Part 2

When taxed with having made the statement to the village youth, John Smith did not deny the charge. He even showed a disposition to defend himself; and the vicar had felt obliged to end the interview by abruptly walking away. Some months had passed since that incident. But in his heart the vicar had not been able to forgive what he could only regard as a piece of effrontery. Henceforward all his dealings with John Smith were tainted by that recollection. The subject still rankled in his mind; indeed he would have been the first to own that it was impossible now for such a man as himself to consider the problem of John Smith without prejudice. Moreover, he was aware that an intense and growing personal resentment boded ill for the young man’s future life in the parish of Penfold-with-Churley.

Sore, unhappy, yet braced with the stern delight that warriors feel, the vicar reached the common at last. That open, furze-clad plateau which divided Sussex from Kent and rose so sharply to the sky that it formed a natural altar upon which the priests of old had raised a stone was the favorite tryst of this village wastrel. As soon as Mr. Perry-Hennington came to the end of the steep path from the vicarage which debouched to the common, he shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare. Straight before him, less than a hundred yards away, was the man he sought. John Smith was leaning against the stone.

The vicar took off his hat to cool his head a little, and then swung boldly across the turf. The young man, who was bareheaded and clad in common workaday clothes, looked clean and neat enough, but somehow strangely slight and frail. Gaunt of jaw and sunken-eyed, the face was of a very unusual kind, and from time to time was lit by a smile so vivid as to be unforgetable. But the outward aspect of John Smith had never had anything to say to the vicar, and this morning it had even less to say than usual.

For the vicar’s attention had been caught by something else. Upon the young man’s finger was perched a little, timid bird. He was cooing to it, in an odd, loving voice, and as the vicar came up he said: “Nay, nay, don’t go. This good man will do you no harm.”

But the bird appeared to feel otherwise. By the time the vicar was within ten yards it had flown away.

“Even the strong souls fear you, sir,” said the young man with his swift smile, looking him frankly in the eyes.

“It is the first time one has heard such a grandiloquent term applied to a yellow-hammer,” said the vicar coldly.

“Things are not always what they seem,” said the young man. “The wisdom of countless ages is in that frail casket.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the vicar sharply.

“Many a saint, many a hero, is borne on the wings of a dove.”

“Transcendental rubbish.” The vicar mopped his face with his handkerchief, and then he began: “Smith”--he was too angry to use the man’s Christian name--“my daughter tells me you have been blasphemous.”

The young man, who still wore the white feather in his coat, looked at the angry vicar with an air of gentle surprise.

“Please don’t deny it,” said the vicar, taking silence for a desire to rebut the charge. “She has repeated to me word for word your mocking speech when you put that symbol of cowardice in your buttonhole.”

John Smith looked at the vicar with his deep eyes and then he said slowly and softly: “If my words have hurt her I am very sorry.”

This speech, in spite of its curious gentleness, added fuel to the vicar’s anger.

“The humility you affect does not lessen their offense,” he said sharply.

“Where lies the offense you speak of?” The question was asked simply, with a grave smile.

“If it is not clear to you,” said the vicar with acid dignity, “it shall not be my part to explain it. I am not here to bandy words. Nor do I intend to chop logic. You consider yourself vastly clever, no doubt. But I have to warn you that the path you follow is full of peril.”

“Yes, the path we are following is full of peril.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?” said the vicar sternly.

“Mankind. All of us.”

“That does not affect the question. Let us leave the general alone, let us keep to the particular.”

“But how can we leave the general alone, how can we keep to the particular, when we are all members of one another?”

The vicar checked him with an imperious hand.

“Blasphemer.” he said with growing passion, “how dare you parody the words of the Master?”

“No one can parody the words of the Master. Either they are or they are not.”

“I am not here to argue with you. Understand, John Smith, that in all circumstances I decline to chop logic with--with a person of your sort.”

