Part 30 (2/2)

”The divisions of what one may call the primary and secondary--I mean, if a deed be born of itself, a pure creation, or whether it is the result of a reaction. I have had more girls 'go wrong' after a religious revival than at any other time. Pure reaction! I firmly believe reaction is at the bottom of half the marriages and all the divorces of the world.”

”It's at the back of quite half the crime,” a.s.sented Flynn, ”and murder should certainly be cla.s.sified under that distinction.”

”It's at the bottom of nearly all the decisive steps in a man's own life,” said Ishmael thoughtfully. He was thinking that his self-created impulses seemed to have ceased with the death of his love for Blanche.

She and Cloom had both been pa.s.sions born of their own inevitable necessity. But his marriage came under the heading of ”reaction” if ever anything did. He wondered whether this new fire he felt beginning to warm him did not partake of some quality of reaction also--reaction from the dreams and undisciplined longings of adolescence which had served him so badly. At the thought the glow died down, and greyness spread over the vague budding schemes that had begun to swell life out.

”But one mustn't confuse the law of reactions with that of cause and effect,” the Parson went on, ”which it is easy to do if you let yourself think sloppily.”

Dan pounced on the point eagerly. ”No, indeed, or it's all reforms would be only on the secondary plane, instead of which any reform worthy the name is a pure impulse of creation. I don't believe any deed, public or private, of the finest calibre can come under the head of the secondary type.”

”Perhaps not,” said Boase, ”but it's all the more important a distinction. Both the foolish and the criminal deed are less blameworthy if they are the result of some violent reaction, even if the fine deed is the less unalloyed.”

Thinking it over that night with his accustomed honesty, Ishmael came to the conclusion that it was the law of cause and effect, and not the law of reactions, which prompted his new stirrings, and he was as nearly right as any man may be about his own motive power.

CHAPTER VI

THE NATION AND NICKY

The school board was only a beginning, and, though Ishmael never yielded to Dan's persuasiveness to the extent of standing for Parliament, he took an increasing share in local administration. Reform was in the air; it was the great time of reforms, when men burned over what would now seem commonplaces, so used are we become to the improvements these men made.

When Gladstone dissolved Parliament in '74 and made his appeal to the country to reinstate the Liberals, Ishmael boldly made up his mind as to his own convictions and supported the Liberal candidate. But England was sick of the Liberals, in spite of the reforms of the late Government.

The dread of Home Rule, the defeat of the Ministry over the unpopular Irish Universities Bill, and the ill-feeling aroused by the payment of the fine to the United States for the depredations of the _Alabama_--which was to have marked the beginning of a new era when all troubles would be settled by arbitration--these things had all, though none had loomed as large in the popular imagination as the great Tichborne case, contributed to the weariness felt where Mr. Gladstone was concerned. Ishmael, unswayed by the childish temper of the nation, based his convictions chiefly upon the condition of the lower cla.s.ses, which he had too good cause to know was entirely unsatisfactory. Not all the old English squiredom of Mr. Disraeli--surely the most incongruous figure of a squire that ever gave prizes to a cap-touching tenantry--could persuade Ishmael that the labourer might live and rear a family in decency on ten s.h.i.+llings a week. The labourer had just sprung into prominence in the eyes of the world, but Ishmael had known him intimately for years. The Ballot Act having been pa.s.sed in '72, this election held a charm, a secret excitement, new in political history; but in West Penwith the people were so anxious to impress Ishmael with the fact that they had voted the way he wished, or if it were the Parson whose favour they coveted, to tell that gentleman that the Conservative candidate had had the benefit of their votes, that much of the objective of voting by ballot was lost. Except, as Ishmael observed, that they were all quite likely to be lying anyway....

As all the world knows, Gladstone's party failed to get in, largely owing to the influence of the publicans and brewers, who had been alarmed at his attempts to regulate the liquor traffic, and Mr. Disraeli came into power; the pendulum had swung once more. Daniel Flynn had paid a flying visit to the West and made a few impa.s.sioned speeches in favour of the Liberal candidate, and Ishmael had driven him about the country.

If Blanche Grey could have looked ahead she might have seen fit to stand by her bargain after all. That Va.s.sie and her Irish firebrand should sit at dinner with Lord Luxullyan, that Ishmael should be called upon to receive with the other county potentates a Royal princeling on a tour in the West--who could have foretold these things? Certainly not Ishmael himself; and though the Parson had had limitless ambitions for him, he had never thought of them in actual terms.

