The
COMING

BY

J. C. SNAITH

AUTHOR OF “THE SAILOR,” “ANNE FEVERSHAM,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK 1917

Copyright, 1917, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America

THE COMING

I

He came to his own and his own knew him not.

The vicar of the parish sat at his study table pen in hand, a sheet of paper before him. It was Saturday morning already and his weekly sermon was not yet begun. On Sundays, at the forenoon service, it was Mr. Perry-Hennington’s custom to read an old discourse, but in the evening the rigid practice of nearly forty years required that he should give to the world a new and original homily.

To a man of the vicar’s mold this was a fairly simple matter. His rustic flock was not in the least critical. To the villagers of Penfold, a hamlet on the borders of Sussex and Kent, every word of their pastor was gospel. And in their pastor’s own gravely deliberate words it was the gospel of Christ Crucified.

There had been a time in the vicar’s life when his task had sat lightly upon him. Given the family living of Penfold-with-Churley in October, 1879, the Reverend the Honorable Thomas Perry-Hennington had never really had any trouble in the matter until August, 1914. And then, all at once, trouble came so heavily upon a man no longer young, that from about the time of the retreat from Mons Saturday morning became a symbol of torment. It was then that a dark specter first appeared in the vicar’s mind. For thirty-five years he had been modestly content with a simple moral obligation in return for a stipend of eight hundred pounds a year. He had never presumed to question the fitness of a man with an Oxford pass degree for such a relatively humble office. A Christian of the old sort, with the habit of faith, and in his own phrase “without intellectual smear,” he had always been on terms with God. And though Mr. Perry-Hennington would have been the last to claim Him as a tribal deity, in the vicar’s ear He undoubtedly spoke with the accent of an English public school, and used the language of Dr. Pusey and Dr. Westcott. But somehow August, 1914, had seemed to change everything.

It was now June of the following year and Saturday morning had grown into a nightmare for the vicar. Doubt had arisen in the household of faith, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but only a firm will and a stout heart had been able to dispel it. Terrible wrong had been done to an easy and pleasant world and God had seemed to look on. Moreover it had been boldly claimed that not only was he a graduate of a foreign university, but that he had justified the ways of Antichrist.

After grave and bitter searchings of heart, Mr. Perry-Hennington had risen, not only in the pulpit but in the public press, to rebut the charge. But this morning, seated in a charming room, biting the end of a pen, a humbler, more personal doubt in his mind. Was it a man’s work to be devoting one’s energies to the duties of a parish priest? Was it a man’s work to be addressing a few yokels, for the most part women and old men? As far as Penfold-with-Churley was concerned Armageddon might have been ages away. In fact Mr. Perry-Hennington had recently written a letter to his favorite newspaper in very good English to say so.

For the tenth time that morning the vicar dipped his pen in the ink. For the tenth time it hung lifeless, a thing without words, above a page thirsting to receive them. For the tenth time the ink grew dry. With a faint sigh, which in one less strong of will would have been despair, he suddenly lifted his eyes to look through the window.

The room faced south. Sussex was spread before him like a carpet. Fold upon fold, hill beyond hill, it flowed in curves of inconceivable harmony to meet the distant sea. To the right a subtle thickening of sunlight marked the ancient forest of Ashdown; straight ahead was Crowborough Beacon; far away to the left were dark masses of gorse, masking the delicate verdure of the weald of Kent. There was not a cloud in the sky. The sun of June, a generous, living warmth, was everywhere. But as the vicar gazed solemnly out of the window he had not a thought for the enchantment of the scene.

Suddenly he rose a little impatiently and opened the window still wider. If he was to do his duty on the morrow he must have more light, more air. A grizzled head was flung forth to meet the strong, keen sun, to snuff the magic air. A clean wind racing by made his lips and eyelids tingle, and then, all at once, he remembered his boy on the Poseidon.

But he must put the Poseidon out of his mind if he was to do his pastoral duty on the morrow. Before he could draw in his head and buckle to his task, an odd whirr of sound, curiously sharp and loud, came on his ear. There was an airplane somewhere. Involuntarily he shaded his eyes to look. Yes, there she was! What speed, what grace, what incomparable power in the live, sentient thing! How feat she looked, how noble, as she rode the blue like some fabled roc of an eastern story.

“Off to France,” said the vicar. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and then put them on again.

But the morrow’s sermon was again forgotten. He had remembered his boy in the air. The graceless lad whom he had flogged more than once in that very room, who had done little good at Marlborough, who had preferred a stool in a stockbroker’s office to the University, was now a superman, a veritable god in a machine. A week ago he had been to Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the King for an act of incredible daring. His name was great in the hearts of his countrymen. This lad not yet twenty, whom wild horses would not have dragged through the fourth Æneid, had made the name of Perry-Hennington ring throughout the empire.

From this amazing Charley in his biplane, it was only a step in the father’s mind to honest Dick and the wardroom of the Poseidon. The vicar recalled with a little thrill of pride how Dick’s grandfather, the admiral, had always said that the boy was “a thorough Hennington,” the highest compliment the stout old sea dog had it in his power to pay him or any other human being. And then from Dick with his wide blue eyes, his square, fighting face and his nerves of steel the thoughts of the father flew to Tom, his eldest boy, the high-strung, nervous fellow, the Trinity prize man with the first-class brain. Tom had left not only a lucrative practice and brilliant prospects at the Bar, but also a delicate wife and three young children in order to spend the winter in the trenches of the Ypres salient. Moreover, he had “stuck it” without a murmur of complaint, although he was far too exact a thinker ever to have had any illusions in regard to the nature of war, and although this particular war defied the human imagination to conceive its horror.

Yes, after all, Tom was the most wonderful of the three. Nature had not meant him for a soldier, the hypersensitive, overstrung lad who would faint over a cut finger, who had loathed cricket and football, or anything violent, who in years of manhood had had an almost fanatical distrust of the military mind. Some special grace had helped him to endure the bestiality of Flanders.

From the thought of the three splendid sons God had given him the mind of the vicar turned to their begetter. He was only just sixty, he enjoyed rude health except for a touch of rheumatism now and again, yet here he was in a Sussex village supervising parish matters and preaching to women and old men.

At last, with a jerk of impatience that was half despair, he suddenly withdrew his head from the intoxicating sun, the cool, scented wind of early June. “I’ll see the Bishop, that’s what I’ll do,” he muttered as he did so.

But as he sat down once more at his writing table before the accusing page, he remembered that he had seen the Bishop several times already. And the Bishop’s counsel had been ever the same. Let him do the duty next him. His place was with his flock. Let him labor in his vocation, the only work for which one of his sort was really qualified.

Bitterly this soldier of God regretted now that he had not chosen in his youth the other branch of his profession. Man of sixty as he was, there were times when he burned to be with his three boys in the fight. His own father, a fine old Crimean warrior, had once given him the choice of Sandhurst or Oxford, and the vicar was now constrained to believe that he had chosen the lesser part. By this time he might have been on the General Headquarters Staff, whereas he was not even permitted to wear the uniform of the true Church Militant.

At last with a groan of vexation the vicar dipped his pen again. And then something happened. Without conscious volition, or overt process of the mind, the pen began to move across the page. Slowly it traced a succession of words, whose purport he didn’t grasp until an eye had been passed over them. “Let us cast off the works of darkness, let us put on the armor of light.”

Sensible at once of high inspiration he took a vital force from the idea. It began to unseal faculties latent within him. His thoughts came to a point at last, they grew consecutive, he could see his way, his mind took wings. And then suddenly, alas, before he could lay pen to paper, there came a very unfortunate interruption.

