NOT altogether pleased with the turn of events, Dr. Joliffe drove the
vicar home. He was a conscientious man, and he had no more confidence
in “that fool Parker,” than Dr. Parker had in “that fool Joliffe.”
Still, the vicar could not be expected to know that. On the way back to
Penfold he was inclined to congratulate himself. Machinery had been set
in motion which could hardly fail to deal effectively with John Smith.
Dr. Joliffe was gloomy. All the way home he confined himself to polite
monosyllables, and kept his eyes glued to the steering wheel of the
car. Hitherto he had not had occasion to question the sanity of John
Smith, whom he had always regarded as a particularly harmless creature.
And even if the vicar had reported the man correctly, Dr. Joliffe was
by no means clear that Mr. Perry-Hennington was not taking an extreme
view of his duty.
The vicar, however, had not a doubt in the matter. A sermon unprepared
still cast its shadow over him, but a cloud had lifted from his mind. A
sanguine man endowed with great animal energy, he never questioned the
logic of his own views, the soundness of his judgment, or the absolute
rectitude of his conduct. It was in the interests of the community that
John Smith should be taken care of. It even gave the vicar a certain
satisfaction that his duty in a most disagreeable matter should now
stand out so clearly before him.
Mr. Perry-Hennington had only just time to drink a cup of tea at
the vicarage before he was off on his travels again. This time his
objective was Grayfield, a feudal sort of hamlet over on the Sussex
side. He had to speak at a recruiting meeting, arranged by his old
Magdalen friend Whymper, with whom a distinguished member of parliament
was spending the weekend.
Edith accompanied her father in the gig; and they had been invited to
dine at the manor after the meeting. Grayfield was a good hour for old
Alice, upon whom Anno Domini had set an unmistakable seal. But it was
a rare evening for a drive. The sweet, clean air of the Sussex uplands
was like a mellow wine; the road was straight and firm; the sun of June
still lingered over Ashdown; trees and hedges wore a sheen of glory,
with a trim farm or a cowled oasthouse nestling here and there. This
calm and quiet land with its mathematically parceled acres, its placid
cows and horses looking over five-barred gates to watch the stately
progress of old Alice, its occasional forelock-pulling rustic, was
like a “set” in a theater. The whole scene was so snug, so perfect, so
ordained, that nature appeared to have very little part to play in it.
“Odd to think that Armageddon is _here_,” said the vicar.
Edith thought it was, very.
The vicar gave a shake of the reins to encourage old Alice. And then he
said: “It’s my firm belief that there are people on this countryside
who don’t realize it even yet.”
“I’m sure there are,” said Edith.
“It will be brought home to every man, every woman, every child in the
land before we are through with it.”
“You think so?” said Edith, in the curious, precise voice she had
inherited from the Henningtons. “Personally I am not so sure. We are
much too secure here. I sometimes think that an invasion would be the
best thing that could happen to us.”
“I am inclined to agree with you,” said her father, with another shake
for old Alice. “But it’s gradually coming home to the nation. Rather
than give in we shall fight to the last man and the last shilling, and
unless they have altered since the days of Frederick the Great they
will do the same.”
“But it can’t go on indefinitely. It means extermination.”
“The end of civilization at any rate,” said the vicar mournfully. “The
clock has already been put back a century.”
“Sooner or later something must surely happen.”
“But what can happen? We don’t begin to look like downing them, and
it’s unthinkable that they can down us.”
“There’s God,” said Edith, in a voice of sudden, throbbing softness.
“I’m convinced that He must put an end to it soon.”
Before the vicar continued the conversation he gave Alice a little
touch of the whip.
“Have you ever thought, my dear girl, what an awful weight of sin there
is upon the human race? Instead of expecting God to put an end to it
soon, it will be little short of miraculous if He ever puts an end to
it at all.”
“But think of the awful suffering which falls for the most part on
those who are the least to blame.”
“There is Biblical precedent for all that has happened, nay for far
more than has happened. It is a judgment on the world, and the
innocent have to suffer with the guilty.”
