Yesterday had been a destructive day, so bitter and killing that it seemed as if this morning everything should have been withered; but instead of being withered things were pulsing with new vigour. Even where there was no life showing above the soil, life spoke to him from below. The air, vivifying yet soft, had that baptismal touch which comes only at one time of the year. And running all through Nature was the thrill which comes out of nowhere, like the Spirit, so that the quiet land seemed to heave and thrill like sunlit waves of sea.
It came to him now that, next year, when the thrill was in the air, he would be in Canada. It would be the same thrill, he told himself hurriedly, because Nature’s magic was the same everywhere; and yet it would not be quite the same. On the soil where you had been born and bred there was always something more. Not only did you feel the thrill of the spring that was coming, but the thrill of the springs that were gone; so that, with each fresh spring on your native ground, the thrill deepened because of the past.
That thrill, at least, if he went to Canada, he would never feel again....
He had been right about Machell, he discovered later.... He discovered it after breakfast,—a breakfast which seemed to him more like a meal in a railway station than anything else. Beyond removing a few things from the mantelpiece, and routing a few other things out of a cupboard, Mattie had not actually begun her preparations for packing, but she managed to give the impression, nevertheless. The ebb and flow of her talk, rising and falling as she passed between kitchen and larder, came to him like the signals of approaching or departing trains.... Finishing his meal more hurriedly than usual, he went out to find Len again standing staring at the cottage.
This time, however, Machell made no attempt at concealment. Instead, he came forward to meet his chief awkwardly but eagerly.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” he began hastily, as if unable to contain himself any longer, “but there’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s all over the place you’re giving up your job, and I thought happen you’d put in a word for me if I was to apply for it.”
For a moment or two after he had spoken Kirkby did not know how to answer. He should have been prepared for the shock, he knew, but the fact remained that he was not prepared for it. Absurd as it seemed, it had not yet occurred to him that this sort of thing would follow naturally upon his “notice.” It would have come to him, of course, with the actual sending of the letter, but so far he had not progressed beyond the actual writing of it. His intuition had been trying to warn him, it was true, but he had not been able to grasp what it wished to tell him. But it was clear enough to him now why Len had seemed to him like a stranger who might possibly do him harm....
“What makes you think I’m meaning to give up?” he enquired at last, evading the question, and shifting his gaze from the man’s face to the greenhouse behind him.
Len wriggled uncomfortably.
“Nay, I don’t know ...” he began, looking down. “But it’s been all over the spot for a long while now. They’ve got it down at the village, too. Mrs. Kirkby’s always talked a deal about leaving, you see,” he added, rather more confidently, “and lately it’s seemed to me you were leaning that way yourself.”