II

There was a knock on the study door.

“Come in,” called the vicar rather sharply.

The whole household knew that on Sunday morning those precincts were inviolable.

His daughter Edith came hurriedly into the room. A tall, thin, eager-looking girl, her large features and hook nose were absurdly like her father’s. Nobody called her handsome, yet in bearing and movement was the lithe grace the world looks for in a clean-run strain. But lines of ill-health were in the sensitive face, and the honest, rather near-sighted eyes had a look of tension and perplexity. An only girl, in a country parsonage, thrown much upon herself, the war had begun to tell its tale. Intensely proud that her brothers were in it, she could think of nothing else. Their deeds, hazards, sacrifices were taken for granted as far as others could guess, but they filled her with secret disgust for her own limited activities. Limited they must remain for some little time to come. It had been Edith’s wish to go to Serbia with her cousin’s Red Cross unit. And in spite of the strong views of her doctor she would have done so but for a sharp attack of illness. That had been three months ago. She was not yet strong enough for regular work in a hospital or a munition factory, but as an active member of a woman’s volunteer training corps, she faithfully performed certain local and promiscuous duties.

There was one duty, however, which Edith in her zeal had lately imposed upon herself. Or it may have been imposed upon her by that section of the English press from which she took her opinions. For the past three Saturday mornings it had been carried out religiously. Known as “rounding up the shirkers,” it consisted in making a tour of the neighboring villages on a bicycle, and in presenting a white feather to male members of the population of military age who were not in khaki.

The girl had just returned from the fulfillment of the weekly task. She was in a state of excitement slightly tinged with hysteria, and that alone was her excuse for entering that room at such a time.

At first the vicar was more concerned by her actual presence than for the state of her feelings.

“Well, what is it?” he demanded impatiently, without looking up from his sermon.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, father”—the high-pitched voice had a curious quiver in it—“but something rather disagreeable has happened. I felt that I must come and tell you.”

The vicar swung slowly round in his chair. He was an obtuse man, therefore the girl’s excitement was still lost upon him, but he had a fixed habit of duty. If the matter was really disagreeable he was prepared to deal with it at once; if it admitted of qualification it must wait until after luncheon.

There was no doubt, however, in Edith’s mind that it called for her father’s immediate attention. Moreover, the fact was at last made clear to him by a mounting color, and an air of growing agitation.

“Well, what’s the matter?” A certain rough kindness came into the vicar’s tone as soon as these facts were borne in upon him. “I hope you’ve not been overtaxing yourself. Joliffe said you would have to be very careful for some time.”

The attempt of a somewhat emotional voice to reassure him on that point was not altogether a success.

“Then what is the matter?” The vicar peered at her solemnly over his spectacles.

Edith hesitated.

The vicar mobilized an impatient eyebrow.

“It’s—it’s only that wretched man, John Smith.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington gave a little start of annoyance at the mention of the name.

“He’s quite upset me.”

“What’s he been doing now?” The vicar’s tone was an odd mingling of scorn and curiosity.

“It’s foolish to let a man of that kind upset one,” said Edith rather evasively.

“I agree. But tell me——?”

“It will only annoy you.” Filial regard and outraged feelings had begun a pitched battle. “It’s merely weak to be worried by that kind of creature.”

“My dear girl”—the tone was very stern—“tell me in just two words what has happened.” And the vicar laid down his pen and sat back in his chair.

“I have been insulted.” Edith made heroic fight but the sense of outrage was too much for her.

“How? In what way?” The county magistrate had begun to take a hand in the proceedings.

A little alarmed, Edith plunged into a narrative of events. “I had just one feather left on my return from Heathfield,” she said, “and as I came across the Common there was John Smith loafing about as he so often is. So I went up to him and said: ‘I should like to give you this.’”

A look of pained annoyance came into the vicar’s face. “It may be right in principle,” he said, “but the method doesn’t appeal to me. And I warned you that something of this kind might happen.”

“But he ought to be in the army. Or working at munitions.”

“Maybe. Well, you gave him the feather. And what happened?”

“First of all he kissed it. Then he put it in his buttonhole, and struck a sort of attitude and said—let me give you his exact words—‘And lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.’”

The vicar jumped up as if he had been stung. “The fellow said that! But that’s blasphemy!”

“Exactly what I thought, father,” said Edith in an extremely emotional voice. “I was simply horrified.”

“Atrocious blasphemy!” Seething with indignation the vicar began to stride about the room. “This must be carried further,” he said.

To the lay mind such an incident hardly called for serious notice, even on the part of the vicar of the parish whose function it was to notice all things seriously. But with a subtlety of malice that Mr. Perry-Hennington deeply resented it had searched out his weakness. For some little time now, John Smith had been a thorn in the pastoral cushion. Week by week this village wastrel was becoming a sorer problem. Although the man’s outrageous speech was of a piece with the rest of his conduct, the vicar immediately felt that it had brought matters to a head. He had already foreseen that the mere presence in his parish of this young man would sooner or later force certain issues upon him. Let them now be raised. Mr. Perry-Hennington felt that he must now face them frankly and fearlessly, once and for all, in a severely practical way.

His imperious stridings added to Edith’s alarm.

“Somehow, father,” she ventured, “I don’t quite think he meant it for blasphemy. After all he’s hardly that kind of person.”

“Then what do you suppose the fellow did mean?” barked the vicar.

“Well, you know that half crazy way of his. After all, he may not have meant anything in particular.”

“Whatever his intention he had no right to use such words in such a connection. I am going to follow this matter up.”

Edith made a second rather distressed attempt to clear John Smith; the look in her father’s face was quite alarming.

But Mr. Perry-Hennington was not to be appeased. “Sooner or later there’s bound to be serious trouble with the fellow. And this is an opportunity to come to grips with him. I will go now and hear what he has to say for himself and then I must very carefully consider the steps to be taken in a highly disagreeable matter.”

Thereupon, with the resolution of one proud of the fact that action is his true sphere the vicar strode boldly to the hatstand in the hall.

III

As Mr. Perry-Hennington surged through the vicarage gate in the direction of the village green, a rising tide of indignation swept the morrow’s discourse completely out of his mind. This was indeed a pity. Much was going on around and its inner meanings were in themselves a sermon. Every bush was afire with God. The sun of June was upon gorse and heather; bees, birds, hedgerows, flowers, all were touched with magic; larks were hovering, sap was flowing in the leaves, nature in myriad aspects filled with color, energy and music the enchanted air. But none of these things spoke to the vicar. He was a man of wrath. Anger flamed within him as, head high-flung, he marched along a steep, bracken-fringed path, in quest of one whom he could no longer tolerate in his parish.

For some little time now, John Smith had been a trial. To begin with this young man was an alien presence in a well-disciplined flock. Had he been native-born, had his status and position been defined by historical precedent, Mr. Perry-Hennington would have been better able to deal with him. But, as he had complained rather bitterly, “John Smith was neither fish, flesh nor well-boiled fowl.” There was no niche in the social hierarchy that he exactly fitted; there was no ground, except the insecure one of personal faith, upon which the vicar of the parish could engage him.

The cardinal fact in a most difficult case was that the young man’s mother was living in Penfold. Moreover, she was the widow of a noncommissioned officer in a line regiment, who in the year 1886 had been killed in action in the service of his country. John, the only and posthumous child of an obscure soldier who had died in the desert, had been brought to Penfold by his mother as a boy of ten. There he had lived with her ever since in a tiny cottage on the edge of the common; there he had grown up, and as the vicar was sadly constrained to believe, into a freethinker, a socialist and a generally undesirable person.

