Because a maturing mystic is under contract to the spiritual - and even to some extent the material - welfare of the entire universe, travel, even to his home town that raised him, is not the most significant of adventures. When Toby was younger, of course his visits out and back were wonderful, and coming home from the wilderness to his fifth year at the university has already been discussed in some of its glory, because that was also a preface to the deepening of his spiritual life and his conversion, but once these events were accomplished, and he had also started a family, mere geography, no matter how culturally significant and full of the most useful memories, never held any sway over the inner landscape of his spirit.
Claims like this easily disturb the ordinary human way of thinking, even in pretty lofty places. As Toby himself was later rather shocked to read, the author John Buchan waxed remarkably undiscerning - and he the son of a clergyman - over an occasion when Saint Bernard of Clairvaux walked the shores of an alpine lake lost in religious rapture and quite unmoved by the natural splendors of his surroundings. Being fond of the Buchan stories he had read in his youth, Toby was doubly scandalized. Moreover, having had a home for some months in some first rate mountain scenery himself, but also knowing at the same time no little presence of the spirit of philosophy, to say nothing of a few definitely spiritual events, he knew what it was to have nature simply get shoved to the back burner. This was logical enough: once you were given a handle on the Creator, creation was the ladder to the stars, not the stars themselves.
So this re-entry to the city of his formation was somewhat flat. Perhaps if he had arrived convinced that he was coming back to stay there might have been more mental fireworks, as when he returned from the Homathko wilderness, but he had no such expectations. It was really Hastings and the little university there that seemed to be his provocations, as much as he had felt much against leaving Sitka Flats. He would try to find a reason for staying in Vancouver, of course. Jelena was quite adamant about Hastings and its provincialism and small-mindedness becoming the grave of his intellect, and therefore hers as well. In fact she seemed to have a particular abhorrence against returning that seemed quite insurmountable, and not a little puzzling, given all the merry stories of the place she had told him over the years. Her reaction was a surprise, but, as a mystic with his head most of the time in the hands of a God who preferred him to concentrate on situations immediately in front of his nose, and had the actual technical apparatus for making sure this happened, Toby did not speculate very far ahead of the day-to-day. The simple plan of the moment was to hole up at the Omagh's, nicely located for his foraging out into the city in search of a teaching post. They'd a different place now, more spacious, and a few blocks closer to Tenth Avenue.
As even the most casual reader is aware by now, Toby was not going to find himself with a school, neither in Vancouver nor anywhere else in the southwest corner of the province. He was scheduled for another destination, and, in the long run, for a task much more demanding and important than that of a simple commander of the blackboard, as noble and essential calling as that may be. Some of his assignment would be incomparably positive - further development in the spiritual life and spiritual direction - while at the precise same time he would face - albeit in confusion and puzzlement - with as dark and negative a set of situations as a devout soul could encounter. This was not then clear to Toby, but it was perfectly clear to Providence, which knew all about, with equal clarity in each case, not only the highest possible levels of spiritual activity, but also the lowest depths of depraved behaviour in clergy and religious. His short summer in his old home town was simply an interesting interlude, with an opportunity to survey other areas of the Church, to have a chance to realize that they were not especially exciting, after he and Jelena's time in the north, so that he would be content in all the dramas and trials of his new home. When God has for a man a job in mind, He prepares him for it in detail.
In Toby's case, the preparation had been exhaustive, thorough, utterly, complete, in someone under thirty, for a soul that would have to endure, as a devout Catholic, the failures in leadership that had begun to plague the Hastings diocese in precisely the same year that Toby, literally raging with the fervour that only a converted mystic can have, joined the Church and found it all he could ever hope to ask for as a place to give his entire being. It was not simply that he had spent his life so far analyzing mankind with the eye and ear of a novelist, but he had also had the mystic's intellect's repeated visits to the forge of perfection, to meet the hammer that God so thoughtfully provided for steadily eliminating all the spiritual faults known to mankind. It was not that he had nothing left to learn: far from it, and his last diocese would give him just that school of finality; but as those who habitually knelt before the sacrament of life and liberty went on their way from day to day, he was not a little unique. Perhaps he had come to the city of his birth and education for a few weeks just so God could make him further realize his own peculiar situation, little of which had anything specific to do with geography, and everything to do with what went on in his own soul.
And, of course, the soul of his spouse, who was not merely his wife and the mother of his children, but to her own great surprise from the very beginning, the keeper of his conscience and the monitor of his spirit. That's what you got when you fell in love with a woman who had read the autobiography of Teresa of Avila before she was out of her teens, and also bricked up such a nice act of spiritual intelligence by studying literature and history, and sang and acted well stuff that was worth acting and singing. If she felt strong reasons for not going back to Hastings, there was no way he could argue them away. He would have to rely on the Toby/Jelena traditional method, which was to wait on God's providence. This was a routine which had worked impeccably so far, giving them a life of constant adventure in all the things which really mattered, so it could only be expected that it would work again. Gods always knew what He was up to: the trick was not to get in his way.
But why was she so stuck on a life back in Vancouver? Surely she knew that on both sides of the family the parents were too middle class to accept their - well, mendicant, life style - and there would be constant rows over the raising of the grandchildren. His own parents were hopelessly inimical to organized religion, while Jelena's father never darkened the door of a church except for weddings and funerals of his friends and relatives, and her mother, for all her faithfulness, and admirable affections for culture, had never been entirely happy with her son-in-law's radical relationship with theology. Priests, of course, were expected to know the supreme texts of the Church. It was their job, and the laity took comfort in priests who earned their humble salaries. But that a layman should quote Thomas Aquinas, and scowl like Elijah? Especially when he had taken an unseemly lot of time to get a decent job?
If only to keep familial peace, and save Toby from one hell of a lot of yelling at his relatives, Providence had moved them north six weeks after they were married, got them out of town, up on the cutting edge of the necessities of the faith, and given him one more year as a monk in his texts and his mystical brooding before he stepped up the blackboard and discovered how much he loved the company of the souls of children.
And Jelena had gone for all that like Joan of Arc straightening out the Dauphin and the army of the Franks.
How had they got to this determination to try to re-roost in the chief market town of the Fraser Valley and its Catholics dedicated to taking it easy? What did she know about Hastings that he didn't know?
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