(1)
ONE afternoon in October, four months and more after that previous
conversation, the card of Mr. Edward Scrope was brought up to Dr.
Brighton-Pomfrey. The name awakened no memories. The doctor descended to
discover a man so obviously in unaccustomed plain clothes that he had a
momentary disagreeable idea that he was facing a detective. Then he saw
that this secular disguise draped the familiar form of his old friend,
the former Bishop of Princhester. Scrope was pale and a little untidy;
he had already acquired something of the peculiar, slightly faded
quality one finds in a don who has gone to Hampstead and fallen amongst
advanced thinkers and got mixed up with the Fabian Society. His anxious
eyes and faintly propitiatory manner suggested an impending appeal.
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful consultant; he
prided himself on being all things to all men; but just for an instant
he was at a loss what sort of thing he had to be here. Then he adopted
the genial, kindly, but by no means lavishly generous tone advisable
in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social deterioration
without being very seriously to blame.
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with defective
eyesight and an unsuitable nose for the glasses he wore, and he
flaunted--God knows why--enormous side-whiskers.
“Well,” he said, balancing the glasses skilfully by throwing back his
head, “and how are you? And what can I do for you? There's no external
evidence of trouble. You're looking lean and a little pale, but
thoroughly fit.”
“Yes,” said the late bishop, “I'm fairly fit--”
“Only--?” said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of the
manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
“Well, I'm run down and--worried.”
“We'd better sit down,” said the great doctor professionally, and looked
hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between his
patient and the light.
“This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has involved very
considerable strains,” Scrope began. “That I think is the essence of the
trouble. One cuts so many associations.... I did not realize how
much feeling there would be.... Difficulties too of readjusting one's
position.”
“Zactly. Zactly. Zactly,” said the doctor, snapping his face and making
his glasses vibrate. “Run down. Want a tonic or a change?”
“Yes. In fact--I want a particular tonic.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey made his eyes and mouth round and interrogative.
“While you were away last spring--”
“Had to go,” said the doctor, “unavoidable. Gas gangrene. Certain
enquiries. These young investigators all very well in their way. But we
older reputations--Experience. Maturity of judgment. Can't do without
us. Yes?”
“Well, I came here last spring and saw, an assistant I suppose he was,
or a supply,--do you call them supplies in your profession?--named, I
think--Let me see--D--?”
“Dale!”
The doctor as he uttered this word set his face to the unaccustomed
exercise of expressing malignity. His round blue eyes sought to blaze,
small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to pucker his brows. His
colour became a violent pink. “Lunatic!” he said. “Dangerous Lunatic! He
didn't do anything--anything bad in your case, did he?”
He was evidently highly charged with grievance in this matter. “That man
was sent to me from Cambridge with the highest testimonials. The
very highest. I had to go at twenty-four hours' notice. Enquiry--gas
gangrene. There was nothing for it but to leave things in his hands.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey disavowed responsibility with an open,
stumpy-fingered hand.
“He did me no particular harm,” said Scrope.
“You are the first he spared,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.
“Did he--? Was he unskilful?”
“Unskilful is hardly the word.”
“Were his methods peculiar?”
The little doctor sprang to his feet and began to pace about the room.
“Peculiar!” he said. “It was abominable that they should send him to me.
Abominable!”
He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, aglow.
His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He protruded his
face towards his seated patient. “I am glad that he has been killed,” he
said. “Glad! There!”
His glasses fell off--shocked beyond measure. He did not heed them. They
swung about in front of him as if they sought to escape while he poured
out his feelings.
“Fool!” he spluttered with demonstrative gestures. “Dangerous fool! His
one idea--to upset everybody. Drugs, Sir! The most terrible drugs! I
come back. Find ladies. High social position. Morphine-maniacs. Others.
Reckless use of the most dangerous expedients.... Cocaine not in it.
Stimulants--violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible.
Exalted persons. Royalty! Anxious to be given war work and become
anonymous.... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea--to
disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations deranged.
Shattered the practice of years. The harm he has done! The harm!”
He looked as though he was trying to burst--as a final expression of
wrath. He failed. His hands felt trembling to recover his pince-nez.
Then from his tail pocket he produced a large silk handkerchief and
wiped the glasses. Replaced them. Wriggled his head in his collar,
running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
“Excuse this outbreak!” he said. “But Dr. Dale has inflicted injuries!”
Scrope got up, walked slowly to the window, clasping his hands behind
his back, and turned. His manner still retained much of his episcopal
dignity. “I am sorry. But still you can no doubt tell from your books
what it was he gave me. It was a tonic that had a very great effect on
me. And I need it badly now.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was quietly malignant. “He kept no diary at all,”
he said. “No diary at all.”
“But
“If he did,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey, holding up a flat hand and
wagging it from side to side, “I wouldn't follow his treatment.”
He intensified with the hand going faster. “I wouldn't follow his
treatment. Not under any circumstances.”
“Naturally,” said Scrope, “if the results are what you say. But in
my case it wasn't a treatment. I was sleepless, confused in my mind,
wretched and demoralized; I came here, and he just produced the
stuff--It clears the head, it clears the mind. One seems to get away
from the cloud of things, to get through to essentials and fundamentals.
It straightened me out.... You must know such a stuff. Just now,
confronted with all sorts of problems arising out of my resignation,
I want that tonic effect again. I must have it. I have matters to
decide--and I can't decide. I find myself uncertain, changeable from
hour to hour. I don't ask you to take up anything of this man Dale's.
This is a new occasion. But I want that drug.”
At the beginning of this speech Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey's hands had fallen
to his hips. As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had stiffened. His head
had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses.
At the end he gave vent to one or two short coughs, and then pointed his
words with his glasses held out.
“Tell me,” he said, “tell me.” (Cough.) “Had this drug that cleared your
head--anything to do with your resignation?”
And he put on his glasses disconcertingly, and threw his head back to
watch the reply.
“It did help to clear up the situation.”
“Exactly,” said Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey in a tone that defined his own
position with remorseless clearness. “Exactly.” And he held up a flat,
arresting hand. .
