to them both.
Scrope glanced furtively at his daughter who was leaning forward with
tender eyes on her lover, and his heart went out to her. But his manner
remained judicial.
“All this is very sudden,” he said.
“Or you would have heard all about it, Sir,” said young Riverton.
“It's just the hurry that has made this seem furtive. All that there is
between us, Sir, is just the two telegrams we've sent, hers and mine.
I hope you won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do
anything very committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by
the evening train to-morrow.”
“Mm,” said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.
“In these uncertain times,” he began.
“Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?” said Eleanor sharply.
“I know there's that side of it,” said the young man. “I oughtn't to
have telegraphed,” he said.
“Can't I take a risk?” exclaimed Eleanor. “I'm not a doll. I don't want
to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me.”
Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.
“Is this taking care of her?” he asked.
“If you hadn't telegraphed--!” she cried with a threat in her voice, and
left it at that.
“Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in
those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut
off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.”
“You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.
“No one else can,” she answered. “I'm--I'm grown up.”
“Even if it hurts?”
“To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said. “This--This--” She flashed
her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed
with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....
Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked
the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked
him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. “I suppose, after
all,” he said, “that this is better than the tender solicitude of a
safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking
to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by
doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to
me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.” He got up.
“I go west,” he said, “presently. You, I think, go east.”
“I can assure you, Sir,” the young man began.
Scrope held his hand out. “Take your life in your own way,” he said.
He turned to Eleanor. “Talk as you will,” he said.
She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
man, who saluted.
“You'll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the
implications of that invitation.
She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to
go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
considerations. The two young people turned to each other.
Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
bumped amicably together.
(10)
Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.
He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent
problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at
the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an
interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.
Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those
dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.
That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.
The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.
Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were
at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been
thinking--What had he been thinking?
He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his
mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light
was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young
lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had
come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to
the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized
Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund
adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and
comfort, trusting to God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn
them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon
them?
Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
death.
Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to
himself.
He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel
mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to
wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....
And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time
there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of bow-strings, no
throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no magic and melodramatic
drawing back of the curtain from the mysteries; the water and the
bridge, the ragged black trees, and a distant boat that broke the
silvery calm with an arrow of black ripples, all these things were still
before him. But God was there too. God was everywhere about him. This
persuasion was over him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in
his nerves, a peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a
perfected conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real
coming of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that
for the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so
perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the foot
of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and leaves in
the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.
(11)
It was a phase of extreme intellectual clairvoyance. A multitude of
things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy, contradictory and
incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene, full and assured. He
seemed to see all things plainly as one sees things plainly through
perfectly clear still water in the shadows of a summer noon. His doubts
about God, his periods of complete forgetfulness and disregard of God,
this conflict of his instincts and the habits and affections of
his daily life with the service of God, ceased to be perplexing
incompatibilities and were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects
of the business of living.
It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem
of more importance than great and final things. For man is a creature
thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of
individuality to the knowledge of a common end. We stand deep in
the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only
realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape
from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.
Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that
lie ready to man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,
ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential
things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial
lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less
natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused
with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric
traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and
the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize
that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here
continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God
is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little
of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary
to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
contradiction in these manifest facts.
In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as
a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a
continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable
desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to
the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing
God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake
through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were
possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in
religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the
curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.
We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus
himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God,
had cried upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as
it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of
life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt,
is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and
hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....
“We don't know directly,” Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
of the hand, “we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
glimpse, we go over our reasons.”...
And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and
sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the
perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver,
because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the
active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love,
there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and
special forms of service to justify a priesthood. “God is God,” he
whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite,
sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal
functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living
God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a
struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and
within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they
reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so
God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were
finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to
our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and
pain and pleasure.
(12)
Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of
the immediate presence of God. He floated in that realization. He
was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine
interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated
every recess of his mind. He spread out his ideas to the test of this
presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light
might judge them.
There came back to his mind the substance of his two former visions;
they assumed now a reciprocal quality, they explained one another and
the riddle before him. The first had shown him the personal human aspect
of God, he had seen God as the unifying captain calling for his personal
service, the second had set the stage for that service in the spectacle
of mankind's adventure. He had been shown a great multitude of human
spirits reaching up at countless points towards the conception of the
racial unity under a divine leadership, he had seen mankind on the
verge of awakening to the kingdom of God. “That solves no mystery,”
he whispered, gripping the seat and frowning at the water; “mysteries
remain mysteries; but that is the reality of religion. And now, now,
what is my place? What have I to do? That is the question I have been
asking always; the question that this moment now will answer; what have
I to do?...”
