War in Heaven
Charles Williams
1930
Contents:
THE PRELUDE
THE EVENING IN THREE HOMES
THE ARCHDEACON IN THE CITY
THE FIRST ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
THE CHEMIST'S SHOP
THE SABBATH
ADRIAN
FARDLES
THE FLIGHT OF THE DUKE OF THE NORTH RIDINGS
THE SECOND ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
THE OINTMENT
THE THIRD ATTEMPT ON THE GRAAL
CONVERSATIONS OF THE YOUNGMAN IN GREY
THE BIBLE OF MRS. HIPPY
'TO-NIGHT THOU SHALT BE WITH ME IN PARADISE'
THE SEARCH FOR THE HOUSE
THE MARRIAGE OF THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
THE PRELUDE
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
A few moments later there was. Lionel Rackstraw, strolling back from lunch, heard in the corridor the sound of the bell in his room, and, entering at a run, took up the receiver. He remarked, as he did so, the boots and trousered legs sticking out from the large knee-hole table at which he worked, but the telephone had established the first claim on his attention.
"Yes," he said, "yes... No, not before the 17th... No, who cares what he wants?... No, who wants to know?... Oh, Mr. Persimmons. Oh, tell him the 17th... Yes... Yes, I'll send a set down."
He put the receiver down and looked back at the boots.
It occurred to him that someone was probably doing something to the telephone; people did, he knew, at various times drift in on him for such purposes. But they usually looked round or said something; and this fellow must have heard him talking. He bent down towards the boots.
"Shall you be long?" he said into the space between the legs and the central top drawer; and then, as there was no answer, he walked away, dropped hat and gloves and book on to their shelf, strolled back to his desk, picked up some papers and read them, put them back, and, peering again into the dark hole, said more impatiently, "Shall you be long?"
No voice replied; not even when, touching the extended foot with his own, he repeated the question. Rather reluctantly he went round to the other side of the table, which was still darker, and, trying to make out the head of the intruder, said almost loudly: "Hallo! hallo! What's the idea?" Then, as nothing happened, he stood up and went on to himself: "Damn it all, is he dead?" and thought at once that he might be.
That dead bodies did not usually lie round in one of the rooms of a publisher's offices in London about half-past two in the afternoon was a certainty that formed now an enormous and cynical background to the fantastic possibility. He half looked at the door which he had closed behind him, and then attempted the same sort of interior recovery with which he had often thrown off the knowledge that at any moment during his absence his wife might be involved in some street accident, some skidding bus or swerving lorry. These things happened--a small and unpleasant, if invisible, deity who lived in a corner of his top shelves had reminded him--these things happened, and even now perhaps... People had been crushed against their own front doors; there had been a doctor in Gower Street. Of course, it was all untrue. But this time, as he moved to touch the protruding feet, he wondered if it were.
The foot he touched apparently conveyed no information to the stranger's mind, and Lionel gave up the attempt. He went out and crossed the corridor to another office, whose occupant, spread over a table, was marking sentences in newspaper cuttings.
"Mornington," Lionel said, "there's a man in my room under the table, and I can't get him to take any notice. Will you come across? He looks," he added in a rush of realism, "for all the world as if he was dead."
"How fortunate!" Mornington said, gathering himself off the table. "If he were alive and had got under your table and wouldn't take any notice I should be afraid you'd annoyed him somehow. I think that's rather a pleasant notion," he went on as they crossed the corridor, "a sort of modern King's Threshold--get under the table of the man who's insulted you and simply sulk there. Not, I think, starve--that's for more romantic ages than ours--but take a case filled with sandwiches and a thermos... What's the plural of thermos?... " He stared at the feet, and then, going up to the desk, went down on one knee and put a hand over the disappearing leg. Then he looked up at Lionel.
"Something wrong," he said sharply. "Go and ask Dalling to come here." He dropped to both knees and peered under the table.
Lionel ran down the corridor in the other direction, and returned in a few minutes with a short man of about forty-five, whose face showed more curiosity than anxiety. Mornington was already making efforts to get the body from under the table.
"He must be dead," he said abruptly to the others as they came in. "What an incredible business! Go round the other side, Dalling; the buttons have caught in the table or something; see if you can get them loose."
"Hadn't we better leave it for the police?" Dalling asked. "I thought you weren't supposed to move bodies."
"How the devil do I know whether it is a body?" Mornington asked. "Not but what you may be right." He made investigations between the trouser-leg and the boot, and then stood up rather suddenly. "It's a body right enough," he said. "Is Persimmons in?"
"No," said Dalling; "he won't be back till four."
"Well, we shall have to get busy ourselves, then. Will you get on to the police-station? And, Rackstraw, you'd better drift about in the corridor and stop people coming in, or Plumpton will be earning half a guinea by telling the Evening News."
Plumpton, however, had no opportunity of learning what was concealed behind the door against which Lionel for the next quarter of an hour or so leant, his eyes fixed on a long letter which he had caught up from his desk as a pretext for silence if anyone passed him. Dalling went downstairs and out to the front door, a complicated glass arrangement which reflected every part of itself so many times that many arrivals were necessary before visitors could discover which panels swung back to the retail sales-room, which to a waiting-room for authors and others desiring interviews with the remoter staff, and which to a corridor leading direct to the stairs. It was here that he welcomed the police and the doctor, who arrived simultaneously, and going up the stairs to the first floor he explained the situation.
At the top of these stairs was a broad and deep landing, from which another flight ran backwards on the left-hand to the second floor. Opposite the stairs, across the landing, was the private room of Mr. Stephen Persimmons, the head of the business since his father's retirement some seven years before. On either side the landing narrowed to a corridor which ran for some distance left and right and gave access to various rooms occupied by Rackstraw, Mornington, Dalling, and others. On the right this corridor ended in a door which gave entrance to Plumpton's room. On the left the other section, in which Lionel's room was the last on the right hand, led to a staircase to the basement. On its way, however, this staircase passed and issued on a side door through which the visitor came out into a short, covered court, having a blank wall opposite, which connected the streets at the front and the back of the building. It would therefore have been easy for anyone to obtain access to Lionel's room in order, as the inspector in charge remarked pleasantly to Mornington, "to be strangled."
For the dead man had, as was evident when the police got the body clear, been murdered so. Lionel, in obedience to the official request to see if he could recognize the corpse, took one glance at the purple face and starting eyes, and with a choked negative retreated. Mornington, with a more contemplative, and Dalling with a more curious, interest, both in turn considered and denied any knowledge of the stranger. He was a little man, in the usual not very fresh clothes of the lower middle class; his bowler hat had been crushed in under the desk; his pockets contained nothing but a cheap watch, a few coppers, and some silver-- papers he appeared to have none. Around his neck was a piece of stout cord, deeply embedded in the flesh.
So much the clerks heard before the police with their proceedings retired into cloud and drove the civilians into other rooms. Almost as soon, either by the telephone or some other means, news of the discovery reached Fleet Street, and reporters came pushing through the crowd that began to gather immediately the police were seen to enter the building. The news of the discovered corpse was communicated to them officially, and for the rest they were left to choose as they would among the rumours flying through the crowd, which varied from vivid accounts of the actual murder and several different descriptions of the murderer to a report that the whole of the staff were under arrest and the police had had to wade ankle-deep through the blood in the basement.
To such a distraction Mr. Persimmons himself returned from a meeting of the Publishers' Association about four o'clock, and was immediately annexed by Inspector Colquhoun, who had taken the investigation in charge. Stephen Persimmons was rather a small man, with a mild face apt to take on a harassed and anxious appearance on slight cause. With much more reason he looked anxious now, as he sat opposite the inspector in his own room. He had recognized the body as little as any of his staff had, and it was about them rather than it that the inspector was anxious to gain particulars.
"This Rackstraw, now," Colquhoun was saying: "it was his room the body was found in. Has he been with you long?"
"Oh, years," Mr. Persimmons answered; "most of them have. All the people on this floor--and nearly all the rest. They've been here longer than me, most of them. You see, I came in just three years before my father retired--that's seven years ago, and three's ten."
"And Rackstraw was here before that?"
"Oh, yes, certainly."
"Do you know anything of him?" the inspector pressed. "His address, now?"
"Dalling has all that," the unhappy Persimmons said. "He has all the particulars about the staff. I remember Rackstraw being married a few years ago."
"And what does he do here?" Colquhoun went on.
"Oh, he does a good deal of putting books through, paper and type and binding, and so on. He rather looks after the fiction side. I've taken up fiction a good deal since my father went; that's why the business has expanded so. We've got two of the best selling people to-day--Mrs. Clyde and John Bastable."
"Mrs. Clyde," the inspector brooded. "Didn't she write 'The Comet and the Star'?"
"That's the woman. We sold ninety thousand," Persimmons answered.
"And what are your other lines?"
"Well, my father used to do, in fact he began with, what you might call occult stuff. Mesmerism and astrology and histories of great sorcerers, and that sort of thing. It didn't really pay very well."
"And does Mr. Rackstraw look after that too?" asked Colquhoun.
"Well, some of it," the publisher answered. "But of course, in a place like this things aren't exactly divided just--just exactly. Mornington, now, Mornington looks after some books. Under me, of course," he added hastily. "And then he does a good deal of the publicity, the advertisements, you know. And he does the reviews."
"What, writes them?" the inspector asked.
"Certainly not," said the publisher, shocked. "Reads them and chooses passages to quote. Writes them! Really, inspector!"
"And how long has Mr. Mornington been here?" Colquhoun went on.
"Oh, years and years. I tell you they all came before I did."
"I understand Mr. Rackstraw was out a long time at lunch to-day, with one of your authors. Would that be all right?"
"I daresay he was," Persimmons said, "if he said so."
"You don't know that he was?" asked Colquhoun. "He didn't tell you?"
"Really, inspector," the worried Persimmons said again, "do you think my staff ask me for an hour off when they want to see an author? I give them their work and they do it."
"Sir Giles Tumulty," the inspector said. "You know him?"
"We're publishing his last book, 'Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels in Folklore'. The explorer and antiquarian, you know. Rackstraw's had a lot of trouble with his illustrations, but he told me yesterday he thought he'd got them through. Yes, I can quite believe he went up to see him. But you can find out from Sir Giles, can't you?"
"What I'm getting at," the inspector said, "is this. If any of your people are out, is there anything to prevent anyone getting into any of their rooms? There's a front way and a back way in and nobody on watch anywhere."
"There's a girl in the waiting-room," Persimmons objected.
"A girl!" the inspector answered. "Reading a novel when she's not talking to anyone. She'd be a lot of good. Besides, there's a corridor to the staircase alongside the waiting-room. And at the back there's no-one."
"Well, one doesn't expect strangers to drop in casually," the publisher said unhappily. "I believe they do lock their doors sometimes, if they have to go out and have to leave a lot of papers all spread out."
"And leave the key in, I suppose?" Colquhoun said sarcastically.
"Of course," Persimmons answered. "Suppose I wanted something. Besides, it's not to keep anyone out; it's only just to save trouble and warn anyone going in to be careful, so to speak; it hardly ever happens. Besides--"
Colquhoun cut him short. "What people mean by asking for a Government of business men, I don't know," he said. "I was a Conservative from boyhood, and I'm stauncher every year the more I see of business. There's nothing to prevent anyone coming in."
"But they don't," said Persimmons.
"But they have," said Colquhoun. "It's the unexpected that happens. Are you a religious man, Mr. Persimmons?"
"Well, not--not exactly religious," the publisher said hesitatingly. "Not what you'd call religious unpleasantly, I mean. But what--"
"Nor am I," the inspector said. "And I don't get the chance to go to church much. But I've been twice with my wife to a Sunday evening service at her Wesleyan Church in the last few months, and it's a remarkable thing, Mr. Persimmons, we had the same piece read from the Bible each time. It ended up--'And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.' It seemed to me fairly meant for the public. 'What I say unto you,' that's us in the police, 'I say unto all, Watch.' If there was more of that there'd be fewer undiscovered murders. Well, I'll go and see Mr. Balling. Good day, Mr. Persimmons."
THE EVENING IN THREE HOMES
I
Adrian Rackstraw opened the oven, put the chicken carefully inside, and shut the door. Then he went back to the table, and realized suddenly that he had forgotten to buy the potatoes which were to accompany it. With a disturbed exclamation, he picked up the basket that lay in a corner, put on his hat, and set out on the new errand. He considered for a moment as he reached the garden gate to which of the two shops at which Mrs. Rackstraw indifferently supplied her needs he should go, and, deciding on the nearest, ran hastily down the road. At the shop, "Three potatoes," he said in a low, rather worried voice.
"Yes, sir," the man answered. "Five shillings, please."
Adrian paid him, put the potatoes in the basket, and started back home. But as at the corner he waited for the trams to go by and leave a clear crossing, his eye was caught by the railway station on his left. He looked at it for a minute or two in considerable doubt; then, changing his mind on the importance of vegetables, went back to the shop, left his basket with orders that the potatoes should be sent at once, and hurried back to the station. Once in the train, he saw bridges and tunnels succeed one another in exciting succession as the engine, satisfactorily fastened to coal-truck and carriages, went rushing along the Brighton line. But, before it reached its destination, his mother, entering the room with her usual swiftness, caught the station with her foot and sent it flying across the kitchen floor. Her immediate flood of apologies placated Adrian, however, and he left the train stranded some miles outside Brighton in order to assist her in preparing the food for dinner. She sat down on a chair for a moment, and he broke in again hastily.
"Oh, mummie, don't sit down there, that's my table," he said.
"Darling, I'm so sorry," Barbara Rackstraw answered. "Had you got anything on it?"
"Well, I was going to put the dinner things," Adrian explained. "I'll just see if the chicken's cooked. Oh, it's lovely!"
"How nice!" Barbara said abstractedly. "Is it a large chicken?"
"Not a very large one," Adrian admitted. "There's enough for me and you and my Bath auntie."
"Oh," said Barbara, startled, "is your Bath auntie here?"
"Well, she may be coming," said Adrian. "Mummie, why do I have a Bath auntie?"
"Because a baby grew up into your Bath auntie, darling," his mother said. "Unintentional but satisfactory, as far as it goes. Adrian, do you think your father will like cold sausages? Because there doesn't seem to be anything else much."
"I don't want any cold sausages," Adrian said hurriedly.
"No, my angel, but it's the twenty-seventh of the month, and there's never any money then," Barbara said. "And here he is, anyhow."
Lionel, in spite of the shock that he had received in the afternoon, found himself, rather to his own surprise, curiously free from the actual ghost of it. His memory had obligingly lost the face of the dead man, and it was not until he came through the streets of Tooting that he began to understand that its effect was at once more natural and more profound than he had expected. His usual sense of the fantastic and dangerous possibilities of life, a sense which dwelled persistently in a remote corner of his mind, never showing itself in full, but stirring in the absurd alarm which shook him if his wife were ever late for an appointment--this sense now escaped from his keeping, and, instead of being too hidden, became too universal to be seized. The faces he saw, the words he heard existed in an enormous void, in which he himself-- reduced to a face and voice, without deeper existence--hung for a moment, grotesque and timid. There had been for an hour some attempt to re-establish the work of the office, and he had initialled, before he left, a few memoranda which were brought to him. The "L. R." of his signature seemed now to grow balloon-like and huge about him, volleying about his face at the same time that they turned within and around him in a slimy tangle. At similar, if less terrifying, moments, in other days, he had found that a concentration upon his wife had helped to steady and free him, but when this evening he made this attempt he found even in her only a flying figure with a face turned from him, whom he dreaded though he hastened to overtake. As he put his key in the lock he was aware that the thought of Adrian had joined the mad dance of possible deceptions, and it was with a desperate and machine-like courage that he entered to dare whatever horror awaited him.
Nor did the ordinary interchange of greetings do much to disperse the cloud. It occurred to him even as he smiled at Barbara that perhaps another lover had not long left the house; it occurred to him even as he watched Adrian finding pictures of trains in the evening paper that a wild possibility--for a story perhaps; not, surely not, as truth-- might be that of a child whose brain was that of the normal man of forty while all his appearance was that of four. An infant prodigy? No, but a prodigy who for some horrible reason of his own concealed his prodigiousness until the moment he expected should arrive. And when they left him to his evening meal, while Barbara engaged herself in putting Adrian to bed, a hundred memories of historical or fictitious crimes entered his mind in which the victim had been carefully poisoned under the shelter of a peaceful and happy domesticity. And not that alone or chiefly; it was not the possibility of administered poison that occupied him, but the question whether all food, and all other things also, were not in themselves poisonous. Fruit, he thought, might be; was there not in the nature of things some venom which nourished while it tormented, so that the very air he breathed did but enable him to endure for a longer time the spiritual malevolence of the world?
Possessed by such dreams, he sat listless and alone until Barbara returned and settled herself down to the evening paper. The event of the afternoon occupied, he knew, the front page. He found himself incapable of speaking of it; he awaited the moment when her indolent eyes should find it. But that would not be, and indeed was not, till she had looked through the whole paper, delaying over remote paragraphs he had never noticed, and extracting interest from the mere superfluous folly of mankind. She turned the pages casually, glanced at the heading, glanced at the column, dropped the paper over the arm of her chair, and took up a cigarette.
"He's beginning to make quite recognizable letters," she said. "He made quite a good K this afternoon."
This, Lionel thought despairingly, was an example of the malevolence of the universe; he had given it, and her, every chance. Did she never read the paper? Must he talk of it himself, and himself renew the dreadful memories in open speech?
"Did you see," he said, "what happened at our place this afternoon?"
"No," said Barbara, surprised; and then, breaking off, "Darling, you look so ill. Do you feel ill?"
"I'm not quite the thing," Lionel admitted. "You'll see why, in there." He indicated the discarded Star.
Barbara picked it up. "Where?" she asked. "'Murder in City publishing house.' That wasn't yours, I suppose? Lionel, it was! Good heavens, where?"
"In my office," Lionel answered, wondering whether some other corpse wasn't hidden behind the chair in which she sat. Of course, they had found that one this afternoon, but mightn't there be a body that other people couldn't find, couldn't even see? Barbara herself now: mightn't she be really lying there dead? and this that seemed to sit there opposite him merely a projection of his own memories of a thousand evenings when she had sat so? What mightn't be true, in this terrifying and obscene universe?
Barbara's voice--or the voice of the apparent Barbara--broke in. "But, dearest," she said, "how dreadful for you! Why didn't you tell me? You must have had a horrible time." She dropped the paper again and hurled herself on to her knees beside him.
He caught her hand in his own, and felt as if his body at least was sane, whatever his mind might be. After all, the universe had produced Barbara. And Adrian, who, though a nuisance, was at least delimited and real in his own fashion. The fantastic child of his dream, evil and cruel and vigilant, couldn't at the same time have Adrian's temper and Adrian's indefatigable interest in things. Even devils couldn't be normal children at the same time. He brought his wife's wrist to his cheek, and the touch subdued the rising hysteria within him. "It was rather a loathsome business," he said, and put out his other hand for the cigarettes.
II
Mornington had on various occasions argued with Lionel whether pessimism was always the result of a too romantic, even a too sentimental, view of the world; and a slightly scornful mind pointed out to him, while he ate a solitary meal in his rooms that evening, that the shock which he undoubtedly had felt was the result of not expecting people to murder other people. "Whereas they naturally do," he said to himself. "The normal thing with an unpleasant intrusion is to try and exclude it-- human or not. So silly not to be prepared for these things. Some people, as De Quincey said, have a natural aptitude for being murdered. To kill or to be killed is a perfectly reasonable thing. And I will not let it stop me taking those lists round to the Vicar's."
He got up, collected the papers which he had been analysing for reports on parochial finance, and went off to the Vicarage of St. Cyprian's, which was only a quarter of an hour from his home. He disliked himself for doing work that he disliked, but he had never been able to refuse help to any of his friends; and the Vicar might be numbered among them. Mornington suspected his Christianity of being the inevitable result of having moved for some time as a youth of eighteen in circles which were, in a rather detached and superior way, opposed to it; but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist. It was because the Vicar, a hard-worked practical priest, had been driven by stress of experience to some similar standpoint that the two occasionally found one another congenial.
That evening, however, he found a visitor at the Vicarage, a round, dapper little cleric in gaiters, who was smoking a cigar and turning over the pages of a manuscript. The Vicar pulled Mornington into the study where they were sitting.
"My dear fellow," he said, "come in, come in. We've been talking about you. Let me introduce the Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum--Mr. Mornington. What a dreadful business this is at your office! Did you have anything to do with it?"
Mornington saluted the Archdeacon, who took off his eyeglasses and bowed back. "Dreadful," he said, tentatively Mornington thought; rather as if he wasn't quite sure what the other wanted him to say, and was anxious to accommodate himself to what was expected. "Yes, dreadful!"
"Well," Mornington answered, rebelling against this double sympathy, "of course, it was a vast nuisance. It disturbed the whole place. And I forgot to send the copy for our advertisement in the Bookman--so we shan't get in this month. That's the really annoying part. I hate being defeated by a murder. And it wasn't even in my own room."
"Ah, that's the trade way of looking at it," the Vicar said. "You'll have some coffee? But this poor fellow... is it known at all who he was?"
"Nary a know," Mornington answered brightly. "The police have the body as the clue, and that's all. Rather large, and inconvenient to lug about, and of course only available for a few days. Nature, you know. But it's the Bookman that annoys me--you wouldn't believe how much."
"Oh, come, not really!" the Vicar protested. "You wouldn't compare the importance of an advertisement with a murder."
"I think Mr. Mornington's quite right," the Archdeacon said. "After all, one shouldn't be put out of one's stride by anything phenomenal and accidental. The just man wouldn't be."
"But, still, a murder--" the Vicar protested.
The Archdeacon shrugged. "Murders or mice, the principle's the same," he answered. "To-morrow is too late, I suppose?"
"Quite," Mornington answered. "But I needn't worry you with my phenomenal and specialist troubles."
