On the morning of the meet of the hounds he was called an hour
earlier. He drank a cup of tea and ate a piece of dry toast in a back
room. The dining-room was full of servants, who laid out a long table
rich with comestibles and glittering with glass. Mrs. Norton and Kitty
were upstairs dressing.
He wandered into the drawing-room and viewed the dead, cumbrous
furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer. He stood at
the window staring. It was raining. The yellow of the falling leaves
was hidden in grey mist. 'This weather will keep many away; so much
the better; there will be too many as it is. I wonder who this can
be.' A melancholy brougham passed up the drive. There were three old
maids, all looking sweetly alike; one was a cripple who walked with
crutches, and her smile was the best and the gayest imaginable smile.
'How little material welfare has to do with our happiness,' thought
John. 'There is one whose path is the narrowest, and she is happier
and better than I.' And then the three sweet old maids talked with
their cousin of the weather; and they all wondered--a sweet feminine
wonderment--if he would see a girl that day whom he would marry.
Presently the house was full of people. The passage was full of girls;
a few men sat at breakfast at the end of the long table. Some red-
coats passed. The huntsman stopped in front of the house, the dogs
sniffed here and there, the whips trotted their horses and drove them
back. 'Get together, get together; get back there! Woodland Beauty,
come up here.' The hounds rolled on the grass and leaned their fore-
paws on the railings, willing to be caressed.
'Now, John, try and make yourself agreeable; go over and talk to some
of the young ladies. Why do you dress yourself in that way? Have you
no other coat? You look like a young priest. Look at that young man
over there; how nicely dressed he is! I wish you would let your
moustache grow; it would improve you immensely.' With these and
similar remarks whispered to him, Mrs. Norton continued to exasperate
her son until the servants announced that lunch was ready. 'Take in
Mrs. So-and-so,' she said to John, who would fain have escaped from
the melting glances of the lady in the long seal-skin. He offered her
his arm with an air of resignation, and set to work valiantly to carve
a large turkey.
As soon as the servants had cleared away after one set another came,
and although the meet was a small one, John took six ladies in to
lunch. About half-past three the men adjourned to the billiard-room to
smoke. The numerous girls followed, and with their arms round each
other's waists and interlacing fingers, they grouped themselves about
the room. At five the huntsmen returned, and much to his annoyance,
John had to furnish them with a change of clothes. There was tea in
the drawing-room, and soon after the visitors began to take their
leave.
The wind blew very coldly, the roosting rooks rose out of the
branches, and the carriages rolled into the night; but still a remnant
of visitors stood on the steps talking to John. He felt very ill, and
now a long sharp pain had grown through his left side, and momentarily
it became more and more difficult to exchange polite words and smiles.
The footmen stood waiting by the open door, the horses champed their
bits, the green of the park was dark, and a group of girls moved about
the loggia, wheels grated on the gravel... all were gone! The butler
shut the door, and John went to the library fire. There his mother
found him. She saw that something was seriously the matter. He was
helped up to bed, and the doctor sent for.
For more than a week he suffered. He lay bent over, unable to
straighten himself, as if a nerve had been wound up too tightly in the
left side. He was fed on gruel and beef-tea, the room was kept very
warm; it was not until the twelfth day that he was taken out of bed.
'You have had a narrow escape,' the doctor said to John, who, well
wrapped up, lay back, looking very pale and weak, before a blazing
fire. 'It was lucky I was sent for. Twenty-four hours later I would
not have answered for your life.'
'I was delirious, was I not?'
'Yes; you cursed and swore fearfully at us when we rolled you up in
the mustard plaster. It was very hot, and must have burnt you.'
'It has scarcely left a bit of skin on me. But did I use very bad
language? I suppose I could not help it.... I was delirious, was I
not?'
'Yes, slightly.'
'I remember, and if I remember right, I used very bad language. But
people when they are delirious do not know what they say. Is not that
so, doctor?'
'If they are really delirious they do not remember, but you were only
slightly delirious... you were maddened by the pain occasioned by the
pungency of the plaster.'
'Yes; but do you think I knew what I was saying?'
'You must have known what you were saying because you remember what
you said.'
'But could I be held accountable for what I said?'
'Accountable? ... Well, I hardly know what you mean. You were
certainly not in the full possession of your senses. Your mother (Mrs.
Norton) was very much shocked, but I told her that you were not
accountable for what you said.'
'Then I could not be held accountable, I did not know what I was
saying.'
'I don't think you did exactly; people in a passion don't know what
they say!'
'Ah! yes, but we are answerable for sins committed in the heat of
passion; we should restrain our passion; we were wrong in the first
instance in giving way to passion.... But I was ill, it was not
exactly passion. And I was very near death; I had a narrow escape,
doctor?'
'Yes, I think I can call it a narrow escape.' The voices ceased. The
curtains were rosy with lamp-light, and conscience awoke in the
languors of convalescent hours. 'I stood on the verge of death!' The
whisper died away. John was still very weak, and he had not strength
to think with much insistence, but now and then remembrance surprised
him suddenly like pain; it came unexpectedly, he knew not whence or
how, but he could not choose but listen. Was he responsible for those
words? He could remember them all now; each like a burning arrow
lacerated his bosom, and he pulled them to and fro.
He could now distinguish the instantaneous sensation of wrong that had
flashed on his excited mind in the moment of his sinning.... Then he
could think no more, and in the twilight of contrition he dreamed
vaguely of God's great goodness, of penance, of ideal atonements. And
as strength returned, remembrance of his blasphemies grew stronger and
fiercer, and often as he lay on his pillow, his thoughts passing in
long procession, his soul would leap into intense suffering. 'I stood
on the verge of death with blasphemies on my tongue. I might have been
called to confront my Maker with horrible blasphemies in my heart and
on my tongue; but He, in His Divine goodness, spared me; He gave me
time to repent. Am I answerable, O my God, for those dreadful words
that I uttered against Thee, because I suffered a little pain, against
Thee who once died on the cross to save me! O God, Lord, in Thine
infinite mercy look down on me, on me! Vouchsafe me Thy mercy, O my
God, for I was weak! My sin is loathsome; I prostrate myself before
Thee, I cry aloud for mercy!'
