vivid. Arrived in the macadamised road of civilisation, she followed

it without giving a thought to the fact that girls, soaked to the skin, hatless but happy, are rareties along even country roads. The surface had been rapidly softening under the downpour, but little she cared for that either. Blackberries gleamed scarlet, purple, black in every hedge; thrushes, in the now gentle rain, were already out on the war-path for worms; and the sweep of the South Downs on her right was visible through the dripping trees. Ursula began to sing to herself as she went, breaking off to nod friendlily to a carter who knew her, and picking up her song again without troubling whether or not he was out of earshot. That was her way. She had always seen clearly and scorned muddle-headed conventionalities; at first, while her father lived and she was still in her teens, with a certain submission to authority, but since, after her twenty-first birthday, quite openly and frankly. Her mother, who never had had much of a will of her own, gave in to her daughter as she had to her husband. Thus, at Ursula's suggestion, they had taken the old cottage under Chanctonbury on the edge, but actually part of, Mr. Tressor's estate, and Mrs. Manning had been forced to admit the advantage of the change from the big establishment which Mr. Manning had maintained as befitted a banking magnate. Then, a rather lonely aunt coming to live with them, the girl had announced her intention of having a flat and studio in town, and since she had her own money and moreover made more, nothing in the world was able to prevent her. She came and went now between the two, with intervals of wandering abroad. She had a big circle of her own acquaintances of whom her mother knew little, chiefly however, it must be confessed, because she did not understand more than about a third of what they said and did when they came down to Sussex with her daughter; but she had only a few friends. These her mother knew less than the rest, retaining enough spirit to avow definitely that she did not want to know them. They professed views and took part in movements which were, frankly, beyond toleration. There was Muriel Lister, for example, who preached in churches and actually led a campaign for the admission of women to the priesthood.

Yet Ursula herself took active part in no movements or campaigns. On account of this it was perhaps odd that the leaders of them should be her friends. But then a subtle reason underlay that. For Ursula was rather a good person to talk to, and a very good person to have coffee with by night in her studio after the fatigue of committees, inclined, as is the way of committees, to be a little heavy in hand. She was sympathetic, understanding, entirely capable of giving an opinion, but she did not say much. Also she was clean-handed, so to speak. It was a little irritating, possibly, at times, that she was so resolutely unimpassioned when a reactionary bishop insulted women or ministers took back by some Civil Service Regulation what the Removal of Sex Disabilities Act had given. But one knew it was Ursula. And one knew, moreover, that at a crisis neither bishop nor ministers mattered to her a toss of her present rain-soaked plait.

For Ursula, with her quiet, good-humoured resolution and her unquestioned art, not only saw life from an enviable angle, but quietly acted as if that were the only one from which it should be seen by reasonable people. Her cousin had once said of her that she "pressed towards the goal" with apostolic conviction. Not that it was a wholly good definition because, unlike the apostle, she tried to make no proselytes, seeing the world about her as a very lovely satisfying thing with which she was content to be satisfied. Constitutionally, and from environment, no lost cause had as yet come vividly her way.

Two days later she was introduced to Paul. Manning and he were doing the round of the park, Manning with a gun under his arm, Paul, metaphorically, with a pencil in his hand. In other words, he was realising what a lovely place it was. The wide sweeps of grass, the clumps of trees, the views of the Downs, and the utter quiet of this little Sussex backwater were already exercising their magic upon him. The two of them had come along the northern boundary of the estate and were now skirting the lake. It was a wild overgrown place, with nothing formal about it, a big irregular sheet of water with a tangle of weeds and lilies at one end and a regiment of great elms closing it in. An avenue of limes led from it to the house, an odd avenue that only appeared as an avenue when you came upon its entrance, suddenly, in the middle of grassy park-land. Thus it started nowhere in particular, and, from a distance, had no particular object, since the water itself lay low at the far end of it behind a raised bank. Paul already loved that. You wandered down from the garden and saw, suddenly, the green guarded road of it running away into the park. Intrigued, you entered, and sauntered carelessly up it. Then, at quite a long last, you climbed the slope of the bank and suddenly saw before you this still enchanted refuge where the fish leaped in the gathering dusk and white swans sailed friendlily up in the heat of the sun. Here and there a fallen trunk lay half in and half out of the water. In places there was no coming at the brink for forests of reeds. But, at its deepest corner, a promontory of hazels that was almost an island, thrust out into its serenity.

The friends leaped from stone to tussock and tussock to log and landed. A suggestion of a path led them through the few yards of undergrowth. And there, hidden by a screen of green, with the water at her feet, sat Ursula on the flat prow of a punt. She was making a little water-colour, palette in one hand, brush in the other, a little impressionist study of a pine that stood by himself on the bank opposite, his brown roots reaching down into the lake.

