Part 10

It was vain for Brandon to desist. He was at the mercy of Olympians who did not hesitate to misuse their powers. He was whisked off to bed like a naughty child, and the privilege of a further talk with John Smith was withdrawn indefinitely. He protested strongly to the nurse and bitterly to his wife, but he was told that it would not be safe to see the young man again until he could do so without playing tricks with his temperature.

Brandon fumed in durance for the rest of the day. The patience which had borne him through all his trials threatened to desert him now. He was tormented with the thought of his own helplessness. The recent visit had moved Brandon to the very depths of his being, and the longing to help John Smith escape the coil that fate was weaving now burnt in his veins a living fire. As he lay helpless and overwrought, on the verge of fever, the stupidities of the little world around him were magnified into a crime for which humanity itself would have to pay.

The next morning, Wednesday, at eleven o’clock came Dr. Joliffe. The higher medical science had begun to despair of ever restoring to Brandon the use of his limbs, and he was now in the sole care of his local attendant, who came to see him every other day.

Dr. Joliffe found the patient still keeping his bed by the orders of the nurse. In the course of an uncomfortable night he had slept little, and his temperature was still a matter for concern. Moreover, not the nurse alone, but Mrs. Brandon also, had already delivered themselves vehemently on the subject of John Smith.

For one reason or another Dr. Joliffe would have been very willing just now to consign John Smith to limbo. Nor was this desire made less when the patient, after being duly examined, reported upon, and admonished, requested the nurse to withdraw from the room in order that he might talk with the doctor privately.

Joliffe knew well enough what was coming. And he would have done much to avoid further contact with a most unhappy subject, from which consequences were flowing of an ever-increasing embarrassment. But there was no means of escape. For Brandon, the subject of John Smith had become almost an obsession; a fact which the doctor had begun to realize to his cost.

“What steps have been taken?” Brandon began as soon as they were free of the nurse’s presence.

“Steps?” Joliffe fenced a little.

“In regard to John Smith.” There was a sudden excitement in the bright eyes. “He’s in my mind night and day. I can’t bear the thought that he should be destroyed.”

“I’m sorry to say that Birdwood Thompson can’t come here.” The professional voice was dulcet and disarming. “He’s in a very bad state of health and giving up practice. His second boy went down on the _Victorious_, and his eldest was killed the other day in France, so I suppose that may have something to do with it.”

“Well, what is being done?”

“As you ask the question,” was the cautious reply, “we have agreed upon Murfin. Personally, I don’t think he’s as good as Moriarty or the other man, but we wrote to him in order to save trouble.”

“In order to save trouble!” Brandon gasped. “Save trouble in a matter of this kind?”

“Certainly. And we are all of us very anxious that you should not worry over it any more.”

“But--don’t you see--what a terrible thing it is?”

“Not exactly terrible.” Dr. Joliffe spoke gravely but cheerfully. “Quite an everyday occurrence, you know, if one looks at it in the right way.”

“An everyday occurrence--if--one--looks--at--it--in--the right way!”

“Undoubtedly. Cases of this kind are always arising. Whatever view one may take of the man, he is certainly on the border line; therefore, whether he’s certified or not is merely a question of expediency. And what I have to point out to you is that in the last resort, as the world is just now, with all these public safeguards in operation the final decision will be taken by the authorities.”

“How cruel!” said Brandon, with growing excitement.

“Not necessarily cruel,” said Dr. Joliffe in a mellifluous tone.

“To think of our local _Shallows_ sitting in judgment on the first spirit of the age!”

“The irony of circumstances.”

“No.” Brandon’s eyes were hectic. “It takes more than two thousand years to change the world. An old story is being retold with a few modern improvements. I see that. But, Joliffe, I believe you to be a just man, and I count on your help. For the love we both bear the Republic, I want you to put up a fight for John Smith.”

“There, my dear fellow, calm yourself,” said the doctor soothingly. “I will undertake to see that no injustice is done in the matter.”

“In other words, that he is not molested.”

“That is beyond my power, because, as I say, the Bench will move if we don’t.”

