"What a glorious sight!" said one of them, with a deep-drawn breath; "I've never seen anything to touch it…." A couple of farmers' wives standing by peered curiously at the speaker and his companion. "Simme them folk must be lacken' their senses," said one to the other, "carlen' a sight like this bewtiful! Lacken' their senses, sure 'nough!"
Ishmael smiled to himself, and in his mind agreed with both. "I wonder how it happened?" piped up another artist, anxious to remove a false impression of callousness. Ishmael explained that spontaneous combustion was probably the cause of the fire, and a farmer standing near volunteered his opinion that Angwin had packed his hay damp. Everyone stood a while longer, staring; the glow had gone from the smouldering ricks, and the excitement of the event began to die in the minds of the onlookers. The artist straightened himself and prepared to go. "They're out now," he said, half-regretfully, half-cheerfully. The farmer near him spoke again. "Them ricks won't be out for days and nights," he said; "they'll go on burning in their hearts. They'm naught but a body o' fire, that's what they are … a body o' fire…."
Ishmael stayed to see Angwin and do what he could to help; then he began his walk home. He was not running now, but aware of a physical discomfort that was not mere exhaustion. He had a sharp pain in his side such as children call a stitch, but no amount of stooping to tie imaginary shoelaces would drive it away. He was glad to accept the offer of a lift home when he was overtaken by a farmer's cart, and as he was jogged along the pain grew fiercer. By the time he reached Cloom the splendid fire that had warmed him on his run had died to nothingness, and at his ashen look Georgie cried out. He allowed her to help him to bed and give him hot drinks, to scold him in her woman's way.
"Such a foolish thing to do at your age … you might have known!" she kept on repeating. He said little, but in his own mind ran the refrain: "She doesn't understand. She's still too young…." He wondered whether women ever really did know when talking was a mere foolishness, however sensible the thing said. And again, over and over to himself, as an accompaniment even to his pain, ran: "How well worth it …!" For he had recaptured for a magic couple of hours something he had thought left behind him, had burned with it ardently and secretly. He too had been a body of fire.
The phrase stayed, pricking at him, through the drifting veils of sleep that alternately deepened and thinned about him all night long.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW JUDITH
For a long time Ishmael paid the price of that night raid upon his physical resources, and when he was beginning to take up work again, as usual, Nicky was off to Canada—off with the latest thing in outfits, letters of introduction, high hopes, and such excitement at thought of the new world at his feet that only at the last moment did the sorrow that because of the uncertainty of life all leave takings hold, strike him. Then—for he was a very affectionate boy—he felt tears of which he was deeply ashamed burning in his eyes; he ignored them, made his farewells briefer, and was gone.
A few days later Judith came down to pay her promised visit. Both Ishmael and Georgie drove over to meet her train, and both failed for the first startled moment to recognise her. Ishmael had an incongruous flash, during which that occasion years earlier when he had seen her and Georgie walking down that same platform towards him was the more vivid actuality.
Judith's epicene thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much as the colouring of her face and the fact that she was wearing pince-nez that made her an absolutely different being. This was the third time in her life that Judy was coming down to the West. Once it had been as a very young girl, full of dreams and questionings; once it had been as a woman who had already learned something of proportion; now it was as this elderly and alien person whom her friends could not connect with the Judith they had known. Not till they saw the beam of her eyes, as profound but somehow less sad than the eyes of the girl had been, did they feel it was the same Judy. The exaggerated colour on her face, the white powder and overdone rouge, embarrassed them both. Judy saw it and laughed, and when they were in the waggonnette and driving along the road she said: "You're thinking how horribly I'm made up! I can't help it. I began it and I found I couldn't leave off, and that's the truth. And of course my eye for effect has got out. But I don't think I'm generally as bad as this. It comes of having done myself up in the train."