CHAPTER II
AUTUMN
A few evenings later Ishmael went out alone on to the moors, filled with very different ideas from any that had held him of late. Not the petty friction of domesticity, nor the pervading thought of that queer feeling in his eyes, nor care for Nicky's future, or anything of the present, stirred within him. A letter received by Georgie that day, and the thought and realisation of which Ishmael had carried about with him through all his varied work, now swamped his mind in memories so vivid that the present was only in his mind as a faint bitter flavour hardly to be noticed.
Judy had written to Georgie, had written to say she was coming down some time soon, but primarily the letter had been to give news of Killigrew. Ishmael and Georgie knew—exactly how they could not have told—in what relationship Judith and Killigrew had stood to each other; Ishmael felt he had known ever since that evening when he met Judy in Paradise Lane, and to Georgie the certainty had come with greater knowledge of life and realisation of herself. They had hardly mentioned the affair to each other, and then only in a round-about manner, but each guessed at the other's knowledge. Georgie was aware that for some years now Judith had seen very little of Killigrew, but how or why the severance had come about neither she nor Ishmael could guess. Judith had never mentioned Killigrew to them except as a mutual friend; she always had the strength of her own sins. Never till this letter had she spoken or written otherwise, but now she told that Killigrew was very ill in Paris and that she had gone to him. Very ill was practically all she said, beyond a mere mention that the illness was typhoid; but Ishmael knew at once what she meant, though she either would not or could not write it. Through all Georgie's comments and hopes that soon better news would come he never doubted, though he said little, that Killigrew was dying, if not already dead, when Judith wrote. He knew her well enough, and guessed at her still more acutely, to know that she was quite capable of so much of reticence. And why did she speak so confidently of coming down to Cloom some time quite soon? She would not leave Paris while Joe was still unwell…. Ishmael knew, with the sureness he had once or twice before known things in his life, and the knowledge affected him strangely. He felt no violent grief, but a great blank. He had not seen Killigrew for years; but with the knowledge that he was to see him no more went something of himself—something that had belonged to Killigrew alone and that had responded to something in him which henceforth would be sealed and dead. He kept himself busy all day, but now he walked fast along the road, only accompanied by his thoughts.
The first hint of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall, and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old mine-shaft. Ishmael felt a moment's gladness for its escape; then he went on, and, soon leaving the road, he struck out over the moor.
On he went till he came to a disused china-clay pit, showing pale flanks in the curve of the moor. A ruined shaft stood at the head, the last of the sunset glowing through its empty window-sockets; an owl called tremulously, the sheep answered their lambs from the dim moor. A round pearl-pale moon swung in the east, level with the westering sun; as he sank she rose, till the twilight suddenly wrapped the air in a soft blue that was half a shadow, half a lighting. The last of the warm glow had gone; only the acres of feathery bents still held a pinkish warmth in their bleached masses.
Ishmael sat upon the dry grass, where the tiny yellow stars of the creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay almost too idle for thought.
He wondered both why he did not feel more, and why he was feeling so much. If Killigrew had died when they were both young, Ishmael would have felt a more passionate grief—an emptiness, a resentment that never again would he see and talk with him; but part of himself would not have died too. As he lay, there suddenly came into his mind the first two occasions on which he had heard of deaths that affected him at all intimately—the deaths of Polkinghorne and of Hilaria. Of both he had heard from Killigrew, he remembered. Polkinghorne—that news could not have been said actually to have grieved either of them, but it had been the first time in Ishmael's life that even the thought of death as a possible happening had occurred to him. Hilaria—a sense of outrage had been added to that; it was not her death that taught him anything beyond the mere commonplace that death can be a boon, but the news of her illness, that illness which unseen had been upon her even in the days when they had tramped the moors together and she had read to an enthralled ring of boys the breathless instalments of "The Woman in White." It had been the first time he had recognised that fear and horror lie in wait along the path of life, that not naturally can we ever leave it, that sooner or later illness or accident must inevitably make an end. Even with his passionate distaste for the mere idea of death, this recognition would not have hit him so hard, if it had not been that the fact of Hilaria's youth, of her having been, as he phrased it, "Just like anyone else, just like I am …" had shown him that not only for strangers, for people who are mere names in newspapers, do the hard things of life lie in wait. There was always this something waiting to spring—that might or might not show teeth and claws any time in life, that did not, in the form of an out-of-the-ordinary fate such as Hilaria's, often touch even on the fringe of knowledge, but that nevertheless was shown to be possible. That was the rub, that was what he had been aware of ever since. Life was not a simple going-forward, lit by splendid things, marked maybe by the usual happenings such as the death of parents, and even friends; but it could hold such grim things as this…. Once one had seen what tricks life could play there was no trusting it in quite the same way again. That such happenings should be possible would have seemed incredible till the realisation of Hilaria drove it home. Of no use to say that these things were the exception. They could still happen.
And now Killigrew—before his natural time, though not so violently as had been the case with the other two old playmates. Killigrew had lived his life very thoroughly, though he had always loved not well but too wisely. Sitting there on the lonely moor amid the ruined china-clay works, with only the sounds of bird and beast breaking the still air, Ishmael seemed to himself as though suspended in a state that was neither space nor time, when independent of either he could roam the past as the present, and even the future as well. It was as though time were cut out of one long endless piece as he had often imagined it as a little boy, when he had been puzzled that it was not as easy to see forwards as backwards, and been pricked by the feeling that it was merely a forgotten faculty which at any moment hard straining, if only it lit on the right way, could regain. For the first time for many years he had a glimpse of the pattern of life instead of only the intricacies, seemingly without form, of each phase. Killigrew and, in a much less degree—but, as he now saw, hardly less keenly—Hilaria, had both so affected the web of his life, not in action, but in thought, that without them he would either have learnt different lessons or the same lessons quite differently. Even Judith, Carminow, and all the rest of the people who had impinged in greater or less degree, went to make the pattern, though not always, as with Killigrew, Hilaria, and Polkinghorne, could he see any one definite thing that they had been the means of making clear to his groping vision. For we cannot know people with even the lightest degree of intimacy without both taking from them and giving to them. Externally it may be only two or three people in life who have had the influencing of it, but each casual encounter has helped to prepare us for those people.
What Ishmael felt in regard to Killigrew at the present moment—and rightly felt, for, as he found out later, on the day the letter arrived at Cloom Killigrew had died—left a blank in his life, but more it brought home to him that, the meridian once passed, blanks were things that would increase. Children grew up, but they grew away; grandchildren would be a stay, but one must be content to be a background for them. This falling away, step by step, through life was, he saw, part of its ordered procession. And he saw too, with a deadly sureness there was no evading, that this thing he knew of Killigrew stood for another knowledge to him as well, a knowledge he had been fighting and to which he still refused to accede. The knowledge that physical decay had to be, that for him it had begun. He was still a young man as men count youth nowadays, but he knew the difference between that and the tingle of the rising sap of real youth. It was not Killigrew's death he mourned so much as the death of that self who had been Killigrew's friend.