Part 16 (2/2)
There are times in life when our affairs are at some high crest, when all emotion and the processes of thought become intensified and crystallised: the slightest incident makes a deep-bitten impression; the most momentary effect of colour or lighting, or the tones of a voice, remain in the memory indissolubly connected with the phase the mind is pa.s.sing through. Every sense is hung upon a hair-trigger, and even irrelevant things touch more sharply than usual, in the same way that a magnifying gla.s.s reveals the minutest pores and hairs on the hand holding whatever the primary object to be looked at may be. They are mercifully few, those periods of intense clarity, for they leave a mind and heart deadened and surfeited, that slowly awake to the dull consciousness of pain, even as the body, numbed by a severe accident, only after a while awakes to sentient aching. Ishmael pa.s.sed into this phase in the first days after the scene in the wood, before physically he was conscious of much beyond a dull throbbing in his head.
He lay and stared from out his bandages, feigning more stupor than he felt in his pa.s.sionate craving to keep off all discussion and inquiry.
He lay and watched the spring sunlight creep over the whitewashed wall opposite, and every slow black fly that crawled across the patch of warmth might have been crawling over his raw nerves. He almost expected the surface of the wall to contract like a skin and twitch them off, as he felt his own skin doing out of sympathy.
In the night, when the wall was filmed with shadow save for the faint flickering of a rushlight that made great rounds of light upon the dimness, then he saw all his life at Cloom pa.s.sing in a shadow show across the wall, crawling like the flies.... He was never delirious; physically his fine and sane const.i.tution was recovering well from a nasty blow--it was merely as though all his mind had been set a little faster, like a newly-regulated clock, a clock set to work backwards; and he could hear its ticking through all the sounds of everyday life that, hushed as much as might be, came into his room.
He felt sick of it all, sick of the striving at Cloom, of the quarrels with Archelaus, of Tom's cat-like attacks, of his mother's plaints, of the cruelties he felt spoiling the whole countryside like a leprosy. He cared for no one near him except Killigrew, because he alone stood for the things of an alien world. He hated the sound of John-James' boots that never failed to go a tip-toe over the cobbles below his window. He wanted nothing, not even to get away from it all. He was too absorbed watching it upon the wall, hearing his own mind ticking out its comments like that horrible instrument Va.s.sie had upon the piano to time her exercises.
It was the first time since the fit in his childhood, which he did not remember, that he had ever lain helpless or suffered in his body, and he was aware of humiliation. All he could remember of the scene in the wood showed him his own futility. Everything was wasted--nothing he had done was any good nor the doing of it, then or ever again, at all worth while. Nothing seemed to matter.
So pa.s.sed the first two days of his consciousness, and the speed at which the clock of his mind was regulated made the world's time seem interminable. When the two days had gone they seemed to him to be lengthy, not as two weeks or years or anything in a known measure of counting, but as some period of time s.p.a.ced quite differently. This is the time that only sick people know, that fills their eyes with knowledge not understood of the healthy sympathisers beside their beds, who, though they may have sat the nights and days out with them, yet have not the same measure to count the pa.s.sing of their hours.
With the third day came pain, bodily pain, and that saved Ishmael. It seemed to him then that physical hurts were so far worse than mental that his dread depression vanished before it. He would have welcomed that back to save his body a pang; it seemed to him his head must burst with the pain raging in it, and he cared about nothing else in the world. When that too pa.s.sed he was as one who has floated out of stormy seas into smooth waters--too weak to navigate them, but blissfully aware that it does not matter, they are safe and he can drift with the current. It was only then he began to talk, and he never once referred to what had happened. He asked where Archelaus was, and when he heard he had gone back to his work in the mine that day he said no more. And it was characteristic of Ishmael that no one ever knew whether he were aware of that impulse of his brother's, and what it had nearly led to, or not. With cessation of physical pain and the exhaustion of the high-keyed string of his mind, came blessed reaction. Even the fact that nothing mattered ceased to matter. The suggestion, emanating simultaneously from the Parson and Killigrew that he should accompany the latter back to London stirred him to only a faint thrill--indeed, a certain disinclination to accept the offer was almost as strong as the urgings of the common sense which told him that soon he would be won to pleasure and interest, once the initial effort was over. Still, as the days slipped past, he found himself looking forward more and more keenly.
On the afternoon before he was to go to town he was resting on a couch in his room when the sounds of Va.s.sie's arrogant but not unpleasing voice came floating up to him from the parlour as she sang her latest song, the fas.h.i.+onable ”Maiden's Prayer.” He smiled a little to himself; he could picture Killigrew, leaning attentive, turning the pages, smiling between narrowed lids at the lovely thing she looked--chin raised and full throat vibrant--yet giving so little away beyond his admiration. The song faded, silence fell, then a door opened and closed.
Va.s.sie's voice was raised, this time in welcome. He guessed the visitor to be Phoebe from the fluttered feminine quality of the sounds below--staccato sentences whose words he could not catch, but whose very rhythm, broken and eager, betrayed them. A moment later, and a knock came at his door.
It was Va.s.sie who entered, somewhat sulkily, her beauty clouded by a shade of reluctance--Phoebe, shrinking, palpitant, staying in the shadowy pa.s.sage.
”Phoebe has come to know if she may say good-bye to you, Ishmael?”
said Va.s.sie. ”She's heard you're going to London, and can't believe you'll ever come back safely....”
”Why, Phoebe, that's kind of you,” he called; ”but won't you come in for a moment?” He was pleased after a mild fas.h.i.+on to see her--she at least stood for something not too intimately connected with his own household, he told himself. The next moment he remembered that there had been some suggestion--what his blurred recollection of it could not tell him--that she might be being courted by Archelaus; but the slight recoil of distaste stirred within him fell away before her frank eagerness, her kindly warmth, as she pattered into the room, her skirts swaying around her. She sat primly down beside the couch while Va.s.sie stayed by its foot, determined not to sit down also and so give an air of settled ease to the interview.
”I--I hope you are better, Ishmael?” faltered Phoebe. She had never before been in a young man's bedroom, even bereft of its tenant, and she felt shy and fluttered.
”Oh, I'm all right!” answered Ishmael. ”I don't think poor Silly Peter has enough muscle to hit very hard, you know.”
A look of intense relief floated across the strained demureness of Phoebe's countenance: raised eyelids and a heightened colour testified to what pa.s.sed through her mind.
”Oh, then it was Silly Peter--” she began ingenuously; then broke off.
”Yes, didn't you know? He was dazed with the lights, and then the sudden darkness and all of us being so angry, I suppose.... Hullo, what's that?”
It was Killigrew's voice calling softly up the stairs to Va.s.sie. She hesitated, made a feint of going to the door only to hear what he wanted, and then went rustling down to him. Phoebe snuggled a little more comfortably on her chair with an unconscious movement of pleasure.
”He said downstairs he wanted to finish taking her picture to-day while the light lasted,” she said; then ran on: ”Ishmael, I've been so unhappy....”
”Have you, Phoebe? Why, what about?” Then, as he saw her flush and bite her pouting lower lip, he added: ”Not because of me? I say, how jolly of you! But there wasn't any necessity--”
”How silly you are! As if one did things--worried and that sort of thing--because it was necessary! It's because one can't help it.”
”Then it was all the nicer of you. But I meant that really it wasn't anything to worry about. I'm as right as rain, and it's given me a jolly good excuse to go up to London and see the world.”
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