“Don’t worry!  After all something must come to all of us,” she said.

The phrase knocked at Ishmael’s heart.  “Something must come to all of us....”  Everyone had to die of something, from some outrage on nature.  There had to be some convulsion out of the ordinary course to bring it about; cases where the human machine simply ran down, as with the Parson, were rare.  This horror was lying in wait for all—­the manner of their leaving.  It was astonishing, looked at in cold blood, that people lived and were gay and happy with this hanging over them from their birth onwards.  He realised that it was this fact—­that only by some disruption of the ordinary course could death come—­which had always made death seem so unnatural to him.  He had for a flash the feeling that every woman, however maternal, has when she knows she is to have a baby—­a feeling of being caught in something that will not let one go.  “Something must come to all of us....”

Her “something” had come to Vassie.  She had to submit to the operation, but, though she rallied from it, no real good could be done, and the end became merely a question of time.  She did not kick against the pricks, as Ishmael had done all his life; she accepted it all with a certain stoicism that was not without its grandeur, and, though she became very irritable, she had moments of greater softening than ever before.  She was dying when the clouds of the coming war with the South African Republics first began to lower over the country.  The Flynns were in London, for Vassie was now too ill ever to think of crossing over to Ireland again, but she suddenly took it into her head to wish to be taken down to Cloom.  This was when she heard the news that Nicky, who had been a volunteer for some time, had enlisted in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.  She had always been very attached to him, spending upon him what of thwarted motherhood she alone knew, and he for his part had responded to her rather more than he did to most people.  Ishmael was wired to, and in November of ’99, a month after the declaration of war, Dan brought her down with a couple of hospital nurses and she was installed in the biggest and sunniest room at Cloom.

With Nicky’s absorption into the Army and Vassie’s incursion hard upon the edge of her final parting Ishmael was more strangely affected than by anything that had happened merely to himself in his whole life.  The approach of death for Vassie, the perpetual chance of it for Nicky, gave him the fulness of life, in so far as life means the power to feel.  He had thought the loss of power to feel for himself an inevitable part of age, as it had been of the thickening and greater materialism of middle life; but now he knew that never had he been ravaged as now, because never before had he encountered fear for someone he loved.