These were hard terms for Mr. Perry-Hennington to apply to anyone, but the conduct of the black sheep of the fold was now common talk, if not an open scandal. For one thing he was thought to be unsound on the war. He was known to hold cranky views on various subjects, and he had addressed meetings at Brombridge on the Universal Religion of Humanity or some kindred high-flown theme. Moreover, he talked freely with the young men of the neighborhood, among whom he was becoming a figure of influence. Indeed, it was said that the source of a kind of pacifist movement, faintly stirring up and down the district, could be traced to John Smith.

Far worse, however, than all this, he had lately acquired a reputation as a faith-healer. It was claimed for him by certain ignorant people at Grayfield and Oakshott that by means of Christian Science he had cured deafness, rheumatism and other minor ills to which the local flesh was heir. The vicar had been too impatient of the whole matter to investigate it. On the face of it the thing was quite absurd. In his eyes John Smith was hardly better than a yokel, although a man of superior education for his rank of life. Indeed, in Mr. Perry-Hennington’s opinion, that was where the real root of the mischief lay. The mother, who was very poor, had contrived, by means of the needle, and by denying herself almost the necessities of life, to send the lad for several years to the grammar school at the neighboring town of Brombridge, where he had undoubtedly gained the rudiments of an education far in advance of any the village school had to offer. John had proved a boy of almost abnormal ability; and the high master of the grammar school had been sadly disappointed that he did not find his way to Oxford with a scholarship. Unfortunately the boy’s health had always been delicate. He had suffered from epilepsy, and this fact, by forbidding a course of regular study, prevented a lad of great promise obtaining at an old university the mental discipline of which he was thought to stand in need.

The vicar considered it was this omission which had marred the boy’s life. None of the learned professions was open to him; his education was both inadequate and irregular; moreover, the precarious state of his health forbade any form of permanent employment. Situations of a clerical kind had been found for him from time to time which he had been compelled to give up. Physically slight, he had never been fit for hard manual labor. Indeed, the only work with his hands for which he had shown any aptitude was at the carpenter’s bench, and for some years now he had eked out his mother’s slender means by assisting the village joiner.

The unfortunate part of the matter was, however, that the end was not here. Mentally, there could be no doubt, John Smith, a man now approaching thirty, was far beyond the level of the carpenter’s bench. His mind, in the vicar’s opinion, was deplorably ill-regulated, but in certain of its aspects he was ready to admit that it had both originality and power. The mother was a daughter of a Baptist minister in Wales, a fact which tended to raise her son beyond the level of his immediate surroundings; but that apart, the village carpenter’s assistant had never yielded his boyish passion for books. He continued to read increasingly, books to test and search a vigorous mind. Moreover, he had an astonishing faculty of memory, and at times wrote poetry of a mystical, ultra-imaginative kind.

The case of John Smith was still further complicated for Mr. Perry-Hennington by the injudicious behavior of the local squire. Gervase Brandon, a cultivated, scholarly man, had encouraged this village ne’er-do-well in every possible way. There was reason to believe that he had helped the mother from time to time, and John, at any rate, had been given the freedom of the fine old library at Hart’s Ghyll. There he could spend as many hours as he wished; therefrom he could borrow any volume that he chose, no matter how precious it might be; and in many delicate ways the well-meaning if over-generous squire, had played the part of Mæcenas.

In the vicar’s opinion the inevitable sequel to Gervase Brandon’s unwisdom had already occurred. A common goose had come to regard himself as a full-fledged swan. It was within the vicar’s knowledge that from time to time John Smith had given expression to views which the ordinary layman could not hold with any sort of authority. Moreover, when remonstrated with, “this half-educated fellow” had always tried to stand his ground. And at the back of the vicar’s mind still rankled a certain mot of John Smith’s, duly reported by Samuel Veale the scandalized parish clerk. He had said that, as the world was constituted at present, the gospel according to the Reverend Thomas Perry-Hennington seemed of more importance than the gospel according to Jesus Christ.

When taxed with having made the statement to the village youth, John Smith did not deny the charge. He even showed a disposition to defend himself; and the vicar had felt obliged to end the interview by abruptly walking away. Some months had passed since that incident. But in his heart the vicar had not been able to forgive what he could only regard as a piece of effrontery. Henceforward all his dealings with John Smith were tainted by that recollection. The subject still rankled in his mind; indeed he would have been the first to own that it was impossible now for such a man as himself to consider the problem of John Smith without prejudice. Moreover, he was aware that an intense and growing personal resentment boded ill for the young man’s future life in the parish of Penfold-with-Churley.

Sore, unhappy, yet braced with the stern delight that warriors feel, the vicar reached the common at last. That open, furze-clad plateau which divided Sussex from Kent and rose so sharply to the sky that it formed a natural altar upon which the priests of old had raised a stone was the favorite tryst of this village wastrel. As soon as Mr. Perry-Hennington came to the end of the steep path from the vicarage which debouched to the common, he shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare. Straight before him, less than a hundred yards away, was the man he sought. John Smith was leaning against the stone.

The vicar took off his hat to cool his head a little, and then swung boldly across the turf. The young man, who was bareheaded and clad in common workaday clothes, looked clean and neat enough, but somehow strangely slight and frail. Gaunt of jaw and sunken-eyed, the face was of a very unusual kind, and from time to time was lit by a smile so vivid as to be unforgetable. But the outward aspect of John Smith had never had anything to say to the vicar, and this morning it had even less to say than usual.

For the vicar’s attention had been caught by something else. Upon the young man’s finger was perched a little, timid bird. He was cooing to it, in an odd, loving voice, and as the vicar came up he said: “Nay, nay, don’t go. This good man will do you no harm.”

But the bird appeared to feel otherwise. By the time the vicar was within ten yards it had flown away.

“Even the strong souls fear you, sir,” said the young man with his swift smile, looking him frankly in the eyes.

“It is the first time one has heard such a grandiloquent term applied to a yellow-hammer,” said the vicar coldly.

“Things are not always what they seem,” said the young man. “The wisdom of countless ages is in that frail casket.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the vicar sharply.

“Many a saint, many a hero, is borne on the wings of a dove.”

“Transcendental rubbish.” The vicar mopped his face with his handkerchief, and then he began: “Smith”—he was too angry to use the man’s Christian name—“my daughter tells me you have been blasphemous.”

The young man, who still wore the white feather in his coat, looked at the angry vicar with an air of gentle surprise.

“Please don’t deny it,” said the vicar, taking silence for a desire to rebut the charge. “She has repeated to me word for word your mocking speech when you put that symbol of cowardice in your buttonhole.”

John Smith looked at the vicar with his deep eyes and then he said slowly and softly: “If my words have hurt her I am very sorry.”

This speech, in spite of its curious gentleness, added fuel to the vicar’s anger.

“The humility you affect does not lessen their offense,” he said sharply.

“Where lies the offense you speak of?” The question was asked simply, with a grave smile.

“If it is not clear to you,” said the vicar with acid dignity, “it shall not be my part to explain it. I am not here to bandy words. Nor do I intend to chop logic. You consider yourself vastly clever, no doubt. But I have to warn you that the path you follow is full of peril.”

“Yes, the path we are following is full of peril.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?” said the vicar sternly.

“Mankind. All of us.”

“That does not affect the question. Let us leave the general alone, let us keep to the particular.”

“But how can we leave the general alone, how can we keep to the particular, when we are all members of one another?”