"Hullo, Ursula," said Manning, "we didn't see you. Let me introduce Paul Kestern. He's going to be a near neighbour, so you've got to know him."

The girl looked up but did not move. Paul found himself staring across a tiny strip of water into clear brown eyes, a pale oval face, and a frame of black hair, all set on a tall pillar of white throat and neck. She was wearing a brilliant yellow jumper, without adornment, and a short blue skirt. She was long-limbed, and he realised vaguely that her white bare arms and black stockinged legs were shapely and lissom and good to see. "How do you do," he said properly.

"I've seen you before somewhere," she replied.

Paul was puzzled. He shot a glance at Manning, but he was fiddling unconcernedly with his gun. Left to his own resources, he continued to be polite.

"It's awfully rude of me," he said, "but I'm afraid I don't remember."

"Neither do I," she said.

He smiled. So did she. "Let's call it quits," he suggested.

"I'm afraid I must, but I shall hope to remember yet," she retorted whimsically.

"Possibly it was at Cambridge," suggested Paul.

"Rather not," put in Manning, restoring his piece to his arm, "Ursula never comes to see me."

"Of course not," she returned equably, "why should I?"

Manning laughed. They were good friends, these two. "Why, indeed," he said, "but you needn't rub it in. And you might be so nice as to come and have dinner in the immediate future and make up a four at bridge."

"You must first," she said, "extract a nice note of invitation from Mr. Tressor, and it must include mother and auntie. In addition you must call upon us. Call this afternoon, and bring Mr. Kestern. Meantime you're just a little bit of a nuisance at the moment. I want to paint."

"Kestern's a poet," remarked Manning gravely.

The girl nodded. "'_Leaves in Autumn_,'" she said.

Paul flushed. "You've read it?" he cried excitedly.

She smiled slowly. "I've even painted it," she said.

"What?"

"Painted it. That is, there was one poem especially I couldn't forget. I saw it rather vividly."

"Oh," said Paul, with a deep breath. Somehow the fact that she knew of his work and had appreciated it to that extent, seemed to him the biggest praise that he had had yet. He could not take his eyes off her. "Which one?" he asked at last.

She considered him a moment Then: "I'll show you the sketch," she said, "and you shall guess which it is meant to illustrate." She got up as she spoke and turned round for a case that lay behind her in the punt.

"Oh, do," cried Paul, starting forward.

Manning laughed. "She's not got it there," he said.

Something in his tone--a faint trace of mockery, it seemed to Paul--struck them both. Paul looked guilty of foolishness and the girl stood arrested. They both of them looked at Manning. That instant pose remained with Paul long afterwards as the key-note of their meeting. It was symbolic, somehow, as if Manning would always be faintly contemptuous of them. But why, the boy had no idea.

"Well," said Ursula, and she spoke so soon that it was as if there had been no pause, "I have not, it is true. I was only going to pack up because I can paint no more just now, thanks to you, Arnold, you old rotter. But I will do more now. Mr. Kestern, will you walk back with me, and see your picture?"

"May I?" asked Paul eagerly.

Manning thrust his hand into his arm. "What about the Mill cottage?" he asked banteringly.

"Oh, I clean forgot," said Paul, and hesitated.

His friend laughed. "Good Lord, Paul," he said, "a pretty sort of an agent you'll make! I was taking him to see his first job," he explained. "Old Morley wants a new roof, or something of that sort. But, of course, it doesn't matter. I was only rotting. We'll walk up with you, Ursula. That'll be the call, and on my own responsibility I'll invite you and my dear aunt in to bridge after dinner this very day."

"So he's going to be Mr. Tressor's agent," said Ursula, busy over her painting materials.

"Well," said Paul honestly and a little awkwardly, "it's only an excuse, I fear."

"Paul's to prove himself a poet," said Manning, "and incidentally to settle the theory and content of revelation. Perhaps you'll help him."

"Perhaps," said the girl serenely. "I hope so."

They strolled back together, Manning in the middle, and it was Manning who did most of the talking. He chatted on, occasionally asking a question, but for the most part taking it for granted, apparently from experience, that Ursula would listen rather than speak. Paul, too, was not much included in the conversation, which concerned the Manning family and their friends and the girl's work. Thus he gathered from the bantering talk a good deal concerning her life here and in London, her art and her friends. It interested him profoundly. She was a new type altogether in his experience, one of which he had heard rumours, so to speak, at Claxted (where such strange goings-on were occasionally mentioned with scandalised horror), but which one would equally fail to find at Thurloe End or St. Mary's. Glancing past his friend from time to time, he watched her face. She turned her head but little, walking steadily and silently forward. But he noticed how she kept her eyes up, and how she had a trick of staring at a tree or a cloud or a beast in the lush pasture with a kind of untroubled wonder. It was easy to understand that here was an artist.