"As a matter of fact," the Archdeacon went on placidly, "we were talking about your firm at first rather differently." He pointed with his glasses to the manuscript on the table, and looked coyly at Mornington. "I dare say you can guess," he added.
Mornington tried to look pleased, and said in a voice that almost cracked with doubt: "Books?"
"A book," the Vicar said. "The Archdeacon's been giving a series of addresses on Christianity and the League of Nations, and he's made them into a little volume which ought to have a good sale. So, of course, I thought of you."
"Thank you so much," Mornington answered. "And you'll excuse me asking-- but is the Archdeacon prepared to back his fancy? Will he pay if necessary?"
The Archdeacon shook his head. "I couldn't do that, Mr. Mornington," he said. "It doesn't seem to me quite moral, so to speak. You know how they say a book is like a child. One has a ridiculous liking for one's own child--quite ridiculous. And that's all right. But seriously to think it's better than other children, to push it, to 'back' its being better, as you said--that seems to me so silly as to be almost wicked." He shook his head sadly at the manuscript.
"On the general principle I don't agree with you," Mornington said. "If your ideas are better than others' you ought to push them. I've no patience with our modern democratic modesty. How do you know the publisher you send it to is a better judge than you are? And, if he rejects it, what do you do?"
"If I send it to all the publishers," the Archdeacon answered, "and they all reject it, I think I should believe them. Securus iudicat, you know."
"But it doesn't," Mornington said. "Not by any manner of means. The orbis terrarum has to be taught its business by the more intelligent people. It has never yet received a new idea into its chaotic mind unless imposed by force, and generally by the sword."
He picked up the MS. and turned over the pages. "'The Protocol and the Pact,'" he read aloud, "'as Stages in Man's Consciousness.' 'Qualities and Nationalities.' 'Modes of Knowledge in Christ and Their Correspondences in Mankind.' 'Is the League of Nations Representative?'"
"I gather," he said, looking up, "that this is at once specialist and popular. I don't for a moment suppose we shall take it, but I should like to have a look at it. May I carry it off now?"
"I think I'd like to keep it over the week-end," the Archdeacon answered. "There's a point or two I want to think over and a little Greek I want to check. Perhaps I might bring it down to you on Monday or Tuesday?"
"Do," Mornington said. "Of course, I shan't decide. It'll go to one of our political readers, who won't, I should think from the chapter-headings, even begin to understand it. But bring it along by all means. Persimmons' list is the most muddled-up thing in London. 'Foxy Flossie's Flirtations' and 'Notes on Black Magic Considered Philosophically'. But that, of course, is his father, so there's some excuse."
"I thought you told me the elder Mr. Persimmons had retired," the Vicar said.
"He is the Evening Star," Mornington answered. "He cuts the glory from the grey, as it were. But he pops in a good deal so as to do it. He hovers on the horizon perpetually, and about once a fortnight lightens from the east to the west, or at least to Persimmons' private office. A nice enough creature--with a perverse inclination towards the occult."
"I'm afraid," the Vicar said gloomily, "this interest in what they call the occult is growing. It's a result of the lack of true religion in these days and a wrong curiosity."
"Oh, wrong, do you think?" Mornington asked. "Would you say any kind of curiosity was wrong? What about Job?"
"Job?" the Archdeacon asked.
"Well, sir, I always understood that where Job scored over the three friends was in feeling a natural curiosity why all those unfortunate things happened to him. They simply put up with it, but he, so to speak, asked God what He thought He was doing."
The Vicar shook his head. "He was told he couldn't understand."
"He was taunted with not being able to understand--which isn't quite the same thing," Mornington answered. "As a mere argument there's something lacking perhaps, in saying to a man who's lost his money and his house and his family and is sitting on the dustbin, all over boils, 'Look at the hippopotamus.'"
"Job seemed to be impressed," the Archdeacon said mildly.
"Yes," Mornington admitted. "He was certainly a perfect fool, in one meaning or other of the words." He got up to go, and added: "Then I shall see you in the City before you go back to... Castra Parvulorum, was it? What a jolly name!"
"Unfortunately it isn't generally called that," the Archdeacon said. "It's called in directories and so on, and by the inhabitants, Fardles. By Grimm's Law."
"Grimm's Law?" Mornington asked, astonished. "Wasn't he the man who wrote the fairy tales for the parvuli? But why did he make a law about it? And why did anyone take any notice?"
"I understand it was something to do with Indo-European sounds," the Archdeacon answered. "The Castra was dropped, and in parvulorum the p became f and the v became d. And Grimm discovered what had happened. But I try and keep the old name as well as I can. It's not far from London. They say Caesar gave it the name because his soldiers caught a lot of British children there, and he sent them back to their own people."
"Then I don't see why Grimm should have interfered," Mornington said, shaking hands. "Fardles... it sounds like an essay by Maurice Hewlett. Castra Parvulorum... it sounds like... it sounds like Rome. Well, good night, sir. Good night, Vicar. No, don't come to the door."
III
Actually at the moment when Mornington was speaking of him the elder Mr. Persimmons was sitting in a comfortable chair in an Ealing flat, listening to his son's account of the afternoon's adventure. He was a large man, and he lay back watching Stephen with amused eyes, as the younger man grew more and more agitated over the incredible facts.
"I'm so afraid it'll be bad for business," he ended abruptly.
The other sighed a little and looked at the fire. "Business," he said. "Oh, I shouldn't worry about business. If they want your books, they'll buy your books." He paused a little, and added: "I called in to see you to-day, but you were out."
"Did you?" his son said. "They didn't tell me."
"Just as well," Mr. Persimmons answered, "because you needn't know now. You won't be called at the inquest. Only, if anybody ever asks you, say you'll ask me and find out. I tell you because I want to know what you are doing and saying."
Stephen was looking out of the window, and a minute went by before he spoke. Then he said absently, "What did you want? Anything important?"
"I wanted to talk about the balance sheet," his father answered. "There are a few points I don't quite understand. And I still incline to think the proportion of novels is too high. It fritters money away, merely using it to produce more novels of the same kind. I want a definite proportion established between that and the other kind of book. You could quite well have produced my Intensive Mastery instead of that appalling balderdash about Flossie. Stephen, are you listening?"
"Yes," Stephen said half-angrily.
"I don't believe you mean to produce my book," his father went on equably. "Did you read it?"
"Yes," Stephen said again, and came back into the room. "I don't know about it. I told you I didn't quite like it--I don't think other people would. Of course, I know there's a great demand for that sort of psycho-analytic book, but I didn't feel at all sure--" He stopped doubtfully.
"If you ever felt quite sure, Stephen," the older man said, "I should lose a great deal of pleasure. What was it you didn't feel quite sure about this time?"
"Well, all the examples--and the stories," Stephen answered vaguely. "They're all right, I suppose, but they seemed so--funny."
"'Funny Stories I Have Read', by Stephen Persimmons," his father gibed. "They weren't stories, Stephen. They were scientific examples."
"But they were all about torture," the other answered. "There was a dreadful one about--oh, horrible! I don't believe it would sell."
"It will sell right enough," his father said. "You're not a scientist, Stephen."
"And the diagrams and all that," his son went on. "It'd cost a great deal to produce."
"Well, you shall do as you like," Persimmons answered. "But, if you don't produce it by Christmas, I'll print it privately. That will cost a lot more money, Stephen. And anything else I write. If there are many more it'll make a nasty hole in my accounts. And there won't be any sale then, because I shall give them away. And burn what are over. Make up your mind over the week-end. I'll come down next week to hear what you decide. All a gamble, Stephen, and you don't like to bet except on a certainty, do you? You know, if I could afford it, I should enjoy ruining you, Stephen. But that, Stephen--"
"For God's sake, don't keep on calling me Stephen like that," the wretched publisher said. "I believe you like worrying me."
"But that," his father went on placidly, "wasn't the only reason I came to see you to-day. I wanted to kill a man, and your place seemed to me as good as any and better than most. So it was, it seems."
Stephen Persimmons stared at the large, heavy body opposite lying back in its chair, and said, "You're worrying me... aren't you?"
"I may be," the other said, "but facts, I've noticed, do worry you, Stephen. They worried your mother into that lunatic asylum. A dreadful tragedy, Stephen--to be cut off from one's wife like that. I hope nothing of the sort will ever happen to you. Here am I comparatively young--and I should like another child, Stephen. Yes, Stephen, I should like another child. There'd be someone else to leave the money to; someone else with an interest in the business. And I should know better what to do. Now, when you were born, Stephen--"
"Oh, God Almighty," his son cried, "don't talk to me like that. What do you mean--you wanted to kill a man?"
"Mean?" the father asked. "Why, that. I hadn't thought of it till the day before, really--yesterday, so it was; when Sir Giles Tumulty told me Rackstraw was coming to see him--and then it only just crossed my mind. But when we got there, it was all so clear and empty. A risk, of course, but not much. Ask him to wait there while I get the money, and shut the door without going out. Done in a minute, Stephen, I assure you. He was an undersized creature, too."
Stephen found himself unable to ask any more questions. Did his father mean it or not? It would be like the old man to torment him? but if he had? Would it be a way of release?
"Well, first, Stephen," the voice struck in, "you can't and won't be sure. And it wouldn't look well to denounce your father on chance. Your mother is in a lunatic asylum, you know. And, secondly, my last will--I made it a week or two ago--leaves all my money to found a settlement in East London. Very awkward for you, Stephen, if it all had to be withdrawn. But you won't, you won't. If anyone asks you, say you weren't told, but you know I wanted to talk to you about the balance sheet. I'll come in next week to do it."
Stephen got to his feet. "I think you want to drive me mad too," he said. "O God, if I only knew!"
"You know me," his father said. "Do you think I should worry about strangling you, Stephen, if I wanted to? As, of course, I might. But it's getting late. You know, Stephen, you brood too much; I've always said so. You keep your troubles to yourself and brood over them. Why not have a good frank talk with one of your clerks--that fellow Rackstraw, say? But you always were a secretive fellow. Perhaps it's as well, perhaps it's as well. And you haven't got a wife. Now, can you hang me or can't you?" The door shut behind his son, but he went on still aloud. "The wizards were burned, they went to be burned, they hurried. Is there a need still? Must the wizard be an outcast like the saint? Or am I only tired? I want another child. And I want the Graal."
He lay back in his chair, contemplating remote possibilities and the passage of the days immediately before him.
THE ARCHDEACON IN THE CITY
The inquest was held on the Monday, with the formal result of a verdict of "Murder by a person or persons unknown," and the psychological result of emphasizing the states of mind of the three chief sufferers within themselves. The world certified itself as being, to Lionel more fantastic, to Mornington more despicable, to Stephen Persimmons more harassing. To the young girl who lived in the waiting-room and was interrogated by the coroner, it became, on the contrary, more exciting and delightful than ever; although she had no information to give-- having, on her own account, been engaged all the while so closely indexing letter-books that she had not observed anyone enter or depart by the passage at the side of her office.
On the Tuesday, however, being, perhaps naturally, more watchful, she remarked towards the end of the day, three, or rather four, visitors. The offices shut at six, and about half-past four the elder Mr. Persimmons, giving her an amiable smile, passed heavily along the corridor and up to his son's room. At about a quarter past five Barbara Rackstraw, with Adrian, shone in the entrance--as she did normally some three or four times a year--and also disappeared up the stairs. And somewhere between the two a polite, chubby, and gaitered clergyman hovered at the door of the waiting-room and asked her tentatively if Mr. Mornington were in. Him she committed to the care of a passing office-boy, and returned to her indexing.
Gregory Persimmons, a little to his son's surprise and greatly to his relief, appeared to have shaken off the mood of tantalizing amusement which had possessed him on the previous Friday. He discussed various financial points in the balance sheet as if he were concerned only with ordinary business concerns. He congratulated his son on the result of the inquest as likely to close the whole matter except in what he thought the unlikely result of the police discovering the murderer; and when he brought up the subject of Intensive Mastery he did it with no suggestion that anything but the most normal hesitation had ever held Stephen back from enthusiastic acceptance. In the sudden relief from mental neuralgia thus granted him, Stephen found himself promising to have the book out before Christmas--it was then early summer--and even going so far as to promise estimates during the next week and discuss the price at which it might reasonably appear. Towards the end of an hour's conversation Gregory said, "By the way, I saw Tumulty yesterday, and he asked me to make sure that he was in time to cut a paragraph out of his book. He sent Rackstraw a postcard, but perhaps I might just make sure it got here all right. May I go along, Stephen?"
"Do," Stephen said. "I'll sign these letters and be ready by the time you're back." And, as his father went out with a nod, he thought to himself: "He couldn't possibly want to go into that office again if he'd really killed a man there. It's just his way of pulling my leg. Rather hellish, but I suppose it doesn't seem so to him."
Lionel, tormented with a more profound and widely spread neuralgia than his employer's, had by pressure of work been prevented from dwelling on it that day. Soon after his arrival Mornington had broken into the office to ask if he could have a set of proofs of Sir Giles Tumulty's book on Vessels of Folklore.
"I've got an Archdeacon coming to see me," he said--"don't bow--and an Archdeacon ought to be interested in folklore, don't you think? I always used to feel that Archdeacons were a kind of surviving folklore themselves-they seem pre-Christian and almost prehistoric: a lingering and bi-sexual tradition. Besides, publicity, you know. Don't Archdeacons charge? 'Charge, Archdeacons, charge! On, Castra Parvulorum, on! were the last words of Mornington.''
"I wish they were!" Lionel said. "There are the proofs, on that shelf: take them and go! take them all."
"I don't want them all. Business, business. We can't have murders and Bank Holidays every day."
He routed out the proofs and departed; and when by the afternoon post an almost indecipherable postcard from Sir Giles asked for the removal of a short paragraph on page 218, Lionel did not think of making the alteration on the borrowed set. He marked the paragraph for deletion on the proofs he was about to return for Press, cursing Sir Giles a little for the correction--which, however, as it came at the end of a whole division of the book, would cause no serious inconvenience--and much more for his handwriting. A sentence beginning--he at last made out-- "It has been suggested to me" immediately became totally illegible, and only recovered meaning towards the end, where the figures 218 rode like a monumental Pharaoh over the diminutive abbreviations which surrounded it. But the instruction was comprehensible, if the reason for it was not, and Lionel dispatched the proofs to the printer.
When, later on, the Archdeacon arrived, Mornington greeted him with real and false warmth mingled. He liked the clergyman, but he disliked manuscripts, and a manuscript on the League of Nations promised him some hours' boredom. For, in spite of his disclaimer, he knew he would have to skim the book at least, before he obtained further opinions, and the League of Nations lay almost in the nadir of all the despicable things in the world. It seemed to him so entire and immense a contradiction of aristocracy that it drove him into a positive hunger for mental authority imposed by force. He desired to see Plato and his like ruling with power, and remembered with longing the fierce inquisition of the Laws. However, he welcomed the Archdeacon without showing this, and settled down to chat about the book.
"Good evening, Mr. Archdeacon," he said rapidly, suddenly remembering that he didn't know the other's name, and at the same moment that it would no doubt be on the manuscript and that he would look at it immediately. "Good of you to come. Come in and sit down."
The Archdeacon, with an agreeable smile, complied, and, as he laid the parcel on the desk, said: "I feel a little remorseful now, Mr. Mornington. Or I should if I didn't realize that this is your business."
"That," Mornington said, laughing, "is a clear, cool, lucid, diabolical way of looking at it. If you could manage to feel a little remorse I should feel almost tender--an unusual feeling towards a manuscript."
"The relation between an author and a publisher", the Archdeacon remarked, "always seems to me to partake a little of the nature of a duel, an abstract, impersonal duel. There is no feeling about it."
"Oh, isn't there?" Mornington interjected. "Ask Persimmons; ask our authors."
"Is there?" the Archdeacon asked. "You astonish me." He looked at the parcel, of which he still held the string. "Do you know," he said thoughtfully, "I don't think I have any feeling particularly about it. Whether you publish it or not, whether anyone publishes it or not, doesn't matter much. I think it might matter if I made no attempt to get it published, for I honestly think the ideas are sound. But with that very small necessary activity my responsibility ends."
"You take it very placidly," Mornington answered, smiling. "Most of our authors feel they have written the most important book of the century."
"Ah, don't misunderstand me," the Archdeacon said. "I might think that myself--I don't, but I might. It wouldn't make any difference to my attitude towards it. No book of ideas can matter so supremely as that. 'An infant crying in the night,' you know. What else was Aristotle?"
"Well, it makes it much pleasanter for us," Mornington said again. "I gather it's all one to you whether we take it or leave it?"
"Entirely," the Archdeacon answered, and pushed the bundle towards him. "I should, inevitably, be interested in your reasons so far as they bear stating."
"With this detachment," the other answered, undoing the parcel, "I wonder you make any reservation. Could any abominable reason shatter such a celestial calm?"
The Archdeacon twiddled his thumbs. "Man is weak," he said sincerely, "and I indeed am the chief of sinners. But I also am in the hands of God, and what can it matter how foolish my own words are or how truly I am told of them? Pooh, Mr. Mornington, you must have a very conceited set of authors."
"Talking about authors," Mornington went on, "I thought you might be interested in looking at the proofs of this book we've got in hand." And he passed over Sir Giles's Sacred Vessels.
The Archdeacon took them. "It's good work, is it?" he asked.
"I haven't had time to read it," the other said, "But there's one article on the Graal that ought to attract you." He glanced sideways at the first page of the MS., and read "Christianity and the League of Nations, by Julian Davenant, Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum." "Well, thank God I know his name now," he reflected.
Meanwhile the third visitor, with her small companion, had penetrated to Lionel's room. They had come to the City to buy Adrian a birthday present, and, having succeeded, had gone on according to plan to the office. This arrangement--as such arrangements by such people tend to be--had been made two or three weeks earlier, and the crisis of the previous Friday had made Lionel only the more anxious to see if Barbara's presence would in any way cleanse the room from the slime that seemed still to carpet it. He had been a little doubtful whether she herself would bear the neighbourhood, but, either because in effect the murder had meant little to her or because she guessed something of her husband's feelings, she had made no difficulty, had indeed assumed that the visit was still to be paid. Adrian's persistent interest in the date-stamp presented itself for those few minutes to Lionel as a solid reality amid the fantasies his mind made haste to induce. But Barbara's own presence was too much in the nature of a defiance to make him entirely happy. He kissed her as she sat on his table, with a sense of almost heroic challenge; neither he nor she were ignorant, and their ignoring of the subject was a too clear simulation of the ignorance they did not possess. But Adrian's ignorance was something positive. Lionel felt that a dead body beneath the desk would have been to this small and intent being something not so much unpleasant as dull and unnecessary; it might have got in the way of the movements of his body, but not of his mind. This was what he needed; his unsteady thought needed weighting, but with what, he asked himself, of all the shadows of obscenity that moved through the place of shadows which was the world--with which of all these could he weight it? From date-stamp to waste-paper basket, from basket to files, from files to telephone Adrian pursued his investigations; and Lionel was on the point of giving an exhibition of telephoning by ringing up Mornington, when the door opened and Gregory Persimmons appeared.
"I beg your pardon," he said, stopping on the threshold, "I really beg your pardon, Rackstraw."
"Come in, sir," Lionel said, getting up. "It's only my wife."
"I've met Mrs. Rackstraw before," Persimmons said, shaking hands. "But not, I think, this young man." He moved slowly in Adrian's direction.
"Adrian," Barbara said, "come and shake hands."
The child politely obeyed, as Persimmons, dropping on one knee, welcomed him with a grave and detached courtesy equal to his own. But when he stood up again he kept his eyes fixed on Adrian, even while saying to Barbara, "What a delightful child!"
"He is rather a pet," Barbara murmured. "But, of course, an awful nuisance."
"They always are," Persimmons said. "But they have their compensations. I've always been glad I had a son. Training them is a wonderful experience."
"Adrian trains himself, I'm afraid," Barbara answered, a little embarrassed. "But we shall certainly have to begin to teach him soon."
"Yes," Gregory said, his eyes still on Adrian. "It's a dreadful business, teaching them what's wrong. It has to be done all the same, and he's too fine a child to waste. I beg your pardon again--but I do think children are so wonderful, and when one meets the grown-ups one feels they've so often been wasted." He smiled at Barbara. "Look at your husband; look at me!" he said. "We were babies once."
"Well," Barbara said, smiling back, "I wouldn't say that Lionel had been altogether wasted. Nor you, Mr. Persimmons."
He bowed a little, but shook his head, then turned to Lionel. "All I came for, Rackstraw," he said, "was to say that I saw Tumulty yesterday, and he was rather anxious whether you could read a postcard he sent you about his book."
"Only just," Lionel answered, "but I managed. He wanted a paragraph knocked out."
"And you got it in time to make the correction?" Gregory asked again.
"Behold the proof," Lionel said, "in the proof. It goes off to-night." He held the sheet out to the other man, who took it with a word of thanks and glanced at the red-ink line. "That's it," he said, "the last paragraph on page 218." He stood for a moment reading it through.
In the room across the corridor the Archdeacon turned over page 217 and read on.
"It seems probable therefore," the book ran, "if we consider these evidences, and the hypothetical scheme which has been adduced, not altogether unreasonably, to account for the facts which we have--a scheme which may be destroyed in the future by discovery of some further fact, but till then may not unjustifiably be considered to hold the field--it seems probable that the reputed Graal may be so far definitely traced and its wanderings followed as to permit us to say that it rests at present in the parish church of Fardles."
"Dear me!" the Archdeacon said; and, "Yes, that was the paragraph," said Mr. Gregory Persimmons; and for a moment there was silence in both offices.
