Part 13 (2/2)
It was a long speech for John-James, and he paused with his countenance suffused a deep purplish hue. Ishmael seized his hand and wrung it with a sudden young gust of enthusiasm that he could not control.
”You'll help. I know you will. Oh, we'll pull the old place up yet.
We'll make such a thing of it....”
But John-James had withdrawn his hand limply. ”Go maken it so fine it'll be a pretty place for gentry, s'pose,” he said; ”be shamed to see I about the place then, I reckon.”
Ishmael laughed joyously at him. ”Don't be an a.s.s, John-James,” he said; and it was the first time he had been able to meet any little speech of the kind without strain. John-James stood at ease, and slowly some faint trace of a change of expression appeared on his immobile features.
”I reckon thee'll do, lad,” was all he said; but Ishmael felt his heart give an upleap of triumph; he knew he had made his first conquest. As he and John-James went into breakfast side by side he felt quite equal to meeting Annie unperturbed. But he was not to be called on to make trial of his stoicism, as Annie hardly spoke to him; but with a thrill of emanc.i.p.ation he realised that his mother's tongue no longer held terror for him--merely the annoyance of a persistent fly.
As long as he lived Ishmael never forgot the exquisite moment when he broke his first furrow on his own land. Harvest gathered is a wonder and a release from strain; sowing and tending of seed and young crops is sweet, but ploughing holds more of romance than all the rest. It is the beginning, the fresh essay with soil that has become once more savage; it is the earliest essential of man's conquest of Nature; his taming of her from a wild mistress to a fruitful wife.
The day shone with the clear pearliness of early June: high in air the big c.u.mulus clouds rode golden-white, trailing their shadows over the dappled land beneath; the branches of hawthorn gleamed silvery amidst the pearly blossom; a wine-pale sunlight washed with iridescence sky and earth. In the great sloping field, which held six days' hard ploughing between its stone ramparts, the granite monolith stood four-square to all the winds that blew, defying ploughs and weathers. The two brown horses waited by the highest hedge, the plough, that always looks so toy-like and is so stubborn, quiescent behind them, a boy ready at their heads, switch in hand. With a freshness of emotion never quite to be recaptured, Ishmael gathered up the rope reins and took the handles of the plough in his grip. The impact of the blade against the soil when the straining horses had given the first jerk up the slope was as some keen exquisite mating of his innermost being with the substance of the earth ... a joy almost sensual, so strong was the pleasure of the actual physical contact as yielding soil and fine hard edge met--his hands sensitively aware of the texture of that meeting through the iron frame of the plough. Up and down the field, over its humped back, widening the strip of brown between him and the hedge, always with pleasure at sight of that long rich fold of earth turning over perpetually under the sideways impact of the blade, turning over till the green turf was hidden by the brown of the under soil....
The field was not an easy one for the horses by reason of its curve; the off horse, on the vore, as the part already ploughed is called, dug his great hoofs firmly in the stiff soil, but the near horse slipped perpetually on the short turf. Every now and then the plough had to be stopped while great hunks of granite were hacked out of the earth; then, with loud cries of encouragement and a cut of the whip, the horses were urged on again, the flash of their shoes gleaming rhythmically up and down, up and down, as Ishmael guided the plough behind them. His hands gripped the handles, the plough clanked, the horses struggled, and the sound of their hoofs made a dull thud-thud upon the earth; the wind blew gratefully on his moist brow and on the flanks of the animals; at every turn the shouts of his voice as he stopped the horses and reversed the clanking plough went up through the quiet world.
The gulls sat, dazzlingly white, motionless as little headstones, along the rim where green land met brown vore, then rose and shrieked and swooped as the clatter began again, dipping in the wake of the new furrow. And the sun went overhead, making sweating steeds and sweating man and bright wheels and brighter blade of the plough glisten like sculptured bronze, while all the time the green was being more and more swamped, furrow after furrow, by the encroaching brown.
That night Ishmael was sore and stiff, but happy, with a deep physical content. The next day and the next and on till the last furrow lay turned along the lower hedge he kept himself at it doggedly, in spite of aching muscles, driven by a vague feeling that this was his initiation, his test of knighthood, and that to fail at it, to leave it to other hands, would augur ill. When, on the sixth night, he washed the sweat and earth from off his healthily tired body he felt life could hold nothing sweeter than what it had yielded him in these six days. He had taken seizen of his land.
CHAPTER IV
THE SHADOW AT THE WINDOW
For nearly three years that content of Ishmael's held--held till the Parson, who had worked for it, grew ill-pleased. It seemed unnatural that so young a man should never want to roam further afield than the annual cattle fair; should be sufficiently stayed with that perpetual struggle against weald and weather. It was just that tussle which, by keeping the body hard and the mind stimulated, made the content possible. Ishmael had up till now asked for nothing better, and so far, so good. But, as the Parson told himself, the time would come when he would demand more, and then, for lack of knowing other possibilities, he might slake himself with whatever was near at hand and slowly sink into the things of the soil till he was smothered with their reek. Up till now he had spiritualised the land by his wrestling with it, but now that some measure of success, enough to make the struggle less a thing that must not be relaxed for a day, had come, now was the time when the reverse process might begin unseen.
Cloom had undergone a wonderful regeneration, though at present it went only skin-deep, and if left to herself she would soon relapse into savagery. Ground that had been furze-ridden within the memory of man now yielded roots and grain, though not yet richly; the stubborn furze had been burnt and hacked and torn up, the thorns and thistles, the docks and sorrel, had been patiently attacked until they too yielded, the fine clinging roots of the innocent-looking pink-faced centaury and the more blatant charlock had been eliminated from the tenacious soil; while the pale golden cows of alien breed waxed fat and gave rich milk only a few tones paler than their own smooth flanks.
