CHAPTER V
THE PARSON'S PHILOSOPHY
That summer the Parson began to show signs of breaking up. Judith had been struck by the change in him when she came down, a change less plain to those who were seeing him often, but startlingly distinct to her who had not seen him for so long. She took up her friendship, that had begun on that evening when he had found her in the church, in the place where it had left off, and this was somewhat to the credit of both, since it transpired that during the past year Judy had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Judith was quiet about her religion as she had been about her love. She had not accepted it in any spirit of there being nothing else left for her now in life, as the vulgar-natured would have supposed had they known her history; neither was it because, most frequent accusation of the ignorant, it appealed to the sensuous side of her. For ritual she cared as little as the Parson, and by preference she always went to low Mass instead of to a high Mass. She had found something that for her had been hitherto hidden, and Boase saw it and was glad. It was noteworthy that it was to him and not to Ishmael she spoke of it. Georgie, with all her dearness, was almost too prosperous to understand. Judy radiated an inner joy that Ishmael had not attained and that Georgie had never felt the need of. That joy had not been won until her feet had trod stranger ways than her friends at Cloom ever imagined. Often she was seized by a pang of conscience that they should admire her as a creature above everything honest and courageous … for there was more to know of her now than her relation with Killigrew. She knew how the single-heartedness of that had absolved her in their eyes; but for what it had plunged her in they would have had less comprehension. For it was not in a nature so essentially womanly as Judith's to be content with sex-starvation once passion had been aroused in her, and the irony of it all was that she, who had not for several years awoken to stirred senses with the man she loved, was unable to stifle their urgency after she had left him.
From slight dalliance with first one man and then another, she had progressed to the greater intimacies, ashamed but unfighting. Till at last the pricking thing had begun to grow fainter and her will stronger and she was able to break away. She hid the truth and kept up the old tradition of having loved only once, partly because it was true she had not felt actual love again, but partly for vanity's sake….
It was not that she was vain of the romantic figure she seemed to her friends; it was a more deadly thing than that. She was vain of the quality of her past love. Too much had been made of it, and she would have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great passion. And to this had she come, although her love had been so real….
Ishmael never again during that visit felt quite the easy intimacy with Judy that he had touched that day by the stream, though as the next few years went on and her visits became a regular thing to look forward to there was built up between them a fabric of friendship that grew to be something unique to both. Those things which had happened to Judy had taught her every tolerance and sympathy.
They were not on the whole bad, those years that followed. Nicky, after writing more or less regularly, suddenly announced his intention of coming home again, and Ishmael was filled with a joy that no personal thing had had power to wake in him since the boy had gone. The thought of Nicky had seldom been far from him; always it was with the idea of Nicky in the forefront of his mind that he worked for Cloom. When he had first taken on the idea of Cloom as the central scheme of his life it had been for Cloom itself, or rather for the building up of an ideal Cloom which his father's conduct had shattered. Now he realised that if he had had no son to inherit after him his work would not have held the same deep significance for him, even though it was not with any conscious idea of a son that he had started on his task. Now, since Nicky's departure, he had begun to see how incomplete the whole scheme would have been without him, how incomplete it would still be if Nicky wanted to wander all his days, or if modernity and the new country over the sea should have come to mean more to him than the old. He knew by Nicky's letter that this was not so, and his heart sang within him. For days after the letter came a glamour that to his eyes the world had lost illuminated it once again.
The 'nineties, young and go-ahead as they felt to themselves, did not seem to Ishmael nearly as wonderful as the 'seventies, which had seen so much deeper changes. This world—in which people now moved so complacently talking of Ibsen and Wilde, of weird Yellow Books of which he heard from Judith, and many other things all designated as fin-de-siècle—he had seen it in the making. The very children growing up in his house, the plump little Ruth and the clever, impatient Lissa, they thought they knew so much more than he did because they had been born so much later; and so in a way they did, in as much as the younger generation always sees more truly because it has not had time to collect so many prejudices, but can come straight and fresh to setting right the problems of the world. But what Lissa and Ruth did not yet realise as he did was that the day would come when children born in the new century would look upon them with a gentle pity.
