Part 3

“Why do anything?” answered the inner voice of the university graduate qua the county gentleman. “Edith is naturally a little upset, but the question to ask oneself is: Are these poor crackbrains really doing any harm?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington had been long accustomed to identify that particular voice with the highest part of himself. In many of the minor crises which had arisen in his life he had thankfully and gratefully followed it. There were times undoubtedly when it was the duty of a prudent person to turn the blind eye to the telescope. But a very little reflection convinced him that this occasion was not one of them.

Apart from the fact that it was quite impossible to allow such a fantastic heresy to arise in his parish, there was the public interest to consider. The country was living under martial law, and it had come to his knowledge that the King’s enemies were receiving open countenance. The man Smith was a poor sort of creature enough, however one might regard him, but he was thought to have influence among persons of his own standing, and it was said to be growing. Moreover, there was “his faith-healing tomfoolery” to be taken into account; at the best a trivial business, yet also a portent, which was having an effect upon the credulous and the ignorant. Therefore the man must be put in his place. And if possible he must be taught a lesson. The subject was beset with thorns of the prickliest kind, but the vicar had never lacked moral courage of an objective sort, and he felt he would be unworthy of his cloth if for a moment he allowed himself to shirk his obvious duty.

While a rather hide-bound intellect set squarely to the problem before it, Mr. Perry-Hennington marched slowly along the only attempt at a street that the village of Penfold could boast. At the far end was a massive pair of iron gates picked out with gold, surmounted by a medieval arch of stone, upon which a coat of arms was emblazoned. Beyond these portals was a short avenue of glorious trees which led to the beautiful old house known as Hart’s Ghyll, the seat for many generations of the squires of Penfold.

The symbol above the gates brought the vicar up short with a shock of surprise. Unconscious of the direction in which the supraliminal self had been leading him, he was inclined to accept it as the clear direction of a force beyond himself. It seemed, therefore, right to go at once and lay this difficult matter before Gervase Brandon, the man whom he felt bound to blame more than anyone else for John Smith’s unhappy state of mind.

The owner of Hart’s Ghyll, having married Mr. Perry-Hennington’s niece, could claim to be his relation by marriage. Brandon, a man of forty-two, born to the purple of assured social position, rich, cultivated, happily wed, the father of two delightful children, had seemed to possess everything that the heart of man could desire. Moreover, he had a reputation not merely local as a humane and liberal thinker--a too liberal thinker in the opinion of the vicar, who was proud to belong to a sturdier school. A model landlord who housed his laborers in absurdly modern and hygienic dwellings, who, somewhat to the scandal of less enlightened neighbors, allowed his smaller tenants to farm his land at purely nominal rents, he did his best to foster a spirit of thrift, independence and true communal feeling.

As a consequence there were those who held the squire of Penfold to be a mirror of all the virtues. There was also a smaller but vastly more influential class which could not bear to hear his name mentioned. He was mad, said the county Guys of the district. The vicar of Penfold did not go quite to that length, but he sympathized with the point of view. When he lunched and dined, as he often did, with the neighboring magnates, he was wont to sigh sadly over “that fellow Brandon,” and at the same time gravely lament, but not without an air of plaintive humor, that niece Millicent had yet to teach him sense. And this statement always involved the corollary that niece Millicent’s failure was the more surprising since the Perry-Henningtons were a sound old Tory stock.

The opinion current in old-port-drinking circles was that Gervase Brandon was as charming a fellow as you would meet in a day’s march, but that he was overeducated--he had been a don at Oxford before he came into the property--and that he had more money to spend than was good for him. For some years he had been “queering the pitch” for less happily placed neighbors and contemporaries, and these found it hard to forgive him. They had prophesied that the day would come when his vagaries would cause trouble, and at the moment the famous Brandon coat of arms of the lion and the dove, and its motto: “Let the weak help the strong, let the strong help the weak,” came within the vicar’s purview, he felt that the prophecy had been most oddly, not to say dramatically, fulfilled.

