Part 46 (1/2)

He helped, too, to carry out ”crowse”--the midmorning lunch--to the men, and he wandered about with the crowds of stray children and patted the unresponsive dogs, and was admired by the women and bored by them, and himself partook of big saffron buns, that Marjorie said would spoil his dinner, but that didn't. Nothing, he felt, could have spoilt anything that day.

With evening and the last whirring of the thresher Ishmael, watching him at play, felt, as he always had, that it is impossible to watch children without an ache for the inevitable pity of it that they should have to grow up. It was not, he felt, because they are particularly happy--for never again can there be griefs blacker than those which darken all a child's horizon, but simply because they stand for something beautiful which can never come again. Now, looking at Jim and the other children, he felt the old pity, but tinged with something new. For the first time he saw that it was only by realising that children were symbols, the mere pa.s.sing exponents of a lovely thing which was itself ever present, that it became possible to look at them without that aching. There would always be, he supposed, some people who could look at children and feel, not so much pity that these young things must age as self-pity that they themselves had lost childhood; but others looked as he always had, with a more impersonal pang, sorry that so beautiful a thing should fade. And it was for the comfort of such as he to realise that it did not matter in the least, because, though children grew up and away, childhood remained--a bright banner carried from hand to hand, always in a new grasp before the old one could tarnish it. More, he saw that it was this very evanescence which had for him given childhood its sadness that also gave it its beauty; if there were anywhere on earth a race of perpetual children it would not be beautiful. For he saw that it was the inevitable slipping-away of all life which gave poignancy to loveliness.

He spoke something of his thought to Lissa, and she nodded in comprehension.

”That's why no picture or sculpture can be as beautiful as the human model,” she said, ”not because of any necessary inferiority, but simply in the terrible permanence of man's work as compared with G.o.d's.”

They stood a while longer side by side, and then Jimmy, who with the last whirring note of the thresher suddenly felt very tired, came and leant up against his grandfather. Ishmael stooped over the boy, and with a great heave, despite Marjorie's protests--she had come out to take her son to bed--he hoisted him up to his old bowed shoulder.

”Say good-night to the thresher,” he told him. ”You are going to bed, and it is going to bed too.”

”Is it very tired?” asked Jimmy.

”Yes, nicely tired, like you when you have been running about all day.”

”Not nasty tired like I am after lessons?”

”No, not nasty tired.”

”Are you tired, Grandad?”

”Yes,” said Ishmael.

”Nice tired or nasty tired?”

”Nice tired,” said Ishmael; ”old men and little boys both go nice tired.”

”Like the thresher?” persisted Jimmy, and, receiving an answer that satisfied him, allowed his grandfather to carry him in to bed, though he could have gone in so much more quickly himself, for grandpapa could not run with him on his shoulder as his father could. But Jimmy was in no hurry, because every minute gained was a minute out of bed and in this wonderful world where threshers hummed and golden clouds wove themselves ceaselessly in the air.

Ishmael too felt very tired, as he had said; but, as he had also said, it was a pleasant tiredness. His day had been too full for thought other than of what was happening before his eyes. An exquisite sense of fitness, of something that was falling into place as everything in the history of the harvest had done, a sense as of gathered sheaves and stored grain, was with him, though sub-consciously. His brain felt filled with visual impressions, his old eyes held a riot of blue and gold, and a humming was still in his ears. As he closed his lids that night golden motes danced within them.

He sank off into sleep, and then drifted, half-awake again, to that state when the mind is not fully aware of where it is or of what has happened. It seemed to him, for one blurred moment, that he was a little boy again, falling to sleep on that evening when the Neck was cried ...; and then, out of the far past, came back to him the remembrance that it was at the Vicarage he had slept that night. Something told him he was not there now.... Vaguely, in the darkness, he put up his hand to feel if the plaster Christ were above his head. His groping old fingers found it, and he stayed, half-reared up against his pillows for an instant, while he touched the drooping head with its th.o.r.n.y crown, and on that familiar touch he let his hand fall, and with it fell asleep.

CHAPTER VII

GARNERED GRAIN

The next morning he was found lying as though worn out suddenly, never to move or speak again. Only his brain was still alert as he lay there and watched them all from under his heavy lids. Three days he lay, and they could not even tell how much he understood, for he was past the effort that communicating with them would have meant; but all the while he was feeling his brain was clearer than it had ever been in his life, that at last he knew many things he could have told them if he could have spoken, only they were things that cannot be taught by one man to another, for every man must find them for himself.

At first it seemed to him he was floating very peacefully on a clear sea, untroubled in mind or body, though seeing he was drifting, because he was also aware that whither he was drifting was the inevitable direction of a kindly current. Then after a little or long while, he could not have told which, he seemed himself to become stationary, while past him flowed the pattern of his life as he remembered it--scenes grey and many-coloured, blurred at the edges, but sharp with an aching clarity at the core. They had all gone, these happenings, but it was not that which gave the poignancy; it was that the Ishmael who had taken part in them was gone too, and each had borne something of himself away with it.

Those first childish years after he had known Cloom was to be his, that he had to regenerate it; then those years at St. Renny ... Killigrew floated past him, joyous and pagan. There was Hilaria, joyous also ... he had forgotten her for years now. At St. Renny life was always just ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters.... In those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres. Yet even then there had been something else, some recognition of the fact that even this was not an end to itself alone.... Then youth--the first years at Cloom and that wonderful incursion into the London that was as past as he was, that London that had been half-wonder, half-nightmare, and that had held his love for Blanche. There had been a brief spell when he had told himself that this was the chief thing, that in that pa.s.sionate fusing of two spirits, that absorption in some one other loved being, lay the end in life, but the mirage had dissolved then even as the image of it wavered and faded now. While he was lost and groping in the wastes it had left him in, there swam up the memory of Hilaria again, but no horror went with it. And though this second impinging of her life on his bore the far-off memory of fear, yet it now seemed as vital and natural as the first. She had shown him something long ago which he was fully understanding now.

He pa.s.sed on, and again there lifted its head the thing which, in his clean, boyish horror, he had taken to hold a terror which he now saw it did not of necessity. He had learnt to mistrust it because it had led him into what had at the time been such a mistaken marriage with poor little Phoebe; but that, too, seemed to matter very little now. He saw again how in that one hectic year he had tried to tell himself that physical pa.s.sion was at least the chief drug of life, that the wonder and the intoxication of it made all else pale, that it made even sordidness and strain worth while; and he saw again his revulsion from it, his effort to break away.

He drifted into the blackness he supposed was night, and came up out of it at the hour of his life when for the first time he had found something which, however it had modified or changed, had yet never entirely been swamped by anything else, which in some ways had strengthened--the wonder of fatherhood that he had felt, the ecstasy of creation, which had dawned for him on that night when Phoebe had whispered to him.... What now of that hour, that hour which had seemed so utterly broken by what Archelaus had told him all these years after?

He still could not see quite clearly, though now it was with no sense of being hopelessly baffled that he fell back awhile from before that curtain. He went on pa.s.sing again through his life, and he saw the harder years that came crowding along, those definite, clear-cut years of young manhood when he had somehow drifted a little away from Boase, when he had first begun to be a man in the country, when all his schemes and working out of them had filled the hours--still with Nicky as the chief personal interest.