It added to this young man’s offense in the eyes of the vicar that he had presumed to address him as an intellectual equal. It was true that in a way of delicate irony, which even Mr. Perry-Hennington was not too dense to perceive, this extraordinary person deferred continually to the social and mental status of his questioner. It was the manner of one engaged in rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, but every word masked by the gentle voice was so subtly provocative that Mr. Perry-Hennington felt a secret humiliation in submitting to them. The implication made upon his mind was that the rôle of teacher and pupil had been reversed.

This unpleasant feeling was aggravated to the point of the unbearable by John Smith’s next words.

“Judge not,” he said softly. “Once priests judged Jesus Christ.”

The vicar recoiled.

“Abominable!” he said, and he clenched his fists as if he would strike him. “Blasphemer!”

The young man smiled sadly. “I only speak the truth,” he said. “If it wounds you, sir, the fault is not mine.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington made a stern effort to keep himself in hand. It was unseemly to bandy words with a man of this kind. Yet, as he belonged to the parish, the vicar in a sense was responsible for him; therefore it became his duty to find out what was at the back of his mind. Curbing as well as he could an indignation that threatened every moment to pass beyond control, he called upon John Smith to explain himself.

“You say you only speak the truth as it has been shown you. First I would ask whence it comes, and then I would ask how do you know it for the truth?”

“It has been communicated by the Father.”

“Don’t be so free with the name of God,” said the vicar sternly. “And I, at any rate, take leave to doubt it.”

“There is a voice I hear within me. And being divine it speaks only the truth.”

“How do you know it is divine?”

“How do I know the grass is green, the sky blue, the heather purple? How do I know the birds sing?”

“That is no answer,” said the vicar. “It is open to anyone to claim a divine voice within did not modesty forbid.”

The smile of John Smith was so sweetly simple that it could not have expressed an afterthought. “Had you a true vocation,” he said, “would you find such uses for your modesty?”

The vicar, torn between a desire to rebuke what he felt to be an intolerable impertinence and a wish to end an interview that boded ill to his dignity, could only stand irresolute. Yet this odd creature spoke so readily, with a precision so rare and curious that his every word seemed to acquire a kind of authority. Bitterly chagrined, half insulted as the vicar was, he determined to continue the argument if only for the sake of a further light upon the man’s state of mind.

“You claim to hear a divine voice. Is it for that reason, may one ask, that you feel licensed to utter such appalling blasphemies?”

John Smith smiled again in his odd way.

“You speak like the men of old time,” he said softly.

“I use the King’s English,” said the vicar. “And I use it as pointedly, as expressively, as sincerely as lies in my power. I mean every word I say. You claim the divine voice, yet all that it speaks is profanity and corruption.”

“As was said of the prophets of old?”

“You claim to be a prophet?”

“Yes, I claim to be a prophet.”

“That is interesting.” There was a sudden change of tone as the vicar realized the importance of the admission. He saw that it might have a very important bearing upon his future course of action. “You claim to be a prophet in order that you may blaspheme the Creator.”

“I claim to be a prophet of the good, the beautiful, and the true. I claim to hear the voice of the eternal. And if these things be blasphemous in your sight, I can only grieve for your election.”

“Leave me out of it, if you please.” The clean thrust had stung the vicar to fury. “I know perfectly well where and how I stand, and if there is the slightest doubt in the matter it will be the province of my bishop to resolve it. But with you, Smith, who, I am ashamed to say, are one of my parishioners, it is a very different matter. In your case I have my duty to perform. It is one that can only cause me the deepest pain and anxiety, but I am determined that nothing shall interfere with it. Forgive my plainness, but your mind is in a most disorderly state. I am afraid Mr. Brandon is partly to blame. I have told him more than once that it was folly to give you the run of his library. You have been encouraged to read books beyond your mental grasp, or at least beyond your power to assimilate becomingly, in the manner of a gentleman. You are a half-educated man--it is my duty to speak out--and like all such men you are wise in your own conceit. Now there is reason to believe that, in virtue of an old statute which is still operative, you have made yourself amenable to the law of the land. At all events I intend to find out. And then will arise the question as to how far it will be one’s duty to move in this matter.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington watched the young man narrowly as he uttered this final threat. He had the satisfaction of observing that John Smith changed color a little. If, however, he had hoped to frighten the man it was by no means clear that he had succeeded.

