CHAPTER VII
GARNERED GRAIN
The next morning he was found lying as though worn out suddenly, never to move or speak again. Only his brain was still alert as he lay there and watched them all from under his heavy lids. Three days he lay, and they could not even tell how much he understood, for he was past the effort that communicating with them would have meant; but all the while he was feeling his brain was clearer than it had ever been in his life, that at last he knew many things he could have told them if he could have spoken, only they were things that cannot be taught by one man to another, for every man must find them for himself.
At first it seemed to him he was floating very peacefully on a clear sea, untroubled in mind or body, though seeing he was drifting, because he was also aware that whither he was drifting was the inevitable direction of a kindly current. Then after a little or long while, he could not have told which, he seemed himself to become stationary, while past him flowed the pattern of his life as he remembered it—scenes grey and many-coloured, blurred at the edges, but sharp with an aching clarity at the core. They had all gone, these happenings, but it was not that which gave the poignancy; it was that the Ishmael who had taken part in them was gone too, and each had borne something of himself away with it.
Those first childish years after he had known Cloom was to be his, that he had to regenerate it; then those years at St. Renny … Killigrew floated past him, joyous and pagan. There was Hilaria, joyous also … he had forgotten her for years now. At St. Renny life was always just ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters…. In those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres. Yet even then there had been something else, some recognition of the fact that even this was not an end to itself alone…. Then youth—the first years at Cloom and that wonderful incursion into the London that was as past as he was, that London that had been half-wonder, half-nightmare, and that had held his love for Blanche. There had been a brief spell when he had told himself that this was the chief thing, that in that passionate fusing of two spirits, that absorption in some one other loved being, lay the end in life, but the mirage had dissolved then even as the image of it wavered and faded now. While he was lost and groping in the wastes it had left him in, there swam up the memory of Hilaria again, but no horror went with it. And though this second impinging of her life on his bore the far-off memory of fear, yet it now seemed as vital and natural as the first. She had shown him something long ago which he was fully understanding now.
He passed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it did not of necessity. He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now. He saw again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that physical passion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from it, his effort to break away.
He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had strengthened—the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had whispered to him…. What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after? He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that curtain. He went on passing again through his life, and he saw the harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase, when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes and working out of them had filled the hours—still with Nicky as the chief personal interest.
In his childhood he had lived by what would happen in a far golden future, in his youth by what might happen any dawning day; but in his years of manhood, and from then till he began to feel the first oncoming of age, he had lived by what he did. Then he came again to Georgie, and saw how insensibly he had been won to softer ways, though never to the glamour-ridden ways of first youth. They had been sweet, those years, and the sweeter for the outside things—the friendship with Killigrew that had vivified his life, the pleasant intermittent times with Judith, the renascence of intimacy with Boase and the growth of his children, growing away from him every year, but none the less to be loved for that. What had he lived by during those years? Not, consciously, by anything, except a mere going on and a determination to make the best of things, to get the most out of everything. When the Parson died he had a glimpse of a world he had lost sight of since his youth, but not then could he give up this one sufficiently to do more than glimpse it. And when Nicky was in South Africa he had suffered that second violent onslaught of the personal which racked him this way and that. Vassie—the horror that her death had held now seemed to him as empty of all save peace as Hilaria's. But all the while he had been living by what he found in that passionate moment when he stood, a man of sixty, at the top of the hill above the seaward valley and had seen the rainbow arching over Cloom and the distant sea. Beauty, the actual joy of the world, that had been feeding his soul all the time, giving him those moments of ecstasy without which Killigrew had always said the soul could not be saved alive. From that moment the slope of the ten years down to the present seemed so swift that he found his vision of them less clear than of preceding periods. What of these last years, each of which was bringing him with, it seemed, such increasing momentum, towards the end?
And in a flash he saw what he had, all unknowingly, lived by since the decline of his powers had fallen upon swiftness, and he saw it as what alone makes life bearable. He had lived by the knowledge of death, by the blessed certainty that life could not go on for ever, that there must be an end to all the wanderings and pain, to all the dulnesses and unsatisfactory driftings, to all the joys that would otherwise fall upon sluggishness or cloy themselves. This it was that gave its fine edge to pleasure, its sweet sharpness to happiness, and their possible solace to pain and grief. He had lived, as all men do, knowingly or not, by death. This was the secret bread that all men shared.