God was coming into the life of all mankind in the likeness of a captain
and a king; all the governments of men, all the leagues of men, their
debts and claims and possessions, must give way to the world republic
under God the king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion
in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this--or be no more than
fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy
of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious
sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human
development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much
was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom.
To live and serve God's kingdom on earth, to help to bring it about, to
propagate the idea of it, to establish the method of it, to incorporate
all that one made and all that one did into its growing reality, was the
only possible life that could be lived, once that God was known.
He sat with his hands gripping his knees, as if he were holding on to
his idea. “And now for my part,” he whispered, brows knit, “now for my
part.”
Ever since he had given his confirmation addresses he had been clear
that his task, or at least a considerable portion of his task, was
to tell of this faith in God and of this conception of service in his
kingdom as the form and rule of human life and human society. But up to
now he had been floundering hopelessly in his search for a method and
means of telling. That, he saw, still needed to be thought out. For
example, one cannot run through the world crying, “The Kingdom of God
is at hand.” Men's minds were still so filled with old theological ideas
that for the most part they would understand by that only a fantasy of
some great coming of angels and fiery chariots and judgments, and hardly
a soul but would doubt one's sanity and turn scornfully away. But one
must proclaim God not to confuse but to convince men's minds. It was
that and the habit of his priestly calling that had disposed him towards
a pulpit. There he could reason and explain. The decorative genius
of Lady Sunderbund had turned that intention into a vast iridescent
absurdity.
This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to
see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.
He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two
aims. He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue. A stronger man
of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a
useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for
himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness;
she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque
persistence. It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was
necessary. And he was equally clear now that for him there must be
no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission. He was a man of
intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration
of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to
make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be
“carrying on,” with his mind blank and his faith asleep.
His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general
things again. Had God any need of organized priests at all? Wasn't that
just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand
years?
His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to
his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a
comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama. He
had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the
two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the
twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest,
the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the
element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated
tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable
in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the
prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest
religion is the antithesis to prophet religion. He saw that the
founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like
himself--only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative
force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative--men reaching
out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion
to the new. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when
Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common
that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from
rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and
sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of
God. Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.
But none of these efforts had got altogether clear. The organizing
temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust
of the discretion of the young by the wisdom of age, the fear of
indiscipline which is so just in warfare and so foolish in education,
the tremendous power of the propitiatory tradition, had always caught
and crippled every new gospel before it had run a score of years. Jesus
for example gave man neither a theology nor a church organization; His
sacrament was an innocent feast of memorial; but the fearful, limited,
imitative men he left to carry on his work speedily restored all these
three abominations of the antiquated religion, theology, priest, and
sacrifice. Jesus indeed, caught into identification with the ancient
victim of the harvest sacrifice and turned from a plain teacher into
a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal, was surely the supreme
feat of the ironies of chance....
“It is curious how I drift back to Jesus,” said Scrope. “I have never
seen how much truth and good there was in his teaching until I broke
away from Christianity and began to see him plain. If I go on as I am
going, I shall end a Nazarene....”
He thought on. He had a feeling of temerity, but then it seemed as if
God within him bade him be of good courage.
Already in a glow of inspiration he had said practically as much as
he was now thinking in his confirmation address, but now he realized
completely what it was he had then said. There could be no priests,
no specialized ministers of the one true God, because every man to
the utmost measure of his capacity was bound to be God's priest and
minister. Many things one may leave to specialists: surgery, detailed
administration, chemistry, for example; but it is for every man to think
his own philosophy and think out his own religion. One man may tell
another, but no man may take charge of another. A man may avail himself
of electrician or gardener or what not, but he must stand directly
before God; he may suffer neither priest nor king. These other things
are incidental, but God, the kingdom of God, is what he is for.
“Good,” he said, checking his reasoning. “So I must bear witness to
God--but neither as priest nor pastor. I must write and talk about him
as I can. No reason why I should not live by such writing and talking if
it does not hamper my message to do so. But there must be no high place,
no ordered congregation. I begin to see my way....”
The evening was growing dark and chill about him now, the sky was barred
with deep bluish purple bands drawn across a chilly brightness that
had already forgotten the sun, the trees were black and dim, but his
understanding of his place and duty was growing very definite.
“And this duty to bear witness to God's kingdom and serve it is so plain
that I must not deflect my witness even by a little, though to do
so means comfort and security for my wife and children. God comes
first....”
“They must not come between God and me....”
“But there is more in it than that.”
He had come round at last through the long clearing-up of his mind, to
his fundamental problem again. He sat darkly reluctant.
“I must not play priest or providence to them,” he admitted at last. “I
must not even stand between God and them.”
He saw now what he had been doing; it had been the flaw in his faith
that he would not trust his family to God. And he saw too that this
distrust has been the flaw in the faith of all religious systems
hitherto....
