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, tha