Abraham's Bosom by Basil King

Author:Basil King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Start Classics
Published: 2013-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

Berkeley Noone withdrew from communication with his invisible companion in order to assimilate some of these ideas. In his effort to cling to his faculties, as he called it, he put it plainly to himself that he was in a state betwixt reality and dreamland. The very clarity of his mind was like that produced by some mighty stimulant. It was one of the phases of dying he had heard about; but it was at least a pleasant phase, putting the evil moment a little further off. Meantime he watched his wife and children with renewed perplexity.

It puzzled him that, while he was lying at the very point of death, they should apparently be going and coming on errands not directly connected with himself.

A few minutes ago his wife was holding his right hand and Phil his left.

Each of the others was watching him, as he was watching them, with eyes of piteous farewell. He might have supposed that, for the rest of the time he stayed with them, they would have no other preoccupation.

But now they seemed bent on obeying some lord who was not death. Moreover, in the "Light of the World," they continued to undergo a transfiguration he could neither describe nor define. They were themselves but themselves glorified. Emily was again the dryad of their youthful days; but a dryad with ways of light and tenderness he had never known her to possess. Each of the children was bathed in the same beautifying radiance. He knew them--and yet he didn't know them. All he could affirm of them exactly was that his doubts and worryings and disappointments on account of them were past. He felt what Angel had just been telling him, that he was waking from some troubled dream on their behalf. The boys were not sordid; Beatrice was not wilful; Constantia was not a renegade to her God. That he should ever have thought so began to seem to him incomprehensible.

Angel spoke, as if there had been no interruption:

"It's because mortals never see each other, except as wearing grotesque masks, behind which the true and normal features are hidden. The Dream Man may catch the shadow of God's Man; but he never beholds him as he is. He invents another Dream Man. The Dream Man is to God's Man no more than the reflection in the hollow of a silver spoon to the face it is supposed to give back."

Once more Berkeley Noone was quick to seize a point that made for mortal reality:

"But there is a face there."

"Oh, yes; there is a face there. The Man of Dust never creates anything. He only takes what God has created and distorts it. His senses have about the same degree of accuracy as wind-swept water, which shows the objects standing above it not only upside down but quivering, broken--a succession of shadows that appear and disappear and reappear, and have no stability."

"But your Man of Dust has intelligence; he has power. Look at his development through the ages; look at his discoveries, his inventions, his mastery of the elements.

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