(13)
In this strange voyage of the spirit which was now drawing to its end,
in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and
assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present
stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some
remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy;
every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He
had likened himself to the Anglican church, to the whole Christian body,
as, for example, in his imagined second conversation with the angel
of God. But now he found himself associating himself with a still more
far-reaching section of mankind. This excess of solicitude was traceable
perhaps in nearly every one in all the past of mankind who had ever had
the vision of God. An excessive solicitude to shield those others from
one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the
revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling
errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.
“Suffer little children to come unto me”; the text came into his head
with an effect of contribution. The parent in us all flares out at the
thought of the younger and weaker minds; we hide difficulties, seek to
spare them from the fires that temper the spirit, the sharp edge of
the truth that shapes the soul. Christian is always trying to have a
carriage sent back from the Celestial City for his family. Why, we ask,
should they flounder dangerously in the morasses that we escaped, or
wander in the forest in which we lost ourselves? Catch these souls
young, therefore, save them before they know they exist, kidnap them to
heaven; vaccinate them with a catechism they may never understand, lull
them into comfort and routine. Instinct plays us false here as it plays
the savage mother false when she snatches her fevered child from the
doctor's hands. The last act of faith is to trust those we love to
God....
Hitherto he had seen the great nets of theological overstatement and
dogma that kept mankind from God as if they were the work of purely evil
things in man, of pride, of self-assertion, of a desire to possess and
dominate the minds and souls of others. It was only now that he saw how
large a share in the obstruction of God's Kingdom had been played by the
love of the elder and the parent, by the carefulness, the fussy care,
of good men and women. He had wandered in wildernesses of unbelief, in
dangerous places of doubt and questioning, but he had left his wife and
children safe and secure in the self-satisfaction of orthodoxy. To none
of them except to Eleanor had he ever talked with any freedom of his
new apprehensions of religious reality. And that had been at Eleanor's
initiative. There was, he saw now, something of insolence and something
of treachery in this concealment. His ruling disposition throughout the
crisis had been to force comfort and worldly well-being upon all those
dependants even at the price of his own spiritual integrity. In no way
had he consulted them upon the bargain.... While we have pottered, each
for the little good of his own family, each for the lessons and clothes
and leisure of his own children, assenting to this injustice, conforming
to that dishonest custom, being myopically benevolent and fundamentally
treacherous, our accumulated folly has achieved this catastrophe. It is
not so much human wickedness as human weakness that has permitted the
youth of the world to go through this hell of blood and mud and fire.
The way to the kingdom of God is the only way to the true safety, the
true wellbeing of the children of men....
It wasn't fair to them. But now he saw how unfair it was to them in a
light that has only shone plainly upon European life since the great
interlude of the armed peace came to an end in August, 1914. Until
that time it had been the fashion to ignore death and evade poverty and
necessity for the young. We can shield our young no longer, death has
broken through our precautions and tender evasions--and his eyes went
eastward into the twilight that had swallowed up his daughter and her
lover.
The tumbled darkling sky, monstrous masses of frowning blue, with icy
gaps of cold light, was like the great confusions of the war. All our
youth has had to go into that terrible and destructive chaos--because of
the kings and churches and nationalities sturdier-souled men would have
set aside.
Everything was sharp and clear in his mind now. Eleanor after all had
brought him his solution.
He sat quite still for a little while, and then stood up and turned
northward towards Notting Hill.
The keepers were closing Kensington Gardens, and he would have to skirt
the Park to Victoria Gate and go home by the Bayswater Road....
(14)
As he walked he rearranged in his mind this long-overdue apology for his
faith that he was presently to make to his family. There was no one to
interrupt him and nothing to embarrass him, and so he was able to
set out everything very clearly and convincingly. There was perhaps a
disposition to digress into rather voluminous subordinate explanations,
on such themes, for instance, as sacramentalism, whereon he found
himself summarizing Frazer's Golden Bough, which the Chasters'
controversy had first obliged him to read, and upon the irrelevance of
the question of immortality to the process of salvation. But the reality
of his eclaircissement was very different from anything he prepared in
these anticipations.
Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about
the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at
the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading
with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and
Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady
Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre
in Burlington House. The family was all downstairs in the dining-room
because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet
in the drawing-room. He came into the room and exchanged greetings with
Lady Ella. Then he stood for a time surveying his children. Phoebe, he
noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole
she was more like Eleanor than any other of them. Miriam knitted with a
steady skill. Clementina's face too expressed a tussle. He took up one
of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many
could be made in an hour. Then he asked some idle obvious question
about the fire upstairs. Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was
disturbing her. He hovered for a moment longer. He wanted to catch his
wife's eye and speak to her first. She looked up, but before he could
convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and
then bent over her work again.
