Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey had the savoir-faire of a successful ; 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 , , but by no means generous tone advisable in the case of a man who has suffered considerable social without being very seriously to blame.
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was a little round-faced man with 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 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 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 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 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 all very well in their way. But we older reputations—Experience. of . 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 . His round blue eyes sought to blaze, small cherubic muscles exerted themselves to 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 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 that they should send him to me. Abominable!”
He turned, with all the round knobs that constituted his face, . His side-whiskers waved apart like wings about to flap. He 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 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 .... not in it. —violent stimulants. In the highest quarters. Terrible. persons. ! Anxious to be given war work and become .... Horrible! He's been a terrible influence. One idea—to disturb soul and body. Minds unhinged. Personal relations . 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 . 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. his head in his collar, running his fingers round his neck. Patted his tie.
“Excuse this outbreak!” he said. “But Dr. Dale has 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 . “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 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 , 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 . As Scrope went on the doctor's pose had . His head had gone a little on one side; he had begun to play with his glasses. At the end he gave to one or two short coughs, and then 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 ?—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 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, liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added it became and , 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, his knobby little face like a 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 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 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 . “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 of failure. Now he gave way to an 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 were all our genteel, professional lives. I was seized upon, for a time I was altogether 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 an easy-going man. I want to myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes, and I find myself tired, , .... 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 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 is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, selfish and insincere. I am talking 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 , 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 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 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 of struggle and poverty, but her prompt 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 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 of the mind, 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 . 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 him to: “We are not hiding our heads.”
She at once. “I am sorry, ,” 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 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 paint and peeling wallpaper, kitchens for the most part underground, and either without bathrooms or with built-out bathrooms that were manifestly 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 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 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 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 and , of an alien feminine influence, of the entire moral and material 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 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 that she faced the fact that with the of the drug and all signs of nervous gone, he still pressed quietly but toward a 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 about small things, especially during his seasons of ; now he came back changed, a much graver man, rather older in his manner, carefully to her, kinder and more , at times astonishingly apologetic, but 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 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 tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic . It was she who at last took decisions into her hands when he was too 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 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 , , 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 as a fact of psychological interest that this , ill-lit little room Lady Ella more than any other of the discomforts of their new quarters. The bishop's writing-desk filled a whole side of it. 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 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 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 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 ; the first cook was reluctant and , 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 , 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 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 to prevent the 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 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 were accustomed to “tune up” their engines. All these facts were 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, 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 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 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 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 and Universality of God. He was to be the prophet of a reconsidered faith, calling the whole world from and , from egotisms and vain , 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 the manifest 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 of the chapel enterprise, he had imagined himself in the of a small but figure 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 . He had agreed in an inattentive way that this was to be eight hundred a year, with a certain proportion of the . “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 disregarded the intense activities into which Lady Sunderbund incontinently . 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 , 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 . He said that hitherto all temples and places of worship had been conditioned by due to the 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 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 , 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 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 to invite Positivists, members of the Church, leaders among the Scientists, old of the . Charles Voysey, Swedenborgians, converts, Indian Theosophists, 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 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 the soul, to her it was something that illuminated prayer-books. For a considerable time they followed their divergent without any realization of their . 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 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 called to proclaim the True God to all the world. He would have the most 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 , 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 —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 made it extremely improbable that the most literary work would do more than double this sum. Yet for all that these nasty, ugly, sordid facts were entirely disregarded, they did somehow persist in coming in and 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 a storm of 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 of green , 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 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 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 towers flanking a vast archway approached by a long flight of steps. Between the towers appeared a . It was as if the 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 that were driving away in the foreground after “setting down.” “Here is the plan,” she said, thrusting another sheet upon him before he could take in the quality of the design. “The g'eat Hall is to be pe'fectly 'ound, no , 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 , rather more costly—”
“That doesn't matta. I'm making heaps and heaps of money. Half my p'ope'ty is in and a lot of the 'eat in . 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 , 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 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,” 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 . “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 . It is, I see, a building, a great 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 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 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 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 wars as this war, a God of economics, a God of railway 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 . Oh, it has its ! 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 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 and felt . He had never liked and 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 . “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 , 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 .
“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 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 , 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 of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.
“We could have been so happy,” she , “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 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 in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady on a sofa, and when after some cramped she stood up before him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the better, a newborn 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 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 . At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he were a servant. Her 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, like himself, robed as a priest in vestments.
She snatched the offending drawing from him and tore it to .
“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 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 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 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 ; from being a bright and spirited person, she had converted herself into a warm and 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 .
He was not the first of men who have tried to find in vain how and when a relationship becomes an . He ought to break off now, and the 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 into which it was leading him. It came as an 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 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 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 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 , 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 of the dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were . 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 for his wife and children and his consequent desire to materially. As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and Peter the 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 -coloured .
And yet he wanted to go on with it. All his imagination and intelligence was busy now with the possibility of in some way 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, and damned himself, if after all those others were 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 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 and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.
For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his .
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 to succeed him on the bench of . 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 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 him....
A of moral impatience stirred him. He the back of the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.
No. He did not like it....
A torn sunset of purple and streamed 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 . 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 ....
“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 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 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 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 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 part. “I'd like just to see this boy,” he said, and added: “If it isn't rather ....”
“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, 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 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 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 fair face a little
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