“Then leave it to them to take the first step. And in the meantime we’ll get legal advice.”

“Murfin comes down on Friday.”

“Easy to stop him.”

“The vicar won’t consent to that, I’m afraid.”

“No, I suppose not. But if you love this country you will do your best to restrain a profoundly stupid man.”

Plain, common-sensible Dr. Joliffe thought the line of argument a little high-flown, and said so in a tone of scrupulous kindness.

“I don’t overstate,” said Brandon. “Let me explain my meaning. The Republic is rising to a height of moral grandeur that few would have dared to prophesy for her. But as always, there is a flaw in her armor. The enemies of the light are seeking it, and if they should find it there is absolutely nothing between this world and barbarism.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.” Dr. Joliffe shook a grave head.

“I can tell you that she is about to treat her most august citizen as Rome, her great prototype, treated Another.”

Dr. Joliffe continued to shake his head. Not only was he puzzled, he was rather distressed by such an extravagant statement. “How I wish I could get your mind off this subject!” he said.

“You must not hope to do that,” said Brandon. “It is decreed that I should lie supine, a helpless log, while night and day my brain is turned into a weaver’s shuttle. I can do nothing, yet I somehow feel that the high gods have called me to do everything. This man has no other friend, and it is for that reason, Joliffe, that I ask you to stand my proxy in his defense.”

“But I assure you no defense is possible,” said Joliffe, with a feeling of growing distress.

“Let us brief counsel.”

“No purpose will be served. As you know, the vicar is a most stubborn man. And if he doesn’t succeed one way he will another. If we doctors are obdurate he will turn to the Bench, and if the Bench won’t oblige he’ll have recourse to the military.”

“It hardly seems credible.”

“I agree. But that’s the man. And the worst of it is that from his own point of view in a time like the present he may be perfectly right.”

“I refuse to believe that he can be right at any time.”

“But surely, a man who sides openly with the enemy ought not to be at large.”

“Has he gone beyond what Jesus would have done in such circumstances?”

“Hardly a practical analogy, I’m afraid. In any case, John Smith is not Jesus, even if his half-witted old mother may think so. The law is bound to regard him as a crack-brained rustic, and in my humble opinion anyone who tries to persuade it that the poor fellow is anything else, will be very unwise.”

“In other words you decline your help?”

“Only because,” said Dr. Joliffe, “I now see the hopelessness of the position. Knowing John Smith as I do, I consider that Mr. Perry-Hennington has made a mountain out of a molehill. Of course he’s a fanatic on the subject, but the poor, feckless chap is amenable to the law as it exists at present, and he has no means of escape. It will be far wiser, believe me, to accept the inevitable. All that his friends can hope to do is to make things as comfortable for him as possible.”

“That shall be done at any rate,” said Brandon. “It is Perry-Hennington’s intention, I presume, to have him sent to the county asylum.”

“It is the only place for him, I’m afraid. But, of course, even there he will be extremely well treated.”

“I don’t question that, but assuming it to be his destination, I should like him to live in comfort and dignity. Wouldn’t it be possible for him to go to some such place as Wellwood Sanatorium?”

“Well, of course,” said Dr. Joliffe, “that is almost a question of ways and means. Wellwood is an ideal place for the poor fellow. But of course it is out of the question.”

“Why?”

“The expense.”

“No matter what it may be,” said Brandon, “I shall be only too happy to bear it.”

“It will not be less than five hundred a year.”

“If it were twice as much I should count it a high privilege to be allowed to do that for him.”

Dr. Joliffe shook the head of a prudent man over this piece of quixotism. “Very generous of you,” he said, “but they look after their patients so extraordinarily well at Broad Hill, that I am sure this expense is quite unnecessary.”

Brandon, however, stuck to his plan.

He had now made up his mind that if the worst happened, Wellwood should be the home of John Smith.

“Very well.” Dr. Joliffe saw that a purposeless opposition could do no good. “If the necessity arises it shall be arranged for him to go there. And now I want you to forget all about this miserable matter. Dismiss it entirely from your thoughts.”