They came then to the cottage and Paul was introduced to the mother and aunt. Ursula stood by while the usual things were said, and then turned to him. "Now, Mr. Kestern," she said, "will you come this way?"

Her mother glanced up, but said nothing, and Paul, since no one else moved, followed her alone.

She led the way upstairs and into a room over the porch, the room from which she had watched the rain. It was big and airy and light, half studio and half bedroom. The bed itself stood in an alcove, curtained with a vivid cretonne, blue in the main, on which rioted a bold design of orange and yellow and scarlet fruit, with apple-blossom and leaves. The curtain was half drawn, and the still Puritan Paul felt a little that he ought not to look that way. Ursula, quite obviously had no such views at all, for she crossed the room to the alcove, pulled the curtain yet further back, and sought for a portfolio that lay in a little recess near the head of the bed.

Paul stood hesitatingly. He did not quite know what to do. The girl called to him over her shoulder. "Sit down, will you," she said, "anywhere."

He walked over to a couch by the window and sat down, looking out over the gay garden to the Downs. Hollyhocks marched as an army with banners in a bed beneath the window. Chanctonbury's crown, clear and bright in the sunlight to-day, rose into the pale blue sky above.

"What a glorious window-seat," he said, with a little note of content in his voice. She threw him a glance, but did not speak. She was searching through the portfolio.

"I think," observed Paul meditatively, "I'm the luckiest man alive to get a chance of a year here."

"Yes?"

"I can't make up my mind what to do, you see," he said.

"I should have thought there was absolutely no doubt."

"No?" queried Paul in genuine astonishment.

"Of course not. You've got to write great poetry."

"I've also got to live," said Paul, with a flicker of a smile.

"Naturally. What about it?"

"Well, I've got to earn money."

Ursula found what she was looking for. "Here it is," she said, coming over to him.

And then, carrying on the conversation: "I think those of us who can see and express things, ought to think first of that," she said. "After all, one lives somehow."

But Paul hardly heard. He was staring at the little picture, and was very silent.

She broke the silence. "Well, can you guess the poem?" she demanded.

"'Spent,'" he whispered, half to himself.

Her silence told him he was correct. It was the short thing, since then slightly renamed and improved, that Tressor had, of all he had written, praised superlatively. Of all he had written, but, as he looked at this, astonishment welled up in him. "But this is not what I wrote," he said.

It was a picture of dull-red angry sunset tones over a bare stony plain and a dimly-outlined ragged track. A solitary figure of a man lay there, just as he had stumbled forward and fallen at the last step. The light glowed on his sunburnt nude back, his face in shadow; and on one other object, for, some short way beyond him, was a dimly-seen ruined shrine, with the statue of a god, half overthrown. The stone effigy reeled insecurely against a broken pillar, and the glow of the dying sun caught on its upcast face. The girl had copied some Greek masterpiece, and there, in that lone waste, as if to mock the beaten human figure, a regular, perfect, immobile brow and eyes and nose and lips turned upwards to the sky. In the fallen man was life, beaten and despairing, but life; in the fallen god was death, serene and lovely, but death.

"This is not what I wrote," repeated Paul again.

"But you instantly named it."

"It alone, of the pieces in the book, fitted at all," he said.

"I suspect that was not all. I should not be in the least surprised if you had more in your mind than you knew. Anyway, your spent day struck me so."

Paul started, and looked at her almost with awe. He saw it all so plainly. He had sat down to write one evening after a dull heavy day when all the growing doubt and despair in his soul had been surging around him. He had written of a dying sun, a barren waste, a wearied walk, a lost hope; yet he had not seen this--no, no, not this.

"It was an ordinary day," said Paul.

"To you perhaps. To me it meant a life."

"But it's wrong of life," he said.

She hesitated. "Speaking generally, I agree," she answered, "but why do you say so?"

"That fallen god, that empty temple," he urged, suddenly, almost passionately moved, he could hardly say why.

"I see." She was quite deliberate. "I remember what Arnold said. You have still an idol in the shrine."

"God," said Paul reverently, "only He is no idol."

"There is no god," said Ursula.