If blame there was for the appearance of a Mad Mullah in the parish, without a doubt it must be laid to the door of Gervase Brandon. In the most absurd way he had long encouraged one whom the vicar could only regard as a wastrel. He had allowed this incorrigible fellow the run of the Hart’s Ghyll library, and the vicar recalled meeting John Smith in the village street with a priceless Elzevir copy of Plato’s Theætetus under his arm, the Brandon crest stamped on the leather, the Brandon bookplate inside. The vicar understood that the man had been a frequent visitor at the house, that money had been given him from time to time, and that the mother had been allowed to occupy the cottage on the common rent free. Was it to be wondered at that a weak, half-developed brain had been thrown off its balance?

In these circumstances it was right that Gervase Brandon should be made to understand the mischief he had wrought; it was right that he should be called upon to take a hand in the adjustment of the coil. But as Mr. Perry-Hennington passed through the gate of Hart’s Ghyll and walked slowly up the avenue toward the house there was still a reservation in his mind. As matters were with Brandon now he might not be able to grapple with a problem of a nature to make heavy demands upon the mental and moral faculties.

The vicar had scarcely entered upon this aspect of the case, when the sight of a spinal carriage in the care of two nurses forbade any more speculation upon the subject. He was suddenly brought face to face with reality in a grimly practical shape.

“How are you this morning, Gervase?” said the vicar, stopping the little procession with a hearty voice. The question was addressed to a gaunt, hollow-eyed man in a green dressing gown, who was propped up on pillows.

“I’ve nothing to complain of,” said Gervase Brandon. He spoke in a calm, gentle way. “Another capital night.”

“Do you still have pain?”

“None for a week, I’m thankful to say. But I touch wood!”

The optimistic, almost gay tone did not deceive the vicar. The tragic part of the matter was that the cessation of pain was not a hopeful sign. Brandon might not have known that. This morning, at any rate, he had the half-defiant cheerfulness of one who did not intend to admit physical calamity. Yet he must have well understood the nature of the thing that had come upon him. For three long, terrible months he had lain on his back, paralyzed from the waist down, the result of shell shock sustained on the beaches of Gallipoli. There was every reason to fear a lesion of certain ganglia, and little hope was now held out that he would ever walk again.

To a man in meridian pride of body such a prospect hardly bore thinking about. But the blow had been borne with a fortitude at which even a man so unimaginative as the vicar could only marvel. Not again would the owner of Hart’s Ghyll prune his roses, or drive a golf ball, or cast a fly, or take a pot shot at a rabbit; not again would he take his children on his knee.

Brandon had always been the least militant of men. His instincts were liberal and humane, and in the happy position of being able to live as he chose he had gratified them to the full. He had had everything to attach him to existence; if ever fortune had had a favorite it was undoubtedly he. It had given him everything, with a great zest in life as a crowning boon. But in August, 1914, in common with so many of his countrymen, he had cast every personal consideration to the wind and embraced a life which he loathed with every fiber of his being.

He had only allowed himself one reason for the voluntary undertaking of a bestial task, and it was the one many others of his kind had given: “So that that chap won’t have to do it”--the chap in question being an engaging, curly-headed urchin still in the care of a governess. Well, the father had “done his bit,” but as far as the small son was concerned there was no guaranty that it had not been done in vain. And none knew that better than the shattered man propped up in the spinal carriage.

The sight of Gervase Brandon had done something to weaken the vicar’s resolve. It hardly seemed right to torment the poor fellow with this extremely disagreeable matter. Yet a moment’s reflection convinced Mr. Perry-Hennington that it would be most unwise to take any decisive step without discussing it with the man best able to throw light upon it. Moreover, as the vicar recognized, Brandon’s mental powers did not seem to have shared his body’s eclipse. He appeared to enjoy them to the full; in fact it might be said that complete physical prostration had added to their perceptiveness. Whenever the vicar talked with him now he was much impressed by the range and quality of his mind.