Neither was Boase altogether happy about the path in life of his spiritual son, although that path seemed to lead, in its un.o.btrusive manner, upward. It was an age when materialism was to the fore, when the old faiths had not yet seen their way to harmonise with the undeniable facts of science, when morality itself was of a rather priggish and material order. And Ishmael would in not so many years now be reaching the most material time of life--middle age. At present he was very much under the sway of two entirely different people--Daniel Flynn and little Nicky.

When Nicky reached the age of eight years he was entrancing, very much of a personage, and to Ishmael a delightful enigma. Nicky was so vivid, so full of pa.s.sing enthusiasm, so confident of himself, with none of the diffidence that had burdened Ishmael's own youth. He was not a pretty boy, but a splendidly healthy-looking one, with fair hair, not curly, but rough, that defied all the blandishments of Maca.s.sar oil, and long limbs, rather supple than st.u.r.dy, for ever growing out of his clothes.

He had the pretty coaxing ways of a young animal--Phoebe's ways, with a bolder dash in them; and his brown eyes looked at one so frankly that it was a long time before Ishmael could bring himself to understand that this son of his was apparently without any feeling for the truth. It was not so much that he lied as that he seemed incapable of discriminating between the truth and a lie; whatever seemed the most pleasant thing to say at the moment Nicky said, and hoped for the best. It was a problem, but Boase was less worried by it than the young father.

”Children often seem to have a natural affinity for the false instead of the true,” he said, ”and they grow out of it when they begin to see more plainly. The great thing is not to frighten him so that he doesn't dare admit it when he's lied.”

Ishmael accepted the Parson's advice thankfully; besides having a distaste for the idea of corporal punishment, he could hardly have borne to hurt the eager, bright creature who always hung about him so confidingly when in the mood, but who had no compunction in not going near him for days, except to say good-morning and good-night, when in one of his elusive fits.

Va.s.sie, who had no children of her own, adored her little nephew, and was very proud of him, so one way and another it was not remarkable that Nicky was in a fair way to be spoilt. Already he was too much aware of his own charm, of the fact that to these kind but rather stupid people, whom it was so easy to deceive, he was wonderful. He seemed to be a clean-natured boy, but what he did and did not know it would have been hard to say, as, added to a certain secretiveness which in different ways both Phoebe and Ishmael possessed, there was in him a strain of elusiveness; you could not coerce him to a definiteness he did not wish any more than you could catch a b.u.t.terfly by stabbing at it in air with a needle.

Ishmael would sometimes observe him quietly when the boy was unaware of scrutiny, and always the mere sight of the round close-cropped head, the delicious idle busyness of childhood, the air at once of import and carelessness it holds, disarmed and captured him. It seemed to him to be his own younger self he was watching, and the pathos of unconscious youth, slipping, slipping, imperceptibly but swiftly, struck at his heart. How little while ago it seemed since he had been like Nicky, intent on profound plans, busy in a small but vivid sphere which focussed in self, which swayed and expanded and grew incredibly bright or dark beyond hope at such slight happenings! Looking back on his own childhood, drawing on it for greater comprehension of his Nicky, he never could connect it up with his present self, it always seemed to him a different Ishmael that he saw, who had nothing to do with the one he knew nowadays. He saw his own figure, small and alive, as he might have looked at some quite other person into whose nature he had been gifted with the power to see clearly, not as himself younger, less developed.

In the same way he regarded his early manhood, when he looked back upon the ardent boy who had loved Blanche and staked all of intensity that apparently he was capable of on that one personality. Phoebe too....

With memory of her he felt more alien still, unless he were looking at Nicky; then he would have a queer sensation that he was seeing some embodiment of what she had stood for to the pa.s.sionate Ishmael who had married her. Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like if she had not died.... She would have lost her charm perhaps, become coa.r.s.er--or would that peculiar dewy softness of hers have survived the encroachments of the years? Further apart they would inevitably have grown; less and less of sympathy between them would have been inevitable. So much his honesty had to admit. Pa.s.sion, which he flattered himself he had so mastered, almost as though it had been shocked out of him on that terrible night of waiting for its fruit to come and rend the mother's life away from her--would pa.s.sion have lived?

He knew that as anything individual between her and him it could not have, so that he would always have been meaning to deny its claims, and would always have been falling into what would have become a mere custom of the flesh impossible to break, only yielding, after years of it, to boredom.

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