On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news. The Parson could not often get over to Cloom Manor now, but it was the highest tribute to him that not only Ishmael and Judy and Georgie, when she could spare the time, but the children too, considered a visit to the Parson in the light of a pleasure. Boase knew it and was glad—even his sturdy aloofness and self-reliance would have felt a pang at being called on for decency's sake.
Ishmael found Boase lying on the long chair in his study, that for him always held something, some smell or atmosphere of the mind, that carried him back to his childhood. He felt in the midst of the old days again at once, when he was not looking at Boase, who was grown very old, his once rather square face and blunt features having taken on a transparency of texture that was in itself ageing, while his hair, sparse about the big brow, was a creamy white like froth. Boase called to Ishmael, recognising his step, to take off his wet things in the hall, for it was raining hard, with that whole-hearted rain of the West which when it begins seems as though it could never stop again. That was a wet summer, when the stalks of the growing harvest were flattened to the earth and the corn sprouted green in the ear and the hay rotted on the ground before ever it could be carried. Ishmael had to be careful about getting wet since that night when he had run to the burning of Angwin's ricks, and he did not scorn the Parson's offer of a pair of shabby old slippers that lurked under the hall chair for just such occasions as this.
It seemed to Ishmael that if he had not been feeling such a different being himself he might have been a little boy again and time never have moved on from the days when he lived here with the Parson and did his lessons in this room. Outside the shrubs bent before the rainy wind, as they had done so many times before his childish eyes; the scrap of lawn visible between them showed as sopping and as green; the fuchsia had grown bigger; but its purple and scarlet blossoms, so straightly pendant, each held a drop of clear water at the tip, as they had ever done in weather such as this. Within the room might be a little fuller, a little smaller, whether owing to the Parson's untidiness, with which the new housekeeper could not cope as well as had old Mrs. Tippet, long dead, or whether to the shrinking that takes place in rooms after childhood is passed, Ishmael could not have told. Three walls were still lined with dusty golden-brown books that he had been wont to describe as smelling of bad milk pudding, and the shabby green tablecloth was littered with sermon paper and more books just as it had been for his lessons. He almost expected to see Vassie's golden head, no more alien from him than his own boyish dark one, bending over it as he looked.
Boase held out a thin hand to him, laying down the book he had been reading, after slipping a marker in the place. Ishmael saw it was a new book from the library. "Robert Elsmere" was the name upon its cover.
"What good thing has happened?" asked Boase, watching Ishmael's face.
"Padre, you are too clever; if you had lived a few centuries earlier you would certainly have been burned alive! Nicky is coming home."
"That is splendid news! He has been away quite long enough to be good."
"For him?"
"No, for you. You are getting stodgy, Ishmael."
Ishmael laughed, but felt rather annoyed all the same.
"What is one to do? I am growing old."
"Nonsense! Have the decency to remember that compared with me you are a young man. Wait till you are close on eighty and then see how you feel about it."
Ishmael had a quick feeling that after all he was young compared with this frail, burning whiteness, yet it seemed to him that he could never be as old as that, that then indeed life could not be worth living. Aloud he said mechanically:
"You? You are always young."
"Age does not matter when you are really old; it is only the getting old that matters," said Boase; "it is like death. No one minds being dead; it's the dying that appals. But seriously, my dear boy, what really matters is to have the quality of youth. Don't lose that."
"I'm not sure I ever had it," said Ishmael slowly, sitting down by the long chair.
"Perhaps not. You were acutely young, which is not quite the same thing. Our friend Killigrew had the quality of youth. One can say of him that he died young. I think your Nicky has that quality too. That's why he'll be so good for you."
"What about the girls? Aren't they enough to save my soul alive?"
