CHAPTER VII
THE HEART OF THE CYCLONE
There are times in life when our affairs are at some high crest, when all emotion and the processes of thought become intensified and crystallised: the slightest incident makes a deep-bitten impression; the most momentary effect of colour or lighting, or the tones of a voice, remain in the memory indissolubly connected with the phase the mind is passing through. Every sense is hung upon a hair-trigger, and even irrelevant things touch more sharply than usual, in the same way that a magnifying glass reveals the minutest pores and hairs on the hand holding whatever the primary object to be looked at may be. They are mercifully few, those periods of intense clarity, for they leave a mind and heart deadened and surfeited, that slowly awake to the dull consciousness of pain, even as the body, numbed by a severe accident, only after a while awakes to sentient aching. Ishmael passed into this phase in the first days after the scene in the wood, before physically he was conscious of much beyond a dull throbbing in his head.
He lay and stared from out his bandages, feigning more stupor than he felt in his passionate craving to keep off all discussion and inquiry. He lay and watched the spring sunlight creep over the whitewashed wall opposite, and every slow black fly that crawled across the patch of warmth might have been crawling over his raw nerves. He almost expected the surface of the wall to contract like a skin and twitch them off, as he felt his own skin doing out of sympathy.
In the night, when the wall was filmed with shadow save for the faint flickering of a rushlight that made great rounds of light upon the dimness, then he saw all his life at Cloom passing in a shadow show across the wall, crawling like the flies…. He was never delirious; physically his fine and sane constitution was recovering well from a nasty blow—it was merely as though all his mind had been set a little faster, like a newly-regulated clock, a clock set to work backwards; and he could hear its ticking through all the sounds of everyday life that, hushed as much as might be, came into his room.
He felt sick of it all, sick of the striving at Cloom, of the quarrels with Archelaus, of Tom's cat-like attacks, of his mother's plaints, of the cruelties he felt spoiling the whole countryside like a leprosy. He cared for no one near him except Killigrew, because he alone stood for the things of an alien world. He hated the sound of John-James' boots that never failed to go a tip-toe over the cobbles below his window. He wanted nothing, not even to get away from it all. He was too absorbed watching it upon the wall, hearing his own mind ticking out its comments like that horrible instrument Vassie had upon the piano to time her exercises.
It was the first time since the fit in his childhood, which he did not remember, that he had ever lain helpless or suffered in his body, and he was aware of humiliation. All he could remember of the scene in the wood showed him his own futility. Everything was wasted—nothing he had done was any good nor the doing of it, then or ever again, at all worth while. Nothing seemed to matter.
So passed the first two days of his consciousness, and the speed at which the clock of his mind was regulated made the world's time seem interminable. When the two days had gone they seemed to him to be lengthy, not as two weeks or years or anything in a known measure of counting, but as some period of time spaced quite differently. This is the time that only sick people know, that fills their eyes with knowledge not understood of the healthy sympathisers beside their beds, who, though they may have sat the nights and days out with them, yet have not the same measure to count the passing of their hours.
With the third day came pain, bodily pain, and that saved Ishmael. It seemed to him then that physical hurts were so far worse than mental that his dread depression vanished before it. He would have welcomed that back to save his body a pang; it seemed to him his head must burst with the pain raging in it, and he cared about nothing else in the world. When that too passed he was as one who has floated out of stormy seas into smooth waters—too weak to navigate them, but blissfully aware that it does not matter, they are safe and he can drift with the current. It was only then he began to talk, and he never once referred to what had happened. He asked where Archelaus was, and when he heard he had gone back to his work in the mine that day he said no more. And it was characteristic of Ishmael that no one ever knew whether he were aware of that impulse of his brother's, and what it had nearly led to, or not. With cessation of physical pain and the exhaustion of the high-keyed string of his mind, came blessed reaction. Even the fact that nothing mattered ceased to matter. The suggestion, emanating simultaneously from the Parson and Killigrew that he should accompany the latter back to London stirred him to only a faint thrill—indeed, a certain disinclination to accept the offer was almost as strong as the urgings of the common sense which told him that soon he would be won to pleasure and interest, once the initial effort was over. Still, as the days slipped past, he found himself looking forward more and more keenly.