If she had lashed him with a whip, he could not have been more startled, more outraged. There, in that sunny window, looking out over that gay garden, this attractive, striking, interesting girl, for whose work and thought he had already a youthful generous impulse, had suddenly blasphemed. And she had done it so coolly, so unemotionally. "There is no god," she had said, exactly as if she had passed a detached criticism on art or verse.

And yet no ringing affirmation, no dogmatic assertion to equal hers, sprang to his lips. Conflict and pain had done more in his heart than he had guessed. "Oh, there must be, there must be!" was all that he could cry, as if he hoped against hope.

Ursula took the picture from his hand and their eyes met. Even in his distress, he saw the miracle. Hers were utterly serene. He knew his own to be inchoate, baffled, grieved. And yet in her serenity, too, was a touch of kindliness, and a kind of deep wonder of understanding as if, despite her empty heaven, she looked on mystery.

Something deep down in him stirred before those eyes of hers. He forgot that he had only known her half a morning. He forgot that he was a man and a Christian, and she was a girl and a heathen. And he forgot entirely that it was the fool who said in his heart there is no god. "Oh," he cried, "you've no idea how down and out I am!"

She smiled and put out her hand. "I'll help," she said, "and I put it badly, too, just now. Peradventure there is a god, but, you know, we don't know even his Name and--and--he seems asleep."

They were odd words, he thought vaguely, but somehow there was tenderness and strength hidden in them. Paul Kestern knew suddenly how much he wanted both. And so he reached out, too, and put his hand into hers.

(3)

The impression of Ursula's personality was indeed strong enough to veil the full significance of what she had said for several days. In part, moreover, the influence of Tressor and Manning, and still more, the business of adjustment to his new environment made for this. Paul always sensed the atmosphere of houses and places in rather a cat-like way, wandering about a little, twisting, as it were, in the new bed, until it was familiar and friendly. And Fordham Manor was so different from any other house in which he had ever stayed, let alone lived, that the process took time.

It was a very beautiful place, of more than one date, but the front had been wholly rebuilt in the early Georgian period, while the back had been left Jacobean. The result was singularly arresting. Strong, severe, plain, dignified, yet not pompous and over heavy, a circular drive ran up to the entrance hall. On either side equally matched buildings--the servants' quarters and the like--pushed out, each with a little cupola and gables. Wide open high iron gates led to a gravelled drive with a balustrade, a slope, and below a big herbaceous border. Below that again there was a further walk, a low railing, and a full wide sweep of park-land where, away to the right and but trees from here, ran the avenue. But when one skirted or passed right through the house, one came out on a herb garden and box-trimmed walks; and from the beds of rosemary, lavender and thyme one looked back to the sweet smiling red brickwork and wide windows of the earlier building, with an irregular roof and high dormer windows.

Within, the house had in fact many faults. The rooms were much too small for its size for one thing. But while this would have mattered to a family in residence, if anything it added to its suitability for Tressor, a bachelor and only an occasional visitor. Besides there was at least one feature which admirably fitted now. There was a large partially divided hall into which descended a wide dignified staircase. This hall particularly pleased Paul. It was rather a stately obvious hall as one entered from the front, but one skirted the stairs, and behold its aspect changed. The big fireplace behind was Jacobean. There was a bookcase full of new books meant to be read. There were long low chairs and a plenty of rugs and footstools. And the portraits in the front portion gave way to a picture or two which he was beginning to love. One was a Dutch landscape, sombre, mysterious, and the other ploughlands and three strong horses that climbed a ridge in a gale of driving wind.

The men were already settling down. They met at breakfast, and thereafter Tressor departed to his study and was no more seen till lunch. Manning and Paul, however, gaily wasted half a morning. They smoked a pipe in the gardens, and picked up the newspapers in the lounge hall on their way to work afterwards, Paul usually reading or glancing through anything he had done the day before. In the afternoon, they rode or motored or walked, found tea waiting them on their return, and separated for a couple of hours' more serious going before the dressing bell. In the evening things seemed to fall out with easy content, though Tressor would withdraw to his study again as often as not. It was all rather leisured and easy. Expressed in colour, Paul thought of Claxted as having none; of Thurloe End as black and white and scarlet; of Fordham as blue and old gold within and brown and green without.

As for duties, as yet he had none worth the mention. Old Mrs. Bird, the housekeeper, and he, already loved each other. It was obvious that she proposed to take charge of him. Rider, who combined the functions of valet and butler and chauffeur, had instructions to take Paul over when Tressor was away, and seemed gravely imperturbed. Timothy, the head gardener and an institution, appeared actually prepared to teach him a little; and as for the gamekeeper, who lived at the lodge, he talked dogs and horses with Manning by the hour, and accepted Paul because he could listen with grave attention. In a word, the establishment was plainly ready to accept him, and he was, as he should have been, profoundly grateful.