“My dear Sir,” he said. “How can you expect me to help you to a drug so
disastrous?--even if I could tell you what it is.”
“But it was not disastrous to me,” said Scrope.
“Your extraordinary resignation--your still more extraordinary way of
proclaiming it!”
“I don't think those were disasters.”
“But my dear Sir!”
“You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you
simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me--this
drug of Dr. Dale's helping--has been the great release of my life. It
crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things
about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so
again.”
“Why?”
“There is a crisis in my affairs--never mind what. But I cannot see my
way clear.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet
and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses
pendulum-wise. “Tell me,” he said, looking sideways at Scrope, “what
were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it
give you this--this vision of the truth--that led to your resignation?”
Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly
that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best
of his ability.
“It was,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “a golden, transparent
liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added
it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I
held it up to the light.”
“Yes? And when you took it?”
“I felt suddenly clearer. My mind--I had a kind of exaltation and
assurance.”
“Your mind,” Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey assisted, “began to go twenty-nine to
the dozen.”
“It felt stronger and clearer,” said Scrope, sticking to his quest.
“And did things look as usual?” asked the doctor, protruding his knobby
little face like a clenched fist.
“No,” said Scrope and regarded him. How much was it possible to tell a
man of this type?
“They differed?” said the doctor, relaxing.
“Yes.... Well, to be plain.... I had an immediate sense of God. I
saw the world--as if it were a transparent curtain, and then God
became--evident.... Is it possible for that to determine the drug?”
“God became--evident,” the doctor said with some distaste, and shook his
head slowly. Then in a sudden sharp cross-examining tone: “You mean you
had a vision? Actually saw 'um?”
“It was in the form of a vision.” Scrope was now mentally very
uncomfortable indeed.
The doctor's lips repeated these words noiselessly, with an effect of
contempt. “He must have given you something--It's a little like morphia.
But golden--opalescent? And it was this vision made you astonish us all
with your resignation?”
“That was part of a larger process,” said Scrope patiently. “I had been
drifting into a complete repudiation of the Anglican positions long
before that. All that this drug did was to make clear what was already
in my mind. And give it value. Act as a developer.”
The doctor suddenly gave way to a botryoidal hilarity. “To think that
one should be consulted about visions of God--in Mount Street!” he said.
“And you know, you know you half want to believe that vision was real.
You know you do.”
So far Scrope had been resisting his realization of failure. Now he
gave way to an exasperation that made him reckless of Brighton-Pomfrey's
opinion. “I do think,” he said, “that that drug did in some way make God
real to me. I think I saw God.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey shook his head in a way that made Scrope want to
hit him.
“I think I saw God,” he repeated more firmly. “I had a sudden
realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid
and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives. I was
seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve
him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and
self-love and secondary things. And I want to hold to that. I want to
get back to that. I am given to lassitudes. I relax. I am by temperament
an easy-going man. I want to buck myself up, I want to get on with my
larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled.... The
drug was a good thing. For me it was a good thing. I want its help
again.”
“I know no more than you do what it was.”
“Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect?
If for example I tried morphia in some form?”
“You'd get visions. They wouldn't be divine visions. If you took small
quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening. But
the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you,
moral decay--rapid moral decay. To touch drugs habitually is to become
hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere. I am
talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell
you that.”
“I had an idea. I had a hope....”
“You've a stiff enough fight before you,” said the doctor, “without such
a handicap as that.”
“You won't help me?”
The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself
with an extended hand and waggling fingers.
“I wouldn't if I could. For your good I wouldn't. And even if I would
I couldn't, for I don't know the drug. One of his infernal brews,
no doubt. Something--accidental. It's lost--for good--for your good,
anyhow....”
(2)
Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house. He
hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.
“That door closes,” he said. “There's no getting back that way.”...
He stood for a time on the kerb. He turned at last towards Park Lane and
Hyde Park. He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course
for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.
(3)
At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the
crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear
before him. He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had
himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain
call to him to proclaim God to the world. He had realized God, and it
was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to
the same realization. The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with
that idea. He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and
dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to
his anxiety for his wife and family. When he had talked to Eleanor
upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was
manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible. They had
sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and
confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon
the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and
reconstruct the world.
It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and
confused. It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over
the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation. Indeed it had not been
won over. She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon
the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful. He was secretly
disappointed and disconcerted by her tone. And the same hesitation of
the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank
explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from
telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was
to play in his future ministry. In his own mind he felt assured about
that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his
wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to
Lady Sunderbund's project. And in accordance with that idea he set
up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete
cessation of income. “As yet,” he told Lady Ella, “we do not know where
we stand. For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp. We
must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive
district. If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know
better how things are with us.”
He reviewed a choice of London districts.
Lady Ella said her bitterest thing. “Does it matter where we hide our
heads?”
That wrung him to: “We are not hiding our heads.”
She repented at once. “I am sorry, Ted,” she said. “It slipped from
me.”...
He called it camping, but the house they had found in Pembury Road,
Notting Hill, was more darkened and less airy than any camp. Neither he
nor his wife had ever had any experience of middle-class house-hunting
or middle-class housekeeping before, and they spent three of the most
desolating days of their lives in looking for this cheap and modest
shelter for their household possessions. Hitherto life had moved them
from one established and comfortable home to another; their worst
affliction had been the modern decorations of the Palace at Princhester,
and it was altogether a revelation to them to visit house after house,
ill-lit, ill-planned, with dingy paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens
for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with
built-out bathrooms that were manifestly grudging afterthoughts, such
as harbour the respectable middle classes of London. The house agents
perceived intimations of helplessness in their manner, adopted a
“rushing” method with them strange to people who had hitherto lived in
a glowing halo of episcopal dignity. “Take it or leave it,” was the note
of those gentlemen; “there are always people ready for houses.” The
line that property in land and houses takes in England, the ex-bishop
realized, is always to hold up and look scornful. The position of the
land-owning, house-owning class in a crowded country like England is
ultra-regal. It is under no obligation to be of use, and people are
obliged to get down to the land somewhere. They cannot conduct business
and rear families in the air. England's necessity is the landlord's
opportunity....
