Part 17

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._

DEAR MR. BRANDON:

I cannot tell you what an effect the play is making here. You will remember that, when I read it, I set my heart on the greatest production ever seen. And it was because the spirit of the play made me _feel_ that I owed it to a world which had suffered me sixty-eight years, in which I had prospered exceedingly, and from which I have on the whole derived much happiness. Well, after many unforeseen trials, difficulties and disappointments, this aim has been achieved. Having at last brought together the cast I wanted, with great players in the chief parts, and having made sure of a noble interpretation, I opened the doors of this theater, for the first time in its history, at a democratic price, so that the downtown seamstress could have a glimpse of the Something Else, as well as her sister on Fifth Avenue.

That was not the act of a man of business, although it has proved a business action. I am not out to make money by this play. I don’t want to make money out of it, because I feel, and this will make you smile, that it’s like trafficking in the Word of God. But under the terms of the contract entered into between us on behalf of the unknown author, who I am sorry to learn from Mr. Pomfret is seriously ill, large sums are going to be earned by it in all parts of the world. In the course of the next few months it will be played here and in Canada, by at least fifty stock companies. Next month I start for Stockholm, in order to produce it at the state theater. Christiansen, the poet, has prepared a version which I believe to have true inspiration. As you know, his reputation has European significance, and several of his German friends, among them the Director of the National Theater, will be present at the first performance. The fame of the play has already reached Europe, and Christiansen hopes for an early performance in Berlin. Arrangements are also being made in Paris, Rome, Petrograd, and Vienna, and in the course of a few months I expect versions of it to appear in all these places. Van Roon’s beautiful version for the Hague, Hjalmar’s for Christiania and Ximena’s for Madrid, will be produced within a few weeks, so you see that the grass is not growing under our feet.

There is every reason to look for great developments. It is hoped that the play may be a means of keeping open the door for civilization.

Believe me, dear Mr. Brandon, Very sincerely yours, URBAN MEYER.

P.S. I have just heard that the play has been awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. Christiansen writes that he has been asked to go to England and offer an address to the author on behalf of the Scandinavian Government.

U. M.

XLIII

THE blinds were down at the vicarage. Prince, whose stealthy grace of movement was that of the perfect parlor maid, walked with more than usual delicacy. Her master had not slept in his bed for two nights. Miss Edith was working in a Paris hospital, and news had come from France that Mr. Tom was gone.

In the absence of Miss Edith, Prince felt herself to be the most authoritative female in that diminished household; and she was much concerned for her master, whom she adored. It was the nature of Prince to adore. In her face was the look of stern beauty worn by nearly every Englishwoman of her generation. It seemed but yesterday that she had ordered a wedding dress she was never to wear, because “her boy,” a lusty towheaded young sergeant of the Sussex Regiment, had gone to sleep on the Somme.

Ever since the telegram had come from the War Office, the vicar had not been himself. But his first act had been to go up to town for the day, and comfort and advise the brave girl whose three bairns would never see their father again. It had called for a great effort, for he was stunned by the sense of loss. To a father, the first-born is a symbol. And there is nothing to replace an eldest son in the heart of a lonely man who lives in the memory of a great happiness. He had only to look at gifted, rare-spirited Tom to see the mother, to watch the play of her features, to behold the light of her eyes.

Of his four children he had never disguised the fact that Tom was the fine flower. Like many men of rather abrupt mental limitation, the vicar had, at bottom, a reverence for a good brain. This boy had been given a talent, and many a time had the father amused himself with the pious fancy that the brilliant barrister, of whom much was predicted, would be the second Lord Chancellor of his name and blood.

On the third morning of the news, as the vicar sat at breakfast solitary and without appetite, Prince brought him a letter. It bore a service postmark. It was from Somewhere in France, and it said:

_1st Metropolitan Regiment._

DEAR SIR:

It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that Captain Perry-Hennington was killed on the 5th inst. His loss falls very heavily indeed upon his brother officers and the men of his Regiment. I will not attempt to say how much he meant to all ranks, for no man could have been more looked up to, or more generally beloved. All knew him for what he was, a good soldier, a true Christian, a great gentleman. He was in the act of writing you a letter (which I inclose) when word was brought to him that a man of another battalion, mortally hit, had asked for Captain Perry-Hennington. He went out at once, across the danger zone to a communication trench, where the poor fellow lay, but half way he was caught by a shell and killed instantly. If it was his turn, it was the end he would have asked for, and the end those who loved him would have asked for him. Assuring you of the Regiment’s deepest sympathy in your great loss,

I am, very sincerely yours, G. H. ARBUTHNOT, Lieutenant Colonel.