He went into the back study and lit his gas fire. Hitherto he had always
made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking
thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it
with only a gentle thud. Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down
the blind--pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker's opposite.
Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire. Presently Ella would come
in and he would talk to her. He waited a long time, thinking only weakly
and inconsecutively, and then he became restless. Should he call her?
But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way. He did not
want the portentousness of “wanting to speak” to her and calling her out
to him. He got up at last and went back into the other room. Clementina
had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on
the sideboard. He saw it was one of Chasters' books, he took it up, it
was “The Core of Truth in Christianity,” and he felt an irrational
shock at the idea of Clementina reading it. In spite of his own
immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the
polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion. He fidgeted
past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.
Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out. He
hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a
conversation. Then he picked up Chasters' book again. “Does any one want
this?” he asked.
“Not if I may have it again,” consented Clementina.
He took it back with him and began to read again those familiar
controversial pages. He read for the best part of an hour with his knees
drying until they smoked over the gas. What curious stuff it was! How
it wrangled! Was Chasters a religious man? Why did he write these
books? Had he really a passion for truth or only a Swift-like hatred
of weakly-thinking people? None of this stuff in his books was really
wrong, provided it was religious-spirited. Much of it had been indeed
destructively illuminating to its reader. It let daylight through all
sorts of walls. Indeed, the more one read the more vividly true its
acid-bit lines became.... And yet, and yet, there was something hateful
in the man's tone. Scrope held the book and thought. He had seen
Chasters once or twice. Chasters had the sort of face, the sort of
voice, the sort of bearing that made one think of his possibly saying
upon occasion, rudely and rejoicing, “More fool you!” Nevertheless
Scrope perceived now with an effort of discovery that it was from
Chasters that he had taken all the leading ideas of the new faith that
was in him. Here was the stuff of it. He had forgotten how much of it
was here. During those months of worried study while the threat of
a Chasters prosecution hung over him his mind had assimilated almost
unknowingly every assimilable element of the Chasters doctrine; he
had either assimilated and transmuted it by the alchemy of his own
temperament, or he had reacted obviously and filled in Chasters' gaps
and pauses. Chasters could beat a road to the Holy of Holies, and shy
at entering it. But in spite of all the man's roughness, in spite of a
curious flavour of baseness and malice about him, the spirit of truth
had spoken through him. God has a use for harsh ministers. In one man
God lights the heart, in another the reason becomes a consuming fire.
God takes his own where he finds it. He does not limit himself to nice
people. In these matters of evidence and argument, in his contempt for
amiable, demoralizing compromise, Chasters served God as Scrope could
never hope to serve him. Scrope's new faith had perhaps been altogether
impossible if the Chasters controversy had not ploughed his mind.
For a time Scrope dwelt upon this remarkable realization. Then as
he turned over the pages his eyes rested on a passage of uncivil and
ungenerous sarcasm. Against old Likeman of all people!...
What did a girl like Clementina make of all this? How had she got the
book? From Eleanor? The stuff had not hurt Eleanor. Eleanor had been
able to take the good that Chasters taught, and reject the evil of his
spirit....
He thought of Eleanor, gallantly working out her own salvation. The
world was moving fast to a phase of great freedom--for the young and the
bold.... He liked that boy....
His thoughts came back with a start to his wife. The evening was
slipping by and he had momentous things to say to her. He went and just
opened the door.
“Ella!” he said.
“Did you want me?”
“Presently.”
She put a liberal interpretation upon that “presently,” so that after
what seemed to him a long interval he had to call again, “Ella!”
“Just a minute,” she answered.
(15)
Lady Ella was still, so to speak, a little in the other room when she
came to him.
“Shut that door, please,” he said, and felt the request had just that
flavour of portentousness he wished to avoid.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk to you--about some things. I've done something rather
serious to-day. I've made an important decision.”
Her face became anxious. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“You see,” he said, leaning upon the mantelshelf and looking down at the
gas flames, “I've never thought that we should all have to live in this
crowded house for long.”
“All!” she interrupted in a voice that made him look up sharply. “You're
not going away, Ted?”
“Oh, no. But I hoped we should all be going away in a little time. It
isn't so.”
“I never quite understood why you hoped that.”
“It was plain enough.”
“How?”
“I thought I should have found something to do that would have enabled
us to live in better style. I'd had a plan.”
“What plan?”
“It's fallen through.”
“But what plan was it?”
“I thought I should be able to set up a sort of broad church chapel. I
had a promise.”
Her voice was rich with indignation. “And she has betrayed you?”
“No,” he said, “I have betrayed her.”
Lady Ella's face showed them still at cross purposes. He looked down
again and frowned. “I can't do that chapel business,” he said. “I've had
to let her down. I've got to let you all down. There's no help for it.