The vicar checked him with an imperious hand.

“Blasphemer.” he said with growing passion, “how dare you parody the words of the Master?”

“No one can parody the words of the Master. Either they are or they are not.”

“I am not here to argue with you. Understand, John Smith, that in all circumstances I decline to chop logic with—with a person of your sort.”

It added to this young man’s offense in the eyes of the vicar that he had presumed to address him as an intellectual equal. It was true that in a way of delicate irony, which even Mr. Perry-Hennington was not too dense to perceive, this extraordinary person deferred continually to the social and mental status of his questioner. It was the manner of one engaged in rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, but every word masked by the gentle voice was so subtly provocative that Mr. Perry-Hennington felt a secret humiliation in submitting to them. The implication made upon his mind was that the rôle of teacher and pupil had been reversed.

This unpleasant feeling was aggravated to the point of the unbearable by John Smith’s next words.

“Judge not,” he said softly. “Once priests judged Jesus Christ.”

The vicar recoiled.

“Abominable!” he said, and he clenched his fists as if he would strike him. “Blasphemer!”

The young man smiled sadly. “I only speak the truth,” he said. “If it wounds you, sir, the fault is not mine.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington made a stern effort to keep himself in hand. It was unseemly to bandy words with a man of this kind. Yet, as he belonged to the parish, the vicar in a sense was responsible for him; therefore it became his duty to find out what was at the back of his mind. Curbing as well as he could an indignation that threatened every moment to pass beyond control, he called upon John Smith to explain himself.

“You say you only speak the truth as it has been shown you. First I would ask whence it comes, and then I would ask how do you know it for the truth?”

“It has been communicated by the Father.”

“Don’t be so free with the name of God,” said the vicar sternly. “And I, at any rate, take leave to doubt it.”

“There is a voice I hear within me. And being divine it speaks only the truth.”

“How do you know it is divine?”

“How do I know the grass is green, the sky blue, the heather purple? How do I know the birds sing?”

“That is no answer,” said the vicar. “It is open to anyone to claim a divine voice within did not modesty forbid.”

The smile of John Smith was so sweetly simple that it could not have expressed an afterthought. “Had you a true vocation,” he said, “would you find such uses for your modesty?”

The vicar, torn between a desire to rebuke what he felt to be an intolerable impertinence and a wish to end an interview that boded ill to his dignity, could only stand irresolute. Yet this odd creature spoke so readily, with a precision so rare and curious that his every word seemed to acquire a kind of authority. Bitterly chagrined, half insulted as the vicar was, he determined to continue the argument if only for the sake of a further light upon the man’s state of mind.

“You claim to hear a divine voice. Is it for that reason, may one ask, that you feel licensed to utter such appalling blasphemies?”

John Smith smiled again in his odd way.

“You speak like the men of old time,” he said softly.

“I use the King’s English,” said the vicar. “And I use it as pointedly, as expressively, as sincerely as lies in my power. I mean every word I say. You claim the divine voice, yet all that it speaks is profanity and corruption.”

“As was said of the prophets of old?”

“You claim to be a prophet?”

“Yes, I claim to be a prophet.”

“That is interesting.” There was a sudden change of tone as the vicar realized the importance of the admission. He saw that it might have a very important bearing upon his future course of action. “You claim to be a prophet in order that you may blaspheme the Creator.”

“I claim to be a prophet of the good, the beautiful, and the true. I claim to hear the voice of the eternal. And if these things be blasphemous in your sight, I can only grieve for your election.”

“Leave me out of it, if you please.” The clean thrust had stung the vicar to fury. “I know perfectly well where and how I stand, and if there is the slightest doubt in the matter it will be the province of my bishop to resolve it. But with you, Smith, who, I am ashamed to say, are one of my parishioners, it is a very different matter. In your case I have my duty to perform. It is one that can only cause me the deepest pain and anxiety, but I am determined that nothing shall interfere with it. Forgive my plainness, but your mind is in a most disorderly state. I am afraid Mr. Brandon is partly to blame. I have told him more than once that it was folly to give you the run of his library. You have been encouraged to read books beyond your mental grasp, or at least beyond your power to assimilate becomingly, in the manner of a gentleman. You are a half-educated man—it is my duty to speak out—and like all such men you are wise in your own conceit. Now there is reason to believe that, in virtue of an old statute which is still operative, you have made yourself amenable to the law of the land. At all events I intend to find out. And then will arise the question as to how far it will be one’s duty to move in this matter.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington watched the young man narrowly as he uttered this final threat. He had the satisfaction of observing that John Smith changed color a little. If, however, he had hoped to frighten the man it was by no means clear that he had succeeded.

“You follow your conscience, sir,” he said with a sweet unconcern that added to the vicar’s inward fury. “And I try to follow mine. But it is right to say to you that you are entering upon a deep coil. The soul of man is abroad in a dark night, yet the door is still open, and I pray that you at least will not seek to close it.”

“The door—still open!” The vicar looked at him in amazement. “What door?”

“The door for all mankind.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“For the present let them so remain. But I will give you a piece of news. At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said: ‘I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.’”

The vicar could only gaze in silence at John Smith.

“And I said: ‘Certainly, I am very glad to pray for Germany,’ and we knelt and prayed together. And then he rose and showed me the little town with its quaint gables and turrets where he sleeps at night, and I asked him to have courage and then I embraced him and then he left me, saying he would return again.”

The vicar heard him to the end with a growing stupefaction. Such a speech in its complete detachment from the canons of reason could only mean that the man was unhinged. The words themselves would bear no other interpretation; but in spite of that the vicar’s amazement soon gave way to a powerful resentment. At that moment the sense of outrage was stronger in him than anything else.

A certain practical sagacity enabled him to see at once that an abyss had opened between this grotesquely undisciplined mind and his own. The man might be merely recounting a dream, indulging a fancy, weaving an allegory, but at whatever angle he was approached by an incumbent of the Established Church, only one explanation could cover such lawlessness. The man was not of sound mind. And after all that was the one truly charitable interpretation of his whole demeanor and attitude. An ill-regulated, morbidly sensitive organization had broken down in the stress of those events which had sorely tried an intellect as stable as Mr. Perry-Hennington’s own. Indeed it was only right to think so; otherwise, the vicar would have found it impossible to curb himself. Even as it was he dared not trust himself to say a word in reply. All at once he turned abruptly on his heel and walked away as on a former occasion.

IV

As the vicar made his way across the green toward the village he deliberated very gravely. It was clear that such a matter would have to be followed up. But he must not act precipitately. Fully determined now not to flinch from an onerous task, he must look before and after.

Two courses presented themselves to his sense of outrage. And he must choose without delay. Before committing himself to definite action he must either see Gervase Brandon, whom he felt bound in a measure to blame for John Smith’s state of mind, and take advice as to what should be done, or he must see the young man’s mother and ask her help. It chanced, however, that Mrs. Smith’s cottage was near by. Indeed it skirted the common, and he had raised the latch of her gate before he realized that the decision had somehow been made for him, apparently by a force outside himself.

It was a very humble abode, typical of that part of the world, but a trim hedge of briar in front, a growth of honeysuckle above the porch, and a low roof of thatch gave it a rustic charm. The door stone had been freshly whitened, and the window curtains, simple though they were, were so neat and clean that the outward aspect of Rose Cottage was almost one of refinement.

The vicar’s sharp knock was answered by a village girl, a timid creature of fourteen. At the sight of the awe-inspiring figure on the threshold, she bobbed a curtsey, and in reply to the question: “Is Mrs. Smith at home?” gurgled an inaudible “Yiss surr.”