Inclosed in the letter was a scrap of paper on which was written:

DEAREST DAD:

“I fear the will is going. For nearly three years it has been my continual prayer to Our Father in Heaven that the mind be not taken before the soul is released, but if----”

As soon as the vicar had read these strange words he rose unsteadily from the table, went into the study and locked the door. Then kneeling under a favorite portrait of the boy’s mother, he offered a humble prayer of thanks. A little afterward, unable to bear the restraint of four walls, he went out, hatless, into the sunlight of a very perfect day. Very slowly, yet hardly knowing what he did, he passed through the vicarage gate, and turned into the steep and narrow path leading to the village green. Half way up some familiar lines of Milton began to ring oddly in his ears:

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

And they were accompanied by an odd phrase he had once heard on the lips of Gervase Brandon. In the height of a forgotten controversy, Brandon had said that “for him the image of the spectrum had altered.” As the phrase now came to the vicar he caught a glimpse of its meaning. Somehow he perceived a change of mental vision. At that moment he seemed to walk closer with God than he had ever walked; at that moment he was in more intimate communion with an adored wife, a beloved son. Even the sweet upland air and the flow of the sun through the leaves had a new quality. The feeling of personal loss was yielding to praise and thanksgiving; never had the vicar been so sure of that loving mercy upon which his boy had implicitly relied.

Filled with a new, a greater life, he found himself, without knowing it, on the village green. And then in a flash, as he came to the priest’s stone, the angle of the spectrum shifted again. He was pierced by the recognition of a great presence. A voice, faint, far off, yet clear as the sound of flowing water, touched his ear with such ecstasy that he looked around to see whence it came. A sky gloriously burnished with the presence of God alone could have winged it; and as he looked up, came the words: “And, lo, the heavens opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him.”

Thrilled by a joy which was half fear, the vicar leaned against the stone. And as he did so a rush of wild thoughts swept his mind like a tide. His eyes grew dark as he saw again a summer twilight and a frail figure of fantasy kneeling upon the spot to which he was now rooted. In a series of pictures, a terrible and strange scene was reënacted. A motor car glided stealthily past the door of the widow’s cottage; it came round the bend of the road; as it stopped by the edge of the green, two heavy somber men descended from it, and from his own base ambush, but a few yards off, he saw them cautiously approach the kneeling figure.

Again he was the witness of the acts and the words that passed. He saw the figure rise as they came up; he heard the greeting of the calm, expecting voice: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Again he saw the grim procession move across the grass, he saw the upward gesture to the God in the sky, which at the moment had revolted him; and then he saw the car stealthily turn the bend in the track and fade among the dark-glowing gorse.

A nausea came upon the vicar. Sick with sudden terror, he realized what he had done. To the fate which his own boy could not face and had been allowed, as a crowning mercy, to escape, he had himself condemned a fellow creature without a hearing, and perhaps against the weight of evidence. By what authority had he immured a fellow citizen in a living tomb? By what authority had he denied the first and highest of all sanctions to a human soul? The doom that his own poor lad, with all his heroism, had not the superhuman courage to meet, this defenseless villager had embraced in the spirit of a martyr and a saint.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Again the vicar saw him rise from his knees, and with a wan but happy smile go forth to a fate by comparison with which the grave was very kind. Overborne by a sudden passion of illogical remorse, the vicar sank to his own knees by the stone, on a spot bare of grass, the fruit, perhaps, of John Smith’s many kneelings in many bygone years. Broken and bereaved, a lone animal wounded and terrified, he humbly asked that he might be allowed to meet his wife and his boy in Heaven.

The vicar rose from his knees. Faint and chill of heart, he hardly cared to look up for a visible answer to his prayer. He was now in outer darkness. For Thomas Perry-Hennington there was no descent of the Spirit from the hard sky, glowing with strange beauty. He listened wildly, yet he could only hear the water flowing by Burkett’s mill.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

The living words were spurring him to frenzy. But the soul of man, naked and shuddering, helpless and lonely, recoiled upon itself with the fear that there was none of whom to seek forgiveness. For one, Thomas Perry-Hennington, there was no means of access to the Father. By an idolatrous act, setting the state above the Highest, he had severed all communication. In bigotry, arrogance, imperfect faith he had betrayed the Master; in pharisaic blindness he had crucified the Son of Man.