“Impossible,” said Brandon. “We are deliberately closing the Door.”

“Closing the door?”

“For the human race.”

The doctor looked sadly, uncomprehendingly at his patient. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Of course you don’t, my dear friend. It is not to be expected that you should. And at present I can’t enlighten you.”

Dr. Joliffe shook a rather ominous head. Brandon was a mass of morbid fancies and illusions; and the doctor was very far indeed from being satisfied with the state in which he found him. He felt it to be his duty to give a little serious admonition, and then he withdrew from the room. The nurse was waiting in the dressing room adjoining, and to her he confided certain misgivings. The patient must stay in bed, he must not read, he must avoid all things likely to cause worry or excitement. And beyond everything else his mind must be kept from the subject of John Smith.

XXIV

IN the evening of the same day the vicar dined at Longwood. Edith accompanied him. Mr. Murdwell had the forethought to send a car for his guests, so that a mile journey on a wet night was made _en prince_.

Mr. Perry-Hennington was not in a mood for dining out. A certain matter was still in abeyance, and it seemed to hang over him like a cloud. He felt it was weak and illogical to allow such an affair, which was one of simple duty, to disturb him. But somehow he was far more upset by it than he cared to own.

Fortunately, the evening made no great demand upon the guests. Indeed, it proved to be an agreeable relaxation. There was nothing in the nature of a party, a fact of which the vicar had been expressly apprised beforehand; five people, to wit; Mr. Murdwell, his wife and daughter, Edith and himself.

Mr. Perry-Hennington was well able to appreciate a good dinner. And in spite of his present rather disgruntled state, he did not remember ever to have had a better in the course of many years of dining out. The perfection of Parisian cooking allied to dry champagne was without a suspicion of war time economy; and though the lavishness of the menu did not march with the vicar’s recent pronouncements, it was hardly possible to rebuke it in the present case. Besides, these people were American; their wealth was said to be beyond the dreams of avarice; and to judge by the frame in which they were set, there seemed to be little need for them to economize in anything.

The vicar confided to Edith afterward that he had found their new neighbors “most entertaining.” And this was strictly true. Intellectually he was not quite so ossified as his theological outfit made him appear. Behind the arrogance, the dogmatism, the closed mind, was a certain shrewd man-of-the-worldliness, conceived on broad and genial lines, which is seldom lacking in the English upper class. And of that class Mr. Perry-Hennington was not an unworthy specimen. He could tell a story with anyone; he knew, had known, and was connected with many persons whom the world regards as interesting; he was traveled, sociable, distinguished in manner, and the impression he made upon his host and upon his hostess more particularly--which after all was the more important matter--was decidedly favorable.

Mr. Murdwell was a man of international reputation, though sprung from quite small beginnings in his native Ohio. And behind the sophisticated naïveté of Jooly his wife, and Bud his daughter, was a well-marked tendency to think in dukes and duchesses. They had known them on the Riviera, had studied them in hotels and country houses in divers lands, and there was little doubt that sooner or later Bud would burgeon into a princess.

The _famille_ Murdwell had traveled far in a very short time. Its rise had been one of the romances of scientific and social America. The genius of Murdwell _père_, to which the whole world was now paying tribute, had, among many other things, raised a palace on Fifth Avenue, acquired property on Long Island, and a villa in Italy. To these was now added an English country house “for the duration of the war.”

This was the first appearance of the Murdwell ladies in the United Kingdom, and they were immensely interested in it. They had only been three months in the country and everything was new. Hitherto their knowledge of it had been based on the Englishman abroad, the reports of travelers, and the national output of fiction. As a consequence, they frankly owned that they had rather underrated it. So far they had been agreeably surprised to find it not altogether a one-horse affair. It is true they had arrived in the island at an exceptional time, but somehow it was more a going concern than they had been led to expect.

For instance, when they were told that the local parson and his daughter were coming to dinner, they had good-humoredly resigned themselves to an evening of acute boredom. But one of the social peculiarities of England, as far as they had seen it at present, was that things are always just a bit better than you look for--the evening, when it came, was really so much more entertaining than a similar function would have been in Kentucky, which they took as the equivalent for Sussex.

