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.”