The Archdeacon was considering that he had, in fact, never been able to find out anything about a certain rarely used chalice at Fardles. A year or two before the decease of the last Vicar a very much more important person in the neighbourhood had died--Sir John Horatio Sykes-Martindale, K.V.O., D.S.O., and various other things. In memory of the staunch churchmanship of this great and good man, his widow had presented a complete set of altar fittings and altar plate to the parish church, which was then doing its best with antique but uncorresponding paten and chalice. These were discarded in favour of the new gift, and when the Archdeacon succeeded to the rectory and archdeaconry he followed his predecessor's custom. He had at different times examined the old chalice carefully, and had shown it to some of his friends, but he had had no reason to make any special investigation, nor indeed would it have been easy to do so. The new suggestion, however, gave it a fresh interest. He was about to call Mornington's attention to the paragraph, then he changed his mind. There would be plenty of time when the book was out: lots of people--far too many--would hear about it then, and he might have to deal with a very complicated situation. So many people, he reflected, put an altogether undue importance on these exterior and material things. The Archbishop might write? and Archaeological Societies--and perhaps Psychical Research people: one never knew. Better keep quiet and consider.
"I should like", he said aloud, "to have a copy of this book when it comes out. Could you have one sent to me, Mr. Mornington?"
"Oh, but I didn't show it to you for that reason," Mornington answered. "I only thought it might amuse you."
"It interests me very deeply," the Archdeacon agreed. "In one sense, of course, the Graal is unimportant--it is a symbol less near Reality now than any chalice of consecrated wine. But it is conceivable that the Graal absorbed, as material things will, something of the high intensity of the moment when it was used, and of its adventures through the centuries. In that sense I should be glad, and even eager," he added precisely, "to study its history."
"Well, as you like," Mornington answered. "So long as I'm not luring or bullying you into putting money into poor dear Persimmons's pocket."
"No one less, I assure you," the Archdeacon said, as he got up to go. "Besides, why should one let oneself be lured or bullied?"
"Especially by a publisher's clerk," Mornington added, smiling. "Well, we'll write to you as soon as possible, Mr. Davenant. In about forty days, I should think. It would be Lent to most authors, but I gather it won't be more than the usual Sundays after Trinity to you."
The Archdeacon shook his head gravely. "One is very weak, Mr. Mornington," he said. "While I would do good, and so on, you know. I shall wonder what will happen, although it's silly, of course, very silly. Good-bye and thank you."
Mornington opened the door for him and followed him out into the corridor. As they went along it they saw a group, consisting of Gregory and the Rackstraws outside Stephen Persimmons's room at the top of the stairs, and heard Gregory say to Barbara, "Yes, Mrs. Rackstraw, I'm sure that's the best way. You can't teach them what to want and go for because you don't know their minds. But you can teach them what not to do with just a few simple rules about what's wrong. Be afraid to do wrong--that's what I used to tell Stephen."
"Le malheureux!" Mornington murmured as he bowed to the group, and let his smile change from one of respect to Gregory to one of friendliness for Barbara. The Archdeacon's foot was poised doubtfully for a moment over the first stair. But, if he had been inclined to go back, he changed his mind and went on towards the front door, with the other in attendance.
"Yes," Barbara said, distracted by Mornington's passing, "yes, I expect you're right."
"I suppose," Gregory remarked, changing the conversation, "that you've settled your holiday plans by now. Where are you going?"
"Well, sir," Lionel said, "we weren't going away this year at all. But Adrian had a slight attack of measles a month or so ago, so we decided we ought to, just to put him thoroughly right. Only every place is booked up and we don't seem able to get anything."
"I don't want to seem intrusive," Gregory said hesitatingly, "but, if you really want a place, there's a cottage--not a very grand one--down near where I live. It's on my grounds actually, and it's quite empty just now... if it's any good to you."
"But, Mr. Persimmons, how charming of you!" Barbara cried. "That would be delightful and just the thing. Where do you live, by the way?"
"I've just taken a place in the country," Gregory answered, "in Hertfordshire, near a little village called Fardles. Indeed, I've only just moved in. It belonged to a Lady Sykes-Martindale, but she's been advised to go to Egypt for her health, and I took the house. So it's quite new to me. Adrian and I could explore it together."
"How splendid!" Barbara said. "But are you quite sure, Mr. Persimmons? I did want to get away, but we were giving up hope. Are you quite sure we shan't be intruding?"
"Not if you will let me see something of you there," Gregory assured her. "And, if Adrian liked me enough," he smiled at the boy, "you and your husband--" A motion of his hand threw England open to their excursions.
"It's very good of you, sir," Lionel began.
"Nonsense, nonsense," the other answered. "There's the cottage and here are you. I'll write about it. When do you go, Rackstraw? July? I'll write in a week or two, then. And now I must go and look at more figures. Good night, Mrs. Rackstraw. I shall see you again in five weeks or so. Good night, Adrian." He bowed down to shake the small hand. "Good night, Rackstraw. I'm delighted you'll come." He waved his hand generally and departed.
"What a divine creature!" Barbara said, going down the stairs. "Adrian darling, we're really going away. Would you like to go into the country?"
"Where is the country?" Adrian said.
"Oh--out there," Barbara said. "Away from the streets. With fields and cows."
"I don't like cows," Adrian said coldly.
"I daresay you won't see any," Lionel put in. "It does seem rather fortunate, Barbara."
"I think it's perfectly splendid," Barbara said joyously.
"Can I take my new train?" Adrian asked. And, in a whirl of assurances that he should take anything he liked or needed or had the slightest inclination to take, they came out into the hot June evening.
THE FIRST ATTEMPT ON THEGRAAL
The Archdeacon of Castra Parvulorum returned to Fardles and his rectory on the next morning, for a few days' clearing up before he went on his holiday. After he had spent an hour or two in his study, he got up suddenly, and, going out of the house, took the private path that led through his garden and the churchyard to the small Norman Church. The memory of the article he had read in Mornington's office had grown more dominating as he returned to the place where, if Sir Giles Tumulty were right, the Graal, neglected and overlooked, stood in his sacristy. No one had ever seen the Archdeacon excited, not even when, in the days of his youth, he had assisted his friends to break up a recruiting meeting in the days of the Boer War; and even now he yielded to himself as he might have yielded to a friend's importunities, and went along the path rather with an air of humouring a pleasant but persistent visitor than with any eagerness of his own.
The church stood open, as it always did, from the early celebration till dusk. The verger was at the moment engaged on the Archdeacon's roses, and, since Fardles lay off the main road, it was rarely that it was visited by strangers. Fardles itself indeed lay a little way distant from the church, the nearest houses being about a quarter of a mile off and the main street of the village beginning another quarter of a mile beyond them. The railway station formed the third corner of an equilateral triangle, with the village and the church at the angles of its base. On the other side of the base a similar triangle was formed by the grounds of the late Sir John Horatio Sykes-Martindale's house. The house itself--Cully, as it was called, to the Archdeacon's secret and serious delight, and without any distress to the naturally ignorant Sir John--lay in the middle of its grounds; an enormous overbuilt place, of no particular age and no particular period. And beyond it, towards the apex of this second triangle, lay the empty cottage of which Mr. Gregory Persimmons had spoken to Lionel.
The Archdeacon went into the church and passed on into the sacristy. He unlocked and opened the tall and antique chest in which the sacred vessels were kept, lifted one of them out, and, carrying it back into the church, set it upon the altar. Then he stood and looked at it carefully.
It was old enough, that appeared certain; it was plain enough too, almost severe. The drinking cup itself was some six inches in depth, with a stem in proportion, and a small pedestal which was carried by slowly narrowing work up some distance of the stem. The whole was about fifteen or sixteen inches high. There were, so far as the Archdeacon could see, no markings, no ornamentation, except for a single line, about half an inch below the rim. It was made of silver, so far as he could tell, slightly dented here and there, but still apparently good for a considerable amount of use. It stood there on the altar, as it had done so many mornings, until the grief of Lady Sykes-Martindale had enriched the late Vicar's sacristy with a new gold chalice. And the Archdeacon stood and considered it.
Of course, the thing was not impossible. He did not remember Sir Giles's article accurately enough to know the stages by which the archaeologist had traced the Graal from Jerusalem to Fardles: here a general tradition, there a local rumour, a printed paragraph or an unpublished MS., even the remnants of an old tapestry or a carving in a remote Town Hall. He could see clearly that it might all be nothing but a fantasy of peculiar neatness, and he attached little importance to the vessel itself. But he was conscious that a great many people might attach a good deal of importance to it if there were any truth in the story. If it were the Graal, what would they want to do with it? He considered with pleasure that at least it was in the hands of the officials of the Church, and that there were some things that even officials of the Church could not do. They could not, for example, sell it to a millionaire. But why, the Archdeacon asked himself, should he object to it being sold to a millionaire?
He was about to restore the vessel to the sacristy when he asked himself this question, and stayed for a moment or two with it in his hands. Then he changed his mind, went and locked the door of the cabinet, and came back to the altar. "Ah, fair sweet Lord," he said half-aloud, "let me keep this Thy vessel, if it be Thy vessel; for love's sake, fair Lord, if Thou hast held it in Thy hands, let me take it into mine. And, if not, let me be courteous still to it for Thy sake, courteous Lord; since this might well have been that, and that was touched by Thee." He smiled a little, took up the chalice, and went back to the Rectory.
There he passed straight to his own pleasant bedroom and opened an inner door which led to a small room, once perhaps a dressing-room. It was furnished now with a pallet-bed, a hard chair or two, a table, and a kneeling-desk. On one otherwise empty wall a crucifix hung; a small shelf in one corner held a few books, and there were one or two more on the table. The window in one of the pair of shorter walls looked out over the graveyard towards the church. The Archdeacon went across to the mantelshelf, set down his burden, looked at it for a minute or two, murmured a prayer, and went down to lunch.
After lunch he walked for a little while in his garden. His locum tenens, a rather elderly clergyman whom the Archdeacon thoroughly disliked, but who needed the money that the temporary post would bring him, was not due till the next day. The Archdeacon felt a pain, slight but definite, at the idea that this tall, lean, harassed, talkative, and inefficient priest would sit in his chair and sleep in his bed; not so much that they were his chair and his bed as that it seemed a shame that such ready and pleasant things should be subjected to the invasion of human futility. He put out his hand and touched a flower, then withdrew it. "I am becoming sentimental," he thought to himself. "How do I know that a chair is full of goodwill, or a bed anxious to please? They may be, but they mayn't. Their life is hidden with Christ in God. Oh, give thanks to the God of all gods," he sang softly, "for His mercy endureth for ever."
"Mr. Davenant?" said a voice at his back.
The Archdeacon, a little startled, turned. A large man whose face he dimly remembered was looking over the garden gate.
"Er--yes," he said vaguely, "that is, yes. I am Mr. Davenant."
"Mr. Archdeacon, I suppose I ought to say," the other went on agreeably. "I knew I was wrong as soon as I'd spoken."
"Not at all," the Archdeacon answered. "You wanted to see me? Come in, won't you?" He opened the gate for the stranger, who, as he entered, uttered a word of thanks and went on: "Well, I did, rather. My name is Persimmons, Gregory Persimmons. I've just bought Cully, you know, so we shall be neighbours. But I understand from the village talk that you're going away to-morrow, and I didn't come to-day merely for a neighbourly call."
"Whatever the reason-" the Archdeacon murmured. "Shall we go inside or would you rather sit down over there?" He indicated a garden-seat among the flowers.
"Oh, here, by all means," Persimmons said. "Thank you." He accepted a cigarette. "Well the fact is, Mr. Archdeacon, I have come as a beggar and yet not a beggar. I have come to beg for another and pay for myself."
The Archdeacon put a finger to his glasses. The word Persimmons had taken him back to the previous day's visit to Mornington; and he was asking himself whether this was the voice that had been offering advice on how to train children. There was something about this last sentence also that offended him.
"I know a priest," Persimmons proceeded, "who is in bad need of some altar furniture, especially the sacred vessels, for a new mission church he's starting. Now, I was talking to one and another down here--the grocer's an ardent churchman, I find. And one of your choir-boys, and so on--as one does. And I gathered--you'll tell me if I'm wrong--that you had an extra chalice here which you didn't often use. So I wondered, as you have the set that Lady Sykes-Martindale gave, whether you'd consider letting me have it at a reasonable price, for my friend."
"I see," the Archdeacon said. "Yes, quite. I see what you mean. But, if you'll forgive me asking, Mr. Persimmons, surely a new chalice would be better than a--shall I say, second-hand one?" He threw a deprecating smile at Gregory and loosed an inner secret smile to Christ at the epithet.
"My friend," Persimmons said, leaning comfortably back and lazily smoking, "my friend hates new furniture for an altar. He has some kind of theory about stored power and concentrated sanctity which I, not being a theologian, don't profess to understand. But the result of it is that he infinitely prefers things that have been used for many years in the past. Perhaps you know the feeling?"
"Yes, I know the feeling," the Archdeacon said. "But in this instance I'm afraid it can't be rewarded. I'm afraid the chalice is not to be parted with."
"It's natural you should say that," the other answered, "for I expect I've put it clumsily, Mr. Archdeacon. But I hope you'll think it over. Of course, I know I'm a stranger, but I want to feel part of the life here, and I thought if I could send out a--a sort of magnetic thrill by buying that chalice for my friend... and I'd be glad to buy another for you if you wanted it replaced... I thought... I don't know... I thought... "
His voice died away, and he sat looking half-wistfully out over the garden, the portrait of a retired townsman trying to find a niche for himself in new surroundings, shy but good-hearted, earnest if a little clumsy, and trying not to touch too roughly upon subjects which he seemed to regard with a certain ignorant alarm. The Archdeacon shot a glance at him, and after a minute's silence shook his head. "No," he said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Persimmons, but that chalice is not for sale. But perhaps I can do something for you. Over in your direction, some eight miles beyond you, there's a church which I think has exactly the kind of thing you want. I know that recently they had an altar set up in their Lady Chapel, replaced the vessels at the High Altar, and bought fresh ones for the other two. If the Vicar hasn't given his old ones away yet, he's the very man for you--and he hadn't a week ago, because I was over there. I'll give you a note of introduction to him if you like--he's a nice fellow; he's one of the old Rushforths, you know: they're a side branch of the Herberts. A good old Anglican family, one might say. His Christian name's Herbert--a very pleasant fellow. Devoted to the Church, too. Fasts in Lent and all that kind of thing, I believe; and they do say he hears confessions--but I don't want to take any notice of that unless I'm driven to. It wouldn't matter, of course, I couldn't do anything--that's the great charm of being an Archdeacon, one never can. But there's a certain prestige and so on, and I don't want to throw that, for what it's worth, against him. Herbert Rushforth, yes, I'll certainly give you a note. Or, even better--I have to go out that way? probably? possibly--this evening, and I'll call on him and ask him myself. And, if he has them still, he'll be delighted for you to have them; you needn't mind in the least--he's extremely well-to-do. He'll want to leave them at Cully to-morrow, and perhaps he will. Even if you don't want to take them over personally, as, of course, you may, he could have them sent to your friend. Where did you say his church was?" The Archdeacon, a fountain-pen in his hand, a slip of paper on his knee, looked pleasantly and inquiringly at Mr. Persimmons, and all round them the flowers gently stirred.
Mr. Persimmons was a little taken back. There had not appeared to him to be any conceivable reason why the Archdeacon should refuse to part with the old chalice, and if by any chance there had been any difficulty he had still expected to be able to obtain sight of it, to see what it looked like and where it was kept. He found himself at the moment almost, it seemed, on the other side of the county from Fardles, and he did not immediately see any way of getting back. He thought for a moment of making his imaginary clerical friend a native of Fardles, in order to give him a special delight in things that came from there, but that was too risky.
"Oh, well," he said, "if you don't mind, I think I won't give you his name. He might be rather ashamed of not being able to buy the necessary things. That was why, I thought, if you and I could just quietly settle it together, without bringing other people in, it would be so much better. A clergyman doesn't like to admit that he's poor, does he? And that was why--"
Damnation! he thought, he was repeating himself. But the Archdeacon's fantastic round face and gold glasses were watching him with a grave attention, and where but now had been a steady flow of words there was an awful silence. "Well," he said, with an effort at a leap across the void, "I'm sorry you can't let me have it."
"But I'm offering it to you," the Archdeacon said. "You didn't want the Fardles chalice particularly, did you?"
"Only as coming from the place where I was going to live," Persimmons said, and added suddenly: "It just seemed to me as if, as I was leaving my friend myself, I was sending him something better instead, something greater and stronger and more friendly."
"But you were talking about a chalice," the Archdeacon objected perplexedly. "How do you mean, Mr. Persimmons--finer and stronger and so on?"
"I meant the chalice," Gregory answered. "Surely that--"
The Archdeacon laughed good-naturedly and shook his head. "Oh, no," he said, "no. Not the chalice alone. Why, if it were the Holy Graal itself," he added thoughtfully, replacing the cap on his fountain-pen and putting it away, "you could hardly say that about it." He stood up, a little disappointed at not having noticed any self-consciousness about the other when he had mentioned the Graal. "Well," he said, "I must apologise, but you will understand I have some work to do; I'm going to-morrow, as you say. Will you forgive me? And shall I speak to Rushforth?"
"If you will be so good," Persimmons answered. "Or, no, don't let me take up your time. I will go and see him, if I may mention you name? Yes, I assure you I would rather. Good afternoon, Mr. Archdeacon."
"Good afternoon," the Archdeacon said. "I shall see you often when I return, I hope."
He accompanied his visitor to the gate, chatting amicably. But when Persimmons had gone he walked slowly back towards the house, considering the discussion thoughtfully. Was there a needy mission church? and was his visitor to be its benefactor? And the chalice? It seemed possible, and even likely, in this fantastic dream of a ridiculous antiquary, that the Graal of so many romances and so long a quest, of Lancelot and Galahad and dim maidens moving in antique pageants of heraldry and symbolism and religion, the desire of Camelot, the messenger of Sarras, the relic of Jerusalem, should be resting neglected in an English village. "Fardles," he thought, "Castra Parvulorum, the camp of the children: where else should the Child Himself rest?" He re-entered the Rectory, singing again to himself: "Who alone doeth marvellous things; for his mercy endureth for ever."
It was the custom of the parish that there should be a daily celebration at seven, at which occasionally in summer a small congregation assembled. Before this, at about a quarter to seven, the Archdeacon was in the habit of saying Morning Prayer publicly, as he was required to do by the rubrics. Once a week, on Thursday mornings, he was assisted by the sexton; on the other mornings he assisted himself. As, however, the sexton with growing frequency overslept himself, the Archdeacon preferred to keep the key of the church himself, and it was with this in his hand that he came to the west door about half-past six the next morning. At the door, however, he stopped, astonished. For it hung open and wrenched from the lock, wrenched and broken and pushed back against the other wall. The Archdeacon stared at it, went closer and surveyed it, and then hastened into the church. A few minutes gave him the extent of the damage. The two boxes, for the Poor and for the Church, that were fixed not far from the font, had also been opened, and their contents, if they had any, looted; the candlesticks on the altar had been thrown over, the candles in them broken and smashed, and the frontal pulled away and torn. In the sacristy the lock of the cabinet had been forced and the gold chalice which commemorated the late Sir John had disappeared, together with the gold paten. On the white-washed wall had been scrawled a few markings--"Phallic," the Archdeacon murmured, with a faint smile. He came back to the front door in time to see the sexton at the gate of the churchyard, and, judiciously lingering on the footpath beyond, two spasmodically devout ladies of the parish. He waved to them all to hurry, and when they arrived informed them equably of the situation.
"But, Mr. Archdeacon--" Mrs. Major cried.
"But, Mr. Davenant--" Miss Willoughby, who, as being older, both in years and length of Fardles citizenship, than most of the ladies of the neighbourhood, permitted herself to use the personal name. And "Who can have done it?" they both concluded.
"Ah!" the Archdeacon said benignantly. "A curious business, isn't it?"
"Isn't it sacrilege?" said Mrs. Major.
"Was it a tramp?" asked Miss Willoughby.
"What we want is Towlow," the sexton said firmly. "Towlow isn't at all bad at finding things out, though, being a Wesleyan Methodist, as he calls himself, he can't be expected to want to find out these bloody murderers. I'll go and get him, shall I, sir?"
"How fortunate my brother's staying with me," Mrs. Major cried out. "He's in the Navy, you know, and quite used to crime. He even sat on a court-martial once."
Miss Willoughby, out of a wider experience, knew better than to commit herself at once. She watched the Archdeacon's eyes, and, as she saw them glaze at these two suggestions, ventured a remote and disapproving "H'm, h'm!" Even the nicest clergymen, she knew, were apt to have unexpected fads about religion.
"No," the Archdeacon said, "I don't think we'll ask Towlow. And though, of course, I can't object to your brother looking at these damaged doors, Mrs. Major, I shouldn't like him to want to make an arrest. Sacrilege is hardly a thing a priest can prosecute for--not, anyhow, in a present-day court."
"But--" Mrs. Major and the sexton began.
"The immediate thing," the Archdeacon flowed on, "is the celebration, don't you think? Jessamine"--this to the sexton-"will you move those candlesticks and get as much of the grease off as you can? Mrs. Major, will you put the frontal straight? Miss Willoughby, will you do what you can to set the other ornaments right? Thank you, thank you. Fortunately the other chalice is at the rectory; I will g go and get it." Then he paused a moment. "And perhaps," he said gravely, "as these two boxes have been robbed, we may take the advantage to restore something." He moved from one box to the other, dropping in coins, and a little reluctantly the two ladies imitated him. Jessamine was already at the altar.
As the Archdeacon walked up to the house he allowed himself to consider the possibilities. The breaking open of the west door pointed to a more serious attack than that of a casual tramp; tramps didn't carry such instruments as this success must have necessitated. But, if a tramp were not the burglar, then the money in the boxes had not been the aim. The gold chalice, then? Possible, possible: or the other chalice, the one of whose reputed history, except for that quarter of an hour in Mornington's room, he would have known nothing--could that be the aim? After all, the man who wrote the book--what was his name?--might have mentioned it, mentioned it to anyone, to a collector, to a millionaire, to a frenzied materialist. But one wouldn't expect them to try burglary at once. He saw in the distance the garden-seat where he had sat in talk the previous afternoon. And had they? Or had they tried purchase? Persimmons--Stephen Persimmons, publisher--Christianity and the League of Nations--a mission church in need? sacrilege--phallic scrawls.
