He turned about and found himself still in bed. The early morning light filled the room. He sat up in bed, still wrenching at his throat, his heart pounding violently. He had been dreaming; but so powerful was the experience that he sat there dazed for a minute, not sure if he was really awake, still overwhelmed by the horror of what he had seen. It was that evil dream again. That was the third time now that he had dreamt more or less the same thing, the scene at night with the nuns pulling the drowned person out of the lake, and with it the conviction that it was their own victim that lay at their feet upon the strand. Each time the dream was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of evil; and each time too Michael had the strange impression that the booming sound which preceded the dream was not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping he had really heard and which had stirred him towards waking.
His watch said twenty minutes to six. He got up now and crossed to the window, half expecting to see something odd. Everything was as usual, with the derelict and deserted look of the early morning. On the clipped grass near the house a number of blackbirds were running about, following the mysterious activities of newly risen birds. Nothing else stirred. The lake was bland and unbroken, brimming with the pale diffused light of the sun which was risen in a thick haze. It would be another hot day. Michael looked across to where the Abbey wall ended and the lake water lapped among bulrushes along the shore. There was no pebbled strand, and no figures to be seen. Michael wondered what his dream could signify and what it was in the depths of his mind which made him attribute something so terrible to those innocent and holy nuns. He had this thought with an intimation, not so much of the pressure of dark forces upon him, as of the reality within himself of some active and positive spring of evil. He shook his head and knelt down at the open window, still looking towards the scene of the dream, and began wordlessly to pray. His body relaxed. His prayer was no struggle, but the surrender of himself, with all the ill that he contained, to the Ground of his being. Gradually his serenity returned and with it a calm joy, the renewal of the certainty that there existed truly that living God in whom all pain is healed and all evil finally overcome.
It was too late now to go to bed again, so Michael sat down for a while with his Bible. Then he addressed himself to the problems of the day. He remembered with a little distress that it was Saturday, and the weekly Meeting of the community was to take place during the morning. This week there was a rather troublesome agenda. The Meeting was fairly informal and Michael himself usually prepared just beforehand a list of topics to be discussed; and members of the Meeting could then raise their own topics if they wished. He began now to jot down on a piece of paper: mechanical cultivator, financial appeal, squirrels, etc. arrangements, for bell. His pencil paused as he mused over the list. He glanced at his watch. Still twenty minutes before it was time to go to Mass.
The Imber community in its present form had existed for just under a year. Its beginnings, in which Michael had played a crucial part, had been casual, and its future was uncertain. Imber Court itself had been for several generations the home of Michael’s family, but Michael himself had never lived there, and the house, too expensive to keep up, had mostly been let, and during the war and for a few years after was used as offices by a Government department. Then it became empty and the question had arisen of its being sold. Michael, who had always been profoundly attracted by the place, avoided it for this reason. He hardly ever went there, and retained only a vague conception of the house and the estate. As a younger man he had intended to become a priest, but had failed to do so, and had spent a number of years as a schoolmaster. Although he had kept his sense of a religious vocation he had never until very recently made any visit to Imber Abbey; the taboo which rested for him upon the Court had included the Abbey also. It now seemed to him, looking back, as if this ground had been kept sacred, forbidden to him until the time when it should be the scene of decisive changes in his life. He visited the Court in the course of business, when the question of its sale was in the air, and, because it seemed proper, asked to pay his respects to the Abbess. The future destiny of the Court would naturally be of keen interest to the Abbey. Michael was also curious, and now that he was at last close by, very anxious to make the acquaintance of the Benedictine community of whose holiness he had heard so much.
His encounter with the Abbess changed his life and his plans completely. With an ease which at first surprised him and which later seemed part of an inevitable pattern, the Abbess imparted to Michael the idea of making the Court the home of a permanent lay community attached to the Abbey, a “buffer state”, as she put it, between the Abbey and the world, a reflection, a benevolent and useful parasite, an intermediary form of life. There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. Work, as it now is, the Abbess argued with a kind of realism which surprised Michael at the time, can rarely offer satisfaction to the half-contemplative. A few professions, such as teaching or nursing, remain such that they can readily be invested with a spiritual significance. But although it is possible, and indeed demanded of us, that all and any occupation be given a sacramental meaning, this is now for the majority of people almost intolerably difficult; and for some of such.people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, as she put it, who cannot find a work which satisfies them in the ordinary world, a life half retired, and a work made simple and significant by its dedicated setting, is what is needed. Our duty, the Abbess said, is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those people, which will make our spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish; and in this search, said the Abbess, we must make use of a divine cunning. “As wise as serpents, as harmless as doves.”