“You follow your conscience, sir,” he said with a sweet unconcern that added to the vicar’s inward fury. “And I try to follow mine. But it is right to say to you that you are entering upon a deep coil. The soul of man is abroad in a dark night, yet the door is still open, and I pray that you at least will not seek to close it.”

“The door--still open!” The vicar looked at him in amazement. “What door?”

“The door for all mankind.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“For the present let them so remain. But I will give you a piece of news. At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said: ‘I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.’”

The vicar could only gaze in silence at John Smith.

“And I said: ‘Certainly, I am very glad to pray for Germany,’ and we knelt and prayed together. And then he rose and showed me the little town with its quaint gables and turrets where he sleeps at night, and I asked him to have courage and then I embraced him and then he left me, saying he would return again.”

The vicar heard him to the end with a growing stupefaction. Such a speech in its complete detachment from the canons of reason could only mean that the man was unhinged. The words themselves would bear no other interpretation; but in spite of that the vicar’s amazement soon gave way to a powerful resentment. At that moment the sense of outrage was stronger in him than anything else.

A certain practical sagacity enabled him to see at once that an abyss had opened between this grotesquely undisciplined mind and his own. The man might be merely recounting a dream, indulging a fancy, weaving an allegory, but at whatever angle he was approached by an incumbent of the Established Church, only one explanation could cover such lawlessness. The man was not of sound mind. And after all that was the one truly charitable interpretation of his whole demeanor and attitude. An ill-regulated, morbidly sensitive organization had broken down in the stress of those events which had sorely tried an intellect as stable as Mr. Perry-Hennington’s own. Indeed it was only right to think so; otherwise, the vicar would have found it impossible to curb himself. Even as it was he dared not trust himself to say a word in reply. All at once he turned abruptly on his heel and walked away as on a former occasion.

IV

AS the vicar made his way across the green toward the village he deliberated very gravely. It was clear that such a matter would have to be followed up. But he must not act precipitately. Fully determined now not to flinch from an onerous task, he must look before and after.

Two courses presented themselves to his sense of outrage. And he must choose without delay. Before committing himself to definite action he must either see Gervase Brandon, whom he felt bound in a measure to blame for John Smith’s state of mind, and take advice as to what should be done, or he must see the young man’s mother and ask her help. It chanced, however, that Mrs. Smith’s cottage was near by. Indeed it skirted the common, and he had raised the latch of her gate before he realized that the decision had somehow been made for him, apparently by a force outside himself.

It was a very humble abode, typical of that part of the world, but a trim hedge of briar in front, a growth of honeysuckle above the porch, and a low roof of thatch gave it a rustic charm. The door stone had been freshly whitened, and the window curtains, simple though they were, were so neat and clean that the outward aspect of Rose Cottage was almost one of refinement.

The vicar’s sharp knock was answered by a village girl, a timid creature of fourteen. At the sight of the awe-inspiring figure on the threshold, she bobbed a curtsey, and in reply to the question: “Is Mrs. Smith at home?” gurgled an inaudible “Yiss surr.”

“Is that the vicar?” said a faint voice.

Mr. Perry-Hennington said reassuringly that it was, and entered briskly, with that air of decision the old ladies of the parish greatly admired.

A puny, white-haired woman was seated in an armchair in the chimney corner, with a shawl over her shoulders. She had the pinched, wistful look of the permanent invalid, yet the peaked face and the vivid eyes had great intelligence. But they were also full of suffering, and the vicar, at heart genuinely kind, was struck by it at once.

“How are you today, Mrs. Smith?” he said.

