"Like adding to the sum of ugliness. These people do that too," said Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by day; "and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one only lets it alone...."
"There's a queer vein of cruelty in the Celt--at least in the Cornish Celt--that is worse than the Latin," went on Boase. "When they are angered they wreak vengeance on anything. And sometimes when there are a lot of them together under circumstances which you would think would have roused their pity, the devil of wanton cruelty enters into them. I shall never forget when a school of whales came ashore in the Bay ... they lay there stranded, poor creatures! And from the oldest man to the little boys out of school a blood-lust came on everyone. They tore and hacked at the poor creatures with penknives and any weapon they could get, they carved their names on them and stopped up their blow-holes with stones, till the place was a perfect shambles and the blood soaked into the sand as into an arena in ancient Rome.... Nobody could stop them. It was a sight to make one weep for shame that one was a man."
Ishmael lay in silence. He knew--no one with eyes to see could live there and not know--but, like Killigrew, he had always tried not to think too much about it. He was so unable to take things superficially that he feared thought, and hence often did less than men who did not care as much. He gave a slight movement now that was not so much impatience as a thrusting away of a thing that sickened him and which he felt he could not stem. It seemed to him that the glory of the day had departed. He, too, remembered that shambles of which the Parson spoke; it had been the first time the pain in the world he so loved had come home to him. He remembered now how, as he and the Parson had come back, in melancholy silence, from that scene of blood, his own declarations about its being such a good world, made to the Parson on his first night home and repeated so often since to his own high-beating heart, had mocked at him. What did it avail being happy when there was such pain in the world? Himself or another, or, worse still, these innocents that could not philosophise about it--that any should suffer made all happiness futile. The same deadly consciousness came upon him now on the sunny cliff, and he resented that the topic should have been started, himself keeping a sullen silence. But the Parson turned and spoke directly to him.