it seemed entirely outside time. It seemed to Paul that an immense energy flooded in upon him. He felt in himself the ancient, the longed-for strength of faith. At last, after all his barren years, he was tense with a new vitality, fully charged, ready to spend himself in a new effulgent life.
The smiling, transfigured Archangel laid a hand on Paul’s knee. Paul said, ‘At last I feel Jesus.’
Now while Paul and the Archangel were yielding themselves to this glamorous experience, there was indeed a ‘presence’ with them in the room, though one of a very different nature from that which these two Terrestrial animals themselves had conjured in their imaginations. It was the presence of a man who had seen human species after human species wrest for itself out of chaos some slight amenity and some precarious faith, only to collapse into misery, into despair, often into agony. It was the presence of one who himself looked forward to the impending extinction of Man; who found in this event, and in all existence, overmastering beauty indeed, but for the love-sick human individual no consolation. Strange that it was my presence in Paul’s mind, my coldly scrutinizing presence, that had lent actuality to his sense of union with the God of Love! The exhortation of the priest had made him notice in himself an obscure feeling which had already on earlier occasions fleetingly disturbed him with a sense that in some way he was ‘possessed’. I now found him peering, as it were, into the recesses of his being in search of the source of this feeling, believing that what he would see would be the love-gaze of Jesus. Had he discovered what it was that actually ‘possessed’ him, had he come, so to speak, face to face with his Neptunian parasite, his vision would have been shattered, and no doubt he would have taken me for the Devil. But I was at pains to elude detection. Mentally I held my breath, as it were, lest any slight movement of my mind should reveal more of me than that vague ‘presence’ which he had so fantastically misinterpreted.
It was not easy for me to maintain my immobility, for the spectacle of Paul’s fervour stirred me deeply, both toward pity and toward laughter. For what was it that was happening to him? Apart from the complication of my ‘presence’, which lent a spurious actuality to his vision, his experience was an epitome of the religious history of the First Human Species, a pitiable confusion of factors irrelevant to one another. In the first place Paul, partly through the wealth of cosmic imagery with which I had already drenched him, had indeed come face to face with the majesty of the universe. In the second place he had with Katherine experienced very vividly the great excellence which is called love. But the Christian tradition, working on him through his revered priest, had combined with his own desire so as to persuade him to attribute love to the pitiless universe itself. This confusion was caused partly by a trick played upon him by his own remote past. For the strange familiarity and the delicious consolation and peace which Paul had savoured in this religious moment were after all but an echo of his own obscure yearning for the tenderness of the breast and the elysium of the womb.
Henceforth Paul thought of himself as a soldier of Christ. He undertook a campaign of asceticism and general discipline. For instance, he made rules to limit his eating. When he succeeded in keeping them, the only result was that he rose from every meal with a wolfish craving, and thoughts of food haunted him throughout the day. He tried sleeping on his bedroom floor, but always before the night was over he crept guiltily into bed. His self-discipline was always half-hearted and ineffective, for he had no real faith in its spiritual efficacy. He did it, not with the earnestness of the God-hungry soul, but because earnestly religious persons were supposed to do so, and he wanted to be one of them.
Paul found great satisfaction in doing odd jobs for the Archangel. He took up work at the boys’ club. Unfortunately he soon found that he was not much good with boys, having few of the attributes which they admired. He was useless at boxing and billiards, useless at back-chat. And he had no authority, for in his heart he was frightened of the boys. But for the Archangel’s sake, and also for self-discipline, he stuck to the club. Finally he took charge of the canteen. He was cheated over halfpence, and at the end of the evening he basely made up the losses out of his own pocket. In intervals of selling coffee and buns he sat behind the counter reading. But this furtive practice caused him much heart-searching; and when the Archangel was about, he put his book away and tried to be genial with the boys.
Paul succeeded in persuading himself that nearly all his actions were expressions of his master-motive, to be a soldier of Christ in the modern world. But as a matter of fact he had many quite independent interests. He lived a varied and often hilarious life with the little band of the Archangel’s student admirers. He had also several tentative amorous passages. He worked industriously and with some success. He read much contemporary literature and some popular science. But all his scientific thought he censored rigorously for religion’s sake.
Paul’s religious fervour expressed itself chiefly not in action but in writing free verse of a quasi-biblical character. He persuaded himself that he had an ‘urge’ to produce verbal formulations of his spiritual experience, that he was ‘inspired’. But to his parasite it was clear that what he produced in this phase was not wrung from him by the intensity of experience. These poems were but literary exercises, imitative in technique, and seldom vitalized by any original imagination. The Archangel applauded these effusions because they were correct in sentiment, but he regarded them as merely play, not as a man’s work for God. He could not perceive that though they failed they meant much to Paul. It is worth while to give one example for the light which it throws on Paul’s mind at this time.
MEN
Behold the sons of men,
who sin,
whose hearts are divine!
In selfishness they heap misery on one another;
yet for love they die.
They are blown about like dead leaves;
yet for love they stand firm.
For bread they trample one another,
yet for a dream they die.
Scatter gold among them, and they are beasts;
show them God, and they are sons of God.
3. PAUL FACES THE FACTS
Without my help it might have taken Paul some years to outgrow his phase of mental obedience and spiritual confusion. But time was pressing. I needed him to be well-advanced in his next phase at the close of his university career, so that he might be prepared to meet the crisis of 1914 in a significant manner. Therefore, when I had allowed him some months of play in his little Christian nursery, I began once more to exercise my influence upon him. I infiltrated him with images of cosmical majesty and horror, with apprehensions of human weakness and meanness and agony, with doubts and questions intolerable to his religion.
During the previous two years Paul had come across a number of distressing facts about the world, but he had contrived to see them in the rosy light of his religion. These experiences now, through my influence, began to haunt him. At all times of the day and night he was now liable to sinister visual and auditory images, either taken intact from his own past, or reconstructed in still more repugnant forms. It was as though hitherto he had been wandering in a luxuriant but volcanic land in which only now and again he had encountered the blow-holes and sulphurous jets of nether chaos; but now, it seemed, the whole terrain was heaving, cracking, belching under his feet. Over his books in his own comfortable suburban home he would be distressed by visions of the slum-tenement homes that he had visited when he was working for an ‘after-care’ committee. And somehow they seemed more sordid and overcrowded in imagination than in reality. While he was walking on the down, he would remember with abnormal distinctness a brawl that he had once witnessed in the East End. Bottles were thrown. A man’s face was cut. A woman was knocked over. Her head came against the kerbstone with an audible crack, like the collision of bowls on a green. While he was reading or eating or walking, and especially while he was lying in bed and not yet asleep, faces would confront him; faces which, when he had encountered them in actuality, had seemed but opaque