Edith was silent a little while.
“It all seems so horribly unfair,” she said at last, in a deep,
palpitating tone which the vicar had not heard her use before. “It is
not the people who have made the war who are really suffering by it.”
“They who question!” and the vicar shook up old Alice yet again.
A long silence followed, through which old Alice jogged in her placid
way. Hardly a ripple stirred the evening air. It was very difficult to
realize what was happening within a hundred miles.
“I can’t help thinking of that man,” Edith suddenly remarked.
“What man?” said her father. For the moment his thoughts were far away.
An unwritten sermon was looming up at the back of his brain.
“John Smith. I can’t tell you what a curious impression he has left
upon me. Somehow I have done nothing but think of him ever since the
thing happened.”
It was a wrench for the vicar to quit the sequence of ideas which
was being formed so painfully in his mind. And for the time he had
had quite enough of the subject of John Smith, nay, was in process
of suffering a reaction from it. Besides it was such a vexatiously
disagreeable matter that he had no wish to discuss it more than was
absolutely necessary.
“I should forget the man if I were you,” was his counsel to Edith.
“Somehow I can’t. He’s made a most curious impression upon me. I begin
to feel now that I had no right to take for granted that what he said
was meant for blasphemy.”
The vicar dissented forcibly. “There can be no possible excuse for
him. It was a most improper remark for any man to make in such
circumstances, and you were quite right to feel as you did about it.
But if you are wise you will now put it out of your mind; at the
same time I should like you to give up the practice of distributing
feathers.”
“Yes, father, I will,” said Edith with a quick flush.
“You will be wise. I am arranging for an inquiry to be made into the
man’s mental condition.”
“Is that absolutely necessary?” The flush grew deeper.
“The public interest calls for it. This incident is a climax of many.”
“Yet somehow he doesn’t seem exactly insane.”
“Not even when he talks in that way?” said the vicar surprisedly. “My
dear girl, it is the only charitable explanation.”
“Do you really think so?” said the reluctant Edith.
“Demonstrably.”
“And yet somehow, when one really thinks about him, he seems so sweetly
reasonable.”
“Sweetly reasonable!” The vicar pinned down the unfortunate phrase.
“How can you say that? A mild and harmless creature, perhaps--apart
from his opinions--but reasonable!--surely that is the very last word
to apply to him.”
Perplexity deepened upon Edith’s face. “Somehow, I can’t throw off the
curious impression he has left upon me.”
“Try to forget the man.” The vicar spoke sternly.
“Dismiss him from your thoughts, at any rate while the case is _sub
judice_. You have done your duty by reporting the matter to me, and I
am doing mine by putting in motion proper machinery to deal with it.”
“I sincerely hope that nothing is going to happen to him.”
“He will be sent to an asylum.”
Edith shivered. “Oh, I hope not,” she said, drawing in her breath
sharply. “To my mind that is the cruellest fate that can overtake any
human being.”
“One doesn’t altogether agree,” said the vicar. “He will be taken
care of as he ought to be, and treated, of course, with the greatest
humanity. You must remember that asylums are very different places
from what they were sixty years ago, when Dickens--I think it was
Dickens--wrote about them.”
“But it must mean dreadful suffering to be held for the rest of one’s
life within four walls among lunatics without hope of escape.”
“Why should it, if the mind is really unsound? You must remember that
such people don’t suffer in the way that rational people do.”
“But suppose he doesn’t happen to be insane?”
“If he doesn’t happen to be insane the law cannot confine him as a
lunatic.”
“Who will decide?”
“He will be certified by two doctors.”
Again came silence, only broken by the peaceful plodding of old Alice.
And then said Edith suddenly: “Father, whoever certifies John Smith
will take an awful responsibility upon himself.”
“No doubt,” said the vicar. “Yet hardly so grave a one as you might
think. It is the only right, reasonable and charitable view to take of
him. And if the medical profession cannot be brought to do its clear
and obvious duty, the man will have to be dealt with in some other and
less gentle way.”
