Dawn of All, Robert Hugh Benson [ebook reader with highlighter txt] 📗

whole system of the thing seemed new to him. He had imagined (he scarcely knew why) the Vatican to be a place of silence and solemn dignity and darkness, with a few sentries here and there, a few prelates, a cardinal or two--with occasionally a group of very particular visitors, or, on still rarer occasions, a troop of pilgrims being escorted to some sight or some audience.

Certainly it was not at all like this to-night.

First, the whole place was illuminated in nearly every window. Huge electric lights blazed behind screens in all the courts; bands of music were stationed at discreet intervals one from another; and through every section that he went, through corridors, reception-rooms, up and down stairways, seething in every court, streaming through every passage and thoroughfare, moved a multitude of persons--largely ecclesiastics, but also very largely otherwise (though there were no ladies present)--talking, questioning, laughing, wholly, it seemed, at their ease, and appearing to find nothing unusual in the entire affair. Here and there in some of the great rooms small courts seemed to be in process--a company of perhaps thirty or forty would be standing round two or three notabilities who sat. There was usually a cardinal here, sometimes two or three; and on three or four occasions he saw what he imagined must be royalty of some kind, seated with a cardinal, while the rest stood.

It was to him a very extraordinary spectacle, in spite of his further initiation that day into this new world, so utterly unfamiliar to him; and it seemed once more to drive home to his consciousness this strange state of affairs of which his friend had tried to persuade him, but which he yet found difficult wholly to take in. Certainly the world and the Church seemed on very cordial terms. . . .

But now he had lost himself altogether. He had wandered up a long corridor, thinking that it would lead him back to the Court of St. Damasus, whence he knew his way well enough; and he now paused, hesitating. For it seemed to him that every step he was taking led him farther from the lights and the din of voices and music.

He could see behind him, framed in a huge open doorway, as on an illuminated disc, a kaleidoscope of figures moving; and in front, as he stood, the corridor, although here the lights burned as brilliantly as elsewhere, seemed to lead away into comparative darkness. Yet he felt certain of his direction.

Then, as he stood, a door opened somewhere in front, and he thought he heard voices talking again. It reassured him, and he went on.

It was not until he found himself in a small lobby (comparatively small that is, for it was not less than forty feet square, and the painted coffered ceiling was twenty feet above his head), that he stopped again, completely bewildered. There was no longer any sound to guide him, for he had closed a couple of passage-doors behind him as he came; and he noticed that practically complete silence was on all sides; a single illuminated half-globe shone gently from the ceiling overhead.

He stood some time considering and listening to the silence, till he became aware that it was not silence. There was a very faint murmur of a voice behind one of the four doors that opened on this lobby; and beside the door there rested (he now noticed for the first time) the halberd of a Swiss, as if the soldier had just been called within. This decided him; he went to the door, laid his hand upon the handle, and immediately the murmur ceased. He pushed down the handle and opened the door.

For a moment as he stared within he could not understand: he had expected a passage--a guard-room--at least something secular. Yet it was some kind of a chapel or sacristy into which he was looking: he observed the outline of an altar with its crucifix; and two figures.

Then one of the figures--in the habit of a Franciscan, barefooted, with a purple stole across its shoulders--had sprung towards him, and half pushed, half waved him backwards again.

"What are you doing here? How dare you----I beg pardon, Monsignor, but----"

"I beg pardon, father; I had lost my way. . . . I am a stranger."

"Back--back that way, Monsignor," stammered the friar. "The guard should have told you."

The truth was dawning on the prelate little by little, helped by the flash of the other kneeling white figure he had seen within.

"Yes," stammered the friar again. "The Holy Father. Back that way, Monsignor. Yes, yes--that door straight opposite."

It was over; the two doors had closed almost simultaneously, behind the friar as he had gone back to his duty, and behind the priest who now stood again at the end of the long corridor down which he had come. He stood here now, strangely moved and affected.

He had seen nothing remarkable in itself--the Pope at confession. And yet in some manner, beyond the startling fact that he had groped his way, all unknowing, to the Pope's private apartments, and at such a moment, the dramatic contrast between the glare and noise of the reception outside--itself the climax of a series of brilliant external splendours--and the silent half-lighted chapel where the Lord of All kneeled to confess his sins, caused a surprising disturbance in his soul.