It isn't the way. I can't have anything to do with Lady Sunderbund and
her chapel.”
“But,” Lady Ella was still perplexed.
“It's too great a sacrifice.”
“Of us?”
“No, of myself. I can't get into her pulpit and do as she wants and keep
my conscience. It's been a horrible riddle for me. It means plunging
into all this poverty for good. But I can't work with her, Ella. She's
impossible.”
“You mean--you're going to break with Lady Sunderbund?”
“I must.”
“Then, Teddy!”--she was a woman groping for flight amidst intolerable
perplexities--“why did you ever leave the church?”
“Because I have ceased to believe--”
“But had it nothing to do with Lady Sunderbund?”
He stared at her in astonishment.
“If it means breaking with that woman,” she said.
“You mean,” he said, beginning for the first time to comprehend her,
“that you don't mind the poverty?”
“Poverty!” she cried. “I cared for nothing but the disgrace.”
“Disgrace?”
“Oh, never mind, Ted! If it isn't true, if I've been dreaming....”
Instead of a woman stunned by a life sentence of poverty, he saw his
wife rejoicing as if she had heard good news.
Their minds were held for a minute by the sound of some one knocking
at the house door; one of the girls opened the door, there was a brief
hubbub in the passage and then they heard a cry of “Eleanor!” through
the folding doors.
“There's Eleanor,” he said, realizing he had told his wife nothing of
the encounter in Hyde Park.
They heard Eleanor's clear voice: “Where's Mummy? Or Daddy?” and then:
“Can't stay now, dears. Where's Mummy or Daddy?”
“I ought to have told you,” said Scrope quickly. “I met Eleanor in the
Park. By accident. She's come up unexpectedly. To meet a boy going to
the front. Quite a nice boy. Son of Riverton the doctor. The parting had
made them understand one another. It's all right, Ella. It's a little
irregular, but I'd stake my life on the boy. She's very lucky.”
Eleanor appeared through the folding doors. She came to business at
once.
“I promised you I'd come back to supper here, Daddy,” she said. “But I
don't want to have supper here. I want to stay out late.”
She saw her mother look perplexed. “Hasn't Daddy told you?”
“But where is young Riverton?”
“He's outside.”
Eleanor became aware of a broad chink in the folding doors that was
making the dining-room an auditorium for their dialogue. She shut them
deftly.
“I have told Mummy,” Scrope explained. “Bring him in to supper. We ought
to see him.”
Eleanor hesitated. She indicated her sisters beyond the folding doors.
“They'll all be watching us, Mummy,” she said. “We'd be uncomfortable.
And besides--”
“But you can't go out and dine with him alone!”
“Oh, Mummy! It's our only chance.”
“Customs are changing,” said Scrope.
“But can they?” asked Lady Ella.
“I don't see why not.”
The mother was still doubtful, but she was in no mood to cross her
husband that night. “It's an exceptional occasion,” said Scrope, and
Eleanor knew her point was won. She became radiant. “I can be late?”
Scrope handed her his latch-key without a word.
“You dear kind things,” she said, and went to the door. Then turned and
came back and kissed her father. Then she kissed her mother. “It is
so kind of you,” she said, and was gone. They listened to her passage
through a storm of questions in the dining-room.
“Three months ago that would have shocked me,” said Lady Ella.
“You haven't seen the boy,” said Scrope.
“But the appearances!”
“Aren't we rather breaking with appearances?” he said.
“And he goes to-morrow--perhaps to get killed,” he added. “A lad like
a schoolboy. A young thing. Because of the political foolery that we
priests and teachers have suffered in the place of the Kingdom of God,
because we have allowed the religion of Europe to become a lie; because
no man spoke the word of God. You see--when I see that--see those two,
those children of one-and-twenty, wrenched by tragedy, beginning with
a parting.... It's like a knife slashing at all our appearances and
discretions.... Think of our lovemaking....”
The front door banged.
He had some idea of resuming their talk. But his was a scattered mind
now.
“It's a quarter to eight,” he said as if in explanation.
“I must see to the supper,” said Lady Ella.
(16)
There was an air of tension at supper as though the whole family felt
that momentous words impended. But Phoebe had emerged victorious from
her mathematical struggle, and she seemed to eat with better appetite
than she had shown for some time. It was a cold meat supper; Lady Ella
had found it impossible to keep up the regular practice of a cooked
dinner in the evening, and now it was only on Thursdays that the
Scropes, to preserve their social tradition, dressed and dined; the rest
of the week they supped. Lady Ella never talked very much at supper;
this evening was no exception. Clementina talked of London University
and Bedford College; she had been making enquiries; Daphne described
some of the mistresses at her new school. The feeling that something was
expected had got upon Scrope's nerves. He talked a little in a flat and
obvious way, and lapsed into thoughtful silences. While supper was being
cleared away he went back into his study.
