第41章 THE SEVENTH - THE SECOND VISION(1)

A MONTH later found the bishop's original state of perplexity and insomnia returned and intensified.He had done none of all the things that had seemed so manifestly needing to be done after his vision in the Athenaeum.All the relief and benefit of his experience in London had vanished out of his life.He was afraid of Dr.Dale's drug; he knew certainly that it would precipitate matters; and all his instincts in the state of moral enfeeblement to which he had relapsed, were to temporize.

Although he had said nothing further about his changed beliefs to Lady Ella, yet he perceived clearly that a shadow had fallen between them.She had a wife's extreme sensitiveness to fine shades of expression and bearing, and manifestly she knew that something was different.Meanwhile Lady Sunderbund had become a frequent worshipper in the cathedral, she was a figure as conspicuous in sombre Princhester as a bird of paradise would have been; common people stood outside her very very rich blue door on the chance of seeing her; she never missed an opportunity of hearing the bishop preach or speak, she wrote him several long and thoughtful letters with which he did not bother Lady Ella, she communicated persistently, and manifestly intended to become a very active worker in diocesan affairs.

It was inevitable that she and the bishop should meet and talk occasionally in the cathedral precincts, and it was inevitable that he should contrast the flexibility of her rapid and very responsive mind with a certain defensiveness, a stoniness, in the intellectual bearing of Lady Ella.

If it had been Lady Sunderbund he had had to explain to, instead of Lady Ella, he could have explained a dozen times a day.

And since his mind was rehearsing explanations it was not unnatural they should overflow into this eagerly receptive channel, and that the less he told Lady Ella the fuller became his spiritual confidences to Lady Sunderbund.

She was clever in realizing that they were confidences and treating them as such, more particularly when it chanced that she and Lady Ella and the bishop found themselves in the same conversation.

She made great friends with Miriam, and initiated her by a whole collection of pretty costume plates into the mysteries of the "Ussian Ballet" and the works of Mousso'gski and "Imsky Ko'zakof."The bishop liked a certain religiosity in the texture of Moussorgski's music, but failed to see the "significance "--of many of the costumes.

(2)

It was on a Sunday night--the fourth Sunday after Easter--that the supreme crisis of the bishop's life began.He had had a feeling all day of extreme dulness and stupidity; he felt his ministrations unreal, his ceremonies absurd and undignified.In the night he became bleakly and painfully awake.His mind occupied itself at first chiefly with the tortuousness and weakness of his own character.Every day he perceived that the difficulty of telling Lady Ella of the change in his faith became more mountainous.And every day he procrastinated.If he had told her naturally and simply on the evening of his return from London --before anything material intervened--everything would have been different, everything would have been simpler....

He groaned and rolled over in his bed.

There came upon him the acutest remorse and misery.For he saw that amidst these petty immediacies he had lost touch with God.

The last month became incredible.He had seen God.He had touched God's hand.God had been given to him, and he had neglected the gift.He was still lost amidst the darkness and loneliness, the chaotic ends and mean shifts, of an Erastian world.For a month now and more, after a vision of God so vivid and real and reassuring that surely no saint nor prophet had ever had a better, he had made no more than vague responsive movements; he had allowed himself to be persuaded into an unreasonable and cowardly delay, and the fetters of association and usage and minor interests were as unbroken as they had been before ever the vision shone.Was it credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it breaks and leaves us where we were.

"Louse that I am!" he cried.

He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light that had for a moment touched him.

But what had he to do with God, he, the loiterer, the little thing?

He was little, he was funny.His prevarications with his wife, for example, were comic.There was no other word for him but "funny."He rolled back again and lay staring.

"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right has a little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as "the body of this death?"He was the most unreal thing in the universe.He was a base insect giving himself airs.What advantage has a bishop over the Praying Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety?

Does he matter more--to God?

"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--yes."

He sat up in bed struck by his own answer, and full of an indescribable hunger for God and an indescribable sense of his complete want of courage to make the one simple appeal that would satisfy that hunger.He tried to pray."O God! "he cried, "forgive me! Take me!" It seemed to him that he was not really praying but only making believe to pray.It seemed to him that he was not really existing but only seeming to exist.He seemed to himself to be one with figures on a china plate, with figures painted on walls, with the flimsy imagined lives of men in stories of forgotten times."O God!" he said, "O God," acting a gesture, mimicking appeal.

"Anaemic," he said, and was given an idea.