If a square peg can be persuaded to forsake a round hole, some of us
here feel that the country might make a more profitable use of your
services, that is to say, there is an opportunity to give your highly
specialized qualities freer play. A ministry of Social Reconstruction
is being formed, to deal mainly with post-war problems--it is not
quite our English way to take time by the forelock in this audacious
fashion, but some of our Colonial friends are teaching us a thing or
two--and last night in conversation with Prowse and Mortimer among
others, your name came up. We agreed that your particular light is
not one to hide under a bushel of coal. One shudders to think of the
number of tricks of the kind that have been played already, but at
last we are beginning to realize that the country can’t afford it. So
if you will consent to work under Prowse, with or without payment, I
think the War Office can be persuaded to spare you for a larger sphere
of usefulness.
Yours ever,
GEORGE SPEKE.
In the depths of his boredom Brandon could have kissed the letter,
and have wept for joy. The tact of an expert handler of men, who well
understood the bundle of quixotisms with whom he had to deal, had
played the tempter’s part with rare success. A letter of that kind left
no doubt that the country was about to gain enormously by depleting the
Tynesi de Terriers of a morbidly conscientious subaltern, while at the
same time enriching a government department with a real live ex-fellow
of Gamaliel.
It was not until early in the new year, however, that Brandon
was transferred to a wooden structure in Saint James’s Park, the
headquarters of the newly-created department. He was almost ashamed
to find how much more congenial was the work he had now to do. To the
really constructive mind, there is something repellent in the naïve
formulas, and the crude paraphernalia of mere destruction. Here in the
new “billet” was scope for a rather special order of brain. He was able
to look forward to a future in which a new England would arise. There
were already portents in the sky, portents which told him that the
world of the future was going to be a very different place from the
world of the past. Much depended on whether the grim specter of war
could be laid with reasonable finality for a long time to come, but
from the day in which he took up his new labors he did not doubt that,
whatever the final fate of Prussia, the issue of Armageddon itself
would be a nobler, a broader spirit in the old land which he loved so
dearly, and a freer, humaner world for every race that had to live in
it.
His position in the Social Reconstruction Bureau was one of importance.
Long before the war, even before he came into the Hart’s Ghyll
property, it had been his ambition to make the world a rather better
place for other people to inhabit. And the opportunities which came to
him now gave rare scope to a reawakened energy. A marvelous field had
been offered to this protagonist of works and faith.
In spite of the last terrible clinch in which the new world as well as
the old was now involved, these were great days for Brandon. His powers
burgeoned nobly in the service of that nation which had now definitely
emerged, in spite of all her limitations and her legacies from the
past, as the banner bearer of civilization.
Deep in his heart lay the faith that through blood and tears the whole
race of men would be born again. And month by month that faith grew,
even amid the final stupendous phase when the specter of famine stalked
through the land. Moreover, he had a sense of personal election. A
promise had been made to him, and through him, to his fellows. “One
unconverted believer” was now the living witness that all the old
prophecies were true.
Every living thing in the world around him, of which a supernal Being
was the center, had a new meaning, a new force, a new divinity.
Unsuspected powers were now his; latent faculties allowed him to live
more abundantly. He looked up where once a skeptic’s eye had looked
down, and the difference was that between a life in the full glory of
light and sorry groping in darkness.
The news always reaching him of the growth of the miracle was now the
motive power of a great belief, yet to one able to trace it from the
germ it hardly seemed credible or at the best too good to be true. From
many sources there came tidings of the new force at work in the world.
The play was making history; wherever it appeared, reverberations
followed. From one end of North America to the other, it had gone like
fire. Irenic in tone and intention it might be, but also within it was
that which raised it above party and above creed.
The people who saw and heard “A Play Without a Name” were able to
fulfill Urban Meyer’s prediction. A great world religion had found a
miraculous birth in the theater. By the wave of an enchanter’s wand,
the stage had become an inspired teacher who received the sanction of
the few, and met the need of the many. The message it had to deliver
was simple as truth itself, yet the divine charm of its setting forth
haunted even the smallest soul with a magic glimpse of the Kingdom of
the Something Else. The play’s appeal was so remarkable that many who
saw it simply lived for the time when they could see it again. It was
a draught from the waters of Helicon; and, for them who drank of the
Pierian spring, arose enchanted vistas of what the world might be if
love and fellowship, works and faith, were allowed to remake it.
Urban Meyer had said that the world might be born again through the
power of a great play. And in the first months of its production the
signs were many that he was a true prophet. Through the wedding of
insight with beauty, sympathy with truth, it reconciled factions,
harmonized creeds.
Those who asked too much of life rejoiced as greatly in its sovereign
humanity as those who asked too little. A divine simplicity spoke to
all sorts of men. The pillar of the Church and the despiser of all
religions, the over-good and the average person received from the well
of a pure and infinite love, a new evidence, a new portent of the risen
Christ.
It was said of those who saw it, that they were never quite the same
afterward. An enchantment was laid upon the heart of man. Feeling,
humor, imaginative truth, formed the basis of its triumph. A desire to
do good was evoked, not because it was a sound spiritual investment or
because others might be induced to do good to oneself, but it made of
well-doing a natural act, like the eating of food or the drawing of
breath.
Among the evidences of the new magic now at work in the world was a
remarkable letter which Brandon received at the beginning of February.
It said:
_Independence Theater,
New York,
January 24._