Thence he returned to the dining-room hearthrug as his family resumed
their various occupations.
He tried to speak in a casual conversational tone.
“I want to tell you all,” he said, “of something that has happened
to-day.”
He waited. Phoebe had begun to figure at a fresh sheet of computations.
Miriam bent her head closer over her work, as though she winced at what
was coming. Daphne and Clementina looked at one another. Their eyes said
“Eleanor!” But he was too full of his own intention to read that glance.
Only his wife regarded him attentively.
“It concerns you all,” he said.
He looked at Phoebe. He saw Lady Ella's hand go out and touch the girl's
hand gently to make her desist. Phoebe obeyed, with a little sigh.
“I want to tell you that to-day I refused an income that would certainly
have exceeded fifteen hundred pounds a year.”
Clementina looked up now. This was not what she expected. Her expression
conveyed protesting enquiry.
“I want you all to understand why I did that and why we are in the
position we are in, and what lies before us. I want you to know what has
been going on in my mind.”
He looked down at the hearthrug, and tried to throw off a memory of his
Princhester classes for young women, that oppressed him. His manner
he forced to a more familiar note. He stuck his hands into his trouser
pockets.
“You know, my dears, I had to give up the church. I just simply didn't
believe any more in orthodox Church teaching. And I feel I've never
explained that properly to you. Not at all clearly. I want to explain
that now. It's a queer thing, I know, for me to say to you, but I want
you to understand that I am a religious man. I believe that God matters
more than wealth or comfort or position or the respect of men, that he
also matters more than your comfort and prosperity. God knows I have
cared for your comfort and prosperity. I don't want you to think that in
all these changes we have been through lately, I haven't been aware of
all the discomfort into which you have come--the relative discomfort.
Compared with Princhester this is dark and crowded and poverty-stricken.
I have never felt crowded before, but in this house I know you are
horribly crowded. It is a house that seems almost contrived for small
discomforts. This narrow passage outside; the incessant going up and
down stairs. And there are other things. There is the blankness of our
London Sundays. What is the good of pretending? They are desolating.
There's the impossibility too of getting good servants to come into our
dug-out kitchen. I'm not blind to all these sordid consequences. But all
the same, God has to be served first. I had to come to this. I felt I
could not serve God any longer as a bishop in the established church,
because I did not believe that the established church was serving God.
I struggled against that conviction--and I struggled against it largely
for your sakes. But I had to obey my conviction.... I haven't talked
to you about these things as much as I should have done, but partly at
least that is due to the fact that my own mind has been changing and
reconsidering, going forward and going back, and in that fluid state
it didn't seem fair to tell you things that I might presently find
mistaken. But now I begin to feel that I have really thought out things,
and that they are definite enough to tell you....”
He paused and resumed. “A number of things have helped to change the
opinions in which I grew up and in which you have grown up. There were
worries at Princhester; I didn't let you know much about them, but there
were. There was something harsh and cruel in that atmosphere. I saw for
the first time--it's a lesson I'm still only learning--how harsh and
greedy rich people and employing people are to poor people and working
people, and how ineffective our church was to make things better. That
struck me. There were religious disputes in the diocese too, and they
shook me. I thought my faith was built on a rock, and I found it was
built on sand. It was slipping and sliding long before the war. But the
war brought it down. Before the war such a lot of things in England and
Europe seemed like a comedy or a farce, a bad joke that one tolerated.
One tried half consciously, half avoiding the knowledge of what one was
doing, to keep one's own little circle and life civilized. The war shook
all those ideas of isolation, all that sort of evasion, down. The world
is the rightful kingdom of God; we had left its affairs to kings and
emperors and suchlike impostors, to priests and profit-seekers and
greedy men. We were genteel condoners. The war has ended that. It
thrusts into all our lives. It brings death so close--A fortnight ago
twenty-seven people were killed and injured within a mile of this by
Zeppelin bombs.... Every one loses some one.... Because through all that
time men like myself were going through our priestly mummeries, abasing
ourselves to kings and politicians, when we ought to have been crying
out: 'No! No! There is no righteousness in the world, there is no right
government, except it be the kingdom of God.'”
He paused and looked at them. They were all listening to him now. But he
was still haunted by a dread of preaching in his own family. He dropped
to the conversational note again.
“You see what I had in mind. I saw I must come out of this, and preach
the kingdom of God. That was my idea. I don't want to force it upon you,
but I want you to understand why I acted as I did. But let me come to
the particular thing that has happened to-day. I did not think when I
made my final decision to leave the church that it meant such poverty as
this we are living in--permanently. That is what I want to make clear to
you. I thought there would be a temporary dip into dinginess, but that
was all. There was a plan; at the time it seemed a right and reasonable
plan; for setting up a chapel in London, a very plain and simple
undenominational chapel, for the simple preaching of the world kingdom
of God. There was some one who seemed prepared to meet all the immediate
demands for such a chapel.”