“I am beginning to wish I hadn’t spoken of the matter,” said Edith, in
an anxious tone.
“My dear,” said the vicar, shaking up old Alice, “in mentioning it,
disagreeable and distressing as it may be, you did no more than your
duty. You must now leave other people to do theirs, and at the same
time you must have the good sense to dismiss the matter entirely from
your thoughts.”
Again Edith shivered. But further discussion was forbidden by their
journey’s end. They had now reached the outskirts of Grayfield, and the
gates of the manor were before them.
X
THERE was a very stimulating meeting in the parish room. The squire of
Grayfield, the vicar’s Magdalen friend, Whymper, was by divine right
in the chair. He was a dry, melancholy, exanimate sort of creature; a
man of few words and very pronounced dislikes, not without force in a
narrow way, but locally of more account as the husband of Lady Jane
than from any native quality. Still, he made an excellent chairman.
Brief, concise, self-effacing, he loathed his job; anything in the
nature of speechifying bored him extremely, and he had a rooted
objection “to making an ass of himself in public,” but natural grit and
a high sense of duty pulled him through. In fact he did his job so well
that it would have been hard for any man to improve on his performance.
There were only two speakers. One was the vicar of Penfold, but he
was not the person who had filled the parish room to overflowing. A
famous member of Parliament, a reputed master of the forensic arts, was
spending a week-end at the manor house, and he had kindly consented to
rouse the young men of the district.
This paladin, who spoke before the vicar, was a tall thin-faced man of
forty-five, who hardly looked his age. George Speke by name, he was the
kind of man no British government is ever without, and he discoursed
the commonest of common sense with an air of ease and authenticity.
He put the case for Britain and her allies with a force and a cogency
that none could gainsay. And in that room at any rate, there was not
the slightest wish to gainsay it. Even the group of young men at the
back of the room, upon whom the local constable and two specials
kept a vigilant eye, and to whom Mr. Speke’s remarks were addressed
officially, showed no inclination to traverse his clear statement of
historical fact. It was a very finished effort, and somehow it moved
his audience.
Mr. Perry-Hennington came rather in the nature of an anticlimax. He had
no pretensions to be considered an orator, as he was careful to warn
his hearers at the outset; he had nothing to say that had not already
been said far better in print, yet he felt it to be his duty to stand
on a public platform and declaim obvious truths which the newspapers of
the realm had weeks ago made banal and threadbare. But somehow there
was a driving force, a contained ferocity about Mr. Perry-Hennington’s
sincerity, trite and ill-phrased as it was, which, with the aid of
copious “hear, hear’s” from Mr. Speke and his old Magdalen friend,
Whymper, first staved off an epidemic of coughing and then of
feet-shuffling, and then of coughing again. At last he got fairly into
his stride, a strong, unmusical voice increasing in violence as he did
so. And as the more violent he grew the more his audience approved,
they soon began to march together toward a thrilling climax. Finally
he swung into his fine peroration: “We shall not lay down the sword,
etc.,” which belonged to another, and ended stronger than he began
amidst quite a storm of cheering.
It was a mediocre performance, well within the range of any member of
the educated classes, yet all who heard it seemed greatly impressed.
Even Mr. Whymper and Mr. Speke seemed greatly impressed, and what was
of still more importance it went home to a number of young men at the
back of the room. When the meeting was over these came forward to the
table at the side of the platform, at which a recruiting officer sat,
and gave in their names. Nowhere else could such a scene have been
enacted. To the ordinary intelligence, it was almost unbelievable
that magnificent fellows in the pride of manhood could be moved to
the supreme sacrifice by the jejune lucidities of Mr. Speke, and
the brand of spirituality that the vicar of Penfold had to offer.
Something must have been in the air of that overheated room. Behind the
trite phrases, behind the rather otiose pomposities of the one, the
deliberately quiet, over-varnished style of the other, must have been
that spirit which, by hardly more than the breadth of a single hair,
had temporarily saved civilization for mankind.