Thoughts like these, coming at this moment, were too much for human endurance; in that direction madness lay. A little while he stood by the stone, trying to hold on to the thing he called “himself.” And then a strange desire came upon him to crave the light of one whom he had traduced. He dare not set his act higher, he dare not state his treason in other terms; at that moment the will itself forbade his so doing. An issue was now upon him which reason could not accept. To the inner eye within the mind itself all was darkness, but looking now with the ear alone he thought he heard a far, faint voice in the infinite stellar spaces, a voice telling him to go at once to Wellwood.

Suddenly he turned and trailed off back to the vicarage, like some hapless, hunted thing of the fields, that flees too madly for hope of escape. As he half ran down the steep path, his white face gleaming in the sun, he began to repeat mechanically, in order still to keep in touch with the central forces:

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

By the time he had reached the middle of the lane, it came to him that he was obeying his wife’s voice.

Turning in at the vicarage gate he called across the privet to the ancient Hobson to leave his roots, and go and put the harness on old Alice.

XLIV

VIA Grayfield, Easing and Chettleford the distance to Wellwood was nearly twenty miles. He might train from Brombridge, but the service was bad and there would be three miles to walk at the end. So he decided that old Alice should take him to Grayfield, and then he would ask Whymper to lend him his car.

But long before he came to Grayfield he felt that this could not be. At that moment his old Magdalen friend was the last person in the universe he desired to meet. If he had now to face his kind it must be some other. Thus, as the stately chimneys and fine gables of the Manor house, rising proudly behind an enchanted copse of fern and Canterbury bells, came into view, he urged old Alice past them at her best pace and on to the Chequers, Grayfield’s model public house. Its landlord, Hickman, a civil, obliging fellow, was known to the vicar, who in this dilemma was very glad of his help. It was not fair to ask the full journey of poor old Alice.

He was able to exchange her temporarily for the landlord’s young mare. But in the process he had to submit to an ordeal that he would have given much to be spared.

“I see, sir, in the _Advertiser_,” said Hickman, as he gave the ostler a hand in the inn yard, “that the Captain’s gone. My boy went the same day. He was not in the Captain’s lot, but I happen to know that he thought there was no one like him. He was such a gentleman, and he had a way with him that had a rare power over young chaps.”

The vicar could not answer the honest fellow, whose voice failed suddenly and whose eyes were full of tears. But he held out his hand very simply, and Hickman, his tears now falling softly, like those of a child, took it.

“Excuse me, sir. Bill was my all. You see, I buried the wife in the spring. Things are at a dead end for me now.”

The vicar, unable to speak, offered his hand again.

All at once Hickman took him firmly by the coat-sleeve and led him a dozen paces away from the ostler. “Excuse the great freedom, sir”--the big, not over-bright fellow’s whisper was excessive in its humility--“but, as a minister of the Gospel, there’s one question I’d like to ask you.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington shuddered at the perception of what was coming.

“The only hope for a chap like me is that I’ll meet the wife and the boy in Heaven. Otherwise, I’m at a dead end as you might say. As one man to another, what chance do you think there is?”

The vicar grew cold at the heart.

“Of course, I’m not a churchgoer; I am not a religious man or anything of that kind. My father wasn’t. I’ve always tried to go straight, keep sober, pay my way and so on, but of course, I’ve never taken Communion or read the Bible or done anything to curry favor. That’s not my nature. Still, I reckon myself a fairish, decentish chap; and on Sunday evening, after the service, I went round to talk to our vicar here, Mr. Pierce.”

“Yes.” Mr. Perry-Hennington gave an eager gasp. “That was very wise. What did he say to you?” His lips could hardly shape the question.

“Why, sir, he said that a Christian couldn’t doubt for a moment that one day he would be with his wife and children in Heaven.”

“Mr. Pierce said that!”

“He did. And I told him I didn’t pretend to be a Christian and I asked him if he thought I had left it too late.”

“Yes?”

“Well, sir, he said it was never too late to be a Christian. And he gave me a prayer book--he’s a very nice gentleman--and told me to take it home and read it.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve tried to read it, sir, but to be quite honest, I don’t feel that I shall ever be much of a Christian.”

