Part 49

“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, protruding his knobby little face like a clenched 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 immediate 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 repudiation 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 hilarity. “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 realization of failure. Now he gave way to an exasperation 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 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. I want 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 I would 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.