"Oh, well, girls are never quite the same thing. A father loves his daughters if anything more than his sons, but it's as a father and not as a fellow human. You know, I've seen a good deal of Judith this summer; she's always good at coming and talking to an old man, and what interests me about her is that she keeps so fluid. I mean that she never sticks where she was. I don't want you to either. You came in the days of Ruskin and Pater and of great men politically, but I don't want you to stick there. There's no merit in being right at one time in one's life if one sticks to that rightness after it has lost its significance. You know, a stopped clock is right twice every twenty-four hours, but it's a rightness without value. Keep fluid, Ishmael. It is the only youth."
"Is that why you're reading 'Robert Elsmere'?" asked Ishmael, with a smile.
"Exactly. I'm not going to change what feeds my soul daily for what is offered me between these covers, but that's not the point. One can always discriminate, but one should always give oneself things to discriminate between."
There was a short silence, which the Parson broke. "I too have had a letter," he said, and there was something in his voice which made Ishmael aware of a portent beyond the ordinary. "From Archelaus …" added Boase.
"From Archelaus?" echoed Ishmael. The name came upon him like the name of one dead, it seemed to him that when they spoke of Killigrew they touched more upon the living than when they mentioned Archelaus. "Why does he write?" he added; and his voice sounded harsh and dry even to his own ears, so that he felt a little shame at himself.
"He has met Nicky in Canada."
"I thought Archelaus had gone West in the States, if he were still alive at all. I was beginning to think something must have happened to him. No one has heard for so long. He took a funny idea into his head at one time to write to Georgie, whom he had never seen—queer letters, telling very little, full of sly remarks one couldn't get the rights of." Ishmael paused, waiting for the Parson to produce the letter and show it him, but Boase made no move. "It's funny Nicky never mentioned it," went on Ishmael with an odd little note that was almost jealousy in his voice….
"He says he did not tell Nicky who he was," said the Parson reluctantly. "I think there is more good in that queer, distorted creature than you think for, Ishmael. Seeing the boy seems to have roused him to old feelings of home…. He writes oddly, but in a strain that is not wholly base."
"I can't make out why he wants to write to you at all, Padre; he always hated you, blamed you so … for the marriage and all that."
"There is not much accounting for the vagaries of a man like that. Your father thought to be ironic when he had you called Ishmael; he saw every man's hand against you—you the youngest and the one against so many. And you have made a strong, secure life for yourself and your children, and it is Archelaus who wanders…."
"Archelaus would always have wandered. He has it in his soul. Do you remember the day Killigrew was classifying men by whether they wandered or stayed at home? He was right about Archelaus then. Da Boase—you don't think I could have behaved any differently to him, do you? He wouldn't be friends. That time in the wood … you know … I always knew in my heart that he had hit out at me, though I was so afraid of really knowing it that I never spoke of it even to you. And then when he came home after my marriage to poor little Phoebe—he made the first advances, it's true, but I never felt happy about them, although he seemed so altered. I've reproached myself sometimes that I was glad when he went away after she died. I always hoped he wouldn't come back any more. What else could I do, Da Boase?"
"I too hope he will never come home any more," said the Parson slowly, "and yet … if he does, try and remember, Ishmael … not that he is your brother—that would not make things easier—but that he is not quite an ordinary man, that in him the old brutalities dormant in most of us have always been strong and that he has had nothing to counteract them. He is not quite as we are. If we cannot understand we should not judge."
Again a little silence fell. Then Ishmael said suddenly:
"What does feed your soul, Da Boase? I shouldn't have asked you that," he added swiftly. "Besides, I know. But though I know, and though I believe in it too, yet I can't yet find all I want in it."
Boase lay silent, looking out of the rainy window at the wash of green and pearly grey without. His hand caressed Ishmael's as though he had been a little boy again.
