long enough. "She was boasting at breakfast—after you'd gone out, Ishmael—that Archelaus was a captain now, and I laughed, and said it was more than he'd ever been in the army, but that of course a mine captain wasn't a real one … and she was furious. She said it was quite real enough for her and Archelaus anyway, though perhaps not for the likes of me. I met Archelaus at the mill the other day when I was over seeing Phoebe, and he certainly did seem smart, ever so different from when he came back. You wouldn't have known him."
She ended on her high laugh and rolled over a little woolly puppy that lay in her lap, burying her long fingers in its coat. She was perched upon a grassy slope like some vast moth that had alighted there, her pale skirts spread, a white cashmere shawl swathed about her shoulders, her golden head tipped back on her full throat. Over her, like a swaying flower, a tiny parasol reared on a long tasselled stalk, held in Killigrew's hand as he lounged beside her. He let his eyes run over her now, tipping the parasol to one side so that at his pleasure the late sunlight should touch her hair and her still flawless skin. She knew she could stand the test, and stayed a moment before motioning him to tip the parasol back again.
"It seems to me Archelaus is going a lot to the mill," observed Killigrew idly, and more for the purpose of saying something than because he really thought so. "I ran into him there the other day when I was doing my sketch of it."
A short hush, pregnant with thought, followed on his words. To Boase and Vassie—those two so different beings—came the swift reflection "That would not be at all a bad thing. It would remove a danger."
Killigrew was interested, as an onlooker, in the idea of the alliance his own words had suggested. Ishmael felt an irrational little pang. Phoebe's smiles, her little friendliness, had always belonged to him—Archelaus would crush them as big fingers rub the powder off a butterfly's wings…. If he and Archelaus had been more truly brothers it would have been a very nice arrangement … little Phoebe would make a sweeter sister in some ways than the imperious Vassie….
"This puppy is for Phoebe," cried Vassie, breaking into a hurried speech; "it's been promised her a long time. She's so fond of pets."
This was true. Phoebe's maternal instincts made her love to have a soft, helpless little lamb or calf dependent on her; but it seemed her instinct was oddly animal in quality, for when the creature on which she had lavished so much care grew to sturdiness she saw it go to the butcher's knife with unimpaired cheerfulness and turned her attentions to the next weakling. It was a standing joke against Phoebe that she called all her hens by name and nursed them from the egg up, only to inform you brightly at some meal that it was Henrietta, or Garibaldi, or whatever luckless bird it might be, that you were devouring.
"If you like I'll take that puppy over to the mill now, if you'll see Wanda doesn't follow to bring it back," observed Ishmael, getting to his feet, "and then perhaps I can find out something about this bush-beating scare. If Archelaus is there—"
"Be careful, Ishmael," said the Parson quietly.
"Oh, I'll keep my temper, or try to. Coming with me, Joe?"
Vassie sat nonchalantly picking blades of grass. She would sooner never have seen Killigrew again than have asked him to stay with her, even than have suggested, with apparent carelessness, some plan that should keep him. But she waited with throbbing heart for his answer.
"I'd like to," said Killigrew briskly; "I've been abominably lazy till to-day, and that means I shall get fat. And when a person with light eyelashes and sandy whiskers gets fat all is over. I should have to go into my Guv'nor's business and become an alderman."
He reared his singularly graceful self up from the grass as he spoke and helped Vassie to her feet.
"Good-bye, both of you, then," said Vassie, withdrawing her hand when she was on her feet. "If you're going to the mill, I'll expect you when I see you."
This would have been arch had Vassie been a little less clever; as it was it sounded so natural that even that man-of-the-world, Killigrew, was taken in. As he set off with Ishmael he felt a moment's regret that he had not stayed with Vassie—a moment inspired by her lack of pique at his not having stayed.
The sun that had gilded Vassie's head had sunk swiftly by the time they reached the mill; and when the miller opened to their knock a flood of lamplight came out to mingle with the soft dusk. Phoebe's mother had died some two or three years earlier, and since then the miller had lived with only an old aunt of his own to help him look after his daughter. He peered out at them almost anxiously, Ishmael thought, and seemed rather upset at sight of him.