“Is that the vicar?” said a faint voice.

Mr. Perry-Hennington said reassuringly that it was, and entered briskly, with that air of decision the old ladies of the parish greatly admired.

A puny, white-haired woman was seated in an armchair in the chimney corner, with a shawl over her shoulders. She had the pinched, wistful look of the permanent invalid, yet the peaked face and the vivid eyes had great intelligence. But they were also full of suffering, and the vicar, at heart genuinely kind, was struck by it at once.

“How are you today, Mrs. Smith?” he said.

“No better and no worse than I’ve been this last two years,” said the widow in a voice that had not a trace of complaint. “It is very kind of you to come and see me. I wish I could come to church.”

“I wish you could, Mrs. Smith.” The vicar took a chair by her side. “It would be a privilege to have you with us again.”

The widow smiled wanly. “It has been ordained otherwise,” she said. “And I know better than to question. God moves in a mysterious way.”

“Yes, indeed.” The vicar was a little moved to find John Smith’s mother in a state of grace. “There is strength and compensation in the thought.”

“If one has found the Kingdom it doesn’t matter how long one is tied to one’s chair.”

“It gratifies me to hear you say that.” The vicar spoke in a measured tone. And then suddenly, as he looked at the calm face of the sufferer, he grew hopeful. “Mrs. Smith,” he said, with the directness upon which he prided himself, “I have come to speak to you about your boy.”

“About John?” The widow, the name on her lips, lowered her voice to a rapt, hushed whisper.

The vicar drew his chair a little closer to the invalid. “I am very, very sorry to cause you any sort of trouble, but I want to ask you to use your influence with him; I want to ask you to give him something of your own state of mind.”

The widow looked at the vicar in surprise. “But,” she said softly, “it is my boy John who has made me as I am.”

The vicar was a little disconcerted. “Surely,” he said, “it is God who has made you what you are.”

“Yes, but it is through my boy John that He has wrought upon me.”

“Indeed! Tell me how that came to be.”

The widow shook her head and smiled to herself. “Don’t ask me to do that,” she said. “It is a long and wonderful story.”

But the vicar insisted.

“No, no, I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone would believe me. And the time has not yet come for the story to be told.”

The vicar still insisted, but this feeble creature had a will as tenacious as his own. His curiosity had been fully aroused, but common sense told him that in all human probability he had to deal with the hallucinations of an old and bed-ridden woman. A simple intensity of manner and words oddly devout made it clear that she was in a state of grace, yet it would seem to be rooted in some illusion in which her worthless son was involved. Although the vicar was without subtlety, he somehow felt that it would hardly be right to shatter that illusion. At the same time the key to his character was duty. And his office asked that in this case it should be rigidly performed. Let all possible light be cast upon the mental history of this man, even if an old and poor woman be stricken in the process. A cruel dilemma was foreshadowed, but let it be faced manfully.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said after a trying pause, “I am very sorry, but there is bad news to give you of your son.”

The effect of the words was remarkable.

“Oh, what has happened to him?” The placid face changed in an instant; one hand clutched at the thin bosom.

The vicar hastened to quell her fears. “Nothing has happened to him,” he said in a grave, kind tone, “but I grieve to say that his conduct leaves much to be desired.”

The widow could only stare at the vicar incredulously.

“I am greatly troubled about him. For a long time now I have known him to be a disseminator of idle and mischievous opinions. I have long suspected him of being a corrupter of our village youth. This morning”—carried away by a sudden warmth of feeling the vicar forgot the mother’s frailty—“he insulted my daughter with a most blasphemous remark, and when I ventured to remonstrate with him he entered upon a farrago of light and meaningless talk. In a word, Mrs. Smith, much as it grieves me to say so, I find your son an atheist, a socialist and a freethinker and I am very deeply concerned for his future in this parish.”

In the stress of indignation the vicar did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. But the widow was less disconcerted than he felt he had a right to expect her to be. It was true that she listened with amazement, but far from being distressed, she met him with frank skepticism. It deepened an intense annoyance to find that she simply could not believe him.

He gave her chapter and verse. But a categorical indictment called forth the remark that, “John was such a great scholar that ordinary people could not be expected to understand him.”

Such a statement added fuel to the flame. Mr. Perry-Hennington did not pretend to scholarship himself, but he had such a keen and just appreciation of that quality in other people that these ignorant words aroused a pitying contempt. The mother’s attitude could only be taken as a desire to shield and uphold her son.

“Well, Mrs. Smith,” said the vicar, rising from his chair, “I have to tell you that talk of this kind cannot be tolerated here. I very much hope you will speak to him on the matter.”

“But who am I, vicar, that I should presume to speak to him?”

“You are his mother.”

“Of late I have begun to doubt whether I can be his mother.”

The vicar looked at the widow in amazement. “Surely you know whether or not he is your son?” he said in stern surprise.

“Yes, he is the child of my body, but I grow afraid to claim him as mine.”

“For what reason?”

“He is not as other men.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the vicar with stern impatience.

The widow looked at the vicar with a sudden light of ecstasy in her eyes. “I can only tell you,” she said, “that my husband was killed in battle months before a son was born to me. I can only tell you that I prayed and prayed continually that there might be no more wars. I can only tell you that one night an angel came to me and said that my prayer had been heard and would shortly be answered. I was told that I should live to see a war that would end all wars. And then my boy was born and I called him John Emanuel.”

The vicar mustered all his patience as he listened, half-scandalized, to the widow’s statement. He had to fortify himself with the obvious fact that she was a feeble creature who had known many sorrows, whose mind had at last given way. Somehow he felt a shocked resentment, but she was so palpably sincere that it was impossible to visit it upon her. And then the thought came to him that this pitiful illusion was going to add immensely to his difficulties. Having always known her for a decent woman and, when in health, a regular churchgoer, he had counted confidently upon her help. It came as a further embarrassment to find her mind affected. For her sake he might have been inclined to temporize a little with the son, in the hope that she would bring the influence of a known good woman to bear upon him. But that hope was now vain. The widow’s own mind was in a state of almost equal disorder, and any steps the matter might demand must now be taken without her sanction.

Had the mother infected the son, or had the son infected the mother was now the vicar’s problem. Regarding the one as a natural complement to the other, and reading them together, he saw clearly that both were a little unhinged. Beyond all things a good and humane man, he could not help blaming himself a little that he had not realized sooner the true state of the case. Now that he had spoken with the mother, the son became more comprehensible. Without a doubt the one had reacted on the other. It simplified the task it would be his bounden duty to perform, even if it did not make it less repugnant. The fact that two persons shared such a fantastic illusion made it doubly imperative that immediate steps should be taken in a matter which Mr. Perry-Hennington was now viewing with a growing concern.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said very sternly, “there is one question I feel bound to ask. Am I right in the assumption that you regard your son as a—er—a messiah?”

The answer came at once.

“Yes, vicar, I do,” said the widow falteringly. “The angel of the Lord appeared to me, and my son John—if my son he is—has come to fulfill the Prophecy.”

V

The vicar left Rose Cottage in a state of the deepest perturbation he had ever known. He was not the kind of man who submits lightly to any such feeling, but again the sensation came upon him, which he had first felt half an hour ago in his amazing interview with John Smith, that an abyss had suddenly opened under his feet, into which he had already stumbled.

