"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.

CHAPTER VI

"SOMETHING MUST COME TO ALL OF US"

With autumn Boase died. Like his life, his death seemed so natural, so without any sense of strain or outrage, that it was robbed, even for the man who had loved him, of all bitterness beyond that of personal loss. He had not gone uncriticised more than can anyone; there were not a few of the country people too coarse of grain to understand a man's life could really be as his appeared, and a certain capriciousness in his own likes and dislikes, which was one of his greatest weaknesses, had made for him intolerant critics among his own class. Yet, all in all, he was as near perfection, not only in character, but in understanding, as anyone Ishmael had ever heard of—far more so than anyone he had ever met. And of later years the Parson had grown in tolerance, which always to him had been a Christian duty—though it was far from being a weak or maudlin tolerance; and he had also lost much of that individualism which had been the only thing to cloud his judgment. More than most old men he had been free from glorification of the past, though not as free as he himself imagined. Something of Ishmael had gone with Killigrew's going, but that something had hardly included much of his heart; now there was buried with the Parson, or, more truly, strove to follow him whither he had gone, a love which was as single-natured a thing as can be felt. The return of Nicky was the only thing which at all filled the emptiness in Ishmael's days.

Nicky had altered, and for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world without so many acres behind him. He was full of new ideas for farming, which he had imbibed in Saskatchewan, and Ishmael, with a smile of dry amusement against himself, found he was as suspicious of them as ever John-James had been of his iron ploughs and Jersey cows. Farming being "the thing" in Canada, Nicky, who had gone away rather despising it, came back eager to try his hand.

When Ishmael had first started machinery at Cloom, beginning with a binder and going on to a steam thresher that he hired out for the harvest all around the district, the hedges had been black with folk crowding to see the wonders, just as they had when the first traction engine made its appearance in West Penwith. Yet Cornishmen, who are conservative creatures, still cling to their straight-handled scythes, although they are less convenient than those with curved handles in use up-country. Nicky had small use for customs such as this, and he poured forth ideas that would have turned John-James pale, if anything could have affected his seamed and weather-beaten countenance.