Then seeing Christ amid His white million of youths, beautiful singing
saints, gold curls and gold aureoles, lifted throats, and form of harp
and dulcimer, he fell prone in great bitterness on the misery of
earthly life. His happiness and ambitions appeared to him less than
the scattering of a little sand on the sea-shore. Joy is passion,
passion is suffering; we cannot desire what we possess; therefore
desire is rebellion prolonged indefinitely against the realities of
existence; when we attain the object of our desire, we must perforce
neglect it in favour of something still unknown, and so we progress
from illusion to illusion. The winds of folly and desolation howl
about us; the sorrows of happiness are the worst to bear, and the wise
soon learn that there is nothing to dream of but the end of desire.
God is the one ideal, the Church the one shelter, from the incurable
misery of life. The life of the cloister is far from the meanness of
life. And oh! the voices of chanting boys, the cloud of incense, and
the Latin hymn afloat on the tumult of the organ.
In such religious aestheticisms the soul of John Norton had long
slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its
habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal
idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling
man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as
this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism
were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he
overstepped the line ruled by the Church, was repulsed. From him John
Norton's faith had suffered nothing; the severest and most violent
shocks had come from another side--a side which none would guess, so
complex and contradictory are the involutions of the human brain.
Hellenism, Greek culture and ideal; academic groves; young disciples,
Plato and Socrates, the august nakedness of the Gods were equal, or
almost equal, in his mind with the lacerated bodies of meagre saints;
and his heart wavered between the temple of simple lines and the
cathedral of a thousand arches. Once there had been a sharp struggle,
but Christ, not Apollo, had been the victor, and the great cross in
the bedroom of Stanton College overshadowed the beautiful slim body in
which Divinity seemed to circulate like blood; and this photograph was
all that now remained of much youthful anguish and much temptation.
A fact to note is that his sense of reality had always remained in a
rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and
mankind. For instance, his belief in the misery and degradation of
earthly life, and the natural bestiality of man, was incurable; but of
this or that individual he had no opinion; he was to John Norton a
blank sheet of paper, to which he could not affix even a title. His
childhood had been one of tumult and sorrow; the different and
dissident ideals growing up in his heart and striving for the mastery,
had torn and tortured him, and he had long lain as upon a mental rack.
Ignorance of the material laws of existence had extended even into his
sixteenth year, and when, bit by bit, the veil fell, and he
understood, he was filled with loathing of life and mad desire to wash
himself free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural
flesh that had precipitated a perilous worship of deified flesh. But
the Gothic cathedral had intervened; he had been taken by the beauty
of its architecture and the beauty of its Gregorian chant. But now he
realised--if not in all its truth, at least in part--that his love of
God had only taken the form of a gratification of the senses, a
sensuality higher but as intense as those which he so much reproved.
His life had been but a sin, an abomination. And as a woman rising
from a bed of small-pox shrinks from destroying the fair remembrance
of her face by pursuing the traces of the disease through every
feature, he hid his face in his hands and called for forgiveness--for
escape from the endless record of his conscience. He saw the Hell
which awaits him who blasphemes. To the verge of that Hell he had
drifted.... He pictured himself lost in eternal torment. The Christ he
saw had grown pitiless. He saw Christ standing in judgment amid a
white million of youths....
Too weak to think clearly, he sat dreaming. The blazing fire decorated
the darkness, and the twilight shed upon curtains purfled with birds
and petals. He sat, his head resting on his large, strong fingers,
pining for sharp-edged mediaeval tables and antique lamps. The soft,
diffused light of the paper-shaded lamp jarred his intimate sense of
things. However dim the light of his antique lamps, their beautiful
shapes were always an admonition, and took his thoughts back to the
age he loved--an age of temples and disciples. Recollection of Plato
floated upon his weak brain, and he remembered that the great
philosopher had said that there were men who were half women, and that
these men must perforce delight in the society of women. That there
were men too who were wholly men, and that these perforce could find
neither pleasure nor interest away from their own sex. He had always
felt himself to be wholly male, and this was why the present age, so
essentially the age of women, was repellent to him.
His thoughts floated from Greece to Palestine, and looking into the
blaze he saw himself bearing the banner of the Cross into the land of
the infidel, fighting with lance and sword for the Sepulchre. He saw
the Saracen, and trembling with aspiration, he heard the great theme
of salvation to the Saviour sung by the basses, by the tenors, by the
altos; it was held by a divine boy's voice for four bars high up in
the cupola, and the belief theme in harp arpeggios rained down like
manna on the bent heads of the knights.
Awaking a little, his thoughts returned to the consideration of his
present condition. He had been ill, death had been by his bedside, and
in that awful moment he had blasphemed. He could conceive nothing more
terrible, and he thanked God for his great mercy. If worldly life was
a peril he must fly from that peril, the salvation of his soul must be
his first consideration. His thoughts lapsed into dreams--dreams of
aisle and cloister, arches and legended panes. Palms rose in great
curls like the sky, and beautiful harmonies of voices were gathered
together, grouped and single voices, now the white of the treble, now
the purple of the bass, and these, the souls of the carven stone, like
birds hovering, like birds in swift flight, like birds poising,
floated from the arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian,
and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments;
the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences
the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of
ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of God had
descended upon him.