Part 33 (1/2)

You'll find the others at the foot of the cliff, you know.” He went on up over the brow of the cliff, carrying the screaming, struggling Nicky with the terrible ease of a grown-up coping with a child. Georgie remained sitting where she was for a few moments till the exhausted screams of Nicky died in the distance.

Ishmael's annoyance had not abated when they reached Cloom, though by now his arm had tired somewhat, and Nicky, sobbing angrily, walked beside him, firmly led by the hand. Ishmael took him up to the little room over the porch which was Nicky's own and there administered a whipping for the first time. Nicky was too exhausted to scream by then, but his anger grew deeper. He was aware that his father had often pa.s.sed over worse actions, and that it was not so much his, Nicky's, disobedience in the matter of throwing things at Georgie which was the trouble as some mood of his father's which he had come up against. He resented the knowledge and burned with his resentment. When Ishmael, suddenly sorry, stayed his by no means heavy hand and stood the child between his knees, Nicky would not face his look, but stood with tightly shut eyes and set mouth. Ishmael thought it was shame at his punishment which sealed Nicky's eyes; he knew what agonies it would have occasioned him at that age, and he felt sorrier still. But Nicky never felt shame; he could extract a compensating excitement from every untoward event, and at the present moment he was making a luxury of his rage.

Ishmael tried to get some expression of contrition from the child, but vainly, and at length he left him, safely shut in. He was very puzzled as he went and smoked in the garden below. He would not go out on to the cliff again lest Nicky should be up to any dangerous pranks in his room or have another screaming fit. For the first time it was brought home to him how terribly children differ from the children that their parents were.... Nothing he remembered, be it never so vivid, about himself, helped him to follow Nicky. He would never have drawn attention to himself as Nicky constantly did; he would not have dared--his self-conscious diffidence would not have let him. He had had fits of losing his head, but more quietly, often in his imagination alone. He did not see that the self-consciousness of childhood was at the bottom of both his youthful reserve and Nicky's ebullitions. That his own pride had been his dominating factor, forbidding him to enter into contests where he was bound to be worsted, and that for Nicky pride did not exist in comparison with the luxury of spreading himself and his feelings over the widest possible area with the greatest possible noise, made the difference between them so marked that Ishmael could see nothing else.

Nicky had inherited from older sources, he reflected, a flamboyance such as Va.s.sie and Archelaus and, in his underhand way, even Tom possessed, but that had missed himself.

Killigrew and the others were coming over to supper, and the Parson also was expected. Ishmael judged that Nicky had had enough excitement for one day, and so, though not as any further punishment, sent him to bed with a supper-tray instead of letting him come down. He recounted the afternoon's happenings at supper and confessed himself hopelessly puzzled.

”I don't understand the workings of his mind,” he admitted; ”when I took him up his supper he seemed quite different from the half-an-hour earlier when I'd been up. He'd--it's difficult to describe it--but it was as though he'd adjusted the whole incident in his own mind to what he wanted it to be. He greeted me with a sort of forgiving and yet chastened dignity that made me nearly howl with laughter. He sat up there in his bed as though he were upon a throne and expecting me to beg for pardon, or, rather, as though he knew I wouldn't, but he had the happy consciousness that I ought to. It was confoundingly annoying. I asked him whether he wanted to see Miss Barlow to say good-night--you know the pa.s.sionate devotion he's had for her of late--and all he said was, 'No, thank you; he didn't think he could trust himself to speak to her just yet!' I said, 'Don't be a little idiot,' and he only smiled in a long-suffering manner, and I came away feeling squashed by my own small son.”

”He sounds as though he were going to suffer from what is called the artistic temperament,” observed the Parson.

”Let's hope not,” chimed in Killigrew, ”because the so-called artistic temperament is never found among the people who do things, but only in the lookers-on. The actual creators don't suffer from it.”

”It depends what one means by the artistic temperament,” said Judy rather soberly. ”If you mean the untidy emotional sort of people who excuse everything by saying they have the artistic temperament, I agree with you. That's what the Philistine thinks it is, of course.”

”Oh, the real thing, the thing that creates, is nothing in the world but a fusion of s.e.x,” said Killigrew swiftly. ”It gives to the man intuition and to the woman creativeness--it adds a sixth sense, feminising the man and giving the woman what is generally a masculine attribute. But that's not what the Padre means. He's using the word in its accepted derogatory sense.”

”I don't think he is quite, either,” said Judy. ”I think what you mean is more the deadly literary sense, isn't it, Padre?--the thing some people are cursed with, the voice that gets up and lies down with them, that keeps up a running commentary on whatever they do. The creative people can suffer from that.”

”You mean the thing I always had as a youngster,” said Killigrew. ”If I went fis.h.i.+ng I used to hear something like this: 'The boy slipped to the bank with the swift sureness of a young animal, and sat with long brown legs in the water while his skilful fingers fixed the bait on the hook.'”

”That's the sort of thing,” said Judith. ”It's deadly dangerous.”

”Don't you think I've grown out of it, then?” asked Killigrew quickly, but with a laugh. Judy did not reply, but turned to Ishmael.

”Don't you know at all what I mean?” she asked. ”You must have had moments like that--every child has. Some people let it grow into a habit--that's what's fatal.”

Ishmael thought it over. ”Yes,” he admitted. ”I can remember whole tracks of thought like that in my childhood, but I think I recognised the danger and made myself alter.”

”I'm sure you didn't suffer from it,” declared Boase. ”I knew you very thoroughly, Ishmael, and you were reserved and inarticulate; you never acted for effect.” He felt startled, as though a sudden gap had yawned in the dear past; it did not seem to him possible, or only as the grotesque possibility of a nightmare, that the boy Ishmael should have held tendencies, trends of thought, which he had not realised....

Later came a message from Nicky that he would like Miss Parminter to come up and say good-night to him. They all laughed at the masculine tactics adopted thus early, but Judith went upstairs.

Later, when the others were thinking of going, Ishmael went up for her.

She was kneeling by the bed, a dark figure in the dim room. Nicky was asleep, one arm still flung round her shoulder: she held hers lightly across him; her head was bowed upon the sheet. Ishmael hesitated a moment, struck by something of abandon in her pose. Then he touched her lightly on the shoulder. She started and looked up.

”Oh, it's you!” she said, peering at him through the darkness. ”How you startled me!”

”The others are going,” said Ishmael. ”It's been good of you to stay up here. How long's the little chap been asleep?”

”Oh, ages! He's so sweet, I couldn't go downstairs to the lamp and all of them somehow. So small and soft.... You are lucky, Ishmael.”

”Am I?” said he, rather taken aback. ”I hadn't thought of myself in that light. But I know what you mean ... about Nicky.”

They left the room together, but Judy cloaked herself in the pa.s.sage and would not go again into the brightly-lit room. The Parson and Killigrew saw the two girls home, but Georgie and Boase reached the cottage first, and Georgie fell asleep while she was sitting up in bed waiting, scandalised, in spite of her modernity, for the return of Judith.

Nicky, sleeping peacefully in his little bed, had much to answer for that day. He had shown the startled Ishmael the gap that lies between two generations, whatever the tie of blood and affection; he had shown him too, by his anger at being torn out of it, that he could still have a mood of clamour for some thrill almost forgotten, some ecstasy he had thought dead ... and he had sent Judy, trembling, eager, as not for many months past, to the arms of the lover who could be so careless of her, but whom, when she chose, she could still stir to a degree no other woman had ever quite attained.

CHAPTER IX