All this was in the main Ishmael's work; and his blunders had been few--he had a genius for the land. It had been hard work though it meant joy, and left not much time or ease of limb for recreation. It had been in that respect the Parson met difficulties. There was hunting in season, and Ishmael was a keen rider to hounds, in spite of his aversion to slaughter of any kind, which upon the farm was the source of not unkindly mirth amongst the men. They could not yield of their fullest respect and nothing of comprehension to a master who was never present when his own pigs were killed, beyond one occasion when he attended to a.s.sure himself that all was done in the most merciful way and had ended by being violently sick into the bowl of pig's blood. In hunting Ishmael found, like many another, that his own excitement helped him to bear with the thought of the fox's pain, though he was always glad, in guilty secret, when there was no kill. It was not this idiosyncrasy that troubled Boase; it was the social questions that hunting evoked. Boase, who also followed to hounds, felt his heart glow to see how well the boy was received; for Ishmael's surly shyness had pa.s.sed into a new phase, expressed by a rather charming deference mingled with independence which appealed to the brusque, goodhearted members of the ”county,” who went to make up the very mixed hunt in that spa.r.s.ely-peopled district.
Still, all was not well. Va.s.sie had grown in discontent, Annie in melancholy. The girl herself might--probably would, with her beauty and adaptability--have won a place with Ishmael had it not been for the mother. Annie's touchy pride, mingled with what Va.s.sie frankly called her ”impossibleness,” made the situation hopeless, for the former quality would not let her efface herself, and the latter prevented her daughter being called upon. Therefore, although Ishmael went out now and again and had struck up a fairly intimate acquaintance with one or two nice families within a radius of ten miles, yet he had no sort of home life which could satisfy him for long.
The only thing Boase saw to be thankful for was that Ishmael's thoughts had not been driven on to Phoebe, and that was probably only because it had never occurred to Ishmael as a possible contingency. He had been so healthily occupied and was so used to Phoebe. Also, Va.s.sie, in her discontent, spent the time visiting her rather second-cla.s.s friends in Plymouth as much as possible, and, even when she did not insist on sweeping Phoebe with her, intercourse with the mill stopped almost entirely. Annie never pretended to any liking for the helpless Phoebe, who could not even answer her back when she insulted her, as she frequently did all timid people. Never since that accidental touch of quaintness on the first evening had Ishmael discovered any kindred habit of mind in Phoebe, and she, in her sweetly-obtuse way, sometimes wondered that Ishmael did not want to be more with her.
It was not a common failing with the chaps around that district.
Phoebe's peculiar allure of utter softness was not one that could remain unfelt even among the slow and primitive young men she met day by day, or who gazed at her dewy mouth and eyes in the church which, for the sake of the vision, they attended instead of chapel. Va.s.sie, who was really a beauty, they only feared. At any moment, if he were not drawn outside himself and the affairs of Cloom, that sudden curious twist of vision which means glamour might occur for Ishmael as he looked at Phoebe. If there were no rich enough materials at hand to make a fuller life for the boy, then, thought the Parson, with logic, it must be brought to him. The difficulty was Ishmael himself.
He had a curious quality derived of some inherited instinct of fear--a quality that made him distrust change. It had been that which had held him back on the day at St. Renny when he had dallied with the notion of running away to sea; it had been that which had made him loth to leave school at the end in spite of his excitement over returning to a Cloom legally his; and it was that now which enabled him to be hypnotised by his own furrows drawing out in front of him. He clung to what happiness he knew in a way rare in one so young, and he was quite aware how much of it he found even in uncongenial company. What might lie beyond it he distrusted.
Not for nothing had Annie lived through the stress she had before his birth, and from her circ.u.mstances, though not her nature, he drew that queer mingling of content and dread. But from the old Squire, little as he resembled him in all else, came that impersonality in what are usually personal relations.h.i.+ps, against which even the Parson beat in vain. Through all his pa.s.sionate sinning James Ruan had held himself aloof from the sharer in his sins. What for him had been the thing by which he lived no one ever knew; his sardonic laughter barred all ingress to his mind.
With Ishmael, as the Parson was beginning to see, places had so far stood for more than people. St. Renny, the manner and atmosphere of it, had meant more than Killigrew, the Vicarage than the Parson, Cloom than his brothers and sister and the friends he made there. It was towards this very detachment that the Parson's upbringing of Ishmael had tended, and yet he now felt the need of more. For some appet.i.te for more life was bound to stir and break into being one day, and Boase was pa.s.sionately desirous that it should make for happiness and good. Thus Boase thought of it all, but, after the fas.h.i.+on of the race of which Ishmael also was one, he showed no sign of his meditations.
With the approach of the boy's twenty-first birthday the Parson saw light. Though Ishmael had come of age, as far as the property went, three years earlier, still the occasion was not without import, and could fittingly mark some change. A word to Annie produced no result, a hint to Va.s.sie and the thing was in full swing. Ishmael always thought it was his own idea that Killigrew, back in London from his Paris studies, should be asked down to Cloom. It was not everyone that could have been called in to help at celebrating a twenty-first birthday under such circ.u.mstances as Ishmael's; it could hardly be made an occasion for feasting tenantry and neighbouring gentry, but it might be used for what Boase, through Killigrew, hoped--the disruption of an atmosphere. That done, a new one could be created.
Killigrew arrived. He startled the natives considerably by his loose jacket and flowing tie, but his red hair was cut fairly short, though his chin was decked by a soft young pointed beard that gave him a Mephistophelian aspect ludicrously set at naught by his white eyelashes, which, round his more short-sighted eye, were set off by a single gla.s.s.
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