THE very remarkable news from New York gave Brandon, for the rest
of his brief stay at Hart’s Ghyll, a feeling of almost perilous
exhilaration. Since his recovery, less than a year ago, his whole life
had been a subtle embodiment of the miraculous. And the letter from
Urban Meyer had intensified the sense of the miraculous to such a
degree, that at first it hardly seemed possible to meet the bald facts
of the case in its new aspect and remain perfectly rational. For more
years than Brandon cared to count, he had held the cold faith that
miracles do not occur; it had now been proved to him, beyond a doubt,
that miracles do occur, and he had to face the truth squarely, and yet
continue in the work of the world.
To make his task the more difficult, he could not help feeling that his
present job was one for which he was ill-qualified; certainly it was
not the one he would have chosen. Somehow it filled him with a deep
repugnance to train others in the art of killing, even in the art of
killing the Hun; but it was not for him to decide where such powers as
he had could be of most use to the state. He did not quarrel with the
edict which declared him unfit for the trenches, but there were times
when he would almost have preferred their particularly foul brand of
boredom to the dismal routine of acquiring a parade voice, and the
grind of rubbing up his mathematics, a branch of knowledge in which he
had never shone.
It came to him, therefore, with a sense of grateful relief, when one
day, about a week after he had returned to his unit, a letter reached
him of an informal friendliness, yet written on government paper. It
said:
_Whitehall,
December 2._