He came into the inner room where he had looked at the chalice before he went out that morning, and as he came in it seemed to meet him in sound. A note of gay and happy music seemed to ring for a moment in his ears as he paused in the entrance. It was gone, if it had been there, and gravely he genuflected in front of the vessel and lifted it from its place. Carrying it as he had so often lifted its types and companions, he became again as in all those liturgies a part of that he sustained; he radiated from that centre and was but the last means of its progress in mortality. Of this sense of instrumentality he recognized, none the less, the component parts--the ritual movement, the priestly office, the mere pleasure in ordered, traditional, and almost universal movement. "Neither is this Thou," he said aloud, and, coming to the garden door, looked round him. In the hall the clock struck seven; he heard his housekeeper moving upstairs; as he came out into the garden he saw on the road a few men on their way to work. Then suddenly he saw another man leaning over the gate as Persimmons had leant the previous afternoon; only this was not Persimmons, though a man not unlike him in general height and build. The man opened the gate and came into the garden, though not directly in the path to the churchyard gate, and on the sudden the Archdeacon stopped.
"Excuse me, mister," a voice said, "but is this the way to Fardles?" He pointed down the road.
"That is the way, yes," the Archdeacon answered. "Keep to the right all the way."
"Ah, thankee," the stranger said. "I've been walking almost all night-- nowhere to go and no money to go with." He was standing a few yards off. "Excuse me coming in like this, but seeing a gentleman--"
"Do you want something to eat?" the Archdeacon asked.
"Ah, that's it," said the other, eyeing him and the chalice curiously. "Reckon you've never been twenty-four hours without a bite or sup." He took another step forward.
"If you go round to the kitchen you shall be given some food," the Archdeacon said firmly. "I am on my way to the church and cannot stop. If you want to see me I will talk to you when I come back." He lifted the chalice and went on down the path and through the churchyard.
The Mysteries celebrated, he returned, still carefully carrying the chalice, and set it out of sight in a cupboard in the breakfast-room. When his housekeeper came in with coffee he asked after the stranger.
"Oh yes, sir, he came round," she said, "and I gave him some food. But he didn't eat much, to my thinking, and he was off again in ten minutes. Those folk don't want breakfast, money's what they're after. He wouldn't stop to see you, not after I told him you might get him a job. Money, that's what he wanted, not a job, nor breakfast, either."
But the Archdeacon absurdly continued to doubt this. He had felt, all through the short conversation in the garden, that it was not himself, but the vessel that the stranger had been studying--and that not with any present recognition, but as if he were impressing it on his memory. His train went at half-past nine; it was now half-past eight. But the train was out of the question; he had to explain the state of the church to the locum tenens; he had to go over to Rushforth, not now for Persimmons, but for his own needs. And, above all, he had to decide what to do with that old, slightly dented chalice that was hidden in the cupboard of the breakfast-room of an English rectory.
The first thing that occurred to him was the bank; the second was the Bishop. But the nearest bank was five miles off; and the Bishop was probably thirty-five, at the cathedral city. He might be anywhere, being a young and energetic and modern Bishop, who organized the diocese from railway stations, and platforms at public meetings before and after speaking, and public telephone-boxes, and so on. The Archdeacon foresaw some difficulty in explaining the matter. To walk straight in, and put down the chalice, and say: "This is the Holy Graal. I believe it to be so because of a paragraph in some proofs, a man who tried to buy it for a mission church and said that children ought to be taught not to do wrong, a burglary at my church, and another man who asked the way to Fardles"--would a young, energetic, modern Bishop believe it? The Archdeacon liked the Bishop very much, but he did not believe him to be patient or credulous.
The bank first then, and Rushforth next. And, in a day or two, the Bishop. Or rather first a telegram to Scotland. He sat down to write it, meaning to dispatch it from the station when he took the train to town. Then he spent some time in looking out a leather case which would hold the chalice, and had indeed been used for some such purpose before. He ensconced the Graal--if it were the Graal--therein, left a message with his housekeeper that he would be back some time in the afternoon, and by just after nine was fitting his hat on in the hall.
There came a knock at the door. The housekeeper came to open it. The Archdeacon, looking over his shoulder, saw the stranger who had invaded his garden that morning standing outside.
"Excuse me, ma'am," the stranger said, "but is the reverend gentleman in? Ah, to be sure, there he is. You see, sir, I didn't want to worry you over your breakfast, so I went for a bit of a walk. But I hope you haven't forgotten what you said about helping me to find work. It's work I want, sir, not idleness."
"You didn't seem that keen on it when you were talking to me about it," the housekeeper interjected.
"I didn't want to forestall his reverence," the stranger said. "But anything that he could do I'd be truly grateful for."
"What's your name?" the Archdeacon asked.
"Kedgett," the other answered, "Samuel Kedgett. I served in the war, sir, and here--"
"Quite," the Archdeacon answered. "Well, Mr. Kedgett, I'm sorry I can't stop now; I have to go to town most unexpectedly. Call"--he changed "this evening" into "to-morrow morning"--"and I'll see what can be done."
"Thank you, sir," the other said, with a sudden alertness. "I'll be there. Good-bye, sir." He was out of the porch and down the garden path before his hearers were clear that he was going.
"What a jumpy creature!" the housekeeper said. "Dear me, sir, I hope you're not going to give him work here. I couldn't stand, a man like that."
"No," the Archdeacon said absently, "no, of course, you couldn't. Well, good-bye, Mrs. Lucksparrow. Explain to Mr. Batesby when he comes, won't you? I shall be back in the afternoon probably."
Along the country lane on the other side of the churchyard there was little to be seen beyond the fields and pleasant slopes of the country twenty miles out of North London. The Archdeacon walked along, meditating, and occasionally turning his head to look over his shoulder. Not that he seriously expected to be attacked but he did feel that there was something going on of which he had no clear understanding. "How vainly men themselves amaze," he quoted, and allowed himself to be distracted by trying to complete the couplet with some allusion to the high vessel. He produced at last, as he came to a space where four roads met and as he went on through what was called a wood, but was not much more than a copse--he produced as a result:
How vainly men themselves divert, Even with this chalice, to their hurt!
and heard a motor-car coming towards him in the distance. It was coming very quietly from the direction of the station, and in a few minutes it came round the curve of the road. He saw someone stand up in it and apparently beckon to him, quickened his steps, heard a faint voice calling: "Archdeacon! Archdeacon!" felt a sudden crash on the back of his head, and entered unconsciousness.
The car drew up by him. "Quick, Ludding, the case," Mr. Persimmons said to the man who had slipped from the wood in the Archdeacon's rear. He caught it to him, opened it, took out the chalice, and set it in another case which stood on the seat by him. Then he gave the empty one back to Ludding. "Keep that till I tell you to throw it away," he said. "And now help me lift the poor fellow in. You have a fine judgement, Ludding. Just in the right place. You didn't hit too hard, I suppose! We don't want to attract attention. A little more this way, that's it. We have some brandy, I think. I will get in with him." He did so, moving the case which held the Graal. "Can you put that with the petrol-tin, Ludding? Good! Now drive on carefully till we come to the cross-roads."
When, in a few moments, they were there, "Now throw the case into the ditch," Persimmons went on, "over by that clump, I think. Excellent, Ludding, excellent. And now round up to the Rectory, and then you shall go on to the village or even the nearest town for a doctor. We must do all we can for the Archdeacon, Ludding. I suppose he was attacked by the same tramp that broke into the church. I think perhaps we ought to let the police know. All right; go on."
THE CHEMIST'S SHOP
For some three weeks the Archdeacon was in retirement, broken only by the useful fidelity of Mrs. Lucksparrow and the intrusive charity of Mr. Batesby, who, having arrived at the Rectory for one reason, was naturally asked to remain for another. As soon as the invalid was allowed to receive visitors, Mr. Batesby carried the hint of the New Testament, "I was sick and ye visited me" to an extreme which made nonsense of the equally authoritative injunction to be "wise as serpents." He was encouraged by the feeling which both the doctor and Mrs. Lucksparrow had that it was fortunate another member of the profession should be at hand, and by the success with which the Archdeacon, dizzy and yet equable, concealed his own feelings when his visitor, chatting of Prayer Book Revision, parish councils, and Tithe Acts, imported to them a high eternal flavour which savoured of Deity Itself. Each day after he had gone the Archdeacon found himself inclined to brood on the profound wisdom of that phrase in the Athanasian Creed which teaches the faithful that "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God" are salvation and the Divine End achieved. That the subjects of their conversation should be taken into God was normal and proper; what else, the Archdeacon wondered, could one do with parish councils? But his goodwill could not refrain from feeling that to Mr. Batesby they were opportunities for converting the Godhead rather firmly and finally into flesh. "The dear flesh," he murmured, thinking ruefully of the way his own had been treated.
In London the tracing of the murderer seemed, so far as Stephen Persimmons and his people could understand, to be a slow business. Descriptions of the murdered man had been circulated without result. There had been no papers--with the exception, crammed into the corner of one pocket, of the torn half of a printed bill inviting the attendance of outsiders at a mission service to be held at some (the name was torn) Wesleyan church. The clothes of the dead man were not of the sort that yield clues--such as had any marks, collars and boots, were like thousands of others sold every day in London. There were, of course, certain minor peculiarities about the body, but these, though useful for recognition, were of no help towards identification.
Investigations undertaken among the van-men, office boys, and others who had been about the two streets and the covered way about the time when the corpse entered the building resulted in the discovery of eleven who had noticed nothing, five who had seen him enter alone (three by the front and two by the side door), one who had seen him in company with an old lady, one with a young lad, three with a man about his own age and style, and one who had a clear memory of his getting out of a taxi, from which a clean-shaven or bearded head had emerged to give a final message and which had then been driven off. But no further success awaited investigations among taxi-drivers, and the story was eventually dismissed as a fantasy.
Mornington suspected that a certain examination into the circumstances of the members of the staff had taken place, but, if so, he quoted to his employer from Flecker, "the surveillance had been discreet." Discreet or not, it produced no results, any more than the interview with Sir Giles Tumulty that Inspector Colquhoun secured.
"Rackstraw?" Sir Giles had said impatiently, screwing round from his writing-desk a small, brown wrinkled face toward the inspector, "yes, he came to lunch. Why not?"
"No reason at all, sir," the inspector said, "I only wanted to be sure. And when did he leave you--if you remember?"
"About half-past two," Sir Giles said. "Is that what he ought to have done? I'll say two, if you like, if it'll help you catch him. Only, if you do, you must arrange for me to see the hanging."
"If he left at half-past two, that's all I want to know," the inspector said. "Did you happen to mention to anyone that he was coming?"
"Yes," said Sir Giles, "I told the Prime Minister, the Professor of Comparative Etymology at King's College, and the cook downstairs. Why the hell do you ask me these silly questions? Do you suppose I run round telling all my friends that a loathsome little publisher's clerk is going to muck his food about at my table?"
"If you felt like that," the inspector said, holding down his anger, "I wonder you asked him to lunch."
"I asked him to lunch because I'd rather him foul my table than my time," Tumulty answered. "I had to waste an hour over him because he didn't understand a few simple things about my illustrations, and I saved it by working it in with lunch. I expect he charged overtime for it, so that he'd be two shillings to the good, one saved on his food and another extra pay. I should think he could get a woman for that one night. How much do you have to pay, policeman?"
The inspector at the moment felt merely that Sir Giles must be mad; it wasn't till hours afterwards that he became slowly convinced that the question was meant as an insult beyond reach of pardon or vengeance. At the time he stared blankly and said soberly: "I'm a married man, sir."
"You mean you get her for nothing?" Sir Giles asked. "Two can live as cheaply as one, and your extras thrown in? Optimistic, I'm afraid. Well, I'm sorry, but I have to go to the Foreign Office. Come and chat in the taxi; that's what your London taxis are for. When I want a nice long talk with anyone I get in one at Westminster Abbey after lunch and tell him to go to the Nelson Column. We nearly always get there for tea. Oh, good-bye, policeman. Come again some day."
The immediate result of this conversation was to cause Colquhoun to suspect Rackstraw more grievously than before. But no amount of investigation could prove the tale of the lunch unreliable or connect him in any way with an unexplained disappearance or even with any semi-criminal attitude towards the law. He owed no money; he seemed to do nothing but work and stop at home, and his connection with Sir Giles, which was the most suspicious thing about him, was limited apparently to the production of Sacred Vessels in Folklore. The inspector even went the length of procuring secretly through Stephen Persimmons an advance copy of this, and reading it through, but without any result.
Another of the advance copies Mornington had sent personally to the Archdeacon, and a few days before the official publication, and some four weeks after the archidiaconal visit to the publishing house he had a letter in reply.
DEAR MR. MORNINGTON, the Archdeacon wrote, I have to thank you very much for the early copy of Sacred Vessels which you were good enough to send me. It is a book of great interest, so far as anything intellectual can be, and especially to a clergyman; who has, so to speak, a professional interest in anything sacred, and especially to anything which has a bearing on Christian tradition--I mean, of course, Sir Giles Tumulty's study of the possible history of the Holy Graal.
There is one point upon which I should like information if you are able to give it to me--if it is not a private matter. This article on the Graal contained, when I glanced through it in the proofs you showed me, a concluding paragraph which definitely fixed the possibility (within the limitations imposed by the very nature of Sir Giles's research) of the Graal being identified with a particular chalice in a particular church. I have read the article as it now stands with the greatest care, but I cannot find any such paragraph. Could you tell me (1) whether the paragraph was in fact deleted, (2) whether, if so, the reason was any grave doubt of the identification, (3) whether it would be permissible for me to get into touch with Sir Giles Tumulty on the subject?
Please forgive me troubling you so much on a matter which has only become accidentally known to me through your kindness. I am a little ashamed of my own curiosity, but perhaps my profession excuses it in general and in particular.
I hope, if you are ever in or near Castra Parvulorum, you will make a special point of calling at the Rectory. I have one or two early editions--one of the Ascent of Mount Carmel--which might interest you.
Yours most sincerely,
JULIAN DAVENANT.
"Bless him," Mornington said to himself as, coiled curiously round his chair, he read the letter, "bless him and damn him! I suppose Lionel will know." He dropped the letter on his desk, and was opening another, when Stephen Persimmons came into the office. After a few sentences had been exchanged, Stephen said: "When do you go for your holidays, Mornington?"
"I was going at the end of August--for some of them, anyhow," Mornington answered--"if that fits in all right. It fitted in when I fixed it. But I'm only walking a little, so, if there's any need, I can easily alter it."
"The fact is," Stephen went on, "I've been asked to go with some people I know to the South of France at the beginning of August, and I might stop six weeks or so if things didn't call me back. But I like you to be here while I'm away."
"The beginning of August--six weeks--" Mornington murmured, "and it's the fifth of July now. Well, sir, I'll go before or after, whichever you like. Rackstraw goes next Friday, and he'll be back by the end of the month."
"Are you sure it's convenient?" Stephen asked.
"Entirely," the other said. "I shall walk as long as I feel like it, and stop when and where I feel like it. And I can walk in July as well as in September. Anyhow, I'm only taking ten days or a fortnight now. I have to go to my mother in Cornwall in October for the rest."
"Well, what about now, then?" said Stephen.
"Now, then," Mornington answered. "Or at least Friday week, shall we say? Unless, of course, I'm arrested. I feel that's always possible. Didn't I see the inspector calling on you the other day, sir?"
"You did, blast him!" Stephen broke out. "Why that wretched creature got huddled up here I can't imagine. It's killing me, Mornington, all this worry!" He got up and wandered round the office.
Behind his back his lieutenant raised surprised eyebrows. It was a nuisance, of course, but, as Stephen Persimmons had for alibi the statement of every other reputable publisher in London, this agitation seemed excessive. It might be the murder in general, but why worry? Stephen was always reasonably decent to the staff, but to worry over whether any of them had committed a murder seemed to point to a degree of personal interest which surprised him.
"I know," he said sympathetically. "You feel you'd like to murder the fellow just for having been murdered. Some people always muddle their engagements. Probably he had arranged to be done in at a tea-shop or somewhere like that--he was just that kind of fellow--and then got mixed and came here first. Has the inspector any kind of clue? The body, by now, is past inspecting."
"I don't believe he knows anything, but one can't be sure," Persimmons answered. "And, of course, if he does it needn't--"
He became unhappily silent.
Mornington uncoiled himself and got up. "Are you sure you wouldn't like to go away now for a week or two, sir?" he said. "It's rather knocked you over, I expect."
"No," Stephen said, drifting to the door. "No, I can't go away now. I simply can't. We'll leave it at that then." He disappeared.
"We seem to be leaving it at a very undefined that," Mornington thought to himself, as he went back to his letters. "Stephen never was what the deceased would probably have called 'brainy'. But he seems rather cloudy even for him."
Later in the day he replied to the camp of the children.
MY DEAR MR. ARCHDEACON,
--The fact is that the paragraph you refer to was cut out by Sir Giles Tumulty at the last moment. This puts us in a mild fix, because I suppose technically proofs in a publisher's office are private, till the book is published. And after, for that matter. I am given to understand by the people here who have met him that he is the nearest to a compound of a malevolent hyena and an especially venomous cobra that ever appeared in London, and I shrink therefore from officially confirming your remembrance of that paragraph. But you were here, and you saw the proofs, and, if you could conceal the unimportant fact that we showed them to you, write to Sir Giles by all means.
This sounds as if I were proposing an immorality. But it only means that, while I can't officially say 'Write,' I am reluctant to say 'Don't write.' Your tact will no doubt discover the wise road. Personally, I hope you'll find out.
Thank you for your invitation. I may conceivably turn up one day before the month ends.
Did you have a pleasant time in Scotland?
Yours very sincerely,
K. H. MORNINGTON.
At the moment when this letter was being dictated Sir Giles had, in fact, a visitor from Fardles sitting with him; not the Archdeacon, but Mr. Gregory Persimmons. They were speaking in subdued tones, both of them rather greedily, as if they each wanted something from the other, and the subject of their conversation might have eluded Mornington, had he heard it, for a considerable time. When Gregory had been shown in, Sir Giles got up quickly from his table.
"Well?" he said.
Gregory came across to him, saying: "Oh, I've got it--a little more trouble than I thought, but I've got it. But I don't quite like doing anything with it... In fact, I'm not quite sure what it's best to do."
Sir Giles pushed a chair towards him. "You don't think," he said. "What do you want to do?" He sat down again as he spoke, his little eager eyes fixed on the other, with a controlled but excited interest. Persimmons met them with a sly anxiety in his own.
"I want something else first," he said. "I want that address."
"Pooh," Sir Giles said, "that won't help you. Tell me more about this other thing first. Do you notice anything about it? How does it affect you?"
Gregory considered. "Not at all, I think," he said. "It's just an ordinary piece of work--with a curious smell about it sometimes."
"Smell?" Sir Giles said. "Smell? What sort of smell?"
"Well," Persimmons answered, "it's more like ammonia than anything else; a sort of pungency. But I only notice it sometimes."
"I knew a cannibal chief in Nigeria who said the same thing," Sir Giles said musingly. "Not about that, of course, and not ammonia. It was a traditional taboo of the tribe--the dried head of a witch-doctor that was supposed to be a good omen to his people. He said it smelt like the fire that burned the uneaten offal of their enemies. Curious--the same notion of cleansing."
Gregory sniggered. "It'll take Him a good deal of ammonia to clean things out," he said. "But it'd be like Him to use ammonia and the Bible and that kind of thing."
Sir Giles switched back to the subject. "And what are you going to do with it?" he asked alertly.
Gregory eyed him. "Never mind," he said. "Or, rather, why do you want to know?"
"Because I like knowing these things," Sir Giles answered. "After all, I saved it for you when you asked me, on condition that you told me about your adventures, or let me see them for myself. You're going mad, you know, Persimmons, and I like watching you."
"Mad?" Gregory said, with another snigger. "You don't go mad this way. People like my wife go mad, and Stephen. But I've got something that doesn't go mad. I'm getting everything so." He stretched out both arms and pressed them downwards with an immense gesture of weight, as if pushing the universe before and below him. "But I want the ointment."
"Better leave it alone," Sir Giles said tantalizingly. "It's tricky stuff, Persimmons. A Jew in Beyrout tried it and didn't get back. Filthy beast he looked, all naked and screaming that he couldn't find his way. That was four years ago, and he's screaming the same thing still, unless he's dead. And there was another fellow in Valparaiso who got too far to be heard screaming; he died pretty soon, because he'd forgotten even how to eat and drink. They tried forcible feeding, I fancy, but it wasn't a success: he was just continually sick. Better leave it alone, Persimmons."
"I tell you I'm perfectly safe," Gregory said. "You promised, Tumulty, you promised."
"My lord God," Sir Giles said, "what does that matter? I don't care whether I promised or not; I don't care whether you want it or not; I only wonder whether I shall get more from--" He broke off. "All right," he said, "I'll give you the address--94, Lord Mayor Street, Finchley Road. Somewhere near Tally Ho Corner, I think. Quite respectable and all that. The man in Valparaiso was a solicitor. It's in the middle classes one finds these things easiest. The lower classes haven't got the money or the time or the intelligence, and the upper classes haven't got the power or intelligence."
Gregory was writing the address down, nodding to himself as he did so; then he looked at a clock, which stood on the writing-table, pleasantly clutched in a dried black hand set in gold. "I shall have time to-day," he said. "I'll go at once. I suppose he'll sell it me? Yes, of course he will, I can see to that."
"It'll save you some time and energy," Sir Giles said, "if you mention me. He's a Greek of sorts--I've forgotten his name. But he doesn't keep tons of it, you know. Now, look here, Persimmons. This is two things you have got out of me, and I've had nothing in return. You'd better ask me down to wherever you hatch gargoyles. I can't come till after Monday because I'm speaking at University College then. I'll come next Wednesday. What's the station? Fardles? Send me a card to tell me the best afternoon train and have it met."
Gregory promised in general terms to do this, and as quickly as he could got away. An hour after he had hunted out Lord Mayor Street.
It was not actually quite so respectable as Sir Giles had given him to understand. It had been once, no doubt, and was now half-way to another kind of respectability, being in the disreputable valley between two heights of decency. There were a sufficient number of sufficiently dirty children playing in the road to destroy privacy without achieving publicity: squalor was leering from the windows and not yet contending frankly and vainly with grossness. It was one of those sudden terraces of slime which hang over the pit of hell, and for which beastliness is too dignified a name. But the slime was still only oozing over it, and a thin cloud of musty pretence expanded over the depths below.
At one end of the road three shops huddled together in the thickest slime; a grocer's at the corner, flying the last standard of respectability in an appeal towards the Finchley Road some couple of yards away--like Roland's horn crying to Charlemagne. At the far end of the street a public house signalized the gathering of another code of decency and morals which might in time transform the intervening decay. Next to the grocer's was a sweet-shop, on which the dingy white letters ADBU OC A appeared like a charm, and whose window displayed bars of chocolate even more degradingly sensual than the ordinary kind. Next to this was the last shop, a chemist's. Its window had apparently been broken some time since and very badly mended with glass which must have been dirty when it was made, suggesting a kind of hypostatic union between clearness and dinginess. Nor, since the breakage, had the occupant, it seemed, troubled to re-dress the window; a few packets of soap and tooth-paste masked their own purpose by their appearance. Persimmons pushed open the door and, first looking to see that the shop was empty, went quietly in.
A young man was lounging behind the counter, but he did no more than look indolently at his customer. Persimmons tried to close the door and failed, until the other said "Push it at the bottom with your foot," when he succeeded, for the door shut with an unexpected crash. Gregory came to the counter and looked at the shopman. He might be Greek, as Sir Giles had said, he might be anything, and the name over the door had been indecipherable. The two looked at one another silently.
At last Persimmons said: "You keep some rather out of the way drugs and things, don't you?"
The other answered wearily: "Out of the way? I don't know what you mean--out of the way? Nothing's out of the way."
"Out of the ordinary way," Gregory said quickly and softly, "the way everyone goes."
"They go nowhere," the Greek said.
"But I go," Persimmons answered, with the same swiftness as before. "You have something for me."
"What I have is for buyers," the other said, "all I have is for buyers. What do you want and what will you pay?"
"I think I have paid a price," Gregory said, "but what more you ask you shall have."
"Who sent you here?" the Greek asked.
"Sir Giles Tumulty," said Gregory, "and others. But the others I cannot name. They say"--his voice began to tremble--"that you have an ointment."
"I have many precious things." The answer came out of an entire weariness which seemed to take from the adjective all its meaning. "But some of them are not for sale except to buyers."
"I have bought everything." Gregory leaned forward. "The time has come for me to receive."
Still the other made no movement. "The ointment is rich and scarce and strange," he said. "How do I know that you are worth a gift? And what will my master say if I mistake?"
"I cannot prove myself to you," Gregory answered. "That I know of it-- is not that enough?"
"It is not enough," the other said. "But I have a friendship for all who are in the way. And priceless things are without any price. If you are not worth the gift, the gift is worth nothing to you. Have you ever used the ointment?"
"Never," Gregory said; "but it is time, I am sure it is time."
"You think so, do you?" the Greek said slowly. "There comes a time when there is nothing left but time--nothing. Take it if you like."
Still with the minimum of movement, he put out his hand, opened a drawer in the counter, and pushed on to it a little cardboard box, rather greasy and dented here and there.
"Take it," he said. "It will only give you a headache if you are not in the way."
Gregory caught up the box and hesitated. "Do you want money?" he asked.
"It is a gift, but not a gift," the other answered. "Give me what you will for a sign."
Gregory put some silver on the counter and backed toward the door. But the same difficulty that had met him in closing it now held it fast. He pulled and pushed and struggled with it, and the Greek watched him with a faint smile. Outside it had begun to rain.
THE SABBATH
"I met Mr. Persimmons in the village to-day," Mr. Batesby said to the Archdeacon. "He asked after you very pleasantly, although he's sent every day to inquire. It was he that saw you lying in the road, you know, and brought you here in his car. It must be a great thing for you to have a sympathetic neighbour at the big house; there's so often friction in these small parishes."
"Yes," the Archdeacon said.
"We had quite a long chat," the other went on. "He isn't exactly a Christian, unfortunately, but he has a great admiration for the Church. He thinks it's doing a wonderful work--especially in education. He takes a great interest in education; he calls it the star of the future. He thinks morals are more important than dogma, and of course I agree with him."
"Did you say 'of course I agree' or 'of course I agreed'?" the Archdeacon asked. "Or both?"
"I mean I thought the same thing," Mr. Batesby explained. He had noticed a certain denseness in the Archdeacon on other occasions. "Conduct is much the biggest thing in life, I feel. 'He can't be wrong whose life is for the best; we needs must love the higher when we see Him.' And he gave me five pounds towards the Sunday School Fund."
"There isn't," the Archdeacon said, slightly roused, "a Sunday School Fund at Fardles."
"Oh, well!" Mr. Batesby considered. "I daresay he'd be willing for it to go to almost anything active. He was very keen, and I agree--thought just the same, on getting things done. He thinks that the Church ought to be a means of progress. He quoted something about not going to sleep till we found a pleasant Jerusalem in the green land of England. I was greatly struck. An idealist, that's what I should call him. England needs idealists to-day."
"I think we had better return the money," the Archdeacon said, "If he isn't a Christian--"
"Oh, but he is," Mr. Batesby protested. "In effect, that is. He thinks Christ was the second greatest man the earth has produced."
"Who was the first?" the Archdeacon asked.
Mr. Batesby paused again for a moment. "Do you know, I forgot to ask?" he said. "But it shows a sympathetic spirit, doesn't it? After all, the second greatest! That goes a long way. Little children, love one another --if five pounds helps us to teach them that in the schools. I'm sure mine want a complete new set of Bible pictures."
There was a pause. The two priests were sitting after dinner in the garden of the Rectory. The Archdeacon, with inner thoughts for meditation, was devoting a superficial mind to Mr. Batesby, who on his side was devoting his energies to providing his host with cheerful conversation. The Archdeacon knew this, and knew too that his guest and substitute would rather have been talking about his own views on the ornaments rubric than about the parishioners. He wished he would. He was feeling rather tired, and it was an effort to pay attention to anything which he did not know by heart. Mr. Batesby's ecclesiastical views he did--and thought them incredibly silly--but he thought his own were probably that too. One had views for convenience' sake, but how anyone could think they mattered. Except, of course, that even silly views...
A car went by on the road and a hand was waved from it. To Gregory Persimmons the sight of the two priests was infinitely pleasurable. He had met them both and summed them up. He could, he felt, knock the Archdeacon on the head whenever he chose, and the other hadn't got a head to be knocked. It was all very pleasant and satisfactory. There had been a moment, a few days ago, in that little shop when he couldn't get out, and there seemed suddenly no reason why he should get out, as if he had been utterly and finally betrayed into being there for ever--he had felt almost in a panic. He had known that feeling once or twice before, at odd times; but there was no need to recall it now. To-night, to-night, something else was to happen. To-night he would know what it all was of which he had read in his books, and heard--heard from people who had funnily come into his life and then disappeared. Long ago, as a boy, he remembered reading about the Sabbath, but he had been told that it wasn't true. His father had been a Victorian Rationalist. The Archdeacon, he thought, was exceedingly Victorian too. His heart beating in an exalted anticipation, he drove on to Cully.
Mr. Batesby was asleep that night, and the Archdeacon was, in a Victorian way, engaged in his prayers, when Gregory Persimmons stood up alone in his room. It was a little after midnight, and, as he glanced out of the window, he saw a clear sky with a few stars and the full moon contemplating him. Slowly, very slowly, he undressed, looking forward to he knew not what, and then--being entirely naked--he took from a table the small greasy box of ointment and opened it. It was a pinkish ointment, very much the colour of the skin, and at first he thought it had no smell. But in a few minutes, as it lay exposed to the air, there arose from it a faint odour which grew stronger, and presently filled the whole room, not overpoweringly, but with a convenient and irresistible assurance. He paused for a moment, inhaling it, and finding in it the promise of some complete decay. It brought to him an assurance of his own temporal achievement of his power to enter into those lives which he touched and twist them out of their security into a sliding destruction. Five pounds here, a clever jeer there--it was all easy. Everyone had some security, and he had only to be patient to find and destroy it. His father, when he had grown old and had had a good deal of trouble, had been inclined to wonder whether there was anything in religion. And they had talked of it; he remembered those talks. He had-- it had been his first real experiment--he had suggested very carefully and delicately, to that senile and uneasy mind, that there probably was a God, but a God of terrible jealousy; God had driven Judas, who betrayed Him, to hang himself; and driven the Jews who denied Him to exile in all lands. And Peter, his father had said, Peter was forgiven. He had stood thinking of that, and then had hesitated that, yes, no doubt Peter was forgiven, unless God had taken a terrible revenge and used Peter to set up all that mystery of evil which was Antichrist and Torquemada and Smithfield and the Roman See. Before the carefully sketched picture of an infinite, absorbing, and mocking vengeance, his father had shivered and grown silent. And had thereafter died, trying not to believe in God lest he should know himself damned.
Gregory smiled, and touched the ointment with his fingers. It seemed almost to suck itself upward round them as he did so. He disengaged his fingers and began the anointing. From the feet upwards in prolonged and rhythmic movements his hands moved backward and forward over his skin, he bowed and rose again, and again. The inclinations gradually ceased as the anointing hands grew higher--around the knees, the hips, the breast. Against his body the pink smears showed brightly for a moment, and then were mingled with and lost in the natural colour of the flesh. All the while his voice kept up a slow crooning, to the sound of which he moved, pronouncing as in an incantation of rounded and liquid syllables what seemed hierarchic titles. He touched his temples and his forehead with both hands, and so for a moment stayed.
His voice grew deeper and charged with more intensity, though the sound was not noticeably quicker, as he began the second anointing. But now it was only the chosen parts that he touched--the soles of the feet, the palms of the hands, the inner side of the fingers, the ears and eyelids, the environs of nose and mouth, the secret organs. Over all these again and again he moved his hands, and again ceased and paused, and the intensity died from his voice.
For the third anointing was purely ritual. He marked various figures upon his body--a cross upon either sole, a cross inverted from brow to foot, and over all his form the pentagon reversed of magic. While he did so his voice rose in a solemn chant which entered with a strange power through those anointed ears, and flowed through his body as did the new faint light that seemed to shine through his closed eyelids. Light and sound were married in premonitions of approaching experience; his voice quivered upon the air and stopped. Then with an effort he moved uncertainly towards his bed, and stretched himself on it, his face towards the closed window and the enlarging moon. Silent and grotesque he lay, and the secret processes of the night began.
If it had been possible for any stranger to enter that locked room in the middle of his journeying they would have found his body lying there still. By no broomstick flight over the lanes of England did Gregory Persimmons attend the Witches' Sabbath, nor did he dance with other sorcerers upon some blasted heath before a goat-headed manifestation of the Accursed. But scattered far over the face of the earth, though not so far in the swiftness of interior passage, those abandoned spirits answered one another that night; and That beyond them (which some have held to be but the precipitation and tendency of their own natures, and others for the equal and perpetual co-inheritor of power and immortality with Good)--That beyond them felt them and shook and replied, sustained and nourished and controlled.
After Gregory had laid himself upon the bed he made the usual attempt at excluding from the attention all his surroundings. But to-night the powerful ointment worked so swiftly upon him, stealing through all his flesh with a delicious venom and writhing itself into his blood and heart, that he had scarcely come to rest before the world was shut out. He was being made one with something beyond his consciousness; he accepted the union in a deep sigh of pleasure.
When it had approached a climax it ceased suddenly. There passed through him a sense of lightness and airy motion; his body seemed to float upwards, so unconscious had it become of the bed on which it rested. He knew now that he must begin to exercise his own intention, and in a depth beyond thought he did so. He commanded and directed himself towards the central power which awaited him. Images floated past him; for his mind, rising as it were out of the faintness which had overcome it, now began to change his experiences into such sounds and shapes as it knew; so that he at once experienced and expressed experience to himself intellectually, and could not generally separate the two. At this beginning, for example, as he lay given up to that sensation of swift and easy motion towards some still hidden moment of exquisite and destructive delight, it seemed to him that at a great distance he heard faint and lovely voices, speaking to him or to each other, and that out of him in turn went a single note of answering glee.
And now he was descending; lower and lower, into a darker and more heavy atmosphere. His intention checked his flight, and it declined almost into stillness; night was about him, and more than night, a heaviness which was like that felt in a crowd, a pressure and intent expectation of relief. As to the mind of a man in prayer might come sudden reminders of great sanctities in other places and other periods, so now to him came the consciousness, not in detail, but as achievements, of far-off masteries of things, multitudinous dedications consummating themselves in That which was already on its way. But that his body was held in a trance by the effect of the ointment, the smell of which had long since become part of his apprehension, he would have turned his head one way or the other to see or speak to those unseen companions.
Suddenly, as in an excited crowd a man may one minute be speaking and shouting to those near him, and the next, part of the general movement directed and controlled by that to which he contributes, there rose within him the sense of a vast and rapid flow, of which he was part, rushing and palpitating with desire. He desired--the heat about his heart grew stronger--to give himself out, to be one with something that should submit to him and from which he should yet draw nourishment; but something beyond imagination, stupendous. He was hungry--but not for food; he was thirsty--but not for drink; he was filled with passion-- but not for flesh. He expanded in the rush of an ancient desire; he longed to be married to the whole universe for a bride. His father appeared before him, senile and shivering; his wife, bewildered and broken; his sop, harassed and distressed. These were his marriages, these his bridals. The bridal dance was beginning; they and he and innumerable others were moving to the wild rhythm of that aboriginal longing. Beneath all the little cares and whims of mankind the tides of that ocean swung, and those who had harnessed them and those who had been destroyed by them were mingled in one victorious catastrophe. His spirit was dancing with his peers, and yet still something in his being held back and was not melted.
There was something--from his depths he cried to his mortal mind to recall it and pass on the message--some final thing that was needed still; some offering by which he might pierce beyond this black drunkenness and achieve a higher reward. What was the sacrifice, what the oblation that was greater than the wandering and unhappy souls whose ruin he had achieved? Heat as from an immense pyre beat upon him, beat upon him with a demand for something more; he absorbed it, and yet, his ignorance striking him with fear, shrunk from its ardent passions. It was not heat only, it was sound also, a rising tumult, acclamation of shrieking voices, thunder of terrible approach. It came, it came, ecstasy of perfect mastery, marriage in hell, he who was Satan wedded to that beside which was Satan. And yet one little thing was needed and he had it not--he was an outcast for want of that one thing. He forced his interior mind to stillness for a moment only, and in that moment recollection came.
From the shadowy and forgotten world the memory of the child Adrian floated into him, and he knew that this was what was needed. All gods had their missionaries, and this god also who was himself and not himself demanded neophytes. Deeply into himself he drew that memory; he gathered up its freshness and offered it to the secret and infernal powers. Adrian was the desirable sacrifice, an unknowing initiate, a fated candidate. To this purpose the man lying still and silent on the bed, or caught up before some vast interior throne where the masters and husbands and possessors of the universe danced and saw immortal life decay before their subtle power, dedicated himself. The wraith of the child drifted into the midst of the dance, and at the moment when Adrian far away in London stirred in his sleep with a moan a like moan broke out in another chamber. For the last experience was upon the accepted devotee; there passed through him a wave of intense cold, and in every chosen spot where the ointment had been twice applied the cold concentrated and increased. Nailed, as it were, through feet and hands and head and genitals, he passed utterly into a pang that was an ecstasy beyond his dreams. He was divorced now from the universe; he was one with a rejection of all courteous and lovely things; by the oblation of the child he was made one with that which is beyond childhood and age and time--the reflection and negation of the eternity of God. He existed supernaturally, and in Hell...
When the dissolution of this union and the return began, he knew it as an overwhelming storm. Heat and cold, the interior and exterior world, images and wraiths, sounds and odours, warred together within him. Chaos broke upon him; he felt himself whirled away into an infinite desolation of anarchy. He strove to concentrate, now on that which was within, now on some detail of the room which was already spectrally apparent to him; but fast as he did so it was gone. Panic seized him; he would have screamed, but to scream would be to be lost. And then again the image of Adrian floated before him, and he knew that much was yet to be done. With that image in his heart, he rose slowly and through many mists to the surface of consciousness, and as it faded gradually to a name and a thought he knew that the Sabbath was over and the return accomplished.
* * *
"He's very restless," Barbara said to Lionel. "I wonder if the scone upset him. There, darling, there!"
"He's probably dreaming of going away," Lionel answered softly. "I hope he won't take a dislike to the place or Persimmons or anything."
"Hush, sweetheart," Barbara murmured. "All's well. All's well."
ADRIAN
The Archdeacon, as he considered matters, found himself confronted by several dilemmas As, for example: (1) Was the stolen chalice the Holy Graal or not? (2) Had it or had it not been taken from him on the supposition that it was? (3) Had Mr. Persimmons anything to do with the supposition or with the removal? (4) Ought he or ought he not to take an active interest in retrieving it? (5) If so, what steps ought he to take?
He felt that, so far as the property itself was concerned, he was very willing to let it slip--Graal or no Graal. But he admitted that, if by any ridiculous chance Mr. Persimmons had had to do with its removal, he should have liked the suspicions he already entertained to be clear. On the other hand, it was impossible to call in the police; he had a strong objection to using the forces of the State to recover property. Besides, the whole thing would then be likely to become public.
He was revolving these things in his mind as he strolled down the village one evening in the week after the Rackstraws had occupied the cottage on the other side of Cully. Except that Barbara, in a rush of grateful devotion, had come to the early Eucharist on the Sunday morning, and he had noticed her as a stranger, the Archdeacon knew nothing of their arrival. He had been diplomatically manoeuvred by Mr. Batesby into inviting him to stop another week or two. Mr. Batesby thought the Archdeacon ought to go for a holiday; the Archdeacon thought that he would not trouble at present. For he felt curiously reluctant to leave the neighbourhood of Cully and perhaps of the Graal.
As he came to the village he heard a voice calling him and looked up. Coming towards him was Gregory Persimmons, with a stranger. Gregory waved his hand again as they came up.
"My dear Archdeacon," he said, shaking hands warmly, "I'm delighted to see you about again. Quite recovered, I hope? You ought to go away for a few weeks."
"I owe you many thanks," the Archdeacon answered politely, "not only for rescuing me from the road and taking me to the Rectory, but for so kindly and so often inquiring after me. It has really been very thoughtful of you." He substituted "thoughtful" for "kind" at the last minute with an eye on truth.
"Not a bit, not a bit," Persimmons said. "So glad you're better. Have you met Sir Giles Tumulty by any chance? Sir Giles, 'meet' the Archdeacon of Fardles, as they say elsewhere."
"I hear you have been set on by tramps," Sir Giles said, as they shook hands. "Many about here?"
As the Archdeacon began to reply, Barbara Rackstraw came along the road with Adrian on their way home, and Persimmons, with a word of apology, skipped aside to meet them. The Archdeacon slurred over the subject of tramps, and proceeded casually: "I have just been reading your last book, Sir Giles. Most interesting." He became indefinitely more pompous, a slight clericalism seemed to increase in him, "But, you know, that article on the Graal--most interesting, most interesting. And you think, er--m'm, you think true?"
"True?" Sir Giles said, "true? What do you mean--true? It's an historical study. You might as well ask whether a book on the Casket Letters was true."
"Umph, yes," the Archdeacon answered, exuding ecclesiasticism. "To be sure, yes. Quite, quite. But, Sir Giles, as we happen to have met so pleasantly, I have a confession--yes, a confession to make, and a question to ask. You'll forgive me both, I'm sure."
Sir Giles in unconcealed and intense boredom stared at the road. Persimmons, Adrian's hand in his, was walking slowly from them, chatting to Barbara. The Archdeacon went on talking, but the next thing that Sir Giles really heard was--"and it seemed most interesting. But it was my fault entirely, only, as I've kept it quite secret, I hope you won't mind. And, if you could tell me--in strict confidence, affecting me as it does--why you cut that last paragraph out, it would of course be a very generous act on your part, though I quite realize I have no right to ask it."
His voice ceased, but by this time Sir Giles was alert. The last paragraph cut out? There was only one last paragraph he had cut out lately. And how did this country clergyman know? His fault entirely, was it? He shook a reluctant head at the Archdeacon. "I'm rather sorry you've seen it," he said. "But there's no harm done, of course. After all, being your church, you have a kind of claim! But, as far as cutting it out--" He raised his voice. "Persimmons! Persimmons!"
The Archdeacon threw a hand out. "Sir Giles, Sir Giles, he is talking to a lady."
"Lady be damned," said Sir Giles. "A country wench, I suppose, or a county wench--it doesn't signify, anyhow. Persimmons!"
Gregory made his farewells to Barbara and Adrian near a turn in the road and returned. "Yes?" he said. "Why such particular excitement?"
Sir Giles grinned. "What do you think?" he said. "The Archdeacon saw that paragraph you made me cut out. So he knew it was his church the Graal was in. And it was Persimmons," he added to the priest, "who wanted it taken out. He pretended the evidence wasn't good enough, but that was all nonsense. Evidence good enough for anybody."
From the turn in the road Adrian shouted a final goodbye, and Gregory, remembering his work, turned and waved before he answered. Then he smiled at the Archdeacon, who was looking at him also with a smile. Sir Giles grinned happily, and a bicyclist who passed at the moment reflected bitterly on the easy and joyous time which such people had in the world.
"Dear me," the Archdeacon said. "And was that the cause of the needy mission church, Mr. Persimmons?"
"Well," Persimmons said, "I'm afraid it was. I have been something of a collector in my time, and--once I understood from Sir Giles what your old chalice might be--I couldn't resist it."
"It must be a wonderful thing to be a collector," the Archdeacon answered gravely. "Apparently you may be seized any time with a passion for anything. Have you a large collection of chalices, Mr. Persimmons?"
"None at all, since I didn't get that," Gregory answered. "To think it's in the hands of some thief now, or a pawnbroker perhaps. Have you put the police on the track yet, Archdeacon?"
"No," the Archdeacon answered. "I don't think the police would find it. The police sergeant here believes in letting his children run more or less wild, and I feel sure he wouldn't understand my clues. Well, good-day, Sir Giles. Good-day, Mr. Persimmons."
"Oh, but look here," Gregory said, "don't go yet. Come up to Cully and have a look at some of my things. You don't bear malice, I'm sure, since I didn't succeed in cheating you."
"I will come with pleasure," the Archdeacon said. "Collections are always so delightful, don't you think? All things from all men, so to speak." And, half under his breath, as they turned towards Cully, he sang to himself, "Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for He is gracious; for His mercy endureth for ever."
"I beg your pardon?" Gregory asked at the same moment that Sir Giles said, "Eh?"
"Nothing, nothing," the Archdeacon said hastily. "Merely an improvisation. The fine weather, I suppose." He almost smirked at the others, with gaiety in his heart and curving his usually sedate lips. Gregory remembered the way in which the priest's monologue had carried him half over the county, and began almost seriously to consider whether he were not half-witted. Sir Giles, on the other hand, began to feel more interest than hitherto. He glanced aside at Gregory, caught his slight air of bewilderment, and grinned to himself. It appeared that his country visit might be of even more interest than he supposed. He always sought out--at home and abroad--these unusual extremists in religion; they wandered in a borderland, whatever their creed, of metaphysics, mysticism, and insanity which was a peculiarly fascinating spectacle. He had himself an utter disbelief in God and devil, but he found these anthropomorphic conceptions interesting, and to push or delay any devotee upon the path was entertainment to a mind too swiftly bored. The existence and transmission of the magical ointment had become gradually known to him during his wanderings. Of its elements and concoction he knew little; they seemed to be a professional mystery reserved to some remoter circle than he had yet touched. But the semi-delirium which it induced in expectant minds was undoubted, and whenever chance made him acquainted with suitable subjects and he could, without too much trouble to himself, introduce the method, he made haste to do so. Subjects were infrequent; it required a particularly urgent and sadistic nature; he was not at all sure that Persimmons was strong enough. However, it was done now, and he must gain what satisfaction he could from the result.
Of the Graal he thought similarly. That the chalice of Fardles was the Graal he had little doubt; the evidence was circumstantial, but good. He regretted only that the process of time had prevented him from studying its origin, its first user, and his circle, at close quarters. "All martyrs are masochists," he thought, "but crucifixion is a violent form." Yet, given in the Jew's mind the delusion that he loved the world, what else was the Passion but masochism? And the passion of the communicant was, of course, a corresponding sadism. Religion was bound to be one of the two; in extreme cases both. The question was, which was the Archdeacon?
The Archdeacon, ignorant that this question was being asked, strolled happily on between his two acquaintances, and with them turned up the drive to Cully. He promised himself opportunities of making clear to Persimmons that he guessed very clearly who had the Graal. He wished that in the early stages of his recovery he had not let out to Mr. Batesby that he had been robbed of the chalice. Mr. Batesby had, of course, passed the information on. If only it were still a secret! But why should anyone want it so much, he wondered. Collecting--well, collecting perhaps.
"Do you collect anything in particular, Mr. Persimmons?" he asked. "Or merely any unconsidered trifles?"
"I have a few interesting old books," Gregory said. "And a few old vestments and so on. I once took an interest in ecclesiology. But of late I have rather concentrated on old Chinese work-masks, for instance."
"Masks are always interesting," the Archdeacon said. "The Chinese mask, I think, has no beard?"
"None of mine have--long mustachios, but no beard," answered Gregory.
"False beards," the Archdeacon went on, "are never really satisfactory. A few weeks ago a man called to see me in what I suspect to have been a false beard, I can't imagine why. It seems such a curious thing to wear."
"I believe that many priesthoods make it a part of their convention not to wear beards," Gregory said conversationally. "Now what is the reason of that?"
"Obvious enough," Sir Giles put in. "They have dedicated their manhood to the god--they no longer possess virility. They are feminine to the god and dead to the world. Every priest is a kind of a corpse-woman... if you'll excuse me," he added after a pause to the Archdeacon, who said handsomely: "I wish it were more largely true."
"Not every priest," Persimmons said. "There are virile religions, adorations of power and strength."
"To adore strength is to confess weakness," Sir Giles said. "To be power is not to adore it. The very weakest only dream of being powerful. Look at the mystics."
"Don't, this evening," Gregory said to the Archdeacon, laughing. "Come in and look at some of my treasures."
Cully was a large, rambling house, with "the latest modern improvements". Gregory took his companions up a very fine staircase into a gallery from which his own rooms opened out. In the hall itself were a few noticeable things--a suit of armour, a Greek head, a curious box or two from the Minoan excavations, a cabinet of old china. The gallery was hung with the Chinese masks of which Gregory had spoken, and, having examined them on their way, the visitors were brought at last into their host's sitting-room. It was lined with books, and contained several cabinets and cases; a few prints hung on the walls.
"I suppose," Sir Giles said, glancing round him, "if you had succeeded in cheating the Archdeacon out of the Graal, you'd have kept it in here."
"Here or hereabouts," Gregory said. "The trouble is that in the alterations which earlier inhabitants of the house made the old chapel was converted, at least the upper part of it, into these rooms--my sitting-room, my bedroom, my bathroom, and so on. So far as I can understand, the bathroom--or what is almost the bathroom--is just over where the altar stood; so that to restore the chalice to its most suitable position would be almost impossible."
"As a matter of manners," the Archdeacon admitted, "perhaps. But surely not more so than achieving it--if I may say so--by throwing dust in the eyes of its keeper. No, I don't speak personally, Mr. Persimmons; I allude only to an example of comparative morals."
"What upsets the comparison," Sir Giles said, "is that in the one case you have a strong personal lust and action deflected in consequence. But in the second action is? comparatively--free."
"I shouldn't have thought that any action was freer than any other," the Archdeacon said as he followed Gregory across the room. "Man is free to know his destiny, but not free to evade his destiny."
"But he can choose his destiny," Gregory answered, taking a book from the shelves. "He may decide what star or what god he will follow."
"If you spell destiny and god with capital letters--no," the Archdeacon said. "All destinies and all gods bring him to One, but he chooses how to know Him."
"He may defy and deny him for ever," Gregory said, with a gesture.
"You can defy and deny the air you breathe or the water you drink," the Archdeacon answered comfortably. "But if you do you die. The difference in the parallels is that in the other case, though you come nearer and nearer to it, you never quite die. Almost--you are in the death-agony-- but never quite."
Sir Giles interrupted the discussion. "I'm going to revise my last Monday's lecture," he said. "I know the orthodox creed and the orthodox revolt by heart. I don't quite know how the Archdeacon would put it, but I know your apologia inside out, Persimmons. I heard it put very well by a wealthy Persian once. I've got a note of it somewhere. What time do you dine in this bloody hole of yours?" he threw over his shoulder as he went towards the door.
"Half-past seven," Gregory called, and turned back to exhibit more of his possessions. These now were rare books, early editions, and bibliographical curiosities in which the Archdeacon took a definite and even specialized interest. The two bent over volume after volume, confirming and commenting, their earlier hostility quiescent, and a pleasant sense of intellectual intimacy established. After the examination had gone on for some time Gregory took from a drawer a morocco case in which was a thin square pamphlet. He drew it out and held it towards the priest. "Now this," he said, "may interest you. Look at the initials."
The Archdeacon took it carefully. It was a copy of the old pre-Shakespearean King Leir, stained and frayed. But on the front was scrawled towards the top and just against the title the two letters "W.S." and just under them in a precise, careful hand "J.M."
"Good heavens!" the Archdeacon exclaimed. "Do you mean-?"
"Ah, that's the point," Gregory said. "Is it or isn't it? There's very little doubt of the J.M. I've compared it with the King's College MS., and it's exact. But the W.S. is another matter. One daren't believe it! Alone--perhaps, but both together! And yet, why not? After all, it's very likely Shakespeare didn't take all his books back to Stratford, especially when he'd written a better play himself. And he may have known Milton the scrivener. We don't know."
There was a soft tap at the door. "Come in," Gregory called, and the door opened to show a man standing on the threshold.
"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but you're wanted on the telephone. A Mr. Adrian, I understood, sir."
"Damn!" Gregory said. "I forgot I told him to ring me up. It's a child staying near here," he went on, "who was frightfully interested in the telephone, so... And the telephone's in the hall."
"Please, please," the Archdeacon said. "Don't disappoint him, I shall be quite happy here." His eyes were on the books on the table. But so were Gregory's. He had heard and seen the interest the Archdeacon felt, and one or two of these treasures were small, compact things. Yet to disappoint Adrian might throw him back there. He moved to the door and caught the arm of the man who stood there.
"Ludding," he whispered, "keep your eye on him. Don't let him put anything in his pocket. Do something about the room till I get back."
"He may recognize me, sir," the man said doubtfully.
"Then look through the crack in the door, but watch him whatever you do. I shall only be two or three minutes." He went swiftly along the gallery and down the stairs, and Ludding softly manipulated the door till he was able to take in the leaning figure at the table.
The Archdeacon's eyes were on the books, but his attention was on the gallery. He heard Persimmons go, guessed the other was watching, and leaned still more awkwardly forward. Then suddenly he made a grotesque noise, dragged out his handkerchief, put it to his mouth, and rushed out of the room. Ludding, leaping back from the door as he came, received him with a stare.
"I'm going to be sick," the Archdeacon gurgled, leaning forward. "Where's the... Ouch!" He ended with a convulsive choke.
"Here, sir." Ludding ran and threw open a door. The Archdeacon shot by him, banged it, looked round. In a corner behind the door the Graal lay on its side. He caught it up and considered, looking at the window. For him to carry it off, he recognized, was impossible; he would be knocked on the head again before he got home, if he ever did get home. There were only two possibilities, to leave it where it was or to throw it out of the window. He made a loud, hideous noise for Ludding's benefit and peered out.
Terrace and lawns below, grounds and plantations beyond, but all the Cully domain. Could he by any chance recover it if he threw it out? But Persimmons would be bound to guess what had happened. He would search too, with the advantages all on his side. The Archdeacon preferred to keep the advantages and leave the Graal. After all, he would know and the other wouldn't. Certainty and uncertainty--certainty for him.
"Ouch," he said loudly, laid down the chalice where he had found it, and said in his heart: "Fair sweet Destiny, draw all men to the most happy knowledge of Thee." He leant against the wall for a minute till he heard a soft whispering outside, then he pulled the chain loudly, opened the door, and came rather staggeringly out. As he did so, Ludding slipped past him into the little room.
"My dear Archdeacon!" Gregory cried sympathetically. "I'm so sorry." But his eyes went hurrying past the other, after Ludding, and for the moment while the servant was absent he stood between his guest and the stairs. Ludding was out almost immediately, and behind the priest's back nodded at his master. Gregory, with a little sigh, looked directly at the Archdeacon, who looked as sorry for himself as his inexperience could contrive.
"It's the screwing myself up," he said faintly. "It's nothing; my stomach's a weak thing, Mr. Persimmons. But I think perhaps I had better be getting home."
"Bring the car round, Ludding," Gregory said. "Yes, I insist. Are you sure you won't stop here a little while?"
"No, really, really," the Archdeacon said, his reluctance sounding like weakness. "I'll just get out into the air."
"Do," Gregory exclaimed. "Take my arm." And with murmurs and distressed ejaculations and gentle protests the two dropped to the hall.
It was later in the evening, when dinner was over and the two were alone, that Gregory told Sir Giles of the incident.
"It may have been true," he said doubtfully, "but I didn't quite like it. But he hadn't touched the Cup. I went back to see."
"He'll know it's there," Sir Giles explained.
"He may know it as much as he likes," Gregory answered. "I'll get a whole pedigree for that Cup. Stephen gave it to me, I think. It's his word against half a dozen I can arrange for, if he makes a fuss. And a clergyman accusing his Good Samaritan of theft because he's got a chalice which the clergyman, after a knock on the head, thinks he recognizes. Oh, no, Tumulty, it wouldn't do."
"What should you have done if he'd taken it?" Sir Giles asked.
"Taken it back. I saw that when I was coming upstairs after that beastly baby had been taken away from the telephone," Gregory said spitefully. "Violence--real violence--wouldn't have been necessary. Taken it back and written to the Chief Constable."
"Who'd have wanted it traced, probably," said Sir Giles. "And would have found out about that damned book. Who was the accursed imbecile who let him see it?"
"Some fool at my son's," Gregory said. "But I'll have the pedigree all right. Don't worry, Tumulty."
"Don't worry!" Sir Giles cried. "Who the hell are you talking to, Persimmons? Don't worry! Me worry over your bastard murders, indeed. The thing that'll keep you safe is that no-one with more brains than a gutter-bred snipe like that Archdeacon would think your collection of middle-class platitudes worth adding to. Chinese masks--you might be a Jew financier. And, anyhow, what do you want to do with the thing?"
"Ah, now that's important," Gregory said. "I didn't quite know at first, but I do now. I'm going to talk to the child."
"Ungh?" Sir Giles asked.
"Say it's what we think it is, it's been as near the other centre as anything in this world can get," Gregory went on. "And it's been kept pretty deep down in that world all the time. It's close to the place where all things meet and all souls--anyhow, their souls. And I can get at that baby there--the real baby--and make the thing easy up here. Not at first altogether perhaps, but I shall do it. I shall make the offering there when he agrees--till we go to the Sabbath together."
"You do talk pretty? Persimmons," Sir Giles said. "You believe that this damn Graal is more use than that coffee cup?"
"I think it is the great chalice of their initiation," Gregory answered. "And I think we can use it--I and my people. I can meet Adrian there and separate and draw and convert him. It's got power in it; it's a gate. But anyone can use the power, and a gate is for coming out as well as going in."
"Pretty, pretty," Sir Giles murmured, his head on one side. "And when does your blessed child bleat out through the gate of the fold? Don't forget I want to see."
"You won't see anything; you'll be horribly bored," Gregory sneered.
"I shall see you," Sir Giles said, with a sweet mildness. "And I shan't be bored. I saw something like it in Brazil. But there they killed a slave. Are you going to kill Ludding, by any chance?"
"Don't be a fool," Gregory said. "Well, come, if you like. I don't mind, all this cleverness of yours is such universes away that it won't interfere. Only I warn you, absolutely nothing'll happen."
"Don't die, that's all I ask," Sir Giles said. "In Brazil one of them did, and it might be more difficult to bribe the police here."
They went from the dining-room to a small room next to Gregory's bedroom, which he unlocked with a key he carried on his own chain. There appeared in it only a cabinet in one corner, two or three cushions dropped beside it, and a low pedestal of wood in the centre on which lay an oblong slab of stone. On this slab stood two candlesticks, around the pedestal, at a good distance, had been drawn a white circle, in which at one point was a small gap. Before he entered the room Gregory had fetched the Graal from its corner; he passed through the gap, set it upright on the slab between the candlesticks, and turned to Sir Giles.
"You'd better sit down at once," he said, "and I should recommend you to keep within the circle. There are curious forces released sometimes on these occasions."
"I know all about that," Sir Giles said, as he brought two of the cushions into the circle, also taking care to pass through the gap. "I saw a man once in Ispahan who looked as if he'd been unable to breathe once he got outside. Atmospheric disturbances, but why? Why does your purely subjective industry disturb the air? Well, never mind. I won't say a word more." He settled himself comfortably on his cushions over against one of the shorter sides of the pedestal. Gregory went over to the cabinet, and there first changed from the clothes he was wearing into a white cassock, marked with esoteric signs. He then brought from it an antique vessel, from which he poured what was apparently wine into the Graal till it all but brimmed. He brought also a short rod and laid it on the slab in front of the Graal; he arranged and lit at what appeared to be the back of the altar a chafing-dish containing herbs and powders, scattered other powders upon it, and came back to the front of the altar. Lastly, with great care, he brought to it from the cabinet a parchment inscribed with names and writings, and a small paper from which he let fall on to the wine in the Graal what appeared to Sir Giles to be a few short hairs.
He considered the arrangements, went back and closed the cabinet, re-entered the circle, took the rod from the altar, and, bending down, with a strong concentration of countenance, closed the gap, drawing the rod slowly as if with an effort against the path of the sun. He came to the front of the altar, and immersed himself in a profound silence.
Sir Giles, curled upon the cushions, watched him intently, noting every change in his face and the growing remoteness of his eyes. Almost an hour had passed before those eyes, seeming to stir of their own volition, lowered themselves from the darkness of the room to the Graal standing in the steady light of the two candles. Very slowly he stretched his hands over the chalice and began to speak. Sir Giles, straining his ears, caught only an occasional phrase. "Pater Noster, qui fuisti in caelis... per te omnipotentem in saecula saeculorum... hoc est calix, hoc est sanguis tuus infernorum... in te regnum mortis, in te delectatio corruptionis, in te via et vita scientiae maleficae... qui non es in initio, qui eris in sempiternum. Amen." He took up the rod from the altar, still moving with extreme slowness and, resting it on the edge of the chalice, allowed it to touch the surface of the wine; his eyes followed its length and rested also there. "De corpore, de mente... mitte animum in simulacro... per potestatem tuam in omnibus... animum Adriani cujus nomen scripsi in sanguine meo dimitte in sanguine tuo... Adrianum oblationem pro me et pro seipsum... nomen tuum." The rod moved in magical symbols upon the wine. "De Cujus corpore haec sunt... O Pastor, O Pater, O Nox et Lux infernorum et domus rejectionis."
The vibrating voice ceased, and it seemed to Sir Giles that the faintest of mists hung for a moment over the chalice and was dissolved; then, more urgently and in a lower tone the voice began again, but the phrases the listener caught were now far between. "... Adrianum filium tuum, ovem tuam... et omnia opera mea et sua... tu cujus sum et cujus erit... dimitte... dimitte." It paused again, and then in a murmur through which the whole force of the celebrant seemed to pass, it came again. "Adrian, Adrian, Adrian... "
Faint, but certain, the mist rose again from the wine; and Sir Giles, absorbedly drinking in the spectacle, saw Gregory's eyes light up with recognition. He seemed without moving to draw near the altar and the chalice and the mist, his face was bent toward it; he spoke, carefully, quietly, and in English. "Adrian, it is I who speak, image to image, through this shadow of thee to thee. Adrian, well met. Know me again, O soul, and know me thy friend and master. In the world of flesh know me, in the world of shadows, and in the world of our lord. Many times I shall shape thine image thus, O child, my sacrifice and my oblation, and thou shalt come, more swiftly and more truly thou, when I desire thee. Image of Adrian, dissolve and return to Adrian, and may his soul and body, whence thou hast come, receive this message that thou bearest. I, dimissus es."
The mist faded again; the priest of these mysteries sank upon his knees. He laid the rod on the altar; he stretched out both hands and took the chalice into them; he lifted it to his lips and drank the consecrated wine. "Hic in me et ego in hoc et Tu, Pastor et Dominus, in utrisque." He remained absorbed.
The candles had burned half an inch more towards their sockets before, very wearily, he arose and extinguished them. Then he broke the circle, and slowly, in reverse order, laid away the magical implements. He took the Graal and set it inverted on the floor. He took off his cassock and put on--in a fantastic culmination--the dinner-jacket he had been wearing. Then he turned to Sir Giles. "Do what you will," he said. "I am going to sleep."
FARDLES
"I have read," said Kenneth Mornington, standing in the station of a small village some seven miles across country from Fardles, "that Paris dominates France. I wish London dominated England in the matter of weather."
Further letters exchanged between him and the Archdeacon had led to an agreement that he should spend the first Sunday of his holiday at the Rectory, arriving for lunch on the Saturday. The Saturday morning in London had been brilliant, and he had thought it would be pleasanter to walk along the chord of the monstrous arc which the railway made. But it had grown dull as the train left the London suburbs, and even as he jumped from his compartment the first drops of rain began to fall. By the time he had reached the outer exit they had grown to a steady drizzle, and the train had left the station.
Kenneth turned up his collar and set out; the way at least was known to him. "But why," he said, "do I always get out at the wrong times? If I had gone on I should have had to sit at Fardles station for an hour and a half, but I should have been dry. It is this sheep-like imitation of Adam which annoys me. Adam got out at the wrong time. But he was made to by the railway authorities. I will write," he thought, and took to a footpath, "the diary of a man who always got out at the wrong time, beginning with a Caesarean operation. And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped. A Modern Macduff, one might call it. And death? He might die inopportunely, before the one in advance had been moved on, so that all the angels on the line of his spiritual progress found themselves crowded with two souls instead of the one they were prepared for. "Agitation in Heaven. Excursionist unable to return. Trains to Paradise overcrowded. Strange scenes at the stations. Seraph Michael says rules to be enforced." Stations... stages... it sounds like Theosophy. Am I a Theosophist? Oh, Lord, it's worse than ever; I can't walk to a strange Rectory through seven miles of this."
In a distance he discerned a shed by the side of the road, broke into a run, and, reaching it, took shelter with a bound which landed him in a shallow puddle lying just within the dark entrance. "Oh, damn and blast!" he cried with a great voice. "Why was this bloody world created?"
"As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively, to know God and to glorify Him for ever."
Kenneth peered into the shed, and found that there was sitting on a heap of stones at the back a young man of about his own age, with a lean, long face, and a blob of white on his knee which turned out in a few minutes to be a writing pad.
"Quite," Kenneth said. "The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative. They might be con-con consanguineous? contemporaneous? consubstantial? What is the word I want?"
"Contemptible, concomitant, conditional, consequential, congruous, connectible, concupiscent, contaminable, considerable," the stranger offered him. "The last is, I admit, weak."
"The question was considerable," Kenneth answered. "You no doubt are considering it? You are even writing the answer down?"
"A commentary upon it," the other said. "But consanguineous was the word I wanted, or its brother." He wrote.
Kenneth sat down on the same heap of stones and watched till the writing was finished, then he said: "Circumstances almost suggest, don't you think, that I might hear the context--if it's what it looks?"
"Context--there's another," the stranger said. "Contextual 'And that contextual meaning flows Through all our manuscripts of rose.' Rose? Persia? Hafix--Ispahan. Perhaps rose is a little ordinary. 'And that contextual meaning streams Through all our manuscripts of dreams."'
"Oh, no, no," Mornington broke in firmly. "That's far too minor. Perhaps something modern--'And that impotent contextual meaning stinks In all our manuscripts, of no matter what coloured inks.' Better be modern than minor."
"I agree," the other said. "But a man must fulfil his destiny, even to minority. Shall I 'think the complete universe must be Subject to such a rag of it as me?'"
He was interrupted by Kenneth kicking the earth with his heels and crying: "At last! at last! 'Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames!' I didn't think there was another living man who knew George Chapman."
The stranger caught his arm. "Can you?" he said, made a gesture with his free hand, and began, Mornington's voice joining in after the first few words:
"That with thy music--footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive, fire about the world."
The conversation for the next ten minutes became a duet, and it was only at the end that Kenneth said with a sigh: "'I have lived long enough, having seen one thing.' But before I die--the context of consanguineous?"
The stranger picked up his manuscript and read:
"How does thy single heart possess A double mode of happiness In quiet and in busyness!
Profundities of utter peace Do their own vehemence release Through rippling toils that never cease.
Yet of those ripples' changing mood, Thou, ignorant at heart, dost brood In a most solemn quietude.
Thus idleness and industry Within that laden heart of thee Find their rich consanguinity."
"Yes," Kenneth murmured, "yes. A little minor, but rather beautiful."
"The faults, or rather the follies, are sufficiently obvious," the stranger said. "Yet I flatter myself it reflects the lady."
"You have printed?" Kenneth asked seriously, for they were now discussing important things, and in answer the other jumped to his feet and stood before him. "I have printed," he said, "and you are the only man--besides the publisher--who knows about it."
"Really?" Mornington asked.
"Yes," said the stranger. "You will understand the horrible position I'm in if I tell you my name. I am Aubrey Duncan Peregrine Mary de Lisle D'Estrange, Duke of the North Ridings, Marquis of Craigmullen and Plessing, Earl and Viscount, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Sword and Cape, and several other ridiculous fantasies."
Mornington pinched his lip. "Yes, I see," he said. "That must make it difficult to do anything with poetry."
"Difficult," the other said, with almost a shout. "It makes it impossible."
"Oh well, come," Kenneth said; "impossible? You can publish, and the reviews at least won't flatter you."
"It isn't the reviews," the Duke said. "It's just chatting with people and being the fellow who's written a book or two--not very good books, but his books, and being able to quote things, and so on. How can I quote things to the people who come to see me? How can I ask the Bishop what he thinks of my stuff or tell him what I think of his? What will the Earl my cousin say about the Sitwells?"
"No, quite," Mornington answered, and for a few minutes the two young men looked at one another. Then the Duke grinned. "It's so silly," he said. "I really do care about poetry, and I think some of my stuff might be almost possible. But I can never find it anywhere to live for more than a few days."
"Anonymity?" Kenneth asked. "But that wouldn't help."
"Look here," the Duke said suddenly, "are you going any where in particular? No? Why not come up to the house with me and stop a few days?"
Mornington shook his head regretfully. "I have promised to stop with the Archdeacon of Fardles over the week-end," he said.
"Well, after then?" the Duke urged. "Do, for God's sake come and talk Chapman and Blunden with me. Look here, come up now, and I'll run you over to Fardles in the car, and on Monday morning I'll come and fetch you."
Kenneth assented to this, though he refused to leave his shelter. But within some half an hour the Duke had brought his car to the front of the shed and they were on the way to Fardles. As they drew near the village, approaching it from the cottage side of Cully, they passed another car in a side turning, in which Mornington seemed to see, as he was carried past, the faces of Gregory Persimmons and Adrian Rackstraw. But he was in a long controversy with the Duke on the merits of the Laureate's new prosody, and though he wondered a little, the incident made hardly any impression on his mind.
The Archdeacon, it appeared, knew the Duke; the Duke was rather detachedly acquainted with the Archdeacon. The detachment was perhaps due to the fact, which had emerged from the few minutes' conversation the three had together, that the Duke of the North Ridings was a Roman Catholic (hence the Sword and Cape), so far as his obsession with poetry and his own misfortunes left him leisure to be anything. But he promised to come to lunch on Monday, and disappeared.
"I forgot Batesby," the Archdeacon said suddenly to Mornington, as the car drove off. "Dear me! I'm afraid the Duke and he won't like one another. Batesby's dreadfully keen on Reunion; he has a scheme of his own for it--an admirable scheme, I'm certain, if only he could get other people to see it in the same way."
"I should have thought the same thing was officially true of the Duke," Mornington said as they entered the house.
"But only because he's part of an institution," the Archdeacon said, "and one can more easily believe that institutions are supernatural than that individuals are. And an institution can believe in itself and can wait, whereas an individual can't. Batesby can't afford to wait; he might die."
At lunch Mornington had Mr. Batesby's scheme of Reunion explained at length by its originator. It was highly complicated and, so far as Kenneth could understand, involved everyone believing that God was opposed to Communism and in favour of election as the only sound method of government. The Archdeacon remarked that discovering the constitution of the Catholic Church was a much pleasanter game than tennis, to which he had been invited that afternoon.
"Though they know I don't play," he added plaintively. "So I was glad you were coming, and I had an excuse."
"How do you get exercise?" Kenneth asked idly.
"Well, actually, I go in for fencing," the Archdeacon said, smiling. "I used to love it as a boy romantically, and since I have outgrown romance I keep it up prosaically."
The constitution of the Catholic Church occupied the lunch so fully that not until Mr. Batesby had gone away to supervise the Lads' Christian Cricket Club in his own parish, some ten miles off, did Kenneth see an opportunity of talking to his host about Christianity and the League of Nations. And even then, when they were settled in the garden, he found that by the accident of conversation the priest was already chatting about the deleted paragraph of Sacred Vessels in Folklore.
"Who?" he asked suddenly, arrested by a name.
"Persimmons," the Archdeacon answered. "I wonder if he had anything to do with your firm. I seem to remember seeing him the day I called on you."
"But if it's the man who's taken a house near here called Mullins or Juggins or something, of course he's something to do with our firm," Mornington cried. "He's Stephen's father; he used to be the firm. Does he live at Buggins?"
"He lives at Cully," the Archdeacon said, "which may be what you mean."
"But how do you know he wanted the paragraph out?" Kenneth demanded.
"Because Sir Giles told me so--confirmed by the fact that he tried to cheat me out of the Graal, and the other fact that he eventually had me knocked on the head and took it," answered the Archdeacon.
Kenneth looked at him, looked at the garden, looked across at the church. "I am not mad," he murmured, "'My pulse doth temperately keep time.'... Yes, it does. 'These are the thingummybobs, you are my what d'ye call it.' But that a retired publisher should knock an Archdeacon on the head... "
The Archdeacon flowed into the whole story, and ended with his exit from Cully. Mornington, listening, felt the story to be fantastic and ridiculous, and would have given himself up to incredulity, had it not been for the notion of the Graal itself. This, which to some would have been the extreme fantasy, was to him the easiest thing to believe. For he approached the idea of the sacred vessel, not as did Sir Giles, through antiquity and savage folklore, nor as did the Archdeacon, through a sense of religious depths in which the mere temporary use of a particular vessel seemed a small thing, but through exalted poetry and the high romantic tradition in literature. This living light had shone for so long in his mind upon the idea of the Graal that it was by now a familiar thing--Tennyson and Hawker and Malory and older writers still had made it familiar, and its familiarity created for it a kind of potentiality. To deny it would be to deny his own past. But this emotional testimony to the possibility of its existence had an intellectual support. Kenneth knew--his publicity work had made clear to him--the very high reputation Sir Giles had among the learned; a hundred humble reviews had shown him that. And if the thing were possible, and if the thing were likely... But still, Gregory Persimmons... He looked back at the Archdeacon.
"You're sure you saw it?" he asked. "Have you gone to the police?"
"No," the Archdeacon said. "If you don't think I saw it, would the police be likely to?"
"I do, I do," Kenneth said hastily. "But why should he want it?"
"I haven't any idea," the priest answered. "That's what baffles me too. Why should anyone want anything as much as that? And certainly why should anyone want the Graal? if it is the Graal? He talked to me about being a collector, which makes me pretty sure he isn't."
Kenneth got up and walked up and down. There was a silence for a few minutes, then the Archdeacon said: "However, we needn't worry over it. What about me and the League of Nations?"
"Yes," Kenneth said absently, sitting down again. "Oh, well, Stephen simply leapt at it. I read it, and I told him about it, and I suggested sending it to one of our tame experts? only I couldn't decide between the political expert and the theological. At least, I was going to suggest it, but I didn't have time. 'By an Archdeacon? By an orthodox Archdeacon? Oh, take it, take it by all means, by all manner of means.' He positively tangoed at it."
"This is very gratifying," the Archdeacon answered, "and the haste is unexpected."
"Stephen", Kenneth went on, "has a weakness for clerical books; I've noticed it before. Fiction is our stand-by, of course; but he takes all the manuscripts by clergymen that he decently can. I think he's a little shy of some parts of our list, and likes to counterbalance them. We used to do a lot of occult stuff; a particular kind of occult. The standard work on the Black Mass and that sort of thing. That was before Stephen himself really got going, but he feels vaguely responsible, I've no doubt."
"Who ran it then?" the Archdeacon asked idly. "Gregory," Mornington answered. He stopped suddenly, and the two looked at one another.
"Oh, it's all nonsense," Mornington broke out. "The Black Mass, indeed!"
"The Black Mass is all nonsense, of course," the Archdeacon said; "but nonsense, after all, does exist. And minds can get drunk with nonsense."
"Do you really mean", Mornington asked, "that a London publisher sold his soul to the devil and signed it away in his own blood and that sort of thing? Because I'm damned if I can see him doing it. Lots of people are interested in magic, without doing secret incantations under the new moon with the aid of dead men's grease."
"You keep harping on the London publisher," the other said. "If a London publisher has a soul--which you're bound to admit--he can sell it if he likes: not to the devil, but to himself. Why not?" He considered. "I think perhaps, after all, I ought to try and recover that chalice. There are decencies. There is a way of behaving in these things. And the Graal, if it is the Graal," he went on, unusually moved, "was not meant for the greedy orgies of a delirious tomtit."
"Tomtit!" Mornington cried. "If it could be true, he wouldn't be a tomtit. He'd be a vulture."
"Well, never mind," the priest said. "The question is, can I do anything at once? I've half a mind to go and take it."
"Look here," said Mornington, "let me go and see him first. Stephen thought it would look well if I called, being down here. And let me talk to Lionel Rackstraw." He spoke almost crossly. "Once a silly idea like this gets into one's mind, one can't see anything else. I think you're wrong."
"I don't see, then, what good you're going to do," the Archdeacon said. "If I'm mad--"
"Wrong, I said," Kenneth put in.
"Wrong because being hit on the head has affected my mind and my eyes-- which is almost the same thing as being mad. If I'm demented, anyhow-- you won't be any more clear about it after a chat with Mr. Persimmons on whatever he does chat about. Nor with Mr. Rackstraw, whoever he may be."
Kenneth explained briefly. "So, you see, he's really been a very decent fellow over the cottage," he concluded.
"My dear man," the Archdeacon said, "if you had tea with him and he gave you the last crumpet, it wouldn't prove anything unless he badly wanted the crumpet, and not much even then. He might want something else more."
This, however, was a point of view to which Kenneth, when that evening he walked over to the cottage, found Lionel not very willing to agree. Gregory, so far as the Rackstraws were concerned, had been nothing but an advantage. He had lent them the cottage; he had sent a maid down from Cully to save Barbara trouble; he had occupied Adrian for hours together with the motor and other amusements, until the child was very willing for his parents to go off on more or less extensive walks while he played with his new friend. And Lionel saw no reason to associate himself actively--even in sympathy--with the archidiaconal crusade; more especially since Mornington himself was torn between scepticism and sympathy.
"In any case," he said, "I don't know what you want me to do. Anyone that will take Adrian off my hands for a little while can knock all the Archdeacons in the country on the head so far as I am concerned."
"I don't want you to do anything", Kenneth answered, "except discuss it."
"Well, we're going up to tea at Cully to-morrow," Lionel said. "I can talk about it there, if you like."
Kenneth arrived at Cully on the Sunday afternoon, after having heard the Archdeacon preach a sermon in the morning on "Thou shall not covet thy neighbour's house," in which, having identified "thy neighbour" with God and touched lightly on the text "Mine are the cattle upon a thousand hills," he went off into a fantastic exhortation upon the thesis that the only thing left to covet was "thy neighbour" Himself. "Not His creation, not His manifestations, not even His qualities, but Him," the Archdeacon ended. "This should be our covetousness and our desire; for this only no greed is too great, as this only can satisfy the greatest greed. The whole universe is His house, the soul of thy mortal neighbour is His wife, thou thyself art His servant and thy body His maid--a myriad oxen, a myriad asses, subsist in the high inorganic creation. Him only thou shalt covet with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength. And now to God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, be ascribed, as is most justly due, all honour... " The congregation searched for sixpences.
Lionel, Barbara, and Adrian were with Persimmons and Sir Giles on the terrace behind the house when Kenneth arrived, and had already spoken of his probable visit. Gregory welcomed him pleasantly enough, as one of the staff who had originally worked under him. But Kenneth's mind was already in a slight daze, for, as he had been conducted by the maid through the hall, he had seen on a bracket about the height of his head from the ground, in a corner near the garden door, an antique cup which struck him forcibly as being very like the one the Archdeacon had described to him. It seemed impossible that, if the priest's absurd suspicions were right, Persimmons should so flaunt the theft before the world--unless, indeed, it were done merely to create the impression of impossibility. "There is no possible idea", Kenneth thought as he came on to the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act. How are you, Mr. Persimmons? You'll excuse this call, I know."
The conversation rippled gently round the spring publishing season and books in general, with backwaters of attention in which Adrian immersed himself.
It approached, gently and unobserved by the two young men, the question of corrections in proof, and it was then that Sir Giles, who had until then preserved a sardonic and almost complete silence, said suddenly: "What I want to know is, whether proofs are or are not private?"
"I suppose they are, technically," Lionel said lazily, watching Adrian. "Subject to the discretion of the publisher.
"Subject to the discretion of the devil," Sir Giles said. "What do you say, Persimmons?"
"I should say yes," Gregory answered. "At least till they are passed for press."
"I ask," Sir Giles said pointedly, "because my last proofs were shown to an outsider before the book was published. And if one of these gentlemen was responsible I want to know why."
"My dear Tumulty, it doesn't matter," Gregory in a quiet, soothing tone put in. "I asked you not to mention it, you know."
"I know you did," Sir Giles answered, "and I said that I felt I ought to. After all, a man has a right to know why a mad clergyman is allowed to read paragraphs of his book which he afterwards cancels. I tell you, Persimmons, we haven't seen the last of your... Archdeacon yet."
It was evident that Barbara's presence was causing Sir Giles acute difficulty in the expression of his feelings. But this was unknown to Kenneth, who, realizing suddenly what the other was talking about, said, leaning forward in his chair, "I'm afraid that's my fault, Sir Giles. It was I showed the Archdeacon your proofs. I'm extremely sorry if it's inconvenienced you, but I don't think I agree that proofs are so entirely private as you suggest. Something must be allowed to a publisher's need for publicity, and perhaps something for the mere accidents of a publishing house. There was no special stipulation about privacy for your book."
"I made no stipulation," Sir Giles answered, staring hostilely at Kenneth, "because I didn't for an instant suppose I should find it being read in convocation before my final corrections were made."
"Really, really, Tumulty," Gregory said. "It's unfortunate, as it's turned out, but I'm sure Mornington would be the first to deplore a slight excess of zeal, a slight error of judgement, shall we say?"
"Error of judgement?" Sir Giles snarled. "It's more like a breach of common honesty."
Kenneth came to his feet. "I admit no error in judgement," he said haughtily. "I was entirely within my rights. What is the misfortune you complain of, Mr. Persimmons?" He moved so as to turn his back on Sir Giles.
"I don't complain," Gregory answered hastily. "It's just one of those things that happen. But the Archdeacon, owing to your zeal, my dear Mornington, has been trying to saddle me with the responsibility for the loss of this chalice Sir Giles was writing about. I do wish he'd never seen the proofs. I think you must admit they ought to be treated as private."
"It's exactly like reading out a private letter from the steps of St. Paul's," Sir Giles added. "A man who does it ought to be flung into the gutter to starve."
"Now, now, Tumulty," Gregory put in, as the enraged Kenneth wheeled round, and Barbara and Lionel hastily stood up, "it's not as bad as that. I think perhaps strict commercial morality would mean strict privacy, but perhaps we take a rather austere view. The younger generation is looser, you know--less tied--less dogmatic, shall we say?"
"Less honest, you mean," Sir Giles said. "However, it's your affair more than mine, after all."
"Let's say no more about it," Gregory said handsomely.
"But I will say more about it," Kenneth cried out. "Do you expect me to be called a thief and a liar and I don't know what, because I did a perfectly right thing, and then be forgiven for it? I beg your pardon, Barbara, but I can't stand it, and I won't."
"You can't help it," Sir Giles said, grinning. "What will you do? We've both forgiven you, my fine fellow, and there it stops."
Kenneth stamped his foot in anger. "I'll have an apology," he said. "Sir Giles, what is the importance of this beastly book of yours?"
Barbara moved forward and slipped her arm in his. "Kenneth dear," she murmured; and then to Gregory, "Mr. Persimmons, I don't quite know what all this is about, but couldn't we do without forgiving one another?" She smiled at Sir Giles. "Sir Giles has had to forgive so many people, I expect, in different parts of the world, that he might spare us this time."
Lionel came to her help. "It's my fault more than Mornington's," he said. "I was supposed to be looking after the proofs, and I let an uncorrected set out of my keeping. It's me you must slang, Sir Giles."
"In the firm is one thing," Sir Giles said obstinately, "one risks that. But an outsider, and a clergyman, and a mad clergyman--no."
"Mad clergyman be--" Kenneth began, and was silenced by Barbara's appealing, "But what is it all about? Can you tell me, Mr. Persimmons?"
"I can even show you," Gregory said pleasantly. "As a matter of fact, Adrian's seen it already. We had a game with it this morning. It's a question of identifying an old chalice." He led the way into the hall, and paused before the bracket. "There you are," he said, "that's mine. I got it from a Greek, who got it from one of his countrymen who fled before the Turkish recovery in Asia Minor. It comes, through Smyrna, from Ephesus. Old enough and interesting, but as for being the Graal-- Unfortunately, after the Archdeacon had read this paragraph about which we've all been behaving so badly, three things happened. I did ask him if he had a chalice to spare for a friend of mine who has a very poor parish; thieves made an attempt on the church over there; and the Archdeacon was knocked on the head by a tramp. He seems to think that this proves conclusively that I was the tramp and that this is his missing chalice. At least, he says it's missing."
"How do you mean, sir--says it's missing?" Lionel asked.
"Well, honestly--I dare say it's mere pique--but we none of us really know the Archdeacon, do we?" Gregory asked. "And some of the clergy aren't above turning an honest penny by supplying American millionaires with curios. But it looks bad if it does happen to come out--so if the thing can disappear by means of a tramp or an unknown neighbour... "
There was a moment's pause, then Kenneth said, "Really, sir, if you knew the Archdeacon... "
"Quite right," Gregory answered. "Oh, my dear fellow, I'm being unjust to him, no doubt. But a man doesn't expect his parish priest practically to accuse him of highway robbery. I shouldn't be surprised if I heard from the police next. Probably the best thing would be to offer him this one to replace the one he says he's--I mean the one he's lost. But I don't think I'm quite Christian enough for that."
"And how did you play with it this morning?" Barbara asked, smiling at Adrian.
"Ah, that is a secret game, isn't it, Adrian?" Gregory answered merrily. "Our secret game. Isn't it, Adrian?"
"It's hidden," Adrian said seriously. "It's hidden pictures. But you mustn't know what, Mummie, must she?" He appealed to Gregory.
"Certainly not," Gregory said.
"Certainly not," Adrian repeated. "They're my hidden pictures."
"So they shall be, darling," Barbara said. "Please forgive me. Well, Mr. Persimmons, I suppose we ought to be going. Thank you for a charming afternoon. You're making this a very pleasant holiday."
Sir Giles had dropped away when they had entered the hall, and the farewells were thus robbed of their awkwardness; although Gregory detained Kenneth in order to say, "I think I can put it right with Tumulty, although he was very angry at first. Talked of appealing to my son and getting you dismissed, you know."
"Getting me what?" Kenneth cried.
"Well, you know what my son is," Gregory said confidentially. "Efficient and all that--but you've known him in business, Mornington, and you know what he is. Rather easily influenced, I'm afraid. And Sir Giles is a good name for his list."
"A very good name," Kenneth admitted, feeling less heated and more chilly than he had done. It was true--Stephen Persimmons was weak, and would be terrified of losing Sir Giles. And he had before now been guilty of dismissing people in a fit of hysterical anger.
"But I've no doubt it's all right," Gregory went on, watching the other closely, "no doubt at all. Let me know if anything goes wrong. I've a great regard for you, Mornington, and a word, perhaps... And keep the Archdeacon quiet, if you can. It would be worth your while."
He waved his hand and turned back into the house, and Kenneth, considerably more disturbed than before, walked slowly back to the Rectory.
THE FLIGHT OF THE DUKE OF THE NORTH RIDINGS
When the Duke's car arrived outside the Rectory about twelve on the Monday, its driver saw at the gates another car, at the wheel of which sat a policeman whom he recognized.
"Hallo, Puttenham," he said. "Is the Chief Constable here then?"
"Inside, your Grace," Constable Puttenham answered, saluting. "Making inquiries about the outrage, I believe."
The Duke, rather annoyed, looked at the Rectory. He disliked the Chief Constable, who had taken up the business of protecting people, developed it into a hobby, and was rapidly making it a mania and a nuisance--at least, so it appeared to the Duke. He remembered now that at a dinner at his own house some few days before the Chief Constable had held forth at great length on a lack of readiness in the public to assist the police, as exemplified by the failure of the Archdeacon of Fardles to report to them one case of sacrilege and one of personal assault. It had been objected that the Archdeacon had been confined to his bed for some time, but now that he had preached again the Chief Constable had obviously determined to see what his personal investigation and exhortation could do. The Duke hesitated for a moment, but it occurred to him that Mornington might welcome the opportunity of escaping, and he strolled slowly up to the door. Introduced into the study, he found the Chief Constable in a high state of argumentative irritation, Mornington irrationally scornful of everything, and the Archdeacon--for all he could see--much as usual.
"How do, Ridings," the Chief Constable said, after the priest had greeted his visitor. "Perhaps you may help me to talk sense. The Archdeacon here says he's lost a chalice, and won't help the proper authorities to look for it."
"But I don't want them to look for it," the Archdeacon said, "if you mean the police. You asked me if I knew what the hypothetical tramp or tramps were looking for, and I said yes--the old chalice that used to be here. You asked me if it had disappeared, and I said yes. But I don't want you to look for it."
The Duke began to feel that there might be something satisfying about even an Anglican priest. There were few things he himself would like less than to have the Chief Constable looking for anything he had lost. But robbery was robbery, and though, of course, a priest who wasn't a priest could have no real use for a chalice, still, a chalice was a chalice, and, anyhow, the Chief Constable was sure to go on looking for it, so why not let him? But he didn't say this; he merely nodded and glanced at Mornington.
"I suppose you want to find it?" the Chief Constable said laboriously.
"I don't--you must excuse me, but you drive me to it," the Archdeacon answered. "I don't want the police to find it. First, because I don't care for the Church to make use of the secular arm; secondly, because it would make the whole thing undesirably public; thirdly, because I know where it is; and fourthly, because they couldn't prove it was there."
"Well, sir," Kenneth said sharply, "then, if it can't be proved, we oughtn't to throw accusations about."
"Precisely what I am not doing," the Archdeacon answered, crossing his legs. "I don't accuse anyone. I only say I know where it is."
"And where is it?" the Chief Constable asked. "And how do you know it is there?"
"First," the Archdeacon said, "in the possession of Mr. Persimmons of Cully--probably on a bracket in his hall, but I'm not certain of that. Secondly, by a combination of directions arising out of the education of children, books of black magic, a cancelled paragraph in some proofs, an attempt to cheat me, the place where the Cup was kept, a motor-car, a reported threat, and a few other things."
The Chief Constable was still blinking over the sudden introduction of Mr. Persimmons of Cully, and it was the Duke who asked, "But if you have all these clues, what's the uncertainty--in your own mind?" he added suddenly, as he also became aware of the improbability of a country householder knocking an Archdeacon on the head in order to steal his chalice.
"There is no uncertainty in my own mind," the priest answered. "But the police would not be able to find a motive."
"We of course can," Kenneth said scornfully.
"We--if you say we--can," the Archdeacon said, "for we know what it was, and we know that many kinds of religion are possible to men."
"You are sure now that it was--it?" Kenneth answered.
"No," the priest answered, "but I have decided in my own mind that I will believe that. No-one can possibly do more than decide what to believe."
"Do I understand, Mr. Archdeacon," the Chief Constable asked, "that you accuse Mr. Persimmons of stealing this chalice? And why should he want to steal a chalice? And if he did, would he be likely to keep it in his hall?"
"There is always the Purloined Letter," the Duke murmured thoughtfully. "But even there the letter wasn't pinned up openly on a notice-board. Couldn't we go and see?"
"That is what I was going to suggest," said the Chief Constable. He stood up cheerfully. "I quite understand about your anxiety over the loss of this chalice"--Kenneth cackled suddenly and walked to the window. "Anyone would be anxious about a chalice of, I understand, great antiquarian interest. But I feel so certain you're mistaken in this... idea about Mr. Persimmons that I can't help feeling that a meeting perhaps, and a little study of his chalice, and so on... And then you must give us a free hand." He looked almost hopefully at the priest. "If you could spare us half an hour now, say?"
"I can't possibly move from here," the Archdeacon said, "without a clear understanding that I don't accuse Mr. Persimmons in any legal or official sense at all. I will come with you if you like, because I can't refuse a not-immoral call from the Chief Magistrate"--the Chief Constable looked gratified "and, as I have no reason to consider Mr. Persimmons's feelings--I really haven't," he added aside to Kenneth, who had turned to face the room again--"I should like, as a matter of curiosity, to see if it's another chalice or if it's mine. But that's all."
"I quite understand," the Chief Constable said sunnily. "Ridings, are you coming? Mr.--?" He hesitated uncertainly. The Duke looked at Kenneth, who said: "I think I ought to go; it won't take long. Would you mind waiting a few minutes?"
"I'll take you to the gate," the Duke said, "and wait for you there-- then we'll go straight on."
Between the Archdeacon and the Chief Constable in their car the only conversation was a brief one upon the weather; in that which preceded them, Mornington, in answer to the Duke's inquiries, sketched the situation as he understood it.
"And what do you think yourself?" the Duke asked.
Mornington grimaced. "Certum quia impossibile," he said. "If I must come down on one side or the other, I fall on the Archdeacon's. Especially since yesterday," he said resentfully. "But it's all insane. Persimmons's explanation is perfectly satisfactory--and yet it just isn't. The paragraph and the Cup were both there--and now they both aren't."
"Well," the Duke said, "if I can help annoy the Chief Constable, tell me. He once told me that poetry wasn't practical."
At the gates of Cully the cars stopped. "Will you come in, Ridings?" the Chief Constable asked.
"No," the Duke said; "what have I to do with these things? Don't be longer than you can help catechizing and analysing and the rest of it." He watched them out of sight, took a writing-pad from his pocket, and settled down to work on a drama in the Greek style upon the Great War and the fall of the German Empire. The classic form appeared to him capable at once of squeezing the last drop of intensity out of the action and of presenting at once the broadest and most minute effects. The scene was an open space behind the German lines in France; the time was in March 1918; the chorus consisted of French women from the occupied territory; and the deus ex machina was represented by a highly formalized St. Denis, whom the Duke was engaged in making as much like Phoebus Apollo as he could. He turned to the god's opening monologue.
Out of those habitable, fields which are Nor swept by fire nor venomous with war, But, being disposed by...
He brooded over whether to say Zeus or God.
Meanwhile, Gregory received his guests with cold politeness, to which a much warmer courtesy was opposed by the Archdeacon. "It isn't my fault that we're here," the priest said, when he had introduced the Chief Constable. "Colonel Conyers insisted on coming. He's looking for the chalice that was stolen."
"It certainly isn't my wish," the irritated Colonel said, finding himself already in a false position. "The Archdeacon gave me to understand that he believed the chalice had somehow got into Cully, and I thought if that was cleared up we should all know better where we were."
"I suppose," Gregory said, "that it was Mr. Mornington who told you I had a chalice here."
"You remember I saw it myself," the Archdeacon said. "It was the position then that made me feel sure it was the... it was an important one. You people are so humorous." He shook his head, and hummed under his breath: "Oh, give thanks to the God of all gods... "
Colonel Conyers looked from one to the other. "I don't quite follow all this," he said a trifle impatiently.
"'For his'--it doesn't at all matter--'mercy endureth for ever,'" the Archdeacon concluded, with a genial smile. He seemed to be rising moment by moment into a kind of delirious delight. His eyes moved from one to the other, changing from mere laughter as he looked at the Colonel into an impish and teasing mischief for Persimmons, and showing a feeling of real affection as they rested on Kenneth, between whom and himself there had appeared the beginnings of a definite attraction and friendship. Gregory looked at him with a certain perplexity. He understood Sir Giles's insolent rudeness, though he despised it as Giles despised his own affectation of smoothness. But he saw no reason in the Archdeacon's amusement, and began to wonder seriously whether Ludding's blow had affected his mind. He glanced over at Mornington--there at least he had power, and understood his power. Then he looked at the Chief Constable and waited. So for a minute or two they all stood in silence, which the Colonel at last broke.
"I thought," he began, rather pointedly addressing himself to Persimmons, "that if you would show us this chalice of yours it would convince the Archdeacon that it wasn't his."
"With pleasure," Gregory answered, going towards the bracket and followed by the others. "Here it is. Do you want to know the full history? I had it--" he began, repeating what Kenneth had heard the previous day.
Colonel Conyers looked at the priest. "Well?" he said.
The Archdeacon looked, and grew serious. His spirit felt its own unreasonable gaiety opening into a wider joy; its dance became a more vital but therefore a vaster thing. Faintly again he heard the sound of music, but now not from without, or indeed from within, from some non-spatial, non-temporal, non-personal existence. It was music, but not yet music, or if music, then the music of movement itself--sound produced, not by things, but in the nature of things. He looked, and looked again, and felt himself part of a moving river flowing towards some narrow channel on a ripple of which the Graal was as a gleam of supernatural light. "Yes," he said softly, "it is the Cup."
Gregory shrugged, and looked at the Chief Constable. "I will give you the address of the man from whom I bought it," he said, "and you can make what inquiries you like--if you think it necessary."
The Colonel pursed his lips, and said in a lowered voice, "I will tell you if it's necessary. But I'm not sure the identification is sufficiently valuable. I understand the Archdeacon had an accident to his head some time ago."
"Unfortunately, it was I who found him lying in the road and brought him home, and I think that's confused the idea of robbery with me," Gregory continued, also in a subdued voice. "It's very unfortunate, and rather embarrassing for me. I don't want to appear un-neighbourly, and if it goes on I shall have to think about selling the house. He's an old resident, and I'm a new one, and, of course, people would rather believe him. If I gave him this chalice--but I should be sorry to part with it. I like old things, but I don't like them enough to half kill a clergyman to get them. I'm in your hands, Colonel. What do you advise?"
The Colonel considered. Kenneth had walked a little distance away, so as not to appear to overhear their talk; the Archdeacon was still gazing at the chalice as if in a trance. But now he was conscious of some slight movement on his own part towards which he was impelled; he knew the signs of that approaching direction, and awaited it serenely. By long practice he had accustomed himself in any circumstances--in company or alone, at work or at rest, in speech or in silence--to withdraw into that place where action is created. The cause of all action there disposed itself according to that Will which was its nature, and, so disposing itself, moved him easily as a part of its own accommodation to the changing wills of men, so that at any time and at all times its own perfection was maintained, now known in endurance, now in beauty, now in wisdom, now in joy. There was no smallest hesitation which it would not solve, nor greatest anxiety which it did not make lucid. In that light other things took on a new aspect, and the form of Gregory, where he stood a few steps away, seemed to swell into larger dimensions. But this enlargement was as unreal as it was huge; the sentences which he had altered a few days back on denying and defying Destiny boomed like unmeaning echoes across creation. Nothing but Destiny could defy Destiny; all else which sought to do so was pomposity so extreme as to become merely silly. It was a useless attempt at usurpation, useless and yet slightly displeasing, as pomposity always is. In the universe, as in Fardles, pomposity was bad manners; from its bracket the Graal shuddered forward in a movement of innocent distaste. The same motion that seemed to touch it touched the Archdeacon also; they came together and were familiarly one. And the Archdeacon, realizing with his whole mind what had happened, turned with unexpected fleetness and ran for the hall door.
Everyone else ran also. The Colonel, having made up his mind, had drawn Gregory a few steps away, and was telling him what he advised. Neither of them had seen, as Kenneth did, the unexpected yet gentle movement with which the Archdeacon seemed suddenly to reach up, take hold of the Cup, and begin to run. But they heard the first step, and rushed. Kenneth, who was nearer the door, was passed by the priest before he could move; then he also took to his heels. The Archdeacon, practised on his feet in many fencing bouts, flew out of the door and down the drive, and Gregory and the Colonel both lost breath--the first yelling for Ludding, the second shouting after the priest. Kenneth only, in as good condition, younger and with longer legs, overtook the fugitive half-way to the gates. Up to that moment he had still been sceptical and undetermined in his mind; but he knew, as he came level, that, right or wrong, it was impossible for him to lay a detaining hand upon his friend, and as he felt the decision taken his own gaiety returned. He ran on in advance, reached the gate and threw it open, reached the Duke's car in three strides, and opened that door also.
The Duke had been writing poetry; Constable Puttenham had been asleep in the August sun. But the Duke, hesitating over a word, had been staring at the gate, and saw the returning guests before the distant shouts had done more than pleasantly mingle with the constable's dreams.
"Drive like hell," Kenneth said to the Duke as the Archdeacon reached the car, and himself jumped up by the driver's side. The constable, awaking to cries of "Puttenham" from the Colonel rushing round the curve of the drive, sat bolt upright. "Stop him, Puttenham," the Colonel yelled. But the bewildered policeman saw no-one to stop. He saw the Archdeacon settling down in the car, and Mornington by the Duke's side. He saw the other car begin to move, but who it was he was to stop was by no means clear--it couldn't be the Duke. Nevertheless, the ducal car was the only thing in sight--unless it was Gregory Persimmons; he by now had reached the gate in advance of the shouting Colonel. The constable ran for him, and met him. "Not me, you everlasting ape!" Gregory howled at him. "The car, you baboon, the car!" "The Archdeacon," the Colonel bellowed. "Stop the Archdeacon!" The constable left Gregory and began to run after the car, which by now had got fairly started. "Stop, God blast you!" the Colonel yelled again. "Come back, you fool!" The constable, in one entire maze, stopped and came back, to find Gregory and the Colonel scrambling into their own car. "Drive like hell," the Colonel said; "we may catch him."
"After the Duke, sir?" the bewildered constable asked.
"After that damned black-coated hypocrite," the Colonel shouted, still in a stentorian voice, so that the Archdeacon, a quarter of a mile away, unconsciously turned to protest. "I'll unfrock him--I'll have him in the dock!"
"Drive," Gregory said, looking unpleasantly at the constable, and the constable drove.
So through the English roads the Graal was borne away in the care of a Duke, an Archdeacon, and a publisher's clerk, pursued by a country householder, the Chief Constable of a county, and a perplexed policeman. And these things also perhaps the angels desired to look into.
At least the Duke of the North Ridings did. After a few moments he said to Mornington, "I suppose you know what we're doing?"
"We're carrying the San Graal," Mornington said. "Lancelot and Pelleas and Pellinore--no, that's not right--Bors and Percivale and Galahad. The Archdeacon's Galahad, and you can be Percivale: you're not married, are you? And I'm Bors-but I'm not married either, and Bors was. It doesn't matter; you must be Percivale, because you're a poet. And Bors was an ordinary workaday fellow like me. On, on to Sarras!" He looked back over his shoulder. "Sari-as!" he cried to the car behind. "We shall meet at Carbonek!"
"What in God's name are you singing about?" the Duke asked.
Mornington was about to reply when the Archdeacon, leaning forward, said with a slight formality: "I couldn't take advantage of your kindness, my lord, unless you knew the circumstances. I don't want to rush you... "
"Really?" the Duke said, manipulating a corner. "Oh, really? Well, I'm not objecting, but--damn that dog!--there seems to be a slight rush somewhere. Perhaps it's the people behind. Mornington, stop laughing and tell me where I'm to drive to."
"But, indeed," the Archdeacon protested, "I'd rather you put me down than--"
"No, look here," Kenneth said, pulling himself together, "it's all right really. Honestly, Ridings. The Archdeacon has got the Graal there."
"The Graal?" the Duke said, and again, in a voice that rejected the idea still more strongly, "The Graal?"
"The Graal," Kenneth assured him. "Malory? Tennyson--Chretien de Troyes--Miss Jessie Weston. From Romance to Reality, or whatever she called it. That's what's happening, anyhow. I give you my word, Ridings, that it's really serious."
The Duke spared him a glance. An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy. Mornington went on explaining as quietly and as clearly as was possible, and at last the Duke said, shrugging his shoulders, "Well, if you say so... But where are we going?"
Kenneth looked back at the Archdeacon, then changed his mind and said, "Where are we going now, anyhow?"
"London as straight as we can," the Duke answered.
"Humph!" said Kenneth. "I suppose you've got a house there?"
"Of sorts," the Duke answered.
"Well, let's go there, and we can tell you the whole thing in full. Unless they telephone to the police on the way?" Over his shoulder he offered the Archdeacon the question.
"I don't think he'll do that," the priest said. "He wants it kept quiet too."
"They can't stop us without arresting us," the Duke said thoughtfully, "if I refuse to stop."
"Arrest of the Duke of the North Ridings and the Archdeacon of Fardles. Strange story. Is the Holy Graal in England? Evidence by a retired publisher. By God, Ridings, they daren't stop us!" Kenneth cried, as the magnitude of the possibilities of publicity became clear to him.
"London, then," the Duke said, and gave himself up to his destiny.
Kenneth glanced back at the pursuing car. "The Archdeacon's lost his Rectory," he thought, "and I've lost my job, and the Duke's near losing his reputation. But poor old Gregory's lost the Graal--and Giles Tumulty will lose his nerve if I ever get a chance at him," he added, remembering the previous afternoon.
In the pursuing car the same thought of publicity entered the minds of its occupants, and first of Gregory. He was therefore in time to check the impulse of Colonel Conyers towards the station telephone by pointing out to him the dimensions of the scandal which might result. "In the courts it's bound at best to be a drawn battle; I may recover the chalice, but a lot of people will believe the Archdeacon--all the clerical party. Whereas, if we can only get hold of the Duke and explain matters, it's quite likely he'll see how strong my case is. Is he a great friend of the Archdeacon's?"
"I didn't know they even knew each other," the Chief Constable said. "The Duke's a Roman Catholic; all his family are. He's in with the Norfolks, too; his mother was a Howard. It makes this freak of his all the more surprising. That damned clergyman must have bamboozled him somehow."
As they rushed on, however, Gregory began to recover his poise; the Duke was the only unknown quantity in the allied opposition, and he found it impossible to believe that the Duke was unpersuadable. He had other resources after all; there was Sir Giles, who had a good deal of curious knowledge of hidden circles, for it was at his advice that a visit had been paid on the Saturday to the Greek in the chemist's shop. Sir Giles had insisted that a pedigree could be more easily and more certainly created there than by a reliance on the less effective Stephen. With this, and the police if necessary behind him, he smiled at the car in front, which maintained a steady space between them. It escaped, as a white hart of heaven, before the pursuing hounds--escaped for a while, but hardly, and with little hope. The teeth were gnashing behind at it; already the blood showed here and there on the white coat; already the pursuer felt the taste in his mouth. Mornington should suffer; that was clear; and the Archdeacon--but how was not yet clear. And the Graal should be withdrawn again into the seclusion of a frozen sanctuary.
They approached London, still with the distance varyingly, but on the whole steadily, maintained; they entered it, and ran down towards the West End. The Duke kept the car at as great a speed as possible, and stopped it at a house in Grosvenor Square. Mornington sprang out and opened the door for the Archdeacon, who got out, still holding the Graal, and the three ran to the front door, which opened before them. The Duke pushed the other two in, and, with his arms in theirs, led them on through the hall, saying over his shoulder as he did so, "If anyone calls, Thwaites, I am not at home."
"Very good, your Grace," the footman said, and went calmly to the door as footsteps sounded before it.
"Ridings, Ridings!" the Colonel called, and found his way blocked as the Duke and his friends disappeared in the indistinct shadows.
"His Grace is not at home, sir," the footman said.
"Damn it, man, I saw him!" the Colonel cried.
"I am sorry, sir, but his Grace is not at home."
"I am the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire," Colonel Conyers raged. "I represent the police."
"I am sorry, sir, but his Grace is not at home."
Gregory touched the Colonel's arm. "It's no use," he said. "We must write, or I must call presently."
"It's perfectly monstrous," the Colonel cursed. "The whole thing's insane and ridiculous. Look here, my man, I want to see the Duke on important business."
"I am sorry, sir, but his Grace is not at home."
"Come with me," Gregory said. "Let's make sure of my right first and enforce it afterwards."
"You'll hear more of this," the Colonel said threateningly. "It's no use standing there and telling me these lies. Tell Ridings I'm going to have an explanation, and the sooner he lets me hear from him the better. I've never been treated like this before in my whole life."
"I'm sorry, sir, but his Grace?"
The Colonel flung away, and Gregory went with him. The footman closed the door, and, hearing the bell, went to the library.
"Have they gone?" the Duke asked.
"Yes, your Grace. One of the gentlemen seemed rather annoyed. He asked you to write to him explaining."
The three looked at one another. "Very well, Thwaites," the Duke said. "I'm not at home to anyone till after lunch, and see that we have something to eat as soon as possible." Then, as the servant left the room, he sat down and turned to the priest. "And now," he said, "let's hear about this Graal."