"That feeds my soul from which my soul came …" he said slowly, "and daily the vision draws nearer to me and its reflection here strengthens even to my earthly eyes. This world is dear and sweet, but only because I know that it is not all, or even the most important part. Each day is the sweeter to me because each day I can say 'Come quickly, O Lord Jesus.' I do not need to say to you all that knowledge means."
The rain had blown away when Ishmael went home again, yet it seemed to him he went with a more anxious heart than that with which he had set out. Boase had seemed to him like someone who is almost gone already, whose frail envelope must soon be burned through, and it had come to him that no one could ever take his place. Killigrew he was missing as much now as when he died, because though he had not seen him so very often, yet Killigrew and he had each stood for something to the other that no one else could quite supply, and so his going had left a sense of loss that time did nothing to fill. But with Boase it was more than that. There was something in Ishmael which Boase had fathered and which knew and recognised its spiritual paternity. His mind had taken much colour from Killigrew, but from Boase it had taken form. He felt that that afternoon in the stuffy study he had touched something he had almost forgotten, that had slipped rather out of his life for the past years, since Nicky had been growing up: a significance, a sense of some plan of which he had caught glimpses in his youth and had since forgotten.
As he went through the wet world it seemed to him as though he were once again the same Ishmael who had so often gone this way long years ago, when the soul behind life had still intrigued him more than the manifestations of life itself. Whether it was that that afternoon in the study had awakened with sharper poignancy than ever before the remembrance of his youth, that some aspect of the room, with its musty books, its fire and the driving rain without, had awakened in him a forgotten memory of a day that had once held actual place in his life but had long since been lost, awakened it through the mere material agencies of the sense of smell and sight: or whether the Parson had touched him in some atrophied cord that had rung more freely in days gone by, the effect was the same.
As he went it was as though time had ceased to exist, as though he caught some vision of the whole pattern as one rhythmic weaving, and not isolated bits disconnected with each other. The sensation mounted to his brain and told him that time itself was a mere fashion of thought, that he was walking in some period he could not place. He remembered the day when the Neck had been cried, and it had seemed to him that the moment was so acute it could never leave off being the present and slip into the past; he remembered the first day at St. Renny when he was staring at the sunbeam and feeling that that at least would go on spell-bound for ever; he remembered that moment when, on his return to Cloom, he had gone over the fields with John-James and, looking once more on the same field, had recalled that first moment, and smiled to see how it had slipped away and was gone. He had smiled without thinking that first moment akin to the second one in which he was, whereas now he saw how the one had led to the other and both to this … and how they were all so much one that none seemed further off than another. The word "present" lost significance in such a oneness as this. It came to him that this sense of completeness, of inevitable pattern, was what the Parson felt, what enabled him to wait so tranquilly.
Ishmael mounted the long slope and stood looking down upon Cloom, and it seemed to him the fabric of a dream. So strong upon him was the sense of loss of the time-sense that the place-sense also reeled and slipped to a different angle in his mind. He saw how in a far-off field at the crest of the further slope serried rows of washing were laid out, looking so oddly like gravestones that the surface of his mind took it for a cemetery until, pricked to a more normal consciousness, he realised that there could be no such thing there, but only a field belonging to a farm of his own. Even then it seemed to him that he was wandering in an unfamiliar country, with a something unreal about it that gave it a dreamlike quality. The sky was by now a deep slate colour; below it the yellow of the road and the green of the fields showed a bleached pallor, and on the telegraph poles that rose and dipped to the crest the china insulators looked like motionless white birds against the darkness. He went on and down to his house; but all the while he knew that this was not his real habitation, that the house Boase was building daily, stone by stone, was for him too the ultimate bourne, that house which, in some other dimension, only glimpsed here to the dazzling of the mind, is straightened by neither time nor place as we understand them. He knew it, but not yet for him did the knowledge hold any peace—rather it sent a chill of helplessness to his heart. He still wanted something in this world, and not in the next, to make the inner joy by which he lived.