“Gervase,” said the vicar after a brief mental survey of the position, “I wonder if I might venture to speak to you about something that is troubling me a good deal?”

“Certainly, certainly,” said the occupant of the spinal carriage, with an alert, almost eager smile. “If there’s any way in which I can be of the slightest use, or any way in which you think I can I shall be only too delighted.”

“I hate having to bother you with a matter of this kind. But it is likely that you know something about it. And I am greatly in need of advice, which I hope you may be able to give.”

“I hope I may.” The vicar’s gravity was not lost upon Brandon. “Perhaps you would like to discuss it in the library?”

“If you don’t mind.”

VI

TO the library the spinal carriage was taken. When it had been wheeled into the sunny embrasure of that wonderful room, which even the vicar never entered without a slight pang of envy, the nurses retired, leaving the two men together.

The library of Hart’s Ghyll was richly symbolical of the aristocracy of an old country. It had once been part of a monastery which had been set, as happened invariably when religion had a monopoly of learning and taste, in the fairest spot the countryside could offer for the purpose. From the large mullioned window the view of Hart’s Ghyll and its enchanted vistas of hill, stream and woodland beyond was a miracle of beauty. And the walls of the room displayed treasures above price, such a collection of first editions and old masters as even a man so insensitive as the vicar sometimes recalled in his dreams. Their present owner, who in the vicar’s opinion had imbibed the modern spirit far too freely, had often said that he could not defend possession in such abundance by one who had done nothing to earn it. In an ideal state, had declared this advanced thinker, these things would be part of the commonweal--a theory which Mr. Perry-Hennington considered fantastic. To his mind, as he had informed niece Millicent, it was perilously like an affront to the order of divine providence.

The spirit of place seemed to descend upon the vicar, as in a hushed, rather solemn tone, he asked Brandon whether the sun would be too much for him.

“Not for a man who has been grilled in Gallipoli,” answered Brandon with a stoic’s smile. “But if you will open that window a little wider and roll me back a bit, I shall have my own piece of earth to look at. Give me this and you may take the rest of Christendom. It’s been soaked into my bones, into my brain. One ought to be a Virgil or a Wordsworth.”

“Which I hope you may presently prove, my dear fellow,” said the vicar, touched by a sense of the man’s heroism.

“Alas, they are born.”

“In spirit at any rate you are with them.” The vicar was moved to an infrequent compliment.

But he had suddenly grown nervous. Now that he was face to face with his task he didn’t know how to enter upon it. The wave of indignation which had borne him as far as the library of Hart’s Ghyll had been dissipated by the presence of a suffering it was surely inhuman to embarrass. The younger man, his rare faculty of perception strung to a high pitch, saw at once the vicar’s hesitation. Like an intensely sympathetic woman, Brandon began unconsciously to help him disburden his mind of that which was trying it so sorely.

At last Mr. Perry-Hennington found himself at the point where it became possible to break the ice.

“My dear Gervase,” he said, “there is nothing I dislike more than having to ask you to share my troubles, but a most vexing matter has arisen, and you are the only person whose advice I feel I can take.”

“I only hope I can be of use.”

“Well--it’s John Smith.” The vicar took the plunge. And as he did so, he was sufficiently master of himself to watch narrowly the face of the stricken man.

Brandon fixed deep eyes upon the vicar.

“But he’s such a harmless fellow.” The light tone, the placid smile, told nothing.

“I admit, of course, that one oughtn’t to be worried by a village wastrel.”

“I challenge the term,” said Brandon with the note of airy banter which always charmed. “Not for the first time, you know. I’m afraid we shall never agree about the dear chap.”

“No, I’m afraid we shall not.” The vicar could not quite keep resentment out of his voice. But in deference to a graceful and perhaps merited rebuke, the controversialist lowered his tone a little. “But let me give you the facts.”

