Part 9 (2/2)

He slung it over one shoulder without a word, inwardly resenting bitterly the touch of the ludicrous it gave to the evening's happenings, and almost silently he went with the stumbling girl towards the town, only leaving her at the corner of her lane. She thanked him with a new shyness, and taking the c.u.mbrous emblem of her inferiority over her left arm, held out her strong hard little right hand to him.

”Don't think it horrid of me to have stayed,” she pleaded. ”It was that I so wanted you to win ... I was afraid ...”

”It was very--very unladylike,” began Ishmael, then paused. Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause no more.

”Don't worry, Ishmael,” she said. ”Father has often told me of people hurting their backs wrestling and doing things like that, and he says it's very seldom anything. If it is they can't walk at all, and he walked quite well. Besides, I know he's pretending it's worse than it is to upset you; he's that sort....”

Ishmael felt a little pang of grat.i.tude, he gripped her hand, muttered a ”good-night,” and was off through the darkness. But he did not go back to the school for an hour yet. He was in for such trouble an hour more or less after time made no difference, and he was past thinking in terms of the clock. He had grown up violently and painfully in a short s.p.a.ce, and ordinary methods of measuring time mean very little to one who has crowded years of growth into one evening. He walked about the moor till physical exhaustion drove him in, where Old Tring, with a glance at him, gave him hot brandy and water and sent him to bed with hardly a word.

Not till next day did Ishmael notice he was lame in one knee.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WIND UPON THE GRa.s.s-FIELD

A week after the fight Ishmael went over the moor to the sea. Everything was very still, even his footsteps were soundless on the thick turf. It was one of those days filled with a warm mist, so fine it cannot be observed near at hand, but always seeming to encircle the walker, as though he carried some charm to make a hollow s.p.a.ce around him where the breath of the mist may not live. Yet, out in it for long, the clothes become sodden, while every gra.s.s-blade and leaf can be seen to hold its burden of a glittering drop, though the earth itself remains dry and powdery and on the hard, pale roads the dust lies all day, as though the actual soil were not of the texture to respond to a mist so fine.

Not a breath blew the vaporous clouds in the wreaths that usually change shapes while one watches, and the long drifts in the valley at Ishmael's feet hung motionless in the air, the dark side of the opposite slope showed here and there, crossed by the pale zig-zag of the path. He went on to the cliff's edge; far below at its foot the sea, lost further out, was visible, motionless and soundless, save for the faint rustle where it impinged upon the cliff in a narrow line of white. No outward pull or inward swell of the sea's breast was visible; it was as though that fine edge of murmurous whiteness were always made of the same particles of water, hissing perpetually along the cliff's foot.

Ishmael lay down on the damp young bracken and listened to the stillness that was only pierced by the rare wail of a syren far out to sea and the steady moan of the horn from the lighthouse. He felt as dead as the world seemed, as grey, as lost to all rousing; and, ignorant of reactions, wondered why, and whether henceforth he would always be like that.

He was suffering from too much fuss. In the days which had elapsed since the wrestling bout on the moor Doughty's injury had seemed likely to prove a bad sprain, but there had been a terrible twenty-four hours when the doctor, a portentous person with more pessimism than knowledge, had wagged his head forebodingly over the moaning patient. Doughty had felt it was not in nature for anyone to be severe on a boy with an injured back, and so he babbled freely, under cover of a pretended delirium, feeling it was better to let his version get first to Old Tring. For he guessed how that personage, always one to examine the springs of action before judgment, would look at his share in the matter. Dr. Harvey had asked for a famous Plymouth surgeon to be sent for, and this afternoon he had arrived. On his verdict as to Doughty's condition depended Ishmael's own fate, and he knew it. For, whatever the provocation, the fact remained that Ishmael had injured a schoolfellow in a wrestling match admittedly serious in its intent, and the discipline of the school had to be considered, all the more rigidly that many rumours, mostly untrue, had circulated in the school. Old Tring had suspended judgment, merely sending for Boase, who had arrived one evening at St. Renny covered with s.m.u.ts and giving freely his opinions about the railway, on which, for motives of Christian poverty, he had been rash enough to travel in one of the unroofed third cla.s.s compartments.

And, for the first time in his knowledge, Ishmael was aware that the Parson had not quite understood. It was not that he did not understand what Ishmael felt as much as that he expected him to feel so much more than he did. Ishmael loathed a fuss. Yet the Parson had been a rock of support; Old Tring had been generosity itself; Polkinghorne and Carminow, even the little boys, had held their tongues and let him see that for their part they intended to think no more of what Doughty had said. Killigrew had treated the whole affair as something between a joke and a matter so unimportant it made really no difference to anyone. And of all the att.i.tudes it was Killigrew's, in the revulsion from fuss, that Ishmael was beginning to adopt as his own. The only burning thing he felt about his position was anger--an anger against his father in the first place and against Archelaus, oddly enough, in the second. He knew that his eldest brother would do all in his power to make life as difficult as possible when he went back to take up the reins at Cloom.

With that burning grudge went another sensation--the realisation that if all things had been otherwise, been normal, Cloom would, after all, never have been his, and he was struck by a certain unfairness that it should be his now.

But of any shame at his position he felt none, and it was this that apparently he was expected to feel by all save Killigrew. They were all so eager to make him understand that there was nothing for him to feel ashamed about, that no one thought any the less of him or wanted him to think any less of himself. Ishmael began to discover what he never, being very un-self-a.n.a.lytical, fully realised, that he was one of those elect souls born without that gift of the Evil One--shame. Some attain that freedom by hard striving, but some are born free, and of them was Ishmael.