Again came that period of unconsciousness which corresponded to night, and the third day dawned. Again his brain felt of a crystal clearness; he was undistressed by the fact he could not speak to those around him or even return the pressure of their hands, for he was feeling all the old intoxicating joy of discovery at breaking into new lands. He even felt a mischievous elation that all this secret pageant, this retrospective wonder that was life, should be his to watch and enjoy, while all around thought him past emotion already.
If, then, men lived by death, what was death? Not a mere cessation—then a going-on…. He made no definite images of it in his mind, did not even wonder whether he should see those others he had known and loved who had passed into these tracts before him. That seemed to him now, as it always had when he had thought of it, rather unimportant. What mattered, he had always known, was the adjustment of the soul to something beyond it, to which it and the whole of life stood in inextricably close and vital relationship. Those other relationships, those other meetings, might be included in that as an added pleasure, but the other thing, if there at all, would necessarily be of such supreme importance as in its bright light to drown all minor effulgence. And that it was there, always, in this world and the next, he knew, for he had always felt his soul breathe it as surely as his lungs had inhaled the free airs of the earth. That the first meeting with it might not be all happiness, that as, in the Parson's creed, inevitable pains would have to be worked through before the soul could be sufficiently purged to meet it clearly upon its ultimate levels, mattered very little. At least, the pains would be different pains, not the same old wearying ones of earth—the disappointments and the mortifications, the burning anxieties and the bitter losses, the overwhelming physical disasters, that everyone had to go through sooner or later.
It lay before him, not as a darkness, but a brightness, that he knew. He felt an exquisite easing, even of the very muscles of his stricken body, as he thought of it—a brightness which every soul went to swell, which gained a glowing, luminous pulse of light from each one that slipped into its shining spaces….
And with that came light on all that puzzled and tormented him since he had known the facts about Nicky, and the mere physical paternity of him seemed a small thing beside such light as this. That passion of joy he had felt when he had heard of Nicky's coming had not been wasted: it had gone to make something in himself he would never otherwise have known; it had gone on in him as a living force, and had helped him to make Nicky what he was as much as one human being can make another. Archelaus had "won" in that Cloom would belong, though no man knew it, to his son and his grandson after him, but it no longer seemed to Ishmael to matter whether Archelaus "won" or not. There was at last no striving, no unacknowledged but hidden combat, no feeling of lingering unfairness.
Ishmael knew how, with all his elusiveness, Nicky had been very malleable, immensely open to impressions, to what was held before him, and he knew how different Nicky would have been if Archelaus had had the moulding of him. Just as even at this hour he was reverting to all he had learnt—more from watching and imbibing it than any other way—from Boase, so Nicky had absorbed from him what made him what he was. And yet, so till the end did the deep inherited instinct of the man who lives by land hold him, Ishmael took pleasure in the thought that, after all, Nicky was of Ruan blood…. So much of earth held by him as everything else began to slip away.
Then towards evening thought fell away too, leaving him only with what he had called to Jimmy a "nice tiredness." So do children feel after a day's play, so do old, old men feel after a life's work….
He was dimly but certainly aware that Nicky was beside his pillow, his hand upon him, that other figures were beyond, of Nicky's bent head, but in his drowsy mind it was confused with the head of the plaster Christ that had leaned forward from the wall behind and was drooping low over him. The hair fell softly over his eyes like the falling of a shadow, and under it he could see the Divine eyes, that had beamed at him now and again throughout his life, but never as brightly as in boyhood, smiling into his. He smiled back, and then, with a queer little apology in his mind, he turned his eyes away to take a last look at the soft dusk through the window.
Later, when Nicky had closed the sightless eyes, the young moon swam up upon her back. She who had just gone through her full round scarred maturity and died of old age was now virgin once again, with that renascent virginity some of the greatest courtesans have known, a remoteness of spirit, a chill freshness that is in itself eternal youth.