It was thus, then, after a morning stroll, while Manning was perfunctorily looking through _The Times_, that Paul broached the agnosticism of Ursula. The ladies had dined at the Manor the previous evening, and she had sung. Paul had had no conversation out of the ordinary with her, and yet once again the strength of her personality had impressed him. So now, as he stood by the carved and decorated mantelpiece and looked out through the open window to the sunny garden, sniffing the fragrant scent of herbs and box that wafted in, the girl was vividly in his mind. "Arnold," he said.

"Yes? What's up now?"

"I say, I like your cousin."

Manning folded the paper carelessly and tossed it aside, feeling for his tobacco pouch. "I'm sure I'm very pleased," he said.

"Don't rag. She worries me."

"I thought you said you liked her."

"So I do, but it is exactly that that worries me. She's an atheist."

"True. It runs in the family in this generation. A reaction perhaps. Her father was a churchwarden, and her mother likes the vicar to call once a month."

Paul shifted uneasily. "It isn't a subject for joking to me," he said. "You know that, very well you know it. I may be in difficulties, but I believe in God with all my heart."

Manning leaned back easily in his chair and lit his pipe. "You think you do," he said, between the puffs.

Paul rounded on him eagerly. "But I do," he insisted. "To be honest, it is an utter mystery to me how you do not. I can't conceive of it at all. I know we've never discussed the point before--it hasn't seemed to me worth discussion, the existence of God, I mean--but I want to now."

"Ahl And why now?"

"Because, impossible as it seems to me in your or anybody's case, that your cousin should say 'There is no god' utterly staggers me."

"When did she say that?"

Paul told him.

He smoked thoughtfully. "Humph," he said at last, dubiously, "but I doubt if Ursula is as much an atheist as an agnostic. She probably put it that way because her god, whatever she thinks, has nothing worth mentioning in common with any idea of God in your mind."

Paul regarded him for a moment in troubled silence, weighing his words. Then he sighed. "It is utterly beyond me," he said. "How, in the face of things as they are, you or anyone can fail to believe in a Creator, an Inspirer, a Supporter, I do not see. It may be old-fashioned, but even _Paley's Evidences_ seem good enough to me. Allow evolution if you like, allow anything, you've got to get back to _something_. There must have been a beginning, even if it was all the most tenuous of spiral nebulæ. Well, who made that?"

"I haven't the remotest notion," said Manning.

"Well, but...."

"Yes?"

"Well, if God didn't create it, how did it come? What other hypothesis is possible? It's not conceivable, thinkable even at all, that matter is eternal. Why, eternity, backwards or forwards, is unthinkable."

"Exactly. Yet you ascribe this unthinkable attribute to God."

Paul knit his brows. "One must," he objected.

"No," said Manning, sitting up sharply, "that's exactly where you're wrong. One most emphatically must not."

Complete bewilderment settled down on Paul. He made a characteristic little gesture at last. "I suppose I haven't the intelligence necessary to follow you," he said almost bitterly.

"Paul," said Manning, "you have, that's the rub. More, I shouldn't be in the least surprised if you did. You've been God-ridden all your life, obsessed, bound, but you've broken steadily away from the chains. It seems inevitable to me that sooner or later you will break with this also. If I've said nothing much so far, it's because, in a way, I'm not interested. I like you too much to want to see you rot up your life with Roman Catholicism or any arrant nonsense of that sort, but I've always thought you had better keep your God till--till----" He hesitated. Then: "Possibly till the right person came along to deliver you."

"You mean your cousin, I suppose," Paul said slowly.

"Indeed I do not," replied Manning quickly. "I had no idea you two would seriously broach the subject. But it is interesting that it has come that way. You're in good hands, though Ursula keeps more of the cargo than I can carry."

"Precious little, I should think," retorted Paul.

"Well, you can discuss that with her. As for myself----"

"Yes, then, as for yourself."

"You honestly want to know?"

"I do."

"Sit down then. Don't prowl about. I've got to be steadily serious and profound for at least ten minutes, and I need help."

Paul perceived a hassock at his feet and dropped on to it. "Carry on," he said, smiling a little as the other had meant him to do.

But Manning was in no hurry to begin. Before he began to speak, Timothy came past the window, saw the two sitting silently, and went on again, shaking his head and muttering to himself. And when Manning did begin to speak, he was abrupt, and there was a hard note in his voice.

