第33章 THE SIXTH - EXEGETICAL(2)

It did not, however, give way.His mind sat down for two days in a blank amazement at the course before him, and at the end of that time this reasonless and formless institution was as strong as ever.During that time, except for some incidental exchanges at his clubs, he talked to no one.At first he did not want to talk to any one.He remained mentally and practically active, with a still intensely vivid sense that God, the true God, stood watching him and waiting for him to follow.And to follow meant slipping right out of all the world he had ever known.To thrust his foot right over the edge of a cliff would scarcely have demanded more from the bishop's store of resolution.He stood on the very verge.The chief secretion of his mind was a shadowy experiment or so in explanation of why he did not follow.

(3)

Insensibly the extreme vividness of his sense of God's nearness decreased.But he still retained a persuasion of the reality of an immediate listener waiting, and of the need of satisfying him.

On the third day he found his mind still further changed.He no longer felt that God was in Pall Mall or St.James's Park, whither he resorted to walk and muse.He felt now that God was somewhere about the horizon....

He felt too no longer that he thought straight into the mind of God.He thought now of what he would presently say to God.He turned over and rehearsed phrases.With that came a desire to try them first on some other hearer.And from that to the attentive head of Lady Sunderbund, prettily bent towards him, was no great leap.She would understand, if any one could understand, the great change that had happened in his mind.

He found her address in the telephone book.She could be quite alone to him if he wouldn't mind "just me." It was, he said, exactly what he desired.

But when he got to her great airy flat overlooking Hyde Park, with its Omega Workshop furniture and its arresting decoration, he was not so sure whether this encounter was so exactly the thing he had desired as he had supposed.

The world had become opaque and real again as he walked up St.

James's Street and past the Ritz.He had a feeling that he was taking an afternoon off from God.The adventurous modernity of the room in which he waited intensified that.One whole white wall was devoted to a small picture by Wyndham Lewis.It was like a picture of an earthquake in a city of aniline pink and grey and keen green cardboard, and he wished it had never existed.

He turned his back upon it and stared out of the window over the trees and greenery.The balcony was decorated with white and pink geraniums in pots painted black and gold, and the railings of the balcony were black and gold with crimson shape like squares wildly out of drawing.

Lady Sunderbund kept him waiting perhaps five minutes.Then she came sailing in to him.

She was dressed in a way and moved across the room in a way that was more reminiscent of Botticelli's Spring than ever--only with a kind of superadded stiffish polonaise of lace--and he did not want to be reminded of Botticelli's Spring or wonder why she had taken to stiff lace polonaises.He did not enquire whether he had met Lady Sunderbund to better advantage at Mrs.

Garstein Fellows' or whether his memory had overrated her or whether anything had happened to his standard of taste, but his feeling now was decidedly one of disappointment, and all the talk and self-examination he had promised himself seemed to wither and hide away within him.For a time he talked of her view, and then admired her room and its arrangement, which he thought really were quite unbecomingly flippant and undignified for a room.Then came the black tea-things on their orange tray, and he searched in his mind for small talk to sustain their interview.

But he had already betrayed his disposition to "go on with our talk" in his telephone enquiry, and Lady Sunderbund, perceiving his shyness, began to make openings for him, at first just little hinting openings, and then larger and larger ones, until at last one got him.

"I'm so glad," she said, "to see you again.I'm so glad to go on with oua talk.I've thought about it and thought about it."She beamed at him happily.

"I've thought ova ev'y wo'd you said," she went on, when she had finished conveying her pretty bliss to him."I've been so helped by thinking the k'eeds are symbols.And all you said.And I've felt time after time, you couldn't stay whe' you we'.That what you we' saying to me, would have to be said 'ight out."That brought him in.He could not very well evade that opening without incivility.After all he had asked to see her, and it was a foolish thing to let little decorative accidentals put him off his friendly purpose.A woman may have flower-pots painted gold with black checkers and still be deeply understanding.He determined to tell her what was in his mind.But he found something barred him from telling that he had had an actual vision of God.It was as if that had been a private and confidential meeting.It wasn't, he felt, for him either to boast a privilege or tell others of things that God had not chosen to show them.

"Since I saw you," he said, "I have thought a great deal--of the subject of our conversation.""I have been t'ying to think," she said in a confirmatory tone, as if she had co-operated.

"My faith in God grows," he said.

She glowed.Her lips fell apart.She flamed attention.

"But it grows less like the faith of the church, less and less.

I was born and trained in Anglicanism, and it is with a sort of astonishment I find myself passing now out of every sort of Catholicism--seeing it from the outside....""Just as one might see Buddhism," she supplied.

"And yet feeling nearer ?infinitely nearer to God," he said.

"Yes," she panted; "yes."

"I thought if one went out, one went out just to doubt and darkness.""And you don't?"

"No."

"You have gone at one step to a new 'iligion!"He stared for a moment at the phrase.

"To religion," he said.