That such heresies should be current in his own little cure of Penfold-with-Churley, with which he had taken such infinite trouble for the past thirty-five years, that they should arise in his own personal epoch, and that of his favorite books and newspapers and friends and fellow workers and thinkers, was so remarkable that he hardly knew how to face the sore problem to which they gave rise. Unquestionably such ideas were a by-product of this terrible war which was tearing up civilization by the roots. In a sense there was consolation in the thought. Abnormal events give rise to abnormal mental processes. Half-developed, ill-regulated, morbidly impressionable minds were very likely to be overthrown by such a phase as the world was now passing through. But even that reflection did little to reduce Mr. Perry-Hennington’s half-indignant sense of horror, or to soften the fierce ordeal in which he was now involved.

What should he do? An old shirker of issues he did not look for help in the quarter where some might have sought it. He was therefore content to put his question to the bracken, to the yellow gorse, to the golden light of heaven which was now beginning to beat uncomfortably upon him.

“Why do anything?” answered the inner voice of the university graduate qua the county gentleman. “Edith is naturally a little upset, but the question to ask oneself is: Are these poor crackbrains really doing any harm?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington had been long accustomed to identify that particular voice with the highest part of himself. In many of the minor crises which had arisen in his life he had thankfully and gratefully followed it. There were times undoubtedly when it was the duty of a prudent person to turn the blind eye to the telescope. But a very little reflection convinced him that this occasion was not one of them.

Apart from the fact that it was quite impossible to allow such a fantastic heresy to arise in his parish, there was the public interest to consider. The country was living under martial law, and it had come to his knowledge that the King’s enemies were receiving open countenance. The man Smith was a poor sort of creature enough, however one might regard him, but he was thought to have influence among persons of his own standing, and it was said to be growing. Moreover, there was “his faith-healing tomfoolery” to be taken into account; at the best a trivial business, yet also a portent, which was having an effect upon the credulous and the ignorant. Therefore the man must be put in his place. And if possible he must be taught a lesson. The subject was beset with thorns of the prickliest kind, but the vicar had never lacked moral courage of an objective sort, and he felt he would be unworthy of his cloth if for a moment he allowed himself to shirk his obvious duty.

While a rather hide-bound intellect set squarely to the problem before it, Mr. Perry-Hennington marched slowly along the only attempt at a street that the village of Penfold could boast. At the far end was a massive pair of iron gates picked out with gold, surmounted by a medieval arch of stone, upon which a coat of arms was emblazoned. Beyond these portals was a short avenue of glorious trees which led to the beautiful old house known as Hart’s Ghyll, the seat for many generations of the squires of Penfold.

The symbol above the gates brought the vicar up short with a shock of surprise. Unconscious of the direction in which the supraliminal self had been leading him, he was inclined to accept it as the clear direction of a force beyond himself. It seemed, therefore, right to go at once and lay this difficult matter before Gervase Brandon, the man whom he felt bound to blame more than anyone else for John Smith’s unhappy state of mind.

The owner of Hart’s Ghyll, having married Mr. Perry-Hennington’s niece, could claim to be his relation by marriage. Brandon, a man of forty-two, born to the purple of assured social position, rich, cultivated, happily wed, the father of two delightful children, had seemed to possess everything that the heart of man could desire. Moreover, he had a reputation not merely local as a humane and liberal thinker—a too liberal thinker in the opinion of the vicar, who was proud to belong to a sturdier school. A model landlord who housed his laborers in absurdly modern and hygienic dwellings, who, somewhat to the scandal of less enlightened neighbors, allowed his smaller tenants to farm his land at purely nominal rents, he did his best to foster a spirit of thrift, independence and true communal feeling.

As a consequence there were those who held the squire of Penfold to be a mirror of all the virtues. There was also a smaller but vastly more influential class which could not bear to hear his name mentioned. He was mad, said the county Guys of the district. The vicar of Penfold did not go quite to that length, but he sympathized with the point of view. When he lunched and dined, as he often did, with the neighboring magnates, he was wont to sigh sadly over “that fellow Brandon,” and at the same time gravely lament, but not without an air of plaintive humor, that niece Millicent had yet to teach him sense. And this statement always involved the corollary that niece Millicent’s failure was the more surprising since the Perry-Henningtons were a sound old Tory stock.

The opinion current in old-port-drinking circles was that Gervase Brandon was as charming a fellow as you would meet in a day’s march, but that he was overeducated—he had been a don at Oxford before he came into the property—and that he had more money to spend than was good for him. For some years he had been “queering the pitch” for less happily placed neighbors and contemporaries, and these found it hard to forgive him. They had prophesied that the day would come when his vagaries would cause trouble, and at the moment the famous Brandon coat of arms of the lion and the dove, and its motto: “Let the weak help the strong, let the strong help the weak,” came within the vicar’s purview, he felt that the prophecy had been most oddly, not to say dramatically, fulfilled.

If blame there was for the appearance of a Mad Mullah in the parish, without a doubt it must be laid to the door of Gervase Brandon. In the most absurd way he had long encouraged one whom the vicar could only regard as a wastrel. He had allowed this incorrigible fellow the run of the Hart’s Ghyll library, and the vicar recalled meeting John Smith in the village street with a priceless Elzevir copy of Plato’s Theætetus under his arm, the Brandon crest stamped on the leather, the Brandon bookplate inside. The vicar understood that the man had been a frequent visitor at the house, that money had been given him from time to time, and that the mother had been allowed to occupy the cottage on the common rent free. Was it to be wondered at that a weak, half-developed brain had been thrown off its balance?

In these circumstances it was right that Gervase Brandon should be made to understand the mischief he had wrought; it was right that he should be called upon to take a hand in the adjustment of the coil. But as Mr. Perry-Hennington passed through the gate of Hart’s Ghyll and walked slowly up the avenue toward the house there was still a reservation in his mind. As matters were with Brandon now he might not be able to grapple with a problem of a nature to make heavy demands upon the mental and moral faculties.

The vicar had scarcely entered upon this aspect of the case, when the sight of a spinal carriage in the care of two nurses forbade any more speculation upon the subject. He was suddenly brought face to face with reality in a grimly practical shape.

“How are you this morning, Gervase?” said the vicar, stopping the little procession with a hearty voice. The question was addressed to a gaunt, hollow-eyed man in a green dressing gown, who was propped up on pillows.

“I’ve nothing to complain of,” said Gervase Brandon. He spoke in a calm, gentle way. “Another capital night.”

“Do you still have pain?”

“None for a week, I’m thankful to say. But I touch wood!”

The optimistic, almost gay tone did not deceive the vicar. The tragic part of the matter was that the cessation of pain was not a hopeful sign. Brandon might not have known that. This morning, at any rate, he had the half-defiant cheerfulness of one who did not intend to admit physical calamity. Yet he must have well understood the nature of the thing that had come upon him. For three long, terrible months he had lain on his back, paralyzed from the waist down, the result of shell shock sustained on the beaches of Gallipoli. There was every reason to fear a lesion of certain ganglia, and little hope was now held out that he would ever walk again.

To a man in meridian pride of body such a prospect hardly bore thinking about. But the blow had been borne with a fortitude at which even a man so unimaginative as the vicar could only marvel. Not again would the owner of Hart’s Ghyll prune his roses, or drive a golf ball, or cast a fly, or take a pot shot at a rabbit; not again would he take his children on his knee.

Brandon had always been the least militant of men. His instincts were liberal and humane, and in the happy position of being able to live as he chose he had gratified them to the full. He had had everything to attach him to existence; if ever fortune had had a favorite it was undoubtedly he. It had given him everything, with a great zest in life as a crowning boon. But in August, 1914, in common with so many of his countrymen, he had cast every personal consideration to the wind and embraced a life which he loathed with every fiber of his being.