"Look here, Paul," he said, "the root of the matter is just this: God is a guess in the dark. You are driven back and back and back, as you say, till you can't go further, but then you begin to invent meaningless words to cover your inadequacy. You talk about infinite and eternal and almighty, words which are no more than scraps of mathematical logic. The mind knows that it's beaten, that for some odd reason it cannot travel back beyond certain bounds. It's like space: you cannot conceive of something that ends, without your demanding what comes next. Something, you say, must come next, and next, and next. And there can't be a last; and yet there must be a last, an end..."

He stopped, as if he was trying once more himself to beat back against the reeling thought. Paul remained immovable.

"Well, now, the mind hates a vacuum. It must round off things. Thus, then, at that extreme limit of comprehension, when no further logical sequence is possible, it gets out of the difficulty by creating a conception upon which it can rest. Thought demands a beginning, an end, a supreme power, a reason, and the imagination of man, when his mind can no more, simply jumps in the dark. 'All right,' it says, 'there is One Who is Eternal, Almighty, Infinite--God.' A guess in the dark, you see."

Paul stared into that shifting black abyss. The horror of it rose into his eyes. Waves and seas, inexorable, heartless, rolled in upon him, and he felt himself sinking, sinking. The sensation was almost physical, and he had literally to moisten his lips to speak. "We have Christ," he said. "He was not in the dark. He knew."

Manning shrugged his shoulders at that, and said nothing.

"Arnold," cried Paul again, "He knew!"

Manning got up. "Look here, Paul," he said, "we've worked over that ground. Christianity is a matter of evidence. God Almighty, you know something of it! 'By what authority?'" He relit his pipe and tossed the match through the window.

Paul turned the question over in his mind. Of course, that was the question. He saw it, like a flaming note of interrogation, burning in upon him. That unanswerable question: "By what authority?" Father Vassall----

His friend interrupted him.

"And," Arnold burst out, "ultimately, that is evidence we can test for ourselves. What did Christ say of God? Take one thing: that He was a Father, who heard and answered and cared for His creatures, for the least of them. Well, does He--I ask you, does He? Come, now, be honest. You know He doesn't. There is not a flicker of evidence in the whole vast universe that God hears or answers or cares. There are laws, great driving laws, that's all. Shove your finger in and you'll get hurt; jump right in and you'll be killed. Inevitably. Always. Screaming to God won't save you. Some bloody war's on, and a woman implores God to save her lover. Well, does He? If He turn a single bullet aside, He must disarrange the whole cosmic law. _Does He_? I ask you--does He?"

Paul hid his face. He saw the past three years white as an open road before him.... "Does He?"

But Manning did not seem to notice. "There's no _fatherly_ control, that's the point. Even religion squirms before the obviousness of that, and invents excuses. God maketh His rain to fall on the just and on the unjust. Pish, He does no such thing. He has nothing to do with the fall of rain, or He abdicated His power before the dawn of history."

"But Somebody _must_," cried Paul.

Manning dropped back into his chair. "Stop," he cried. "If we are to go on talking you must not say that. You surrender to the savage when you say that. He, poor devil, sees the lightning hit his hut: 'Somebody must be angry,' he says. Experience comes along and shows even unscientific minds the irrefragable laws of thunderstorms, and your poor fellow bleats: 'Then somebody must have caused them.' Science comes along and demonstrates without a doubt the unity of matter and the existence of the electron, and the dear Christian folds his hands: 'But God is the First Cause, the Creator.' Guesses, all of them. Guess if you want to, Kestern, but not to me. I won't. That's flat."

Paul could stand it no more. He jumped up and paced restlessly about. "I see what you mean," he cried.... "Oh, and I see what she meant, too.... It was beautiful, beautiful, but a marble statue after all; and it's the end of the day; and it's fallen--fallen.... Well, the traveller has fallen too.... No wonder.... Oh, no wonder...."

Manning smoked steadily. He had been unusually vehement, and was a trifle ashamed of himself. "I say, Paul," he said at last, "pull yourself together. You're not a fool."

Paul stopped in his walk and stood regarding him. But he did not make an answer to that. "If you don't guess, what happens then?"

Manning smiled languidly. "Well, you don't guess, that's all. It's quite simple. Perhaps there is a god; perhaps He is all that is said about Him. Perhaps.... Only we are reasonable men and we have to go upon facts, and the facts are that there is no trace of Him."

"Unless very existence is a sign--the fact that things are," said Paul, catching at a straw.

"Oh, very well, have it if you will. But of what or of whom is existence a sign? I know it's sentimental twaddle to talk of the cruelty and so on of Nature, and I won't. But you know and I know there are laws, and what sort of laws? To what sort of mind can you argue from Nature's laws? Think."

Paul thought. He thought of the regularity and beauty of ice-crystals which no one can see without a microscope. Why always regular? Why beautiful? He thought of the evolution and the extinction of the dinosaur, the pterodactyl and the rest. Why? Necessary? Useful? "Did the hand, then, of the Potter shake?" He thought of the laws that calmly allow men and women to bring forth congenital idiots or children loathsomely diseased in body or in soul. Laws! He flamed suddenly with rage. "The mind of a devil!" he cried.

"Rubbish," retorted Manning. "Good heavens, Paul, pull yourself together! But there, I suppose it takes time."

"An idiot, then."

"Oh, chuck it. I've some work to do. Go and read Tennyson."

"Well, what other sort of personality could it be?"

"You dear old ass, there's NO personality in it at all. That's the whole argument. You will _guess_. Talk about the high hills! You go skipping on from point to point--in imagination. Existence exists so far as we can tell. Relatively to us it exists, anyway. But that is the end of the argument. You can go no further. Nothing imaginable can have created it--nothing--nothing." And forgetting Tennyson, he pushed his arm through Paul's and led him out into the garden.

The sweet warm sun was releasing a thousand scents. Paul drew trailing fingers through a spiky host of lavender. Butterflies fluttered their apparently aimless dance over the beds, and bees, more obviously purposeful, dived into flowerets. Even the ancient flags on which they stood were cracked and broken by the impetuous thrust of tiny tendrils one could destroy with a pinch.

Arnold Manning took up his parable. "'Consider the lilies,'" he quoted. "Christ took a far step forward, anyway, Paul. The savage only saw horror, and made his grinning abomination as an image of God. The Jew saw, for some reason, the beauty of law and unity, and Elijah mocked the poor leaping priests of Baal and cried out on Jehovah. Christ saw beauty and tenderness, and invested His God with a still higher personality. 'Ye know not the Father,' He said. And we, we poor moderns, we see it all, Paul, and we see that all--all--those conceptions were just shadows of ourselves."

Paul was gazing up towards the Downs with a far-away look in his eyes. Little fleecy floating clouds were racing shadows of themselves across the rich green turf. "I see," he said sadly.

They strolled up and down. "Go and write a poem about this," said Manning with unusual gentleness. "That will buck you up."

Paul slowly shook his head.

(4)

It would be foolish to pretend that a couple of conversations shattered the faith of years, and yet, in life, it often seems so. Under the surface, the insidious work goes on, and perhaps there is never a crisis for which there has not been preparation. So it was with Paul. The ground had been steadily slipping from beneath his feet. Upon a proffered rock, for good or ill, he had not climbed. Now, with all the thunder and confusion of a cataclysm, the elaborate structure fell.

Manning's cool challenge, as much or more than his logic, had brought about the ruin. Does God hear? he had asked, and deliberately awaited the answer. Once Paul would have been as swift and as assured in his reply. In Lambeth Court, on Parker's Piece, even at Port o' Man, he would instantly have answered yes. But those days had gone. He fought the conclusion, wrestled with it, even still prayed earnestly against it, but could not escape the only possible deduction, as it seemed to him. There had been no answer at all, absolutely and literally none; or else, as Father Vassall would have it, he had been heard and led, led deliberately and as he could bear it, to the threshold of the Catholic Church. But his father, than whom none prayed more earnestly, said that that was the devil, and the Bishop of Mozambique that there the angels of God had been set about him for deliverance. Which was right? He had been tossed like a shuttlecock among them.

Out of that dilemma, Tressor's quiet reasoned judgment had opened up a way of escape. Fordham Manor had seemed so plainly the best and wisest refuge. His father, again, had approved. Besides, if he could write verse, that was a gift of God given him for improvement. And it was not that he did not pray even now, and read the Bible, too, as he had been taught. Only the Bible pointed, if anywhere, where they who advised him most to read it would not admit there was any conceivable possibility of going.

No, the arches of the years had led Paul irresistibly on. One by one, soaring unseen before him, they had closed down at the end of each span an appreciable march nearer to the brink of the precipice. He stood there now, peering into its depths, discerning no path at all, suspecting that the plunge into the abyss was only a matter of weeks, or days. Does God hear? demanded Manning, and Paul had no answer but the echo of Job's old cry: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him!"

Small wonder that he could not write poetry. Poetry! There was no meaning in life if God were not--no reasonable end, no conceivable beginning, nothing worth while. Arnold might grub about with his science; Paul sought the spirit of things. And when he turned to Tressor, the don utterly failed him.

It was odd, Paul thought, how entirely he failed him. Paul was coming daily to love more and more this kindly pleasant man, but he was beginning to see joints in his harness. The three of them would talk of an evening, for Paul could not do otherwise, and he would drag a somewhat unwilling Manning into it; but Tressor answered the younger man not at all. He clung to a refuge that was not yet, at any rate, storm-proof for Paul. Logic, said Tressor, failed at a point. The heart of man universally had need of God, and it would not crave if there was nothing to crave for. Tressor relied on intuition and instinct. Instinct and intuition, said Manning, were the result of training and environment. Psychology could dissect and label both, almost as easily as physiology the bones and muscles of a man. There was mystery before and behind, said Tressor, but God was fatherly, and in the end the weary soul would fall back upon His heart and rest.

"Sir," Manning cried one evening, goaded for once out of his habitual calm, "if your principles had been applied in science, man would be still in the Stone Age!"

Tressor had flicked an eyelid and looked hurt. He had shortly gone off to his study, and Manning had as shortly gone after him to apologise. He had returned a little flushed. "He's a jolly good chap," he said to Paul. "It's beastly of me to hurt his feelings."

Feelings! As if, Paul thought, feelings mattered. He walked bareheaded in the avenue and stood on the edge of the sleeping lake, and he cried out of the depths of his tortured soul to God. One syllable of an answer, one solitary sign out of the still night, one resolute conviction even, if God preferred that secret way, among the changing shifting doubts that racked his soul, and he would be ready to drink any kind of cup and be baptized with any baptism.

(5)

Tacked on to the very house, was a peculiar feature of the place. The parish church was also the private chapel. The parish had dwindled all but to the inhabitants of the park and grounds, and one clergyman served Fordham and held as well the living of the considerable village that lay beyond; but, occasionally, once a month for each service, Communion was celebrated, Evensong sung, so near to them that it was difficult even for unsympathetic guests not to go. Besides, Tressor liked one to go, and that was enough for Manning and Paul.

The last Sunday in the month, then, Paul went to Evensong. All the servants were there: dear old Mrs. Bird in a bonnet that tinkled with jet, with service-books the treasured gifts of her master; Timothy, for the most part crouched in his pew, expressionless; Rider, precise and understanding; the maids, strange in Sunday outdoor garments. The three friends occupied a pew discreetly not in the front, flatteringly not too far behind. And Mr. Prideaux took the service and preached.

There had, it appeared, but lately been a serious controversy in the Church. A dean had preached at Westminster on the earlier chapters of Genesis, had depreciated their historic value, and had welcomed the teachings of Professor Darwin. A bishop had retorted in the _Guardian_, and Catholic-minded clergy taken the matter up in the _Church Times_. The _Record_ had said that it had long told the public that this would be the result of ... And so on.

Mr. Prideaux, an able, energetic, zealous man, preached upon the subject. He believed in dealing with subjects of current interest, besides (though he did not say so), unless you are very High Church, the month of August is singularly desert in regard to festivals. He may also have thought that here his small select congregation did at any rate contain a proportion of listeners who would be more interested in such matters than the average villager. And he was quite right in a sense.

Only the Vicar could not know that there was a veritable gulf fixed between his comfortable reasoned theology and the devastating vivid modernism of either Manning or Paul. The priest said that, "of course," Darwinism was not proved; an increasing host of scientists disagreed with it. Besides, Darwin had never taught Darwinism. Again, if he had, there was nothing inherently hostile to the true teachings of the Church in the theory of evolution. There was nothing of revelation as to the precise point at which the ape-man became the man-ape with a soul. And it was only those who had forgotten the true relation of Church and Bible who found any difficulty in Genesis. The devout churchman only saw in these inspired fragments of ancient legend illustrations of the eternal groping of the soul of man after truth, and, he might say, an unique witness to the guiding hand of God....

Mr. Prideaux came to supper afterwards, and played a couple of rubbers of bridge. He was genial, and hoped, when he learned of Paul's taking up of residence at Fordham, that Paul would come to see him. He was a bachelor, and it would be delightful if they could see a good deal of each other.

Paul went up slowly to his room at last. He opened the window and looked out towards the avenue and the lake. The trees stretched grey and ghostly in a dim misty starlight, but they were not friendly or inviting to-night. Something had gone from the face of earth and sky. Darwin, evolution, science, ape-men, the interpretations of texts--what jargon! Where was God now, and why would He not speak? What else mattered? He was silent; He had been eternally silent it seemed; it was but the promptings of their own imagination which men had taken for His voice.

No, he could not go and write poetry any more.