“No better and no worse than I’ve been this last two years,” said the widow in a voice that had not a trace of complaint. “It is very kind of you to come and see me. I wish I could come to church.”

“I wish you could, Mrs. Smith.” The vicar took a chair by her side. “It would be a privilege to have you with us again.”

The widow smiled wanly. “It has been ordained otherwise,” she said. “And I know better than to question. God moves in a mysterious way.”

“Yes, indeed.” The vicar was a little moved to find John Smith’s mother in a state of grace. “There is strength and compensation in the thought.”

“If one has found the Kingdom it doesn’t matter how long one is tied to one’s chair.”

“It gratifies me to hear you say that.” The vicar spoke in a measured tone. And then suddenly, as he looked at the calm face of the sufferer, he grew hopeful. “Mrs. Smith,” he said, with the directness upon which he prided himself, “I have come to speak to you about your boy.”

“About John?” The widow, the name on her lips, lowered her voice to a rapt, hushed whisper.

The vicar drew his chair a little closer to the invalid. “I am very, very sorry to cause you any sort of trouble, but I want to ask you to use your influence with him; I want to ask you to give him something of your own state of mind.”

The widow looked at the vicar in surprise. “But,” she said softly, “it is my boy John who has made me as I am.”

The vicar was a little disconcerted. “Surely,” he said, “it is God who has made you what you are.”

“Yes, but it is through my boy John that He has wrought upon me.”

“Indeed! Tell me how that came to be.”

The widow shook her head and smiled to herself. “Don’t ask me to do that,” she said. “It is a long and wonderful story.”

But the vicar insisted.

“No, no, I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone would believe me. And the time has not yet come for the story to be told.”

The vicar still insisted, but this feeble creature had a will as tenacious as his own. His curiosity had been fully aroused, but common sense told him that in all human probability he had to deal with the hallucinations of an old and bed-ridden woman. A simple intensity of manner and words oddly devout made it clear that she was in a state of grace, yet it would seem to be rooted in some illusion in which her worthless son was involved. Although the vicar was without subtlety, he somehow felt that it would hardly be right to shatter that illusion. At the same time the key to his character was duty. And his office asked that in this case it should be rigidly performed. Let all possible light be cast upon the mental history of this man, even if an old and poor woman be stricken in the process. A cruel dilemma was foreshadowed, but let it be faced manfully.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said after a trying pause, “I am very sorry, but there is bad news to give you of your son.”

The effect of the words was remarkable.

“Oh, what has happened to him?” The placid face changed in an instant; one hand clutched at the thin bosom.

The vicar hastened to quell her fears. “Nothing has happened to him,” he said in a grave, kind tone, “but I grieve to say that his conduct leaves much to be desired.”

The widow could only stare at the vicar incredulously.

“I am greatly troubled about him. For a long time now I have known him to be a disseminator of idle and mischievous opinions. I have long suspected him of being a corrupter of our village youth. This morning”--carried away by a sudden warmth of feeling the vicar forgot the mother’s frailty--“he insulted my daughter with a most blasphemous remark, and when I ventured to remonstrate with him he entered upon a farrago of light and meaningless talk. In a word, Mrs. Smith, much as it grieves me to say so, I find your son an atheist, a socialist and a freethinker and I am very deeply concerned for his future in this parish.”

In the stress of indignation the vicar did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. But the widow was less disconcerted than he felt he had a right to expect her to be. It was true that she listened with amazement, but far from being distressed, she met him with frank skepticism. It deepened an intense annoyance to find that she simply could not believe him.

He gave her chapter and verse. But a categorical indictment called forth the remark that, “John was such a great scholar that ordinary people could not be expected to understand him.”

Such a statement added fuel to the flame. Mr. Perry-Hennington did not pretend to scholarship himself, but he had such a keen and just appreciation of that quality in other people that these ignorant words aroused a pitying contempt. The mother’s attitude could only be taken as a desire to shield and uphold her son.