Now, as he lay upon the cliff, all the embarra.s.sment he felt was at this set of emotions that was expected to rack him and did not. He was not yet old enough to have the courage of his lack of convictions, and he feared he had failed in something a finer creature would have responded to. He rolled over on to his elbows and stared at the pale faces of a clump of wet primroses that stared back at him with an equal innocence of emotion. Beyond them the wild violets gleamed like faint blue flames, and the tightly-curled fronds of young bracken showed silvery grey amongst the litter of last year's stalks that lay in patches of a dead burnt-orange upon the grey-green turf. Ishmael spread his fingers wide and plunged them in the primroses, in the gra.s.s, in the loose soil, for the pleasure of their soft, clean textures. He rubbed his face in them like a young animal, and drew in deep breaths of the best smell in the world--the smell of damp, green growing things. He turned on to his back again. The mist had begun to waver, a breath was stirring fitfully but finely. It came cool upon him, and as it blew the world seemed very gently to come to life again. He could see what he had come to look at and overshot in the mist--the little harbour of Povah lying to his left.

He rolled over and stared curiously at its stone jetties and cl.u.s.tered s.h.i.+pping. There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was still a rare sight in those parts--a steamer. She was a side-wheeler, with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast, fore-and-aft on her mizzen. A little crowd stood on the end of the quay to stare at her, and it was on her that Ishmael too fixed his eyes; then he scrambled up and made his way diagonally down the cliff to the harbour.

It had occurred to him to run away to sea. He was of the land and knew nothing about s.h.i.+ps, but he had often read of boys who ran away to sea--they s.h.i.+pped as cabin-boys and often were killed by the rough life or never heard of again. A sick wave of self-pity flooded Ishmael as he thought of it. He whose salvation was that he so seldom saw himself from the outside--unlike Killigrew, the feeder on emotion, now was aware of the poetic fitness of the story--the proud boy who sooner than live with dishonour had left home and friends to face the wide world and roam, a veritable Ishmael. Adventure began to call to him; the salt on his lips as he licked them seemed its very tang. He was big and strong, and had no fear of hard living; neither was he fearful physically. On one thing he was determined--not to stay to be expelled and then be taken ignominiously back to Cloom and the jeers of his family.

But deep down in him his ineradicable honesty kept nagging at him, telling that this new sea-lure was all make-believe, that not that way for him did happiness lie. Yet he kept on, always with a tingle of excitement mingling with an undercurrent of disbelief in the reality of it all, and made his way to the quayside determined to talk to the sailors and introduce the subject of a new hand.... Half an hour later he came away, after a desultory though interesting enough conversation in which his project had never got past his tongue. Through no cowardice or dread, he had simply not been able to broach it. He stared back at the s.h.i.+p when he paused on the crest of the hill, trying to puzzle out what was struggling for recognition in him. Dimly it began to dawn on him that there are only two ways for a man to live fully. The first is by being rooted to a spot that is everything to him, by which he makes his bread, by which and on which he lives, so that its well-being is as that of himself; and the second is by calling no place home, wandering the world over and remaining always free. The way which lies betwixt these two--that of hiring this house or that, putting belongings about it and being attached to it by purely artificial ties of expediency and rent, a house that was born of the thought of some unknown, the fabric of whose ground is nothing to him who hires it--this way, which is the way of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, is false and unsatisfying. It would be splendid to have two lives and give one to each of the primary ways, to live once by the soil and once by the sea; but that is a thing that can happen to no man. He may wander till he is ageing and then ”settle down,” but that is a different affair. Ishmael was born of the soil; Cloom, not only by inheritance, but by his peculiar training, meant his life. With a sensation of something clogging, but infinitely satisfying too, he admitted it. Cloom had been too strong for him.

It was the only time another path ever even suggested itself to him, and then the suggestion had not been sincere, merely the promptings of that literary sense which is in all imaginative youth. It prompted, too, not so worthily, in an aspect of his new knowledge that did not escape him--a certain romance about it, a feeling that it made him rather interesting, something of a figure.... He would not have been human had he quite escaped that at his age. And yet it was that feeling no one but Killigrew, who frankly mooted it, had a suspicion of as possible, so Ishmael realised with shame. Also his commonsense told him that the sordid and quite unromantic incidents were likely to pile up more thickly than any of charm or pleasure. His was an admirable position for any one who loved self-pity; he would be able to see himself as a romantic centre, to feed on misunderstanding and enjoy a self-conscious isolation.

That was the real danger, one that the Parson, who was in some matters of a beautiful simplicity, had never realised. He had only foreseen the straightforward shames and difficulties, and by these Ishmael was at an age to be untouched, while he was just ripe for the former snare.

He walked over the moor and rejoined the St. Renny track with the sense of relief that we all get when one of two ways has been definitely discarded. He had even ceased to worry over what decision Old Tring had come to, though when he made out the Parson's figure coming towards him his heart gave a leap and then beat more quickly than its wont. He hastened his steps to meet him.

Boase waved his hat in a gesture of triumph, as though to signal that all was well, and his first shouted words told Ishmael that this was not to be the end of his career at St. Renny. With the knowledge went a queer little pang of disappointment; he had so been accustoming his mind to the glamour of expulsion in circ.u.mstances such as his. The Parson, in whose philosophy it would have held nothing but disaster, was beaming with joy. He sat down on a stretch of turf and Ishmael lay beside him, waiting.

”In the first place, the injury isn't serious. Carron, the surgeon from Plymouth, says it's nothing in the world but a muscle torn away, that is painful but not dangerous. He says he does not know why the boy made such a fuss; he can see nothing to account for delirium. I could have given a guess, but refrained.... Anyway, I've been having a talk with Dr. Tring--”

Ishmael kept an ungrateful silence; it seemed to him that week had been all talks.

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