He had only allowed himself one reason for the voluntary undertaking of a bestial task, and it was the one many others of his kind had given: “So that that chap won’t have to do it”—the chap in question being an engaging, curly-headed urchin still in the care of a governess. Well, the father had “done his bit,” but as far as the small son was concerned there was no guaranty that it had not been done in vain. And none knew that better than the shattered man propped up in the spinal carriage.

The sight of Gervase Brandon had done something to weaken the vicar’s resolve. It hardly seemed right to torment the poor fellow with this extremely disagreeable matter. Yet a moment’s reflection convinced Mr. Perry-Hennington that it would be most unwise to take any decisive step without discussing it with the man best able to throw light upon it. Moreover, as the vicar recognized, Brandon’s mental powers did not seem to have shared his body’s eclipse. He appeared to enjoy them to the full; in fact it might be said that complete physical prostration had added to their perceptiveness. Whenever the vicar talked with him now he was much impressed by the range and quality of his mind.

“Gervase,” said the vicar after a brief mental survey of the position, “I wonder if I might venture to speak to you about something that is troubling me a good deal?”

“Certainly, certainly,” said the occupant of the spinal carriage, with an alert, almost eager smile. “If there’s any way in which I can be of the slightest use, or any way in which you think I can I shall be only too delighted.”

“I hate having to bother you with a matter of this kind. But it is likely that you know something about it. And I am greatly in need of advice, which I hope you may be able to give.”

“I hope I may.” The vicar’s gravity was not lost upon Brandon. “Perhaps you would like to discuss it in the library?”

“If you don’t mind.”

VI

To the library the spinal carriage was taken. When it had been wheeled into the sunny embrasure of that wonderful room, which even the vicar never entered without a slight pang of envy, the nurses retired, leaving the two men together.

The library of Hart’s Ghyll was richly symbolical of the aristocracy of an old country. It had once been part of a monastery which had been set, as happened invariably when religion had a monopoly of learning and taste, in the fairest spot the countryside could offer for the purpose. From the large mullioned window the view of Hart’s Ghyll and its enchanted vistas of hill, stream and woodland beyond was a miracle of beauty. And the walls of the room displayed treasures above price, such a collection of first editions and old masters as even a man so insensitive as the vicar sometimes recalled in his dreams. Their present owner, who in the vicar’s opinion had imbibed the modern spirit far too freely, had often said that he could not defend possession in such abundance by one who had done nothing to earn it. In an ideal state, had declared this advanced thinker, these things would be part of the commonweal—a theory which Mr. Perry-Hennington considered fantastic. To his mind, as he had informed niece Millicent, it was perilously like an affront to the order of divine providence.

The spirit of place seemed to descend upon the vicar, as in a hushed, rather solemn tone, he asked Brandon whether the sun would be too much for him.

“Not for a man who has been grilled in Gallipoli,” answered Brandon with a stoic’s smile. “But if you will open that window a little wider and roll me back a bit, I shall have my own piece of earth to look at. Give me this and you may take the rest of Christendom. It’s been soaked into my bones, into my brain. One ought to be a Virgil or a Wordsworth.”

“Which I hope you may presently prove, my dear fellow,” said the vicar, touched by a sense of the man’s heroism.

“Alas, they are born.”

“In spirit at any rate you are with them.” The vicar was moved to an infrequent compliment.

But he had suddenly grown nervous. Now that he was face to face with his task he didn’t know how to enter upon it. The wave of indignation which had borne him as far as the library of Hart’s Ghyll had been dissipated by the presence of a suffering it was surely inhuman to embarrass. The younger man, his rare faculty of perception strung to a high pitch, saw at once the vicar’s hesitation. Like an intensely sympathetic woman, Brandon began unconsciously to help him disburden his mind of that which was trying it so sorely.

At last Mr. Perry-Hennington found himself at the point where it became possible to break the ice.

“My dear Gervase,” he said, “there is nothing I dislike more than having to ask you to share my troubles, but a most vexing matter has arisen, and you are the only person whose advice I feel I can take.”

“I only hope I can be of use.”

“Well—it’s John Smith.” The vicar took the plunge. And as he did so, he was sufficiently master of himself to watch narrowly the face of the stricken man.

Brandon fixed deep eyes upon the vicar.

“But he’s such a harmless fellow.” The light tone, the placid smile, told nothing.

“I admit, of course, that one oughtn’t to be worried by a village wastrel.”

“I challenge the term,” said Brandon with the note of airy banter which always charmed. “Not for the first time, you know. I’m afraid we shall never agree about the dear chap.”

“No, I’m afraid we shall not.” The vicar could not quite keep resentment out of his voice. But in deference to a graceful and perhaps merited rebuke, the controversialist lowered his tone a little. “But let me give you the facts.”

Thereupon, with a naïveté not lost upon the man in the spinal carriage, Mr. Perry-Hennington very solemnly related the incident of the white feather.

Brandon said nothing, but looked at the vicar fixedly.

“I hate having to worry you in this way.” Mr. Perry-Hennington watched narrowly the drawn face. “Of course it had to be followed up. At first, I’ll confess, I took it to be a mere piece of blasphemous bravado in execrable taste, but now I’ve seen the man, now I’ve talked with him, I have come to another conclusion.”

The vicar saw that Brandon’s eyes were full of an intense, eager interest.

“Well?” said the sufferer softly.

“The conclusion I have come to is that it’s a case of paranoia.”

“That is to say, you think he intended the statement to be taken literally?”

“I do. But I didn’t realize that all at once. When I accused him of blasphemy he defended himself with a farrago of quasi mystical gibberish which amounted to nothing, and he ended with a perfectly fantastic statement. Let me give it you word for word. ‘At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said, “I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.” And I said, “Certainly, I shall be very glad to pray for Germany,” and we knelt and prayed together. And then he rose and showed me the little town with its quaint gables and turrets where he sleeps at night, and I asked him to have courage and then I embraced him and then he left me, saying he would return again.’”

Brandon’s face had an ever-deepening interest, but he did not venture upon a remark.

“Of course,” said the vicar, “one’s answer should have been, ‘My friend, he who aids, abets and harbors an unregistered alien enemy becomes amenable to the Defense of the Realm Regulations.’”

“What was your answer?” The look of bewilderment was growing upon Brandon’s face.

“I made none. I was completely bowled out. But I went at once to see the mother. And this is where the oddest part of all comes in. After a little conversation with the mother, I discovered that she most sincerely believes that her son is—is a messiah.”

Again the stricken man closed his eyes.

“There we have the clue. In a very exalted way she told me how her son was born six months after her husband had been killed in action. She told me how she had prayed that all wars might cease, how an angel appeared to her with a promise that she would live to see the war which would end all wars; she told me how a son was born to her in fulfillment of the prophecy, and how she christened him John Emanuel. I was astounded. But now I have had time to think about the matter much is explained. The man is clearly suffering from illusions prenatally induced. There is no doubt a doctor would tell us that it explains his fits. It also accounts for his faith-healing nonsense. And there is no doubt that mother and son have reacted upon one another in such a way that they are now stark crazy.”

“And that is your deliberate opinion?”

“With the facts before me I can come to no other. It is the only charitable explanation. Otherwise I should have felt it to be my duty to institute a prosecution under the blasphemy laws. Only the other day there was a man—a tailor, I believe—imprisoned under the statute of Henry VII. But if, as there is now every reason to think, it is a simple case of insanity, one will be relieved from that disagreeable necessity.”