“Well, Hickman--” suddenly Mr. Perry-Hennington found his voice--“always try to remember this: Jesus Christ came to us here in order that you might be with your dear wife and your dear boy in Heaven, and--and--we have His pledged Word--and we must believe in that.”

“But how is a chap to believe what he can’t prove?”

“We must have faith--we must all have faith.”

“All very well, sir,” said Hickman dourly, “but suppose He has promised more than He can perform?”

“In what way? How do you mean?”

“According to the Bible He was to come again, but as far as I can make out there doesn’t seem much sign of Him yet.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington was silent a moment and then he took one of the landlord’s large hands in both of his own and said in an abrupt, half grotesque, wholly illogical way, “My dear friend, we are all members one of another. It is our duty to hope for the best--our duty to believe that the best will happen.” And as he turned aside, he added with another curious change of voice, which he could not have recognized as belonging to himself, “You see, we are all in the same boat.”

Saying these words, the vicar climbed into his trap with almost the stagger of a drunken man. He hardly knew what he said or what he did, but as soon as the mare was out of the inn yard it came upon him that he had to go to Wellwood, and that the way to get there was through Easing and Chettleford.

Why at that particular moment that particular place should be his destination he didn’t quite know, unless it was in obedience to a voice he had heard in the sky. A modern man, whose supreme desire was to take reason for his guide in all things, even if the vows of his faith forced him to accept the supernatural in form and sum, he feared in this hour to apply it too rigidly.

As the publican’s mare went steadily forward along the winding, humid lanes of a woodland country, a feeling of hopelessness came upon him. What did he expect to do when he got to the end of his journey? Such a question simply admitted of no answer. It was not to be faced by Thomas Perry-Hennington on his present plane of being. The logic of the matter could not be met.

That was the case, no doubt, but a compromise was equally impossible. Something would have to happen. Either he must go forward or he must go back. A soul in strange, terrible torment passed unseen and unseeing through the tiny hamlet of Easing and on and on up a steep hill and then down through a long valley of trees and a gloom of massively beautiful furze country. There was not a ripple of wind in the tense air, and in the early afternoon it grew very dark, with an occasional growl of thunder over the far hills. On the outskirts of Chettleford it began to rain in large slow drops; and as his sweating face perceived the soft, cool splash he half dared to take it as the explicit kindness of Heaven. Upon the wings of that thought came the automatic intrusion into his mind of the words:

Methought I saw my late espousèd saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

And with them came the strange fancy that these tears out of Heaven were those of his wife and his boy.

A mile beyond Chettleford, at the dark edge of a wood, the sudden fear struck him that the soul of Thomas Perry-Hennington was about to enter unending night. A recollection dread and spectral, which might have been Dante or the far distant ages of the past, engulfed him swiftly and completely. It was impossible to turn back now or he would have done so.

The narrow road grew darker and darker as it wound under the heavy, rain-pattered canopy of the wood. Earth and sky were without form, and void. He lost touch with time and place; he began to lose touch with his own identity. He only knew that Thomas Perry-Hennington was his name and that his destination was Wellwood Asylum.

The rain grew heavier, but there was no comfort in it now. He was already far beyond any kind of physical aid. A grisly demon was in him, urging him onward to his doom. His soul’s reaction to it was beyond pity and terror. Quite suddenly, and long before he expected to see them, the heavy iron gates of the asylum were before him. At the sound of wheels an old man, very bent and grim, whom in the wet half-light he almost took for Charon, came slowly out of his lodge and fitted a key to the lock.

XLV

THE vicar and his trap passed through the gates of Wellwood and along a short drive, flanked by wet bushes of rhododendron to the main entrance. In a voice not at all like his own he said to a heavy, rather brutal-looking man who opened one of the doors, “Mr. Perry-Hennington to see Dr. Thorp.”

He was admitted at once to a dim, somber interior, and shown into a small, stuffy waiting room in which he could hardly breathe. It was perhaps a relief to find himself quite alone, but in a very short time the doctor came to him.

The two men were known to each other. It was not Mr. Perry-Hennington’s first visit to Wellwood; and from time to time they had sat together on various committees affecting the social welfare of the county.

The vicar’s state of mind did not allow him to give much attention to Dr. Thorp, otherwise he could hardly have failed to notice that the chief medical officer of the establishment was in a state of suppressed excitement.