On the afternoon before he was to go to town he was resting on a couch in his room when the sounds of Vassie's arrogant but not unpleasing voice came floating up to him from the parlour as she sang her latest song, the fashionable "Maiden's Prayer." He smiled a little to himself; he could picture Killigrew, leaning attentive, turning the pages, smiling between narrowed lids at the lovely thing she looked—chin raised and full throat vibrant—yet giving so little away beyond his admiration. The song faded, silence fell, then a door opened and closed. Vassie's voice was raised, this time in welcome. He guessed the visitor to be Phoebe from the fluttered feminine quality of the sounds below—staccato sentences whose words he could not catch, but whose very rhythm, broken and eager, betrayed them. A moment later, and a knock came at his door.
It was Vassie who entered, somewhat sulkily, her beauty clouded by a shade of reluctance—Phoebe, shrinking, palpitant, staying in the shadowy passage.
"Phoebe has come to know if she may say good-bye to you, Ishmael?" said Vassie. "She's heard you're going to London, and can't believe you'll ever come back safely…."
"Why, Phoebe, that's kind of you," he called; "but won't you come in for a moment?" He was pleased after a mild fashion to see her—she at least stood for something not too intimately connected with his own household, he told himself. The next moment he remembered that there had been some suggestion—what his blurred recollection of it could not tell him—that she might be being courted by Archelaus; but the slight recoil of distaste stirred within him fell away before her frank eagerness, her kindly warmth, as she pattered into the room, her skirts swaying around her. She sat primly down beside the couch while Vassie stayed by its foot, determined not to sit down also and so give an air of settled ease to the interview.
"I—I hope you are better, Ishmael?" faltered Phoebe. She had never before been in a young man's bedroom, even bereft of its tenant, and she felt shy and fluttered.
"Oh, I'm all right!" answered Ishmael. "I don't think poor Silly Peter has enough muscle to hit very hard, you know."
A look of intense relief floated across the strained demureness of Phoebe's countenance: raised eyelids and a heightened colour testified to what passed through her mind.
"Oh, then it was Silly Peter—" she began ingenuously; then broke off.
"Yes, didn't you know? He was dazed with the lights, and then the sudden darkness and all of us being so angry, I suppose…. Hullo, what's that?"
It was Killigrew's voice calling softly up the stairs to Vassie. She hesitated, made a feint of going to the door only to hear what he wanted, and then went rustling down to him. Phoebe snuggled a little more comfortably on her chair with an unconscious movement of pleasure.
"He said downstairs he wanted to finish taking her picture to-day while the light lasted," she said; then ran on: "Ishmael, I've been so unhappy…."
"Have you, Phoebe? Why, what about?" Then, as he saw her flush and bite her pouting lower lip, he added: "Not because of me? I say, how jolly of you! But there wasn't any necessity—"
"How silly you are! As if one did things—worried and that sort of thing—because it was necessary! It's because one can't help it."
"Then it was all the nicer of you. But I meant that really it wasn't anything to worry about. I'm as right as rain, and it's given me a jolly good excuse to go up to London and see the world."
Panic peeped in Phoebe's brown eyes, giving her a flashing look of something woodland, despite her would-be smart attire. She dropped her lids to hide it.
"London…." she murmured. Then, sitting upright, and staring at her twisting fingers:
"Ishmael!…"
A pause which Ishmael broke by asking, "Well?"
"Nothing. Only—I was wondering. Whether you … how you'd like London, and whether you wouldn't find down here, and all of us, very dull when you come back?"
"What rot! Of course not! Why should I?" asked Ishmael, already so in London in anticipation that he could not even take an interest in his return to this older world.
"Oh, I don't know. I only wondered. You never wonder about things, do you, Ishmael?"
"I don't think I ever do anything else."
"Not in the way I mean. You wonder about life and all sorts of things like that that I don't bother about, but not about people, about what you feel for them. That's what I mean by wondering."
"Oh, feeling!…" said Ishmael in a gruff embarrassment; "I dunno. Yes I do, though. I don't think what one feels is so very important—not the personal part of it, anyway. There's such a lot of things in the world, and somehow it seems waste of energy to be always tearing oneself to tatters over one's personal relationship towards any one other person."
Phoebe tried to snatch at the words that blew past over her head as far as her comprehension of them was concerned.
"But how can you say it's not important?" she exclaimed reproachfully. "Even being married wouldn't seem important if you looked at it that way."
"Even being married…." repeated Ishmael. Inwardly came the swift thought: "Well, why is there all this fuss about it, anyway?" All he said was:
"Why, have you been thinking of getting married, Phoebe?"
