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 thorny 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 passionate 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 passed 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 passion 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 passing 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.

In his childhood he had lived by what would happen in a far golden future, in his youth by what might happen any dawning day; but in his years of manhood, and from then till he began to feel the first oncoming of age, he had lived by what he did. Then he came again to Georgie, and saw how insensibly he had been won to softer ways, though never to the glamour-ridden ways of first youth. They had been sweet, those years, and the sweeter for the outside things—the friendship with Killigrew that had vivified his life, the pleasant intermittent times with Judith, the renascence of intimacy with Boase and the growth of his children, growing away from him every year, but none the less to be loved for that. What had he lived by during those years? Not, consciously, by anything, except a mere going on and a determination to make the best of things, to get the most out of everything. When the Parson died he had a glimpse of a world he had lost sight of since his youth, but not then could he give up this one sufficiently to do more than glimpse it. And when Nicky was in South Africa he had suffered that second violent onslaught of the personal which racked him this way and that. Vassie—the horror that her death had held now seemed to him as empty of all save peace as Hilaria's. But all the while he had been living by what he found in that passionate moment when he stood, a man of sixty, at the top of the hill above the seaward valley and had seen the rainbow arching over Cloom and the distant sea. Beauty, the actual joy of the world, that had been feeding his soul all the time, giving him those moments of ecstasy without which Killigrew had always said the soul could not be saved alive. From that moment the slope of the ten years down to the present seemed so swift that he found his vision of them less clear than of preceding periods. What of these last years, each of which was bringing him with, it seemed, such increasing momentum, towards the end?