On sight, the meager, high-shouldered, rather frumpish, rather myopic Miss Thing, with the double-barreled name and the tortoise-shell spectacles, which she wore with effect, promised to be all that the lawless fancy of Bud and Jooly had painted her. But that was a first view. By the time dinner was over they had found things in common with her, and before the evening was out they were more inclined to sit at her feet than she was to sit at theirs. Their wonderful food and wine, their clothes and their surroundings, Bud’s pearls and Jooly’s diamonds, and their talk of Prince This and the Marquis So-and-So seemed to have not the slightest effect upon her. She took everything, Bud and Jooly included, so very much for granted, that their curiosity was piqued. Her dress was worth about a shilling a yard, her hair was done anyhow, her features did not conform to their idea of the beautiful, yet she was not in the least parochial, and both ladies agreed, that had you searched America from the east coast to the west it would have been hard to find anything quite like her.

The vicar puzzled them even more. They were not able to range him at all. Perhaps the thing which impressed them most was “that he didn’t show his goods in the window.”

Indeed, this fact may have struck Mr. Murdwell himself. For as soon as the meal was under way he began to discuss, with a frankness and a humor to which his guests didn’t in the least object, the English custom of “not showing their goods in the window.”

“And a very bad one, too,” said Mr. Murdwell, raising his glass. “To my mind it’s one of the reasons that’s brought this war about.”

The vicar asked for enlightenment.

“If your diplomacy had said: ‘Now look here, Fritz, old friend, if you don’t try to be a little gentleman and keep that torch away from the powder keg you’ll find big trouble,’ you wouldn’t have had to send for me to put the Central Empires out of business.”

“Nothing could have prevented this war,” said the vicar in a deep tone. “It was inevitable.”

“I am not sure that we shall agree about that,” said Mr. Murdwell coolly. “If you had let them know the strength of your hand they would never have dared to raise you.”

The vicar shook his head in strong dissent.

“This trouble goes back some way,” said Mr. Murdwell. “It was in the sixties that you first took to giving people the impression that they could make doormats of you. And then came the Alabama arbitration business in which you curled up at our big talk. We said, ‘England’s a dud,’ and we’ve been saying it ever since. And why? Because like friend Fritz and all the rest of the push, in diplomacy we take moderation for weakness.”

“Would you have our diplomacy always in shining armor?” said the vicar.

“No I wouldn’t. But there’s the golden mean. Think of the way you let Bismarck put his thumb to his nose.”

“But that’s an old story.”

“The historian of the future will have to tell it, though. It seems to me that the world has a pretty strong complaint against you. You’ve underplayed your hand a bit too much. If you had been the Kingpin of Europe, as you ought to have been, and kept the other scholars in their places, things might have been different.”

This airy dogmatism amused the vicar. But in most other people it would have annoyed him extremely.

“Of course I can’t agree,” he said mildly. “I am glad to say we don’t regard this war as a material issue. For us it is a conflict between right and wrong.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Murdwell. “And I’ve already figured that out for myself and that’s why I am here. If I criticize it’s in the spirit of friendship. In this war you’ve gone big. The fact is, you are a bigger proposition than outsiders thought. And the longer I stay here the sharper it bites me. Nobody knows what your resources are. Take our neighbor at Hart’s Ghyll. When I went the other day to make friends with him, it took my breath away to think of a man like that volunteering as a tommy to be frizzled in Gallipoli.”

“But why shouldn’t he,” said the vicar, “if he felt it to be his duty?”

“As you say, why not? But it’s large--for a man like that.”

“Surely not more so for him than for anyone else.”

“There we shan’t agree. There’s a kind of man who can’t keep out of a scrap wherever one happens to be going. And in these islands you’ve got more of that sort to the square mile than anywhere else I’ve visited, although I’ve not yet seen the Basutos. But Gervase Brandon is not of that type. War is against every instinct that man’s got. He hates it with every fiber of his nature.”