"A lady can't be the first to think of it…." said Phoebe.
"I suppose not," he agreed, true to his own age and that in which he lived. Conversation lay quiescent between them; he was aware of a sensation of weariness and wished she would go, pretty as she looked sitting there in her circle of swelling skirt and trim little jacket that fitted over her round breast and left bare her soft throat.
"Have you ever …?" asked Phoebe suddenly.
"Have I ever what?"
"Thought of it … of getting married?"
"Good Lord! not yet. There's been such a lot of other things…."
"Well, when you do I'll hope you'll be very happy," said Phoebe.
"Thanks! I hope so too."
"I don't suppose you'll know me then."
"Why ever not?"
"Oh, well, of course you'll marry a real lady, and she wouldn't want to know me. She'd think me common."
"What utter nonsense, Phoebe! Do all girls talk such silly nonsense? Why, of course I'll always be far too fond of you to lose sight of you, and I expect you and my wife—how idiotic that sounds—will be no end of friends." He did not think so; but there struck him that there was something rather plaintive and wistful about Phoebe that afternoon. Suddenly she rose and settled the basque of her jacket with quick, nervous fingers.
"I must go," she said hurriedly. "I don't know what Vassie'll say at me staying up here like this."
"It was awfully nice of you to come," said Ishmael, taking the little hand that lay idle against a flounce. She made no motion to withdraw it or to move away, and glancing up at her he saw there were tears in her eyes. As he looked they slipped over her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. She made no effort to stay them, nor did she sob—she cried with the effortless sorrow of a tired child.
"Phoebe! why, what's the matter? Are you unhappy about anything?
Phoebe, do tell me what it is?"
She shook her head but stammered out:
"It's nothing, but I'm sort of frightened…. I can't tell you about what. And I thought you might be able to help me and put it all right, but you can't."
"How do you know I can't? You haven't tried me."
"Yes, I have," she said, half-laughing now through her tears that were already dry upon her cheeks. Whatever thought, whatever fear, whatever glimpsing of dread possibilities in herself or in some other person had brought her to his side that afternoon was already weighing less unbearably upon her, though she had failed in her attempt to find an easing. Her mind simply could not sustain for long one idea, and in the passing moment she was always able to find distraction. She found it now in Vassie, who came sweeping in, slightly flushed and with a lighter manner than that with which she had ushered in Phoebe. She bore her off with promise of tea and a look at new gowns with none the less determination, but the sight of tearstains on Phoebe's cheek at once softened and relieved her.
Ishmael was left with a vague feeling that he had failed Phoebe in something she had expected of him. Yet for himself he was cheered by her visit, for it had served to bring him out of that dead, still peace where he had been for so many days, that had not lightened even with returning strength, but that had been swept away by the breath of the commonplace Phoebe brought with her.
As to Vassie, she was occupied with wondering whether the passionate yet careless caresses that Killigrew had lavished on her that afternoon "meant anything" or not. He had told her that in France they always said that "love was an affair of the skin…." And she knew she had a perfect skin. Killigrew had told her it was perfect to stroke as well as gaze upon; none of her English swains had ever told her that. She always looked on Killigrew as a foreigner because he was so alien to herself.
Yet that evening he spent with Ishmael and the Parson, and the next day a grey uncertain morning of blown clouds found Ishmael and Killigrew both seated in the train while she waved her handkerchief at them from a receding platform. And if that handkerchief were to be wet with tears that were not for her brother nor yet for Killigrew except in so far as he had, with his gay tongue and sudden secret kisses, awakened hopes in her that she was beginning to see, by his very nature, could have no foundation, at least she let no one even guess at it. They were tears of rage, almost as much with herself as him, and if Killigrew were never to have had more upon his conscience than a light flirtation with this ambitious and far from ignorant girl, there would have been little to disturb his healthy slumbers. Vassie was not one to waste time over the regrets that eat at the heart, and, though she could not altogether stifle pain at the outset, her strong-set will made the inevitable period of recurrent pangs shorter for her than for most. Killigrew had played the game quite fairly according to his code; it was Vassie's ignorance of any form of philandering beyond the crude interchange of repartee and kisses of the young clerks she had hitherto met that had made the playing of it unequal. She and Phoebe were both enacting the oldest woman's part in the world—that of being left behind to wait; and it was two very unwitting youths who left them. As the train gathered speed on its long journey both Ishmael and Killigrew had their minds on what lay before them, not on anything left behind.