Brandon concurred.

“But as you will readily see, my dear Gervase, the alternative is almost equally distressing. To clear him of the charge of blasphemy it will be necessary to prove him insane; and in that event, of course, he cannot remain at large.”

“Surely the poor chap is quite harmless?”

“Harmless!” Mr. Perry-Hennington had difficulty in keeping his voice under control. “A man who goes about the parish proclaiming himself a god!”

“He has Plotinus with him at any rate.” Again the stricken man closed his eyes. “How says the sage? ‘Surely before this descent into generation we existed in the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us Gods; clear souls and minds immixed with all existence; parts of the Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now.’”[1]

“Really, my dear Gervase,” said the vicar, trying very hard to curb a growing resentment, “one should hesitate to quote the pagan philosophers in a matter of this kind.”

“I can’t agree. They are far wiser than us in the only thing that matters after all. They have more windows open in the soul.”

“No, no.” Mr. Perry-Hennington strove against vehemence. “Still, we won’t go into that.” He was on perilous ground. Of late years Brandon himself had been a thorn in the sacerdotal cushion. The modern spirit had led him to skepticism, so that, in the vicar’s phrase, “he had become an alien in the household of faith.” Now was not the moment to open an old wound or to revive the embers of controversy. But the vicar felt the old spiritual enmity, which Brandon’s stoic heroism had lulled to sleep, again stirring his blood. Therefore, he must not allow himself to be involved in a false issue. Let him keep rigidly to the business in hand. And the business in hand was: What shall be done with John Smith?

It was clear at once that in Brandon’s opinion there was no need to do anything. The vicar felt ruefully that he should have foreseen this attitude. But he had a right to hope that Brandon’s recent experiences, even if they had not changed him fundamentally, would have done something to modify the central heresies. Nothing was further from the vicar’s desire than to bear hardly upon one who had carried himself so nobly, but Brandon’s air of tolerance was a laxity not to be borne. Mr. Perry-Hennington’s soul was on fire. It was as much as he could do to hold himself in hand.

“You see, my dear fellow,” he said, “as the case presents itself to me, I must do one of two things. Either I must institute a prosecution for blasphemy, so that the law may deal with him, or, as I think would be the wiser and more humane course, I must take steps to have him removed to an asylum.”

“But why do anything?”

“I feel it to be my duty.”

“But he’s so harmless. And a dear fellow.”

“I wish I could share your opinion. I can only regard him as a plague spot in the parish. Insanity is his only defense and it has taken such a noxious form that it may infect others.”

“Hardly likely, one would think.”

“We live in abnormal times. I am very sorry, but I can only regard this man as a moral danger to the community. Edith was greatly shocked. I was greatly shocked. You must excuse my saying so, Gervase, but I cannot help feeling that in the circumstances the vast majority of right-thinking people would be.”

“But who are the people who think rightly?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington raised a deprecating hand. Yet Brandon, having acted in the way he had, was entitled to put the question. He had given more than life for an idea, and that fact made it immensely difficult for the vicar to deal with him as faithfully as he could have wished. He was face to face with a skeptic, but the skeptic was intrenched in a special position where neither contempt nor active reproach of any kind must visit him.

But in spite of himself the old slumbering antagonisms were now awake in the vicar. Brandon, too, was a dangerous paradoxical man. Notwithstanding the honor and the love he bore him, Mr. Perry-Hennington felt his pulses quicken, his fibers stiffen. If ever man did, he saw his duty straight and clear. The only real problem was how to do it with the least affront to others, with the least harm to the community.

“By the way,” said Brandon, his gentle voice filling an awkward pause that had suddenly ensued, “have you ever really talked with John Smith?”

“Oh, yes, many times.”

“I mean have you ever really tried—if I may put it that way—to get at the back of his mind?”

“As far as one can. But to me he seems to have precious little in the way of mind to get at the back of. As far as one’s own limited intelligence will allow one to judge, the mind of John Smith seems a half-baked morass, a mere hotch-potch of moonstruck transcendentalisms, overlaid with a kind of Swedenborgian mysticism, if one may so express oneself. To me it seems a case where a little regular training at a university and the clear thinking it induces would have been of enormous value.”

Brandon smiled. “Have you seen his poem?” he asked.

“No.” The answer was short; and then the vicar asked in a tone which had a tinge of disgust, “Written a poem, has he?”

“He brought it to me the other day.” Again Brandon closed his eyes. “To my mind it is very remarkable,” he said half to himself.

“It would be, no doubt,” said the vicar, half to himself also.

“I should like you to read it.”

“I prefer not to do so,” said the vicar after a pause. “My mind is quite made up about him. It would only vex me further to read anything he may have written. We live by deeds, not by words, and never more so than in this stern time.”

“To my mind, it is a very wonderful poem,” said the stricken man. “I don’t think I am morbidly impressionable—I hope I’m not—but that poem haunts me. It is even changing my outlook. It is an extravagant thing to say, but the feeling it leaves on one’s mind is that if a spectator of all time and all existence, a sort of Cosmostheorus, were to visit the planet at this moment, it is the way in which he might be expected to deliver himself.”

“Neoplatonism of the usual brand, I presume.” There was a slight curl of a thin lip.

“Of a very unusual brand, I assure you. It may be neoplatonism, and yet—no—one cannot give it a label. There is the Something Else behind it.” Once more the stricken man closed his eyes. “Yes, there is the Something Else. The thing infolds me like a dream, a passion. I feel it changing me.”

“What is it called?” the vicar permitted himself to ask.

“It is called ‘The Door.’”

“Why ‘The Door’?”

“Is there a Door still open for the human race?—that is the question the poem asks.”

“A kind of mysticism, I presume?”

“I wish I could persuade you to read the poem. To my mind it has exquisite beauty, and a profundity beyond anything I have ever read. It asks a question which at this moment admits of no answer. Everything hangs in the balance. But the theme of the poem is the future’s vital need, the keeping open, at all costs, of the Door.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington shook his head sadly, but the gesture was not without indulgence. He was ready to make allowance for Brandon’s present state. The importance he attached to such lucubrations was quite unworthy of an ex-Fellow of Gamaliel, at any rate in the eyes of a former Fellow of All Saints, which under an old but convenient dispensation Mr. Perry-Hennington could claim to be. This morbid sensibility was a fruit of Brandon’s disease no doubt. But for his own part the vicar had neither time nor inclination for what could only be an ill-digested farrago of mystical moonshine. Unhappily nothing was left to poor Brandon now except to ease his mind as best he could. Such a mental condition was to be deplored. Yet the vicar fervently hoped that the canker would not bite too deep.

“Do let me get the poem for you to read.” Brandon’s eyes were full of entreaty.

“No, no, my dear fellow,” said the vicar gently. “I really haven’t time to give to such things just now. All one’s energies are absorbed in dealing with things as they are. I am quite prepared to take your word that the poem has literary merit—after all, you are a better judge of such matters than I am. But for those of us who have still our work to do, this is not a moment for poetic fancies or any other form of self-indulgence. Moreover, I must reserve my right to full liberty of action in a matter which is causing me grave concern.”

With these words the vicar took a chastened leave. It was clear that nothing was to be hoped for in this quarter. Bitterly disappointed, but more than ever determined to do his duty in a matter which promised to become increasingly difficult, the vicar shook Brandon gently by the hand and left the room. In the large Tudor hall, with its stone flags, old oak and rare tapestry, he came suddenly upon his niece.