CHAPTER VI
"SOMETHING MUST COME TO ALL OF US"
With autumn Boase died. Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss. He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few of the country people too coarse of grain to understand a man's life could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made for him intolerant critics among his own class. Yet, all in all, he was as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding, as anyone Ishmael had ever heard of—far more so than anyone he had ever met. And of later years the Parson had grown in tolerance, which always to him had been a Christian duty—though it was far from being a weak or maudlin tolerance; and he had also lost much of that individualism which had been the only thing to cloud his judgment. More than most old men he had been free from glorification of the past, though not as free as he himself imagined. Something of Ishmael had gone with Killigrew's going, but that something had hardly included much of his heart; now there was buried with the Parson, or, more truly, strove to follow him whither he had gone, a love which was as single-natured a thing as can be felt. The return of Nicky was the only thing which at all filled the emptiness in Ishmael's days.
Nicky had altered, and for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind him. He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amusement against himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to try his hand.
When Ishmael had first started machinery at Cloom, beginning with a binder and going on to a steam thresher that he hired out for the harvest all around the district, the hedges had been black with folk crowding to see the wonders, just as they had when the first traction engine made its appearance in West Penwith. Yet Cornishmen, who are conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes, although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.
John-James was an old man now—he had aged quickly with his outdoor life; but always he refused to let Ishmael pension him off, and though as overseer he had a wage passing any paid in the county, and though he lived comfortably enough in his little cottage chosen by himself, with a tidy body who came in from the village every day to attend to his wants, he still showed all the premature ageing of the countryman. He had never married, and with age had taken many queer ways, one of them being a rooted dislike to having any woman except his sister Vassie in his house. Georgie was never allowed to cross its threshold, and he always called her "Mrs. Ruan." The two little girls he adored, and they knew he was their uncle, though with the unquestioning faith of childhood they accepted that he lived alone in a little cottage like a working man because he was eccentric and mustn't be worried to live as father did. Ishmael was very fond of this brother—as fond as John-James' rigid taciturnity would let him be. John-James' chief peculiarity was displayed always during the week's holiday he took every year; on each day of this week he would make a pilgrimage to some cemetery. A new graveyard was an unfailing magnet for him; he would spend hours there and return next year to note what new headstones had taken root. "Why on earth do you want to go and spend all your holiday in cemeteries, John-James?" Georgie had once asked him; "you'll have to be there for ever and ever some day; why do you want to go before you have to?" John-James, attired in his best broadcloth, with a bowler hat firmly fixed above his weather-beaten face, stared at her stonily "I go to the graveyards," he said at length, "because them be the only places where folks mind their own business…."
Tom had quite dropped out of the family circle made by Ishmael, Vassie, and John-James. He found the annoyance of not being received in the same circles as Ishmael and Vassie too irksome to him—who, he not unfairly considered, had done so much the best and with the greatest handicaps. The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of mayor never was to be for him. He married the daughter of a rich draper—in "the wholesale"—and as soon as he could afford it he dropped all doubtful practices and became strictly honest in his profession.
Of all the family, Vassie, who had started out with a more defined character than the others, was the least changed. She was eminently successful—had been ever since she met Flynn and determined to marry him. She had made him a good wife, for he was one of those men who need feminine encouragement, and with all his brilliance would never have got so far without her to encourage him. He was not to be one of the great men of his day, but he had done well, having attained an Under-Secretaryship under Gladstone's last Administration, which he continued under Lord Rosebery. With the advent of the Conservative party in '95 he retired, though still only sixty, and busied himself with a small estate he had bought in Ireland, where he intended to work out his schemes for model Utopian tenancies. Vassie was irked by the change. She had carried into middle life her superabundant energy—her love of being in the eye of the world. She had no children to occupy her—her only real quarrel with life—and it did not suit her to sit in Ireland while her once flaming Dan played with model villages and made notes for his reminiscences. He had, as flaming dreamers often do, fallen onto the dreams without the fire, and, having attained a certain amount of his ideals, was better pleased to sit and look backwards over those which had not materialised than to face a losing struggle in their cause.
Vassie tried all her wiles to induce him to come to London after the first year in retirement, and at last she was able to assure him that she was not feeling well. The symptoms were but slight to begin with—a tinge of rheumatism in one leg, which annoyed without incapacitating her. The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion. Vassie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next week she was at Cloom.
Ishmael was shocked at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey—that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.
"Don't look like that!" she told him. "The doctor says it's not hopeless, or wouldn't be if I'd let them operate."
"It? What is it?" asked Ishmael.
"Tuberculosis in the knee. They want me to have my leg off, and I won't. You don't want me to, do you, Ishmael? I'd rather die whole if I've got to."