“Was it Lady Sunderbund?” asked Clementina.
Scrope was pulled up abruptly. “Yes,” he said. “It seemed at first a
quite hopeful project.”
“We'd have hated that,” said Clementina, with a glance as if for assent,
at her mother. “We should all have hated that.”
“Anyhow it has fallen through.”
“We don't mind that,” said Clementina, and Daphne echoed her words.
“I don't see that there is any necessity to import this note
of--hostility to Lady Sunderbund into this matter.” He addressed
himself rather more definitely to Lady Ella. “She's a woman of a very
extraordinary character, highly emotional, energetic, generous to an
extraordinary extent....”
Daphne made a little noise like a comment.
A faint acerbity in her father's voice responded.
“Anyhow you make a mistake if you think that the personality of Lady
Sunderbund has very much to do with this thing now. Her quality may have
brought out certain aspects of the situation rather more sharply than
they might have been brought out under other circumstances, but if
this chapel enterprise had been suggested by quite a different sort of
person, by a man, or by a committee, in the end I think I should have
come to the same conclusion. Leave Lady Sunderbund out. Any chapel was
impossible. It is just this specialization that has been the trouble
with religion. It is just this tendency to make it the business of
a special sort of man, in a special sort of building, on a special
day--Every man, every building, every day belongs equally to God.
That is my conviction. I think that the only possible existing sort of
religions meeting is something after the fashion of the Quaker meeting.
In that there is no professional religious man at all; not a trace of
the sacrifices to the ancient gods.... And no room for a professional
religions man....” He felt his argument did a little escape him. He
snatched, “That is what I want to make clear to you. God is not a
speciality; he is a universal interest.”
He stopped. Both Daphne and Clementina seemed disposed to say something
and did not say anything.
Miriam was the first to speak. “Daddy,” she said, “I know I'm stupid.
But are we still Christians?”
“I want you to think for yourselves.”
“But I mean,” said Miriam, “are we--something like Quakers--a sort of
very broad Christians?”
“You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then
you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is
alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.”
“But the creeds?” asked Clementina.
He shook his head. “So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds,
I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious
feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am
a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I
believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in
every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of
God....”
“That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in
Christianity.'”
“You have been reading him?”
“Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.”
“I am not Chasters,” said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: “What he
does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.”
Lady Ella had said no word for some time.
“I would be ashamed,” she said quietly, “if you had not done as you
have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this.... Not when we
understand--as we do now.”
That was the limit of her eloquence.
“Not now that we understand, Daddy,” said Clementina, and a faint
flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.
There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and
perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it
to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the
awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. “Dear Daddy,” she
said, and kissed him.
“We didn't understand properly,” said Clementina, in the tone of one who
explains away much--that had never been spoken....
“Daddy,” said Miriam with an inspiration, “may I play something to you
presently?”
“But the fire!” interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.
“I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,” he said.
Daphne had remained seated at the table.
“Are we never to go to church again?” she asked, as if at a loss.
(17)
Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his
daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness
with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come
down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his
rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much
more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end
the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had
intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination
of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an
aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the
presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life
had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale.
The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt,
domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by
the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....
In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention.
It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real
sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's
purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these
girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints,
the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He
tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said
and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning,
merely a beginning.
After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was
glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the
shadow had first fallen between them. “I was so glad you spoke to them,”
she said. “They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.”
He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole
question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from
him.
“You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid
tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that
has made me come out of the church.”
“No, dear. No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly. “With all these
mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death,
hardship and separation running amok in the world--”
“One has to do something,” she agreed.
“I know, dear,” he said, “that all this year of doubt and change has
been a dreadful year for you.”
“It was stupid of me,” she said, “but I have been so unhappy. It's
over now--but I was wretched. And there was nothing I could say....
I prayed.... It isn't the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.
Now--I'm happy. I'm happy again.
“But how far do you come with me?”
“I'm with you.”
“But,” he said, “you are still a churchwoman?”
“I don't know,” she said. “I don't mind.”
He stared at her.
“But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the
church.”
“Things are so different now,” she said.
Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: “Whither
thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
and me.”
Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
was capable of no such rhetoric.
“Whither thou goest,” she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
no further. “My dear,” she said.
(18)
At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.
He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days. Some theologian
once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity
had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
“respectability,” and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
He whispered four words very softly: “The Kingdom of God!”
He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
The Kingdom of God!
That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. “It comes.
It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....”
