第78章 THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION(22)

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!