Up to now he had been introduced step by step into a new set of experiences, Christian indeed, yet amazingly worldly in their aspect; he had begun to learn that religion could transform the outer world, and affect and use for its own purposes all the pomps and glories of outward existence; he had begun to realize that there was nothing alien to God--no line of division between the Creator and the creature; and now, in one instant, he had been brought face to face again with inner realities, and had seen, as it were, a glimpse of the secret core of all the splendour. The Pope attended by princes--the Pope on his knees before a barefooted friar. These were the two magnetic points between which blazed Religion.

He stood there, trembling a little, trying to steady his bewildered brain--even now, in spite of his years, not unlike the brain of a child. He passed his tongue over his suddenly dry lips. Then he began to move down the passage again, to find his friends.


CHAPTER VII


(I)

"What I can't yet quite understand," said Monsignor, "is that point I mentioned the other day about Faith and Science. I don't see where one ends and the other begins. It seems to me that the controversy must be unending. The materialist says that since Nature does all things, even the most amazing things must be done by her--that we shall be able to explain them all some day, when Science has got a little farther. And the theologian says that some things are so evidently out of the reach of Nature that they must be done by a supernatural power. Well, where's the point of reconciliation?"

Father Jervis was silent for a while.

* * * * *


The two were sitting on the upper deck of an air-ship towards evening, travelling straight towards the setting sun.

He had grown almost accustomed to such views by now; and yet the sight that had been unrolling itself gradually during the last half-hour had held him fascinated for minute after minute. They had taken ship in Rome after a day or two more of sight-seeing, and had moved up the peninsula by stages, changing boats soon after crossing the frontier, for one of the high-flying, more leisurely and more luxurious vessels on which the more wealthy classes travelled. They were due in Lourdes that evening; and, ever since the higher peaks of the Pyrenees had come into sight, had moved over a vision of bewildering beauty. To their left rose the mountains, forming, it seemed to them at the height at which they travelled, an enormous jagged and gigantic pile, hard-lined as steel, yet irradiated with long rays, patches, and pools of golden sunset-light alternated by amazing depths of the shadow whose tones ran from peacock to indigo. Then from the feet of the tumbled pile there ran out what appeared a loosely flung carpet vivid and yet a soft green, patched here and there with white towns, embroideries of woodland, lines of silver water. Yet this too was changing as they watched the shadows grow longer with almost visible movement. New and strange colours, varying about a fixed note of blue according to the nature of that with which the earth was covered, slowly came into being. Here, in front, now and again a patch of water glowed suddenly, three thousand feet beneath, as it met the shifting angle between the eye and the sun; and beyond, far out across the darkening plain, shone the remote line of the sea, itself ablaze with gold, and above and about in every quarter burned the enormous luminous dome of sky.

* * * * *


"I can't put it all accurately," said Father Jervis at last. "I mean I can't tell you off-hand all the tests that are exactly applied to every case. But it's something like this. . . ."

He paused.

"Yes, tell me," said the other, still staring out at the softly rolling landscape.

"Well, first," began the old priest slowly, "in the last fifty years we've classified almost exhaustively everything that nature can do. We know, for instance, for certain, that in certain kinds of temperaments body and mind are in far greater sympathy than in others; and that if, in such a temperament as this, the mind can be fully persuaded that such and such a thing is going to happen--a thing within the range of natural possibility, of course--it will happen, merely through the action of the mind upon the body."

"Give me an instance."

"Well" (he hesitated again) . . . "well, I'm not a physician, and cannot define accurately; but there are certain nervous diseases--hysterical simulation, nervous affections such as St. Vitus' dance--as well, of course, as purely mental diseases, such as certain kinds of insanity---"

"Oh, those," said the other contemptuously.

"Wait a minute. These, I say, given the right temperament and receptiveness to suggestion, can be cured instantaneously."

"Instantaneously?"

"Certainly--given those conditions. Then there are certain other diseases, very closely related to the nervous system, in which there have been changes of tissue, not only in the brain, but in the organs or the limbs. And these, too, can be cured by mere natural suggestion; but--and this is the point--not instantaneously. In cases of this kind, cured in this way, there is always needed a period, I won't say as long as, but proportionate to, the period during which the disease had been developing and advancing. I forget the exact proportions now, but I think, so far as I remember, that at least two-thirds of the time is required for recovery by suggestion as was occupied by the growth of the disease. Take lupus. That certainly belongs to the class I'm speaking of. Well, lupus has been cured in mental laboratories, but never instantaneously or anything like instantaneously."

"Go on, father."

"Finally, there are those physical states that have practically nothing to do directly with the nervous system at all. Take a broken leg. Of course the cure of a broken leg is affected by the state