“Well, Mrs. Smith,” said the vicar, rising from his chair, “I have to tell you that talk of this kind cannot be tolerated here. I very much hope you will speak to him on the matter.”

“But who am I, vicar, that I should presume to speak to him?”

“You are his mother.”

“Of late I have begun to doubt whether I can be his mother.”

The vicar looked at the widow in amazement. “Surely you know whether or not he is your son?” he said in stern surprise.

“Yes, he is the child of my body, but I grow afraid to claim him as mine.”

“For what reason?”

“He is not as other men.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the vicar with stern impatience.

The widow looked at the vicar with a sudden light of ecstasy in her eyes. “I can only tell you,” she said, “that my husband was killed in battle months before a son was born to me. I can only tell you that I prayed and prayed continually that there might be no more wars. I can only tell you that one night an angel came to me and said that my prayer had been heard and would shortly be answered. I was told that I should live to see a war that would end all wars. And then my boy was born and I called him John Emanuel.”

The vicar mustered all his patience as he listened, half-scandalized, to the widow’s statement. He had to fortify himself with the obvious fact that she was a feeble creature who had known many sorrows, whose mind had at last given way. Somehow he felt a shocked resentment, but she was so palpably sincere that it was impossible to visit it upon her. And then the thought came to him that this pitiful illusion was going to add immensely to his difficulties. Having always known her for a decent woman and, when in health, a regular churchgoer, he had counted confidently upon her help. It came as a further embarrassment to find her mind affected. For her sake he might have been inclined to temporize a little with the son, in the hope that she would bring the influence of a known good woman to bear upon him. But that hope was now vain. The widow’s own mind was in a state of almost equal disorder, and any steps the matter might demand must now be taken without her sanction.

Had the mother infected the son, or had the son infected the mother was now the vicar’s problem. Regarding the one as a natural complement to the other, and reading them together, he saw clearly that both were a little unhinged. Beyond all things a good and humane man, he could not help blaming himself a little that he had not realized sooner the true state of the case. Now that he had spoken with the mother, the son became more comprehensible. Without a doubt the one had reacted on the other. It simplified the task it would be his bounden duty to perform, even if it did not make it less repugnant. The fact that two persons shared such a fantastic illusion made it doubly imperative that immediate steps should be taken in a matter which Mr. Perry-Hennington was now viewing with a growing concern.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said very sternly, “there is one question I feel bound to ask. Am I right in the assumption that you regard your son as a--er--a messiah?”

The answer came at once.

“Yes, vicar, I do,” said the widow falteringly. “The angel of the Lord appeared to me, and my son John--if my son he is--has come to fulfill the Prophecy.”

V

THE vicar left Rose Cottage in a state of the deepest perturbation he had ever known. He was not the kind of man who submits lightly to any such feeling, but again the sensation came upon him, which he had first felt half an hour ago in his amazing interview with John Smith, that an abyss had suddenly opened under his feet, into which he had already stumbled.

That such heresies should be current in his own little cure of Penfold-with-Churley, with which he had taken such infinite trouble for the past thirty-five years, that they should arise in his own personal epoch, and that of his favorite books and newspapers and friends and fellow workers and thinkers, was so remarkable that he hardly knew how to face the sore problem to which they gave rise. Unquestionably such ideas were a by-product of this terrible war which was tearing up civilization by the roots. In a sense there was consolation in the thought. Abnormal events give rise to abnormal mental processes. Half-developed, ill-regulated, morbidly impressionable minds were very likely to be overthrown by such a phase as the world was now passing through. But even that reflection did little to reduce Mr. Perry-Hennington’s half-indignant sense of horror, or to soften the fierce ordeal in which he was now involved.

What should he do? An old shirker of issues he did not look for help in the quarter where some might have sought it. He was therefore content to put his question to the bracken, to the yellow gorse, to the golden light of heaven which was now beginning to beat uncomfortably upon him.