He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes. Vassie linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan's voice as he talked to Georgie. Ishmael could not trust himself to speak. Vassie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between them during their lives. She stood for something to him no one else ever had, even as she did for John-James. She had never been popular with women—Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coarse; but to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to them as far as her sex went, she meant a good deal as a friend. Judith and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really intimate, and that was more a curious kinship between them, a mutual respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other's very different character, than anything warmer. But to Ishmael and John-James she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity. When she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more for him than for anyone else in the world. She felt more his equal than she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that were beyond her practical reach. She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never. She slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.
"Don't worry! After all something must come to all of us," she said.
The phrase knocked at Ishmael's heart. "Something must come to all of us…." Everyone had to die of something, from some outrage on nature. There had to be some convulsion out of the ordinary course to bring it about; cases where the human machine simply ran down, as with the Parson, were rare. This horror was lying in wait for all—the manner of their leaving. It was astonishing, looked at in cold blood, that people lived and were gay and happy with this hanging over them from their birth onwards. He realised that it was this fact—that only by some disruption of the ordinary course could death come—which had always made death seem so unnatural to him. He had for a flash the feeling that every woman, however maternal, has when she knows she is to have a baby—a feeling of being caught in something that will not let one go. "Something must come to all of us…."
Her "something" had come to Vassie. She had to submit to the operation, but, though she rallied from it, no real good could be done, and the end became merely a question of time. She did not kick against the pricks, as Ishmael had done all his life; she accepted it all with a certain stoicism that was not without its grandeur, and, though she became very irritable, she had moments of greater softening than ever before. She was dying when the clouds of the coming war with the South African Republics first began to lower over the country. The Flynns were in London, for Vassie was now too ill ever to think of crossing over to Ireland again, but she suddenly took it into her head to wish to be taken down to Cloom. This was when she heard the news that Nicky, who had been a volunteer for some time, had enlisted in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. She had always been very attached to him, spending upon him what of thwarted motherhood she alone knew, and he for his part had responded to her rather more than he did to most people. Ishmael was wired to, and in November of '99, a month after the declaration of war, Dan brought her down with a couple of hospital nurses and she was installed in the biggest and sunniest room at Cloom.
With Nicky's absorption into the Army and Vassie's incursion hard upon the edge of her final parting Ishmael was more strangely affected than by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life. The approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel. He had thought the loss of power to feel for himself an inevitable part of age, as it had been of the thickening and greater materialism of middle life; but now he knew that never had he been ravaged as now, because never before had he encountered fear for someone he loved.
Bitter loss, the loss of disappointment which at the time the soul tells one is worse than loss by death, he had known over Blanche; pain, anger, hardness, with his family he could not have missed; horror and remorse had both assailed him over Phoebe; natural sorrow that held no sense of outrage he had felt for the loss of Killigrew and Boase. But this was something different—this aching sense of helplessness, of a passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof nor Nicky on the far veldt. He had not been of those who are insensitive to the pain of the world—rather had it held too much of his sympathies; but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he would give everything—the war, the whole rest of the world—to have Nicky back in safety. That was only at first, or when the fear was strongest; at other times his sense of proportion and knowledge of how Nicky himself would feel towards such a sentiment, brought him to a truer poise.
The war dragged on. The nation began to see that it was not to be the "walk-over" so confidently expected; disasters occurred, long sieges wore the folk at home even as those in the beleaguered towns, growls against the Government were raised, people talked of "muddling through," and every barrel-organ in the land ground out "Soldiers of the Queen" and "The Absent-minded Beggar." Then the world went mad and mafficked, felt a little ashamed of itself, and became, for the first time for years, rather usefully introspective and self-critical. And "Nicky … Nicky … Nicky …" beat out every swing of the pendulum of Time at Cloom.
Between the beats of intensest feeling Ishmael would fall into the arid spaces which all deep emotion holds as a strongly-running sea holds hollows—spaces where it did not seem to matter so much after all, when in a dry far-off way he could tell himself that nothing really made any difference in life. From these hollows he came up again as a man comes floating into consciousness after chloroform—recalled by a sense of pain. He had one of these spaces just after Vassie had been buried, and all the time he was consoling Dan's frantic and noisy sorrow he was feeling a hypocrite, because, so he told himself, he really did not care. He did care, and deeply, but he was making the mistake of thinking that any grief can go the whole way, that all else in life can possibly be blotted out. True instinct told him it could not, that all of life could never fall in ashes round the head even when it was bowed in irrevocable loss; but a remnant of the conventional made him feel as though it ought to, and this made him distrust what grief he felt. His thought for Nicky, even when he was in his dry spaces, he always knew was eating at him. When, with peace, came the expectation of Nicky's return in safety, it seemed to Ishmael that never before had he known all that fatherhood meant. Cloom, the future, all that he had worked for all his life, would surely come back with Nicky.