"Who's that there?" he asked sharply; then, as Killigrew stepped forward round the porch: "I thought maybe Phoebe was weth 'ee."
"Phoebe? Oh, no!" said Ishmael; "why, is she out?"
"'Tes of no account," replied the miller. "I reckon she'm just gone down-along to see to the fowls or semthen. Will 'ee come in, you and your Lunnon friend?"
Ishmael hesitated, then, remembering on what errand he had come, he stepped in, and, despite Killigrew's obvious unwillingness, they found themselves pledged to stay to supper.
"We really only just came to bring Phoebe this puppy my sister promised her," Ishmael explained. "It's the pick of our Wanda's litter and Phoebe had set her heart on it." Ishmael held up the squirming little thing as he spoke, and it licked its black nose nervously with a pink tongue that came out curled up like a leaf.
"Ah! she'm rare and fond o' dumb animals, is our Phoebe," said the miller, who seemed gratified at this mark of attention. "So long as she can have some lil' weak thing to make a fool on she'm happy, I b'lieve. 'Tes a woman's way."
"It's a very nice way for us poor devils of men," said Killigrew, laughing.
Supper was a short and oddly nervous meal, and still Phoebe did not come in. Ishmael at last felt there was no use staying longer and rose.
"Good-night to you, Mr. Lenine," he said. "I expect I'll find Phoebe over at Cloom. If I do, I'll see her home."
"Good-night to you both," said the miller cordially enough; but when they turned the corner by the wheel he was still peering after them as though beset by some uneasiness.
"Rum old bird," opined Killigrew, as they swung along in the darkness. As they reached the cliff again something brushed through the bushes away to their right, but as they called and no one answered they concluded it was a fox or some other wanderer of the night and went on. Further along still they came on a man leaning against a stone step that crested a wall they had to pass.
He did not move at their approach, and Ishmael touched him on the sleeve.
"Here, we want to pass, please," he said.
"So you want to pass, do you?" said the man, with a slow laugh. "You want to pass …? Well, pass…. I'll not hinder 'ee passing here nor yet to a place that's a sight further on…."
"Archelaus!" exclaimed Ishmael, peering into the darkness. But the man had already moved off and was lumbering down the field, and the sound of his quiet mirth was all that came back to them.
"I really think sometimes that Archelaus must have had a touch of the sun out in Australia," declared Ishmael as they mounted the stile after a brief awkward silence.
"If it's only that …" was all that Killigrew would vouchsafe.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Only you're sure he wouldn't do anything to hurt you …? He doesn't seem to love you by all I've heard and seen since I've been here."
"Of course not. What an idea! He does hate me pretty badly, I'm afraid, but I'm out of his reach. Archelaus knows what side his bread is buttered; he has a well-paid job and wouldn't do anything to upset it."
"There doesn't seem much love lost between you."
"There isn't. I'm incapable of being fair to Archelaus, as he to me, the difference being that I admit it and he doesn't."
"I wonder what he's up to now," exclaimed Killigrew, looking back from the height of the stile; "there's a light gleaming out. Looks as though he were lighting a lantern or signalling with it—"
"A lantern…." Ishmael scrambled up beside the other and his voice was alert. "Then perhaps there is something in this idea of the Parson's. I say, let's follow him. If he goes towards the wood it's fairly certain he's up to something, if it's only wiring rabbits."
"Isn't it rather looking for trouble, old chap?" demurred Killigrew, who did not know the name of fear for himself but was conscious of some undefined dread that had stirred in him at the greeting of Archelaus.
"Better go back, perhaps," he added; "they'll be expecting us. What d'you say?"
"That I'm going to follow Archelaus…. I'm about sick of him and his underhand ways. You don't know how he's made me suffer in all sorts of little things this past month. Talking to my own men at the inn and the farms, laughing at me. Even John-Willy Jacka goes after him now, that used to be a youngster with me…. You can go home if you like."
"Don't be a greater ass than you can help," advised Killigrew genially, and the two set off together for the point where the light had just flickered and gone out, as though the slide had been drawn over the lantern, if lantern it were. On a dim stretch of road they made out a form that bulked like that of Archelaus; it was joined by another and then by two more, and all four set off towards the wood, Killigrew and Ishmael behind them.