Thereupon, with a naïveté not lost upon the man in the spinal carriage, Mr. Perry-Hennington very solemnly related the incident of the white feather.

Brandon said nothing, but looked at the vicar fixedly.

“I hate having to worry you in this way.” Mr. Perry-Hennington watched narrowly the drawn face. “Of course it had to be followed up. At first, I’ll confess, I took it to be a mere piece of blasphemous bravado in execrable taste, but now I’ve seen the man, now I’ve talked with him, I have come to another conclusion.”

The vicar saw that Brandon’s eyes were full of an intense, eager interest.

“Well?” said the sufferer softly.

“The conclusion I have come to is that it’s a case of paranoia.”

“That is to say, you think he intended the statement to be taken literally?”

“I do. But I didn’t realize that all at once. When I accused him of blasphemy he defended himself with a farrago of quasi mystical gibberish which amounted to nothing, and he ended with a perfectly fantastic statement. Let me give it you word for word. ‘At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said, “I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.” And I said, “Certainly, I shall be 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.’”

Brandon’s face had an ever-deepening interest, but he did not venture upon a remark.

“Of course,” said the vicar, “one’s answer should have been, ‘My friend, he who aids, abets and harbors an unregistered alien enemy becomes amenable to the Defense of the Realm Regulations.’”

“What was your answer?” The look of bewilderment was growing upon Brandon’s face.

“I made none. I was completely bowled out. But I went at once to see the mother. And this is where the oddest part of all comes in. After a little conversation with the mother, I discovered that she most sincerely believes that her son is--is a messiah.”

Again the stricken man closed his eyes.

“There we have the clue. In a very exalted way she told me how her son was born six months after her husband had been killed in action. She told me how she had prayed that all wars might cease, how an angel appeared to her with a promise that she would live to see the war which would end all wars; she told me how a son was born to her in fulfillment of the prophecy, and how she christened him John Emanuel. I was astounded. But now I have had time to think about the matter much is explained. The man is clearly suffering from illusions prenatally induced. There is no doubt a doctor would tell us that it explains his fits. It also accounts for his faith-healing nonsense. And there is no doubt that mother and son have reacted upon one another in such a way that they are now stark crazy.”

“And that is your deliberate opinion?”

“With the facts before me I can come to no other. It is the only charitable explanation. Otherwise I should have felt it to be my duty to institute a prosecution under the blasphemy laws. Only the other day there was a man--a tailor, I believe--imprisoned under the statute of Henry VII. But if, as there is now every reason to think, it is a simple case of insanity, one will be relieved from that disagreeable necessity.”

Brandon concurred.

“But as you will readily see, my dear Gervase, the alternative is almost equally distressing. To clear him of the charge of blasphemy it will be necessary to prove him insane; and in that event, of course, he cannot remain at large.”

“Surely the poor chap is quite harmless?”

“Harmless!” Mr. Perry-Hennington had difficulty in keeping his voice under control. “A man who goes about the parish proclaiming himself a god!”

“He has Plotinus with him at any rate.” Again the stricken man closed his eyes. “How says the sage? ‘Surely before this descent into generation we existed in the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us Gods; clear souls and minds immixed with all existence; parts of the Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now.’”[1]

[Footnote 1: Enn VI. 4, 14 [F. W. H. Myers].]

“Really, my dear Gervase,” said the vicar, trying very hard to curb a growing resentment, “one should hesitate to quote the pagan philosophers in a matter of this kind.”

“I can’t agree. They are far wiser than us in the only thing that matters after all. They have more windows open in the soul.”

“No, no.” Mr. Perry-Hennington strove against vehemence. “Still, we won’t go into that.” He was on perilous ground. Of late years Brandon himself had been a thorn in the sacerdotal cushion. The modern spirit had led him to skepticism, so that, in the vicar’s phrase, “he had become an alien in the household of faith.” Now was not the moment to open an old wound or to revive the embers of controversy. But the vicar felt the old spiritual enmity, which Brandon’s stoic heroism had lulled to sleep, again stirring his blood. Therefore, he must not allow himself to be involved in a false issue. Let him keep rigidly to the business in hand. And the business in hand was: What shall be done with John Smith?