“There are many thousands like him,” said the vicar; “many thousands who have simply given their lives--and more than their lives--in a just quarrel.”

“I know. But the quarrel was not his, and he didn’t make it. And it was not as if, like the Belgians, the French, and the Russians, he had the Hun on his doorstep. It would have been quite easy for a man like that to say: ‘Leave it to the British Navy. Sooner or later they are bound to clear up the mess.’”

“He was too honest to do that,” said the vicar. “He saw that a test case had arisen between right and wrong, between God and Antichrist, and he simply went and did his duty.”

“Well, I can only say,” Mr. Murdwell rejoined, “that when I saw him the other day he seemed to believe in neither.”

“That’s because you don’t really know him. Just now, it is true, he is in rather a disturbed state mentally. He has always had a skeptical mind, and there have been times when I’ve been tempted to think that he gave it too much latitude. And just now he is suffering a bad reaction after the horrors he’s been through. And of course he has had to give up the hope of ever walking again. But whatever the opinions of such a man may be, it is only right and fair to judge him by his actions.”

“Yes, he’s made a big sacrifice. And the tragedy of it is he feels now that he’s made it in vain.”

“His mental health is not what it might be just now, poor fellow. He has said things to me about Prussia winning, even if she loses and so on, which I know he cannot really believe.”

“Why not?”

“Because Gervase Brandon is too true an Englishman ever to doubt the spirit of the race. He is depressed just now about a very trivial matter. He has magnified it out of all proportion, whereas had he been fit and well he would not have given it a second thought. No, Gervase Brandon is not the man to despair of the Republic. He is part and parcel of England herself, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone.”

“I see he’s all that. In fact he belongs to one of your first families, with the most beautiful place on the countryside, and the _manes_ of his ancestors, who went to the Crusades, all around him. No, I suppose he couldn’t help doing as he did, if you come to figure it out.”

“He was without a choice in the matter as he freely admits.”

“And yet that man’s a highbrow of highbrows. His knowledge amazed me--not on his own subject, of which he didn’t speak, and I didn’t either, because I know nothing about it, but on my own--on which I claim to know just a little more than anyone else.”

“On the subject of Murdwell’s Law?” said the vicar with an air of keen interest.

But dinner was now at an end, and as the inexhaustible subject of Murdwell’s Law was at all times a little too much for the ladies of the house, they made good their escape before its discoverer could hoist himself upon a theme which promised to revolutionize the world of physical science.

XXV

“PLATO apart,” said Mr. Murdwell, as soon as Bud, Edith and Jooly had fled, “or whatever our neighbor’s secret vice may be, he’s got the strongest brain I’ve come up against lately.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” said the vicar. “Of course he’s by way of being a scholar, a poet, an independent thinker, and all that sort of thing, but since he’s been knocked out I’m afraid he can never be the man he was.”

Mr. Murdwell confessed to surprise also. “I don’t know what he may have been,” he said, “before he went to Gallipoli; I can only say that when I made his acquaintance the other day, it seemed a great privilege to talk to him.”

“Very interesting to know that,” said the vicar.

“He’s the only layman I’ve met who could grasp, on sight, the principle on which Murdwell’s Law depends. And more than that. When by his request I explained to him as briefly as I could the theory of the whole thing, he laid his finger at once on the weak link in the chain. I could hardly believe that he hadn’t a regular scientific training, and that he hadn’t made researches of his own into radioactivity.”

“He probably has.”

“He says not. And he knew nothing of my theory, but he said at once that I had only to restate my formula to alter the nature of war altogether.”

“And is that true?”

“Not a doubt of it. That’s why I’m here, and incidentally that’s why I have such a queer-looking butler. You noticed him, no doubt?”

The vicar had.

“I’ll tell you a little secret. That man is one of New York’s smartest detectives, and he never lets me out of his sight.”

“Really!” said the vicar, drawing warily at a very large cigar.

“You see, at present it’s a nice question whether certain people can hand Gazelee Payne Murdwell his medicine before he hands them theirs. That’s what it all boils down to, you know.”

“Really!” said the vicar.