第59章 THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION(3)

"I think I saw God," he repeated more firmly."I had a sudden realization of how great he was and how great life was, and how timid and mean and sordid were all our genteel, professional lives.I was seized upon, for a time I was altogether possessed by a passion to serve him fitly and recklessly, to make an end to compromises with comfort and self-love and secondary things.And I want to hold to that.I want to get back to that.I am given to lassitudes.I relax.I am by temperament an easy-going man.Iwant to buck myself up, I want to get on with my larger purposes, and I find myself tired, muddled, entangled....The drug was a good thing.For me it was a good thing.I want its help again.""I know no more than you do what it was.""Are there no other drugs that you do know, that have a kindred effect? If for example I tried morphia in some form?""You'd get visions.They wouldn't be divine visions.If you took small quantities very discreetly you might get a temporary quickening.But the swift result of all repeated drug-taking is, I can assure you, moral decay--rapid moral decay.To touch drugs habitually is to become hopelessly unpunctual, untruthful, callously selfish and insincere.I am talking mere textbook, mere everyday common-places, to you when I tell you that.""I had an idea.I had a hope...."

"You've a stiff enough fight before you," said the doctor, "without such a handicap as that.""You won't help me?"

The doctor walked up and down his hearthrug, and then delivered himself with an extended hand and waggling fingers.

"I wouldn't if I could.For your good I wouldn't.And even if Iwould I couldn't, for I don't know the drug.One of his infernal brews, no doubt.Something--accidental.It's lost--for good--for your good, anyhow...."

(2)

Scrope halted outside the stucco portals of the doctor's house.

He hesitated whether he should turn to the east or the west.

"That door closes," he said."There's no getting back that way."...

He stood for a time on the kerb.He turned at last towards Park Lane and Hyde Park.He walked along thoughtfully, inattentively steering a course for his new home in Pembury Road, Notting Hill.

(3)

At the outset of this new phase in Scrope's life that had followed the crisis of the confirmation service, everything had seemed very clear before him.He believed firmly that he had been shown God, that he had himself stood in the presence of God, and that there had been a plain call to him to proclaim God to the world.He had realized God, and it was the task of every one who had realized God to help all mankind to the same realization.The proposal of Lady Sunderbund had fallen in with that idea.He had been steeling himself to a prospect of struggle and dire poverty, but her prompt loyalty had come as an immense relief to his anxiety for his wife and family.When he had talked to Eleanor upon the beach at Hunstanton it had seemed to him that his course was manifest, perhaps a little severe but by no means impossible.

They had sat together in the sunshine, exalted by a sense of fine adventure and confident of success, they had looked out upon the future, upon the great near future in which the idea of God was to inspire and reconstruct the world.

It was only very slowly that this pristine clearness became clouded and confused.It had not been so easy as Eleanor had supposed to win over the sympathy of Lady Ella with his resignation.Indeed it had not been won over.She had become a stern and chilling companion, mute now upon the issue of his resignation, but manifestly resentful.He was secretly disappointed and disconcerted by her tone.And the same hesitation of the mind, instinctive rather than reasoned, that had prevented a frank explanation of his earlier doubts to her, now restrained him from telling her naturally and at once of the part that Lady Sunderbund was to play in his future ministry.In his own mind he felt assured about that part, but in order to excuse his delay in being frank with his wife, he told himself that he was not as yet definitely committed to Lady Sunderbund's project.And in accordance with that idea he set up housekeeping in London upon a scale that implied a very complete cessation of income."As yet," he told Lady Ella, "we do not know where we stand.For a time we must not so much house ourselves as camp.We must take some quite small and modest house in some less expensive district.If possible I would like to take it for a year, until we know better how things are with us."He reviewed a choice of London districts.

Lady Ella said her bitterest thing."Does it matter where we hide our heads?"That wrung him to: "We are not hiding our heads."She repented at once."I am sorry, Ted," she said."It slipped from me."...