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.