It was clear at once that in Brandon’s opinion there was no need to do anything. The vicar felt ruefully that he should have foreseen this attitude. But he had a right to hope that Brandon’s recent experiences, even if they had not changed him fundamentally, would have done something to modify the central heresies. Nothing was further from the vicar’s desire than to bear hardly upon one who had carried himself so nobly, but Brandon’s air of tolerance was a laxity not to be borne. Mr. Perry-Hennington’s soul was on fire. It was as much as he could do to hold himself in hand.

“You see, my dear fellow,” he said, “as the case presents itself to me, I must do one of two things. Either I must institute a prosecution for blasphemy, so that the law may deal with him, or, as I think would be the wiser and more humane course, I must take steps to have him removed to an asylum.”

“But why do anything?”

“I feel it to be my duty.”

“But he’s so harmless. And a dear fellow.”

“I wish I could share your opinion. I can only regard him as a plague spot in the parish. Insanity is his only defense and it has taken such a noxious form that it may infect others.”

“Hardly likely, one would think.”

“We live in abnormal times. I am very sorry, but I can only regard this man as a moral danger to the community. Edith was greatly shocked. I was greatly shocked. You must excuse my saying so, Gervase, but I cannot help feeling that in the circumstances the vast majority of right-thinking people would be.”

“But who are the people who think rightly?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington raised a deprecating hand. Yet Brandon, having acted in the way he had, was entitled to put the question. He had given more than life for an idea, and that fact made it immensely difficult for the vicar to deal with him as faithfully as he could have wished. He was face to face with a skeptic, but the skeptic was intrenched in a special position where neither contempt nor active reproach of any kind must visit him.

But in spite of himself the old slumbering antagonisms were now awake in the vicar. Brandon, too, was a dangerous paradoxical man. Notwithstanding the honor and the love he bore him, Mr. Perry-Hennington felt his pulses quicken, his fibers stiffen. If ever man did, he saw his duty straight and clear. The only real problem was how to do it with the least affront to others, with the least harm to the community.

“By the way,” said Brandon, his gentle voice filling an awkward pause that had suddenly ensued, “have you ever really talked with John Smith?”

“Oh, yes, many times.”

“I mean have you ever really tried--if I may put it that way--to get at the back of his mind?”

“As far as one can. But to me he seems to have precious little in the way of mind to get at the back of. As far as one’s own limited intelligence will allow one to judge, the mind of John Smith seems a half-baked morass, a mere hotch-potch of moonstruck transcendentalisms, overlaid with a kind of Swedenborgian mysticism, if one may so express oneself. To me it seems a case where a little regular training at a university and the clear thinking it induces would have been of enormous value.”

Brandon smiled. “Have you seen his poem?” he asked.

“No.” The answer was short; and then the vicar asked in a tone which had a tinge of disgust, “Written a poem, has he?”

“He brought it to me the other day.” Again Brandon closed his eyes. “To my mind it is very remarkable,” he said half to himself.

“It would be, no doubt,” said the vicar, half to himself also.

“I should like you to read it.”

“I prefer not to do so,” said the vicar after a pause. “My mind is quite made up about him. It would only vex me further to read anything he may have written. We live by deeds, not by words, and never more so than in this stern time.”

“To my mind, it is a very wonderful poem,” said the stricken man. “I don’t think I am morbidly impressionable--I hope I’m not--but that poem haunts me. It is even changing my outlook. It is an extravagant thing to say, but the feeling it leaves on one’s mind is that if a spectator of all time and all existence, a sort of Cosmostheorus, were to visit the planet at this moment, it is the way in which he might be expected to deliver himself.”

“Neoplatonism of the usual brand, I presume.” There was a slight curl of a thin lip.