Dawn of All | Page 3

a priest. He knew all about
that: he had faced it all, and he wasn't afraid. Science had knocked all that religious
nonsense on the head. There wasn't any religion. All religions were the same. There
wasn't any truth in any of them. Physical science had settled one half of the matter, and
psychology the other half. It was all accounted for. So he didn't want a priest anyhow.
Damn priests! There! would they let him alone after that? . . .
And now as to the Piccolomini affair. It was certain that when Aeneas was first raised to
the Sacred College. . . .
Why . . . what was happening to the ceiling? How could he attend to Aeneas while the

ceiling behaved like that? He had no idea that ceilings in the Westminster Hospital could
go up like lifts. How very ingenious! It must be to give him more air. Certainly he wanted
more air. . . . The walls too. . . . Ought not they also to revolve? They could change the
whole air in the room in a moment. What an extraordinarily ingenious . . . Ah! and he
wanted it. . . . He wanted more air. . . . Why don't these doctors know their business
better? . . . What was the good of catching hold of him like that? . . . He wanted air . . .
more air . . . He must get to the window! . . . Air . . . air! . . .


CHAPTER I
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PART I



CHAPTER I

(I)
The first objects of which he became aware were his own hands clasped on his lap before
him, and the cloth cuffs from which they emerged; and it was these latter that puzzled
him. So engrossed was he that at first he could not pay attention to the strange sounds in
the air about him; for these cuffs, though black, were marked at their upper edges with a
purpled line such as prelates wear. He mechanically turned the backs of his hands
upwards; but there was no ring on his finger. Then he lifted his eyes and looked.
He was seated on some kind of raised chair beneath a canopy. A carpet ran down over a
couple of steps beneath his feet, and beyond stood the backs of a company of
ecclesiastics--secular priests in cotta, cassock, and biretta, with three or four bare-footed
Franciscans and a couple of Benedictines. Ten yards away there rose a temporary pulpit
with a back and a sounding-board beneath the open sky; and in it was the tall figure of a
young friar, preaching, it seemed, with extraordinary fervour. Around the pulpit, beyond
it, and on all sides to an immense distance, so far as he could see, stretched the heads of
an incalculable multitude, dead silent, and beyond them again trees, green against a blue
summer sky.
He looked on all this, but it meant nothing to him. It fitted on nowhere with his
experience; he knew neither where he was, nor at what he was assisting, nor who these
people were, nor who the friar was, nor who he was himself. He simply looked at his
surroundings, then back at his hands and down his figure.

He gained no knowledge there, for he was dressed as he had never been dressed before.
His caped cassock was black, with purple buttons and a purple cincture. He noticed that
his shoes shone with gold buckles; he glanced at his breast, but no cross hung there. He
took off his biretta, nervously, lest some one should notice, and perceived that it was
black with a purple tassel. He was dressed then, it seemed, in the costume of a Domestic
Prelate. He put on his biretta again.
Then he closed his eyes and tried to think; but he could remember nothing. There was, it
seemed, no continuity anywhere. But it suddenly struck him that if he knew that he was a
Domestic Prelate, and if he could recognize a Franciscan, he must have seen those
phenomena before. Where? When?
Little pictures began to form before him as a result of his intense mental effort, but they
were far away and minute, like figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope; and
they afforded no explanation. But, as he bent his whole mind upon it, he remembered that
he had been a priest--he had distinct memories of saying mass. But he could not
remember where or when; he could not even remember his own name.
This last horror struck him alert again. He did not know who he was. He opened his eyes
widely, terrified, and caught the eye of an old priest in