He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that
was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth. He was not
alone. While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others
gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith
that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained
chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in
life, for ever. They were many men, speaking divers tongues. He was
but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse. He could smile at the artless
vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that
had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had
brought him so near to founding a new sect. Every soldier in the new
host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity.... And none
was leader. Only God was leader....
“The achievement of the Kingdom of God;” this was his calling.
Henceforth this was his business in life....
For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth
of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy
splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal
beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid
adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars. But neither his
natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or
administrative explicitness. Much more was his dream a vision of
men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit. He saw history growing
reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.
All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely
conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression
and verification of the growth of God within. Then we would bear
children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields. Life
would tower up like a great flame. By faith we reached forward to that.
The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical. And the
price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a
Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and
churches for God.... He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he
marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid
evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its
appointments. For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.
He who had been one of the lucky ones.... Well, men were living in
dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and
lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller
cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....
(19)
Presently his thoughts were brought back to his family by the sounds of
Eleanor's return. He heard her key in the outer door; he heard her move
about in the hall and then slip lightly up to bed. He did not go out to
speak to her, and she did not note the light under his door.
He would talk to her later when this discovery of her own emotions no
longer dominated her mind. He recalled her departing figure and how she
had walked, touching and looking up to her young mate, and he a little
leaning to her....
“God bless them and save them,” he said....
He thought of her sisters. They had said but little to his clumsy
explanations. He thought of the years and experience that they must
needs pass through before they could think the fulness of his present
thoughts, and so he tempered his disappointment. They were a gallant
group, he felt. He had to thank Ella and good fortune that so they were.
There was Clementina with her odd quick combatant sharpness, a harder
being than Eleanor, but nevertheless a fine-spirited and even more
independent. There was Miriam, indefatigably kind. Phoebe too had a real
passion of the intellect and Daphne an innate disposition to service.
But it was strange how they had taken his proclamation of a conclusive
breach with the church as though it was a command they must, at least
outwardly, obey. He had expected them to be more deeply shocked; he had
thought he would have to argue against objections and convert them to
his views. Their acquiescence was strange. They were content he should
think all this great issue out and give his results to them. And his
wife, well as he knew her, had surprised him. He thought of her words:
“Whither thou goest--”
He was dissatisfied with this unconditional agreement. Why could not
his wife meet God as he had met God? Why must Miriam put the fantastic
question--as though it was not for her to decide: “Are we still
Christians?” And pursuing this thought, why couldn't Lady Sunderbund set
up in religion for herself without going about the world seeking for
a priest and prophet. Were women Undines who must get their souls from
mortal men? And who was it tempted men to set themselves up as priests?
It was the wife, the disciple, the lover, who was the last, the most
fatal pitfall on the way to God.
He began to pray, still sitting as he prayed.
“Oh God!” he prayed. “Thou who has shown thyself to me, let me never
forget thee again. Save me from forgetfulness. And show thyself to those
I love; show thyself to all mankind. Use me, O God, use me; but keep my
soul alive. Save me from the presumption of the trusted servant; save me
from the vanity of authority....
“And let thy light shine upon all those who are so dear to me.... Save
them from me. Take their dear loyalty....”
He paused. A flushed, childishly miserable face that stared indignantly
through glittering tears, rose before his eyes. He forgot that he had
been addressing God.
“How can I help you, you silly thing?” he said. “I would give my own
soul to know that God had given his peace to you. I could not do as you
wished. And I have hurt you!... You hurt yourself.... But all the time
you would have hampered me and tempted me--and wasted yourself. It was
impossible.... And yet you are so fine!”
He was struck by another aspect.
“Ella was happy--partly because Lady Sunderbund was hurt and left
desolated....”
“Both of them are still living upon nothings. Living for nothings. A
phantom way of living....”
He stared blankly at the humming blue gas jets amidst the incandescent
asbestos for a space.
“Make them understand,” he pleaded, as though he spoke confidentially of
some desirable and reasonable thing to a friend who sat beside him. “You
see it is so hard for them until they understand. It is easy enough when
one understands. Easy--” He reflected for some moments--“It is as if
they could not exist--except in relationship to other definite people.
I want them to exist--as now I exist--in relationship to God. Knowing
God....”
But now he was talking to himself again.
“So far as one can know God,” he said presently.
For a while he remained frowning at the fire. Then he bent forward,
turned out the gas, arose with the air of a man who relinquishes a
difficult task. “One is limited,” he said. “All one's ideas must fall
within one's limitations. Faith is a sort of tour de force. A feat of
the imagination. For such things as we are. Naturally--naturally.... One
perceives it clearly only in rare moments.... That alters nothing....”
Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in
One Volume under the title of
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
A Series of books upon Social, Religious and
Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY)
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS