CHAPTER THE FIFTH — THE FIRST VISION

(1)

Dr. Dale exceeded the bishop’s worst apprehensions.  He was a lean, lank, dark young man with long black hair and irregular, rather prolonged features; his chin was right over to the left; he looked constantly at the bishop’s face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.  And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to voices.

He began by understanding far too much of the bishop’s illness, and he insisted on various familiarities with the bishop’s heart and tongue and eye and knee that ruffled the bishop’s soul.

“Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?” he asked.  “That was his diagnosis,” said the bishop.  “Neurasthenia,” said the young man as though he despised the word.

The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.

“You don’t of course want to break your vows about drinking and smoking,” said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of derision in his voice.

“Not if it can possibly be avoided,” the bishop asserted.  “Without a loss, that is, of practical efficiency,” he added.  “For I have much to do.”

“I think that it is possible to keep your vow,” said the young man, and the bishop could have sworn at him.  “I think we can manage that all right.”

(2)

The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the next development of this unsatisfactory interview.  He was on the verge of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would return.

The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey’s hearth-rug and was evidently contemplating dissertations.

“Of course,” he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself, “you must have some sort of comfort.  You must get out of this state, one way or another.”

The bishop nodded assent.  He had faint hopes of this young man’s ideas of comfort.

Dr. Dale reflected.  Then he went off away from the question of comfort altogether.  “You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the border-line of bodily and mental things.  You may take a drug or alter your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and it disturbs your health.  It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.  The truth doesn’t, I think, follow the border between those opposite opinions very exactly on either side.  I can’t, for instance, tell you to go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it is just these uncertainties and despairs that rob you of the power of efficient prayer.”

He did not seem to expect anything from the bishop.