Scrope began to generalize about this, and develop a new and sincerer
streak of socialism in his ideas. “The church has been very remiss,”
he said, as he and Lady Ella stared at the basement “breakfast room” of
their twenty-seventh dismal possibility. “It should have insisted far
more than it has done upon the landlord's responsibility. No one should
tolerate the offer of such a house as this--at such a rent--to decent
people. It is unrighteous.”
At the house agent's he asked in a cold, intelligent ruling-class voice,
the name of the offending landlord.
“It's all the property of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners that side of
the railway,” said the agent, picking his teeth with a pin. “Lazy
lot. Dreadfully hard to get 'em to do anything. Own some of the worst
properties in London.”
Lady Ella saw things differently again. “If you had stayed in the
church,” she said afterwards, “you might have helped to alter such
things as that.”
At the time he had no answer.
“But,” he said presently as they went back in the tube to their modest
Bloomsbury hotel, “if I had stayed in the church I should never have
realized things like that.”
(4)
But it does no justice to Lady Ella to record these two unavoidable
expressions of regret without telling also of the rallying courage with
which she presently took over the task of resettling herself and her
stricken family. Her husband's change of opinion had fallen upon her out
of a clear sky, without any premonition, in one tremendous day. In one
day there had come clamouring upon her, with an effect of revelation
after revelation, the ideas of drugs, of heresy and blasphemy, of an
alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material breakdown of
the man who had been the centre of her life. Never was the whole world
of a woman so swiftly and comprehensively smashed. All the previous
troubles of her life seemed infinitesimal in comparison with any single
item in this dismaying debacle. She tried to consolidate it in the idea
that he was ill, “disordered.” She assured herself that he would
return from Hunstanton restored to health and orthodoxy, with all
his threatenings of a resignation recalled; the man she had loved and
trusted to succeed in the world and to do right always according to her
ideas. It was only with extreme reluctance that she faced the fact that
with the fumes of the drug dispelled and all signs of nervous exhaustion
gone, he still pressed quietly but resolutely toward a severance from
the church. She tried to argue with him and she found she could not
argue. The church was a crystal sphere in which her life was wholly
contained, her mind could not go outside it even to consider a
dissentient proposition.
While he was at Hunstanton, every day she had prayed for an hour, some
days she had prayed for several hours, in the cathedral, kneeling upon
a harsh hassock that hurt her knees. Even in her prayers she could not
argue nor vary. She prayed over and over again many hundreds of times:
“Bring him back, dear Lord. Bring him back again.”
In the past he had always been a very kind and friendly mate to her, but
sometimes he had been irritable about small things, especially during
his seasons of insomnia; now he came back changed, a much graver man,
rather older in his manner, carefully attentive to her, kinder and more
watchful, at times astonishingly apologetic, but rigidly set upon his
purpose of leaving the church. “I know you do not think with me in
this,” he said. “I have to pray you to be patient with me. I have
struggled with my conscience.... For a time it means hardship, I know.
Poverty. But if you will trust me I think I shall be able to pull
through. There are ways of doing my work. Perhaps we shall not have to
undergo this cramping in this house for very long....”
“It is not the poverty I fear,” said Lady Ella.
And she did face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any
rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in
one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts
tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the
responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at
last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything
but generalize weakly, and settled upon the house in Pembury Road which
became their London home. She got him to visit Hunstanton again for half
a week while she and Miriam, who was the practical genius of the family,
moved in and made the new home presentable. At the best it was barely
presentable. There were many plain hardships. The girls had to share one
of the chief bedrooms in common instead of their jolly little individual
dens at Princhester.... One little room was all that could be squeezed
out as a study for “father”; it was not really a separate room, it was
merely cut off by closed folding doors from the dining-room, folding
doors that slowly transmitted the dinner flavours to a sensitive worker,
and its window looked out upon a blackened and uneventful yard and the
skylights of a populous, conversational, and high-spirited millinery
establishment that had been built over the corresponding garden of the
house in Restharrow Street. Lady Ella had this room lined with open
shelves, and Clementina (in the absence of Eleanor at Newuham)
arranged the pick of her father's books. It is to be noted as a fact of
psychological interest that this cramped, ill-lit little room distressed
Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters.
The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. Parsimony ruled her
mind, but she could not resist the impulse to get him at least a seemly
reading-lamp.
He came back from Hunstanton full of ideas for work in London. He was,
he thought, going to “write something” about his views. He was very
grateful and much surprised at what she had done to that forbidding
house, and full of hints and intimations that it would not be long
before they moved to something roomier. She was disposed to seek some
sort of salaried employment for Clementina and Miriam at least, but he
would not hear of that. “They must go on and get educated,” he said, “if
I have to give up smoking to do it. Perhaps I may manage even without
that.” Eleanor, it seemed, had a good prospect of a scholarship at the
London School of Economics that would practically keep her. There would
be no Cambridge for Clementina, but London University might still be
possible with a little pinching, and the move to London had really
improved the prospects of a good musical training for Miriam. Phoebe and
Daphne, Lady Ella believed, might get in on special terms at the Notting
Hill High School.
Scrope found it difficult to guess at what was going on in the heads
of his younger daughters. None displayed such sympathy as Eleanor had
confessed. He had a feeling that his wife had schooled them to say
nothing about the change in their fortunes to him. But they quarrelled
a good deal, he could hear, about the use of the one bathroom--there was
never enough hot water after the second bath. And Miriam did not seem to
enjoy playing the new upright piano in the drawing-room as much as
she had done the Princhester grand it replaced. Though she was always
willing to play that thing he liked; he knew now that it was the Adagio
of Of. 111; whenever he asked for it.
London servants, Lady Ella found, were now much more difficult to get
than they had been in the Holy Innocents' days in St. John's Wood. And
more difficult to manage when they were got. The households of the more
prosperous clergy are much sought after by domestics of a serious and
excellent type; an unfrocked clergyman's household is by no means
so attractive. The first comers were young women of unfortunate
dispositions; the first cook was reluctant and insolent, she went before
her month was up; the second careless; she made burnt potatoes and
cindered chops, underboiled and overboiled eggs; a “dropped” look about
everything, harsh coffee and bitter tea seemed to be a natural aspect of
the state of being no longer a bishop. He would often after a struggle
with his nerves in the bedroom come humming cheerfully to breakfast, to
find that Phoebe, who was a delicate eater, had pushed her plate away
scarcely touched, while Lady Ella sat at the end of the table in a state
of dangerous calm, framing comments for delivering downstairs that would
be sure to sting and yet leave no opening for repartee, and trying at
the same time to believe that a third cook, if the chances were risked
again, would certainly be “all right.”
The drawing-room was papered with a morose wallpaper that the landlord,
in view of the fact that Scrope in his optimism would only take the
house on a yearly agreement, had refused to replace; it was a design of
very dark green leaves and grey gothic arches; and the apartment was lit
by a chandelier, which spilt a pool of light in the centre of the room
and splashed useless weak patches elsewhere. Lady Ella had to interfere
to prevent the monopolization of this centre by Phoebe and Daphne for
their home work. This light trouble was difficult to arrange; the plain
truth was that there was not enough illumination to go round. In the
Princhester drawing-room there had been a number of obliging little
electric pushes. The size of the dining-room, now that the study was
cut off from it, forbade hospitality. As it was, with only the family at
home, the housemaid made it a grievance that she could scarcely squeeze
by on the sideboard side to wait.
The house vibrated to the trains in the adjacent underground railway.
There was a lady next door but one who was very pluckily training a
contralto voice that most people would have gladly thrown away. At the
end of Restharrow Street was a garage, and a yard where chauffeurs were
accustomed to “tune up” their engines. All these facts were persistently
audible to any one sitting down in the little back study to think out
this project of “writing something,” about a change in the government of
the whole world. Petty inconveniences no doubt all these inconveniences
were, but they distressed a rather oversensitive mind which was also
acutely aware that even upon this scale living would cost certainly two
hundred and fifty pounds if not more in excess of the little private
income available.
(5)
These domestic details, irrelevant as they may seem in a spiritual
history, need to be given because they added an intimate keenness
to Scrope's readiness for this private chapel enterprise that he was
discussing with Lady Sunderbund. Along that line and along that line
alone, he saw the way of escape from the great sea of London dinginess
that threatened to submerge his family. And it was also, he felt, the
line of his duty; it was his “call.”
At least that was how he felt at first. And then matters began to grow
complicated again.
Things had gone far between himself and Lady Sunderbund since that
letter he had read upon the beach at Old Hunstanton. The blinds of the
house with the very very blue door in Princhester had been drawn
from the day when the first vanload of the renegade bishop's private
possessions had departed from the palace. The lady had returned to
the brightly decorated flat overlooking Hyde Park. He had seen her
repeatedly since then, and always with a fairly clear understanding that
she was to provide the chapel and pulpit in which he was to proclaim to
London the gospel of the Simplicity and Universality of God. He was to
be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from
creeds and sects, from egotisms and vain loyalties, from prejudices of
race and custom, to the worship and service of the Divine King of all
mankind. That in fact had been the ruling resolve in his mind, the
resolve determining his relations not only with Lady Sunderbund but with
Lady Ella and his family, his friends, enemies and associates. He had
set out upon this course unchecked by any doubt, and overriding the
manifest disapproval of his wife and his younger daughters. Lady
Sunderbund's enthusiasm had been enormous and sustaining....
Almost imperceptibly that resolve had weakened. Imperceptibly at first.
Then the decline had been perceived as one sometimes perceives a thing
in the background out of the corner of one's eye.
In all his early anticipations of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined
himself in the likeness of a small but eloquent figure standing in a
large exposed place and calling this lost misled world back to God. Lady
Sunderbund, he assumed, was to provide the large exposed place (which
was dimly paved with pews) and guarantee that little matter which was
to relieve him of sordid anxieties for his family, the stipend. He had
agreed in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year,
with a certain proportion of the subscriptions. “At first, I shall be
the chief subscriber,” she said. “Before the rush comes.” He had been
so content to take all this for granted and think no more about it--more
particularly to think no more about it--that for a time he entirely
disregarded the intense decorative activities into which Lady Sunderbund
incontinently plunged. Had he been inclined to remark them he certainly
might have done so, even though a considerable proportion was being
thoughtfully veiled for a time from his eyes.
For example, there was the young architect with the wonderful tie whom
he met once or twice at lunch in the Hyde Park flat. This young man
pulled the conversation again and again, Lady Sunderbund aiding and
abetting, in the direction of the “ideal church.” It was his ambition,
he said, someday, to build an ideal church, “divorced from tradition.”
Scrope had been drawn at last into a dissertation. He said that hitherto
all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by orientation
due to the seasonal aspects of religion, they pointed to the west or--as
in the case of the Egyptian temples--to some particular star, and by
sacramentalism, which centred everything on a highly lit sacrificial
altar. It was almost impossible to think of a church built upon other
lines than that. The architect would be so free that--
“Absolutely free,” interrupted the young architect. “He might, for
example, build a temple like a star.”
“Or like some wondyful casket,” said Lady Sunderbund....
And also there was a musician with fuzzy hair and an impulsive way of
taking the salted almonds, who wanted to know about religious music.
Scrope hazarded the idea that a chanting people was a religious people.
He said, moreover, that there was a fine religiosity about Moussorgski,
but that the most beautiful single piece of music in the world
was Beethoven's sonata, Opus 111,--he was thinking, he said, more
particularly of the Adagio at the end, molto semplice e cantabile. It
had a real quality of divinity.
The musician betrayed impatience at the name of Beethoven, and thought,
with his mouth appreciatively full of salted almonds, that nowadays we
had got a little beyond that anyhow.
“We shall be superhuman before we get beyond either Purcell or
Beethoven,” said Scrope.
Nor did he attach sufficient importance to Lady Sunderbund's disposition
to invite Positivists, members of the Brotherhood Church, leaders among
the Christian Scientists, old followers of the Rev. Charles Voysey,
Swedenborgians, Moslem converts, Indian Theosophists, psychic phenomena
and so forth, to meet him. Nevertheless it began to drift into his mind
that he was by no means so completely in control of the new departure
as he had supposed at first. Both he and Lady Sunderbund professed
universalism; but while his was the universalism of one who would
simplify to the bare fundamentals of a common faith, hers was the
universalism of the collector. Religion to him was something that
illuminated the soul, to her it was something that illuminated
prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their divergent
inclinations without any realization of their divergence. None the less
a vague doubt and dissatisfaction with the prospect before him arose to
cloud his confidence.
At first there was little or no doubt of his own faith. He was still
altogether convinced that he had to confess and proclaim God in his
life. He was as sure that God was the necessary king and saviour of
mankind and of a man's life, as he was of the truth of the Binomial
Theorem. But what began first to fade was the idea that he had been
specially called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would
have the most amiable conference with Lady Sunderbund, and then as he
walked back to Notting Hill he would suddenly find stuck into his
mind like a challenge, Heaven knows how: “Another prophet?” Even if
he succeeded in this mission enterprise, he found himself asking, what
would he be but just a little West-end Mahomet? He would have founded
another sect, and we have to make an end to all sects. How is there to
be an end to sects, if there are still to be chapels--richly decorated
chapels--and congregations, and salaried specialists in God?
That was a very disconcerting idea. It was particularly active at night.
He did his best to consider it with a cool detachment, regardless of
the facts that his private income was just under three hundred pounds a
year, and that his experiments in cultured journalism made it extremely
improbable that the most sedulous literary work would do more than
double this scanty sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts
were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and
squatting down, shapeless in a black corner of his mind--from which
their eyes shone out, so to speak--whenever his doubt whether he ought
to set up as a prophet at all was under consideration.
(6)
Then very suddenly on this October afternoon the situation had come to a
crisis.
He had gone to Lady Sunderbund's flat to see the plans and drawings for
the new church in which he was to give his message to the world. They
had brought home to him the complete realization of Lady Sunderbund's
impossibility. He had attempted upon the spur of the moment an
explanation of just how much they differed, and he had precipitated a
storm of extravagantly perplexing emotions....
She kept him waiting for perhaps ten minutes before she brought the
plans to him. He waited in the little room with the Wyndham Lewis
picture that opened upon the balcony painted with crazy squares of livid
pink. On a golden table by the window a number of recently bought books
were lying, and he went and stood over these, taking them up one after
another. The first was “The Countess of Huntingdon and Her Circle,”
that bearder of lightminded archbishops, that formidable harbourer of
Wesleyan chaplains. For some minutes he studied the grim portrait of
this inspired lady standing with one foot ostentatiously on her coronet
and then turned to the next volume. This was a life of Saint Teresa,
that energetic organizer of Spanish nunneries. The third dealt with
Madame Guyon. It was difficult not to feel that Lady Sunderbund was
reading for a part.
She entered.
She was wearing a long simple dress of spangled white with a very high
waist; she had a bracelet of green jade, a waistband of green silk,
and her hair was held by a wreath of artificial laurel, very stiff and
green. Her arms were full of big rolls of cartridge paper and tracing
paper. “I'm so pleased,” she said. “It's 'eady at last and I can show
you.”
She banged the whole armful down upon a vivid little table of inlaid
black and white wood. He rescued one or two rolls and a sheet of tracing
paper from the floor.
“It's the Temple,” she panted in a significant whisper. “It's the Temple
of the One T'ue God!”
She scrabbled among the papers, and held up the elevation of a strange
square building to his startled eyes. “Iszi't it just pe'fect?” she
demanded.
He took the drawing from her. It represented a building, manifestly an
enormous building, consisting largely of two great, deeply fluted towers
flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between
the towers appeared a dome. It was as if the Mosque of Saint Sophia had
produced this offspring in a mesalliance with the cathedral of
Wells. Its enormity was made manifest by the minuteness of the large
automobiles that were driving away in the foreground after “setting
down.” “Here is the plan,” she said, thrusting another sheet upon him
before he could fully take in the quality of the design. “The g'eat Hall
is to be pe'fectly 'ound, no aisle, no altar, and in lettas of sapphiah,
'God is ev'ywhe'.'”
She added with a note of solemnity, “It will hold th'ee thousand people
sitting down.”
“But--!” said Scrope.
“The'e's a sort of g'andeur,” she said. “It's young Venable's wo'k. It's
his fl'st g'ate oppo'tunity.”
“But--is this to go on that little site in Aldwych?”
“He says the' isn't 'oom the'!” she explained. “He wants to put it out
at Golda's G'een.”
“But--if it is to be this little simple chapel we proposed, then wasn't
our idea to be central?”
“But if the' isn't 'oem!” she said--conclusively. “And isn't this--isn't
it rather a costly undertaking, rather more costly--”
“That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my
p'ope'ty is in shipping and a lot of the 'eat in munitions. I'm 'icher
than eva. Isn't the' a sort of g'andeur?” she pressed.
He put the elevation down. He took the plan from her hands and seemed to
study it. But he was really staring blankly at the whole situation.
“Lady Sunderbund,” he said at last, with an effort, “I am afraid all
this won't do.”
“Won't do!”
“No. It isn't in the spirit of my intention. It isn't in a great
building of this sort--so--so ornate and imposing, that the simple
gospel of God's Universal Kingdom can be preached.”
“But oughtn't so gate a message to have as g'ate a pulpit?”
And then as if she would seize him before he could go on to further
repudiations, she sought hastily among the drawings again.
“But look,” she said. “It has ev'ything! It's not only a p'eaching
place; it's a headquarters for ev'ything.”
With the rapid movements of an excited child she began to thrust the
remarkable features and merits of the great project upon him. The
preaching dome was only the heart of it. There were to be a library,
“'efecto'ies,” consultation rooms, classrooms, a publication department,
a big underground printing establishment. “Nowadays,” she said, “ev'y
gate movement must p'int.” There was to be music, she said, “a gate
invisible o'gan,” hidden amidst the architectural details, and pouring
out its sounds into the dome, and then she glanced in passing at
possible “p'ocessions” round the preaching dome. This preaching dome
was not a mere shut-in drum for spiritual reverberations, around it ran
great open corridors, and in these corridors there were to be “chapels.”
“But what for?” he asked, stemming the torrent. “What need is there for
chapels? There are to be no altars, no masses, no sacraments?”
“No,” she said, “but they are to be chapels for special int'ests; a
chapel for science, a chapel for healing, a chapel for gov'ment. Places
for peoples to sit and think about those things--with paintings and
symbols.”
“I see your intention,” he admitted. “I see your intention.”
“The' is to be a gate da'k blue 'ound chapel for sta's and atoms and the
myst'ry of matta.” Her voice grew solemn. “All still and deep and high.
Like a k'ystal in a da'k place. You will go down steps to it. Th'ough
a da'k 'ounded a'ch ma'ked with mathematical symbols and balances and
scientific app'atus.... And the ve'y next to it, the ve'y next, is to be
a little b'ight chapel for bi'ds and flowas!”
“Yes,” he said, “it is all very fine and expressive. It is, I see, a
symbolical building, a great artistic possibility. But is it the place
for me? What I have to say is something very simple, that God is the
king of the whole world, king of the ha'penny newspaper and the omnibus
and the vulgar everyday things, and that they have to worship him and
serve him as their leader in every moment of their lives. This isn't
that. This is the old religions over again. This is taking God apart.
This is putting him into a fresh casket instead of the old one. And....
I don't like it.”
“Don't like it,” she cried, and stood apart from him with her chin in
the air, a tall astonishment and dismay.
“I can't do the work I want to do with this.”
“But--Isn't it you' idea?”
“No. It is not in the least my idea. I want to tell the whole world
of the one God that can alone unite it and save it--and you make this
extravagant toy.”
He felt as if he had struck her directly he uttered that last word.
“Toy!” she echoed, taking it in, “you call it a Toy!”
A note in her voice reminded him that there were two people who might
feel strongly in this affair.
“My dear Lady Sunderbund,” he said with a sudden change of manner, “I
must needs follow the light of my own mind. I have had a vision of God,
I have seen him as a great leader towering over the little lives of men,
demanding the little lives of men, prepared to take them and guide them
to the salvation of mankind and the conquest of pain and death. I have
seen him as the God of the human affair, a God of politics, a God of
such muddy and bloody wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of
railway junctions and clinics and factories and evening schools, a God
in fact of men. This God--this God here, that you want to worship, is a
God of artists and poets--of elegant poets, a God of bric-a-brac, a God
of choice allusions. Oh, it has its grandeur! I don't want you to think
that what you are doing may not be altogether fine and right for you to
do. But it is not what I have to do.... I cannot--indeed I cannot--go on
with this project--upon these lines.”
He paused, flushed and breathless. Lady Sunderbund had heard him to the
end. Her bright face was brightly flushed, and there were tears in her
eyes. It was like her that they should seem tears of the largest, most
expensive sort, tears of the first water.
“But,” she cried, and her red delicate mouth went awry with dismay and
disappointment, and her expression was the half incredulous expression
of a child suddenly and cruelly disappointed: “You won't go on with all
this?”
“No,” he said. “My dear Lady Sunderbund--”
“Oh! don't Lady Sunderbund me!” she cried with a novel rudeness. “Don't
you see I've done it all for you?”
He winced and felt boorish. He had never liked and disapproved of Lady
Sunderbund so much as he did at that moment. And he had no words for
her.
“How can I stop it all at once like this?”
And still he had no answer.
She pursued her advantage. “What am I to do?” she cried.
She turned upon him passionately. “Look what you've done!” She marked
her points with finger upheld, and gave odd suggestions in her face of
an angry coster girl. “Eva' since I met you, I've wo'shipped you. I've
been 'eady to follow you anywhe'--to do anything. Eva' since that night
when you sat so calm and dignified, and they baited you and wo'id you.
When they we' all vain and cleva, and you--you thought only of God
and 'iligion and didn't mind fo' you'self.... Up to then--I'd been
living--oh! the emptiest life...”
The tears ran. “Pe'haps I shall live it again....” She dashed her grief
away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.
“I said to myself, this man knows something I don't know. He's got the
seeds of ete'nal life su'ely. I made up my mind then and the' I'd follow
you and back you and do all I could fo' you. I've lived fo' you. Eve'
since. Lived fo' you. And now when all my little plans are 'ipe, you--!
Oh!”
She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then
stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were
littered over the inlaid table. “I've planned and planned. I said, I
will build him a temple. I will be his temple se'vant.... Just a me'
se'vant....”
She could not go on.
“But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,” he said.
“Not my temple,” she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay
rejected drawings. “You could have explained....”
“Oh!” she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they
went sliding one after the other on to the floor. For some long-drawn
moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide
and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
“We could have been so happy,” she wailed, “se'ving oua God.”
And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.
She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat,
bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek,
and began sobbing and weeping.
“My dear lady!” he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.
“Let me k'y,” she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his
backward pace. “You must let me k'y. You must let me k'y.”
His resistance ceased. One hand supported her, the other patted her
shining hair. “My dear child!” he said. “My dear child! I had no idea.
That you would take it like this....”
(7)
That was but the opening of an enormous interview. Presently he had
contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady
on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before
him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the
better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made
him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a
drawing.
In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion
that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far
back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of. Lady
Sunderbund's mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental
thicket. At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at
times she talked as if he were a recalcitrant servant. Her mingling of
utter devotion and the completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes
dazzled and distressed his mind. It was clear that for half a year her
clear, bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving
him exactly what she wanted him to want. The crystal sphere of those
ambitions lay now shattered between them.
She was trying to reconstruct it before his eyes.
She was, she declared, prepared to alter her plans in any way that would
meet his wishes. She had not understood. “If it is a Toy,” she cried,
“show me how to make it not a Toy! Make it 'eal!”
He said it was the bare idea of a temple that made it impossible. And
there was this drawing here; what did it mean? He held it out to her. It
represented a figure, distressingly like himself, robed as a priest in
vestments.
She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to shreds.
“If you don't want a Temple, have a meeting-house. You wanted a
meeting-house anyhow.”
“Just any old meeting-house,” he said. “Not that special one. A place
without choirs and clergy.”
“If you won't have music,” she responded, “don't have music. If God
doesn't want music it can go. I can't think God does not app'ove of
music, but--that is for you to settle. If you don't like the' being
o'naments, we'll make it all plain. Some g'ate g'ey Dome--all g'ey and
black. If it isn't to be beautiful, it can be ugly. Yes, ugly. It can
be as ugly”--she sobbed--“as the City Temple. We will get some otha
a'chitect--some City a'chitect. Some man who has built B'anch Banks or
'ailway stations. That's if you think it pleases God.... B'eak young
Venable's hea't.... Only why should you not let me make a place fo' you'
message? Why shouldn't it be me? You must have a place. You've got 'to
p'each somewhe'.”
“As a man, not as a priest.”
“Then p'each as a man. You must still wea' something.”
“Just ordinary clothes.”
“O'dina'y clothes a' clothes in the fashion,” she said. “You would
have to go to you' taila for a new p'eaching coat with b'aid put on
dif'ently, or two buttons instead of th'ee....”
“One needn't be fashionable.”
“Ev'ybody is fash'nable. How can you help it? Some people wea' old
fashions; that's all.... A cassock's an old fashion. There's nothing so
plain as a cassock.”
“Except that it's a clerical fashion. I want to be just as I am now.”
“If you think that--that owoble suit is o'dina'y clothes!” she said, and
stared at him and gave way to tears of real tenderness.
“A cassock,” she cried with passion. “Just a pe'fectly plain cassock.
Fo' deecency!... Oh, if you won't--not even that!”
(8)
As he walked now after his unsuccessful quest of Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey
towards the Serpentine he acted that stormy interview with Lady
Sunderbund over again. At the end, as a condition indeed of his
departure, he had left things open. He had assented to certain promises.
He was to make her understand better what it was he needed. He was not
to let anything that had happened affect that “spi'tual f'enship.”
She was to abandon all her plans, she was to begin again “at the ve'y
beginning.” But he knew that indeed there should be no more beginning
again with her. He knew that quite beyond these questions of the
organization of a purified religion, it was time their association
ended. She had wept upon him; she had clasped both his hands at parting
and prayed to be forgiven. She was drawing him closer to her by their
very dissension. She had infected him with the softness of remorse; from
being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a
warm and touching person. Her fine, bright black hair against his cheek
and the clasp of her hand on his shoulder was now inextricably in the
business. The perplexing, the astonishing thing in his situation was
that there was still a reluctance to make a conclusive breach.
He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when
a relationship becomes an entanglement. He ought to break off now, and
the riddle was just why he should feel this compunction in breaking off
now. He had disappointed her, and he ought not to have disappointed
her; that was the essential feeling. He had never realized before as
he realized now this peculiar quality of his own mind and the gulf into
which it was leading him. It came as an illuminating discovery.
He was a social animal. He had an instinctive disposition to act
according to the expectations of the people about him, whether they were
reasonable or congenial expectations or whether they were not. That, he
saw for the first time, had been the ruling motive of his life; it was
the clue to him. Man is not a reasonable creature; he is a socially
responsive creature trying to be reasonable in spite of that fact. From
the days in the rectory nursery when Scrope had tried to be a good boy
on the whole and just a little naughty sometimes until they stopped
smiling, through all his life of school, university, curacy, vicarage
and episcopacy up to this present moment, he perceived now that he had
acted upon no authentic and independent impulse. His impulse had always
been to fall in with people and satisfy them. And all the painful
conflicts of those last few years had been due to a growing realization
of jarring criticisms, of antagonized forces that required from him
incompatible things. From which he had now taken refuge--or at any rate
sought refuge--in God. It was paradoxical, but manifestly in God he not
only sank his individuality but discovered it.
It was wonderful how much he had thought and still thought of the
feelings and desires of Lady Sunderbund, and how little he thought of
God. Her he had been assiduously propitiating, managing, accepting, for
three months now. Why? Partly because she demanded it, and there was
a quality in her demand that had touched some hidden spring--of vanity
perhaps it was--in him, that made him respond. But partly also it was
because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt
more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the
catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family.
Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and
bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality
of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill
home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something
between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next
did he propose to do? He wished at times they would say it out instead
of merely looking it. Phoebe's failing appetite chilled his heart.
That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in
clinging to Lady Sunderbund's projects long after he had realized how
little they would forward the true service of God. No doubt there had
been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the
nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in
her, some touch of the infantile,--both appealed magnetically to his
imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude
for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper
materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and
Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour
and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was
no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time
in a state of active service to God. The Church of the One True God (by
favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.
And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence
was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady
Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable
proposition. Why?
Why?
There could be but one answer, he thought. Brought to the test of
action, he did not really believe in God! He did not believe in God as
he believed in his family. He did not believe in the reality of either
his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous
revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations. These beliefs were
upon different grades of reality. Put to the test, his faith in God gave
way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.
And yet he did believe in God. He was as persuaded that there was a
God as he was that there was another side to the moon. His
intellectual conviction was complete. Only, beside the living,
breathing--occasionally coughing--reality of Phoebe, God was something
as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....
Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.
By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was
approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park
ends and Kensington Gardens begins. Following upon his doubts of his
religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:
“Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary
lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to
Phoebe plain and clear?” Old Likeman's argument came back to him with
novel and enhanced powers. Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his
own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did
it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned
himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?
“But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false
and wrong,” he told himself. “God is something more than a priggish
devotion, an intellectual formula. He has a hold and a claim--he should
have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam,
Daphne, Clementina--all of them.... But he hasn't'!...”
It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that
he now returned. It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God
that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that
drug that had touched his soul to belief.
Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after
all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady
Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?
Before him he saw an empty seat. The question was so immense and
conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life
between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not
decide it upon his legs. He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the
seat and drummed with his fingers.
If the answer was “yes” then it was decidedly a pity that he had not
stayed in the church. It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat
and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.
A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.
Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and
Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the
bench of bishops. He had always looked forward to the House of Lords,
intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more
plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the
practice of his brethren. Well, that had gone....
(9)
Regrets were plain now. The question before his mind was growing clear;
whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and
his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary
fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund
offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social
status of his wife and daughters. In which case it was clear to him
he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable
subtlety--and magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....
He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and
revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts.... She
attracted him oddly.... At least this afternoon she had attracted
him....
And repelled him....
A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him. He smacked the back of
the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
No. He did not like it....
A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and
through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found
himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and
mountain and more in our hearts. Against the background of darkling
trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him. There was
little to be seen of her but her outline. Something in her movement
caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.
Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.
It was odd to see her here. He had thought she was at Newnham.
But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her. And there was something in
Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity. The girl had a kind
of instinctive wisdom. She would understand the quality of his situation
better perhaps than any one. He would put the essentials of that
situation as fully and plainly as he could to her. Perhaps she, with
that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the
light of which he stood in need. She would comprehend both sides of it,
the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.
When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen
to a loitering pace. She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead,
almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this
person would approach from east or west. She did not observe her father
until she was close upon him.
Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless,
regarding him. She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have
walked on, that she checked in its inception. Then she came up to him
and stood before him. “It's Dad,” she said.
“I didn't know you were in London, Norah,” he began.
“I came up suddenly.”
“Have you been home?”
“No. I wasn't going home. At least--not until afterwards.”
Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye
again.
“Won't you sit down, Norah?”
“I don't know whether I can.”
She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision. “At
least, I will for a minute.”
She sat down. For a moment neither of them spoke....
“What are you doing here, little Norah?”
She gathered her wits. Then she spoke rather volubly. “I know it looks
bad, Daddy. I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France
to-morrow. I had to make excuses--up there. I hardly remember what
excuses I made.”
“A boy you know?”
“Yes.”
“Do we know him?”
“Not yet.”
For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether. “Who
is this boy?” he asked.
With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense
conventionality. “He's a boy I met first when we were skating last year.
His sister has the study next to mine.”
Father looked at daughter, and she met his eyes. “Well?”
“It's all happened so quickly, Daddy,” she said, answering all that was
implicit in that “Well?” She went on, “I would have told you about him
if he had seemed to matter. But it was just a friendship. It didn't
seem to matter in any serious way. Of course we'd been good friends--and
talked about all sorts of things. And then suddenly you see,”--her tone
was offhand and matter-of-fact--“he has to go to France.”
She stared at her father with the expression of a hostess who talks
about the weather. And then the tears gathered and ran down her cheek.
She turned her face to the Serpentine and clenched her fist.
But she was now fairly weeping. “I didn't know he cared. I didn't know I
cared.”
His next question took a little time in coming.
“And it's love, little Norah?” he asked.
She was comfortably crying now, the defensive altogether abandoned.
“It's love, Daddy.... Oh! love!.... He's going tomorrow.” For a minute
or so neither spoke. Scrope's mind was entirely made up in the matter.
He approved altogether of his daughter. But the traditions of parentage,
his habit of restrained decision, made him act a judicial part. “I'd
like just to see this boy,” he said, and added: “If it isn't rather
interfering....”
“Dear Daddy!” she said. “Dear Daddy!” and touched his hand. “He'll be
coming here....”
“If you could tell me a few things about him,” said Scrope. “Is he an
undergraduate?”
“You see,” began Eleanor and paused to marshal her facts. “He graduated
this year. Then he's been in training at Cambridge. Properly he'd have
a fellowship. He took the Natural Science tripos, zoology chiefly.
He's good at philosophy, but of course our Cambridge philosophy is so
silly--McTaggart blowing bubbles.... His father's a doctor, Sir Hedley
Riverton.”
As she spoke her eyes had been roving up the path and down. “He's
coming,” she interrupted. She hesitated. “Would you mind if I went and
spoke to him first, Daddy?”
“Of course go to him. Go and warn him I'm here,” said Scrope.
Eleanor got up, and was immediately greeted with joyful gestures by an
approaching figure in khaki. The two young people quickened their paces
as they drew nearer one another. There was a rapid greeting; they stood
close together and spoke eagerly. Scrope could tell by their movements
when he became the subject of their talk. He saw the young man start
and look over Eleanor's shoulder, and he assumed an attitude of
philosophical contemplation of the water, so as to give the young man
the liberty of his profile.
He did not look up until they were quite close to him, and when he did
he saw a pleasant, slightly freckled fair face a little agitated, and
very honest blue eyes. “I hope you don't think, Sir, that it's bad form
of me to ask Eleanor to come up and see me as I've done. I telegraphed
to her on an impulse, and it's been very kind of her to come up to me.”
“Sit down,” said Scrope, “sit down. You're Mr. Riverton?”
“Yes, Sir,” said the young man. He had the frequent “Sir” of the
subaltern. Scrope was in the centre of the seat, and the young officer
sat down on one side of him while Eleanor took up a watching position on
her father's other hand. “You see, Sir, we've hardly known each other--I
mean we've been associated over a philosophical society and all that
sort of thing, but in a more familiar way, I mean....”
He hung for a moment, just a little short of breath. Scrope helped
him with a grave but sympathetic movement of the head. “It's a little
difficult to explain,” the young man apologized.
“We hadn't understood, I think, either of us very much. We'd just
been friendly--and liked each other. And so it went on even when I was
training. And then when I found I had to go out--I'm going out a little
earlier than I expected--I thought suddenly I wouldn't ever go to
Cambridge again at all perhaps--and there was something in one of her
letters.... I thought of it a lot, Sir, I thought it all over, and I
thought it wasn't right for me to do anything and I didn't do anything
until this morning. And then I sort of had to telegraph. I know it was
frightful cheek and bad form and all that, Sir. It is. It would be
worse if she wasn't different--I mean, Sir, if she was just an ordinary
girl.... But I had a sort of feeling--just wanting to see her. I don't
suppose you've ever felt anything, Sir, as I felt I wanted to see
her--and just hear her speak to me....”